Texas isn’t entirely without need—consider the recent drought there, and accompanying federal aid—but then again, no major player in the global economy is entirely self-sufficient. Point being, instead of freaking out about angry Texans and other Southerners wanting to control their own destiny, we'd do better to consider their position and complaints, and ask ourselves: Shouldn’t shared values, cultural norms and manageable geography—not the chance tentacles of history and insatiable federal bureaucracy—ultimately be the things that unite a given population?

For two years, I traveled throughout Texas and the South researching these very questions for a book. I concluded that while on its surface secession is an admittedly absurd proposition, there’s a certain logic, even a sense of humanity, in its essence. Sure, splitting the country apart feels unnatural—a crime against manifest destiny, at the very least. Americans have become so accustomed to their hard divisions—conservative-liberal, black-white, Roe-Wade, red-blue, Tea Party-sane—that the chasm separating us feels almost ordained, an organic and even integral part of the national tradition. But just because spiritual, political, racial and commercial divides have always been with us doesn’t mean they must continue to define us.

So let’s back away from the secession ledge for a moment, see if we can’t find a compromise. Maybe the solution for dissatisfied Texans and other wannabe secessionist states that can’t tolerate the oppressive yoke of the federal government is to grant them some measure of quasi-autonomy. There’s plenty of international precedent. Maybe deal with Texas the way that the Philippines deals with its restive state in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, or the way China manages economically independent Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region, even issuing its citizens their own passports. Hell, Scotland already has a semiautonomous parliament and in 2014 it’s going to vote on an independence referendum that could abolish its 300-year tie to the UK. Turn Texas into Puerto Rico or Guam; give them some form of political and social expression in exchange for diminished power in federal government.

Or maybe the solution is simply to give Texas and other secessionist-conservatives what they really want: free passage to the land of all their conservative fantasies. Send them all off with gratis one-way tickets (I’m happy to earmark some of my socialist tax dollars for the effort) to a country with: a small federal government with limited power and meager influence over the private lives of its citizens; extremely weak trade unions routinely sabotaged by the federal government (i.e., a “pro-business environment”); negligible income tax; few immigrants, legal or otherwise; a dominant Christian population, accounting for some 70 percent of the people; no mandatory health insurance or concept of universal health care; a strong social taboo surrounding homosexuality and a constitution that already states, “All individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex”; and a gun culture so ubiquitous that you can find automatic weaponry displayed openly on the streets of its capital city and in many households.