Texas Governor Rick Perry.
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The secessionist movements alive today in Vermont, Hawaii and California are not really battles between left and right: they include libertarian Marxists and tribal-rights activists and anarchists and greens and every other ideology, all stirred up by their opposition to big national government. America is now a multicultural quilt of 300 million people spread across cities and suburbs and forests and prairies; when it is compared with the colonial world of our forebears, it is harder to judge whether what unites us is greater than what divides us--or agree on just how much power we want to cede to Washington so it can fight pirates and build highways and cure cancer, and how much we prefer to keep for ourselves.
While we work all this out, I have an idea for Governor Perry. The 1845 Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas omits the right to secede but affirms Texas' right to divide itself into five states if it chooses. I'm guessing Austin might want to be a state all by itself and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones already thinks he is one. This would give Texans 10 U.S. Senators and much more clout. The risk Perry runs if he really dreams of a country all his own is that his state is home to two former U.S. Presidents; and nothing in the 22nd Amendment says one of them couldn't run for President of the Republic of Texas.