Governor Perry didn\u2019t show up at last week\u2019s \u201cSecession or Sovereignty\u201d rally at the state capitol\u2014no elected officials appeared at all, in fact\u2014though his recent widely noted reference to secession was in the air. All Texans have thought about leaving the union at some point in their lives, Daniel Miller told me a few days after the rally, even if they won\u2019t admit it. Miller, who heads the Texas Nationalist Movement, was one of the rally\u2019s keynote speakers. \u201cTexans have a cultural history that screams independence,\u201d he said. \u201cEverybody in Texas\u2014even if they were joking about it\u2014has said at one point, \u2018We could break off and be our own country again.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
Miller, who is 36 years old and has male-pattern baldness and a neatly trimmed goatee, has been a secessionist for thirteen years. He is self-employed\u2014he runs a popular Internet radio site with his wife\u2014which leaves him plenty of time for politics. The Texas Nationalist Movement is more or less an offshoot of the old Republic of Texas movement, though Miller has taken pains to separate himself from the public perception of the ROT, which took a bad turn when Richard McLaren, a spokesman of sorts, wound up in prison after a hostage standoff in Fort Davis in the mid-1990s. Miller shuns violence. \u201cWe tell all our people that the only solution is a political one,\u201d he said.
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The Texas Nationalist Movement is avowedly non-partisan and Miller bristles at being labeled \u201cright-wing.\u201d His father was a union steelworker and lifelong Democrat; the hold music on Miller\u2019s personal phone line is \u201cThe Revolution Starts Now,\u201d by Steve Earle, a well-known leftist. Miller acknowledged that Perry\u2019s comments\u2014which came at a \u201ctea party\u201d event in Austin in April and which boosted the governor\u2019s poll numbers considerably\u2014had given his group a shot in the arm as well, though he personally is not a fan of the governor. Perry wouldn\u2019t even have mentioned secession at all, Miller said, if he and a few dozen others hadn\u2019t been in the tea party crowd chanting the word at the time. So the governor owes him one.
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Miller, who begins each day with a three-hour \u201cnews cruise\u201d on the Web, is well read. In our forty-five minute conversation he cited John Naisbitt (author of Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives), Igor Panarin (maverick Russian political scientist), Thomas Jefferson, and Sam Houston, who, despite opposing Texas\u2019s first secession movement, has given latter day secessionists a heck of a lot of good quotes. (\u201cTexas has yet to learn submission to any oppression, come from what source it may\u201d; \u201cTexas will again lift its head and stand among the nations,\u201d etc.) This is not the 1860s, however, and there is no reason to think that the next secession will end in civil war, Miller said. \u201cThirty-five new countries have been born in the past decade,\u201d he said. \u201cEverybody in this country stood by and applauded when Lithuania and all the other states left the Soviet Union,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat they need to be doing is applauding us now.\u201d
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The prospect of leaving the union raises a lot of questions. Is secession legal? Will the Longhorns still be in the Big 12? Who will deliver the mail? After thirteen years, Miller has heard them all. \u201cYou can \u2018What if\u2019 this thing to death,\u201d he said. The temptation to find a new one was irresistible, however. What would prevent the various sections of Texas, I asked, from breaking off from the new country after recession? What if, for example, the citizens of the Lower Rio Grande River Valley decided to rejoin Mexico? Miller said he had heard that one before, but he had a hard time envisioning it. A really hard time. \u201cI think the odds of that happening are up there with winning the lottery,\u201d he said. \u201cOr being slammed into by an asteroid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read Next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Governor Perry didn\u2019t show up at last week\u2019s \u201cSecession or Sovereignty\u201d rally at the state capitol\u2014no elected officials…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235037,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[90704,27,29,3343,28,89482],"class_list":{"0":"post-235036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas","8":"tag-september-2009-issue","9":"tag-texas","10":"tag-texas-headlines","11":"tag-texas-history","12":"tag-texas-news","13":"tag-the-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}