“If an insufficient patriotism is one of the ills of contemporary America,” declares National Review editor Rich Lowry, “then a national divorce would prescribe arsenic as a cure. It would burn down America to save America, or at least those parts of America it considered salvageable.” It is precisely here that the anti-secession movement goes wrong, as it has more than once before. In the manner of obtuse historians, they identify the government as the nation itself, and in this case choose the political union over the social fabric. Lowry would sooner see the American tradition perish than...