Its not that it is wrong or off base, so much as that it only address one half of the liberal question.

Government is not the only agent of oppression, oppression comes from all sorts of groups nad people be they religious, ethnic, tribal, regional, or racial.

For minorities that experience oppression at the hand of their neighbors, the government is seen as the only viable form of protection.

How do you address non-governmental oppression?

I think that a federal system from which a member state cannot voluntarily secede is not really a federal system, and that the consolidation of power in a central government is injurious to the division of powers that the federal Constitution was originally supposed to ensure. The original federal system was not a mistake, even if the earlier Confederation was not as bad as it is made out to be, and had it not been transformed into a consolidated government it would be a very good system. And, yes, I would support a state’s secession if it could provide for its own defense and could function as a viable independent state.

Chauvinism has a much older, more precise meaning, which refers to an undue attachment to the cause of a particular person. Chauvin himself was specifically a fanatical Bonapartist. Since then it has been attached to any strong nationalism, but that is not what it originally meant. Were it not such an obviously loaded and pejorative term, I wouldn’t have objected to it at all, but it seems to me that people use the word chauvinist when they wish to discredit a position as inherently unreasonable.

No doubt you realize (in our “country” we use ‘z’s) “chauvinism” means exactly what I was using it to mean.

you assert,

Nation-states that lose or abandon their sovereignty for the sake of some transnational politics or moral goods eventually lose control over their own futures, since they yield meaningful control over most major policy decisions to higher levels of authority and will never be able to recall it once given.

but can you give an example of this being the case? Apart from the EU, which was explicitly designed to be such (and to which nation states must actively apply rather than be compelled), i dont see any examples in history of a nation truly losing “meaningful control” over “major” policy decisions merely by virtue of assent to various treaties.

Since the US Constitution treats treaties with same force of law as itself, obviously treaties should not be entered into lightly, but I dont think Ive yet seen a case that Kyoto or the Sea treaties or any others would really devolve policy control to gnomes n Zurich or some Illuminatus cabal elsewhere.