A series of mass shootings culminated in a savage, Columbine-style attack on a Sacramento-area school that killed 35 kids and two cops. The shooters used semi-automatic rifles and pistols with large-capacity magazines—weaponry that had been illegal in California until the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the state’s gun control laws. Californians raged that the justices—and the federal government—had effectively murdered their children.

That anger soon spiraled into a cold civil war, with California’s elected leaders openly defying federal officials and laws by outlawing most guns, and imposing a mandatory buyback. An authoritarian Republican president retaliated with an economic blockade of the state. After right-wing militias invaded the state and used Facebook Live to broadcast their massacre of California Highway Patrol officers enforcing state gun laws, California’s governor declared her intention to depart the Union, subject to the result of a referendum by voters.

This path to establishing the Golden State as an independent nation is fiction, at least for now. But this account—invented by the Christian conservative writer David French in his 2020 book Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation—might be the most realistic and detailed scenario for a Calexit that I’ve encountered.

The scenario packs a special power because French is a careful and rigorous thinker who desperately wants the United States to remain united. A lawyer, military veteran, and champion of socially conservative causes, he is also loyal to the American tradition of pluralism: he broke early and decisively from friends and allies to oppose President Trump and harsh partisanship. His book is a thoughtful and fair-minded examination of how Americans, across not just the political spectrum but also the nation’s geography, have segregated themselves into communities of the like-minded—and started to hate those with whom they disagree.

French argues that this negative polarization is so extreme that the country may well split apart. To demonstrate how real the threat is, he offers two all-too-possible scenarios—a Texas-inspired departure of the South rooted in abortion politics, and a guns-rights clash that takes first California, and then Oregon and Washington, out of the U.S.

“At the heart of both scenarios,” French writes, “is the fear that your political opponents don’t just hate you. They want to rule you. They want to dominate you.”

The Calexit scenario is based on California progressives’ very real fears of minority, illegitimate rule because of problems with the Senate, Electoral College, and Supreme Court.

In French’s Calexit scenario, Republicans eliminate the Senate filibuster to give their president extraordinary powers to subdue California. The Supreme Court—which layers opinions with celebrations of self-defense that Californians see as inspiring gun violence—is stacked with conservatives because Republican Senates had blocked previous appointments by Democratic presidents. Californians see the president—who seeks to arrest the governor and other top state officials for their defiance—as illegitimate because he lost the popular vote in an election marked by voter suppression.

When California’s governor declares her independence referendum, she says: “The time has come to form a new nation—one born not out of violence but through peace, a nation that is built from the ground up to respect the environment, trust its citizens with decency, and shun the war-making impulses that have cost the lives of countless millions.” She pledges a non-violent departure and publicly asks the president to respect the results of the vote.

The Republican commander-in-chief doesn’t merely respect the vote. Recognizing that California’s departure will ensure an America dominated by conservatives, he seeks to encourage Californians to leave the Union. He announces a new conservative agenda that is anathema to California. And he makes it plain that if Californians vote to remain in the Union, the state will be put, at least temporarily, under military rule.

Given a choice between freedom or occupation, Californians vote by more than two-thirds to leave the Union. Soon Oregon and Washington join us. The new American Pacific Republic is demilitarized; the U.S. provides defense and military protection in return for an “open market” agreement on trade and technology.

French thinks Americans can prevent such a split of their country by embracing tolerance and pluralism. He defends “the rights of communities and associations to govern themselves according to their values and their beliefs—as long as they don’t violate the fundamental rights of their dissenting members.”

Despite his conservative views, he argues, in the name of national unity, for letting progressives in states like California have much more power to go their own way. As an example, he suggests the federal government allow the Golden State to enact its own single-payer health system as an experiment.

If Americans don’t agree to disagree, and live by pluralism, the results will be bad not just for the country, but for the world, French argues. With the U.S. distracted by its own breakup, French suggests in his scenarios, China could easily seize Taiwan, Russia could reclaim much of Eastern Europe, and presumably other secessionist movements around the globe would be emboldened, creating new conflicts.

That’s a sobering analysis. But by this Californian’s lights, the final results of French’s Calexit scenario don’t sound so bad. With New England states also forming their own democratic alliance, the three American nations, along with Canada and Mexico, form one common North American economic union. Tens of millions of Americans relocate to nations that are more aligned with their culture and ideological preferences.

And while America is less of a force in the world, Californians, and the people in America’s three very different nations, seem happier.

The post A Fictional Calexit Scenario Offers a Real Warning appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The scenario may be fictional, but the idea of California independence, once dismissed as a joke, is gaining both cultural currency and real-world urgency. Our own real-life governor, Gavin Newsom, frequently describes California as a “nation-state,” to make the point that the Golden State must act like an independent country to protect itself during the biggest pandemic in a century. In the absence of reliable federal assistance, California’s local and state officials, along with businesses, have scrambled to provide the protective equipment, testing, ventilators, and guidance that were once thought to be the responsibility of federal agencies.

While conventional wisdom remains that California would never leave the union, who can put faith in conventional wisdom anymore? Polling has showed for three years that one-third of Californians support their state’s peaceful withdrawal from the nation. And Californians’ anger at the federal government is high, with relentless and nasty fights between the state and the White House over California’s attempts to protect its immigrants, women, health care, water, housing, environment, and elections.

Those fights can be partisan, but the differences between California and the U.S. run deeper than mere party lines. And they aren’t temporary. Even the election of a Democratic president is unlikely to bring state and nation together. The cause of the rift between Californians and America goes well beyond the political to the structural, the cultural, and the constitutional.

California is a future-oriented modern democracy with a powerful initiative process that allows its highly diverse population (60-plus percent identifying as non-white) to make laws and amend its constitution directly. The U.S., on the other hand, is a majority-white country that clings to a 1789 constitution that famously permitted slavery, is nearly impossible to amend, and prohibits election of the president by popular vote.

While California’s system encourages a constant give-and-take between citizens and leaders, the power of the U.S. presidency is vast and largely unaccountable; one person in the Oval Office could start an apocalyptic nuclear war without permission from voters or other branches of government.

Those other branches are also sheltered from democratic interventions. Too much power lies with a U.S. Senate that makes a mockery of equal representation, with California’s 40 million people receiving the same two senators as Vermont’s 625,000. And the most difficult decisions in America are made by an unaccountable Supreme Court of highly politicized, life-tenured judges.

None of this makes California’s departure from the union likely. But it does guarantee that our state will be in constant conflict with the U.S.—and that there will be repeated attempts by California to escape the union, for at least as long as the current American Constitution remains in place.

So what is the best way to pursue and manage California’s efforts at independence in the years ahead?

The essential answer to that question is: peacefully. And to make independence peaceful, Californians must hew to the principle that any Calexit must win the support of majorities in both California and the United States as a whole.

Reaching such a double consensus means that any healthy process of considering independence must be about more than the narrow questions about how California would create its own country. Instead, an independence process must start by reconsidering the systems and the future of the entire United States. In essence, if California ever decides to leave the United States and form a new country, it must try to transform the United States into a new country first.

Right now is an auspicious time for just such a reconsideration. With protestors toppling statues of the Founders and institutions pledging to end systemic racism in the U.S., the place to start is by reconsidering America’s original system—the Constitution.

This suggestion will make some Americans crazy, because people in this country have come to deify their Constitution. Americans also assume—after hearing such rhetoric for all our lives—that the end of our current Constitution would mean the end of freedom and democracy.

But that’s not true: Ending one republic does not mean the end of a nation. It means starting a new republic. The French are on their fifth republic. Switzerland, a multicultural and multilingual state that has remained stable and peaceful for 500 years, routinely remakes its constitution, most recently in 1999.

California, the nation’s most creative and populous state, is the perfect place to remake the American republic.

A California-led constitutional rewrite would fit our history. While other states went through a process of becoming a territory and then negotiating statehood with Washington, California hurriedly convened an unauthorized convention in 1849 and declared itself a state, leaving the U.S. no choice but to ratify the self-admission in 1850.

In that spirit, California should convene scholars and representatives from as many states as possible to draft a new American Constitution. Such a body would look at constitutions all over the world with the goal of creating the most advanced 21st-century governing system possible.

A new constitution offers the opportunity to re-found the United States with present-day values of equality and justice. Instead of a constitution that started in slavery and persists in discrimination, we could have a constitution that barred discrimination of any kind. Women could finally be made officially, and constitutionally, equal.

A new constitution also could provide for truly national elections, and could include modern devices like national referenda for major decisions (like going to war) and proportional representation to end our polarizing, winner-take-all political culture. The two-house Congress, a breeding ground for corruption, could be replaced with a single parliament. The power of the American executive could be limited, and distributed to more than one person, to prevent one deranged president from blowing up the world. A new constitution could commit the country to environmental protection and make the passing of international treaties easier, to allow America to fight full-force against climate change.

Once that new constitution is drafted—and the draft is translated into all of the world’s languages, so anyone can read it—California voters would decide whether to approve it. If they turn it down, the convention would have to keep revising it until it gets something that meets voter approval.

Once approved in California, the proposed constitution would be sent to the other 49 states, asking them to adopt it. This is an idea grounded in our current national constitution’s Article V, which permits the calling of a convention to amend or even redo the Constitution by the approval of 34 states. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 85, wrote that Article V was included because we might need to change the Founders’ system; they couldn’t have confidence it would always be the best one.

The other states could accept our constitutional proposal. Or they could amend it, in consultation with California. In either event, California would have helped give the United States a 21st-century governing document that, presumably, would be more democratic, and more supportive of equal rights and environmental protection. Free of the old Constitution, the United States could stop endlessly measuring today’s policies against centuries-old legal precedents, and would have more time to plan for the future.

In that scenario, the Golden State would stay in a more perfect union. But it’s also possible that other states would reject the document, and even the entire exercise. That would leave California with the choice of whether to stay and suffer within the U.S., or to negotiate a peaceful exit from the union.

The nation of California would face some of the same challenges the state of California has struggled to manage—water, education, infrastructure, and taxation. But it also would give the world an alternative American nation with governing rules that aren’t compromised by the sins of the 18th century. Perhaps we could finally conquer our rampant gun violence. Or perhaps California could limit its military and adopt a policy of neutrality, thus demonstrating that Americans actually can organize a nation that doesn’t pursue constant warfare.

The good news: If California sought independence, it wouldn’t have to draft a new constitution. It could simply use the constitution it drafted for the U.S. as the governing document of the new Golden Nation.

In this scenario, California could walk away in good conscience, having done everything it could to save America from itself.

The post Could <i>The Politician</i>‘s #Calexit Fantasy Bring Real Change?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

With the sixth largest economy in the world, nearly 40 million people and a land area of more than 160,000 square miles, California is larger by far than most countries. It also is a state with a progressive worldview, and an awareness of the government policies needed to realize that vision. To cite just one example, California’s cap-and-trade and alternative energy initiatives address both global warming and local emissions. In 2018 it is possible that voters in the Golden State could begin a process whereby California splits off from the rest of the United States. Stranger things have happened.

But there is another, more likely scenario—that of Calternative.

The California of high taxes, strict environmental and business regulations, $15-per-hour minimum wages, and exorbitant housing prices has been the subject of an endless stream of articles—too many to cite here—which claim that the Golden State is no longer golden. Their conclusion is that opportunity lies elsewhere. The alternatives to California are supposedly business-friendly states such as Texas and Tennessee.

However, in the time of Trump, California also may be a magnet, particularly for creative, productive, outside-the-box Americans, and of similarly minded foreign expats. Calternative posits a possible future in which California prospers even as other states struggle over the next four years.

Calternative flows from the notion that economist Charles Tiebout described in 1956 in his Journal of Political Economy article “The Pure Theory of Local Expenditure.” Tiebout’s basic idea was that people choose the local government they want by voting with their feet. It doesn’t happen instantaneously, as people are not entirely mobile, but it does happen: part of the decision on where one lives is what kind of government one wants to live under.

In Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, Calexit occurs, or more precisely LeftCoastExit, and the two parts of the United States go in different directions. Ecotopia is populated by socialists and hippies who create a utopia based on sustainable ecosystems. The author was a great believer in this vision and pushed for at least some version of it until his death in 2012. The book is structured as a report written by a journalist from a future ultra-conservative America, visiting Ecotopia 20 years after secession. Implicit is the assumption that there has been little trade or migration back and forth across the border.

In the strange bedfellows camp, Callenbach shares this assumption with conservatives who claim that California is making itself unlivable by adopting a relentlessly progressive social and environmental agenda. Their other shared premise is that there will be little migration to the West Coast; they believe that, compared to California, Houston or Kansas City look good, at least to the real people who start companies and create jobs.

But this assumption should be reconsidered, now that State Senate pro Tem Kevin de León, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, and Governor Jerry Brown have vowed to thwart Trumpian policies on climate change, the environment, labor conditions, and gender equality. Washington and Oregon are likely to take similar positions vis-à-vis Washington D.C. Will this lead to an exodus of businesses and the middle class from the Left Coast, leaving behind a moribund economy of the super-rich, hippies, and their servants? In other words, will the fight against Trump help bring about Callenbach’s dream of Ecotopia (18 years later than he predicted)?

I would submit that this assumption has a logical fallacy. Yes, some may leave California for “business-friendly” states, but many perhaps will migrate in the other direction. Creative, entrepreneurial people–those who start companies and create good 21st century jobs—are not lining up to live in Topeka, nor will they.

Edward Luttwak’s brilliant 1994 essay in the London Review of Books predicted the election of a Donald Trump-like leader, a British exit from the European Union, and the rise of populist ideology throughout Europe. His central idea was that creative destruction, the way in which innovation takes a capitalist economy to the next level, may sometimes happen so fast as to cause a backlash. The backlash he forecast would be a longing for the (real or imaginary) economic security of the past, protected and guaranteed by the government. Were that to occur, Luttwak argued, the result would be a stifling of creativity and innovation as firms become more comfortable in their government-provided security blanket and would feel less need to compete with new ideas.

But what about those who yearn to step out of the box? That is where The Left Coast comes in.

Innovators tend to be non-conformists who go against conventional wisdom and ideas. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in Player Piano, “Out on the edge you see so many things you can’t see from the center.”

So let’s say you’re comfortable challenging the social and business environment of the day, or that you have the temperament and drive to collaborate with other creative people to translate their ideas into commercially successful products. Where better for you to locate than in a bastion of Trump-defiance?

A second source of migration of productive creative people to the Left Coast could result from the social milieu. A society that takes its cues from a president who engages in hurtful talk about gays, women, immigrants, and minorities, people with disabilities, or people of certain religious beliefs, will prove to be uncomfortable at best for those constituencies. California will truly be the Golden State for those targeted by the president—and for anyone seeking a workplace in a more tolerant and pluralistic environment.

The Tiebout Hypothesis held that the variety of taxes and services offered by local governments leads to a sorting of the population according to individual preferences. Today’s well-documented sorting of people according to political beliefs is evidence that the Tiebout Hypothesis applies to more than just local taxes and public safety.

So sure, people who agree with Trumponomics, or who think California is a bad place to do business, or who just are tired of a state with uber-progressive governmental policy, will leave for states and cities that better match their worldview. That phenomenon is being observed and commented upon across the country; Phoenix, Dallas, and Las Vegas are attracting Californians fed up with high taxes and high housing prices.

But the opposite also may be true, particularly with a polarizing President whose supporters constitute a majority in large parts of the U.S. Highly productive people who earn comfortable incomes and can afford to make new homes in California, Washington or Oregon may head West, opting for progressive government, a welcoming and diverse social environment, and greater rather than lesser concern about lower carbon emissions and clean water.

The symmetry of the Tiebout Hypothesis—a symmetry that California bashers and Ecotopians alike both miss—may in fact be a Calternative within the United States that produces an expanded creative, entrepreneurial West Coast that remains one of the fastest growing economies of the world.

The post Go West, Young Entrepreneur–The Left Coast Is Open for Business appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.