That question occurred to me on a recent visit to Independence, California, a settlement of 600 people on U.S. 395, south of Bishop and north of Lone Pine in the windswept Owens Valley.

Spending the day on the streets of Independence, in the shadows of Mt. Williamson and other Eastern Sierra peaks, got me thinking about how much we talk about independence, and how little we cherish independence as a value.

While Independence is the sort of rural, out-of-the-way place that in the American and Californian imagination should embody our ideals of independence, there is very little that’s independent about Independence. Or about us.

Independence isn’t even its own municipality. It’s an unincorporated town—officially, a U.S. Census-designated place. Unincorporated towns don’t have their own city governments, and their people live at the whims of higher levels of government, which may or may not provide basic services. Independence neighborhoods, for example, don’t have sidewalks.

There also isn’t much business. When I visited, local cafes were closed, and the hotel-restaurant across the street from the courthouse was for sale. When I asked what was new in town, I kept getting the same answer: The Subway sandwich shop next to a gas station had been replaced by a smaller, Nevada-based chain, Port of Subs.

Independence is the seat of Inyo County, which helps keep the place alive. The county is a vital employer—between the county courthouse, the county administration, and the county jail on the south edge of town. Like so many rural communities, Independence is also dependent to a great degree on the federal and state governments. The feds manage or own more than one-third of the land in the area, via the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Forest Service, and the National Park Service. The state of California controls another 15 percent of the land. Independence depends very much on the protection of Cal Fire, with a summer of wildfires already underway.

But the biggest outside landowner in the area, with nearly half of the managed land, is the L.A. Department of Water and Power. L.A., in an unforgettable act of deception and treachery, bought up much of the Owens Valley to obtain water for the city in the early 20th century. Today, LADWP manages state-owned lands to control for dust in the Owens Lake, now mostly dry since L.A. took much of its water. DWP trucks are visible around town, and their facilities occupy multiple blocks west of 395. All this means Independence is peculiarly dependent on a city government over 200 miles away from it.

Around the corner from the LADWP buildings is Independence’s greatest public attraction, the Eastern California Museum. But inside this marvel of local history is an origin story rooted in dependence.

The name Independence was imposed by the U.S. military, which established Camp Independence in this valley back on July 4, 1862. In that period, the U.S. Army was not protecting anyone’s independence in California; it was making sure the new state stayed in the Union, while fighting and killing local Indigenous people in campaigns that, according to recent scholarship, amounted to genocide.

That history sat with me when I drove six miles south of town to visit another example of the American government’s approach to this part of California: Manzanar, the World War II incarceration camp for people of Japanese ancestry. The wind never stopped howling as I completed the three-mile loop through the camp, peering at old barracks and reflecting on the insatiable hunger of the United States to imprison its own people and—again in recent years—those who try to migrate here.

Did we stop believing in independence? Or did we ever really believe in it to begin with?

Perhaps we’d be better off giving up on glorifying independence as an American value. The 21st century is all about interdependence instead. We’ve needed one another to survive the pandemic, as our governments proved unable to prevent mass deaths. It seems certain that we’ll need to do the same to save ourselves from climate change. In a country as rough as ours, to be independent is to risk isolation and worse.

“Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land,” wrote the Independence-based writer Mary Austin in her 1903 book about the region, The Land of Little Rain, “you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.”

Today, a large plaque hangs from Austin’s former house on Market Street. As I read it, I wondered: why not call the 4th Solidarity Day? After all, it’s a holiday where we don’t behave independently. Instead, we act collectively, performing the same rituals of barbecues, parades, and fireworks all across the country.

Would we even miss Independence Day if we redefined it? After all, independence is dangerous these days. Americans spend considerable energy pressuring one another to be loyal team members—and not stray from our political, cultural, or corporate tribes. Independent thought, expression or action is likely to get you fired, sued, or severely ostracized.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives, our social movements, and our non-profits spend much of their time cozying up to the wealthy people and institutions that fund them. Talk of revolution and rebellion has been relegated to the fringes.

All that said, Independence Day hasn’t been canceled, at least not yet. The unincorporated town of Independence is organizing a fabulous Fourth of July, including closing down 395 to hold a big parade. There will be fun and games and food. You could call it a celebration of our country’s birthday. Or you could call it a celebration of the birthday of Independence, California.

Just don’t call it a celebration of independence. Because neither you nor anyone else believe in that anymore.

The post Is Independence Still Worth Celebrating? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In asking that, I don’t mean that earthquakes will turn California into an island. Instead, what California and Taiwan share is a problem—the predicament of the halfway country.

Taiwan is in reality an independent nation—in its ambitions, its advanced economy, its democratic government. But many of the world’s countries refuse to recognize it as a separate nation, deferring to mainland China, which claims Taiwan as a possession and responds with bullying and threats whenever Taiwan goes its own way.

California shares some aspects of this half-country conundrum. Our state has the ambitions, economy, and democratic government of one of the leading nations of the world. But it remains very much a part of the United States, which responds with bullying and threats whenever California goes its own way.

Yes, Californians fervently hope that our current conflict with the American government is temporary, a result of the Madness of King Trump, and that once the president is gone, we will return to being full members in good standing in the United States. But the hard truth is that California’s differences with the rest of America predate Trump, and so our status as a halfway country—in the United States, but not quite of it—is likely to become the new normal.

I spent last week in Taiwan, and the major lesson I learned (while planning a 2019 conference on democracy) is that it is exhausting to be a smaller country in the shadow of a larger power. The challenges there resemble those of California, and of younger siblings everywhere. When you’re often having to defend against a bullying big brother, how do you develop yourself into a success, much less a model whose examples might change the world—and even change big brother?

Of course, comparisons only go so far, because although Californians may chafe at our troubled relationship with the federal government—not to mention the relentless verbal attacks by the president—the Chinese government has repeatedly threatened to attack Taiwan militarily, seizing the island nation by force if it becomes too independent.

Still, Taiwan and California share some striking similarities. Both have advanced in education, technology, and culture, and punch well above their weight on the international stage. California has the world’s sixth largest economy, though with just 40 million citizens, it ranks 35th by population. Taiwan, likewise, has the world’s 22nd largest economy, even though its population of 23 million puts it at 55th most populous worldwide.

Even in an era of rising nationalism, both Taiwan and California go their own ways, remaining stubbornly internationalist, committed to free trade and immigration. Taiwan recently liberalized its immigration laws to attract more skilled workers and take advantage of mounting immigration restrictions around the world.

Despite struggling to forge diplomatic relations, Taiwan has built trading relationships all over the world, and stays close to other China neighbors—especially Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea—in the hopes that they will help Taiwan deter any Chinese attack. California, in a different context but a similar spirit, works with other states in a legal defense against the federal government, and has made alliances with other countries to address climate change, which the leaders of the American government consider a hoax.

It is precisely because Taiwan and California are so distinctive that they face threats. Just as President Trump has called California “out of control” and falsely accused Californians of engaging in massive election fraud, President Xi Jinping’s propagandists have raised constant questions about the legitimacy of Taiwan’s own free and fair elections.

Even though the economies of both California and Taiwan are tethered to these larger countries, both places see themselves as defenders of openness and democratic values that are at odds with the increasingly authoritarian governments of their national big brothers.

That authoritarianism has sparked resistance in both places. Taiwan and California each have independence movements that want a more formal split—which adds to the risk of greater conflict. Last week, two former Taiwan presidents and the head of a broadcasting company announced a campaign to force a referendum for Taiwanese independence. Back in California, different groups have filed ballot initiatives seeking votes on California independence.

Both movements pose the same question: How many threats must we suffer from Beijing or Washington before enough is enough?

There are many Taiwanese answers to this. The mainstream response is to stay the course. “We don’t want to be in conflict with China,” Taiwanese premier Lai Ching-te said at a Taipei forum. “But we won’t bend to pressure either.”

But I also heard more robust, provocative answers.

First, be opportunistic in building solidarity. Whenever the Chinese issue threats, point that out to the world, and use it to develop a shared sense of identity. Taiwan has been adept at this. A generation ago, most Taiwanese told pollsters they saw themselves as Chinese. Now, after decades of Chinese bullying, most Taiwanese see themselves as primarily Taiwanese.

Second, never miss an opportunity to expand your autonomy when the larger power leaves an opening. To imagine how that logic might apply to California, consider President Trump’s recent suggestion that he might remove federal immigration enforcement from California. Our state’s political leaders reacted by condemning the president or disregarding the comments as Trumpian nonsense. Perhaps, instead, they should have taken his statements as an offer—and accepted it, declaring the state would happily take control of immigration enforcement and asking him for a date by which ICE would leave California.

Finally, success is the best revenge. The conflict with the larger power is a competition, so do everything you can to be friendlier, more democratic, and more attractive than the larger power menacing you. The most interesting conversations I heard in Taipei were about whether Taiwan should respond to China’s militaristic behavior by declaring itself officially an island of peace—a neutral country, like Switzerland, unwilling to participate in wars outside its boundaries. Such a stance might make it harder for China to attack, and win Taiwan more international support.

And just imagine how popular it might be if California, perhaps through ballot initiative, declared its own official neutrality and said it no longer would support America’s costly and endless wars.

It is possible to take the California-Taiwan comparison too far. “The mainland has missiles pointed at us,” one Taiwanese journalist reminded me. “Does America have missiles pointed at you in California?”

No. But I took heart that Taiwan and California are pursuing strategies based on a similar faith: that a smaller place doesn’t have to be at the mercy of the larger place. That a smaller place, through the power of its own example, can reshape the larger place.

California’s long history of leading America to the future suggests there is real wisdom in such an approach. People in Taiwan—whose foreign investment-based economic revival inspired China to open itself up to foreign investment decades ago—can see this too.

In Taichung, I visited a new Literary Museum located in an old police dormitory from the Japanese colonial period. In one courtyard, I encountered the most magnificent tree you’ll see outside Sequoia National Park. It’s a banyan that has grown so many different roots, that it now appears to be multiple trees with a couple different trunks.

“In this way,” said a guide, “a tree becomes a forest.”

The post Can Taiwan Teach California How to Thrive Under an Authoritarian Power? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear America,

I suppose I should wish you happy birthday. But I’m just not feeling it.

You and I, the United States and California, used to be pretty darn close—“indivisible” was your word and “inseparable” was mine. Sure, we had our differences—I’ve always been a little out there—but the differences were what made us a successful partnership.

America wouldn’t be America without California, and California was proudly part of America, which tolerated our excesses for our mutual glory. President Clinton, in a speech at UCLA during the early ‘90s, reminded us: “Don’t ever forget that California is still America’s America, the cutting edge for a nation still a symbol of hope and optimism throughout the world.”

But you and I have been drifting apart in a thousand small ways and some pretty big ones since then. Today, I look at you and feel like I’m an entirely different place, with different values, mindsets, even different realities.

I never used to think this, but now I find myself wondering about our future: Do you and I even have one together?

When I think of the problems in the relationship, it’s really not me. It’s you. While I’m the almond-producing state with a well-deserved reputation for flights of fancy, you’re the one that has gone nuts.

Now, everyone is entitled to a mid-life crisis, even 18th-century republics. But you are having an especially nasty one. Sometimes I feel like you’ve turned against everything you used to love: immigrants, trade, international alliances, voting rights, women’s rights, science, national parks, building infrastructure, and a certain stoic and respectful demeanor.

These days, you’re constantly freaking out. And the government you installed in Washington—a government my voters opposed by historic margins—is trying to take away people’s health care, make it harder to vote, roll back environmental and climate regulations, restart the failed drug war, defund Planned Parenthood, and pick fights with my best foreign friends and trading partners, perfectly friendly countries like Mexico, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and South Korea.

Couldn’t you have just bought an irresponsibly expensive sports car instead? I mean, you’ve got the global reserve currency to afford one.

Now, all of this crazy nonsense is pretty bad. But here’s what’s even worse, and maybe unforgivable: Your people, your media, and your elected officials keep trying to justify your crack-up as just a natural reaction to what you say is my awfulness. In your narrative, I’m too coastal, too elite, too rich, too educated, too Hollywood, too tech, too globalist, too uninterested in the pain of the rest of the country, and thus too out of touch with you. And so you’ve had to go stone-cold nuts to get my attention, to wake me up.

That thesis is—how do I put this?—exactly what the cows drop in Tulare County pastures after a good feed.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but my people and I know the pain of poverty (we’re tops in the nation in it), economic dislocation (just look back at the carnage of our 1990s recession and our late 2000s housing crisis), and drug abuse. There is no American malady I don’t suffer, with the exception of bad winter weather.

So the fact that you keep projecting your outrageous behavior onto me—while supporting a federal government that believes all these problems will be solved by cutting the taxes of my many millionaires and billionaires—tells me that you’ve taken leave of your senses.

I’m also starting to worry that your insanity and your lack of a coherent foreign policy in East Asia is going to end up getting me nuked by North Korea.

So, going forward, our relationship can’t be the same.

Now, I’m not going to march out the door and become my own country, like the crazy, Russia-compromised #Calexit movement proposed. You are still my country, and I’m not surrendering you. Plus, if I did become independent, I don’t think I could ever sleep at night with a nation as violent and volatile as you on my northern and eastern borders.

But I do need to put some distance between you and me. Let me put it this way: I need some boundaries, but I don’t mean a wall. I need to stand up for myself, and think about my own needs and protection first.

A few weeks ago, a small group of Californians filed a ballot initiative that will give me some space. The initiative, called “California’s Future: A Path to Independence,” does have a separatist bent—it takes “inseparable” out of the California constitution’s line about California being part of the United States. But it’s agnostic on the idea of California leaving the Union. The initiative takes the position that it doesn’t much matter whether California is in the United States or out of it, only that California is able to pursue its own interests, and not have them frustrated by you.

“America, whatever” is its attitude; “California first,” is its policy. The initiative sets up a structure with the express purpose of “buffering Californians” and their values (respect for diversity, science, and democracy) “against chaos, dysfunction, and uncertainty at the federal level.”

In the meantime, it sets up a structure so that California behaves more like its own nation, and looks out for its own interests. Your and my relationship should be, it argues, less about any lingering feelings of love and loyalty, and more about business.

While you slide toward republican authoritarianism, the initiative proposes that California—a place where the people who get the most votes actually win the elections—will stick up for democracy. We will fight for the universal right of all adult citizens to vote, even if you continue policies that make it harder for people to vote. We will challenge attacks on our immigrants, our world-class cities, and our highly effective anti-smog policies.

“As Californians, we have much to gain and little to lose by pursuing autonomy,” the measure says, adding: “The path to both autonomy and full independence is largely the same; for California to take stock of the leverage it has over the United States, and to use this leverage to negotiate for ever greater autonomy.” For example, my people should seek changes to tax and budgeting policy so that I’m not paying more in taxes than I’m getting back in services. And I’m not interested in subsidizing your irresponsible debt or your constant wars, which my people don’t support. And while I’m at it, I’ll be demanding the representation I deserve—starting with more than two senators.

The initiative’s proposed commission—which is modeled on one of California’s most enduring governing entities, the reform body known as the Little Hoover Commission—would pursue both federal and state policy changes and demand progress from elected leaders on ever-greater California autonomy.

It’s not a perfect idea. For one thing, the initiative would name the commission after Juan Bautista Alvarado, an obscure 1840s governor who supported greater California autonomy under Mexican rule. But he also had a colorful personal life, including a drinking problem so bad that he didn’t make it to his own Santa Clara wedding (his half-brother had to stand in for him). It would be better to name the commission for General William Tecumseh Sherman, who is both a major California figure (as an Army officer during the Gold Rush and a leading banker of 1850s San Francisco) and an American military hero who famously marched through some red states with voter registration issues.

Yes, I’m going my own way. But my people are just as American as yours, and so on July 4, I’ll still host many millions of barbecues, and enough patriotic parades and fireworks displays for 39.5 million of your citizens. Back east of the Sierra, I hope your celebrations are bigger and louder than ever, and that your people will stand extra close to the fireworks.

Maybe all the explosions will wake you the hell up.

Independently yours,

California

The post California, Let’s Celebrate July 4 by Declaring Independence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California may have the size and economy and independent spirit of a good-sized country. But California is not a nation. Which is precisely why it would be so self-destructive to seek to become one.

Yes, it’s understandable why, with the election of an evil white supremacist swindler as president of the United States, the idea of California going off on its own suddenly has such great currency. The movement for an independent California has taken off on social media; its supporters are appearing on TV, putting up billboards, and planning a referendum. Our state’s elected leaders are speaking of how Trump’s victory makes them feel like strangers in their own country. And many Californians are rightfully renewing strong objections to how America’s outdated 18th century governing system, from the Electoral College to the U.S. Senate (with just two senators per state, no matter the size) works against California’s interests.

Last week, I was constantly asked about the possibility of California’s independence while running a global forum on direct and participatory democracy. The conference was held, fortuitously, in Spanish Basque Country, whose people are experts in the difficulties of seeking independence, having sought their own nation within the Iberian Peninsula for centuries.

So, after failing to joke away such inquiries, I answered California independence questions with my own query: Do you think we would be better off trying to go our own way?

The responses—from political scientists around the world, and especially the Basques who hosted—were sobering. It’s impossible to know how any secession will turn out, and the process of winning independence is always costlier and harder than would-be secessionists think.

Such efforts are bitter, divisive struggles even for a cohesive nation like the Basque Country, whose people have assiduously protected their distinctive language and culture. When I asked the president of the Basque Parliament, Bakartxo Tejeria, what distinguished Basque democratic culture, she mentioned three things: stubbornness, a very long collective memory, and a determination to never run from a fight.

Such feistiness is inspiring, especially when experienced up close.

But it is not very Californian.

We are open-minded, not stubborn; we celebrate and seek out new incursions of language and culture and migrants, instead of defending against them. And Californians don’t just have short memories of our shared history; most of us never bothered to learn the history in the first place.

And we largely see these aspects of our character not as failures, but as virtues.

We are not a nation. To the contrary, we are best understood as one of the world’s leading un-nations. The word nation, after all, comes from Latin and from old English and French words for “birth” (naissance). But more than a quarter of Californians were born in some other country and millions entered the world in some other state. Nations are defined by common descent, history, language or culture, but Californians pride ourselves on our lack of shared history, which is what makes us so cool, so diverse, so darn good-looking.

If our un-nation can be said to be any one thing—and we are hard to generalize about—it is that we are a sanctuary, for Americans and the rest of the world, who must flee from stubbornness and fighting. When the United States gets into wars—from the Civil War to World War II—its citizens head here to heal and start over. “Things better work here,” Joan Didion famously wrote of her native state, “because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

It is our inclusive un-nationhood, and not just our recent political preference for Democrats, that makes California the natural opposition to the prospect of a federal government peddling racist and xenophobic nationalism. Which is precisely why the idea of an independent California country—so long discussed and joked about—is now newly serious. And newly dangerous.

To be blunt: Do we really want to answer Trumpian nationalism with our own? For our un-nation to pursue its own nationalist project would be a capitulation to the forces of separatism. And it would be nothing less than a betrayal of ourselves, a suicide of the universalist California idea.

It also would be, as a practical matter, a very nasty business. The conflict could last decades, and the costs would be felt not just in politics but in treasure—and quite possibly blood.

We’d have to battle Congress and other states to get their support if we wanted to leave peacefully, and we’d certainly have to take more than our share of America’s debts with us. And if things got so bad that we chose to leave without permission? Do you really think a country as armed and violent and war-prone as the United States would let its greatest province exit without a fight? In the Basque Country, scholars of nationalism from Asia to South America reminded me of what happened in other independence struggles: Koreans killing Koreans, Chinese killing Chinese, Irish killing Irish, and, less than two centuries ago, Americans killing Americans.

Inevitably, the fighting would pit Californian against Californian. Many of us would not want to leave the U.S. And most of us identify more closely with our distinct regions than with the state as a whole, a tendency that could divide us. And don’t forget: While Hillary Clinton won California by 29 points and more than 3.5 million votes, one third of California voters cast ballots for Trump—representing an uncomfortably large Fifth Column with which to coexist.

What sense would it make to take on an independence war of choice when we already face so many other consequential fights? Climate change threatens like the big waves that I watched crest and splash over the top of Basque sea walls. The whole world confronts regional wars and a migration crisis, and Western countries face a calamity of stagnant incomes and retreating democracies.

Let’s also remember that, if we managed to leave, we’d win only the ice-cold comfort of trying to sleep every night next door to an unstable, nuclear-armed country bitter at our departure.

Given the world and the America we now face, Californians shouldn’t waste another second contemplating independence or secession. We must instead focus on defending our nation and protecting its people, regardless of race, religion or legal status, against whatever horrors the haters in Washington D.C might send our way.

But in doing so, we must be careful to avoid escalating the conflict. Ours will have to be a strategy right out of the Cold War. Contest every incursion of the Orange-Haired Empire, while carefully avoiding rhetoric or actions that lead to greater conflict or violence. Build our own alliances and collaborations with states and countries that share our values.

We will have to be especially disciplined about impugning the motives of those who support the new American regime. Instead, we must relentlessly urge them to change their minds, and assure them that when they realize their mistake, we will welcome them like the sanctuary we’ve always been. We’ll have to challenge the nativists and racialists within our own borders with the same spirit.

In other words, we have to stay strong—and stay chill.

We’ll also have to work on improving the power of our own example—we’ll need to get better at governing, and more effective at meeting our state’s economic, educational, and environmental goals. We’ll need to give new meaning to the old adage: Living well is the best revenge.

So, on this Thanksgiving weekend, let’s begin by avoiding rancor or worry at the family table. Instead let’s give thanks for the United States, and for the fact that we’re its biggest, most powerful state, with plenty of weight to throw against Washington.

And let’s remind ourselves that America, for better and for worse, is California’s nation. Why would we ever surrender it?

The post California’s Not Built to Become Its Own Nation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Or you can go for the American history. Those who know of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham—fought September 13, 1759 on a plain named for the early French settler Abraham Martin—often remember it as a fight between a French army commanded by Lieutenant General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm and a British army commanded by Major General James Wolfe. But few know that this battle helped to make the American Revolution possible.

About one-third of Major General Wolfe’s army had been recruited in the American colonies. Two-thirds of the ships that carried his army up the St. Lawrence River to Quebec had been chartered in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of New England sailors had temporarily joined the Royal Navy to take part in the Quebec campaign.

Visit the National Battlefields Park inside the city and you can walk over the ground where American soldiers fought in 1759. Despite its name, the park—Quebec’s equivalent of Central Park—is well known these days as a recreational area, nature preserve, and outdoor concert venue, rather than as a historic site.

James Wolfe, 1727-1759.

But at National Battlefields Park, you can follow in the footsteps of Wolfe’s advance guard that climbed the cliffs lining the St. Lawrence River by walking up the Plains of Abraham Trail. Walk eastward until you reach the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Québec (the Quebec National Fine Arts Museum) and you’re standing at the south end of Wolfe’s line.

Wolfe’s 4,500 British and American soldiers stood there as Montcalm’s army of 3,500 charged across the plains. Wolfe’s disciplined force held their formation and waited for the French to come within range. Montcalm’s army, composed of an uneasy mix of French regulars and Canadian militia, broke apart as a rapid advance over rough ground disrupted its formation and the militia opened fire prematurely, then paused to reload. A series of volleys by Britons and Americans firing flintlock muskets broke the French army and threw Montcalm’s troops into headlong retreat.

By European standards, the battle had been a minor encounter between small bodies of troops. (In the European theatre of the Seven Years’ War, 36,000 Prussians—allied to the British—had defeated 66,000 Austrians—allied to the French—at the Battle of Leuthen in 1757.) Wolfe’s army lost 71 killed, 591 wounded, and three missing; the French had about 600 killed, wounded, and missing. But when the black powder smoke had cleared, a major obstacle to American independence had been eliminated.

That obstacle? The French.

By 1759, the original 13 colonies were potential independent states. They had their own governments, run by local elites and financed by local revenues. And on occasion they organized their own armies and fleets and sent them off to war. New England had sent out expeditions that had besieged Quebec in 1690 and captured Acadia in 1710 and Louisbourg in 1744.

A military plan shows frontline positions of the British and French during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham on Sept. 13, 1759.

But for as long as the French held Canada, independence was out of the question. The British and Americans perceived the French and their Native American allies as a major threat. In wartime, French-Native American war parties raided the American frontier with impunity while privateers from Louisbourg preyed on American shipping. French outposts like Fort Niagara, Detroit, and Louisiana hemmed in the 13 colonies, preventing them from expanding to the west. Americans looked to the Royal Navy and British army to defend the colonies against French aggression.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham changed all that. A few days after the battle, Quebec surrendered after a brief siege. A year later, following three British-American invasions that converged on Montreal, the rest of Canada capitulated. Now in British hands, Canada no longer posed a threat.

So when the British parliament decided to tax the American colonies, there was nothing to stop British colonials from rising up to fight—first for their rights as Englishmen, then for their freedom as Americans. British soldiers who served at the Plains of Abraham ended up on both sides of the American Revolution. William Howe, who led Wolfe’s advance guard during the landing at Quebec, served as British commander-in-chief from 1775 to 1778. Richard Montgomery, one of Wolfe’s officers, joined the American rebels and returned to Quebec in 1775 as the commander of an American invasion of Canada.

The post The Quebec Battle That Opened the Door to America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At a Smithsonian/Zócalo “What It Means to Be American” event, held at the National Museum of American History in Washington, Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez moderated a lively, big-picture discussion about the nature of creativity and the cultural forces that influence it. The evening featured four panelists, all recipients of this year’s Smithsonian magazine Ingenuity Awards, from a wide variety of disciplines: Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto; Zoe Crosher, co-curator of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project; Harvard Alzheimer’s researcher Doo Yeon Kim; and Françoise Mouly, art editor at The New Yorker. In front of an enthusiastic crowd, they debated the right balance of doggedness and collaboration, and hunger and support.

Rodriguez kicked the conversation off by questioning the prevailing vision of the American loner—the individual, as opposed to the group, who tinkers alone in his garage until he or she makes a groundbreaking discovery. Is this the correct way to frame innovation? Is it just as important—or even more so—to have a society that wants innovation to take place?

Kim suggested that while society cannot force genius or ingenuity, a society supportive of innovation is still essential. Consider how easy it is for a society to stifle it, he pointed out. “I was raised in South Korea,” he said, and while there are many things about the country he loves, “I’ve seen a lot of cases where talented people just aren’t in the right place. There are genius people over there, but often they don’t find the right outlet for this genius.” They don’t have the impulse to push their fields forward as a result.

Mouly picked up on this idea by talking about her similar experience coming to the States from Paris. “I spent a few months in New York when I was 19 or 20 and still studying architecture in France,” she said, “and it was absolutely clear to me that there was an openness to new ideas and new ways of doing things.”

When she returned to Paris, she explained, she ran into trouble when she tried to land a job that required three more years of experience than she had. “I said I could do it: I have the skills, I’m interested. And the woman who was doing the hiring looked at me like, ‘Get out of my office,’” Mouly said. “I realized it was my New York spirit.”

While in France she often heard, “That’s not how we do things,” in New York, she never found barriers separating her from the experts. When she wanted to try her hand at plumbing, for instance, she found plumbers and learned from them. “To be curious was enough of a qualification,” she said.

The idea of a lack of hierarchy in America was a theme that ran throughout the conversation. Kim noted that he didn’t see the rigid divisions he’d seen in other places like Korea where “associate professors aren’t allowed” to talk to senior professors. Crosher added nuance to the idea by noting that it’s not that there are no hierarchies here—the politics of the art world, for instance, are “very bizarre, and exist in all sorts of irrational ways that all have to do with the market.” It’s that even in hierarchical fields, often there are ways to work around the established order, she said. The project she was recognized for, which commissioned artists to design works for billboards across the country, was sponsored by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), an arts nonprofit organization that she describes as a “really radical outlet.”

“My idea was insane. No one in a normal museum system would have been able to take this project on,” she said. “So I was able to find someone who could go around it. I constantly find myself bumping up against hierarchies, and I’m constantly finding ways to ways to get around them—or above them, or under them.”

Given the panelists’ rebellious streak, Rodriguez teased, “does ingenuity just mean a bunch of anarchists? Do you have to be a pain in the ass to be inventive?”

“A lot of people think I’m a difficult person,” Stern said. “But didn’t people also think Edison was a difficult person?”

Yet Stern, who has developed numerous scientific instruments for planetary and near-space research missions, also noted that “it sells innovation short to characterize it only in terms of the anarchy aspect. Sometimes it’s just a smart person solving a problem in an inventive way. It’s important that we recognize innovation comes in many forms.”

Collaboration, Stern said, can both help and hinder individual innovation; it’s just “an issue of degree.” On the one hand, sometimes the open-office trend goes too far: People can get distracted when companies try to force collaboration and end up getting in each other’s way, he said. But on the other hand, when he worked in the University of Colorado’s Center for Space and Geosciences Policy, he had different research groups sit together, so that people from different specialties would bump into each other. The result was a cross-pollination of ideas, because people naturally shared thoughts as they passed by.

“Encouraging innovation has been very much to our advantage for the past 220-plus years,” he said. “We’ve been an inventive nation from the get-go, with democracy to the technological powerhouse that this nation has become. It’s cultural, and it feeds on itself. It takes many forms and pathways.”

In a lively question-and-answer session, many audience members pressed the panelists to consider the more challenging sides of innovation. Is war good for creativity? And who’s left out of America’s innovative ethos—who can’t afford to be creative?

On the topic of wars, Stern acknowledged that, for better or worse, they have in fact inspired a lot of technological invention. “It’s unfortunate, but empirically wars spur invention,” he said.

The panelists agreed that not all classes, races, and genders have equal opportunities to innovate—and more education and awareness are important to overcome these obstacles.

Still, said Mouly, “I do believe that here there are opportunities for somebody who is hardworking and passionate, regardless of class and academic achievement. I’m not saying there aren’t problems, but you can make your own way.”

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