“The recall is about freedom,” said Costa, as he gleefully referred to himself as a “wacko” and “president of the Banana Republic of California.”

“Here,” he said, “the people are showing the world that they can kick the rulers out anytime they like.”

I thought of Costa as I watched Gov. Gavin Newsom give his inaugural speech this month in Sacramento. Newsom and Costa occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum. But Newsom, like recall supporters once did, couldn’t stop talking about California as an alternative American republic—a place to demonstrate what real freedom might look like.

“More than any people, in any place, California has bridged the historic expanse between freedom for some, and freedom for all,” Newsom said, adding: “California will continue to lead out loud, by advancing a far-reaching freedom agenda.”

Outside the Golden State, such messianic thinking is mocked as left-coast lunacy. Even inside California, political cognoscenti dismiss Newsom’s rhetoric as advancing national political ambitions. And they recall 2003 as a bizarre sideshow.

These cynics are wrong. Yes, this state has engaged in global hype since the Gold Rush. And yes, much talk about California as global leader is pretentious and over-the-top. But our pretensions have been repeated so long that they have acquired real weight.

In retrospect, and after reflecting on my own career observing California governance in the 21^st century, the 2003 recall looks less like a strange moment and more like the beginning of an era. The recall was an international event that elected a hyper-ambitious world-famous movie star as governor. Since then, state leaders have thought and acted as global agenda-setters, as if they were top diplomats at the United Nations or cardinals in the Vatican.

This shift goes unrecognized because Californians and Americans look lazily at politics, through partisan lenses. The recall, and the elevation of a Republican to the governor’s office, shifted the state right, then the state moved back left. Where’s the continuity in that? Here’s where: in the global scale of the rhetoric, ambitions, and policies of our governors.

While Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom are very different characters, they all increased the power of an office that functions as a second American presidency. And they have talked in world-historical terms of California as a place apart, a model for America and other countries.

Schwarzenegger used the word “Armageddon” more than any politician I’ve ever encountered, and offered himself and his state as world savior. He pursued policies, especially on climate change, health care, and political reform, that were at odds with those of other states and the nation.

“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens and Sparta,” said Schwarzenegger in his fourth State of the State address. “Not only can we lead California into the future … we can show the nation and the world how to get there.”

Brown was less messianic and more philosophical, but he was ambitious. He approved a series of protections and supports for immigrants—in the face of an anti-immigrant wave in Washington—that constituted a new, California form of American citizenship.

And he portrayed California as battling apocalypse, just as Schwarzenegger did. He traveled the world as if he were a president (he even met one-on-one with China’s Xi Jinping) to build a “network of the willing” of provinces and countries eager to prevent climate Armageddon and nuclear holocaust.

But for all of that work, it is not Schwarzenegger or Brown but the current governor, Gavin Newsom, who has been most aggressive in his California exceptionalism. Newsom portrays California as a free nation, providing protection against an America descending into fascism, hatred, violence, book-banning, and restrictions on the rights of immigrants, women, and LGTBQ people. He scheduled his second inaugural for January 6 and led a peaceful march to the Capitol in Sacramento—drawing a deliberate contrast between California and the insurrection of 2021.

In public, Newsom won’t stop talking about the national and global leadership of the “world’s fourth largest economy.” His second inaugural connected his personal and family history to the idea of California as a global bastion of freedom that is both “giving shape to the future” and “molding the character of the nation.”

“Whether your family came here for work, or for safety, California offered freedom to access it, not contingent on you looking a certain way, talking a certain way, thinking a certain way,” he said.

“California lights the territory for the rest,” he concluded.

There is an enormous problem with this sort of rhetoric, one that Newsom openly confronted. The state itself has enormous problems, and the lives of its people are defined by local struggles—especially the struggle to be housed—not by global ambitions.

The question for California now is whether the state can do more than enact progressive policies and ambitious goals. It must make major improvements in the lives of its people.

With recession looming and the state budget suffering, the limitations of California’s outdated governing system—first designed in the 19^th century—are evident. Newsom and other leaders know the system has to change to make it possible for action to match ambitions.

I’ve long been a dark-hearted cynic about the state’s willingness to change. But there are some green shoots. Civic groups have been quietly meeting to talk about making major revisions to, or even rewriting, the constitution, which dates to 1879.

And last week, a new organization, the ProRep Coalition, announced an effort to remake California’s election system. Their proposal, already endorsed by smaller political parties on the right and left, is for a multi-party system of proportional representation—allocating power and representation by the percentage of the vote to allow more diversity and more expertise in government, as the world’s most advanced democracies do.

Such efforts seek to transform the rhetoric of the last 20 years into reality. If they succeed, it would spark a new era for California, where we become not just a state but the next American republic.

The post How the 2003 Recall Created Today’s Republic of California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But how to do that?

This was the meaty question of last night’s panel, “Is This What Direct Democracy Looks Like?” The Zócalo event, in partnership with the Berggruen Institute, the Public Policy Institute of California, and the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, was a searching conversation into how to democratize direct democracy.

“When I go around the world talking about this topic of today’s discussion, there’s one of two kinds of audiences,” said moderator Nathan Gardels, editor-in-chief of Noēma and co-founder of the Berggruen Institute. First, there are those without a voice who desperately want direct democracy. Second, there are those who do have direct democracy, but want to fix its “considerable flaws.” This is where we are in California today, he said, a place where you can see it all—the “good, bad, and the ugly”—of direct democracy.

“I’ve seen the ugly,” said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, who called attention to the problems of statewide ballot initiatives that appear on November ballots.

“We publish a lot of material,” she said, “and somehow, we’re still not getting the information to the people who need it, and people still feel overwhelmed and frustrated.”

Part of the problem is that there is a communication gap, she said, but the other issue is bad actors: “We have folks who come in with lots of money and pay for all the ads in the world, and twist peoples’ minds and they end up voting against things that they normally would never have voted against.”

“If it were up to me, I wouldn’t do propositions at all,” Weber continued. “It’s very easy for those with tremendous amounts of resources to manipulate [initiatives] and undo years and years of community engagement, conversation, [and] action on behalf of community.”

But many Californians prefer to have the final say on legislation, even if it undoes years of work. Public Policy Institute of California president and CEO Mark Baldassare shared new polling data the institute collected after revisiting a number of questions they asked years ago about the public’s attitudes toward direct democracy.

According to the surveys, there’s agreement that direct democracy is a good thing, but it needs to change. Two-thirds of Californians say that there’s too much special interest influence in elections. A majority of Californians in the survey also believe initiatives are too confusing and complicated.

What people are looking for, said Baldassare, are initiatives with some bipartisan consensus—”that this is the best thing possible for everybody in the state, not one interest or another.” That’s why of the approximately 400 ballot measures introduced in the state, only about one-third of the time they pass, he said. “If there’s anything that gives them some doubt about it—and it’s very easy to create doubt about these things, especially in this age—they will vote no,” said Baldassare.

John Matsusaka, Initiative & Referendum Institute president and author of Let the People Rule, agreed that one the biggest challenges when it comes to running direct democracy is getting the electorate sufficiently informed.

“If people were perfectly informed, special interests could spend as much as they want, it wouldn’t really matter,” he said.  To make direct democracy work, we must “make sure we get as much information out to the voters as we can.”

Panelists also discussed how to improve the quality and accuracy of official titles and summaries of ballot initiatives, which are now written not by citizens but by the state attorney general, who is an elected official. As an example of the problem, Matsusaka cited Proposition 6, which proposed to repeal an increase in fuel taxes and vehicle fees but became a flash point; it was confusingly titled “Eliminates Certain Road Repair and Transportation Funding. Requires Certain Fuel Taxes and Vehicle Fees be Approved by the Electorate.”

“If we want voters to make informed decisions, we have to give them an objective title. That’s step number one,” said Matsusaka.

Weber and the panelists also discussed in detail various ideas to change the recall process, after the failure of the 2021 attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom.

But one good thing about the recall ballot, Weber noted, was that it was simple because it only had two questions:

1. Do you want to recall the governor (remove him from office)?

2. If the governor is recalled, who do you want to replace him?

Weber said that record numbers of people turned their recall ballots early—“because they knew how to handle the ballot.”

Weber suggested that the ballot is too crowded today. “People don’t want more initiatives. They want to understand what’s on them.”

“Our goal, she continued, “should be to have initiatives that address issues that people think are important and that people understand.”

Weber said her office is looking into what it will take to do that. Among the models they are looking at is the citizens’ initiative review process in Oregon and other states, in which everyday voters, chosen through a process that involves randomization and sortition, hold hearings on measures, and write short summaries for voters.

“Our process should be better, more effective, get to the people the information they need, and hopefully make some changes that folks believe in,” said Weber.

Baldassare agreed. “There’s got to be something other than the commercials on television on the yes and no side.” He found in the most recent PPIC poll that 77 percent of Californians would support an independent citizens review commission. To Baldassare, what the polling is saying is that “citizens need to be involved.”

Before the conversation wrapped, Baldassare pointed out “one thing about our direct democracy system in California today that’s good”—the number of people who are registering to vote and casting their ballot. He also pointed out that it’s easier to vote than ever, including via Assembly Bill 47, which ensures that everyone gets a ballot in the mail in every future election.

Baldassare brought along his own ballot for the spring statewide election, and help it up to applause from the audience, watching live from the California ASU Center in the Herald Examiner Building in downtown Los Angeles and via a livestream.

“This was something that came out of the tragedy of the pandemic,” Baldassare said of the mail balloting.

“Direct democracy can’t work if people aren’t participating as a democratic institution. We have that today in California,” he said, making reference to 2021’s recall, “in which the winners and losers with grace and dignity believed the results in that election” and saw high participation among voters.

Looking ahead, he said, “that’s something that we can now build on.”

The post The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of California’s Direct Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maddeningly, many Californians who claim to be defenders of democracy persist in calling this democratic triumph an expensive waste of money. (Some of these thoughtless critics even have the gall to call themselves Democrats.) If they don’t want to look like hypocrites, they should stop complaining, reconsider this election’s math, and reflect more deeply on the price of democracy.

Let’s start with the number: $276 million is almost nothing in a state California’s size. That figure represents less than 1 percent of the current budget surplus, and about one-tenth of 1 percent of the overall state budget. To put it in another context, the election cost $100 million less than baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers are paying their right fielder.

Media commentators have spent the past two weeks claiming, falsely, that the recall took $300 million away from schools or healthcare or homelessness. The truth is the exact opposite. The recall helped increase funding for those core government services to historic heights—in part because of the pressure the election put on our state’s ruling Democrats as they negotiated a budget this summer.

And let me blunt: If legislators and the governor had had another $300 million, it’s quite possible they would have blown it on a giveaway to their own political backers. In fact, that’s precisely what happened in July, when some of the same Democratic politicians questioning the recall’s cost spent $330 million to double the size of an unnecessary and ineffective tax credit for wealthy Hollywood producers.

Those same politicians could have reduced the cost of the recall by $60 million if they hadn’t insisted on moving the election date up to September 14 to give Newsom a political advantage.

But let’s not get too upset about that bit of hypocrisy, because even with the additional cost, the recall was worth it.

Spending more on elections has never made more sense than it does right now. California’s election system is in the midst of a historic transition to make voting easier. New practices, like opening vote centers for weeks before elections and sending everyone a mail-in ballot, are so far a success, with turnout up. But this progress is fragile because of a rising wave of disinformation attacking elections and democracy. The people who run our elections—county officials and volunteers—are facing harassment and threats because they do their jobs honestly.

More than 80 percent of the $276 million cost of the recall is going to those same county election officials—who, in running the recall election, get to reinforce new election infrastructure, find new ways to bring out voters, and take measures to protect themselves and their elections against threats. The rest of the money (more than $30 million) is used by the state to do things like print and distribute voter guides in the different languages that Californians speak.

Think of the recall’s cost as money spent on infrastructure—democratic infrastructure. And instead of complaining about it, think of how much more we could invest in it. If we’re serious about saving democracy, we should create funding for every California municipality to have a robust office to support public participation and civic engagement, as foreign cities often do. We also should raise and stabilize election funding, hire more public workers to help hard-to-reach people participate and vote, and provide more public financing for campaigns, with an emphasis on supporting greater information and debate on ballot measures.

More people paying more attention to democracy can help reshape history.

Just look at the dramatic transformation of our governor, who was flailing and unfocused—until it became clear the recall would qualify. Then, Newsom made personnel changes in his team, and curbed his bad habit of creating working groups or commissions or task forces to address tricky problems rather than managing them himself. (The nadir of Newsomian delegation was a “task force” to study…pause for a breath…oxygen in late 2020, instead of simply getting more to hospitals.)

Facing recall, Newsom started taking big, direct actions—and never stopped. After keeping kids out of classrooms for too long, he pressured to force schools to reopen. He replaced a miserly offer of loans to struggling businesses with a system of generous grants. He junked the confusing COVID-19 colored-tier system and reopened the state in June.

If this sounds like cheerleading, well, Newsom saved that too, reversing a ban that initially kept cheerleaders off the sidelines after high school sports reopened.

The hip-hip-hoorays didn’t stop there. Newsom reversed himself and moved aggressively to shut down homeless encampments. And his recall year budget made too many historic investments—from health coverage to college affordability—to list here. To pick just one: after 25 years of California politicians promising and failing to deliver universal preschool, Newsom’s recall budget plan actually provides for a full year of transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds.

When you understand this context, Newsom’s landslide victory does not mean that the election was unnecessary. To the contrary, his win shows the recall’s value. The election affirmed the governor’s big impactful acts of governance, and set the stage for more aggressive action, especially around the pandemic. Newsom framed the election in part as a choice about pushing hard for more vaccinations—meaning this recall will almost certainly save lives.

Now, we Californians just have to keep Newsom—who is prone to distraction and flights of fancy—disciplined, vulnerable, and on edge. He has been more effective in 2021 as his public personality grows saltier, angrier, and wounded.

And if Newsom gets complacent after being re-elected next year, perhaps some civic-minded Californian can qualify another recall to improve the governor’s focus—and give us another opportunity to spend $300 million on our democracy.

The post California’s Recall Was Worth Every Penny appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know a lot of you think this recall is pretty strange. But you don’t have to go far to find a recall that’s even stranger.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has spent the past couple years demanding a recall election. What makes his demand strange, and potentially historic, is the identity of the politician he wants to ask voters to remove: Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

When I first heard about López Obrador’s self-recall, I laughed. Then I asked myself: What constitutes a victory when you seek to recall yourself? Are you a winner when your self-recall succeeds and you are forced out? Or are you a winner when the people vote down your recall because they insist you remain in office?

That’s when it hit me: A self-recall is the ultimate win-win (which is why the Mexican president’s political opponents want to deny him a vote that might make himself look selfless and democratic). So why didn’t I—or at least my expensive team of political consultants—think of this self-recall thing first?

In retrospect, my biggest campaign mistake may have been resisting the recall so forcefully. By calling it a massive threat to California, I tapped into fear, not hope. I made the recall seem bigger, and that made it more real. And I made it about me—a big mistake, because I’m not always an easy guy to like.

Instead, I should have welcomed the recall, and what it says about the struggles of this state and its people.

Of course, I would have had to point out that the recall petition’s sponsors were weird Trumpers who hate my policies of supporting immigrants, the poor, and people caught up in the criminal justice system.

But I should have emphasized that I’m a huge believer in democracy and the right of the people to choose their own leaders.

I also realize that this isn’t the governorship I promised you, or that you voted for. It’s certainly not the governorship I imagined.

The pandemic, and the escalating crises in California, from homelessness to fire, are huge. They’re causing people an unprecedented level of pain. More than 65,000 Californians are dead of COVID. School closures have done long-term damage to our children. Businesses and jobs have been lost. Whole towns, plus thousands of homes and other buildings, have been reduced to ashes.

I’ve done my best to respond in big, creative ways. I’m proud of most of what I’ve done, and when I’ve screwed up, I’ve tried to fix my mistakes. But I understand if others feel new leadership is required. My fellow Californians are my boss, and have the right to make a change. So, I welcome the recall vote and the public’s verdict on whether I’m the guy you want to move the state forward.

Honestly, if I had to do it again, I would have embraced the recall right after the French Laundry news broke. Perhaps that would have robbed it of the momentum it needed to qualify for the ballot, or to make the campaign as close as it’s been.

Perhaps it would have been enough if I had said: I take the blame for all the state’s problems. Now let’s focus on solving them. Instead, I’ve added to the political conflict that is making it so hard to convince people across the spectrum to come together to address all the crises we face.

It’s been a mistake to respond to the recall primarily by attacking the motives of those who support it. The more than 1.5 million Californians who signed petitions are not all Trumpers acting in bad faith. They are our neighbors, and we need them now—as partners in ending the pandemic.

I also regret discouraging any of my fellow Democrats from running to succeed me. I love California, and this state’s success means more to me than my own career, which is why I should have recruited a candidate of my own to run as my replacement. I should have given my supporters a clear choice on the second question on the ballot, and that should have been the person I would most trust to lead this state, if the majority of voters no longer want me doing the job.

My messaging—around the recall and the contest to replace me—has helped poison this election, making it more challenging to achieve the higher turnout I need to keep the governorship. When you tell people an election is an illegitimate trick, it’s harder to get them to vote in it.

Let me close with one argument for voting no, and keeping me in office, that you probably haven’t heard. But it’s the one that touches my own lived reality.

The truth is that my own personal life will be better if I get recalled. I could give up the endless headaches of dealing with California’s many crises, and go back to my fabulous home and loving family (who will no longer get criticized for their every masked or unmasked move). I’ll have no shortage of opportunities to make even more money in various business ventures across this state. If I am recalled by a tiny margin, and my replacement is ineffective and unpopular, I could attempt a political comeback—perhaps even in next year’s gubernatorial election.

I understand that many of you want to punish me. So, if that’s your goal, recalling me isn’t the best way to do it. The harshest punishment you could give me would be to keep me in this crazy job, and to force me to keep governing an ungovernable state and to keep presiding over a California apocalypse that never ends.

The post I Should Have Recalled Myself! appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s older than Montesquieu, the famous 18th-century French nobleman and philosopher, who argued that elected representatives “should be accountable to those that have commissioned them.” The recall also pre-dates Montesquieu’s contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in The Social Contract wrote, “the holders of executive office are not the people’s masters but its officers [and] the people can appoint them and dismiss them as it pleases.”

Indeed, the recall first appeared in the Roman Republic where, in 133 BC, the tribune Octavius—according to Plutarch’s account—was recalled after he had vetoed a senate Bill. In the Middle Ages, the prominent philosopher Marsilius of Padua (1275–1342) acknowledged the citizens’ right to “remove rulers from office who betrayed their trust.” And, a few hundred years later, the radical Levellers of 17th-century England espoused the device; some even believed members of the House of Commons should be subject to revocation, mentioning the power of “removing and calling to account magistrates” in the 1647 Agreement of the People. (This recall never went into effect, however.)

When America seceded from Britain, in 1776, the idea of the recall—perhaps inspired by Montesquieu—found its way into the U.S. Constitution’s precursor, the Articles of Confederation. These provided for the “recall and replacement of delegates even within their one- year term.” The mechanism was even included in James Madison’s first draft of the U.S. Constitution. The so-called Virginia Plan stated unequivocally that “members of the National Legislature” should be “subject to recall.” When this draft was rejected, the lack of a recall provision in the U.S. Constitution was one of the main objections raised by the anti-Federalists. “Brutus”, the pseudonym used by one leading opponent of the document, wrote: “It seems an evident dictate of reason, that when a person authorises another to do a piece of business for him, he should retain the power to replace him.”

Likewise, in the heated debates in the New York ratifying convention, New York delegate Melancton Smith—believed to be Brutus’ alter ego—again defended the recall, noting that it would be used sparingly. “The power of the recall would not be exercised as often as it ought. It is highly improbable that a man, in whom the state has confided, and who has an established influence, will be recalled, unless his conduct has been notoriously wicked,” said Smith. Despite these arguments, his proposal for a recall was rejected as too radical.

Discussions about the recall were not revived until after the American Civil War. In the 1880s, as a result of what was perceived as the corruption of the political system, so-called Populists championed the use of referendums, initiatives, direct elections of senators, primary elections, and the recall. The movement in favor of these reforms had a distinct left-wing tenor, with Social Labor parties joining the Populists.

In Europe, the recall was associated not just with left-wingers, but with revolutionaries: Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci were both advocates. Karl Marx made a case for recalling elected representatives in his pamphlet The Civil War in France. Marx wrote approvingly about the system under which all the elected representatives’ mandates were “at all times revocable” Inspired by Marx, Vladimir Lenin made a case for a “fuller democracy” in which all officials should be “fully elective and subject to recall.” This was the only way of overcoming the problem of parliamentarianism, namely “deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent people in parliament.”

That the recall was a central plank, perhaps even the lynchpin, of Lenin’s theory of representation is also evidenced by a short essay he wrote weeks after the Revolution. “Democratic representation exists and is accepted under all parliamentary systems, but this right of representation is curtailed by the fact that the people have the right to cast their votes once in every two years, and while it often turns out that their votes have installed those who oppress them, they are deprived of the democratic right to put a stop to that by removing these men,” he wrote.

Lenin cited “cantons in Switzerland and some states of America” as places where “this democratic right of recall has survived.” But, perhaps more interestingly, he also suggested that the recall could have made the revolution less violent and that the right of recall held out the prospect of a peaceful means of resolving political problems. Rather than “a rather stormy revolution”—his description of the storming of the Winter Palace—there could have been a peaceful change of power. “If we had had the right of recall,” he reflected, “a simple vote would have sufficed” to remove the provisional government.

In practical politics, the recall remained part of the formal institutions in the Soviet Union, but it was not used before the last decade of communist rule, when the citizens were allowed to use the provisions during the Glasnost period under Mikhail Gorbachev, when two deputies were recalled in Sverdlovsk.

The attempts to introduce the recall into practical politics in Europe mostly failed. True, several German cities and nine states adopted the recall during the years of the Weimar Republic (often at the instigation of moderate socialist politicians). But the provision was of little practical importance.

The recall would gain far more acceptance in the United States, where Americans saw the recall less through the words of European revolutionaries, and more through the special Swiss experience with the recall and other forms of direct democracy.

The American Labor leader J.W. Sullivan’s influential 1892 book, Direct Legislation by the Citizenship, was explicitly based on the author’s impressions from a trip to Switzerland, and he wrote enthusiastically about how “the people may recall their servants at brief intervals.”

Sullivan—like other Americans advocating the use of the recall—argued not for Marxist revolution but for establishing more efficient checks and balances. As William B. Munro, another American populist, suggested, “the chief argument in favour of the recall as advanced by friends of this expedient, is its efficacy as an agent of unremitting popular control over men in public office.”

In a creative analogy later cited in court cases supportive of the recall, Munro found that the tool was an application of the principle of ministerial responsibility, which is a feature of the English government, and which enables the course of public policy to be altered at any moment by the recall of the Cabinet at the hands of the House of Commons.

But America’s established politicians were severely critical of the recall. President William Taft, one of its strongest critics, made a point of vetoing the proposed constitution for Arizona in 1911 (the year before the territory became the 48th state) because of the document’s recall provision. Arizona responded by removing the recall from the draft—and immediately reinstating it once statehood had been granted.

It is a measure of the importance attached to—and the dangers associated with—the recall that Taft continued his crusade against the device after he left the White House. In a series of lectures at Yale University, the former president criticized the recall, which —in his view—would create a “nervous condition of resolution as to whether he [the representative] should do what he thinks he ought to do in the interest of the public.”

Of course, this potential for keeping politicians in check, for preventing legislative activism, was the chief reason behind the Populists’ espousal of the device. “The recall,” noted Pulitzer Prize winner William A. White, the editor of Emporia Gazette and a defender of populist causes, “should make … statesmen nervous.”

In America, the supporters of the recall won the day, and it was implemented in many states at the instigation of politicians and advocates on the left.

Proponents as well as opponents of the recall had expected that the device would be used predominately against judges. This turned out not to be the case. Between 1910 and 1940 only two judges—both of whom had given lenient sentences to rapists—were recalled. It is noteworthy that the California Bar Association was sufficiently concerned about the damage the judges were doing to the legal profession to support the recall.

But overall, the recall is used sparingly at the state level; North Dakota’s governor Lynn Frazier was recalled in 1921, and California’s Gray Davis in 2003.

Newsom, if removed from office, would be just the third recalled governor, in more than a century of the recall’s use in America.

The post Sack Octavius and Newsom! The Recall Is as Old as the Roman Republic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The truth is that the recall is very much a piece of a large and desperate global search for tools to hold powerful elected leaders accountable.

You can see the hunger for methods—any methods—to remove faltering officials in every corner of the world.

Recently, for example, a leading Nigerian scholar, Maduabuchi Ogidi of the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education in Owerri, wrote in infuriating detail how the democratization of his country has produced ceaseless corruption, misappropriation of public funds, abuse of public office, and books’ worth of unfulfilled electoral promises.

How, he asked, might everyday Nigerians end this cycle and bring accountability to their democratically elected leaders?

Unlike many academics, Ogidi was brave enough to answer his question with a detailed proposal—for the establishment of the National Electoral Campaign Promises Commission, an official body of regular citizens with the legal power to require politicians to fulfill their promises, or remove them from office.

That suggestion may sound fanciful, but it fits a worldwide 21st century revolution in democratic practice. People are inventing tools and processes that allow citizens to intervene and participate directly in governance, with the goal of both collaborating with elected officials and keeping them in check. As places around the globe adopt them, the tools evolve and change.

Direct democracy—in which everyday people, rather than elected officials, make laws and amend constitutions—has spread quickly from its strong roots in Switzerland and the American West, to localities and regions in more than 110 countries. Participatory budgeting, a process first created in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1990, is now used by citizens on six continents to decide local budgets. Citizens’ assemblies, which bring together representative groups of regular people to examine some question or solve a problem, have roots in 1970s Germany and Minnesota. They’ve become popular ways to let regular people grapple with big questions; French citizens assemblies, convened in response to protests against a fuel tax, recently recommended major changes to that nation’s climate laws, including tougher emissions standards.

Countries are undertaking more novel experiments as well, like the European Union’s “Home Parliaments,” in which people gather in small groups, online or in person, to come up with recommendations for top continental officials. And there’s growing interest in places like Indonesia—the world’s third-largest and most diverse democracy—in applying non-Western cultural decision-making to modern democratic processes.

This focus on citizen participation represents a significant advance from 20th century democratic reforms, which tended to focus narrowly on improving election processes. But this progress also perversely coincides with growing authoritarianism in many nation-states. Autocratic leaders from Turkey to Russia to the Philippines have been willing to tolerate local democratic tools—especially participatory budgeting and related processes—as long as they don’t challenge their power.

That raises essential questions. Can 21st century tools be scaled up in ways that protect and extend democracy at the national level? And can such tools, used in concert by localities around the world, inspire more international democratic decision-making on climate, economy and public health?

In this context, Professor Ogidi’s idea of a National Electoral Campaign Promises Commission is intriguing, especially if it turns out to be more than an academic whim. He argues that the commission should empower citizens in various ways, including holding hearings to see if politicians have kept their word. But he also suggests going further, to allow citizens to impose real legal punishments against political promise-breakers. That’s a risky suggestion in a country with a considerable history of political violence.

To truly change nations or states, to truly hold democratic officials accountable, the tools of participatory democracy will have to be improved and made more powerful. (The Newsom recall has sparked some ideas). But, more important, the people who use tools of democratic accountability will have to be skillful, and courageous.

The post California’s Recall Is Riding a Global Wave appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The attempted recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom has many geographic roots. Its original proponent was a sheriff’s deputy from Yolo County. The recall petition drew signatures from significant percentages of the population in our smaller, North State counties. And East Coast conservative media and right-wing Republicans from other parts of the country have given it attention and money.

But a recall is about replacing one governor with another. And, for the second gubernatorial recall in a row, it is the frustrations of San Diego County, and its ambitious politicians, that are driving the process.

Back in 2003, the frustrated and ambitious San Diegan behind the recall of Gov. Gray Davis was Congressman Darrell Issa. An ordinary gubernatorial election didn’t hold much hope for a conservative Republican like Issa, but the recall election—with a huge field of replacement candidates—seemed to provide an opening. So, Issa, a car alarm magnate, provided the money to qualify the recall for the ballot, and formed a campaign team, only to abandon his candidacy.

This time, two ambitious men from San Diego lead in early polls of who would replace Newsom if the recall succeeds.

Former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer has long eyed the governorship but seemed to be too moderate to beat a more conservative Republican in a primary election. Faulconer embraced the opportunity of a wide-open recall race, and began campaigning before all the signatures were submitted this spring. Faulconer’s candidacy has given the recall, which had been backed by little-known pro-Trump activists, a bit of legitimacy; he is clearly the candidate that Newsom’s team fears most.

The other San Diegan, businessman John Cox, lost badly to Newsom in the regular 2018 gubernatorial election. But Cox, who has spent years searching for a way into political office, saw the recall as a second chance. He has now thrown his fortune behind the recall and his candidacy, broadcasting ads statewide that show him with a bear, to symbolize the “beastly” changes he will bring to the state.

Why is San Diego the home of recall leaders? Part of the answer lies in the state’s political change. While San Diego—which voted Republican in 19 of 25 20th-century presidential races—has become more Democratic, it’s still not as blue as the state as a whole. The city and county still elect Republicans like Faulconer, who is popular enough with San Diego Democrats to convince himself he might win statewide.

Another political answer to the question lies in San Diego’s little-known status as a hotbed of direct democracy. For much of California’s history, San Diego has been the easiest place to gather signatures on petitions for recalls and ballot initiatives. In some initiative campaigns, San Diego produced signatures at twice the per-voter rate of other counties.

But I suspect that San Diego’s affinity for the recall goes beyond politics. San Diego is a big place, the country’s eighth most populous city, but its cachet and influence don’t match its ambitions—because America’s Finest City, as it bills itself, has the bad luck to be located in California.

San Diego would be the largest metropolis in 43 states, but in California, it’s an after-thought, only the fourth most populous metro region, smaller than even the Inland Empire. Its news, its sports teams, and its leaders don’t get the same level of statewide attention that San Francisco’s and Los Angeles’s do.

San Diego is also a different sort of place than its big brothers up the coast. L.A. and the Bay Area are global mega-regions, proudly out of step with the rest of the United States. San Diego, by contrast, is the most unabashedly American of California cities. It’s a place full of military installations and veterans, who fly their flags and host our state’s largest Fourth of July show. Its location on an international border also reinforces its American identity.

San Diegans, many of whom have dedicated their careers to defending the nation, often see the rest of California as going too far beyond American law and tradition. So, it’s not hard to see why the recall, a reactionary tool, might appeal as a way of pulling California back to reality.

But that doesn’t mean the recall will succeed in installing a San Diegan, much less slowing down change. Back in 2003, the San Diego-funded recall was ultimately won by a foreign-born movie star from Los Angeles.

It doesn’t help the prospects of Cox or Falconer that the last California governor from San Diego, Pete Wilson, who ran as a moderate, has curdled into a full-throated supporter of Donald Trump. Late in life, Wilson, whose statue was briefly taken down in San Diego last fall, defends his anti-immigration politics with the fervor of a man who wants to go down in history as California’s answer to George Wallace.

This year, San Diego’s attempts to take out Gavin Newsom have succeeded in producing another recall election, which is no small feat. But since the election became a certainty, Gov. Newsom has grown more energized and popular.

In today’s California, San Diego has enough horsepower to demand the state reconsider who should be governor—but not enough to take the reins itself.

The post Why Does San Diego Love Recalling Governors?  appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It is, of all people, Gray Davis.

Yes, perhaps paradoxically, Gray Davis, the former governor who voters recalled in 2003, may be the most important ally Gavin Newsom and California’s ruling Democrats have in defeating this year’s recall.

On Election Day this fall, voters will face two questions. First, they must choose, yes or no, whether to remove Newsom from office. Then, they will have the option to vote for one person from a list of candidates who would replace him.

The conundrum facing Democrats is whether they would be better off preventing anyone from within their ranks from running to replace Newsom, or whether the party should place one prominent Democrat on the ballot.

There are strong arguments on both sides. Newsom himself, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and most of the Democratic establishment don’t want a Democratic alternative. They argue that fielding an attractive Democratic candidate would give more Democratic voters permission to vote to recall the governor. They want to keep the Democratic base firmly behind the governor, and offer the voters a stark choice: support Newsom, or risk turning the governorship over to one of several pro-Trump Republicans who are running in the replacement race.

But other Democrats—notably former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a Newsom mentor—say that’s reckless. They think the Democrats should rally behind an alternative of their own, which could keep the governor’s office in Democratic hands if Newsom is recalled. Without such a back-up in place, one of those Trump-backing GOP contenders—part of a Republican party that has turned hard against democracy itself—could end up as our next governor, at least until the November 2022 elections.

But what if there were another way—or rather, a way to have it both ways? What if Democrats could find the perfect replacement candidate?

That candidate is not an ambitious Democratic politician like former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, or 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer—too many Democrats might prefer one of them over the incumbent Newsom, making the recall a contest between different factions of Democrats. Gov. Newsom and the Democratic establishment are correct in arguing that to beat the recall, they need party unity.

What the Democrats need is to offer up a candidate with no political future, a back-up candidate whose opposition to the recall, and support for Gov. Newsom, would be unquestioned.

What if the Democrats called on Gray Davis?

Davis is 78 years old. He’s not charismatic or popular. Best of all for Democrats, his very presence on the ballot would reinforce opposition to the recall.

Davis bitterly fought his own recall in 2003. He knows, better than anyone, the defects of the process. And Davis, who has worked on governance reform efforts since leaving office, could remind voters that recalls actually don’t change that much in California. This is a state where most government decisions are locked in place by budget formulas, ballot initiatives, the constitution, and powerful interest groups.

To illustrate the absurdity of using recalls to force dramatic change, Davis could point to the fact that his successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, relied on Davis’ own aides and doubled down on many of Davis’ own policies. Davis could recount how he and Schwarzenegger have become close friends, with Davis a frequent presence at Schwarzenegger’s institute at USC. The two men even saw each other over a recent Christmas.

Davis has been among those who oppose putting a replacement candidate on the ballot—which reinforces the fact that he would be the perfect replacement. He could campaign with Newsom, whose efforts the former governor has relentlessly praised. Indeed, Davis, by taking on all questions about the recall itself, could reinforce Newsom’s strategy of focusing on his job as governor, and what he can do for Californians. On recall matters, Davis already has been a media surrogate for Newsom on local TV around the state; in an appearance on KABC in Los Angeles, Davis even lapsed into referring to Newsom and himself as “we.”

In other words, Davis would join the ballot as a clear member of team Newsom, thus satisfying the strategic imperatives of both sides of this puzzle. Davis would keep up the attack on the recall while keeping it separate from Newsom, who can focus on bigger, more urgent issues. And Davis’ presence would provide a unifying Democratic insurance policy in case Newsom can’t get a majority to vote to retain him in office.

Gray Davis couldn’t save his own governorship. But he’s the perfect person to save Newsom’s.

The post I Know Who Can Rescue California Democrats (and Maybe Gavin Newsom, Too) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“This is who you are,” he told me.

“The Impostor,” my paper read.

My son was not questioning my sincerity or his paternity. He was trying to reproduce, with paper and pencil, an internet game that he and millions of others started playing obsessively during the pandemic. It’s called Among Us.

I’ve grown to fear this game, and not just because he plays it when he should be in Zoom class or doing homework. The more my kids play it, the more I realize Among Us is far too close an approximation of the awfulness of California, in this moment of COVID-19 and gubernatorial recall.

Among Us reproduces the paranoia that’s become rampant in our state, and in our society—our current sense that nothing is for real and no one is to be trusted.

It’s a multi-player game: 10 people are on a spaceship heading to an unknown destination. At the start of every round, each player is told, separately and secretly, of their role on ship. Eight of the 10 are “crewmates,” who must maintain the ship. But two are informed they are “impostors,” who must sabotage the ship and kill the crewmates—and try to get away with it.

Every so often, and typically after someone turns up dead, players call a meeting so they can try to vote out the impostor. If you work in media, universities, politics, or high-profile organizations with bitter internal divisions, you may have been in conversations like this. It’s full of rapid-fire accusations, calling people out, specious flattery, blame-shifting, deceptive claims of innocence, and outright lies.

In Among Us, as in real life, truth does not govern. The mob does. At each meeting’s end, the players vote to throw someone out of the ship, into death in the vacuum of space. The deliberation takes less time than California’s legislature requires to rubber-stamp new laws in the frantic last hours of session. Only after the vote do the players learn whether they’ve gotten it right and killed an impostor, or if they’ve dispatched a loyal crewmate.

As the game continues, the fear, paranoia and accusations ramp up. Players use security cameras to surveil each other. The game continues until either the crewmates win—by finishing their tasks before everyone is dead—or the impostors win by killing all the crewmates.

When I’ve played with my son, I’ve annoyed him, and other players, by asking questions about the spaceship’s overall mission for humanity. My interest in the larger purposes of all this conflict is seen as pointless; the conflict is the point. In the Among Us meetings, the disinformation and bad faith are so prevalent that no one can discern what information is reliable (just like on Twitter). And the identity politics—Who is good, and who is bad? Who is for real and who is not?—are so engrossing that no one has time to step back and think about where the ship should be going (just like in matters of California’s government).

Watching my son play cunningly, with real skill at deceiving others, I’ve found myself wondering what the late French philosopher René Girard, who taught at Stanford, would make of Among Us. Girard theorized that conflict is the result of human beings imitating each other; societies overcome such conflict by identifying and destroying scapegoats. The game reminds me of his work, and his observation: “When we judge, we are always in a psychic space which is circular.”

A clever Vice essay described the game (which debuted in 2018), as reproducing the COVID conundrum and 2020 itself: “ever-cascading crises, and people trapped in a sense of isolation while they try to solve problems for which they are woefully unequipped.” But Among Us actually spread faster than coronavirus—reaching 60 million players a day last fall, while COVID-19 cases in the U.S. just crossed 30 million.

Among Us is made by a company called InnerSloth, based in Redmond, Washington, but the game, in requiring so much play-acting, fits California, where 160,000 people are members of the union representing actors.

Among Us also reproduces the recall debate. Is Gavin Newsom an impostor, out for himself instead of representing the state? Or is it the Trumpers and Republicans behind the recall who are posing as loyal California crewmates? Who should Californians cast off the ship? And leading Democrats sound like fear-mongering kids in an Among Us game when they claim that losing the governorship to a Republican for just one year (until the 2022 elections) will mean they lose power over California—a state where, regardless of the recall outcome, they will control three-quarters supermajorities in the legislature, every other statewide office, and every significant public institution.

I’ve written previously, and hopefully, that the recall vote might be the occasion for a real public discussion about how to remake the governance system and constitution of the state. I think our young people have the energy and ideas for this. I marvel, for instance, at the new worlds my kids build when they play another game—Minecraft—that encourages constructive thinking and imaginative designs. (In recent years, my kids’ teachers have had them re-create California missions on Minecraft for their 4th grade reports.)

But thinking systemically may not be possible in an Among Us world. It is awfully hard to build the future when you’re spending all your time obsessing about authenticity, interrogating other people’s loyalty and motives, and re-litigating the past.

My son tells me he loves being the Impostor—he likes the feeling of outsmarting people. And on that recent night, when he recreated the game by assigning family members Among Us identities with slips of paper, he and his two brothers quickly identified me as the Impostor.

I did not deny it—one shouldn’t lie to the children, even in games—but I suggested that they, too, might be impostors. I told them about the impostor syndrome, the psychological term for the people who doubt their own accomplishments and fear being exposed of the fraud. And I pointed out that, in the Christian tradition, none of us is truly innocent, that we are all broken, all sinners, and thus in some sense all impostors. So, I asked, why waste precious time voting people off the ship?

At that, my son rolled his eyes, and told me that I don’t know how to play the game.

The post My Son’s Favorite Internet Game Replicates the Paranoia Playing Out in California appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At the very least, I hope you’ll appreciate me if Gov. Gavin Newsom, who won office overwhelmingly in 2018 and remains popular in polls, ends up facing a recall election later this year.

Newsom’s team is already attacking me as an extreme or anti-democratic tool, and claiming that holding a recall vote would be a waste of money. But those attacks, while understandable, are misguided. When you go after me, you’re going after an essential feature of democracy.

I, the recall, am an exquisitely simple and direct democratic tool that allows citizens to petition for a vote to remove elected officials from office before their terms are over. My petitions and elections are quite valuable, even when the targeted official survives the recall attempt (as most do—I am merciful). The threat alone of petitions on my behalf encourages elected officials to pay more attention to constituents. And recall elections allow for swifter public challenges to failing leaders and difficult controversies.

The wisdom of providing angry citizens with a democratic and non-violent means of removing public officials has never been more apparent.

Since I’m not a legal instrument at the federal level in the United States, American voters just spent four years with no immediate and democratic way to consider the removal of a lawless, authoritarian, and dangerous president. Your weak constitutional tools for removal—the 25th Amendment and impeachment—depend not on voters but on supermajorities of elected officials acting against a president who may be their political ally.

Imagine if I had been available these past four years—could I have provided the checks and balances that Congress neglected? Would I have been a better way for Americans to blow off steam, as opposed to posting on Twitter? Could I have—dare I say—tempered or even removed the outgoing president? In my absence, your nation descended into anti-democratic rage, extremism, and political violence.

Other world democracies, with parliamentary or multi-party systems far more advanced than yours, allow the peaceful fall of prime ministers or governments at any time. But at the national level, Americans cling to the self-immolating paradox memorably satirized by the humorist Will Rogers: “On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.”

In this context, California’s long embrace of me is a difference worth celebrating. Since voters added me to the state constitution in 1911, Californians have considered recalls of hundreds of local officials, and attempted the removal of state officials 165 times. Here, people don’t have to wait until the next election to eject dangerous politicians. You have the right to use me to fire them at any time.

My biggest moment in the spotlight was in 2003, when California became the first state since 1921 to recall a governor. The recall campaign that threw out Gray Davis and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger was a huge spectacle, and a moment of real civic engagement; 99 percent of Californians told pollsters they were following news about me back then.

I’m flashing back to 2003 right now, as a petition slowly gathers signatures to recall Newsom. Once again, I originated with Republicans and right-wing activists who had passion but not much money or political experience. The original proponent of pulling the plug on Newsom was a retired Yolo County sheriff’s deputy named Orrin Heatlie, who decided to use me, the recall tool, after watching a YouTube video of Newsom supporting undocumented immigrants.

The effort Heatlie instigated, after fits and starts (there were also four other petitions against the governor), now has backing from Republican consultants and office-holders, too. These establishment folks are using me to raise money—and battling the grassroots proponents for control.

This time around, I’m an underdog because the politics of many of my backers are way too Trumpian for California. Some stated reasons on the petition knock Newsom for actions that are popular—like his sanctuary state protections for immigrants, his support for criminal justice reform, and his insistence that parents have their children vaccinated. The governor’s pandemic management mistakes and his French Laundry dinner don’t appear on the petition as reasons to remove him, because the petition was filed in February 2020, before COVID had shut down much of the state.

But none of this means I’m doomed. I can win again in California if support for me can grow beyond the right. All it might take is a candidate with broad popular appeal. That’s what California got in 2003, when the centrist Schwarzenegger essentially commandeered the recall campaign from the wingnuts and convinced Californians that he could take on their broken governing and budget systems.

Despite Schwarzenegger’s efforts, those systems remain broken, and Newsom, for all his ambitious proposals, hasn’t fixed them. He’s also struggled to respond consistently to the pandemic. So, if a top-notch crisis manager with a real commitment to systemic change were to emerge, I could once again throw out a California governor.

As of right now, that seems unlikely to happen. The best-known replacement candidate, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, couldn’t even manage the lease details of an office building.

And Newsom looks like the sort of deft politician who responds to the threat of me by making adjustments, and ultimately emerging more popular. I can improve politicians in this way. That’s why I take some pride in the fact that—in the weeks since it first appeared I’d be leaving South America (I’m popular in Peru) to come to California in 2021—the governor has shaken up his staff, and offered more focused plans to reopen schools and support idled businesses and workers.

Still, at the risk of appearing self-promotional, I would suggest that having a recall election might be healthy for your state. The pandemic has revealed many urgent problems with your governance, especially centralization of money and power in Sacramento that has left local governments too weak to respond effectively in emergencies.

And California has spent the last four years understandably focused on fighting off attacks from the Trump administration. It’s been too long since the Golden State took a hard look at itself, and whether its public institutions are strong enough to handle the challenges of this very tough century.

I, the recall, would be the perfect vehicle for that kind of self-examination.

The post Why Californians—of Both Parties—Should Embrace the Recall appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.