Then you might be a true patriot in the greatest American tradition.

Or do you cling to the hope of national unity? Do you believe that we must compromise to preserve our sprawling union of 330 million?

Then you might be part of the problem.

The frightening 2020 election is already disrupting how we think about America and California’s place in it—and thank goodness for that. Perhaps now, Americans might come to see national unity as a dangerous and destructive pursuit, and to recognize that embracing our divisions may provide the best hope for protecting our rights and building a better future.

This powerful argument fuels two smart new books. One is a revisionist American history, Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union by The Nation contributing writer Richard Kreitner. The other is a deep, California-inspired analysis of the present and future, Citizenship Reimagined: A New Framework for States’ Rights in the United States, by Arizona State University political scientist Allan Colbern and UC Riverside Center for Social Innovation director S. Karthick Ramakrishnan.

The two books share a crucial insight: that the federal government has never been a reliable protector of Americans and their rights. So progress and protection often result not from unity, but from different parts of the country going their own way. From fighting slavery to advancing women’s suffrage, from same-sex marriage to marijuana legalization, states have often led the way in extending our rights, often in the face of fierce federal opposition.

When Americans unify and govern themselves through national compromise, on the other hand, we have done awful things together—adopting a Constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy, ending Reconstruction and launching Jim Crow, incarcerating minorities, granting ever-greater powers to presidents, and pursuing endless wars.

The good news is that we Americans—“an Obstinate and Ungovernable People, Utterly Unacquainted with the Nature of Subordination,” in the words of a British officer quoted by Kreitner—aren’t often cursed with national unity. Division, disunion, and cold civil war are our natural states, as befits a country that venerates its founding divorce filing, the Declaration of Independence.

“Secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,” Kreitner writes.

Kreitner shows how breaking up the country—an idea typically associated only with the Civil War—has been sought by every region, across every American era, and even considered by major figures like Jefferson and Madison. He offers wonderful tidbits, from President Zachary Taylor’s 1849 opinion that California would be better off as an independent entity to the American diplomat George F. Kennan’s 1993 argument that the U.S. had become “a monster country” that should be divided into a dozen different republics. Our devotion to disunion is so great that, if you haven’t thought of splitting up the country, you probably don’t belong here.

“Paradoxically,” Kreitner writes, “disunion has been one of our only truly national ideas.”

From the Civil War to the civil rights movement, division and conflict have inspired Americans to make big changes. “Disunion startles a man to thought,” said the 19th-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who argued that the North should leave a Union fatally compromised by slavery. “[Disunion] takes a lazy abolitionist by the throat, and thunders in his ear, ‘Thou are the slaveholder!’”

How to use division in pursuit of a better America is the focus of Colbern and Ramakrishnan’s book, Citizenship Reimagined. These two scholars argue that, to counter toxic federal regimes and expand the rights and powers of regular people, states should exercise powers that we typically think of as federal.

They call this approach “progressive state citizenship” and say that the California of the past decade is a model. In particular, they point to a series of bills signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that expanded immigrant rights. These laws granted undocumented Californians the rights to work, drive, and access public services, while also defending law-abiding immigrants from federal overreach.

In this way, California is a turnaround story—in previous decades, the state practiced “regressive state citizenship,” eroding rights for immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. For that reason, they caution that the nation needs robust enforcement of the 14th Amendment to ensure a “federal floor” of rights through which states can’t fall.

“Progressive state governments can provide rights and protections to citizens and noncitizens that exceed the federal floor, temporarily anchoring the country to progressive values and ideals during times of restrictive national regimes,” Colbern and Ramakrishnan write.

The pandemic, with the federal government’s failure forcing states to take on health and safety duties, may accelerate the trend of state leadership going forward, the authors suggest.

Since division is so powerful and productive in the United States, it’s quite possible that whatever conflict follows our current election may be far more consequential than the vote tallies themselves. After all, both campaigns prize unity, albeit in very different ways. President Trump explicitly urges authoritarian, anti-democratic, and violent measures to unify America by force, no matter the costs. And Joe Biden’s emphasis on bipartisan unity, and his desire to avoid bolder policies that might divide his broad coalition, explain why his candidacy feels hollow, even to many Americans who support him.

What the country needs is not another compromise that preserves false unity, but an honest reckoning with the costs and benefits of keeping the national marriage together. This means that everything—from a new constitution to the honorable and traditional American idea of independence and secession—should go on the table. Breaking up the country might even prove the least divisive way to make American life more just.

“If the day should ever come … when the affections of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred,” John Quincy Adams said in 1839, as quoted by Kreitner, “far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint.”

The post Should We Embrace Our Divisions to Build a Better America? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From: Joe Mathews

Re: Summit

If North and South Korea can have a peace summit, why can’t California and Texas do the same?

The United States desperately needs its two biggest states to figure out how to keep the country together.

Our nation’s political leaders are committed to dividing the country; their business model for elections and fundraising depends on ever-greater polarization of the American electorate. And so the American government’s mission now amounts to three things: mismanaging entitlement programs, handing our tax breaks to donors, and throwing trillions of dollars at endless wars that should instead go to our infrastructure.

So if this country is ever going to put itself back together, it’ll be up to your two states. You’re the two most successful examples of American states—capable of attracting millions of Americans and their dreams. Sure, you represent different constituencies and versions of the American idea. Texas represents the cheap, lightly regulated, freedom- and gun-loving counterpoint to California’s progressive cultural and technological powerhouse.

But you have one big thing in common: the American predicament. You are both nation-sized places stuck inside an even larger country. California, with nearly 40 million people, has the world’s fifth-largest economy; while Texas, approaching 30 million people, has the 10th-largest economy in the world. If you were presidents and your states were countries, they would be the 38th and 49th most populous nations on earth, respectively.

All of which gives California and Texas a common enemy: federal power.

For more than a century, whichever party is in power in Washington has seized more authority for the federal government. Recent presidents of all stripes—from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump—have ruled increasingly by executive order and other dictates.

Quite often, this increasingly dictatorial federal power has been aimed at the two of you.

By now, the drill is familiar. A Democratic administration will seek to impose policies that run contrary to Texas’s preferences on health care, the environment, criminal justice, or labor. And so Texas, often with some of its Southern state friends, fights and sues. That’s why, when you were state attorney general, Governor Abbott, you famously described your job as: “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home.”

Now that Republicans are in power, it’s California’s turn to be targeted for its progressive policies on climate, pollution, immigration, and health care. So now the state gets together with its Western (and Northeastern) friends and resists with lawsuits, more than two dozen against the Trump administration. This endless cycle of litigation appears to be escalating so fast that The New York Times called it a legal civil war.

All this fighting isn’t good for the country, or your states. It takes time and resources away from your states’ efforts to improve the lives of your citizens. And the resentments create internal divisions. Both of your states have movements seeking secession from the United States. And the fights with the federal government often inspire legal battles between your states and their cities.

The good news is: You don’t have to live like this! Together, the two of you can break the cycle.

That’s why you need a peace summit. The goals of the talks should be twofold. First, for both states to reaffirm their American-ness and commit to peaceful coexistence.

Second, for both states to work together to reduce federal power, and enhance the independence of states and their local communities.

This must go beyond reaffirming the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reserves for the states the powers not given to the federal government. California and Texas are now so big that they need more explicit autonomy, so that they can make more of their own decisions without interference.

The D.C. Mandarins will call this a revolution. So be it. California and Texas must declare that this is not the United States of 13 states and 3 million people that adopted the constitution in 1789. Our country of more than 320 million is simply too big to be governed centrally from Washington, much less by the sort of people—first-term U.S. senators and reality TV stars—who get elected president these days. Our states deserve to be left alone to pursue their own destinies, with the federal government existing for little more than social insurance and national defense.

Indeed, the best argument for greater state autonomy is a democratic one. Our country barely passes as a democracy at the federal level, with a presidency often won by the candidate who lost the popular vote, a U.S. Senate that makes a mockery of equal representation, and powerful bureaucracies that defy accountability.

You’ll have to figure out through negotiations what your joint agenda is. But conservative Texas will want to transfer more taxing and regulatory power back to the state and local level, while California will want more regulatory and financing power at the state level to pursue major progressive advances in climate change, health care, and immigration protection.

I realize this will be hard politically: You both will lose the political crutch of blasting the other state, and your voters will accuse you of compromising your principles. And Gov. Abbott might have to cool down his “Don’t California my Texas” rhetoric. (Though, c’mon, Greg, it ain’t so bad having all those In-N-Out Burgers and Trader Joe’s in your state, right?)

But a concerted effort to demand greater autonomy for both states—pursued jointly through politics, lawsuits, and even a constitutional amendment—would be healthy. You wouldn’t be able to blame the federal government for your own follies. Instead, California might actually have to confront how its oppressive environmental regulatory regime has made it impossible to build sufficient housing. And Texas might have to face how its lack of planning puts its people in flood plains that stand in the path of hurricanes.

And yes, I know you might miss the good times, when your states were politically aligned with the federal government. But admit it: Even those times weren’t easy, and your federal friends are never that friendly.

President Obama, after all, was little help to California during its housing and budget crises. And President Trump’s trade protectionism is causing headaches for Texas, which has invested heavily in infrastructure and companies that support international trade, especially with its neighbor, Mexico.

Your two states also have more common ground than you might think, even on immigration. While the federal government under Obama and Trump oversaw massive and inhumane deportation of your residents, your two states have invested in educating young immigrants, including the undocumented. It’s no accident that 350,000 of the estimated 800,000 “Dreamers” call one of your two states home.

To get the talks started, California should immediately revoke its counterproductive ban on government-funded travel to Texas. Yes, the Lone Star State has some awfully discriminatory laws on adoption by LGBTQ families, but how do you change minds if you can’t meet with people? And you two governors seem to have a civil relationship: You issued joint statements about natural disasters and the Dodgers-Astros World Series last fall.

Each of your states offers places where a visitor from the other would be comfortable. Why not start the talks in Austin, a chunk of California in the heart of Texas, where Apple employs more than 6,000 people? In California, I can see Gov. Brown taking his Texas counterpart to oil-rich Bakersfield, where you two could chat at Wool Growers, a terrific restaurant serving the food of the Basques—a people who know something about the fight for sovereignty.

I’m not expecting you to produce the political equivalent of “Pancho and Lefty,” the iconic joint album of California’s late Merle Haggard and Texas’s Willie Nelson. (Though bringing Willie to the summit is not a bad idea.) But developing a strong working relationship will be important if Washington totally melts down, and creates a constitutional crisis for the republic, as many fear. In that case, California and Texas will have to put things back together.

In the meantime, regular California-Texas summits would remind us that, while we will never be the most cohesive country, we are a collection of states that requires some unity.

And that, in a country as diverse as ours, there may be no agreement as powerful as an agreement to disagree.

The post Forget North and South Korea. California and Texas Really Need a Peace Summit. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.