The new film Civil War is a historic cinematic achievement. British director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.

Perhaps that was Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces—Abu Ghraib-style torture by gas station attendants, government aerial bombings of civilians, summary execution of journalists, a massive California and Texas invasion of Washington, D.C.—that seem to add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our current path of polarization and political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.

There’s established logic in this message. Early in the film, I kept thinking of the late, great Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, who wrote in his anti-existentialist 1973 masterpiece The Trouble With Being Born: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

But Civil War never provides the illumination or certitude that inspires action. It’s too Hollywood, which is to say that it’s too unoriginal and too violent, with too many guns.

Indeed, the film is so over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days, the Russian and Chinese governments, and their media organs, routinely promote the idea that the U.S. is headed for, in the words of former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a “bloody civil war which [will] cost thousands upon thousands of lives.” Civil War brings that propagandist vision to cinematic life.

If the U.S. does see another civil war, it will almost certainly not involve the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing to a final shootout at the White House. Nor is it likely to involve fights between groups of states, like the California–Texas alliance the film depicts. Those visions—like much of this film, where the internet rarely enters the story and the main characters are traditional still photographers—are anachronisms, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than to 21st-century realities.

Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict won’t separate soldiers from civilians. It will be fought with cyberattacks, misinformation and disinformation, and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be political and legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives. It will also be diplomatic, because an American civil war would be, by definition, a world war. Our enemies will fund and fuel our conflict, while our allies will send emissaries to intervene and negotiate peace.

The fighting will not be between states, because the conflicts in our society are not primarily geographic. Our most bitter fault lines are around ideology, race, gender, age, class, education, and immigrant status. A civil war will map those divides within our metro regions, within our cities, even within our neighborhoods.

For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for those of us who are sympathetic to making California independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away and fire on Camp Pendleton, like South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. And we certainly aren’t going to send troops to march on Washington. We have no military, and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Newsom’s Fox News appearances.

No—if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown.

Unfortunately, that scenario now seems possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and a cowed Congress, using his military to punish cities and communities whose actions he doesn’t like. It’s also possible to imagine such a president invoking executive powers to shut down Congress (as Donald Trump attempted on January 6) or government agencies that won’t bend to his command.

In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, will have little choice but to take on national duties. Behaving more like countries, California and other unrepresented states might drift naturally to formal breakup, the current republic ending not with war but with written agreements between states and a disintegrated federal government.

To make a believable movie about such a real American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film Rashomon famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Perhaps the San Fernando Valley auteur Paul Thomas Anderson could pull off such a film (he used a similar technique in Magnolia). Maybe Drew Goddard, writer-director of the Lake Tahoe noir Bad Times at the El Royale, could manage it.

Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants, some of whom seem like cartoon villains. Instead, the director tells his story through the narrow perspectives of four journalists driving from New York to Washington. All but the main character, played by Kirsten Dunst, come off as callous, selfish, or vaguely ridiculous.

As the president is about to be executed, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait a second because “I need a quote.”

The film feels unimaginative because the idea of another American civil war is actually an old one. For example, Marvel made a much smarter film in 2016 about what drives us to war when feuding superheroes devoted to Captain America and Iron Man turned on each other in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

But watching this Civil War, I found myself thinking of the 1997 satire The Second American Civil War. That cable TV movie, with scenes filmed at Los Angeles City Hall and the State Capitol in Sacramento, envisioned a future that looks too much like our present, with Idaho sparking a civil war in a country badly divided by race, immigration, politics, and media nonsense.

Like Garland’s film, it hid from the harder questions by putting journalists at center stage. But for all its goofiness, that 27-year-old film was the wiser, more relevant, and more responsible movie.

“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer in the satire. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”

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Funny thing about the world we have created and the structures we build—they are only really seen for what they are when in states of abandonment. Our built environment reveals our ambition, labor, materiality, and sometimes the folly of believing that our constructions, even massive assemblies of concrete and steel, will persist in perpetuity. As consumed as we are by daily obligations, we devote little time to consider the spaces we occupy and what they represent.

The recent week-long shutdown of Interstate 10 in downtown Los Angeles, after a huge fire underneath the freeway, left a sudden void in the heart of the nation’s second-largest city.  Without the dizzying flow of commerce or the monotony of a daily commuting ritual, we found an unusual moment to witness the 10 for what it really is: a monument to our priorities including personal mobility, on-demand goods and services, and the expectation of government to keep everything flowing seamlessly. The lifestyle we take for granted was suddenly called into question by the absence of one roadway.

For some, the closure was a useful reminder of the need to rethink our relationship with the automobile and the air-polluting fossil fuels that most vehicles still burn. Others, such as the L.A. Times editorial board, seized the chance to reimagine transportation infrastructure and address the disastrous consequences large highway projects wrought as they were threaded through preexisting—and most often majority non-white—neighborhoods.

While we are at it, maybe this is an opportune time to consider reinvention of the city itself, as we leave behind 20th-century engineering and technology in favor of innovations we anticipate will foster more sustainable, equitable, and accessible urban environments.

This may seem like an inflated agenda to spin out from a single, isolated event. But we know in our collective gut that course corrections are necessary in many aspects of contemporary life and in the structures required to support it. Our infrastructure is a declarative statement of intent, reflecting who we are and the investments we are prepared to make to achieve various ends, for better and for worse. Given an opportunity for close observation—as the recent closure allowed—Interstate 10 can tell us much about ourselves and what we value.

Dan Walters of CalMatters wrote during the 10’s closure: “If any freeway is a cultural icon, it is Interstate 10, which stretches more than 2,460 miles through eight southern tier states, from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica to the Atlantic in Jacksonville, Florida.”

Most drivers may see the 10 not as an icon but as a mundane, utilitarian artifact, if they think much about it at all.  But what Walters recognizes is that this transcontinental freeway is more than a road. Over the course of several thousand miles and wildly varying landscapes, Interstate 10 unites a dynamic, rapidly expanding, and diversifying area of the country.

The region I-10 spans is frequently referred to as the “Sun Belt,” a 20th-century reference to economies centered on recreation and retirement that the 10 itself helped to make possible.

But the southern tier of the U.S. is no longer characterized by leisure. It has become a place of rapid growth and industry.  In many ways, this is the “new America”.

Today, the impacts of climate change are impossible to ignore in this area of the country. If we are to resolve the challenges of diminishing water supplies, drought, and fire, the western I-10 provides the laboratory. If there is to be a transition away from fossil fuels, it will be centered in the 10 corridor, with Houston as the energy capital of the world. If the global challenges of sea level rise, land loss, and increasingly extreme weather are to be addressed, the path of the 10 along the Gulf Coast is the proving ground. An I-10 road trip has become the essential tour through a future with which we have yet to come to terms.

As a product of the 1956 National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, Interstate 10 is an exemplar of national cohesion in the United States. The legislation for the creation of this national network of highways passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 388 to 19, a level of functional bipartisanship that we can only marvel at today. This was America at its post-war apex, building a comprehensive, well-engineered transport system that would lift the nation to unprecedented levels of productivity and connection.

Yet even as it represented newfound capacity to build, the 10, like other interstate freeways, was used to reinforce preexisting fissures and inequities in American society. The planning choices by many cities benefited some neighborhoods and did lasting damage to others—as evident in the ways the 10 was forced through Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, the Fifth Ward in Houston, and Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans.

Some 60 years after the interstate program began, the Biden Administration is addressing the negative byproducts of the system through the new Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods (RCN) Program and buttressed by the Justice40 overlay, which directs 40 percent of certain federal investments to communities marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution—ills in which highways are often the primary culprit.  Whether impacted by climate change or man-made structures, community vitality and resiliency will be measured by the security of the most vulnerable populations.

From its origins in the 1956 federal mandate to current efforts to right past wrongs, the 10 has always had a political dimension. Today, this roadway connects the three most populous states—California, Texas, and Florida—each with an economy larger than most countries. Given their scale, these states have an outsized influence on the national dialogue, social issues, environmental policy, and even the textbooks students across the nation will read. Most importantly, they present vastly different templates for the future of the country…and maybe even for democracy itself.

The political dialogue moving back and forth along the 10 ay be even more consequential than the goods being transported between Los Angeles and Jacksonville . We need a common understanding of the government’s role to not only maintain our roads but to address the existential threats posed by a rapidly transforming environment. Rather than defining ourselves by difference, we need to see ourselves as “neighbors on the same street,” finding throughlines in shared issues, imagining infrastructure in more expansive terms, and building a new pathway to a more resilient future.

The U.S. Interstate 10 corridor is positioned on the front lines of demographic, social, economic, and climate change, and presents the challenges of the 21st century in their highest relief. The case can be made for this “iconic” transect as the leading indicator for the nation as a whole and our capacity to respond to a knowable future. This is the inspiration for the Ten Across initiative

Ten Across is about equipping subsequent generations with the tools to manage a world in flux, one that is unfortunately going to be warmer, dryer, and more unsettled. This is being achieved through education, strategic communications, and forums for engaging the critical issues of our time, many of which are represented in their extremes along the 10.

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President John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were both killed in Dallas on the same weekend in November 1963. They were men from distinctly opposed walks of life, and ended up being on opposite sides of a murder. But they also had things in common. Both were also given to hiding parts of themselves, and engaged in the kind of daring behavior exhibited by James Bond in Ian Fleming’s novels.

John F. Kennedy first read Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale while recovering from back surgery in 1954. When he became president and a reporter asked him to name his favorite books, he included Fleming’s From Russia, with Love. Sales of the novel skyrocketed.

In 1960, he invited the writer to his Georgetown home. “They talked foreign affairs,” reported the Washington Post, “with Fleming arguing that the United States could topple Fidel Castro by dropping pesos over Havana, together with leaflets reading ‘Compliments of the United States.’”

Conspiracy-meisters have claimed that that’s what the CIA actually did, but the record is not clear. One thing that did happen, according to the Post, is that CIA chief Allen Dulles (also a Bond fan) ordered 007-style gadgets such as exploding cigars and knife-tip shoes for his agents that were evidently deployed in Cuba; various accounts point to Castro as having been on the receiving end of an incendiary stogie.

But while Kennedy may have resembled Bond—handsome, debonair, and with a reputation for secret entanglements with mob boss girlfriends, colleagues’ wives, and Marilyn Monroe—it was Oswald who pulled off a Bond-style covert operation. Oswald’s own secret life is said to involve the Miami Cubans, the KGB, the CIA, Dallas oilmen, and the gay New Orleans underground. But in my view, his hidden life was not about allying with covert figures to carry out the greatest homicide of the 20th century, but how to advance beyond his meager circumstances and achieve fame and recognition. He and his mother were locked in a “conspiracy of one,” as I call it—a desperate campaign to matter. When opportunity presented itself on November 22, 1963, Oswald did not let it pass.

It was a lifetime in the making. As a boy, Oswald had a predilection for spying, going undercover, and tricking people. He loved “Let’s Pretend,” a popular radio show for children in which actors re-created classic tales before a live studio audience in Duluth, Minnesota. The show was broadcast nationwide every Saturday morning, and many parents of the era, including Oswald’s mother Marguerite, awaited the weekly airing, welcoming the de facto babysitter. Lee stayed glued to the radio at the designated time, and would act out the stories on his own for his older brothers throughout the week.

One of the reasons that Oswald escaped into fables was that his mother was given to melodrama and constantly sought attention. He spent a great deal of time at the library, especially in New Orleans, his birthplace. (A footnote to his fondness for libraries is that after he was killed, it turned out that a book he had checked out in Dallas was overdue.)

The records at the Napoleon branch of the New Orleans public library show that Lee was a regular in the stacks and had wide-ranging reading interests. Among the books he checked out in the months immediately preceding the assassination were the Bond novels Goldfinger, Thunderball, Moonraker, and From Russia, with Love.

He also borrowed Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage and William Manchester’s Portrait of a President, about Kennedy. Contrary to what many believe, Oswald actually admired the president. He kept a copy of Time magazine with J.F.K. on the cover on his coffee table in Fort Worth and harbored a desire for a part of the American Dream that for him was long foreclosed, but that Kennedy represented. Shortly after the birth of his first daughter, he told his wife that he hoped their next child was a boy: “Someday,” he said, “he could grow up to become President.”

Drawing on his diverse literary inspiration, Oswald made himself the star and director of dramatic scenes throughout his short life. These included violent bullying—often directed at his wife—and loud proclamations of his rights at the mention of any infraction.

His mother was his biggest fan, although her admiration was conditional. Privately, she was withholding and distant, but in public, whenever he was involved in an altercation or dispute, she was quick to utter the mantra of those who feel that they are perpetual victims. “My son did no such thing … he would never do that,” she would say to anyone who accused Lee of misbehavior. In the months and years following the assassination of the President, her proclamations on behalf of her son reached new heights.  “Well, even if my son did kill J.F.K.,” she told reporters, “he’s a national hero because the President had Addison’s disease and Lee put him out of his misery. He should be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.”

Of course, that did not happen. Oswald was interred in Fort Worth–in “the middle class section,” as she made a point of saying proudly to a journalist. Years later, Marguerite was buried in a neighboring plot. For both, a dream had been fulfilled. Lee had finally won fame and recognition—and with it, the everlasting approval of Marguerite.  Meanwhile, Marguerite, who had spent her life working menial jobs and feeling dismissed and disparaged, finally felt acknowledged. As the mother of the assassin, she courted and received reporters, basking in the spotlight that she had long desired.

J.F.K. screened a rough cut of From Russia, with Love, two days before he was killed—the last movie he’d see. He had been communicating privately in those final weeks with Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev, and the two men were approaching agreement on plans for total nuclear disarmament, according to reports that surfaced after the assassination.

But it was Oswald who knew a more intimate side of Russia. He had lived there as a defector, attending parties, dating women, and acquiring a beautiful Russian wife named Marina. He returned to the U.S. in June 1962 with Marina on his arm—and the copy of Time with J.F.K. on the cover that his mother had sent to him in Minsk.

Then, on the morning of November 22, 1963, Oswald embarked on his own spy-thriller operation. He picked up the rifle that he had been hiding in a friend’s garage and headed to work at the Texas School Book Depository. Shortly after noon, he whacked the president, and before long, he himself would enter the history books that he was packing up on the job.

“Even the highest tree,” Fleming wrote in From Russia, with Love, “has an axe at its foot.”

The post The Spy J.F.K. and Lee Harvey Oswald Loved appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In San Antonio, Texas, one memorial—the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine of the Alamo—dominates the landscape. At the Alamo, the artifacts, images, and captions on display tell a unified story: That martyrs died there for Texas independence and that their sacrifice will never be forgotten. The didactics urge the public to observe this history with solemnity and reverie.

Yet the story is one-sided. While there were many root causes of the Alamo siege, one of the most important was that Texas Anglos were fighting Mexican soldiers to uphold slavery. In San Antonio, as in many other cities, the histories of Latinx and Black communities are overshadowed by Anglo-dominated narratives.

In the summer of 2020, George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed prompted a national reckoning with commemoration. Communities began to think about what to do with controversial, often racist, statues, markers, and place names. Many wanted their landscapes to tell a different story—one that did not venerate racial violence.

The targets of these conversations have been mainly physical plaques and statues—but the resolutions are far more varied. New digital tools let scholars, students, and community members create new, and newly inclusive, forms of memorialization. Hitching historical research to new digital technologies helps tell different, more inclusive, and more nuanced narratives about the past. Malleable digital technologies can be much more creative and responsive than stone statues, soldiers in bronze, or iron plaques. In season three of “Western Edition,” the podcast we host at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, we highlight some of these innovative efforts across the West, including in San Antonio.

One of these is the digital history project Mapping the Movimiento. Created by professors at the University of Texas at San Antonio and its Special Collections Library, the project functions like a “bus tour of San Antonio civil rights locations,” history professor Omar Valerio Jiménez says. Anyone in San Antonio with a smartphone can use the interactive map.

Mapping the Movimiento’s 15 sites span the 20th century. They include Edgewood High School, an anchor for the city’s Mexican American West Side and focus of important judicial rulings about public school funding inequities, and the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center, founded in the late 1980s by Chicano and other activists working toward social justice in San Antonio and beyond.

Mario Cantú’s family restaurant is on the map, too. “Anybody who was anybody in the Chicano movement when they came to San Antonio met at Mario’s,” says historian Jerry Gonzalez. Known as “the first eating space in San Antonio to desegregate its food counter,” the restaurant served as a vital social hub for the city’s Mexican American community in the 1950s. Today, the restauarant building has been demolished and the land upon which it once stood is part of the downtown campus of the University of Texas at San Antonio. No physical plaque marks the space. Visitors to Mapping the Movimiento’s website can see artifacts and images from the restaurant’s heyday and learn how Cantú became a key figure in the city’s Chicano and civil rights activist communities.

Similarly, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists, an initiative of Texas A&M University–San Antonio historian Pamela Walker, uses digital mapping to commemorate the sites and experiences of Black San Antonians during the Jim Crow era. In partnership with the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum and the San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation, Walker’s team of student-researchers reconstructed the histories of more than 20 locations included in the Green Books—gazetteers that mapped safe tourist destinations for Black travelers in the Jim Crow era. QR codes placed around the city connect passersby to a digital map of Black San Antonio and a richly researched essay for each featured site.

One of Walker’s students, James Thomas, researched the Carter Undertaking Company, a funeral home at 601 Center Street. Now called the Carter-Taylor-Williams Mortuary, the institution has been continuously operated and family-owned since 1906, and its funeral directors played a crucial role in social justice work of the mid-20th century. Black-owned businesses provided Black families with financial stability, enabling protests against Jim Crow Era abuses and helping in turn to provide safety nets for neighbors, Thomas writes. They provided for elders “who weren’t getting the proper care that they needed,” and contributed in significant ways to “build a better community on the East side for the African Americans.”

Like Mapping the Movimiento, San Antonio’s Safe Spots for Negro Motorists includes sites that still exist and sites that have disappeared from the city. Reading the Green Books in present day offers a glimpse into the vibrant world of Black San Antonio during the era of Jim Crow, but also shows how much of it had been lost to urban renewal. For instance, student Delaney Byrom researched the former State Theater, which hosted plays and movies from 1929 to 1960 at 209 North Main, now the site of a parking lot.

Byrom spoke with patrons of the theater such as Walter Dykes, now in his 90s, who watched films there as a child—dressed up for the occasion in a tie, but still mischievously inclined toward throwing popcorn and making noise. Byrom’s grandmother, Liana Reyes, also frequented the theater as a teen. She remembers it as a segregated place, where she—a Mexican American—could sit in the front, but Black patrons had to enter through the back and sit in the balcony.

Walker hopes her project’s digital markers will be a first step to giving the stories of Black San Antonians “a permanent footprint on the landscape.” Digital memorialization initiatives are important, she says, because, when it comes to historical markers and sites, “there have been far too many communities, especially Black communities and communities of color, who haven’t been able to have a say in [creating memorials that reflect] what’s important to them.”

The landscape of memory and commemoration and race is shifting in the U.S., thanks to historians, students, activists, and community members who are reimagining it in exciting and innovative ways. Pairing grassroots historical research with emerging digital technologies democratizes: It allows communities, individuals, and institutions that have for far too long been left out of public history-making and memory to see their stories heard and respected. The questions Mapping the Movimiento and Safe Spots for Negro Motorists’ researchers grapple with—concerning race, belonging, and legitimacy—lie at the heart of a healthy American democracy, one that can link memory and reckoning.

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Austin, December 2049

Today, state officials held a massive parade and public barbecue to celebrate official federal confirmation that Texas is America’s greatest and most important state.

The occasion: The U.S. Census Bureau released estimates showing that the ever-growing Lone Star State, with more than 40.3 million people, had surpassed stagnant California, stuck at just under 40 million people for 30 years.

As Texans boasted about their new status—“We are the greatest civilization of the greatest country on earth,” declared 79-year-old U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, now in his seventh term—Golden State leaders issued well-practiced denials.

“Population isn’t a true measure of greatness,” protested California Gov. Meghan Markle. “California is still the land of the grandest dreams, of the most embarrassing celebrities, of $10 million two-bedroom starter homes.”

But most longtime observers of the Golden State shrugged at Texas’ triumph.

Some noted that, as early as 2023, estimates from demographers predicted that Texas would surpass California in population by 2050.

In retrospect, 2023 was also the year it became obvious that California would willingly cede national leadership to Texas, signaling its surrender with a total lack of response to a startling and historic drop in population.

California’s population had always grown, often dramatically, ever since statehood. And when California passed New York to become the most populous state in November 1962, the moment launched an era in which the Golden State was seen as the nation’s leader in culture, economy, and policymaking.

That era started to end in the COVID-19 pandemic. From July 2020 to July 2022, it lost more than half a million people. Many pinned the cause on COVID deaths, and Californians leaving the state. But deaths and departures were part of the population decline.

The real problem was the lack of new Californians. The birth rate fell to a level that made old Europe look fertile. Immigration plummeted too, in part because of cruel and restrictionist federal immigration policies. And Americans all but stopped moving to California, with its rampant homelessness and expensive housing. How could they afford to?

In a saner time, such a rapid reversal of population in a state synonymous with arrival and growth—“California, Here I Come”—would have been considered a crisis. State and local governments would have come forward with new programs to encourage births, to keep existing Californians in the state, and to attract new ones. Budget surpluses could have been devoted to big new tax bonuses for starting families, to loan forgiveness for California university graduates who settled in the state after graduation, and to massive new affordable housing and infrastructure projects.

But 2023 was a very peculiar and unsettled time. People were depressed and anxious. Society was divided and in conflict. The public conversation, diminished by the decline of independent media, offered few visions of the future. Instead, the state and the country were consumed by loud and angry debates about racial and gender identity, and how to reinterpret the past.

So, Californians never seized on population decline as a reason to remake and rebuild the state.

And they never did the democratic math and recognized that losing population would mean losing power and influence.

Instead, Californians used population decline as an excuse not to do new and hard things.

This denial was most prominent on housing. Communities countered state pressure to build more housing by arguing that housing wouldn’t be necessary because there would be fewer people. This was a cynical bit of illogic—there couldn’t be more Californians without more housing—and it ignored the hard fact that California’s housing stock was the oldest in the West (and as old as housing stock in much of the Rust Belt).

But it worked. Media amplified the argument. State courts began embracing an argument that people themselves were pollution under the state’s main environmental law. And housing production, which had dropped by nearly half between the early 2000s and the early 2020s, continued its fall. The housing shortage became permanent, freezing California’s population at 40 million.

A similar dynamic froze California in other ways. With the population of children declining rapidly, school districts shut down schools and programs, instead of expanding educational offerings and building new schools to draw more kids. The state’s university systems, consumed by culture war and workplace conduct controversies, did too little to counter declines in enrollment. California’s powerful environmental groups and labor unions kept fighting efforts to build new, climate-resilient infrastructure in water, energy, and transportation.

The message sent by California to the rest of the world was clear: If we don’t build it, you won’t come.

And you didn’t.

In truth, today’s news on state populations was just the latest in a long series of declines. The Texas economy became bigger than California’s in 2040, which was not much of a surprise. Texas had been the nation’s leader in exports and renewable energy since early in the 21st century. For a couple of generations, Texas invested a higher percentage of its budget in education, and delivered better student outcomes, than California.

Meanwhile, the Digital Age ended the primacy of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The entertainment and technology sectors could operate anywhere and no longer required headquarters in California, or anywhere else.

California’s slide down the economic rankings came quickly. In 2023, California’s governor liked to brag about the state becoming the world’s fourth largest economy. The state is down to 14th place today, and dropping.

Which leaves us with questions. If California had focused more on growth and the future back in the 2020s, could it have remained bigger and richer than Texas? Or could the state at least have forestalled its decline?

Maybe. But we’ll never know, because California never really tried.

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These questions might seem strange, but they’re not. Gov. Gavin Newsom broadcast his first re-election TV ad not in California but in Florida, appealing to Floridians to either join California’s fight against the policies of Florida Republicans, or move to California. In response, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted California policies and accused Newsom of treating Californians “like peasants.”

The tussle has been dismissed as partisan trolling, and evidence of both governors’ presidential ambitions. But its import is broader than that. Unwittingly, Newson and DeSantis are opening the door to a novel democratic idea with global implications.

The idea has been called “reciprocal” or “consociated” representation.

The dictionary definition of “consociated” is “brought into association.”  In democracy, “consociated representation” would give people the power to vote for representatives in places with which they might feel association, but are not their own cities, states, or nations.

The idea should have appeal because, especially in a hyper-connected world, the decisions of governments other than our own can have profound effects on our lives. Consider how trade and manufacturing policies in Mexico or southeast Asia have changed the economies of American communities. Or think of your home region, and how the decisions of a big city government can have profound effects on the economic prospects, transportation options, or safety of those who live in surrounding suburbs.

Or—in the context of the Newsom ad, which says that Florida’s educational and health policies threaten basic freedoms—consider how the politics and policies of big states like California and Florida can affect each other, and other states’ and national policies as well.

Florida under DeSantis has led a nationwide attack on teachers’ freedom to say what they want in classrooms. The state has also limited the rights of women and transgendered people—so much so that California is changing laws and starting programs to make itself a sanctuary for people who must leave Florida—and other states—to exercise their rights. Meanwhile, California routinely uses its size and leverage to try to shape laws elsewhere, on matters from climate change to immigration.

In such a context, Californians deserve to have more of a say in what Florida does—and, yes, vice versa.

But how? A smart and coherent proposal for consociated representation comes from Joachim Blatter and Johannes Schulz, political scientists at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, writing in the European Journal of International Relations.

Blatter and Schulz argue that globalism has allowed international corporate elites, powerful national leaders, and unaccountable international organizations like International Monetary Fund to have undemocratic influence over people in other countries. This, in turn, has inspired populist backlashes that polarize politics, threaten the unity of federal systems like the European Union or the United States, and undermine democracy.

Their answer to this major threat is to expand democracy, and link voters in different nations and states. Specifically, Blatter and Schulz argue that governments whose policies overlap should “mutually grant their citizens the right to elect representatives not only in their domestic parliament, but also in the parliaments of ‘consociated democracies’.”

Under their proposal, these “foreign” voters could not elect many representatives in other places—only a handful, a tiny fraction, of your parliament or Congress or legislature would represent people from other places. And they say legislatures should expand to accommodate these new “consociated” representatives—no one would lose representation in the process.

It’s a modest step, but one that could “channel popular dissatisfaction into productive lines” including actual conversation and collaboration between states, Blatter and Schulz write. Systems of what these two scholars call “horizontally expanded and consociated democracies” could offer at least a little defense both against internal authoritarianism and against external enemies (like Russia and China) that seek to exploit divisions within democracies.

Consociated democracy would be a natural for California, which sees itself as a future-shaping nation-state. To start, it would be easier for California to negotiate with other Western states that are already political allies—Oregon or Washington—to form a consociation of democracies. A harder step would be to form another consociation with other large states with which it sometimes quarrels—imagine California, Texas, Florida, and New York agreeing to allow their citizens to elect representatives to each other’s legislatures.

But such arrangements, while novel, are not entirely new. Blatter and Schulz note that as more people have multiple national citizenships, it’s become more common to vote in multiple countries.

Elements of consociated democracy are already present here in California. The city of Los Angeles allows people to vote in local neighborhood councils even if they don’t reside in that neighborhood—having even a tiny interest in a place (even if it’s only stabling a horse there) gives you democratic rights. And the state of California allows people and groups from other states to sponsor and qualify ballot initiatives that enact laws and amend our state’s constitution. California’s legislative term limits and animal rights protections were brought to us in this way by non-Californians.

For California, it might be easiest to introduce consociated representation at the local level.

Your columnist, for example, feels strongly that he should be able to vote in Los Angeles city elections even though he lives in a small city that borders L.A.

Here’s my logic: The media non-profit where I work is based in Los Angeles. I spend most of my leisure time in L.A. (shopping, eating, enjoying sports and other entertainment), and pay local sales taxes. And for transportation, I depend on roads and trains overseen by L.A. officials.

So why shouldn’t Los Angeles empower me—and residents of other surrounding cities—to vote for a couple of additional members to represent us on the L.A. city council?

The post Is It Time for Californians to Vote in Florida and Texas? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Triumphalism is a domineering mentality that took off when the U.S. became a superpower in the mid-20th century. A byproduct of the old American exceptionalism—the belief that the U.S. is unique and even divinely blessed to lead humanity to a brighter future—triumphalism promises that the U.S. will always magically prevail: bloodied and dazed like Rocky Balboa, perhaps, but still knocking out the bad guys in the final round. It can provide a useful survival mechanism, offering promise and comfort in the crazy time of COVID-19, that the U.S. deserves to wag the giant foam finger that says “We’re No. 1!”

But even in its most understandable form, American triumphalism is wishful thinking. To create a more ethical, sustainable, and humane country at home as well as moral credibility abroad, we need to see the consequences of our collective actions with clarity, rather than hiding behind comforting mythologies that keep us from seeing the obvious defects in our plans for Afghanistan, Iraq, or the pandemic. We need to acknowledge our national limitations, not pretend that they don’t exist. Like a narcissist on a dating app, we need to lower our expectations.

This became vivid to me this summer. I live in the sunny boomtown of Austin, Texas, one of the most hyped and happenin’ cities in the world, a financial and cultural juggernaut propelled by high tech, a massive flagship university, and a groovy laidback attitude. One day I was out enjoying a swim at the beautiful Barton Springs, watching hippie yoginis and grad students reading philosophy in the sun, feeling that Austin was still a cool little blueberry in the middle of inflamed red Texas. The next day, at the Texas Capitol just a few miles away, Gov. Greg Abbott signed S.B. 8, a notorious law—referred to as “the heartbeat bill”—that empowers citizen vigilantes to file lawsuits against anyone helping someone get an abortion after six weeks, even in cases of rape or incest, even if their only “crime” was providing a ride to a clinic.

It shook me. Everywhere I looked around Texas in the following weeks, I saw democracy being smothered under a pillow of hate, privilege, and the narrow self-interest of a white conservative minority. Throughout the summer, Gov. Abbott rolled out new voting restrictions targeting the poor, Black, and brown in ways that can only be called Jim Crow Redux. The state adopted a “permitless carry policy” that lets anyone walk around with an unregulated handgun in full view (even police chiefs lobbied against this one, which could make things messy for them during the active shooter incidents that are almost as regular here as Friday night football). And the state began blocking teachers from engaging students in important discussions of white privilege, and other political subjects that offend right wing sensibilities.

Conservatives have been shilling these kinds of exclusionary and retrograde policies for decades, hiding behind the flag—and an imagined, monolithic, triumphalist America—as they chip away at Americans’ actual rights, one by one. It’s a stance that combines with reckless foreign policy and environmental thoughtlessness to convince some Americans that, simply because they are American, they owe nothing to notions of justice, stewardship, fair play, or true individual liberty—and that they never have to question anything. Donald Trump, the purveyor of endless bogus sales pitches (Trump Steaks, Trump Air, Trump Vodka, Trump Magazine, Trump University), is just the latest face of it. Abbott, who papered over the power grid failures that killed 200 Texans in February 2021 with hollow proclamations about energy independence and the Texas can-do spirit, engages in it all the time.

But who do these fictions serve? Even when such dogma is couched in conceit—“Perhaps we’re flawed, but we’re still the greatest country ever!”—its ramifications are clear. We stop noticing when our neighbors lose rights, or when our actions harm foreign friends or the Earth itself. Who wins when we pump up American hubris to the point at which we can’t even see the suffering we cause?

The influential Christian philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr thought a lot about dynamics like the ones playing out in Texas today. A believer in the “ineluctable tragedy” of the human condition and a complex vision of Christianity that has nothing in common with the huckster megachurch “prosperity gospel” of today, Niebuhr argued for a thoughtful politics of humility and moderation, not boastful certainty—in the U.S., or anywhere else. He said that the U.S. “must slough off many illusions which were derived both from the experiences and the ideologies of its childhood innocence,” warning that, “[o]therwise either America will seek escape from responsibilities which involve unavoidable guilt, or it will be plunged into avoidable guilt by too great confidence in its own virtue.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. extended this critique of American victory culture in the 1960s, rejecting U.S. imperialism and capitalism with a fury that has often been whitewashed out of popular memory. A decade later, Jimmy Carter asked Americans to raise their thermostats a few degrees and wear sweaters to save energy. The right wing mocked him as a wimp and a clown: how dare he imagine life with any limits, in God’s special garden of privilege and power?

People who assume America is always the champ (and always should be the champ) cannot understand our real history of oppression, exclusion, and failure to secure a prosperous and secure life for many of our own citizens—let alone for the people in countries where we intervene as a global hegemon, promising to bring freedom to the masses but delivering a much more uncertain outcome.

Recognizing our shortcomings is neither nihilistic nor anti-American. To the contrary: If America has the capacity for collective goodness, and greatness as a country, we must earn it through the hard work of self-honesty, not simply by declaring victory while stumbling forward into the next quagmire at home or abroad. Here in Austin in 2021, that means challenging the obscene war on historical truth, reproductive rights, and racial justice that mythmakers on the right are waging for their own self-interest. As a country it means we must reject the empty promises of MAGA victory culture in favor of real American virtues that rest on evidence, nuance, compassion, and an acceptance of our own limitations.

It is only by making peace with our national failures, limitations, and even decline that America can become more effective on the world stage and at home. But if we don’t change our mindset, we’ll find ourselves falling victim to the next huckster (or the same one!), selling us on how they’re going to make us “great” again without a clue where to even start the process.

The post America Should Lower Its Expectations appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Perhaps that reaction surprises you. After all, your state leaders declared victory when Musk, chief of Tesla and SpaceX, announced the move of his personal residence from L.A. to Austin. And it may seem strange for our state to not even blink as we watch the world’s fourth-richest person walk out the door.

But our sanguine reaction is actually a sign of two things: our growing recognition of the hazards of living amongst the very rich, and the fact that we know this billionaire better than you. So with our thanks for giving the wealthiest Californian a home comes this friendly advice: Watch your back, Texas, because Mr. Musk will mess with you.

Musk’s exit is different than other California-to-Texas moves, about which we feel less good. The departures of so many company headquarters—Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, McKesson, Schwab, and Jamba Juice are only the most recent—cost us high-wage jobs, and reflect real problems with high costs, heavy regulations, and convoluted governance that can make doing business here miserable.

Even worse, many younger working-class Californians—the people who once defined our state’s ambitions—have relocated to your state, where they find cheaper housing and better schools among the culturally diverse suburbs of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. This trend points to Texas’ real advantage—a governing system that gives more power to localities, some of whom skillfully employ their discretion to invest in the future.

While those losses to Texas are lamentable, Musk’s exit is of an entirely different character. California, after all, has a shortage of housing, not billionaires. And while many people leave California because they can’t afford it anymore, Musk is leaving because Californians finally figured out that we couldn’t afford him.

Musk may be worth more than $100 billion—but he’s even richer in hypocrisy and ingratitude. He cultivated the image of the lone, self-made innovator, when he was actually California’s biggest welfare case since the railroad barons.

Musk’s three signature companies—SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity—were built with billions of dollars in government contracts, subsidies, and other largesse. The federal government provided much of this, including low-interest loans that kept Tesla from folding during the Great Recession. Nevada also gave Musk more than $1 billion for a battery factory.

But it was California that showered him with money and provided regulations that favored the electric cars and solar panels his companies sell. Tesla has covered operating losses by selling other car companies the emissions credits it gets under California’s cap-and-trade market. California tax credits also subsidized the purchases of Tesla cars and the development of energy storage technology.

Yet all of California’s support did not make Musk a good citizen of our state. Musk has compromised worker safety at Tesla’s Fremont plant, flouted securities laws, and sabotaged unionization of his employees. He’s also an unrepentant peddler of misinformation to his huge Twitter following.

Most of all, Musk is California’s Frankenstein, the monster we created that then turned against us.

Even after taking so much government money, he routinely blasts our funding of safety net programs. Even after benefiting from our regulations, he’s accused California of over-regulating and demanded we “get out of the way” of innovators. And he has undermined public projects by pretending he had answers for the state’s most bedeviling problems. He touted unproven Hyperloop technology as a cheaper alternative to high-speed rail (his paper on the subject stopped before detailing how it would work), and he claimed he could solve traffic problems by digging giant tunnels underground.

When the pandemic hit this year, his behavior toward California turned from hostile to unforgivably cruel.

He railed against the federal economic relief packages that millions of Californians needed—and then took money from those same packages. He accused California, in pursuing COVID restrictions, of fascism and authoritarianism, while he exchanged friendly messages with the California-hating authoritarian in the White House.

Worst of all, Musk set a dangerous example by defying the stay-at-home orders that required the closing of his Tesla factory in Fremont. He reopened the plant, a decision which may have produced a COVID-19 outbreak there. (Musk himself would later get the virus.) Unbowed, Musk kept criticizing California’s COVID-19 response, and added the threat to leave for Texas, where SpaceX already had two facilities. This fall, he made good on that threat.

On his way out, he broke all world records for chutzpah. He claimed he was leaving because California didn’t sufficiently support companies and innovation, despite all the backing the state has given him. He portrayed his departure as a righteous protest against California’s infringement on freedom—never mentioning Texas’ lack of income taxes, and recent increases in his compensation package. And in a pot-calls-out-kettle moment, Musk had the gall to accuse California of being “entitled.”

So we shouldn’t be sad to see him go.

But his brash brand of nonsense and blame-shifting seems perfect for you, Texas. The state that asked the Supreme Court to cancel millions of votes of people in other states—while demanding that its presidential choice be ratified—is a fitting home for a billionaire who routinely calls for denying others the government assistance that made him rich.

But, Texas, don’t be surprised when he betrays you. Some of your communities have given him subsidies, but you should know that his companies often fall short on their promised job numbers. Neighbors of the SpaceX facility in South Texas are already complaining about community impacts. And a few conservative editorialists have noticed that Texas just welcomed America’s corporate welfare king.

When you point out Musk’s broken promises, he will lash out at you. And, Texas, you offer him plenty of Twitter-friendly targets: your depraved political class, your oil and gas industries, and your failure to legalize cannabis.

SpaceX and Tesla headquarters will remain in California—for now. But if Musk decides to take them with him, it might merely be a short-term blow. If government support for Musk’s businesses dries up, or if Musk gets in deeper trouble with the law, those companies could prove to be houses of cards. (Tesla, after all, has the highest stock value of any car company, even though it doesn’t make that many cars.) In that event, Texas would have to handle the human and corporate carnage of the eventual Musk meltdown.

Lone Star leaders often warn against all things California, as our people turn your suburbs politically blue and fill your boulevards with In-N-Out Burger locations and Trader Joe’s stores. But, Texas, you don’t seem worried—yet—about Musk and his companies.

California, meanwhile, has only one new reason to worry: that, much like the SpaceX Starship test earlier this month, Musk will attempt to return to us… only to end up in flames.

The post Good Riddance, Elon Musk, and Good Luck, Texas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The writer went on to demand that Congress make citizenship harder to obtain, so the government would be protected “against the vicious and criminal, the incompetent and the unfit.”

Sound familiar?

The Trump administration’s endless, bigoted campaign against immigrants may seem shocking. But the rhetoric accompanying that campaign, down to the metaphors comparing immigrants to small, loathsome animals, is nothing new. Much of what we hear today echoes opinions like the ones expressed in that editorial, published in the San Antonio Light, during the early years of the nation’s worst economic downturn, the Great Depression.

William Randolph Hearst’s own eugenicist views were proliferated throughout the newspaper titan’s media empire, which included the San Antonio Light. Hearst, who, as Fortune noted, owned “the biggest pile of newspapers in the world,” had a platform that reached an estimated 5 million daily and 7 million Sunday subscribers in major American cities.

In San Antonio, the Hearst editorial messages reverberated through both English- and Spanish-language media. The Light’s “vermin” editorial, along with its other anti-immigrant diatribes, were at once xenophobic and ironic, as they were published in a city that represented the crucible of Spanish-colonial culture and the U.S.’s Mexican American future. These immigration arguments, however, were far from parochial—they were regional, national, and even transnational. In turn, they made San Antonio’s print culture a case study for the nation’s immigration debates of that day—as well as our own.

While media technology was very different in the early 1930s, at least one important thing was the same then as now: News organizations were divided into camps with polarized ideas about who might be considered American. Many newspapers, including the Spanish-language outlet La Prensa, met the Hearst attacks with equally vociferous counternarratives extolling the virtues of immigrants to the United States.

In examining the 1930s back-and-forth between the news camps, something emerges that might be called “the mediated immigrant.” Unlike the real-life immigrant, composed of flesh and blood and known through personal experience, the “mediated” or “newspaper” immigrant is constructed of the themes, narratives, and rhetoric that U.S. broadsheets and tabloids offered their readers.

San Antonio was a perfect environment for cultivating this mediated immigrant. There, the arguments over immigration weren’t theoretical; the United States was in the process of kicking hundreds of thousands of immigrants out of the country, and Texas sat at the center of the story.

During the Great Depression, approximately 500,000 jobless Mexicans and Mexican Americans were repatriated to Mexico, courtesy of city and county governments nationwide. The formal and largely voluntary repatriation program—which required immigrants to process through local Mexican consulates—was the gentle way to go. Many people were rounded up by law enforcement and deported after a court hearing.

As a result, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, some who had never lived in Mexico, were forced from the United States through Texas, whose 1,254-mile frontier with Mexico is the longest of any U.S. border state. Caravans of hundreds of immigrants crossed the state as they fled with their worldly goods and farm animals packed up or tied to cars, trucks, and horse-drawn wagons. Others poked their heads out of train windows, taking in the dry, dusty landscape of Texas—their last view of the U.S. home they were leaving for an uncertain future in Mexico.

It was an exodus of biblical proportions. Yet the actual story received scant news coverage in papers such as Light, whose editorial page preferred broader, bigoted denunciations.

Meanwhile, the independent English-language San Antonio Express—a powerhouse which represented the Southwest’s banking, ranching, and railroad interests and their investments in Texas’s economic, cultural, and social relationship with Mexico—focused its reporting not so much of farmworkers being removed, but of their employers, U.S. farmers and ranchers, who were suddenly left with fruit and vegetables rotting in fields, and chores undone. The Express’s editorial page campaigned against legislation being debated in Congress that for the first time would restrict Mexican immigration, arguing that Mexicans did “work native white men generally will not do.” In making this argument, the Express called Mexicans “indispensable,” even as it marked them as racially distinct.

It was left largely to La Prensa to convey the exodus’s human dimension, including the starvation and poverty that befell many when they returned to an economically paralyzed Mexico.

Under the Mexican immigrant publisher Ignacio Lozano, La Prensa had become the foremost exemplar of Spanish-language news in the country. Founded in 1913, it circulated in almost every state in the nation, and also in Mexico. Its sister publication, La Opinión, which Lozano started in Los Angeles three years before the stock market crash of 1929, is still in business today. Through his news outlets in these two major American cities founded by Spanish-speaking immigrants, Lozano would help define what it meant to be Mexican and American.

La Prensa emerged as a champion of Mexicans in the face of attacks during this period of forced migration. For instance, one U.S. official in El Paso—referred to only as one “high North American bureaucrat”—characterized the Mexican deportees as “‘lunatics,’ demented people, and prostitutes,” providing a veneer of justification for their removal. La Prensa was quick to report the Mexican consul general’s protests of the smear.

Likewise, La Prensa sprang into action when John C. Box, a congressman from East Texas and a leading proponent of closing the door to Mexican immigration, complained in the language of white nationalism about the “Mexican peon population … injuring farmers and farm life and working and middle class Americans of every group” as well as “injuring public health, burdening charities.”

Countering this image of Mexicans as weak, undesirable, and racially inferior, La Prensa quoted Texas railroad builder Col. Samuel Robertson’s homage to the Mexican role in developing Texas: “Neither the Americans of the pure white race, Englishmen, Welshman … not even the negroes could have opened these lands, infested with snakes, coyotes and vermin; no race other than the Mexican has been macerated in the hands and legs, by the strong spines of the cactus; these workers of Indian blood are forgotten heroes who have made civilization possible in the [Rio Grande] Valley.”

Through this vivid prose of the early 20th-century press, the mediated immigrant took on a form still recognizable today: In Hearst’s newspapers, Mexicans were vicious criminals who constituted vermin. On La Prensa, Mexicans were indigenous heroes who conquered vermin. For the San Antonio Express, the immigrant was a critical economic component whose existence Texas depended upon to thrive.

However they were characterized, as La Prensa assured its readers, Mexicans would remain a part of the nation. Presciently, and on its front page in a banner headline, the paper offered the most vigorous rebuttal to the anti-Mexican hysteria that fueled calls for limiting immigration from Mexico, when its columnist Rudolfo Uranga declared:

There will always be Mexicans in the United States, whether temporarily or permanently … Even though some anti-Mexicanists and xenophobes shout furiously for their removal and exclusion … they will not achieve it because it is no longer possible in our century.

Uranga wrote those words in 1929. Now almost a century old, his writing carries all the more relevance.

The post How Three Texas Newspapers Manufactured Three Competing Images of Immigrants appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When photographs are created by light falling on film, they show what was physically present at that particular moment in time, but some also reveal the emotional undercurrent of a moment as well: what’s not seen but felt, and what reverberates. “The raw materials of photography,” Carter once said in an interview, “are light and time and memory.”

Carter’s oeuvre is vast, but the enigmatic nature of his way of photographing people, the places they live and work, and the animals that populate their worlds can be seen in the hundreds of images included in Keith Carter: Fifty Years, a retrospective published by the University of Texas Press.

On the surface, the photos are snapshots of commonplace goings-on—an image of a five-year-old boy holding a large and weathered baritone in Mexico or two women at a church service in Newton, Texas. But Carter manipulates light and focus to evoke the moods and stories of his subjects. His particular technique of focus—sometimes sharp and bright, often intentionally blurred—and the shallow depth of field, a common practice of 19th century photographers, creates pictures where the story is not spelled out.

Animals have long been an interest of Carter’s, and he often features horses. Carter, quoting Leonardo da Vinci, describes them as “God’s most perfect design.” Many of his most haunting photos explore the invisible links between humans and beasts: A boy hugs his horse goodbye after it’s sold, a Mississippi man sees a litter of kittens as his family, and a distraught woman discovers that a fox found its way into her henhouse. Each portrait presents a puzzle to viewers, who must attempt to discover for themselves what it is about this certain image that makes it so poignant.

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