Calexit

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Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general’s office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.

But, even among enthusiasts, there has not been much thought devoted to imagining what exactly a post-secession California would look like. In part, that may be because of a general reluctance to consider what the essence of a nation really is.

Secessionists don’t seem to realize that independence would be just the beginning of the messy political questions. Their laboratory of democracy would be confronted with several immediate experiments. Most American secession movements have been group efforts, from the Confederacy’s wave of departures to New England’s Hartford Convention flirtation with Yankeexit. Theoretically, in late 1860, South Carolinians were prepared to run an independent nation on their own, prompting unionist James Petigru to call the state “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” No one, however, had designs on fragmenting the “Palmetto Republic” into even smaller pieces.

But California is large enough to function as one or several different nations — or one nation made up of, say, six states, in accordance with venture capitalist Tim Draper’s so-called “Six Californias” ballot initiative. There’s Jefferson, the far-northern hotbed of rebellious rural folk who’d probably push Humboldt County’s hippies to seek a statelet of their own; Los Angeles-anchored West California, dependent only on northern water; the greater San Francisco Bay state of Silicon Valley; Central California, a Texas of the Pacific ringed by liberal neighbors; a swath of land with Sacramento at its center called North California; and South California, stretching from LA-adjacent Inland Empire to the desert hinterland and the Mexican border. If Californians did manage to come together behind the difficult task of securing a peaceful and legitimate withdrawal from the union, they’d be forced to confront that abandoning federalism wouldn’t be nearly so easy.

Without doubt, California’s many minority Republicans — assuming they didn’t all flock to Texas — would push at once to formally institutionalize decentralized government. A quick look at November’s county-level electoral map underscores how strong resistance remains in the far north and Central Valley to Democratic policies. Even many conservatives and libertarians in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, such as traditionally Republican Orange County, would find it hard to endure life under direct rule from Sacramento.

Indeed, California liberals, as soon as they’re unshackled from Washington, could conceivably take a sharp turn toward illiberal left progressivism, pushing for draconian limitations on guns, smoking, speech, and traditional private property rights. Yet doing so would aggravate regional factionalism and stoke reactionary politics on the right. (California gun sales have already gone through the roof.) It’s easy to envision the reasonable middle of politics clearing out as Golden Staters, not always immune to the appeal of cults and fantasies, rushed toward militant extremes.

With no blueprint to borrow from the United States for making states entirely from scratch, Californians would likely have to resort to the initiative process, where their judgment is notoriously questionable, to hammer out how many states, if any, the Second Bear Republic would include and where exactly their borders would be drawn.

In the alternative, of course, they could fight a civil war. It might be, for example, that state-level secessionists in the State of Jefferson — up in the same northerly region that tilted toward Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and toward Trump in the general election — would prefer to hive off on their own, outside both California and the United States. And some urban enclaves might wonder if the time had finally come to go full city-state. After all, can anyone really imagine President Xavier Becerra sending the Army of California to take back the Principality of Mountain View, street by bloody street?

On paper, the leader of the California secession movement lives in an apartment complex near San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood. But in reality, the Calexit campaign is being run by a 30-year-old who lives and works in a city on the edge of Siberia.

On December 18, 2018, Russia Today, a media outlet controlled by the Kremlin, reported that “a campaign calling for the independence of California from the United States has opened an ‘embassy’ in Moscow.

I don't think California will ever secede from the United States----even if earthquakes cause California to break away from the mainland.

If they don't secede, maybe we can kick them out.

IMHO any state locality or region that wants to succeed is going to have to do it by force of arms.

If they don't secede, maybe we can kick them out.

Water would be their big problem. Bet that Central Valley is extra thirsty,all that irrigation.Another big drought and they would hurt.

California's finances are too screwed up for secession.

They would have to devise their own Constitution.

They could promulgate a Declaration of Independence if they so desire.

The USA's constitution was actually ratified in 1789, 13 years after the Declaration of Independence. In 1776, we basically had nothing besides the D of I.