Calexit craziness

Redrawing the map is exciting. It is so exciting that Yes California not only isn’t the only secessionist movement under way in the United States, it isn’t even the only active campaign to redraw the map in California. Former UK Independence party leader Nigel Farage, of all people, is involved in a project to split the state into a western and an eastern California, liberating the more conservative and agrarian half of the state from the half of the state where the money and the people are. And there is the longstanding dream of Jefferson, a proposed state that would strip away several of California’s northernmost counties (the proposed capital is Yreka) and some of southern Oregon’s to form a new state — one with a very high regard for the Tenth Amendment.

They hotly dispute any comparison to Yes California — “We want to add a star to the flag, not take one away!” insists Jefferson supporter Terry Rapoza — but there is at bottom a set of commonalities: the sense that the ordinary democratic institutions as currently configured are insufficient for the times; the feeling that some people are effectively unrepresented, a relatively small group of broadly like-minded people who form only a few drops in the vast sea of American democracy; the belief that radical action oriented toward separation is required. “I don’t want to do this,” says Rapoza. “Show me a way not to do this.” He is in regular touch with his state senator and other California elected officials, and says his message for them is: “Help us to help you help us.”

But Rapoza is pessimistic about the chances of California’s Democratic majority — “the monoparty,” he calls it — getting serious about things like the rule of law and fiscal responsibility. He recites the familiar litany: high taxes and fees that contrast dramatically with crumbling roads and infrastructure — the Oroville-dam emergency seems to have opened a great many eyes — poor schools, unfunded pension liabilities, crime, sanctuary cities that encourage illegal immigration. “We have one senator. Los Angeles has eleven. Who wins that football game?” Rapoza asks. He takes a moment to reconsider the metaphor. “Maybe if you had Tom Brady.”