San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Should California stay or go?
Gwyneth Paltrow shouts “Go to my website or use the hashtag #LetsGetTheCalOuttaHere!” in the Netflix series “The Politician.” Running for governor on a platform of leading California’s secession from the United States, Paltrow’s character wins 98% of the vote.
This may be fiction, but California independence is gaining cultural currency and realworld urgency. Our real governor, Gavin Newsom, frequently describes California as a “nationstate,” to make the point that the Golden State must act like an independent country to protect itself during the biggest pandemic in a century.
While conventional wisdom remains that California would never leave the union, who can put faith in conventional wisdom anymore?
Polling suggests onethird of Californians support their state’s peaceful withdrawal from the nation. And there are relentless fights between the state and the White House over California’s attempts to protect its immigrants, women, health care, water, housing, environment and elections.
Those battles are partisan, but electing a Democratic president is unlikely to bring state and nation together. The cause of the rift between Californians and Americans goes well beyond the political to the structural, the cultural and the constitutional.
California is a modern democracy with a powerful initiative process that allows its highly diverse population to amend its constitution directly. The U.S., in contrast, is a majoritywhite country that clings to a 1789 constitution that permitted slavery, is nearly impossible to amend and prohibits election of the president by popular vote.
The power of the U.S. presidency is largely unaccountable; one person in the Oval Office can start nuclear war without anyone else’s permission. Other branches are also sheltered from democratic interventions. Too much power lies with a U.S. Senate that gives California’s 40 million people the same number of senators as Vermont’s 625,000. Difficult controversies are decided by a Supreme Court of highly politicized, lifetenured judges.
None of this makes California’s departure from the union likely. But it guarantees statefederal conflict, and more frequent attempts by California to escape the union.
This raises the question: How can California independence bids best be managed in the years ahead?
The essential answer is: peacefully. To ensure peace, Calexit must be something that majorities in California and the United States both want.
To reach such a double consensus,
California must create a process that reconsiders the future of the entire United States. If California ever decides to leave the United States and form a new country, it must try to transform the United States into a new country first.
Right now is an auspicious time for reconsideration. With protesters toppling statues of the founders and institutions pledging to end systemic racism, the place to start is by replacing America’s original system — the Constitution.
This suggestion will enrage Americans who deify their Constitution. Americans assume, wrongly, that the end of the Constitution would mean the end of freedom and democracy.
But it’s not true: Ending one republic does not mean the end of a nation. It means starting a new republic. The French are on their fifth republic.
California, the nation’s most creative and populous state, is the perfect place to start rewriting the U.S. Constitution. California should convene scholars and representatives from as many states as possible to draft a new American Constitution.
Such a body would examine constitutions all over the world and create the most advanced 21st century governing system possible.
A new constitution offers the opportunity to refound the United States under presentday ideals of human rights and justice. Instead of a constitution that started in slavery and persists in discrimination, we could have a constitution that barred discrimination of any kind. Women could be made explicitly equal.
A new constitution could provide for truly national elections, national referenda for major decisions (like going to war), and proportional representation to end our polarizing, winnertakeall political culture. The new constitution could commit America to
Online at sfchronicle.com/opinion
environmental protection of the planet.
Once that document is drafted — and translated into major languages — California voters would decide whether to approve it.
If approved, the proposed constitution would be sent to the 49 other states, asking them to adopt it. This idea is grounded in our current national constitution, Article V, which permits the calling of a convention by 34 states to change the Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #85, wrote that Article V was included because the founders couldn’t be sure their preferred system would always be the best one.
The other states could accept our constitutional proposal. Or they could amend it, in consultation with California.
In either event, California would have helped give the United States a 21st century governing document that, presumably, would be more democratic, and more supportive of equal rights and environmental protection — in other words, more like California. Free of the old constitution, the United States could stop endlessly measuring policies against centuriesold legal precedents, and would have more time to plan for the future.
In that scenario, the Golden State would stay in a more perfect union. But it’s also possible that other states would reject the document, and even the entire exercise.
That would leave California with the choice of whether to stay and suffer within the U.S., or to ask permission to leave, and then negotiate a peaceful exit from the nation. The nation of California would face some of the same challenges the state of California has struggled to manage — water, education, infrastructure, and taxation.
But it also would give the world an alternative American nation with governing rules that aren’t compromised by the sins of the 18th century. Perhaps we could finally conquer our rampant gun violence.
Or perhaps California could limit its military and adopt a policy of neutrality, thus demonstrating that Americans can organize a nation without pursuing constant warfare.
The good news: If the state sought independence, it wouldn’t have to draft a new constitution. It could simply use the constitution it drafted for the U.S. as the governing document of the new California nation.
In this scenario, California could walk away in good conscience, having done everything it could to save America from itself.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
Read additional commentary, including past pieces you may have missed by Chronicle columnists and contributors.
A: B: C: A: B: C: A: B: C:
A: B: C: A: B: C: A: B: C: A: B: C:
A:
B:
C: A: B: C: California’s dispatching strike teams to do what?
Clear out fire-prone backcountry
Snuff out fireworks displays
Warn scofflaws to wear masks, or else
One person, one night, $200
City won’t say
$38 per person for group tent
The oncefanciful notion of California independence is gaining cultural currency and realworld urgency.
No plane connections with Beijing
Demand the U.N. do something
Cut off Chinese-run TikTok app
No more gas hookups to stem emissions
Bidets to save on toilet paper
Required security cams to curb crime
U.K. passports help them leave
English lessons to follow politics online
Military pledge to retake the colony
60,000, a bit more than now
75,000, so get ready
100,000, more than double
Cut off the wrong leg of a patient
Ransom to retrieve hacked records
Visitor trapped for days in garage stairwell
Royal Lives Matter clothing line
Greeters at celeb gatherings
Paid speechmaking
Eliminates distancing requirement during football season
Drops Confederate emblem in state flag
Cracks down on riverboat gambling cruises
Yankee Stadium
Statue of Liberty
Broadway theaters