California is preparing to lead the national revolt against Donald Trump, fighting him on climate change, trade and that ridiculous wall. Gird your loins and pass the sunscreen.
California is preparing to lead a national revolt against Donald Trump, fighting him on climate change, trade and that ridiculous wall. Gird your loins and pass the sunscreen
BEGAN with a tweet, as so much does these days. The first shot in the coming war was fired in a 140-character burst by Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. “If Trump wins I am announcing and funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation,” said the first in a volley of tweets by the Iranian-american technology investor. “As 6th largest economy in world,” he said three tweets later, “economic engine of nation, provider of a large % of federal budget, California carries a lot of weight.”
This call to arms was retweeted thousands of times in those bewildering first hours of the Age of Trump. By the next morning, the movement for California to secede from the United States had made national headlines, with Pishevar anointed the movement’s leader. It even had a name, Calexit, an echo of the Brexit movement, which will eventually cleave Great Britain from the European Union. The nativist tone of Brexit foreshadowed the xenophobia of Donald Trump. Calexit is a kind of nativism too, except it’s fundamentally sunny in disposition—a Brexit for American liberals much more closely aligned with Western Europe than West Virginia.
Unrelated to Pishevar’s tweetstorm was a Sacramento rally held the day after the election (but planned long before) by Yes California, a secession group run by a young man from San Diego named Louis Marinelli. Marinelli, 29, wants to use California’s ballot measure process to have his fellow citizens vote for secession, much as they have voted to ban plastic bags and legalize recreational marijuana. Unlike Pishevar, whose secessionary tweets were plainly fired off in a fit of frustration, Marinelli has been long at work on this issue and will eagerly lay out his reasoning to anyone willing to listen. “America is a sinking ship, and the strongest position for California to take is one on its own lifeboat setting its own course forward,” he tells me. “A strong California holding its ground and attempting to influence the decisions of those in Washington at the helm of this sinking ship will find itself at the bottom of the ocean with them.”
Even if the majority of Californians vote for Marinelli’s proposal, peaceful secession from the United States would be nearly impossible, says just about everyone with a knowledge of our federalized system. Pishevar seems to have decided as much; in the days following the election, he backed away from his call for secession. Once ringing with secessionary bravado, his Twitter feed is now protected. A press representative tells me Pishevar wasn’t going to discuss the issue.
Yet there are substantive differences between California and the rest of the nation, a contrast that will only become sharper over the next four years. The Rust Belt gloom that helped elect Trump feels so distant from the Left Coast that it may as well be an abstraction. The America you see from the Sierra Nevada foothills, the endlessly fertile farmlands south of Sacramento and the coastal ranges of Santa Barbara is really a very good place to live: efficient, inclusive, optimistic—america 2.0. Back when the notion of a President Trump still seemed preposterous, the state’s Democratic governor, the gruff Jerry Brown, told a group of labor leaders in Sacramento, “If Trump were ever elected, we’d have to build a wall around California to defend ourselves from the rest of this country.” Brown quickly added that he was joking, but we all know what Freud said about the honesty that humor frequently conceals.
It’s true that Californians’ love of their state can
blind them. The famously beneficent West Coast sunshine hasn’t been distributed evenly across the land; California’s most persistent problems include high unemployment in the desert along the Mexican border and in the rugged, rural northlands, as well as a growing wealth gap along the prosperous coast, especially in the Bay Area, which competes with New York City as the most expensive place to live in the nation. The opioid crisis along the Oregon border is as serious as in the Midwest; the state’s eternally underfunded public schools routinely rank as some of the country’s worst, along with those of the Deep South.
Yet for all those genuinely pressing problems, not all that long ago, the state was a full-blown disaster, to use one of Trump’s favorite words. It was rancorous and dysfunctional, the right wing’s favorite example of liberalism gone mad, not just a state with problems but a problem state. A 1989 cover of Newsweek showed California cleaved in two, a
“AMERICA IS A SINKING SHIP; THE STRONGEST POSITION FOR CALIFORNIA TO TAKE IS ONE ON ITS OWN LIFEBOAT.”
beach on one side, a clogged highway leading to a smog-smothered city on the other. The cover line: “American Dream, American Nightmare.”
Today, cracks about Golden State dysfunction would be as dated as Woody Allen’s quips from Annie Hall about the cultural vapidity of Los Angeles. Led by the proudly parsimonious yet reliably progressive Brown and bolstered by the economic hothouse that is Silicon Valley, California has become the sixth biggest economy in the world. (If Brexit hurts the British economy as much as some think, California could soon be fifth.) Californians pays $452.8 billion in federal income taxes to Washington, eclipsing second-place New York by $150 billion. It grows more food than any other state, produces most of the technologies we’ve grown reliant on and, for better or worse, dictates what we watch in the after-dinner hours. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, California has more electricity-generating solar plants than the rest of the nation combined. About 85 percent of American wine comes from California, as does 100 percent of the Kardashian clan, whose members are estimated to be worth a combined $339 million—that is, about the gross domestic product of Micronesia. Not content with all these riches, California could soon eclipse Wisconsin in the production of cheese.
California’s return to greatness didn’t require border walls or trade wars. Instead of rolling back environmental regulations to curry favor with corporate interests, California has passed the toughest green laws in the nation, the first of them championed by Brown’s predecessor, Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The state’s citizens have voted in measures to increase taxes, legalize marijuana, restrict the rights of gun owners and enact criminal justice reforms. While conservative state legislatures are debating pointless “bathroom bills,” California has passed what some say are the strongest LGBT protections in the entire world. The state hasn’t found a remedy for earthquakes, but a company in Silicon Valley has a workable solution. It involves houses that hover.
What California most definitely did not vote for is a reality-tv huckster pitching grievance-fueled xenophobia and a soot-covered energy portfolio borrowed from the 1950s, not to mention that decade’s social norms, “pussy grabbing” and all. Though not much went right for Democrats on November 8, they crushed it in California, which Hillary Clinton won by 4.3 million votes. California Democrats also won a supermajority in the state Legislature, making it only one of six states with a Democratic “trifecta,” meaning both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office belong to the same party (Republicans, by contrast, now have 25 trifecta states). That effectively ensures the passage of most progressive legislation. Kamala Harris, the state’s attorney general, was elected to the Senate, a victory many believe she will use to launch a presidential run in 2020 or 2024; voters approved measures reinstating bilingual education, legalizing marijuana, instituting background checks for ammunition purchases and increasing the tobacco tax, as if working off a wish list from the editors of The Nation.
What frightens Californians most about the next four years is that, instead of trying to learn from their state’s successes, Trump could seek to extirpate the
IS IT HOT IN
HERE? Gov. Jerry Brown has made climate change the legacy issue of his fourth term, and has vowed to fight any attempts by the Trump administration to roll back progress on that front.
“IF TRUMP WERE EVER ELECTED, WE’D HAVE TO BUILD A WALL AROUND CALIFORNIA TO DEFEND OURSELVES.”
federal programs that even California needs to thrive. Trump (whose transition team did not respond to several requests for comment) opened his presidential campaign at his midtown Manhattan tower by invoking the image of Mexican murderers and rapists blitzing across our southern border. California, on the other hand, has the nation’s biggest share of undocumented immigrants, 2.4 million, who are allowed to get driver’s licenses and would have been allowed to buy health insurance (the state approved that plan but needed federal permission, which it declined to seek). Trump called Syrian refugees “a great Trojan horse”; California welcomed more Syrian refugees in fiscal year 2016 than any other state.
Trump also wants coal plants churning out black smoke and has even complained that environmental regulations eroded the quality of his beloved hairspray. Not only is hairspray passé in most of California, but the state was a major participant in 2015’s climate change accord in Paris, which has most of the industrialized world working to curb greenhouse gas emissions. California expects to get half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, with billions of public and private dollars going to wind and solar projects around the state. On the campaign trail, Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act. California is the nation’s most enthusiastic participant in the Obamacare exchanges and expanded Medicaid coverage, with an estimated 5.2 million residents benefiting from some version of the ACA. Getting rid of the health law could cost the state as many as 334,000 jobs, according to a recent report by the Commonwealth Fund.
Although it’s too early to tell what Trump will do on any of the above issues, Californians aren’t waiting for him to land the first blow. In response to his victory, students at Berkeley High School walked out of class the day after the election, protesting on streets that hosted riots against Ronald Reagan when he was the governor of California 50 years ago. In Oakland, protests descended into violence, with parts of the downtown destroyed. On the Monday after the election, high school students walked out of Los Angeles schools, gathering at Mariachi Plaza, on the city’s heavily immigrant East Side. One of them carried a sign more potent than all the tweets about California’s hoped-for secession: “We are unafraid.” Speaking on his podcast a few days after the election, political journalist John Myers of the Los Angeles Times compared California to District 13, the heart of the anti-capitol rebellion in The Hunger Games. The analogy leaves an intriguing question: Who will be California’s Katniss Everdeen?
The What’s-left Coast
GAVIN NEWSOM walked into the election night party being hosted by Senator Dianne Feinstein and looked up at a television screen. The polls had closed on the East Coast, and the former San Francisco mayor and current lieutenant governor of California watched the returns from Florida come in. Hillary Clinton had been widely predicted to win the state, but the map on the screen was mostly red. That was when Newsom knew that Trump had won. Though progressive measures supported by Newsom passed in California, he told me the results nationwide made it a “miserable evening.”
An avid student of California politics, Newsom recognizes that Trump is a sui generis creature but also hardly the first Republican to hold the state in contempt. “The [George W.] Bush administration was hardly favorable towards California,” he recently told me. He also pointed to James Watt, the rabid anti-environmentalist appointed to the Department of the Interior by Reagan. Governor Reagan, of course, gained national prominence
by crushing protests at the University of California at Berkeley with a deployment of National Guard troops, which left one student dead. “We’ve been here before,” Newsom said in a confident rasp that carried the slightest edge of belligerence. “We’ve not only survived, we’ve thrived.”
Newsom, who many believe could be the state’s next governor, is one of several mostly younger politicians expected to lead the Trump resistance. Another leader of that fight is sure to be Harris, the capable attorney general who in November won election to the U.S. Senate, becoming only the second woman of African-american descent to gain that distinction. Though she has sometimes been criticized for an overly cautious and calculated approach, Harris did not hold back when it became clear she’d won but would not be serving under a President Clinton.
“Do not despair. Do not be overwhelmed,” she said, voice quivering, as she took the stage on election night at a nightclub in downtown Los Angeles. “When we have been attacked and when our ideals and fundamental ideals are being attacked, do we retreat or do we fight? I say we fight!” Her word choices— despair, overwhelmed, attacked, fight— suggested the early scene of an alien invasion flick, the bruised president rallying a terrified nation from the rubble of the White House.
In the trenches with Harris and Newsom will be Governor Brown, a 78-year-old who has fought enough political battles in his career to know how an impulsive neophyte like Trump can be tweaked. Feinstein, a proudly liberal native of San Francisco who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is expected to frustrate Trump’s attempts to appoint a right-wing ideologue to the U.S. Supreme Court. Southern California’s Adam Schiff, who is the ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been assiduously pursuing claims of Russian interference in the presidential election while criticizing Trump for his longing gazes at the Kremlin. Democrat Ro Khanna, a newly elected U.S. representative from Silicon Valley, invoked his Indian heritage and Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance movement when asked by political commentator Randy Shandobil about legislating under Trump. “California,” Khanna said, “has to be a laboratory for resistance.”
There are also the state’s Latino rising stars, including state Senate leader Kevin de León, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and incoming Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who could turn his office into a clearinghouse for anti-trump lawsuits. At his address to the Assembly upon its return to work in early December, Rendon mocked calls for national reconciliation sounded by some since the election. “Californians do not need healing,” he said. “We need to fight.”