More Californians — but slightly fewer Americans — would support the Golden State’s withdrawal from the Union, according to a new poll feeding attention around a nascent movement to achieve a lawful, peaceful secession.

“About 32 percent of Californians want to create their own country, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found, including many Democrats who are frustrated with the election of President Trump,” the Hill reported. “Pollsters surveyed 500 Californians between Dec. 6 and Jan. 19. Nationally, 22 percent of respondents favor secession, they found” — a figure, like the California number, sure to have included some people with federalist or libertarian interests in seeing a discussion over the state’s status change.

“Still, half of Californians opposed the idea,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “though Democrats were more inclined to support it than Republicans. The survey found that 60 percent of Republicans gave the idea of peacefully seceding a thumbs down compared with 48 percent of Democrats and 50 percent of independents.”

In 2014, 24 percent of respondents nationwide were found to be amenable to California secession. But in-state, the new percentage represented a big jump. “The 32 percent support rate is sharply higher than the last time the poll asked Californians about secession, in 2014, when one-in-five or 20 percent favored it around the time Scotland held its independence referendum and voted to remain in the United Kingdom,” Newsmax noted. 

Parting ways

Although peaceful secession has long been confined to the realm of political fantasy, California’s perceived increased deviation from broader political trends nationwide has helped ensure the scheme a prominent place in the popular imagination and the press. “Even though California is the most populous state in the union and has the sixth-largest economy in the world, secession would be, realistically speaking, very difficult,” as the San Francisco Chronicle noted. “Two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of U.S. states (at least 38) would need to approve of the creation of an amendment that would allow for the legality of the state’s withdrawal.” But California Democrats, leery of losing ground on several fronts, have taken advantage of the state’s big popular vote margin in favor of Hillary Clinton to promise a continuation of their hallmark policies. 

“It may not be ‘Calexit’ — the name of a decidedly quixotic campaign for California to withdraw from the union — but it is turning into what is, for all intents and purposes, a slow-motion secession,” the New York Times suggested. “California is becoming to Mr. Trump what Texas — which is as Republican as California is Democratic — was to President Obama: a sea of defiance and a potential source of unending legal and legislative challenges.” On the other hand, “it will be difficult for California to promote the kind of spending program[s] lawmakers want to make up for cuts in Washington, particularly on health care,” the Times observed, complicating the rosy picture summoned by secessionist leaders of a prosperous march to the beat of the state’s own drum. 

Style or substance

For members of Yes California, the quixotic group working hardest toward secession, the increased popularity of a break with the union came as welcome news that seemed to square with their expectations. “We always thought that if we just connected with the people who thought about this, but didn’t tell their friends and family because they would be seen as kooky and weird, that the quiet population would become vocal,” as Marcus Evans, vice president of Yes California, told the Sacramento Bee. 

Nevertheless, growing support could be largely symbolic — a familiar way of expressing dissatisfaction with national politics. “California isn’t the only state which has flirted with abandoning the U.S.,” as HotAir pointed out. “Prior to the election, Public Policy Polling, which often asks gag questions intended to embarrass Republicans, found that 40 percent of Texans would consider secession if Clinton won the election.”

The campaign to place California secession on the ballot next election year entered uncertain waters as news broke that its mastermind lives and works in a city in the center of Russia. 

“I immigrated to California, and I consider myself to be a Californian,” Louis Marinelli told The California Report from his Yekaterinburg apartment, KQED reported. “I wanted to handle some personal issues in my family, regarding immigration. My wife is from Russia. I’m here handling various personal issues. But at the same time, we have some political goals we can achieve while I’m here.” 

From founding to funding

Marinelli’s deep Russian ties, past and present, attracted attention as he took his current stay in the country as an opportunity to start work on a so-called “embassy of California” in Moscow. That undertaking, as Bloomberg noted, has the aid of “a vehemently anti-American group supported by the Kremlin” — the Anti-Globalist Movement of Russia — which Marinelli said supports California’s right to self-determination. “Talking to the Russian tabloid Life, Alexander Ionov, the president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, said that the embassy would serve as a hub to boost tourism and foster cultural and economic exchanges between the Golden State and Russia,” Heat Street reported. 

“We may disagree on several issues, but if we have common ground on one issue, why shouldn’t we have a dialogue?” Marinelli asked Bloomberg. But he has already begun to hit against the limits of that rhetoric. 

“Marinelli’s Russian connection has created a schism, if not quite the Great Schism, in the breakaway movement with members of the California National Party, a group that is formally affiliated with Yes California but has publicly disavowed Marinelli as a Russian marionette. Silicon Valley investor and Hyperloop co-founder Shervin Pishevar briefly became another standard-bearer of ‘Calexit,’ as it come to be known, threatening Marinelli’s virtual monopoly on the cause, but backed off, saying he didn’t really support secession.”

The Trump factor

But crisis management was not the only reason Yes California accelerated its timetable to land their initiative on the California ballot in 2018. (According to the prospective measure’s language, voting yes “would trigger a special election the following March in which residents would decide if ‘California should become a free, sovereign and independent country,'” as the San Jose Mercury News observed.) Donald Trump’s election provoked a degree of dismay among some California Democrats intense enough to suggest a secessionist movement could take advantage while passions remained relatively hot.

“It wasn’t until Trump’s victory last month that mainstream U.S. outlets — including the Sacramento Bee, the L.A. Times and NPR — covered the group more seriously,” KQED noted. “The story got new legs because several influential tech figures took to Twitter to voice their desire for California to leave the union after Trump’s election. Among them was Shervin Pishevar, an investor and co-founder of Hyperloop One, a startup promoting a futuristic new transportation technology.”

Although no elected officials have promoted the breakaway effort, tempers have flared around the idea that a Trump presidency would try to stymie state Democrats, seen by many party members nationwide as a progressive vanguard on social and environmental issues. 

In a recent San Francisco speech before the American Geophysical Union, for instance, Gov. Jerry Brown vowed to press ahead with the state’s current climate policy regardless of what happens in Washington. “If Trump turns off the satellites, California will launch its own damn satellite,” he said, according to the IBTimes. “We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers and we’re ready to fight.” 

Rough going

Despite the flurry of attention, from Russia, Marinelli’s personal political reach in California was likely to remain limited. To date, his track record has been spotty. He “filed a handful of statewide ballot measures related to secession in 2015 and none qualified for the November ballot,” the Sacramento Bee recalled. “He also waged an unsuccessful campaign to represent state Assembly District 80, but didn’t advance beyond the June primary.”

So far, Donald Trump has divided the Republican Party, taken large numbers of voters away from the Democrats, and infused some Americans with optimism but others with despair. Now, he has also laid bare latent political fractures within Silicon Valley, often seen as a more monolithic culture than it is. 

Contempt and caution

While some leading tech figures have been supportive or tolerant of Trump and his movement, others have responded to his election by expressing the strongest possible opposition — including a call for secession. After a tweetstorm throwing support behind the nascent movement to peacefully withdraw California from the Union, Uber investor and Hyperloop cofounder Sherwin Pishevar told CNNMoney the radical idea was “the most patriotic thing I can do. The country is [at] a serious crossroads.”

“Within hours, several other tech founders offered their support for the plan. ‘I was literally just going to tweet this. I’m in and will partner with you on it,’ Dave Morin, an investor and founder of private social networking tool Path, tweeted in response to Pishevar. ‘I support you in this effort let me know what I can do to help,’ Marc Hemeon, a former Google employee and founder of Design Inc., wrote on Twitter.”

Earlier this summer, nearly 150 tech CEOs, founders, authors and investors signed an open letter rebuking Trump. “Donald Trump articulates few policies beyond erratic and contradictory pronouncements. His reckless disregard for our legal and political institutions threatens to upend what attracts companies to start and scale in America. He risks distorting markets, reducing exports, and slowing job creation,” they wrote. “We stand against Donald Trump’s divisive candidacy and want a candidate who embraces the ideals that built America’s technology industry: freedom of expression, openness to newcomers, equality of opportunity, public investments in research and infrastructure, and respect for the rule of law.”

Nevertheless, the attitude among Silicon Valley’s heaviest hitters has been markedly different. Elon Musk waited until just before Election Day to tell CNBC he had doubts about Trump. “I think a bit strongly that he is probably not the right guy,” he said, suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s policies on the economy and the environment were “the right ones” for the current uneasy political climate. “However, the election results are unlikely to have much bearing on the future of Tesla, he said,” the network added. 

From outlier to influencer

Peter Thiel, meanwhile, has emerged as perhaps Donald Trump’s most respected and powerful supporter outside of Washington, D.C. Thiel “was one of the few businesspeople — and the only prominent one in technology — to publicly support Mr. Trump’s presidential run,” the New York Times recalled. “Mr. Thiel spoke at the Republican convention and later gave $1.25 million to support the Trump campaign. That is not much, as presidential donations go, but it happened when the candidate was widely perceived to be floundering. In the process, Mr. Thiel was denounced by much of Silicon Valley. There were calls for Mr. Thiel to step down from Facebook, where he serves on the board, and Y Combinator, a start-up incubator where he is a part-time adviser.” Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg weathered stiff criticism when he insisted that Thiel should not face retaliation or ostracism because of his support for a presidential candidate.

Now, as Thiel told the Times, he’ll have Trump’s ear in an informal advisory role — important, according to Thiel, because Trump’s task is so daunting. Calling for “all hands on deck,” Thiel cautioned against some of his colleague’s frustrated impulses. “At the end of the day, it would be crazy to simply spend four years issuing denunciatory tweets on Twitter,” he said. “For a day or two, that’s fine. But I hope Silicon Valley will be more productive than that.”

Proving out the maxim that some things never go out of style however unpopular they are, a group of California secessionists announced plans to follow up this year’s momentous presidential election with a rally for Golden State independence in Sacramento. 

“The Yes California Independence Campaign, which is based in San Diego, is aiming to qualify a citizen’s initiative in 2018 to get a referendum for secession on the ballot in 2019,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“While the notion of an independent California does seem well-intended — points about immigration, environmental concerns, and education are thoughtful — the practicality of such a proposal is tenuous at best,” the paper concluded.

Revisionist history

The invitation to the Nov. 9 rally casts the Golden State in the role of a republic that was all but annexed by the United States. “In the 166th year of Congress admitting California as a U.S. state without the consent of the people of California itself, we will be organizing an all-day informational booth on the front steps of the California Capitol culminating in an evening independence rally beginning at 5:00 PM the day after Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is elected president of United States because no matter who is elected, California deserves its independence,” the invitation read. 

“California was admitted as a state on September 9, 1850 as the result of a deal struck in Washington where the south agreed to admit California as a free state in exchange for the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (which required northerners to return escaped slaves to their masters in the south), and for the expansion of slavery into the Utah and New Mexico territories.”

The group has already amassed 14,600 likes on Facebook despite admittedly quixotic aims: a much more popular recent push for an independent Texas swiftly ran aground on constitutional legal issues. “After President Obama was re-elected in 2012, more than 125,000 people signed a petition asking for the government to allow the Lone Star State to go its own way,” the Washington Post recalled this summer. “That sentiment was revisited earlier this year, with Republican activists in Texas pushing to include a pro-secession plank in the party platform. (It didn’t happen.)”

Precedent and procedure

Yes California brainchild Louis Marinelli got a summertime publicity boost in the wake of the surprise Brexit result, which many analysts nervously or approvingly cited as a likely trend of populist decentralization throughout the western world. “This is the first Western secessionist movement that worked, and I think that is going to be very profound,” he told Newsweek. “Are you going to say to people in the freest country in the world (you) don’t have the right to self-determination?”

“For Marinelli, who is originally from Buffalo, New York, but calls California home, the commonalities between Brexit and Calexit, are clear: Both the United Kingdom and California feel disenfranchised by professional politicians in distant capitals (Brussels and Washington D.C.), strangled by over-regulation on trade and don’t feel they get enough value for their tax dollars.”

Faced with the prevailing constitutional interpretation that peaceable secession is effectively impossible, Yes California has worked through a response. “California cannot unilaterally declare itself independent of the United States even though the original 13 colonies unilaterally declared their independence from England,” as the group allowed on it website. Instead, it argued, Texas v. White, an 1869 case, indicates “several paths to legal and peaceful secession.” First, however, “it will be necessary for Californians to weigh in on the matter, which is what Yes California’s 2020 independence referendum is about. If there is no mandate from the people to secede, there is no reason for us to embark on this long and difficult legal journey to achieve that goal. So, an independence referendum on the ballot goes first.”

According to Yes California, the next step would either require a constitutional amendment to permit California’s departure from the Union or a convention of the states which would lead amicably to the same result. 

Although Louis Marinelli has launched a campaign to represent the San Diego area in the state Assembly, he has also helped found the California National Party, an independence movement angling to put its scheme before voters this November. Marinelli told Vice the name was “inspired by the Scottish National Party,” with its Yes California campaign serving as “a nod to Yes Scotland, the unsuccessful campaign in support of a ‘Yes’ vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.”

For now, Yes California has not done much to raise expectations to Scottish heights. “So far, the metrics are not encouraging,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Last year, the group raised $10,000, Marinelli said. So far, only 300 people have signed up as volunteers on his website.”

A string of failures

Californians’ rogue experiments with independence have a habit of attracting more notice than support. With his Six Californias initiative, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper “spent $5.2 million on signature-gathering, but couldn’t come close to the needed number of voter autographs,” the Los Angeles Daily News recalled. “It was the worst failure in the modern era for any proposed citizen initiative with respectable financial support.” Only the longstanding effort to carve a rural statelet from southern Oregon and Northern California has kept up a trace of momentum; advocates “took their proposed secession plan to the Legislature early this year, where it got a modicum of press coverage but was never taken seriously,” according to the Daily News.

The breakaway movement, which would create a state of Jefferson, has played neatly into the hands of observers for whom secession is virtually synonymous with Confederate-style backwoods values. “Cut off from the seats of power by geography, alienated by the state’s left-leaning politics and tendency toward regulation, enduring stubbornly high unemployment, facing the decimation of traditional industries such as logging, and harboring few prospects for economic growth, these disaffected citizens — overwhelmingly white and mostly conservative — share many of the concerns about central state overreach as the militia members who recently took control of a wildlife refuge in Oregon,” as the New York Daily News recently noted, allowing that Jeffersonians “are committed to a political solution rather than an armed rebellion.”

Turning left

Yet the nascent movement for an independent California has underscored how secession has become increasingly attractive to progressives rather than reactionaries. “I think a lot of the reasons why there’s so much gridlock in Washington is because California is there with its own set of values,” Marinelli told Newsy. “We could do universal health care, which is something I’d be for. We could go to universal education.”

Even on common defense, Marinelli implied that an independent California should pass on interventions unpopular with California’s left-leaning electorate. “We’re going to continue to do commerce with the Americans and be a part of the Americans in other areas, such as military involvement when our goals are aligned,” he said. “Fundamentally, we have a problem with the United States,” he told the Times. “Ideologically they are very different from us — their agenda, their militarism, their imperialism and colonialism. The United States is always at war. We don’t want to bomb other countries.”

“Marinelli supports a single-payer health care system, reproductive rights, public financing for political campaigns, a path to citizenship for immigrants who are in California illegally, and criminal justice and police reform,” according to the Times. “He thinks the Pledge of Allegiance is propaganda,” the paper added, and, in an ironic twist, “believes that California does not receive its fair share of federal dollars.”

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the Six Californias movement needed approximately 808,000 signatures by July 18. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who masterminded the proposal, put almost $5 million of his own money toward achieving the figure.

Last week, Draper, a political independent, announced in a press conference that his street teams had amassed 1.3 million signatures. Amid a flurry of questions, he also acknowledged the two-year run-up to 2016 will provide Six Californias advocates much-needed time to sway public opinion, which stands at 59 percent against a state breakup.

Adding an extra layer of drama, the rival group One California petitioned Secretary of State Debra Bowen to investigate voter fraud surrounding the collected signatures — alleging that signature gatherers in at least a few instances intentionally misrepresented the goal of the initiative. That’s a misdemeanor in California.

Political crosswinds

Alone, a few thousand discarded signatures won’t strip Six Californias from the ballot. But even if it passes, the Golden State’s dismemberment would have to receive a stamp of approval both from the California Legislature and the U.S. Congress.

It’s not just supporters of Draper’s six statelets, however, who are hoping the secession scheme comes before voters. Capturing widespread rural and conservative discontent, the plan has attracted the admiration of some Republicans for its spirit, if not its practicability.

Although California’s Republican members of Congress are almost all reluctant to embrace the Six Californias plan itself, more than a few sympathize with the frustrations behind it. GOP Reps. Jeff Denham and Doug LaMalfa, both of the Golden State, told The Hill that Californians’ different needs call for different ideas. For Denham, “dividing up into states would be something to look at.” But, said LaMalfa, “I would think that if you are going to divide California, it’s ambitious to do three states or just two.” 

Crafting the pitch

Without resounding support from sitting state officials, Draper and company have the luxury of choosing for themselves how they intend to appeal to voters. Fittingly for a proposal that relies on sectional interests and identities, Six Californias likely requires more than one rationale to maximize support.

In a new report issued by the California Legislative Analyst, for instance, the plan is shown to leave two of the new states richer, and four poorer. That might be a problem for some voters. But for at least some in northern California, the prospect of a short-term economic hit is more appealing than the alternative.

Jefferson Declaration Committee spokesman Mark Baird told the Washington Times that “the short-term economic hit would be far preferable to the state’s slide into a morass of ever-greater debt, taxes and regulation.”

In interviews, Draper himself takes a more cheerily libertarian approach to framing California’s challenges with sectionalism. Rather than berating Bay Area Democrats for capturing state policy, he talks up what classic libertarian theorists such as Robert Nozick call “exit options.”

‘Our government’

As Draper put it, six states would give Californians “a chance to make it our government. We can make it more local, better representation, closer to us. It also creates a choice. If some people feel that their government isn’t working for them – and I know a lot of people in very poor regions feel that the status quo is not working for them – this would be an opportunity for them to easily move to another state without leaving the beautiful weather we get here.”

It’s a logical rethink of long-familiar, but often inconsequential, Republican arguments in favor of “devolving” power from Washington and “returning” it to states. As residents of red and blue states alike have discovered, state governments can sow just as much partisan and policy opposition as the federal government.

Ostensibly, it’s easier to bring about change in government at the state level than it is to alter the federal landscape. But in states that are deep red or, like California, deep blue, any kind of fundamental political change requires a longer time span than many residents are willing to accept.

“Steven Maviglio, a Democratic consultant, and Joe Rodota, a fixture in GOP politics, have formed OneCalifornia, a committee that will oppose Draper’s “Six Californias” plan if and when the constitutional amendment gets on the ballot.”

And you thought there was a two-party system?

It’s easy to understand why this opposition is swarming.. The power of political operatives, as well as such special interests as the California Teachers Association, depends on knowledge of the political makeup and personalities of the current state. Draper’s initiative would multiply the difficulty of their jobs by six.

It would be like, in the current arrangement, trying to influence the state legislatures of California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington State and Idaho. Nobody does that. OneCalifornia? One political milch cow is more like it.

Secession fever

No question passing Draper’s initiative will be difficult. Yet secession is in the air:

• In Venice, 89 percent just voted to split from Italy. A united Italy always was a mistake. The people of Dante and Boccaccio, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, Leonardo and Michelangelo, are too anarchistic to join in the large state jammed together at the opera buffa 1861 Risorgimento.
• Crimea just voted to leave Ukraine. Although admittedly that is complicated by its vote to join Russia amid international tensions.
• In Quebec, which in 1995 voted 49 percent for secession from Canada, separatist fever is back. The people again are echoing the words of de Gaulle from his 1967 visit: “Vive le Québec libre!“
• The Scotts have scheduled a Sept. vote to regain their independence from the United Kingdom. Braveheart lives.
• Catalonia also has set a Sept. vote, in their case to leave Spain. 
• If that happens, the Basques, who long have wanted to leave Spain, wouldn’t be far behind.

Of course, small countries can be repressive. Witness Cuba and North Korea. But at least in those cases, the repression is contained. But in general, small countries — or small states, in case of splitting California — generally engender competition, with freedom bringing immigrants seeking prosperity, while tyranny expels people. We’re already seeing that as so many people and businesses flee California’s highly taxed and regulated economy for Texas, Arizona, Washington State and other states with much lower state taxes and regulations. Six Californias would spark competition among the parts of OneCalifornia that currently are stuck in a dysfunctional relationship. If not this year, then soon California’s parts will be ready for Divorce Court.

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By John Seiler

Whatever America’s many problems, liberals continue to amuse us. The latest is a diatribe in the liberal news site The Daily Beast/Newsweek, “Memo to the South: Go Ahead, Secede Already!” by Lee Siegel, who is described as, “the author of Harvard Is Burning, which has just been published as an Amazon Kindle Single.”

He’s not talking about Southern California seceding from Northern California, but about the old Confederacy leaving again. One difference between the regions is that Yankees like him use profanities a lot more than Southerners. Even though I’m a Yankee, too, I’ll clean up his quotes because this is a family web site.

He writes:

“Let’s not be fooled by all the bipartisan rhetoric that has been streaming out of the GOP since Romney’s self-destruction. Hundreds of thousands of petitioners in a handful of red states still want to secede? Well, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

He can’t avoid a well-worn cliche in his second sentence. And he doesn’t note that Romney was raised a Yankee in Michigan (like me) and was the governor of a Yankee state. The Republicans’ vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan, also was a Yankee from Wisconsin.

“A solid block of Southern states continues to refuse to expand Medicaid, thus squashing one of the linchpins of the president’s health-care reform.”

But Medicare is going broke fast.

“The South will likely be the last and most stubborn battleground in the fight for gay marriage.”

Actually, same-sex “marriage” already is allowed in Southern states. It just isn’t officially recognized by their state governments. And such Yankee states as Michigan and Pennsylvania also are unlikely to provide such recognition unless the U.S. Supreme Court forces them to.

Siegel Utopia

“Gun control? The more the two sides seem to get cozier with each other, the faster gun-control legislation gets watered down—and more and more red states are passing laws making it legal to carry a concealed weapon.”

In what country does Siegel live? Does he know what’s really going on in America? Actually, gun control is stymied in the federal government because such Yankee states as Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania are stuffed with hunters who commonly belong to the Democratic Party but oppose gun control. After the 1994 gun control law was imposed, Democrats lost big time in those states and decided they would rather win and retain offices than impose gun control that didn’t work anyway.

“As for immigration, the red states seem to be relaxing their anti-immigrant fervor, but nothing approaching new legislation is even on the horizon.”

Actually, the argument isn’t about cooling “anti-immigrant fervor,” but about how to regulate immigration. Even Red State politicians would allow some immigration. Without any regulation, about half the world’s 7 billion people would take the next 747 to America.

And the biggest pro-immigration U.S. senator is Lindsay Graham, R-S.C. Next in line is Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Both are Southerners

“Far from being fanciful or fanatical, the proponents of secession have a stronger grasp of political reality than just about anyone else. In fact, there are serious reasons why the North itself should take the lead in a secessionist movement.”

Siegel might have a point there. But here’s his Yankee utopia:

“Just think what America would look like without its mostly Southern states. (We could retain “America’: they could call themselves ‘Smith & Wesson” or ‘Coca-Cola’ or something like that.) Universal health care. No guns. Strong unions. A humane minimum wage. A humane immigration policy. High revenues from a fair tax structure. A massive public-works program. Legal gay marriage. A ban on carbon emissions. Electric cars. Stronger workplace protections. Extended family leave from work in case of pregnancy or illness. Longer unemployment benefits. In short, a society on a par with most of the rest of the industrialized world—a place whose politics have finally caught up with its social and economic realities.”

A lot of humor there. Actually, Smith & Wesson is a Yankee company located in Springfield, Mass. Coca-Cola definitely is located in Atlanta, Ga., but its corporate board is so “progressive” it makes Siegel look like a reactionary. “Universal health care” would just more quickly bankrupt Yankeeland — a better name for a rump North than “America”; as with Canada’s socialized medicine scheme, it would just send sick people South to pay cash for treatment.

“No guns.” As mentioned above, a lot of pro-gun people are Yankees. And how would he seize the estimated 200 million guns from people in Yankeeland? Would he channel Stalin?

“Strong unions,” which would bankrupt state governments even faster. “A humane minimum wage,” which would kill millions of low-wage jobs, especially for minority youth. “A massive public-works program” — paid for with what? “Legal gay marriage.” As mentioned, it’s already legal everywhere, just not state-sanctioned; in any case, most Yankee states already have sanctioned same-sex “marriage,” or soon will.

“A ban on carbon emissions,” which would ban most cars and destroy almost every job in industrial areas such as Detroit and Pittsburgh, plunging Yankeeland back to the stone age.

Fantasy

“In short, a society on a par with most of the rest of the industrialized world.” 

Actually, even the social-democratic countries of Europe don’t go that far. And their birth rates are so low anyway that their people are vanishing. As to Japan, South Korea and China, which also are part of “the industrialized world,” indeed now are leading it, Siegel’s utopia is but a fantasy.

And the Chinese remember how most of his program was enacted under Mao and led to 45 million people  starving to death during the Great Leap Forward.

The reality is that we’re stuck with each other in the Union and will just have to work things out. I think the real time the country might bust apart might be when Social Security and Medicare soon go broke. Right now, all those retired voters around the country depend on a strong central government taking tax money from the young and giving it to the old.

Many are “snow birds” who retired from New York, Michigan and other Cold Weather States to Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and other states in Dixie. They vote about twice as often as young people. So they would prevent the South from seceding. But when those programs go broke, the monetary ties of the welfare state will be gone. Slavery, now gone 150 years, won’t be an issue as it was in 1861.

When the welfare state goes bankrupt, people everywhere, not just in the South, will be very, very mad at Siegel’s beloved central government in Washington, D.C.

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — Psychiatrists talk about the progressive stages of grief people experience after suffering a devastating loss in their personal lives, moving from denial to anger to bargaining (i.e., trying to strike a “deal” with a higher power) to depression and, finally, to acceptance.

Political scientists ought to come up with a similar series of “grief stages” for people grappling with a devastating political loss. Case in point: Republicans, who were convinced that voters would grant them the White House after four years of failed Obama administration policies.

Discouraged political activists have been expressing denial, anger and depression. Currently, they are going through a stage that should be termed “fantasy,” where they advocate ideas that will never come to fruition and pretend there’s a quick, fun solution to deep political problems that will be solved over time and through hard work and vision.

For instance, more than 675,000 Americans, representing all 50 states, have digitally signed online petitions with the White House calling for the secession of their respective states from the union. The Obama administration had created the “We the People” online petition system to encourage the public to more directly participate in the nation’s governance by suggesting ideas that the administration should pursue.

As of Wednesday, petitions from seven states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — each had hit 25,000 signatures, the threshold to prompt a “review” by the White House. As the Daily Caller reported, “Launched Nov. 7, the day after Obama won re-election, the [initial secession petition, started by someone in Louisiana] set off an Internet-driven cascade of disaffected Tea Partiers and other conservatives looking — as one petition organizer told The Daily Caller via a ‘direct message’ on Twitter — ‘just to do something, anything, to show we’re not going away quietly.'”

This certainly fits the “just do something” parameters, but the Obama administration will no doubt provide some three-minute review of the petitions and issue a bland statement calling for the continued unification of our country. This secession movement is typical, perhaps, in a world where many people are fixated on Facebook and Twitter.

There’s nothing unserious about secession, despite the idea having been sullied by the unpleasantness of the mid-19th century. It’s the ultimate check and balance on an out-of-control central government, but powerful nations rarely let the unruly provinces break away without bloody struggles. This idea, a temper tantrum really, is not going to happen in a country where, despite the temporary frustration, people still happily spend their weekends at the shopping malls.

Texas Republic

One opinion writer argued that Texas could pull this off. Of course, it could, technically speaking. But it won’t happen because the federal government owns more and bigger guns than even Texans. States are diverse and complex places. Even in Texas, Obama received more than 41 percent of the vote. At the same time, in California, which gave Obama a stunning 59 percent of the vote, most counties went for Mitt Romney. It would be hard to disentangle our nation based simply on state boundaries — despite the simplistic blue state vs. red state breakdown so common among media analysts.

A number of people happy with the election results have filed their own online petitions with the White House “We the People” system, calling for the secession petitioners to be deported.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry dismissed the secession idea, despite his differences with the feds. Secession, then, would be widely opposed even in places where the idea might sprout.

For those of us living in California, secession would mean something even worse than we have now, given that our leaders are further to the left than most elsewhere. For example, the new cap-and-trade system to fight global warming, the first (and, let’s hope, last) in the nation, got started this past week, with an auction of government-issued greenhouse-gas “allowances” that even the Air Resources Board admits will lead to significant “leakages” (i.e., job losses). The folks who crafted this system would have even more power with California outside the Union.

Break up California

The better idea for frustrated Californians (aside from seeking a new home in Oklahoma City or Abilene, Kansas), is to reconsider the notion of breaking our state into more hospitable segments.

Consider that Sacramento County, for example, has a land area not that much smaller than Rhode Island, and a population about 50 percent larger. San Bernardino County is larger, geographically, than nine states. Who says that California, which spans nearly 800 miles north to south, needs to keep its current configuration?

I’d create several California states. Coastal California would run from Los Angeles County through Sonoma County and would offer little to hinder the liberal experimentation popular in places such as San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Los Angeles. Those living outside this state presumably would be free to visit on weekends and enjoy the cultural amenities, but as nonresidents wouldn’t have to pay for the nuttiness.

My Southern California would include Orange, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties. This state would be politically competitive, but conservative leaning.

So, too, would be my Inland California, which would include most of the vast Central Valley and the Sierras. I would throw the most-northern counties into the already proposed state of Jefferson — reflecting an old-time secessionist movement that would combine portions of Northern California and southern Oregon, a collection of mountainous areas with little population and a distinct culture.

There would be more harmony, and fewer complaints by people on either the left or right, who could find it easier to live under political leadership that better reflects their values and priorities.

It’s a fun thought experiment, an act of silliness that can help forlorn conservative-minded California voters cope with a grievous political situation. But, sooner or later, we need to move on from fantasy and accept the world as it exists so that we can pursue serious ideas to save our state from the abyss.

Steven Greenhut is vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity; Write to him at: steven.greenhut@franklincenterhq.org.