By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, April 17, 2017
The Irish Republican Socialist party and Sinn Fein still
dream of a unified Irish republic. The Catalan Solidarity for Independence
coalition would see the Estelada flag raised over an independent Estat CatalĂ ,
and there are independence-minded movements as far-flung as the western Sahara.
The Uhuru Movement is a kind of separatist movement standing on its head,
looking to transcend national borders (with their colonial histories) and unite
African people in a single African identity. The United States has the Texas
Nationalist Movement hoping to restore the Republic of Texas, and somewhere out
there is a very committed fellow who believes himself to be the rightful king
of Hawaii. There is a more plausible movement for an independent Puerto Rico
and a much less plausible movement for an independent California. All of these
have something in common.
Russians.
Weird, right?
The movement for Californian independence expects to have
an initiative on the 2018 ballot, which would in turn lead to a 2019
referendum. The organizers of the “Yes California” campaign say that winning
the referendum would be only the first step in the long and complex process of
establishing a free and independent California, finally liberated from the
grasp of Washington and, especially, of the military-industrial complex. “Peace
and Security” is, in fact, Exhibit A in the case for Calexit, and the
organizers complain that the U.S. government “spends more on its military than
the next several countries combined. Not only is California forced to subsidize
this massive military budget with our taxes, but Californians are sent off to
fight in wars that often do more to perpetuate terrorism than to abate it. The
only reason terrorists might want to attack us is because we are part of the
United States and are guilty by association.”
If that sounds like it could have been written by Ron
Paul or some lonely disciple of Murray Rothbard, that is no accident: The
leadership of the California-independence movement has a distinctly paleo smell
about it.
“When I talk to people about California independence,
they always say: ‘Well, what would you do if China invades?’” says Yes
California president Louis Marinelli from his home in . . . Yekaterinburg,
formerly Sverdlovsk (city motto: Don’t call us Siberia), an industrial center
on the edge of the Ural Mountains in Russia. “Seriously,” he asks, “when’s the
last time China invaded another country?” I mention the obvious ones: Tibet,
India, and the Soviet Union. There’s Vietnam and Korea. Marinelli is a young
man; perhaps much of this seems like ancient history to him. It does not to the
Indians, or the Russians, or the Vietnamese, or many others. “No, I mean:
When’s the last time China crossed an
ocean to invade another country?” he clarifies. “Only the United States
does that.”
Only?
The American war machine must surely be of some intense
concern to California’s would-be Jefferson Davis, inasmuch as there is no legal
or constitutional process for a state’s separating from the Union, a question
that was settled definitively if not in court then just outside the courthouse
at Appomattox.
***
Marinelli comes from the West Coast of New York, the part
of California on the shores of Lake Erie that is known as Buffalo. He says that
California is a land of immigrants, and he is proud to think of himself as one
of them. He is a relatively recent arrival, having moved to San Diego in 2006,
following stints in Ohio, Iowa, and Russia, where he studied in St. Petersburg
and where he currently teaches English at a language institute. He believes
that Californians are a culturally distinct people who simply live and think
differently from the people of the other 49 states. It does not seem to have
occurred to him that this represents the California that exists between San
Diego and San Francisco west of Interstate 5. I ask him whether he believes
that people in Baker and Afton really are part of a single culture that
includes the people in the Bay Area but excludes nearby Searchlight, Nev., and
Bullhead City, Ariz. He does not quite seem to know where Baker or Afton is,
but speaks vaguely about “the interior.” Sure, it is different, but “we’re all
West Coast people,” he says. People from Calada, Calif., are West Coast people
in the sense that people in Las Vegas are West Coast people, residing as they
do in the Pacific Time Zone. But the folks in Calada are a lot closer to St.
George, Utah, than they are to San Diego.
Perhaps we can chalk this up to the fact that Marinelli’s
immersion in Californian culture is fairly recent. He has been involved in
politics and public affairs for some time, most prominently at the National
Organization for Marriage, working against gay marriage “as if it were a
disease,” as he put it. After boasting of being “the one behind the 2010 Summer
for Marriage Tour,” he quit NOM in a sort of dramatic fashion, repudiating his
previous work, apologizing for it, and publicly declaring his support for
same-sex marriage, only to be mocked by New
York magazine as a confused young man going through a “homophobic
strategist for an anti-gay marriage activist organization phase.” He is a Trump
voter, albeit one who voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, which
he dismisses as — the inevitable word — “rigged.”
“I couldn’t vote for Hillary,” he says. “She was the
anointed candidate from the get-go. It’s like we’re supposed to have affirmative
action in the White House now. We have to have an African-American president
just because, and a woman president just because, and every demographic just
because.” Mrs. Clinton won nearly twice as many votes in California as Trump
did. Marinelli goes on to cite the Republicans’ recent failure to repeal the
Affordable Care Act and “gridlock” in Washington as evidence that California
would be better governed by Californians. California is in fact one of the
states where residents on balance think themselves better off with the
Affordable Care Act than without it, according to a Hoover Institution poll.
Which is to say, the leader of the California-independence movement is
politically at odds, deeply so, with the great majority of Californians.
On the up side, the great majority of Californians
haven’t heard of him.
***
‘I suppose it has a certain romantic appeal,” says Judith
Montgomery, a Bay Area math teacher who, like many Californians, is aware that
there is a vote coming on a quixotic independence campaign but finds the notion
impossible to take seriously. She mentions Ecotopia,
Ernest Callenbach’s influential 1975 novel about a different version of
California secession, one in which the state joins with Oregon and Washington
to form a new “stable-state” nation based on environmental principles, which in
1975 apparently included Bhutanese-style isolation and autarky — the novel’s
premise is that the green utopia is receiving its first American visitor in 20
years. “Ecotopia was my favorite book
when I was 21,” she says. “I’m in my sixties now, and the world doesn’t work
like that.”
The secession talk, she says, is a waste of time and —
more objectionable, in her view — a waste of money that might be better used
elsewhere. She insists that she’s “not the best-informed person,” but her
concerns are the concerns of people who are paying attention, e.g.,
California’s grossly wasteful duplication of administrative jobs in education,
something Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger promised to address but failed to
deliver on. That’s the stuff out of which actual governance is made, and it
isn’t very exciting.
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.”
***
Like the leadership of Yes California, the 21 counties
that would form the State of Jefferson went overwhelmingly for Trump. Mrs.
Clinton pounded Trump in California and reduced him nearly to third-party numbers
in places such as San Francisco, but Trump outperformed her in the Jefferson
counties by an even larger margin than the one she enjoyed in California as a
whole. The Jefferson activists are old-fashioned patriots who sound like
tea-party guys: Tenth Amendment, high taxes, too much debt, too much
regulation, too much welfare spending on too many illegal immigrants. Yes
California’s Louis Marinelli has a pretty right-wing outlook and history,
albeit one that is more Robert A. Taft than Ronald Reagan. What’s funny is that
his Calexit campaign wasn’t doing very much until something happened that
almost nobody in California was expecting. Marinelli cast a protest vote for
Donald Trump, but the guy turned around and won.
Suddenly, secession started to sound more promising not
to paleo-libertarian Californians hiding out in Big Sur cabins but to ordinary,
progressive, Democratic-voting Californians of the familiar variety. Shervin
Pishevar, a big-money tech investor with a hand in everything from Uber to Hyperloop,
declared himself a California separatist after Trump was elected and said he
was “funding a legitimate campaign for California to become its own nation.”
Other Silicon Valley figures such as venture capitalist Jason Calacanis joined
in. And Marinelli’s phone started ringing.
“We have thousands of people literally waiting for us to
even get the opportunity to contact them by phone,” Marinelli says. “There are
60 chapters, and each has a chapter leader. We have 8,000 registered
volunteers.” He says he received more than 17,000 e-mails in November and
December following the election. “Some of them are hate mail, but a lot are
people who want to help.”
He is getting some help — from the Anti-Globalization
Movement of Russia, which is, depending on whom you ask, either a group that
enjoys some financial backing from the Kremlin or an outright Kremlin front. It
provides Marinelli with office space in Moscow, where he has opened a kind of
California embassy, a cultural center whose most recent exhibition was on civil
rights. (Short version: California good, United States bad.) It provided travel
expenses for those far-flung separatists from around the world to attend the
conference it organized in Moscow, although the King of Hawaii was unable to
attend in person and sent video greetings. Marinelli says he supports the Texas
Nationalist Movement and others who attended the event in Moscow. And he scoffs
at the notion that the Kremlin might be attempting to use him and his daft
little crusade for its own ends. “Meddling in other countries’ elections is the
sort of thing the United States does,” he says. His anti-Americanism is deep
and it is reflexive. He says it would be “hypocrisy” for Americans to complain
about Moscow’s meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. I ask him
to consider that even if it were hypocritical, that would not make it untrue.
He responds as subtly as people who believe as he believes always respond. “The
United States supported the Taliban.”
His Russian friends and allies share his belief that the
United States should not be in a position of “dominating the world,” he says,
and adds that they share his belief in the self-determination of peoples. That
would come as news to, among many others, Rafis Kashapov, a Tatar dissident
imprisoned for criticizing Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. He was found guilty
of advocating separatism — which of
course is illegal in Russia. He did not join Marinelli and the others at the
Moscow Ritz-Carlton.
The Russian oligarchs are awash with money and in thrall
to a kind of atavistic nationalism, and they have a lot of cash to throw around
at things like separatist movements in California or Spain or Ireland or any
other place they think they might wrong-foot the West, however slightly. And
where the West comes to an end on the sunny beaches of the Pacific, they have
an ally. At least when he’s visiting from the edge of Siberia.
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