Imagine if President Trump announced that he wanted to oust California from the United States. If it weren't for us, after all, Trump would have won the popular vote he so lusts after by 1.4 million. Blue America would lose its biggest source of electoral votes in all future elections. The Senate would have two fewer Democrats. The House of Representatives would lose 38 Democrats and just 14 Republicans. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, among the most liberal in the nation, would be changed irrevocably. And the U.S. as a whole would suddenly be a lot less ethnically diverse than it is today...His thesis: California as the savior of the United States. I can't be the only person who finds that ludicrous, on any number of levels. Perhaps, if California were to take over the US, we could have a bullet train from Stockton,CA, to Ottumwa, IA, instead of wherever our currently-designed route from nowhere to nowhere is.
For decades California has exerted more influence on American politics and culture than vice versa. Secession would not improve our values. But it would practically ensure that the rest of the U.S. would drift farther away from our laid-back tolerance and easygoing diversity. And they'd still be our neighbors, geographic reality unchanged by political independence.
I've long said that California's natural division is between Coastal California and Inland California, and the author of this article agrees:
Efforts to divide California into more manageable and homogeneous parts are as old as the Bear Flag that was raised over the state capitol at statehood in 1850. When I was a legislative staffer in Sacramento in 1980, a state assemblyman named Stan Statham had a serious proposal that attracted bipartisan support. He recognized that California’s people (now 40 million) would be better served if its competing constituencies had more in common.Instead we'll just bumble along, latching on to every crazy liberal talking point and policy, completely disregarding common sense, history, or human nature, pretending that unicorn farts smell like roses.
Lots of people have their favorite maps for new states. For decades, the natural dividing line ran due east from the coast, just north of Bakersfield; it emphasized the differences between northern and southern California. My favorite design was for three states: one centered on Los Angeles, one centered on San Francisco, and everyone else in a third state. More recently, in 2009, then GOP assemblyman Bill Maze proposed creating two states: a Coastal California state and an Inland California state. The big population centers of San Francisco and Los Angeles would be in the first, but the inland state would include some large coastal counties such as Orange (home of Disneyland) and San Diego.
Perhaps, if California were to take over the US, we could have a bullet train from Stockton,CA, to Ottumwa, IA, instead of wherever our currently-designed route from nowhere to nowhere is.
ReplyDeletethis might be one of the funniest things I have read on here. Thanks.
Coastal and inland seems logical, but I'd extend the coastal region all the way up to the Oregon border.
ReplyDeleteThe far north coastal counties ((Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino) have much more in common with their ultra liberal coastal counties to the south than the northern inland counties (Siskiyou, Modoc, Lassen, Trinity, Shasta).
Just divide it along the San Andreas fault and wait.......OR
ReplyDeleteSell San Francisco to the Chinese (they own most of it already....) and the radical types get the kind of government they claim to want and we get our debts cancelled. Win-win.