California: failed state or new beginning?
Bobblehead sent me a link to this blog post written by Walter Russell Mead, the “Editor-at-large & Director” of The American Interest Online. Mead writes that the recent Supreme Court ruling “that could ultimately force California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates” officially acknowledges that California meets a key requirement for being considered a failed state: “it can no longer enforce the law within its frontiers.”
“Let there be no mistake: when you produce so many criminals that you can’t afford to lock them up, you are a failed state,” Mead writes. “California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state. Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up.”
Mead goes in depth about what he thinks the Golden State’s problems are and explains how he believes it fell from grace after creating the modern concept of the American Dream. (Oddly, he ignores mentioning the tax revolt of the seventies and Prop 13. Interesting…) I read most of the article, but admit to skimming parts. Having lived in California for about four years and witnessed the state’s dysfunction first-hand (though I never kept abreast of the wheeling and dealing in Sacramento as much as I should have), I cannot help feeling Mead misses the mark.
In general, I am tired of anyone old enough to recall glory days when gas cost 18 cents a gallon telling me what went wrong and what the solutions are. (More and more it seems to me they are what went wrong. I am beginning to think their nostalgia for a time forever passed is dangerous and detrimental.) At the same time, though, I feel he touches on an interesting concept when he proposes breaking California into five separate states: “California’s core problem is that it has outgrown the constitutional model we have for it. California is too populous, too diverse, too complicated to flourish as a single state.”
I am unsure if breaking California into more manageable and homogeneous (geographically, at least) states will usher a second coming of past fortunes and progress, but it will at least give folks in the Central Valley and the far northern coast, who have long felt estranged from and alienated by the large urban centers on the coast, autonomy to do as they want. The same goes for those in Mead’s (or whomever’s) derisive Pelosi-land and Lost Angeles. (I did, however, give a knowing and approving smile for this line: “Lost Angeles is a parody of itself, a city to escape rather than a goal to be reached.”)
Of course, California has one hell of a resource problem: water scarcity. There already is multi-state cooperation (at least in theory) about water allocation in the region, so it could be less of a roadblock than it first seems.
(Here’s something I just thought of: perhaps Mead’s California break-up proposal is geared toward partitioning the state’s make-or-break Electoral College role.)
But why stop at California? Mead believes “New York, Florida, Texas and Illinois are obvious candidates for break up,” and follows with what is probably the most compelling and thought provoking line of the entire post: “figuring out how to decentralize and localize state government is an important part of making America work in the 21st century.”
Though it perplexes Bobblehead, I will say California’s ballot proposition system is at least an effort at direct democracy. How useful and practical it is in the Golden State is questionable (Switzerland is an even more mindboggling example), but I think it gives voters the kind of civic empowerment they yearn for. That kind of empowerment (you know, that “for the people, by the people” thing?) is something I think is also possible through the kind of decentralization and state partitioning Mead writes about.
Is a kind of anarchistic/regional/localized/direct form of democracy a cure for the intensifying divisions in our state governments? Instead of centralized governments in places like Des Moines, Sacramento, and Springfield, should we establish federalized governments in Goosetown, Silver Lake, and Lakeview? Will that kind of micromanagement help us better serve ourselves? Perhaps, and I think it would be worth a try. Starting with California is not a bad idea.
“Let there be no mistake: when you produce so many criminals that you can’t afford to lock them up, you are a failed state,” Mead writes. “California used to be the glory of this country, the dream by the sea, the magic state. Now it produces so many criminals it can’t pay to keep them locked up.”
Mead goes in depth about what he thinks the Golden State’s problems are and explains how he believes it fell from grace after creating the modern concept of the American Dream. (Oddly, he ignores mentioning the tax revolt of the seventies and Prop 13. Interesting…) I read most of the article, but admit to skimming parts. Having lived in California for about four years and witnessed the state’s dysfunction first-hand (though I never kept abreast of the wheeling and dealing in Sacramento as much as I should have), I cannot help feeling Mead misses the mark.
In general, I am tired of anyone old enough to recall glory days when gas cost 18 cents a gallon telling me what went wrong and what the solutions are. (More and more it seems to me they are what went wrong. I am beginning to think their nostalgia for a time forever passed is dangerous and detrimental.) At the same time, though, I feel he touches on an interesting concept when he proposes breaking California into five separate states: “California’s core problem is that it has outgrown the constitutional model we have for it. California is too populous, too diverse, too complicated to flourish as a single state.”
Representative government is failing in California because we keep using the wrong template. You can’t run a big city through a series of New England town meetings; you can’t run the 8th biggest economy in the world with an institutional mix designed for much smaller, more homogenous units in a much simpler time. California is a region, not a state, and until we adopt the political institutions that match this reality, the state will continue to fail — our very own Sudan by the sea.
I am unsure if breaking California into more manageable and homogeneous (geographically, at least) states will usher a second coming of past fortunes and progress, but it will at least give folks in the Central Valley and the far northern coast, who have long felt estranged from and alienated by the large urban centers on the coast, autonomy to do as they want. The same goes for those in Mead’s (or whomever’s) derisive Pelosi-land and Lost Angeles. (I did, however, give a knowing and approving smile for this line: “Lost Angeles is a parody of itself, a city to escape rather than a goal to be reached.”)
Of course, California has one hell of a resource problem: water scarcity. There already is multi-state cooperation (at least in theory) about water allocation in the region, so it could be less of a roadblock than it first seems.
(Here’s something I just thought of: perhaps Mead’s California break-up proposal is geared toward partitioning the state’s make-or-break Electoral College role.)
But why stop at California? Mead believes “New York, Florida, Texas and Illinois are obvious candidates for break up,” and follows with what is probably the most compelling and thought provoking line of the entire post: “figuring out how to decentralize and localize state government is an important part of making America work in the 21st century.”
Though it perplexes Bobblehead, I will say California’s ballot proposition system is at least an effort at direct democracy. How useful and practical it is in the Golden State is questionable (Switzerland is an even more mindboggling example), but I think it gives voters the kind of civic empowerment they yearn for. That kind of empowerment (you know, that “for the people, by the people” thing?) is something I think is also possible through the kind of decentralization and state partitioning Mead writes about.
Is a kind of anarchistic/regional/localized/direct form of democracy a cure for the intensifying divisions in our state governments? Instead of centralized governments in places like Des Moines, Sacramento, and Springfield, should we establish federalized governments in Goosetown, Silver Lake, and Lakeview? Will that kind of micromanagement help us better serve ourselves? Perhaps, and I think it would be worth a try. Starting with California is not a bad idea.
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