From left, Temecula Valley Unified School District Trustees Joseph Komrosky, Jen Wiersma, Steven Schwartz and Allison Barclay are seen during a Wednesday, March 22, 2023, board workshop. The board on Tuesday night, June 28, 2023, discussed changing school policy on explicit instructional materials. (File photo by Terry Pierson, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
The further I drove into Oroville, the more disappointment I felt.
I had my passport with me, but no one asked me to show it. American flags still hung from Montgomery Street storefronts. City Hall had not been replaced by a national capitol. And I could find no new standing army or an Oroville Food and Drug Administration.
It was as if the city council of Oroville (pop.20,000), 70 miles north of Sacramento, had never made national news in 2021 by declaring itself a “constitutional republic.”
Too bad. Because there is no greater creative force than the commitment to declare independence and build something new.
That’s the spirit we should celebrate on Independence Day. But it’s been a long time since Independence Day was about independence.
Instead, we put on displays of national unity — even though unity has produced so many awful things in our country. We the people came together to adopt a constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy. In the name of unity, we ended Reconstruction, launched Jim Crow, and pursued unnecessary wars.
The United States only truly advances through disunion. We needed a civil war to end slavery. Every expansion of rights required social movements that divided us. The nation’s signature technological achievements were the products of people who went off on their own, from Kitty Hawk to Cupertino.
On this Independence Day in California, our problem is not lack of unity, but, sadly, our absence of ambition in tearing ourselves apart.
This country needs a revolution, but Californians aren’t supplying one. A state famous for secession movements — with more than 200 attempted break-ups since 1850 — is making only half-hearted efforts. Oroville isn’t the only disappointment.
Who, for example, switched all the coffee in San Bernardino County to decaf this year?
Last fall, the county voted to direct officials to study greater autonomy “up to and including secession from the State of California.”
That verdict portended a wholesale rethinking of the meaning of county government in California and the United States. I hoped that San Bernardino would dream bigger than just statehood, and go all the way, for nationhood. (I would have applied for citizenship.)
But eight months later, there is no public indication of serious work on statehood, and the study that voters demanded has not been published.
In the rural precincts of the North State, the longstanding push for a state of Jefferson, which drew heavy publicity and broad local government support in the early years of this century, seems at low ebb. It’s been eclipsed by the effort by rural counties in Oregon, some of which border California and would have been part of Jefferson, to split off from the Beaver State and become part of an expanded “Greater Idaho.”
This spring, El Dorado County, which includes Lake Tahoe, saw the launch of a new secession effort, the Republic of El Dorado. But again, the effort doesn’t have a clear agenda. It’s also built on the dubious claim, running contrary to law and the constitution, that the county can make itself a state without any sign-off from Congress or the Legislature.
There are other local acts of defiance that could evolve into something bigger, but haven’t yet. Our state is full of sanctuary cities that have developed new ways to protect and serve unauthorized immigrants and their families. School boards, notably in Temecula, have limited access to books or taken conservative stands in the culture wars, thus challenging the state. The city of Huntington Beach and the state are suing each other over housing laws, though it seems unlikely that the outcome will boost housing, much less change the nature of local government in California.
Meanwhile, other, more established ideas for independence in California remain dormant. Bay Area investor Tim Draper, who proposed to split California into multiple states, is now devoted to cryptocurrency instead. Los Angeles, in political crisis, might benefit from the relaunch required by a breakup, but San Fernando Valley secession movement, which triggered a citywide vote a generation ago, is all but dead.
That’s a shame As historian-journalist Richard Kreitner observed in his 2020 book “Break It Up,” “secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,”
So, on this Independence Day, let’s celebrate our country by plotting to break away and build something new.
We’re disunited. And that makes us great.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
Originally published at Joe Mathews