Monica Toft on California’s potential secession
Americans have grown increasingly polarised in recent years. According to the Pew Research Center, median Republicans are more conservative than 97% of Democrats, while median Democrats are more liberal than 95% of Republicans. By contrast, in 1994 those figures were just 64% and 70%, respectively. Some scholars argue that ideological tensions have never been greater in living memory.
“We have to go back historically, to something like the 1890s post-Civil War period, to find politics in the US that are anywhere near as bitterly polarised as we have now,” says Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “Polarisation in Congress is at levels we have not seen in more than 100 years.”
California is no exception. For the past few years, divides both within the state, and between California and the rest of the US, have sparked at least six initiatives aimed at breaking California into smaller states or cleaving it entirely from the rest of the country.
According to Monica Toft, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston, arguments in support of these plans include the belief that the federal government no longer represents California’s economic interests; that the state is so large that proper governance is only possible if applied across a smaller geographic scale; or that irreconcilable differences have emerged between what California and the rest of the US stand for.
To be clear, unless something drastically changes, California is not going to secede any time soon. A constitutional law denies states the right to secession, and there’s scant evidence that the majority of California’s citizens actually want to leave. A 2017 survey of 1,000 Californians conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, found that a bipartisan 68% opposed such initiatives.