California Secession Making Headway in Silicon Valley Community

Also, California already has a militia. We just call it the "National Guard" these days.

California would take a very significant chunk of the US military with it if it left the union, and there are native Californians (who, if they backed California, could cause many problems) in key positions throughout the rest of the military as well.

Form a militia? That's ridiculous. California would be a global military power right out the gate, and a nuclear one at that.

New England and some Midwestern states would fight it tooth and nail as it would leave them, culturally and politically, with substantially diminished power.

America was always an uneasy balance between the North's industrial and merchant ethos and the Southern plantation culture that emphasizes fixed social identity. The problem is that as income inequality, immobility, and non-European immigration has grown, the Southern plantation culture is predominating. It's even infected the more progressive Northern culture by emphasizing identity politics.

Race doesn't "exist", but racism exists, and it's easier to conceptualize and identify racism by classifying people according to "race", such that both perpetrators and victims will naturally self-classify. Likewise, as overt prejudice against various groups has moved into the public sphere in a way that permits it to be challenged, self-classification has grown stronger. Identity politics has always existed, but in Northern political culture it was much less consequential and more fluid. Change came fast and there was less time for pathological patterns to set in. In plantation culture social identity is more fundamental to how power is structured, brokered, and perceived; and obsession with avoiding change means pathological patterns are more likely to set in. This is why, despite racism towards blacks being alive and well in the North, Northerners have historically be more accommodating to power sharing; whereas in the Deep South despite blacks nearing 40% in some states they're still grossly disenfranchised politically, not just economically.

This election is further proof that Southern political culture is spreading like a virus. In most of the U.S. identity is used to exclude and antagonize; in California identity is still largely an inclusive concept (i.e. diversity is still largely seen as an empowering phenomenon, even by poor whites, or at worst a neutral phenomenon). I'd rather not wait to see California go the way of much of the rest of the country.

I grew up in the Deep South, and have lived and worked in the Mid-Atlantic, New England, and Chicagoland. I'd be happy to see California secede (with my family along with it), especially if both Oregon and Washington came along for the ride given the strong economic, legal, and political similarities. Though, that's even more unlikely than California seceding alone. My only hesitation would be leaving behind some other Northern states. The South and rural areas would be almost universally ecstatic to see California go, at least in the abstract. (Some rural white Californians notwithstanding.)

I'm also not oblivious to the fact that the current movement, such as it is, is a peculiarly techie phenomenon and a product of a particular tech-focused worldview I do not share despite my career. But I've thought for years that a California secession would make a ton of sense politically and culturally. The first time I came out here over 15 years ago it felt like a different country; it still feels that way.

For 3, part of that is because of how the electoral college works, a lot of democratic voter probably didn't vote. Of course that goes both ways, who knows what the real numbers are.

There would go a balanced Democracy in the US for decades to come. There would be no California delegation to counter the 2/3 republicans in a new congress and they would lose their financial benefactors from the state. No way. This is all posturing, whining and petulance.

There have been clear situations where a territory has declared independence for reasons that were somewhat bigoted, racist and xenophobic (the confederacy), and many instances where a territory has declared independence for reasons that were not primarly bigoted, racist and xenophobic (probably most times, including the USA itself). Though of course all of these situations are much more complicated than those descriptors.

I'm not suggesting Calexit is a good idea at all, but suggesting an idea is good or not because there is some imagined liberal hypocrisy is not fair. Evaluate the idea on its merits.

But really, this is ill-advised. It's the same thing in Alaska when they don't like the winner -they whine. People don't realize that as LatAm immigrants assimilate into the fabric and Americanize, they tend to drift conservative, so be careful what you wish for.

Also, remember, once California's electoral college is disbanded, goodbye democrats for what, 40, 50 years in the rest of the states? For this reason democrats in the other states would be against it --they'd lose their California democratic bank (monetarily, electorally and congressionally)

It fits a convenient narrative for a moment--we'll show them! However it is not a movement, and is an expression of despair by a small number rather than an actual desire to secede. The temporary defeatist attitude, too, ends up getting quoted, long after people have figured out to move on productively.

To a lesser extent I think a focus on choosing DNC scapegoats sets back the important self examination that needs to be accomplished by people who were certain that the policy directions they were pursuing would also be beneficial to the people who voted for Trump. Was it a message delivery problem, a failure to understand a broader spectrum of grievances than economic pressures alone?

[1] It doesn't matter whether a shift away from electoral college would be better in the context of Nov 8, 2016, because the well known parameters of the electoral college determined voters' participation rates and the candidates' strategies.

The citizens raised taxes and gave Brown Democratic supermajorities which shut down Republican budget brinksmanship. Brown has righted the ship that Schwarzenegger left but medium term will require restructuring those retirement commitments.

Schwarzenegger was pretty much the same as Gray Davis. Not the worst, not the best but unwilling to do the really hard budget work. Jerry Brown lives to work.