For people who have spent little time in California, the metropolitan areas all look pretty much the same. Sure, they know that there are some rural areas of California that are unabashedly right-leaning, but the rest is all pretty much just like San Francisco. But, that's not quite true, though. As recently, as 2008, we saw that California isn't quite the uniform place many outsiders assume it to be. When we look at the voting patterns on Proposition 8 ( the gay-marriage ban) for example, we find some real regional differences:
With the exception of very wealthy Santa Barbara County, a majority of voters in every county in Southern California voted for the ban. Opposition to the ban was heavily concentrated in northern counties with high-income populations, with many of them in the tech industry.
In other words, Silicon Valley and San Francisco are not Orange County or Riverside County or even San Diego County. True enough, none of those latter places are "right wing bastions" in the style of a South Carolina military town. But they're not exactly Nancy Pelosi country either.
So, it's not surprising that the latest effort at breaking up California into smaller pieces, is focused on separating out just the portion of California that is most closely allied ideologically with the Northern California ruling class in the state. Here's the map (the blue parts are "New California"):
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports:
“New California is a new state in development by egregiously aggrieved Californians exercising our Constitutional right to form a new state separate from the tyranny and lawlessness of the state of California,” the group’s Facebook Page says.
The new state, as envisioned, would exclude parts of California along the coastline from Orange north to Napa counties; New California would include all other parts of California, including San Diego County, leaving the coastal stretch as California.
Little is likely to come of this in the short terms, of course. But, if California continues to move toward greater independence from Washington, the stakes will become higher and higher for those regions of the state that object to the current ideological zeitgeist in Sacramento.
Certainly, the fact that California is seeking to separate itself, at least informally, from Washington's edicts hangs over the whole affair. As we've noted here at mises.org, the answer to secession in many cases is even more secession:
[S]ecession already brings with it a solution to the problem. That is, the problems caused by one secession are solved by more secession.
As I've explained here, here, and here, a larger number of states is preferable to a smaller number. A larger number of small states provides more practical choices to taxpayers and citizens in choosing a place to live under a governments that more closely match their personal values.
Thus, in considering the problems of an independent California, we find that the primary problem faced by taxpayers and productive residents in California is that the state is simply too large and contains too diverse a population within its boundaries.
As noted by numerous commentators over the years — including supporters of the Six Californias initiative— California's population is quite politically and culturally diverse, although it has been dominated for decades by a hard-left coalition of voters based around the Bay Area. Compared to these voters, Southern California residents appear downright centrist, but one would not know this by looking at statewide politics because Northern California is so adept at throwing its weight around.
The solution to this, problem lies in breaking up California into still smaller pieces. We can see many of these political lines ripe for decentralization in the voting patterns revealed by statewide votes such as those for Propsition 187 and Proposition 8. We can see it in the map of legislative districts. Nor is this just a matter of metropolitan areas versus rural areas. Many suburban areas within the metroplexes of California are quite right-of-center in their own rights, and would surely benefit from further political decentralization.
