CalExit Part 2

Upon the election of Donald J. Trump for his first disastrous term, one idea that floated around was the secession of California from the Union. I wrote about it at the time here. Ultimately, the idea went nowhere because Californians are extremely patriotic people, and were at the core of the Democratic Party. Heck, Kamala Harris was Joe Biden's VP.

Now, 8 and half years later, as Trump 2.0 appears to be an even greater disaster than his first term, I am left to wonder about CalExit. There is a ballot initiative for secession which I believe is up for a vote in November of 2028. As things are currently going, I can see that ballot initiative doing better than most people expect.

And zooming out from the everyday politics, one thing we can see is that the history of American secession movements are quite strange. Secession movements happen in places that are far from are outside of the political centers, tend to generate a lot of tax revenue, and don't see that revenue come back in the form of beneficial spending. For example, Lombardy and Venezio were the major sources of tax revenue for the Hapsburg Empire in the early 19th Century. 1/3 of the total tax revenue for the entire Empire came from those regions. Ethnically, linguistically, and culturally, these regions were distinct from Vienna, and so the secession movements were not surprising. Similarly, the secession movements in Ireland, the 13 Colonies of the United States, Kashmir, the Soviet Republics, and most other secession movements follow the same pattern.

In the US, the secession by the Confederate states was so strange because rather than being far from the center of power, slave states literally surrounded Washington, D.C., and Southern politicians played prominent roles in American politics throughout the political history of the United States. And Southern states were tax generators, federal spending was so low in the Antebellum period that there was no significant tax burden from the federal government anywhere. So, it really was all about slavery.

But looking at California in 2025, California is exactly the sort of place where a secession movement would grow. California is a net generator of taxes - meaning Californians pay $80 billion more in taxes than the state receives back in federal funding. With Trump threatening to withhold all federal funding from California (well, not all of it, as there are significant military bases here, and the federal government owns most of the top third of the state), that number will grow larger.

It's also clear that Trump's isolationist policies hurt a number of Californian businesses which rely on both foreign labor (either factories abroad, or direct hire of foreign workers), and exports. It doesn't help that Trump has also directly threatened companies like Apple. Further, Trump's policy of deporting workers who have deep ties to the community (and not the "gang members" he promised), has only served to stoke anger here. That certainly has been amplified with the arrest of the President of the SEIU, the largest and most politically active labor union in California, and the recent protests in LA, which Trump has further inflamed by nationalizing the National Guard and sending in troops.

In short, the conditions are looking more and more ripe for a significant secession movement in California. Given the tremendous importance California has for the United States as a whole, it's highly unlikely we would be let go peacefully. All of which, at the end of the day, means that the next four years in California are not going to be great.