The California Redoubt

With American democracy in crisis, California must be a holdout for the gains of the Civil Rights era and beyond.

Complacency amid crisis

On January 6, the United States commemorated the one year anniversary of the most lethal act of insurrection since the Confederate states shelled Fort Sumter in 1861. 

Unlike that attack, which immediately rallied the Union states to send men and materiel to fight the secessionists, our republic has remained complacent. On Dec. 10, 2021, a PowerPoint presentation surrendered by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to a House select committee investigating the attempted takeover of the U.S. Capitol indicated that Trump’s team planned to declare a state of national emergency in order to overturn President Joe Biden’s lawful 2020 electoral victory. And yet the New York Times, who ran a full top-of-the-fold front-page story about former candidate Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in Oct. 2016 ran the story of the planned coup back on page A11. 

American democracy’s transition to the hospice ward has been years in the making, largely out in the open, with relatively little public pushback. While the GOP’s open embrace of authoritarianism may have begun with Trump’s 2016 election, that flame has been stoked by a GOP-dominated Supreme Court as well as the extreme minoritarianism of our political institutions which are set in stone by the Constitution. Couple that with the fact that incumbent parties generally lose seats in a Midterm election and the particularly onerous set of seats Democrats have to win to retain their Senate majority, and it’s a virtual certainty that by 2023, a party which deliberately refuses to accept the results of elections it loses will be firmly in control of Congress. Any doubt over this outcome was erased when Senate Democrats failed to muster up the necessary votes to overturn the filibuster and pass legislation restoring the sections of the Voting Rights Act gutted in 2013 in the decision of Shelby County v. Holder.

It’s no longer a question of whether American democracy will collapse at the federal level, but when. Fixing the flaws in America’s political institutions such that electoral outcomes respect the wishes of a majority of voters requires drastic action.  Yet there’s simply too little time and too little political will to make these changes before the new Congress is seated in 2025. With all the mechanisms in place to simply roll-back the will of the voters, the expiration date for America’s democracy is just the next time Republicans lose a legitimate election. 

Americans at once have both an apocalyptic vision of life under authoritarianism and a naive concept of what it’ll take to fight it. (“Come and take it.” “Don’t tread on me.” “#Resist.”) Authoritarian states are not full of black-clad gendarmes like in The Handmaid’s Tale nor perpetual gray skies and towering propaganda posters like in the Hunger Games. With some major exceptions, life under authoritarian rule in the U.S. will be mostly unchanged for the majority of Americans. Except for vulnerable groups in the crosshairs of the Republican Party’s grievance politics—e.g. women seeking reproductive freedom, Black people in the South and Midwest seeing their franchise rolled back to the 1950s, and refugees fleeing war and climate collapse—most people will hardly notice that anything has changed. 

For disempowered peoples in red states, that drastic change has already begun to arrive. Several states have passed McCarthyite prohibitions on moral panics like “Critical Race Theory”, rendering basic discussion of American history and civics verboten in public schools and universities. Republican-controlled legislatures in many states have also passed draconian penalties for protesting—including legislation in Oklahoma and Iowa that grant immunity to drivers who strike protestors with their cars. Most famously, the state of Texas has invented a clever de-facto ban on abortion by deputizing anyone in the state to bury care providers in costly lawsuits. As scholars of democratic collapse have noted, the civil liberties and rights of minority groups are often the first to decline when an authoritarian regime starts to build power. 

The Republican Party will throw out federal election results not to roll tanks into the center of town and impose some dystopian martial law on San Francisco or Los Angeles. Rather, it’s so that large sectors of the country can simply roll back the clock to the 1950s, an era in which states could be governed by quasi-apartheid regimes free from any accountability in Washington, D.C. While a Republican federal government will most certainly roll back key environmental regulations, impose draconian new immigration rules and slash social services, the goal has never been to force the vision of red state governance on blue states. Rather, blue states in an authoritarian America will more likely be treated with benign neglect by the federal government and their red state neighbors.

Can California save itself?

California can and should start preparing now to be a bulwark against the coming authoritarian wave. Not only will our state need to maintain a robust and competitive liberal democracy to stand in contrast to a backsliding Congress and Presidency, but California will also need to ensure that groups and individuals persecuted in other states can find refuge here. For instance, if the Obergefell decision is indeed next in line to fall as some LGBT rights activists fear, then California’s cities will need to make room for all the people who wish to preserve their marriage rights. Similarly, various marginalized communities and certain activists might find themselves in the crosshairs of racist vigilante violence as was the case for 100 years in the American South following the end of the Civil War. And, as Assemblymember Buffy Wicks of Oakland noted in a recent op-ed, California will likely become one of America’s last holdouts for reproductive freedom. California must rise to the occasion and become home to America in exile—carrying the torch of a free United States until civil rights and democracy can be safeguarded in our nation writ large. 

To do this, California will need to take certain steps both now and in the immediate future. The first step is easy, albeit politically challenging: California needs to start building more new housing—especially apartments—to accommodate people who wish to flee here. If California continues to have some of the highest housing costs in the entire country, all the progressivism in the world won’t matter if the only people who can benefit are incumbent homeowners and millionaires. Refugee resettlement agencies are already cautioning against asylum-seekers coming to California, unless they have family sponsorship in the state already, due to its soaring housing costs. At the start of his term, Gov. Gavin Newsom promised he’d preside over construction of 3.5 million new homes during his first term of office. While we’re nowhere near fulfilling that goal, it’s not too late to get started and to also explore publicly-funded social housing programs aimed at creating more inventory for lower- and middle-income renters. 

Second, while California authorities will continue to cooperate with their federal counterparts on basic public safety functions, federal police shouldn’t get a blank check to operate within our state nor to utilize local resources for federal operations. When California’s Sanctuary State law is inevitably challenged again in the courts, state officials should ensure that county sheriffs who violate this law and cooperate with federal immigration authorities while still using state and local resources are held accountable. Furthermore, California legislators should pass new legislation limiting the ability of the federal government to deputize local law enforcement officers—as the Trump administration did in Portland in the summer of 2020. Finally, California should make it clear that federal police agencies don’t have a free hand to roam in our courthouses, hospitals and detention centers. While the first federal police actions in states like California will likely target undocumented immigrants, one can only guess what other federal decrees these agents will enforce subsequently. Thus, it’s imperative that California doesn’t allow certain federal agencies to develop any more than the bare minimum of operational capacity in our state. 

Last, and most challenging of the immediate tasks facing our state, is the need to fund public services sustainably through new revenue sources in anticipation that the federal government will cut off the state in retaliation for some perceived or actual slight. Though California is (barely) a net donor state, meaning it pays more in federal taxes than it receives from the federal government, federal money still covers a number of vital state and local programs. Last year, the Trump administration threatened to cut off federal money to states making absentee voting easier in the 2020 election and though the move is blatantly unconstitutional, such issues won’t be a deterrent given sufficient democratic erosion. In response, California should devise alternative taxation schemes, such as a state level wealth tax or more robust taxation on land value, in order to make up for any future shortfalls. 

While America’s unusually strong federalist system meant that our country didn’t truly gain universal suffrage until 1965, federalism might prove to be the salvation of liberal democracy in America in the coming authoritarian crisis. As the siege of a federal building in Portland during the summer protests of 2020 showed, the federal government can’t muster the manpower or resources necessary to pacify a single  medium-sized city even when it is interested in doing so. Further, the exercise of federal authority in a state requires significant cooperation among local officials. As such, authoritarianism in America won’t be an all-or-nothing proposition, but rather an ongoing bargaining process between the states and D.C. 

While the temptation to shrink from this moment may be great, both political leaders and ordinary Californians must understand that our republic is entering a moment of great crisis. We can no longer perform politics for its own sake—the Sunday talk show theater of Sorkin-style negotiations in a pluralistic polity and Solomonic compromises with competing interests. This facade is rapidly giving way to an uglier era in which the lives and futures of Californians and other Americans become game-pieces for cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Just as Thomas Payne wrote in 1775, these are times that will try our souls. But try we must, for through these uncertain years a free America may have to live in exile within the borders of our California republic.