Clara Jeffery writes:

California, and the country, cannot await the outcome of the midterms to repel Trump’s siege on democracy. More drastic action is required.

Unfortunately, especially as Trump berates generals and admirals on “the enemy within” and suggests they use US cities as “training grounds,” it’s all too easy to imagine a world where the commanders of California’s military bases are compelled to choose sides. (If you think such scenarios are out of the realm of possibility, ask yourself why he and Pushup Pete Hegseth have been purging the brass.) Our boundaries of oceans and mountains and deserts, our copious natural resources, and our technological prowess make a return to an independent California Republic more feasible than it might be for other states. But in advance, and hopefully in lieu, of that, it’s time to start applying our economic muscle.

When Trump first said he was gutting federal funding to California’s public universities, a system that is the envy of the world, Newsom responded: “Californians pay the bills for the federal government. We pay over $80 BILLION more in taxes than we get back. Maybe it’s time to cut that off, @realDonaldTrump.”

Remember when Mitt Romney called 47 percent of Americans “takers,” layabouts who fed off the “makers” that he claimed to represent? (We do, since Mother Jones’ own David Corn broke that story, arguably changing the course of the 2012 election.) This persistent GOP talking point is especially odd when you consider the residents of 19 mostly blue states pay more to the US Treasury than they get in federal benefits; to Newsom’s point, none pays more than California. (This includes our undocumented residents, who pay billions in federal taxes and receive no federal benefits.) We’re mostly happy to do it because we believe in things like Social Security, public education, pandemic preparedness, and research institutions. But why should we sit by while you take our money, defund our priorities, and shit on our values?

California can’t claim no power in Congress, like DC—home to 700,000 people, more than either Vermont or Wyoming—can. But it’s time to think outside of the electoral box and start flexing our considerable leverage. We are the nation’s largest agricultural state—growing more than a third of the country’s vegetables and ­three-quarters of its fruits—and the fifth-largest food producer in the world. We produce the most milk and the most wine, copious amounts of rice and cattle, and, crucially, 90 percent of US avocados. Other states may be poster children for farms, but we’re No. 1. Hollywood is a $47.2 billion industry exerting, for better or worse, immeasurable global cultural power. The $623 billion tech sector is even mightier. Were California to secede, almost 15 percent of America’s GDP would go with it, and the US could slip behind China as the world’s biggest economy.

Short of actual secession, what could California do? It could learn from the Jimmy Kimmel showdown and lead a financial “countervalue” rebellion, using “the full weight of blue states’ market power, cultural influence and legal authority to raise the stakes of Republican red-state aggression,” Democratic strategists Arkadi Gerney and Sarah Knight wrote in the Washington Post, by imposing “regulatory and economic costs that bite hard enough to make the constituents of even the most insulated legislator feel the pain.” We could start by disinvesting our pension funds from red-state companies like AT&T, American Airlines, ExxonMobil, and Tesla. “The 15 blue trifectas (states where Democrats control the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature), with their larger state budgets and more generous pensions, have state investments that total almost 75 percent more than the 23 red trifectas,” they note.

If that seems a reach, consider that Texas effectively got BlackRock to drop its “woke” investment and governance policies by blackballing it. Blue states could lure away techies, doctors, nurses, and electricians with relocation bonuses. We could institute tax and other incentives to pull new factories and data centers away from red states. We could selectively terminate professional licensing reciprocity. We could ease commerce between friendly states and make it difficult for unfriendly ones.

Economic retribution is just part of a broader constellation of tools that law professors Jessica Bulman-Pozen (Columbia) and Heather K. Gerken (Yale) call “uncooperative federalism” and others call “soft secession.” It’s not, writes Substacker Chris Armitage, “the violent rupture of 1861, but something else entirely. Blue states building parallel systems, withholding cooperation, and creating facts on the ground that render federal authority meaningless within their borders.” Some of this is already underway. [Continue reading…]