TIM DRAPER, a rich Silicon Valley investor who wants to divide California into six states, began his press conference this week with the word “Shit!”, as he toppled the microphones placed before him. That may also be how he ends his campaign. Even if he secures the 807,615 signatures he needs to place his idea on the ballot, and somehow manages to convince a majority of Californian voters to back it, it must still be approved by the Californian legislature as well as Congress. That will not happen.
Mr Draper, who made his fortune backing the likes of Skype and Baidu, is no fool; his motives in pursuing this quixotic dream are unclear. Still, even if his answer is silly, he is asking a good question. With 38m people of innumerable backgrounds working in sectors from marijuana to manufacturing, spread over 164,000 spectacularly diverse square miles, there is little to knit California together. Its icons—Hollywood, Silicon Valley, beaches—are regional, not statewide. The same goes for media markets and sports teams. There are vast health and income disparities across California; two of Mr Draper’s new states would be America’s richest and poorest respectively (see map). Inland and northern conservatives gripe endlessly that the (more populous) coastal liberals want to steal their guns or water.
So, unlike Texans, many of whom hate the United States and wish to secede from it, many Californians hate and wish to leave each other. Kevin Starr, a former state librarian, once totted up all the proposals to split California since statehood in 1850; he counted over 200. One, in 1859, would probably have succeeded had the civil war not got in the way. The sparsely populated counties of California’s far north mutter periodically about carving out a new state, called Jefferson, with like-minded parts of southern Oregon. Such manoeuvres, says Joe Mathews, a commentator on Californian affairs, are best understood as bids to grab attention (and goodies) from parts of the state that barely remember there are people living north of Sacramento.
No one would reconstitute California in its current form if starting from scratch. But unravelling the creation would be immeasurably more painful than dealing with its flaws. Handling water rights is difficult enough within the state, as the current drought has made clear; allocating the stuff across new boundaries would be nightmarish. It is far from clear how the state’s liabilities, particularly pensions, would be redistributed. Mr Draper says internal polls show that his proposal is most popular among California’s poorer regions, but they would quickly lose their appetite for secession if the tax spigot from the Bay Area were shut off. Mr Draper’s plan to appoint bureaucrats to thrash out these issues is less than convincing.
