Secession: What A ****show

*Secession: not that TV show with Brian Cox in it.*

As far as I can tell, there are two active secessionist movements in California.

They’re both … problematic.

First, there’s the CalExit folks. They get most of the press attention, but seem to be primarily a money-making operation for the organizers. They’ve gone through several corporate structures at this point and are even dabbling in cryptocurrency lately; these are both hallmarks of a con.

Second, there’s the California National Party. They actually do seem to be a serious political group. They, at least, have registered with the state as a political party and have a genuine professor of political science as one of the founders.

Wikipedia lists more, but I’m pretty sure the Yes California group are actually the current CalExit folks under a different name.

Between them, though, these two groups demonstrate the two main problems with secessionist movements.

They’re either a grift or they get larded down with other issues.

It’s not surprising that scams would see secessionist movements as fertile ground; they’re a marginalized social space populated by people who are willing to put resources into a a cause with a very low probability of success.

It’s like they’re tailor-made for the confidence trickster.

I’ve never met anyone involved, but everything I’ve read about CalExit leads me to think that they’re a perfect example of this.

And it’s not surprising that secessionist groups tend to take on other issues and causes either; the original organizers will be a small and likely homogeneous collection of people who will agree on other issues as well. It’s also likely that they’ll see these other issues as driving their desire for secession.

The California National Party shows this tendency well; they were obviously started by people who would otherwise align reasonably well with the Green Party or a mildly radical wing of the Democratic Party, and have adopted secession as an extension of those political stances.

The platform of the California National Party demonstrates this, since it would do fine as a Green Party platform if you took the secessionist bits out.

Neither of them places secession as their primary issue.

CalExit is there to sell merch and push a cryptocurrency.

The California National Party is there to pursue a specific secession.

We need a secessionist party that’s just about secession.

Well, it could reasonably make itself be about federal reform or secession.

After all, California doesn’t need to secede; the United States could actually get fixed instead. It’s just that the U.S. system is broken in ways that make fixing it much, much less likely to happen than secession.

The big problem with single-issue parties, though, is that their actual candidates can’t be single-issue; people have other opinions, and if they win they’d be involved in lots of governance decisions that aren’t about secession.

Fortunately, we actually have the technology to solve that problem.

A secessionist party could run with a platform of:

always pursuing stated national reforms or secession when relevant
putting everything else to a poll of the membership before acting
exclusively voting for the status quo if there’s not enough time for a poll

In the modern world of web sites, phone apps and push notifications it’s not likely that any representative would often have to act without being able to poll their constituents within the party.