Unscrambling the California omelet

There are many arguments in support of Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper’s view that California is too big, too diverse and too unwieldy to work efficiently as a state. With 38 million residents and growing; 13 TV markets; some 7,000 government entities, including cities, counties, water and mosquito abatement districts, school districts; and an ethnically and economically polyglot population, most residents feel closer to their local governments than to the distant politicians in Sacramento.

And yet California works — and now that the economy is recovering, it works better than it has in many years. In the early 1990s we passed an initiative, later overturned by the federal courts, denying all public services, including the right to a public education, to all undocumented immigrants, a measure that was more severe than SB1070, the notorious immigrant-bashing law that Arizona enacted in 2010.

Now California is becoming a model for states (and ultimately, one hopes, for nations) as a place where the people who compose that great ethnic and cultural diversity — Anglo, Latino, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Polish, Iranian, Russian — have learned to be comfortable with one another to the point where we rarely notice those ethnic differences.

A decade ago, a California demographer pointed out that the majority of new California homeowners had Hispanic names. California now has hundreds of thousands of Latino business owners, countless Chinese professors and Indian engineers. No one much cares anymore whether the candidate for Congress or the City Council is black or white or “other.” In that context, the recent protest in Murrieta, with its racist overtones, against efforts to house some of the undocumented kids trying to escape the violence in Central America — there were others in other states — is an outlier. The much greater Minutemen movement to stop illegal border crossings that sprang up a decade ago fizzled almost as fast as it arose. The rate of ethnic intermarriage is now at a point where a leading observer pointed out that many of the children born today don’t look like their grandparents. 

A Jewish president of the University of California named Yudof has just been succeeded by an Italian-American woman named Napolitano. This is the place, as someone noted long ago, of the kosher burrito. It has since been joined by the kimchee taco, kosher Thai and Sichuan guacamole.

One fourth of our schoolchildren come from homes where some language other than English is spoken: Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, Hindi, Russian, Polish. And while they still graduate and attend college at disturbingly different rates, the gaps are shrinking. The challenge of that is itself awe-inspiring.

Economically, California, the world’s seventh or eighth largest economy, is still the driver of the nation’s innovation and much of the world’s technology, an area in which Draper himself has played a considerable part. It would be nearly impossible to unscramble the omelet that makes that success possible. 

Which of Draper’s six successor states would manage the great, complex water system that powers California’s agriculture? Who would administer the great public universities that are still the envy of the world? Two or three of Draper’s successor states would get Berkeley, the University of California at San Francisco, UCLA, and the University of California at San Diego; some would get almost nothing.

How would the state’s fiscal obligations, the bonded debt, the underfunded pension obligations, be allocated? If by population, then the new state of Central California, already one of the poorest regions in the nation, would be saddled with an unbearable burden.

And what of the prisons, which house thousands of felons from Los Angeles, but which, for obvious reasons, are located in those poorer places? Would one of the great exports of Draper’s new rural state of Jefferson be prison services? Would the rich taxpayers of the new state of Silicon Valley be willing to subsidize the social services and health care of the people in the deserts of the poor state of South California (which does not include Los Angeles), as they do now?

For Republicans there might be some attraction in a California breakup: The state’s current 55 electoral votes, which in the past six presidential elections have all gone to the Democrat, would split to maybe 48–17 (counting the 10 extra votes for the senators that the new states would get), meaning a somewhat slimmer Democratic edge in the Electoral College.

But 10 new senators? Would anyone in Congress, which must approve the new states, want to dilute his state’s clout in the Senate by 10 percent, particularly anyone from a small state like Wyoming, whose clout in the upper house is many times its population? Not a prayer.

Maybe equally important, Americans (and non-Americans) like the idea of California — one California — both as a symbol of American hope and possibilities and as a land of laid-back lotus eaters. Both stereotypes have truth to them. Long before there was a political entity called California, there was the idea, the vision. It’s on the old maps; it was in the mission of the conquistadors, in the dreams of the pioneers going west. It’s part of us. Draper can’t undo that.