The Golden State's relationship with the United States under Donald Trump has been mortally wounded. L.A.-based journalist Joe Mathews talks about what's next.
Perhaps we should consider changing the name of this edition to “Golden Nation-State Report,” a nod to today’s topic — a big, politically fraught, existential one for California.
To wit: Is California’s future American? Is secession — either in overt or “soft” form — inevitable?
I haven’t jumped on the “California über alles” train yet, but I recently talked to someone who’s been contemplating secession (he prefers “independence”) since Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016. Joe Mathews, a journalist with the L.A.-based Zócalo Public Square whose column on California politics and policy is published in multiple newspapers, sat down with me recently to talk about his new book, “The U.S. vs Us: Essays from California As It Fights — and Leaves — America.”
Watch the full video on our YouTube channel.
Read on for a quick summary of our conversation; or if you’d like, you can listen to it by playing the video embedded above. If you do, I recommend you walk your dog, fold your laundry or really savor that $19 Erewhon smoothie — the recording is about 45 minutes.
(Full disclosure: Mathews serves on the advisory board of the nonprofit overseeing this newsletter.)
Mathews took a rather dim view of secession movements in 2016 and 2017 — recall the “Yes California” effort, with its shady connection to Moscow. (The group behind that effort hasn’t gone away.) Now he says the issue is especially “live” for him because of the threat posed by Trump’s abuse of power, particularly to cities such as Los Angeles. To him, the deeply flawed republic California joined on Sept. 9, 1850 (don’t we look fabulous for 175) no longer exists. With Trump flagrantly violating the U.S. Constitution, the imperfect union we joined is no longer tenable, according to Mathews.
In effect, California has been invited to leave the United States, Mathews believes. And to him, our state is already on its way out. He cited the new interstate compact among California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii to maintain vaccine access for their residents given the decimation of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, especially its vaccine advisory committee, by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
(Who, Mathews noted, lives in Los Angeles.)
This is what is meant by “soft secession,” the state filling the void in roles abandoned or corrupted by the federal government. And Mathews expects to see more of it in the near future.
Anyone who talks about California secession must acknowledge the decades-long movement to create Jefferson, a breakaway state that would be forged out of mostly rural counties in southern Oregon and California’s far north. I asked Mathews about that and Assembly Republican leader James Gallagher’s “two-state solution,” splitting inland and coastal California, which he has offered as a counter to Proposition 50, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2025 redistricting gambit. He lamented that Gallagher wasn’t taken seriously and the Democrats didn’t offer state Republicans an option for increasing their party’s representation in Sacramento.
In fact, Mathews cast the ultimate goal as not necessarily California independence but more fully self-governing, smaller and more manageable city-states — “I’ve given up on the nation-state,” Mathews told me. In the distant future, he hopes his descendants travel the world carrying L.A. County passports.
As for California secession, I am not on board yet. Purely from a logistical standpoint, the task of unwinding California’s infrastructure from the rest of the country would be maddeningly complex. Everything meant to facilitate the free movement of people and material across borders — even the storage and movement of water within the state — would have to be reconsidered. And I’d feel terrible about betraying the legacy of Thomas Starr King (really — the guy literally exhausted himself to death at age 39 convincing Californians to remain in the Union during the Civil War).
Nonetheless, Mathews is not the only mainstream thinker contemplating a national breakup. In his 2024 book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever” (published before Trump’s re-election), Erwin Chemerinsky — a constitutional law specialist and dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law — warned that absent wholesale reforms to make this country a better-functioning democracy, secession movements will arise.
So we should talk about it, as Mathews is more than willing to do. If nothing else, these discussions serve to emphasize the peril of our times – in other words, they’re happening because they may be necessary. And the idea will continue to gain purchase without an unlikely civic sobering-up in Washington.
