By Jill Cowan
April 14, 2020 Please take note of the date of this article.
New York Times
Good morning.On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom, in a joint statement with Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, announced that the three states were working together on a plan to ease sheltering orders and reopen the economy.Mr. Newsom said he would have more details today. The news came the same day that a group of Northeastern state governors announced a similar effort.
Nation-state or not?In recent weeks, Mr. Newsom’s daily news briefings have helped Californians and the world become better acquainted with his preferred vocabulary.California, the nation’s largest state, will, he has assured, “meet this moment.”Mr. Newsom has vowed that his administration will marshal “resources,” “in realtime.”
But none of the governor’s linguistic tics have generated as much debate as his repeated use of the term “nation-state.” On March 15, for instance, he described California as such in explaining the challenges of developing a plan for school closures that addressed the huge range of districts.
“We have to meet the needs of all our diverse communities,” he said, “in a nation-state with six-plus million children.”
And on April 7, he told MSNBC that a huge deal to buy personal protective equipment for workers across the state, including 200 million masks per month, was made possible by California’s enormous purchasing power as — you guessed it — “a nation-state.”He said that efforts to get enough equipment through the federal government weren’t moving quickly enough.“It’s not a cheap shot; at the end of the day, they don’t have the masks at the national stockpile,” Mr. Newsom said. “We decided, enough of the small ball.”On Monday, states and governors announced alliances outside the federal government, and they are pushing back against President Trump’s insistence that he has “total” authority over the decision to lift sheltering orders in the states.
So the repeated suggestion that California is in some way its own nation is touching nerves and prompting concerns about the future of American federalism.
But it’s far from new, William Deverell, a history professor at the University ofSouthern California focusing on California and the West, told me.California, of course, has always held a unique position within the United States— and hasn’t been shy about it.
While California isn’t unusual among states in that its first residents were NativeAmericans who were violently removed from their land by Europeans, itsgeography and its long history under Spanish and Mexican control have madeCalifornia distinct.
Briefly, in 1846, a group of American settlers rebelled against Mexican authorities and declared a “Republic of California.” In September 1850, California became a state.“The historian in me wants to go back to the days of the Gold Rush, and the notion that California was so far beyond the reaches of the union itself,” Mr.Deverell said.
More recently, in the late 1960s, California pushed for many of the environmental regulations that would eventually become federal law. And during the AIDS crisis, Californians’ activism was far ahead of the federal government, he said.Still, in the Trump era, the divide between California’s leaders and the federal government has become wider and more explicit, and the response to the pandemic has made it even more stark.
“The union is set up with this glorious tension,” Mr. Deverell said. Mr. Newsom’s description of California as a nation-state is “a recognition of that tension, which has been exacerbated in recent years by the blueness of California and the redness of the administration.”Still, the question of whether California is a nation-state doesn’t have a clear answer, said Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.
Why Does Gov. Newsom Call California a Nation-State? – The New York Times 3/24/24, 2:39 PM California Today goes live at 6:30 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes.com.
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