Summary: the failure of the Scots secession referendum and of Tim Draper’s so-called Six Californias initiative should not surprise us. What should disturb us is the extent to which California Democrats simultaneously opposed “Six Californias” but cheerled for Scots secession, often for intellectually shoddy reasons. Instead of pouring scorn on the Unionist majority in Scotland’s secession referendum, California Democrats should thoughtfully knowledge that both Unionist voters in Scotland and California Democrats who rejected Six Californias were drawing from a common wellspring of the principled conservatism first articulated by the great Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, who postulated that institutions which are working well should not be lightly or frivolously abolished or materially altered. While SNP leader Alex Salmond and bloviating billionaire Tim Draper may be the big losers, Edmund Burke seems to have been the real winner.
In the last several days, two efforts to break up long-established, substantial bodies politic have been tried and found wanting. In California, Tim Draper’s Six Californias initiative failed to qualify for the November, 2016 ballot. It looks as if the conservative Silicon Valley billionaire’s effort to blow up the state of California and replace it with six smaller, squabbling jurisdictions has failed for the foreseeable future. In Scotland, in a referendum that commanded a larger voter turnout than any in Scottish history, 55 percent of the Scots electorate rejected the Scottish National Party’s bid to have Scotland secede from the United Kingdom.
Here in California, opposition to “Six Californias” was almost a litmus test issue among California Democrats. We correctly saw the effort as being largely Tim Draper’s ego trip, and we set our collective faces against what Draper had tried to market as a “reboot” of California.
But as much as California Democrats rejected partition for themselves, many were prepared to eagerly embrace the sundering of a British Union that had functioned more or less successfully since 1707. Some California Democrats offered thoughtful, principled arguments for Scots secession. Others poured forth word salads that leaned heavily on such undefinable left-wing jargon as “neoliberal neocolonialism” or its apparent fellow traveler “neoliberal neoimperialism,” couching their arguments in nothing more than some kind of reflexive, ostensibly progressive desire to pound a stake into the last home island remnant of the once vast British Empire. Finally, a disturbing number, perhaps even a plurality, of California Democrats couldn’t resist the temptation to see Scots secession as an ethnic revolt -a national liberation struggle, even- against the Sassenach English, as some kind of real life, 21st-century remake of Braveheart, with that sedevacantist idiot Mel Gibson daubing his face with woad and bellowing “they’ll never take our freedom!”
The disappointed reaction of Scots secession-supporting California Democrats has been predictable. The usual expressions of disappointment have traveled hand-in-hand with the almost standard “stupid voters” reaction so often felt by those on the losing side of a hard-fought election. Indeed, some California Democrats even found themselves Moscow’s fellow travelers, uttering rather Republican-sounding, conspiracist claims that the election had been tainted by voter fraud. Only one foreign government, that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has made such a claim, presumably to delegitimize the Scots secession referendum result in the service of Moscow’s evident desire to poke a huge hole in the northern flank of NATO.
Yet, in the end, Moscow’s claims of Scots voter fraud are risible. Britain has a long and honorable history of conducting squeaky clean, aboveboard elections at every level, while Russia has a long and dishonorable history of conducting elections so obviously marred by fraud and vote rigging, and so obviously fraudulent on their face, as to be unworthy of the slightest credence.
Pot, meet kettle.
California Democrats should run, not walk, away from any bullshit Muscovite claim that the Scots secession referendum was vote-rigged, presumably by the Sassenach English.
Yet, as long as disappointed California Democrats have seen fit to open up vials of wrath on the Scottish electorate because Scotland didn’t vote the way certain ostensible progressives in California would have had them vote, California Democrats fail to recognize a reality that links them far more powerfully to Scotland’s “No” voters than many California Democrats might feel comfortable with. For, when all the sound and the fury are over, both the California and Scottish electorates have behaved in remarkably similar ways.
In most Anglo-American bodies politic, influenced in many ways by the thinking of the great Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke, there is a strong streak of what can best be described as Burkean conservatism. Even those of us who identify as progressive often find ourselves confronting an existential Burkean paradox. We embrace progress, but not ungoverned, undisciplined, unthoughtful progress. We tend to look at existing institutions and prefer to conserve them as long as they are functioning reasonably effectively. While we stand for change, we tend to be skeptical of headlong alterations of tried and tested civic institutions. Maintaining a workable civil society is as important to progressives as it is to those who call themselves conservative, if not more so. Just saying “no” to all change has never been a workable option for progressives.
And this has been what distinguishes Anglo-American progressivism from typical American conservatism. Though Edmund Burke himself acknowledged the ineluctably and importance of change, an awful lot of American conservatives find themselves embracing the Falangist conservatism of men like the late William F. Buckley, Jr., who once famously declared that "a conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!'".
It might be easy for certain California Democrats to belabor the Scots electorate with being reactionary, stick in the mud Buckleyan conservatives. Yet as tempting as such a characterization might be, it only serves to demonstrate a kind of willful myopia about the profoundly Burkean reality of the process by which 55 percent the Scots electorate reached its decision to remain within the United Kingdom.
There has been substantial coverage in British and international media and in the Scots and non-Scots blogosphere about the careful, thoughtful nature of the secession debate within the northern kindgom on both sides of the issue. Now the Scots have a reputation for being thoughtful, canny people, and for being heirs of world-famous Scottish Enlightenment, so it’s perhaps not surprising that the run-up to the referendum should have provided Scotland with an opportunity to think things out, and discuss the question of the utility of the Union in a considerate way we Americans can only envy. While the referendum was certainly accompanied by soundbites, snappishness, and all the angst and agita that accompany a hugely consequential election, it does seem to have been accompanied by a thoroughly civilized, thoroughly adult, very Scottish thought process.
Indeed, the Scots' discussion of the Scots secession referendum would have done Edmund Burke himself proud. Burke had an abiding faith in the power of rational debate to form sensible and cogent policy. At the same time, Burke also reprehended the kind of undisciplined, revolutionary enthusiasms he saw taking place in France. Burke may well have been right on that score; the history of France and her five Republics has been a history of an ongoing effort by the French people to develop and perfect strong, rational institutions for civil society. Yet, in more Burkean conservative societies in the Anglo-American world, we have been largely free of the hiccups and convulsions that have so marked the history of France since 1789.
The voters of Scotland were not looking to repeat 1789 in the streets and squares of Edinburgh, along the Royal Mile or in Holyroodhouse. What is relatively safe to infer is that Scots voters, whether supporters or opponents of secession, wanted to send a very clear message to Westminster that, whether in or out of Union, Scotland was no longer prepared to tolerate being treated as the negligible quantity Margaret Thatcher and the Tories had so long regarded Scotland and northern England as being.
To the extent that California Democrats rejected Six Californias and the Scots electorate rejected secession, both tapped deep into the ineffably Burkean wellsprings of much of our own political thinking. Much of Burke’s philosophy can indeed be summed up in the homely aphorism “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and in Bill Clinton’s equally homely aphorism “mend it, don’t end it.” For progressives, the real fight has often been defining how dysfunctional an institution must be before it can be considered broken.
Our fight has also been determine the degree to which we can mend before we must end. In both California and Scotland, both of which tend to break progressive in their political thinking, voters made a thoughtful determination that neither California nor the United Kingdom were so broken as to need radical alteration. Both bodies politic were felt to need nothing more than some routine mending to keep them functional well into the foreseeable future.
Advocates of radical change should consider carefully the extent to which Burkean thought is in many ways the default setting for an awful lot of political thinking worldwide. Instead of seeking to blow everything up, our natural tendency is to embrace the philosophy enunciated by the late Adm. of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgiyevich Gorshkov, who used to express his disdain for overengineered weapons systems by declaring “good enough is best.” For all of our dysfunctions and complaints, we and the Scots seem to have accepted Adm. Gorshkov’s pragmatic view that “good enough [really] is best.”
Moreover, in taking a “good enough is best” view, the canny Scots have arguably performed a uniquely clever bit of political jujitsu on the posh toffs down in the sweltering, Sassenach subtropics of London. Given that David Cameron’s Tory Government has apparently been frightened into promising to devolve even more extensive powers to the Scots Government at Holyroodhouse, Scotland now enjoys a unique faculty of taking credit for that which goes well in the northern kingdom, while shunting all blame for that which does not work well onto the sleazy, Sassenach politicians at Westminster.
At all events, the failure of Scots secession and Six Californias may yet have the prophylactic effect of forcing many of us who identify as progressives to confront our own internalized Burkean conservatism. For, when the sound and the fury are over, we can safely say that Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond and bloviating billionaire Tim Draper were the losers, but that Edmund Burke was very much the winner.
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