California the ungovernable

I often take columns from the SacBee's resident curmudgeon Dan Walters -- who skewers politicians of all ideological stripes with equal and unrestrained cynicism -- with a heaping teaspoon of salt.

That said, when he's right, he's right. And he's right about this:

"Government worked better four decades ago because California was a simpler, more homogeneous place then with more clearly definable priorities. A governmental/political process that requires consensus cannot function effectively when the society it serves has become the most complex on Earth and no longer can muster consensus on any issue..."

Those who think terms limits or redistricting reform or budget reform or any other sort of fiddling at the margins is going to solve California's governance problems are kidding themselves. The state has in actual fact become, through no fault of anyone in particular's, virtually ungovernable.

There are simply too many people with too many different opinions of the direction the state should take on any given issue, and this reality is not just a prescription for but a near-guarantee of political stalemate and paralysis. In that sense our Legislature really has evolved into a microcosm of the U.S. Congress; the ideological divide between the Right and the Left is so huge that you are sometimes left to wonder how meaningful conversation between the two is even possible.

Former Assemblyman Stan Statham's proposal for splitting California into three separate states might have seemed like a crackpot idea at the time, but it's looking better every day now.