The sad truth is that things have not changed much when it comes to drunk driving.

Exhibit A: a real conversation I had with some 5Cers:

Me: DC is great because the public transportation system pretty much eliminates the need to drive from bars to home.
Other 5Cer: Oh, hahah, I drive better when drunk anyway.
Yet another 5Cer: Hahahahahah!  (not horrified).

Only mad men drink and drive, right?

This is absolutely heartbreaking.   Through alcohol education and increased legal consequences, we’ve changed most of the offensive Mad Men-esqe behavior.    Everyone reading this article knows the legal limit.   That leaves only social attitudes relatively unchanged since 1960.

The problem with drunk driving is that it’s hit or miss, no horrible pun intended. If you drink while pregnant, it will affect your child.   If you make sexually inappropriate comments to your secretary, it will affect your career.  But usually, drunk driving doesn’t have immediate consequences.  Most of the time people drive drunk, they don’t get in an accident or pulled over.  Importantly, the drunk driver saves herself the awkward prospect of either sleeping in her car or arranging alternative transportation.  Sadly, for most people, it takes a powerful emotional experience to realize that drunk driving is always a bad idea.

California produces conditions especially conducive to drunk driving accidents.   We have no public transportation, lots of suburban sprawl, and few sidewalks.    People love to exercise outdoors, so the roads are shared by drivers, cyclists, and runners.   In my hometown, drunk driving deaths were horrifyingly common.   A best friend’s mother, an Ironwoman champion and elementary school teacher, was struck on her bicycle as she trained in the afternoon after school got out.  She died four days later, leaving three young daughters, her husband, and our small town devastated.  A high school classmate is in Folsom Prison[*] for killing two former classmates and injuring two others on the Fourth of July.   All had just finished their first year of college at different UCs.

I thank God that Claremont’s drinking culture is always within walking distance.  I definitely don’t have enough confidence in my peers at the 5Cs not to risk their own lives and others on the road.  What do you think?

I understand where these people are coming from; if you think that the political process is irreparably broken, you’re probably going to be very careful to keep potential wrenches out of your new process to fix the old. But Jesus Christ. This opens the door even wider to the Pandora’s Box critique. I mean the thirty-second TV spot against randomly selected delegates practically writes itself:

The Bay Area Council wants to throw the dice with California’s future. (Cue image of a rich, white guy wearing an expensive Italian suit throwing dice down a craps table.) They want to randomly select people to rewrite our State’s Constitution. (Rich white guy pulls people over from the casino floor, shoving money in their pockets; they look confused.) A Constitution that has guided California since 1879, seeing us rise from a backwater frontier state to the envy of the world. (Our rich white guy mimes for the random citizens to begin tearing apart the document.) Yes California has problems. But California’s problems are not too big for us to fix ourselves. Don’t give up on California; vote no on X.

For the voiceover, I’m thinking Glenn Beck meets Keith Olbermann. But seriously can’t we do better than just randomly selecting delegates? That seems to be the baseline for representation (given a large enough sample, you would present the population again with good accuracy). Yet we want more than that from our representatives. We want them to be able to act in our stead. If I haven’t thought through an issue or a new issue arises (say Iran has a flawed election), we want our representatives to respond effectively. We don’t just want them to act as we would; we want them to be better. There are things that we as a public haven’t thought about or plain just don’t know about.

That’s why we have elections. We select people to represent us not only because they share much of the same value set or space of policy preferences as us but also because we trust the way they think and act.

The worry in selecting Constitutional Convention delegates is that it will allow the process to be perverted by special interests and money. Yet the problem with California politics currently is not that we have special interests or money. It’s that the framework under which those forces operate allows them to pervert the system. In calling for a convention, we get to design the system.

Special interests are not inherently evil. I’m a special interest. If you’ve ever written a letter to a congressman or an article in favor of a policy, guess what, so are you. Furthermore, it’s not like delegates would be beholden to special interests once they get elected. They go off and work on rewriting the Constitution for a couple of years. It’s the ultimate retirement effect. Besides, if we want to get a new constitution passed after the convention does its thing, we’re going to need the support of political stakeholders: special interests. So it doesn’t make sense to entirely exclude them from the process.

I’m not saying we close our eyes to these influences. There are alternatives. We can have elections but close them off to anyone who’s been elected to state office or been a lobbyist. We can make districts that elect delegates smaller so money is less of an issue. We don’t have to give up on electing delegates. Let the special interests have their say; just make sure its not effectively the only say. The stakes are high in this debate. We need to make sure we get this right the first time; as the Obama administration is excessively fond of saying, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

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(1) I’ve heard a rumor that the Bay Area Council has filed an initiative that might take us down that path, but the Secretary of State hasn’t f*^$ing put the initiative on their website yet.

The symbolic might of the state’s majesty is everywhere. That is to be expected, though; it is the state’s capitol (and not just any: the Golden State’s). Witness all the big, Greek-looking buildings. Pillars, colonnades, the law: what’s not to love? I mean what sort of freedom hating sociopath hates formal universality? I know those kids posing for pictures in front of the Capitol don’t.

Beneath that shiny exterior, though, lies the twisted, gnarled undergrowth of bureaucracy. In the capitol, the contrast is especially stark. The ground floor is oppressively open. Tourists mill about, intermingling with lobbyists, legislators, and Arnold’s bear. Go a few floors up, however, and you’ll find yourself in a faceless maze of cold institutionalism. Members’ offices look more like holes in the wall of fluorescent nightmare than where LAW gets made.

The cold, hard truth is that much of the state’s legal code is drafted in even more soulless hallways than these. Your water quality regulations aren’t drafted with the poppy enthusiasm of “I’m Just a Bill” or likely even finished with a flourish of the Terminator’s pen. They’re probably drawn up in some bureaucrat’s office. That’s good; I’m glad regulating water quality isn’t flashy. But the silent disconnect between a pedestrian water quality regulation and the symbolic pillars of law that upholds it is deafening.

Yet if the events in Iran have taught us anything, it’s that universality matters. The cleansing power of a simple and pure solution is awesome. “Give us our votes.” People deserve the right to vote. It may be proto-fascistic but man is it something! We need those declarations. Sacramento needs to be more than just a town in the Central Valley; it needs to be the State’s Capitol. Half-baked or not, regulation needs the force and the majesty of law. The functioning of our society demands it. Still, the fractures in our world are unforgiving of our excesses. Here, I have to quote a friend, a soon-to-be Yale law graduate:

“[The liberal state] wants to include everybody in its folds, but this inclusion is imperfect, because like all inclusion, it requires demarcation: taking census data; doling out resources; writing tax codes; determining welfare eligibility. We should not confuse the seduction of universalist rhetoric with true universality.”
–Kiel Brennan-Marquez, “Corporate Gods and Partisan Monsters”

As long as man has been political, we have been trying to embrace all of humanity under one umbrella. Whether justified by divine right or natural law, the underlying impetus is the same. That one umbrella, though, can’t keep us dry in reality’s rainstorm of particularity. Regardless, we’re stuck without shelter, so we might as well try to make do: create a competent state, with sound policies to match. Perhaps it’s futile; perhaps the struggle, though redeeming, is just that; perhaps Fitzgerald was right:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I think about that and take comfort: this tension is nothing new, nothing to be feared. Then I remember that’s just a bunch of bullshit to placate us into mediocrity.

Wrong, at least according to California State Senator Leland Yee. Last week, Yee introduced a bill to seize control of the UC system away from the UC regents.

Is there a more disgustingly political move possible? It’s power for its own sake. Politics as the end of discourse and the means of gaining more power – rather than the means of enacting (what one believes is) sound policy. It’s enough to make a guy want to slap another 1F on them – populist nonsense or not.

And listening to the Governor’s speech on Tuesday, it looks like things are going to get better before they get worse. According to State Controller John Chiang, we’re fourteen eleven days away from running out of cash. So we’ve got to cut – big and fast. Yet sadly most of the state’s budget is locked up in formulas and constitutionally protected programs. So the legislature is going to have to cut a few programs big and leave others untouched – regardless of merit. I know stem cell research is great and all, but fundamental science research takes time. And right now we’re firing fire fighters when fire season is right around the corner. Who knew harnessing the symbolic might of the people’s will could produce bad results?

The Governor has some unilateral options on the table – like his proposal to open up more of California’s waters to drilling. But he doesn’t control his executive cabinet, and the Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi and State Controller John Chiang (both Democrats) oppose the proposal. That’s what independently elected state offices gets you. (Thank you again turn of the century Progressives.) Regardless of your position on offshore drilling, it’s absurd that the Governor is hamstrung by members of his nominal executive team. There’s a reason the nation passed the twelfth amendment after the Jefferson/Burr debacle.

But I’m not going to blame the Progressives. It’s been said that the California political class is willing to blame anyone but themselves (read the LA Times blaming the voters for budget debacle because of all the spending initiatives the voters passed – when the LA Times endorsed 20 out of the last 22 bond measures) – the implication being it’s the political class that’s responsible for this mess. But I think that doesn’t go far enough. California’s current problems are big enough that there’s more than enough blame to go around. And they’re deep enough that it’s going to take more than blame and politicking for us to get out of this mess.

Politics can only ever legitimately function within the socio-legal edifice. We don’t endorse bribery and corruption – effective as they politically may be – because they are transgressions against the law – not to mention social norms and good sense. But when that edifice is so twisted by the perverted governmental structure our constitution sets up and so stained by the ingrained power of public employee unions and fringe ideological groups, it must be torn down and forged anew. A systemic problem needs a system-wide solution – i.e. a constitutional convention.

A constitutional convention will be risky, will be political, and may not work. But those speak to the difficulty of the path, not it’s trustworthiness. It has the potential to fix what all else has not and likely cannot. Sure, you could say, “No, it’s too hard; it’s too radical; it’s just not worth it.  Let’s do something a little more reasonable.”  Realistically though, you can add on all the good government bells and whistle – all the Prop 11’s – you want.  But that will inevitably just be trimming around the edges – rendered meaningless as the rotten core percolates through each piecemeal reform one by one. How else can you explain Arnie’s Governorship?  It’s been a series of idealistic hopes dashed on the same rocks of constitutional reality – with the tattered remains of a few symbolic victories fluttering in the wind. We need to deal with the root of the problem.  If it means we throw everything out and attempt to redream government in California, then so be it.  If there ever was a place to start over, to embrace hope as our last remaining purview of social redemption, it has to be California, whose idea allows even little girls in Sweden to dream of “silver screen flirtation.” (The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication) At least, we all should hope: as the saying goes, California’s present is America’s future.

Read more about voting laws and tips if this is your first time.

Read more about why your vote is important in California (proportional representation + a very close race, etc.)

Also, come hang out in The Hub from 5 PM to 11 PM to watch as the Super Tuesday results come in (hosted by the Democrats of the Claremont Colleges, the Claremont College Republicans, the Claremont Portside, and the Claremont Independent).

There’s a reason why Newsweek named this college “Hottest for Election Year.”