A “State of Jefferson” State of Mind: Explorations in California’s Trump Country

...the adventurous traveler of these northern backroads will also encounter billboards, barns, and even highway sponsorships touting the imaginary place that is no place.

“I love my country, stupid and cruel.  Red, white, and blue,” crooned Jeff Tweedy as my family and I listened to Wilco’s new album while driving through the far northeastern portion of California on the way toward Lava Beds National Monument to camp and explore some caves.  

We dodged fire in the eastern Sierras on the way up and got to the far north before the latest huge blaze hit the region.  The wide-open spaces that surround CA 395 are beautiful, stark, and frequently unforgiving.  Very cold in the winter and brutally hot in the summer, the landscape is lonely, majestic, and heavily scarred by recent fires.  

But far from worrying about the impact of climate change or environmental preservation, many residents of Modoc County, along with their California neighbors in Siskiyou and Del Norte, are angry at the liberal state government and environmentalists who they blame for killing the timber industry which they (wrongly) assume would have saved them from the waves of catastrophic fires that have made life there even more tenuous than it was before 

Poorer, less educated, and far less populated than the rest of the California, a significant chunk of aggrieved, disgruntled residents of this region have long pined to join the Oregon counties, Curry, Josephine, Jackson, and Klamath, in order to create a break-off “State of Jefferson.” Though not part of the original formulation in the 1940s, today many residents of Shasta, Lassen, and other California counties also think kindly of this utopian project.  

It must be pointed out that the majority of people in the State of Jefferson aren’t rightwing extremists and most of the counties in this imagined community don’t share the dream.  That said, there are plenty of pockets of hard-right feeling wrapped in the American flag in places like Siskiyou and Modoc, whose Boards of Supervisors voted in favor of withdrawal from California, and actively keep the hostility going.  

Thus, in addition to the ever-present Trump signs and flags, the adventurous traveler of these northern backroads will also encounter billboards, barns, and even highway sponsorships touting the imaginary place that is no place.  Though destined to fail, the dream of the State of Jefferson survives and was given fresh fuel by Trumpism.  But it is not just the GOP that folks up here love.  

One of the most striking aspects of our week in this portion of California’s Trump country was how openly people sported a wide range of insurrectionist, white separatist, and other extreme right symbols.  We hiked past a good number of all-American white bread folks wearing “1776” shirts with crossed AR-15s underneath, indicating support for the coming rightwing revolution.  In fact, we happened upon a bus of school children on a field trip being “supervised” by a fellow in such swag.  

Offensive after the mass shootings?  That’s the point. Own the libs.  Let your freak flags fly. 

Along with that, we saw the whole range of other Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, anti-government militia, Pepe the Frogs, and more on t-shirts, stickers on trucks, and even tattoos in some cases.  And while my family and I got a few dirty looks for our hybrid SUV, Southern California cultural signifiers, and clearly “blue state” vibes, mostly the people we encountered were friendly and nice.  

They were all good, white, Christian folks who might stop and help you with your flat tire.  Having camped and traveled in areas like this many times in my life, this was not a surprise.  Treat people nicely and they usually respond in kind, particularly if you are white.  

When we stopped at a gorgeous, historic hotel in Alturas for less than a hundred dollars the night before heading into Lava Beds, the young woman at the desk was astonished we were from San Diego, which was, for her, an amazing and exotic place.  She had just graduated from high school and was planning on going to a community college in Oregon to become a dental hygienist.  When my wife suggested she could be a dentist if she kept going to a four-year school, she looked puzzled by the thought.  

Places like Alturas have a small-town USA feeling to them even as the economic situation is bleak, crime is surprisingly high, and mental health and drug issues abound.  These are the places where the mostly white working class went to die.  But there is a kind of pathos to it as well.  

Bitter residents of this lost part of our state are largely right to think that nobody cares about them, even if their conspiratorial explanations for the hard realities that now face them are ill-founded.  It’s the kind of place that FDR’s New Deal sought to reach in the 1930s, but we don’t try to do that sort of thing anymore in America.  

Thus, there is fertile ground for the extremist imagination in this beautiful area.  And it is indeed disconcerting to be camping next to folks with fascist stickers on their motorhome.  What to make of the nice family laughing with their kids and toasting marshmallows for s’mores who want to destroy American democracy after church? 

I can chat about baseball with Dad waiting for the bathroom to open, but if I take him at the words on his pick-up, he’d just as soon see me dead. As Dylan sang long ago in “It’s Alright, Ma I’m Only Bleeding,” I knew that “If my thought-dreams could be seen/They’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”  

Just trolling likely, but the fact that there is so much hostile sentiment in “Let’s Go Brandon” America does make one ponder the fate of our democracy.  Up here in the State of Jefferson, they’ve elected far-right militia members who defeated conservative Republicans 

In some places, people are harassed out of stores for wearing masks, and militias sent in folks to do disaster work during the Oak fire without consulting the crews as a way to recruit members   And, of course, they love their guns.  With wingnuts in other parts of the country shooting up FBI offices, the mood of the Golden State’s Trump country gives one pause.  

In the pre-pandemic past, I’ve drunk at bars and played pool with folks up there and in other outposts of deep red America.  Have a beer with a right-winger?  I’ve done it.  Not changing anybody’s worldview, sorry.  There is no bridge that takes you halfway to the State of Jefferson or Greater Idaho or a host of other American outposts of Trump nation. It all brings to mind another Wilco verse that floated through my head as I wandered up in way Nor Cal, “There is no middle when the other side/Would rather kill than compromise.”  

As we kept encountering an unsettling number of folks wearing t-shirts and various gear overtly calling for the overthrow of the US government and other rightwing extremist fun while they marveled at the caves in Lava Beds, grabbed drinks and candy bars at the gas station, or frolicked in a river by the Oregon border, I continued to be struck by the seeming innocence of these dress-up-and-play traitors.  Sweet as apple pie in most cases.  They filled me with memories of my childhood going back to Michigan to my grandparents’ house by the lake where my father taught me to fish as the sunshine gleamed on the water on a hot, humid day that ended with hot dogs and soda pop.  

It also reminded me of the famous Hannah Arendt formulation of the “banality of evil.”  I thought of her observations of Adolf Eichmann, “I was struck by the manifest shallowness in the doer which made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives.  The deeds were monstrous but the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace and neither demonic nor monstrous.”  

Recently, a group of historians met with Biden in the White House to tell him they thought America’s democracy is teetering. And I can’t help but think that if our moment comes to be defined by the destruction of what some of us used to believe were the unassailable institutions of US democracy, that these good people with their big-ass trucks, giant flags, dying towns full of Americana, fear for the future, and anger at everything will be part of that downfall if only because it will afflict people like me. 

“Suck it up buttercup.  Fuck your feelings.”  

I love my country, stupid and cruel.