State of Mind/State of Mine: California Secessionism, Facebook, and the Newsom Recall

Keywords: state secessionism, feeling, political polarization, social media
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 2

Abstract

In 2021, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, faced an ultimately unsuccessful recall election supported by overwhelmingly white, rural, Republican counties. When this data is visualized geographically, a large amount of support for the recall campaign is concentrated within the boundaries of the State of Jefferson, a state secessionist movement in rural Northern California whose previous iterations date back to the 1850s. Further, grassroots political organizing for the recall campaign was played out online in pre-existing State of Jefferson Facebook groups, often used by residents to express feelings on rural/urban untranslatability and resulting poor governance by the state. Using Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling'' as a framework, this paper argues that a “felt distance” between the residents of the State of Jefferson and Sacramento is not only a major source of the mass rural mobilization for the recall, but the reason the State of Jefferson exists at all. Drawing upon a netnography, archival work, and a series of demographic and time-travel maps, this paper makes a few interrelated conclusions: first, this “felt distance” is the product of an interplay between an isolating physical geography and an ever-evolving emotional structure inherited from the formation of California itself; two, these structures are produced and reproduced through interactions on social media, restructuring spatial relations between peoples and the landscape; and finally, perspectives on reality are shaped by this interaction between the physical, emotional, and digital landscape - having serious implications for rural identity and politics at every level (e.g., hyperlocal to national).