What the ‘Constitutional Republic’ of Oroville says about the state of American democracy

Democracy isn’t as popular as it used to be. Take the Oroville City Council’s overwrought recent declaration that it’s a “Constitutional Republic City,” which is steeped in creeping disregard for a once-presumptive American ideal.

The measure declares that the council’s members and constituents need not follow the laws of the duly and democratically elected state and federal governments in which they’re located — and upon which they’re deeply dependent — because, well, they don’t want to.

“NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT HEREBY RESOLVED by the Oroville City Council that the City of Oroville is declared to be a Constitutional Republic City,” thunders the resolution, and “that any executive orders issued by the State of California or by the United States federal government that are overreaching or clearly violate our constitutionally protected rights will not be enforced by the City of Oroville against its citizens.”

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Or, as one council member put it, “one size doesn’t fit all,” and “just because something makes sense in big cities like (San Francisco), (Los Angeles) or Sacramento doesn’t mean it makes sense in rural Oroville.”

This raises a host of questions for Butte County’s answer to San Marino, the European microstate that shares at least one achievement with Oroville, which is to be even more consumed by COVID denial than the country surrounding it.

Among them: Is it prepared to go to war with the other Northern Californian city-state often derided as a “people’s republic,” Berkeley? If local officials take the next step and erect a border wall along city lines, should the guards be posted outside or inside? And will the Republic of Oroville’s new constitution give its citizens a special right to have their money spent on drafting and debating more nonsensical resolutions?

But Oroville’s bananas republic is most intriguing as a hyperlocal expression of national insanity. As one of the resolution’s own champions, Oroville Mayor Chuck Reynolds, acknowledged, it “doesn’t change anything” for practical purposes. It could change plenty, however, that our democratic union has fallen so far in the estimation of so many, including the putative leaders of a whole California town, that they would so casually dismiss any obligation to it beyond their personal and political whims.

While this measure might sound like a stray trickle from the town beneath the nation’s tallest dam, it’s part of a much larger atmospheric river of misinformation. For a variety of supposed reasons and one real one — namely, that majority rule no longer seems likely to put certain politicians in power — it’s become fashionable in certain circles to point out, as if it’s a crucial distinction, that “America is a republic, not a democracy.”

So states the title of a paper produced last year by the Heritage Foundation, which goes on to criticize the super-majority of Americans laboring under the corrosive illusion that they actually run the place. A few months later, perhaps finding Heritage’s take too nuanced, Utah Sen. Mike Lee distilled it down to just four words on Twitter: “We’re not a democracy.”

Such assertions often allude misleadingly to the Founding Fathers’ trepidation at the prospect of “rank democracy,” as Lee put it, such as the direct brand of citizen rule practiced in ancient Athens. Never mind that for all California’s attempts, truly direct democracy is nonexistent and infeasible in the modern world — or that the distinction between such democracy and the republic favored by the framers is that the will of the people is expressed through their choice of representatives.

A republic isn’t “not a democracy” so much as it’s a particular kind of democracy — and in fact, the only kind anyone has. When Benjamin Franklin made his endlessly quoted and misquoted comment about having formed “A republic, if you can keep it,” it was by way of contrast with a monarchy, not a democracy.

Oroville’s resolution, like much of this strain of politics in California, betrays a literally unhealthy obsession with bucking Gov. Gavin Newsom’s coronavirus precautions as an affront to some constitutional or republican principle. But Newsom’s executive orders are all based on law and subject to review by the courts on constitutional and other grounds, as more than one legal challenge has shown. And the truth is that the governor has embraced his decisive empowerment by the people haltingly compared with many of the state’s own local officials in the Bay Area and Southern California. A purely republican approach by the governor, one embracing the principle of representative democracy, would show less deference to those jurisdictions on one hand or to the likes of Oroville on the other.

The council’s resolution was passed to cheers and plaudits, providing an apt example of the facet of democracy the founders really feared: the temptation to demagogues who would pander to crowds to further their own interests regardless of the public’s. Local politicians in Oroville and beyond should expend less of their energy inventing imaginary republics and more of it serving, representing and keeping the one we have.