Whenever things in Sacramento get really ugly, comes the question, now decades old: Is California, as a Los Angeles Times headline put it last week, "too unwieldy to govern?"

Is the state too big, too diverse, too riven by competing interest groups to be managed by ordinary mortals, or even action heroes?

And with those questions comes another hardy perennial: Should California be split into two or more states, each of which would be smaller and more homogenous?

In the traditional version, never entirely serious, the frontier would be an east-west line at the Tehachapis, a division between the water-abundant north and the arid south. One of those states, wrote a Northern California journalist, would be called Disneyland; the other would be "us."

Back in 1941, there was also a semi-serious secession movement to merge four counties in Northern California – Del Norte, Siskiyou, Modoc and Lassen – and Curry County in southwest Oregon into the new State of Jefferson. They'd even elected a governor, but that was just a few days before Pearl Harbor, and it became another piece of collateral damage in the war.

More recently, a legislator and TV news reader named Stan Statham promoted a wave of advisory votes, most of them in northern California counties, again calling for the state to be split. Most passed but were promptly forgotten, as was Statham's campaign for higher state office.

Given California's new political geography, the most logical split would be with a line running north to south dividing the coastal counties from the interior. West California – call it Pacifica – would be mostly blue; East California – call it Appalachifornia – would be mostly red.

Appalachifornia could sell Pacifica its water at high rates, rent space in its prisons, most of which are in the Central Valley and elsewhere in the interior, reduce taxes and public services to match Alabama's, and free itself from the annoying labor and environmental laws now imposed on it.

In return, Pacifica could provide higher education at out-of-state tuition to the graduates of Appalachifornia high schools who'd qualify and, as before, use its resorts at Palm Springs, Tahoe and Yosemite for its vacation spots.

Most important, the affluent lefty taxpayers in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Santa Barbara, Beverly Hills and points south would no longer have to subsidize the stagnant economy of the interior.

Okay, so it's all hyperbolic, ironic and unfair. Unscrambling the California omelet will always be impossible.

Of course California is governable. No one suggests that the United States, despite a population eight times the size of California's, and notwithstanding an antiquated Senate filibuster rule, an archaic electoral college system and social and economic diversity even greater than ours, can't be governed.

The current budget crisis could be solved – would have been solved long ago – with a majority vote, and with the restoration of the other recognized principles and institutions of democracy. The difficulty is not that we are ungovernable but that we don't want a functioning, accountable government.

This is an old complaint in this column, but it's even truer now than it was a generation ago. Yes, the recession has hit us hard, though no harder than other states. As Steve Levy of the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy reminded us last week, over the past year California lost 0.9 percent of the state's jobs compared to a 1.4 percent decline nationally and 3.1 percent in Arizona, 2.6 percent in Florida, 1.9 percent in Oregon, 1.7 percent in North Carolina and 2.7 percent in Michigan.

Our unemployment rate, at 8.4 percent, is hardly worth cheering about, but it's lower than that in Michigan and Rhode Island, not far above a number of other states and lower, relative to the nation, than it was in prior recessions.

The difference is that because of our convoluted fiscal system, which voters have refused to change, we used fiscal devices in good times that we should have reserved for bad times. We also cut taxes, committed more money to local government, and approved additional billions in spending by initiative even when things were tight. "We" is not just them; "we" is also us.

• In last week's column on the self-isolation of the California Republican Party, I overstated the fact that the party doesn't allow independents to vote in its primaries. That exclusion applies to presidential candidates and to candidates for county central committees, but not to other offices.

It was also not correct to imply that both major parties have become equally extreme. According to a survey early this year, Democrats divide themselves much more broadly among liberals, moderates and conservatives, which makes them far more diverse (politically and ethnically) than our uncompromising right-wing Republicans.