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Also by Peter Schrag
Paradise Lost:
California’s Experience, America’s Future (1998)
California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment (2006)
Not Fit for Our Society:
Immigration and Nativism in America (2010)
When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son
Memoirs, 1940–1941 (with Otto Schrag) (2015)
Copyright © 2018 by Peter Schrag
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Heyday. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.
Book and cover design by Ashley Ingram
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Schrag, Peter, author.
Title: California fights back : the Golden State in the age of Trump / Peter
Schrag.
Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017051359 | ISBN 9781597144476 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Political planning--California. | Political
culture--California. | Liberalism--California. | California--Politics and
government--21st century. | United States--Politics and government--2017-
Classification: LCC JK8749.P64 S44 2018 | DDC 320.9794--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051359
E-book ISBN: 978-1-59714-449-0
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Europeans have long marveled at the driving force, the “restless energy,” of America; but it is only in California that this energy is coeval with statehood.… In California the lights went on all at once, in a blaze, and they have never dimmed.
—Carey McWilliams,
California: The Great Exception (1949)
Prologue
California’s battle against the Washington of Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell—and the increasingly influential fringe represented by Steve Bannon and Alabama’s Roy Moore—encompasses two strands tightly woven around each other. One is the determined fight, wherever possible, against the cruelty and inanity of an administration and congressional majority hell-bent on rolling back the programs and policies of enlightened self-interest enacted over the better part of a century under both Republican and Democratic administrations. The other is a defense of California’s progressive, if still imperfect, success as a model for the nation and the world. The first would not be possible without the second and is inextricably tied to it.
But this is not just the story of a left coast state resisting a revanchist ultraconservative national government that seems to have gone off the rails, the un-Texas of 2018. It’s also a story about the confrontation of reason against unreason, of a belief in knowledge against denial, distortion, lies, and a prideful lack of curiosity.
And because a similar strain of racism, unreason, and denial embedded itself in the Republican Party well before Trump became a candidate, it will probably outlast him. “Donald Trump is not an outlier,” Barack Obama told the New Yorker’s David Remnick shortly after the 2016 election. “He is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails. There were no governing principles, there was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’”
In the GOP, the first of Trump’s qualifications for high office was his baseless racist “Birther” charge, contra all evidence, that Obama was not born in the United States, followed by his attacks on Mexicans as “bad hombres,” his vow to stop all Muslims from entering the United States because they might be terrorists, his fiction about widespread voter fraud, all laced with his indifference to the truth about almost everything. What’s highly probable is that without determined, reasoned resistance, the divisiveness and distrust that Trump fanned and exploited—and the accompanying erosion of American democracy—may poison the nation’s politics and public policy long after he’s gone from office.
And Trump could be gone sooner than anyone expected when he was elected. After his failure to condemn the neo-Nazi thugs in Charlottesville—the praise with faint damns—and the resulting exodus of corporate executives who should have been his closest allies from his advisory councils; his personal attacks on congressional leaders of his own party; his bratty threat, quickly withdrawn, to shut down the government if Congress did not approve his wall at the border; his string of impetuous flips, and the ongoing investigations into the Trump family’s connections with the Russians, Trump’s early departure seemed possible even before the 2018 midterm elections.
Even for Trump haters talking impeachment, that could be a mixed blessing. Trump’s megalomania, racism, misogyny, polarizing personality, his conflicts of interest, his juvenile bullying and daily tantrums have served to impede, if not stop, a broad right-wing agenda that’s nearly unprecedented in American politics. At the same time Trump’s behavior has been an incomparable motivator and fundraiser for liberal groups, from the ACLU and Common Cause to Planned Parenthood, the Environmental Defense Fund, the League of Conservation Voters, and the various wings of the Democratic Party. Without those distractions, this Congress and a White House occupied by Mike Pence, surely the most determined and doctrinaire conservative to hold that office since World War II, and a close ally of the Koch brothers, may be more focused, unified, and politically effective than they could ever be with a crazy uncle raging in the party’s attic.
Republicans celebrate Ronald Reagan as one of their heroes, but it’s unlikely that they would now recognize him as one of their own, a sunny pragmatist who signed hefty tax increases both as California’s governor and as president, signed California’s Therapeutic Abortion Act, supported an ambitious California program of parkland acquisition, and as president negotiated a major nuclear force reduction treaty with the Russians. In the 1980s, he seemed to a lot of his opponents like an extreme conservative. Today he would be regarded as a moderate. Trump has been a dream for energizing moderates and liberals but his departure, whenever it comes, will leave much of the anger, distrust, and divisiveness he fueled festering behind. Without him, a Pence administration and this Republican Congress, while less likely to blunder into nuclear war, could be even more difficult to resist.
But that quandary makes resistance to the powers in Washington even more critical. And there is no state, no party, no
