largest state, the world’s sixth-largest economy, an ethnically diverse majority-minority state that has thrived in large part through the immigration that produced that diversity. California is the nation’s leader, and often the world’s, in progressive energy policy and in reducing its per capita consumption of water, fossil fuels, and other natural resources; in creating the technologies of the future; in celebrating the rich cultural mix, in music and art, in food, in language and cultural traditions that its diversity produces. It is, as the following pages should make clear, the nearest thing to a hopeful model for the nation’s future and the most powerful and persuasive alternative to the course that the wreckers in Washington are so relentlessly pursuing.
PETER SCHRAG
Oakland
November 2017
California Fights Back
I
IT’S BEEN JUST A HALF CENTURY SINCE THE writer Joan Didion, a native daughter, reminded us that the stakes for democracy might be higher in California than anywhere else in America. This is the place, she wrote, “in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
Things have not always worked well in the Golden State. Californians cheered in the months after Pearl Harbor when 120,000 ethnic Japanese, many U.S. citizens among them, were driven from their homes and land and imprisoned in distant internment camps. Californians demanded the exclusion of Chinese immigrants in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and of Mexicans in the twentieth; they herded the Okies fleeing the dust bowl into miserable camps; in the decades after the Gold Rush, they murdered Indians by the thousands. In the fifties, Hollywood blacklisted liberal writers and directors; the University of California required all faculty to take a loyalty oath, while the state senate’s Tenney Committee was relentless in its pursuit of alleged communists. More immediately, as this story should make clear, the California of the 1980s and 1990s looked like much of the America of 2018: fearful, xenophobic, distrustful of government and its own institutions, a state in revolt, it seemed, against its own welcoming, tolerant recent past.
But in the past decade, it’s recovered, indeed dramatically reversed itself—on immigrants and race, on trust in government, on taxation and public goods, on crime and human freedom. It’s regained some of its optimism. It still has a plethora of serious problems and its strain of ethnic prejudice and nativism may never be fully eradicated. But both the history of California’s recovery and the story of what it’s become since are the nearest we have to a model alternative to where Washington’s leaders now want to take the nation.
So, California’s resistance to Trump is not merely a defense of its programs and policies on health, the environment, immigration, and in the treatment of minorities—itself a word with very different meanings in a place where all ethnic groups are minorities and an increasing percentage of residents are of mixed or altogether undetermined ethnicities. It is also a defense, or maybe a celebration, of the California alternative. After Charlottesville and Trump’s failure to loudly condemn the gun-toting Nazis and racists responsible for the violence there, after his relentless attack on Muslims and his campaigns against immigrants and so much else, California’s pluralism—of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and cultures—and the resulting economic success is itself a model for the nation and a damning indictment of those who pretend to lead it. Needless to say, the stakes couldn’t be greater, both for the state and for the United States. Anyone who thinks about this country must know it.
GIVEN CALIFORNIA’S SIZE, demographic diversity, economic heft, and its (mostly) blue political hue, it’s not surprising that the state is both the leader of the resistance to the reactionary drift, and often the mindlessness, in Washington and, at the same time, a bright model of an alternative. And while there was never a chance that it would—or could—secede from the union, as some proposed (and some still do), California, which has always had some centrifugal impulses, behaves increasingly like an independent nation.
None of it was inevitable. Forty years ago, in June 1978, in a major shift from the ebullient, progressive decades that followed World War II, California voters, by a margin of nearly two to one, passed Proposition 13, which slashed local property taxes by nearly 60 percent, sharply constraining all public services, and made California the epicenter of the national tax revolt, what Robert Kuttner called “the revolt of the haves.” It also sparked a wave of voter initiatives, most of them, though not all, conservative—on crime, taxation and state spending, gay marriage, education, the environment, water—that tied government into knots and obviated any populist Tea Party uprising in California. Proposition 13 and its progeny, screaming expressions of distrust in the normal governmental process, was California’s rolling Tea Party revolt. In parts of the California interior, many of which voted for Trump, that’s still the predominant mood.
But probably the most critical political event of that era was the passage in 1994, with the strong backing of Republican Governor Pete Wilson, of Proposition 187 (“Save Our State”), an anti-immigrant ballot measure that would have equaled anything that Donald Trump has yet proposed. On the same day, the voters also passed “three strikes,” the most severe criminal sentencing law in the nation, a law that even a hard-liner like Attorney General Jeff Sessions might now dream about.
Proposition 187 would have denied all public services, including schooling and all but emergency health care, to all undocumented immigrants. It would have required public employees—teachers, police officers, doctors, and social workers—to report every undocumented immigrant they came across to the state’s attorney general and/or federal immigration officials. It was soon blocked as unconstitutional by a federal judge, but not before the resulting panic drove thousands of undocumented immigrants underground, and before Wilson, running a blatantly anti-immigrant TV campaign, parlayed it into his come-from-behind reelection victory. (After the failure of Congress to act on comprehensive immigration reform, it also became a spur to local and state action elsewhere.) In 1996, California voters, again with strong support from Wilson, passed Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action by race or gender in public education, public employment, and contracting. In 1998, they piled it on with Proposition 227, funded by a Silicon Valley millionaire named Ron Unz, which denied bilingual education to any student whose parents did not demand it.
Now California, with some 39 million people, is an ethnically majority-minority state and will soon have an absolute Latino majority. Roughly 2.5 million (in 2014) of the state’s residents are undocumented, a number that may be going down as Mexico’s birthrate declines and its economy improves and as Trump’s government becomes more hostile. The majority of those undocumented immigrants are from Latin America, but others come from almost every country on earth. And contra the general belief, no doubt including Trump’s, that they all slipped over the Mexican border, nationwide about 40 percent are visa overstayers, according to the Pew Research Center and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and far and away the largest number of them are from Canada. They’re visitors who entered legally and just never left. Where in 1994 California passed Proposition 187 and ordered cops and other public employees to report undocumented immigrants to federal authorities, it’s now passing sanctuary bills to prohibit them from doing precisely that.
At last count, the state’s economy was the sixth-largest on earth, just behind the United Kingdom, and just ahead of France. California is the nation’s largest center of trade with Asia, Latin America, and Canada, and despite dire warnings from conservatives about the dangers of “job-killing” tax increases, it’s enacted three major tax increases in the past decade and regained a larger percentage of jobs lost in the 2008 recession
