As I am in CA at the moment, I’m thinking about the place. The size and scale is monumental. The Bay Area sprawls for several hours north/south and east/west. (Of course, it does contain the population of New Zealand and a fair amount of green space.) But the trees and greenish politics belie CA’s true relationship to nature, which is that big homes and long freeways require cars, cars, cars. I suspect that the state will run into ecological limits relatively soon.
Speaking of limits: I recently read two excellent pieces on California’s budget crisis by UC Davis historian Louis Warren. The first lays out the tax and constitutional history that led to structural budget deficits and an eventual inability to fund those deficits:
The root of our problem is our state constitution, which requires a two-thirds majority to raise taxes or pass a budget. In some ways, this is peculiar. No other state requires two-thirds majorities to perform those two vital functions (although Rhode Island and Arkansas both require 66% to raise taxes, their budgets pass on simple majority votes). In other words, to pass a budget every year in California requires the same level of amity and consensus other states require for a constitutional amendment.
Where did the supermajority originate? Although many blame Proposition 13 (passed in 1978), California’s constitution has in fact been this way for a very long time. The state first passed a constitutional amendment requiring two-thirds majorities to approve budgets back in 1933. The rule kicked in only when budgets increased by 5% or more over a previous year. But since most budgets did increase by at least that much (California was growing by leaps and bounds), it kicked in a lot.
...the rise of movement conservatism changed the terms of debate. Republicans never liked taxes, but they saw them as an unfortunate necessity. By the 1970s, conservatives increasingly sounded like the leader of California’s tax rebellion, Howard Jarvis, who condemned all taxes as “felony grand theft.”
Still, for many years, leading Republicans could contain their most conservative brethren and hammer out deals in the old-fashioned way. As late as 1991, a Republican governor (Pete Wilson) championed a tax increase and budget cuts to close a deficit. In 1994 he won re-election.
But already the tide was turning. As Wilson discovered during his abortive presidential campaign in 1995, the “No New Taxes Pledge” had become a litmus test which he had failed. This hostility to all taxes is now conservatism’s defining feature. It is also, historically speaking, quite new. More than anything else, this is what killed the consensus that drove California’s 66% majorities.
The proof is in the pudding. The state has had the same supermajority requirements for the last 47 years. But only for about the last two decades has the budget become a source of continual drama, with legislators deadlocking 18 years out of the last 22. There has been chronic division in the last ten. We are a long way from the consensus that built the Golden State.
The comment thread contains an interesting debate about Proposition 13, the 1978 state constitutional amendment that severely limited the ability of local governments to raise property taxes. That had the effect of destroying CA’s previously excellent K–12 education system and shifting an increasing funding load onto the state government (as local authorities could no longer pay for some essential services).
The second part discusses the origins of the Republican intractability, and the decline/radicalization of the state party. (Essentially, the state Republican party has grown smaller and more racist and ideologically opposed to taxes and social services. This has become a mutually reinforcing cycle.)
To absorb the lessons that California provides, we first must understand that California was once, not so long ago, a Republican stronghold. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the tax revolt all came from here. There were eighteen governors of California in the twentieth century, and fourteen were Republicans. California saw 25 presidential contests between 1896 and 1996, and Republicans won 15 of them, including every presidential race between 1952 and 1988 except for 1964 (the year almost every state went for Lyndon Johnson).
California had a powerful, even dominant Republican Party just twenty years ago. What happened?
The watershed year that ended GOP fortunes was 1994, but the stage was actually set four years earlier, in 1990. That was the year a Republican, Pete Wilson, handily defeated Dianne Feinstein for the governorship. A so-called “moderate” Republican, Wilson took a page from a predecessor, Ronald Reagan, to sign on to what was then the biggest tax increase in California history to balance a budget reeling from the decline of defense spending at the end of the Cold War.
Indeed, the state’s condition was dire. The nation remembers the recession of the early 1990s as a mild one, but in California it was the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Huge defense companies such as General Dynamics, Raytheon and others laid off hundreds of thousands of engineers and other white collar workers. Housing values fell far from their 1980s peak, and many new homeowners soon held mortgages greater than their property values. The poor endured steep service cuts and high unemployment. In 1992, in the aftermath of the verdict exonerating the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King, the city of Los Angeles exploded in the biggest civil insurrection since the Civil War.
So as 1994 approached, Wilson’s re-election was in trouble. His tax increase had balanced the budget, but Republicans were furious at their own governor for agreeing to it, and the economy seemed stuck in a death spiral. Wilson was a Marine Corps veteran with a “law and order” reputation, and the 1992 riots seemed symptomatic of his failing administration. His poll numbers were atrocious, with some surveys putting him twenty points behind the Democratic nominee, state treasurer Kathleen Brown (daughter and sister, respectively of Pat and Jerry Brown, the state’s most famous Democratic governors).
Perhaps it is not surprising that the state which produced the first two presidential candidates to ride the Southern Strategy to victory (Nixon and Reagan) would now produce a governor who created the southern border strategy. The social context for this maneuver was the state’s rapidly expanding Latino population. In 1960, most of California’s immigrants were from Canada or Europe, and the number one immigrant language was English. Even as late as 1970, California was less than 12% Hispanic. But upheaval in Mexico’s economy and particularly the collapse of the peso in 1982 drove millions of immigrants north, where legally and illegally they crossed into the U.S. By 1990, California’s population was 25% Hispanic. The large number of Mexican immigrants helped insure that by about 1994, roughly one in three of all foreign born people in the U.S. lived in southern California – - and the largest proportion of these was Mexican.
California’s racial animosities often flare in bad times. The Panic of 1873 occasioned anti-Chinese riots so vast that authorities worried about a revolution. The Great Depression fueled fierce anti-Okie and anti-Mexican political policies and vigilantism. The recession of the early ‘90s was about to produce a virulent anti-Mexican hysteria – -and Pete Wilson would turn it to his advantage.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, demographic trends (i.e. the growth of a large Hispanic population that felt antagonized by Republican race–baiting) would turn against them within a decade. Essentially barred from power, there was no reason for Republicans not to take a hard right turn.
After 2003, in other states, as immigration from Mexico and elsewhere has reached new heights, national Republicans have mostly failed to heed the lessons of California history. (For that matter, so have California Republicans.) The anti-immigrant vitriol of the 2006 congressional elections could have been borrowed from Pete Wilson’s playbook. By the election of 2008, many leading Republicans were channeling Wilson’s campaign.
The results have been utterly predictable. Last fall, with critical margins from newly energized and many newly-registered Latinos, Democrats swamped Republicans in once reliable southwestern bastions like Nevada and Colorado. Back in the state where it all began, Republicans have not won a presidential election since 1988. In 2008, Barack Obama won California by margins not seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.
Today, the Republican Party in California lags far behind in registrations and in elected officers. The only strategy of their legislative delegation is to deny Democrats the supermajority they need to determine budgets and taxes. Party prospects have seldom looked dimmer.
...
In California, Republican self-destruction has not empowered Democrats as much as you might think. By some measures, since 1994 California has become less progressive, not more. The supermajority requirements for tax increases have taken a terrible toll. Elementary school funding has not improved. State funding for higher education takes up a smaller proportion of the budget than it did in 1994 (when it was already on a downward curve). The Democratic coalition of Latinos, Anglos, and African-Americans is often testy, and its fault lines helped bring on the recall of 2003 – as we shall see in a future post. With minority Republicans blocking any tax increase, Democrats are girding themselves to slash state aid to the poor, medical care for children, higher education, state parks, and a host of other services. So the political structure of the Golden State continues to rattle and shake, and it’s impossible to tell if these are aftershocks or the precursors of the Big One headed our way.
The current crisis has made clear the need for a new progressive agenda. It is not a crisis in which banks are bankrupt but average citizens are untouched. Rather, it is a crisis in which many citizens are overworked, underpaid, and deep in debt. Any durable solution will require the crisis on Main Street to be addressed first – meaning affordable and universal health care, better social welfare, cheaper and more equitable education, and renewed protection of workers. But that agenda will require legislative will. Warren argues that the California deadlock, in which one party is shrinking, increasingly deranged, and blocking progressive change, will soon spill over to the rest of the nation.
So, whatever the solutions to California’s problems, rest assured those problems are coming soon to a theater near you, because unlike any other place, the Golden State is where the future is now. In a sense, California is the un-Las Vegas. What happens here does not stay here, it goes global. The growth of independent political voters? Auto emission regulations? The tax revolt and modern conservatism? We saw them all first in LA and San Francisco. Watts erupted in flames before any other American ghetto in the 1960s. Harvey Milk led the charge for gay rights on our televisions first. The tech boom was here first. And so was the bust.
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