Who cares about Michael Jackson?

The worst part about celebrity deaths is that they tend to dominate our attention, to the exclusion of more important matters. So the Iran election turmoil gets pushed off the front page by a bleached man with no nose.

[Nothing much against Michael Jackson, who was more sick than monstrous. He was a bizarre human being; his bad childhood had rendered him unstable and his massive wealth and fame had insulated him from having to seek therapy. Look at the catalogs from this year's auction of his Neverland accoutrements. They describe a balloon, free-floating from reality.]

One death will even push another off the front page if it belonged to a more famous celebrity. Jackson bumps aside Farrah Fawcett. And that's to say nothing of the ordinary folks! Tiny items in an obituary page that is probably never viewed.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that I read this on Saturday: Giovanni Arrighi died last week.

The department of Sociology at SUNY-Binghamton was the centre for world systems studies in the 1980s and 1990s, though fading when I reached there. Giovanni Arrighi, along with Immanuel Wallerstein, Terence Hopkins, Dale Tomich, Caglar Keydar, others from the global North, and a host of intellectuals who came yearly to Binghamton from the global South, had built the graduate program, combining what may be called orthodox Marxist ideas with historical approaches to capitalism more familiar in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

There was plenty of heated debate. How did the Atlantic slave trade fit into the development of world capitalism? What about formal colonialism, and countries of largely peasant-producers? Does national development have to emulate development in Western Europe in order to be called 'capitalism'?
...
[Arrighi] went on to pose larger questions about development and capitalism - "how is it that world wealth and power are concentrated in a handful of countries" - a question still relevant today. His major work, The Long Twentieth Century (1994), was the answer he offered, having worked on the question for some 15 years, primarily in Binghamton. The dedication in the book is worth noting, as it demonstrates the intimate relation Arrighi had to his intellectual inquiries:

'Between conceiving a book like this and actually writing it, there is a gulf that I would never have bridged were it not for the exceptional community of graduate students with whom I have been fortunate to work during my fifteen years at SUNY-Binghamton. Knowingly or unknowingly, the members of this community have provided me with most of the questions and many of the answers that constitute the substance of this work. Collectively, they are the giant on whose shoulders I have travelled. And to them the book is rightfully dedicated.'

Arrighi's most famous work, The Long Twentieth Century, has been sitting on my metaphorical bookshelf for two or three years at this point. I've read bits and pieces and references, and drawn on his ideas (especially that of transitions from one world-system to another through episodes of financial crisis, which seems pertinent these days). Last year I started in on it, got sidetracked, and had to return it to the library. Three weeks ago, I bought a copy from Moe's. It's got competition: Jameson, Foucault, Dostoyevsky, Judt, Keynes, Derrida, Lefebvre - but it's moving to the top.

In a recent interview with David Harvey, Arrighi spoke of the need for a new world-system, a "commonwealth of civilizations living on equal terms with each other, in a shared respect for the earth and its natural resources." Harvey asked if this could be described as socialism, to which Arrighi responded:

...unfortunately, socialism has been too much identified with state control of the economy. I never thought that was a good idea. I come from a country where the state is despised and in many ways distrusted. The identification of socialism with the state creates big problems. So, if this world-system was going to be called socialist, it would need to be redefined in terms of a mutual respect between humans and a collective respect for nature. But this may have to be organized through state-regulated market exchanges, so as to empower labour and disempower capital in Smithian fashion, rather than through state ownership and control of the means of production. The problem with the term socialism is that it’s been abused in many different ways, and therefore also discredited. If you ask me what would be a better term, I’ve no idea—I think we should look for one. You are very good at finding new expressions, so you should come up with some suggestions.

I tend to think of that last "you" in a broad sense, directed towards the reader rather than Arrighi's interlocutor.

Reflecting upon this point: One of the advantages/drawbacks of my education to date is that it's been long on whats and whys, and short on hows. I haven't exactly minded - I'm no pragmatist, and I prefer solid theoretical grounds to rushing off half-baked.

But I'm short on praxis. One of the benefits of my current job in an economic policy agency is that it's long on the whats and hows. In short, a theory of how the world works is no good if it can't be put into action. (It tends to be the case that theory gets lost entirely, but that's a story for another time.)

As a result of this, I've become more attentive to the "how" questions. It's one thing to be say that the world should be changed. (And it needs to be.) It's another to say what it should change into - let alone to pursue that. Filling out the idea of a better world is a task for our times.

And yes, I am aware of the difficulties involved in any agenda-based politics. Compromises - some fatal to the enterprise's principles - are inevitable. And there is a certain slippage from iconoclastic utopianism - the humanist kind, that affirms that a better world is possible without wrapping actual people around the proposed details - to blueprint utopianism - the kind espoused by Mao and Milton Friedman, in which the principles for a better world are run roughshod over human corpses.

Anyway, RIP Giovanni Arrighi. You should pick up something he's written - perhaps his last book, Adam Smith in Beijing, which discussed China's rise and the possible new world-systems that might result. And maybe think about the sort of world system you want.

Solace

Winter in Wellington; today is the shortest day of the year. I wake up when it’s dar, and return home after the sun has gone down. But things are getting better. The days get longer from here to December.

Work and irregularity

I have what is likely to be an increasingly unusual job. Not because the job itself is strange - although it has its odd points - or because the conditions of work - the hours, the length of contract, the pay - is irregular. Ironically, the regularity of the job will make it irregular.

When we discuss jobs, we are generally talking about this: A full-time, permanent job with regular hours, regular pay, and defined benefits. A job like this is entered into by contract between employer and employee. It's dependable and above-the-board.

It's also becoming much less common, especially for young people. If you're my age, you've probably seen this: "working" often means temporary jobs or internships, juggling several part-time jobs, or frequently swapping jobs (or being fired early). It often means relying on your parents' health coverage (or going without), not saving much (let alone paying into a pension fund or retirement account), and occasionally subsisting on debt. We often do this sort of thing in the expectation that we are "gaining experience" or "building our resumes" - but towards what? The unspoken assumption is that a regular job is waiting for those who get through this thicket of irregularity.

That may not be a realistic example for increasing numbers of us. Two examples from the periphery and the center:

In many Third World countries, an increasing proportion of the population works in the informal or grey economy, the irregular sector. They are beyond the reach of employment law, trade unions, and many social protections. Half to three-quarters of non-agricultural employment in developing countries is irregular. (See for some more details.) It's tenuous work, done in marginal conditions, and it doesn't pay well. Irregular jobs are associated with other legal irregularities - for example, squatting and slum dwelling. (More on that later.)

Japan spent the 1990s in the grips of a "slo-mo depression" caused by a property boom and debt expansion followed by a collapse and a decade of waffling about how to deal with effectively insolvent banks. (Sound familiar? According to Paul Krugman it may soon.) Before this, Japan had a model of employment for life - workers would ally themselves with a company, and in return it would provide them with stability even in retirement. That model broke in the 1990s, but mass layoffs still didn't follow. Instead, the older generations largely kept their jobs, and many young workers ended up effectively trapped within endless "temp" jobs - with little of the advancement possibility or stability of the old system.

If this model of work is to be the future - and I believe that it is - what will it mean for us? The day-to-day implications are probably fairly clear - after all, precarious situations are no good for people, even if they're window-dressed as "flexibility". (I owe this distinction to some Argentine friends, who commented that the "flexibilizacion" of their economy in the 1990s was more accurately called a "precarizacion") Beyond that, I think that it should force us to fundamentally reconsider two things: the legal framework of employment, and the means for pursuing greater equality.

First, equality. A few weeks back, I read The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson. It's a remarkable book - it collects and analyzes various health and social statistics from rich countries over a long period, and concludes that countries with higher inequality experience more crime, worse health, less social mobility, and less trust and social cohesion. More strikingly, inequality touches everybody in society, not just the poor.

The authors comment that if social conditions are making people unhappy, unwell, untrusting, and, frequently, untrustworthy, the solution is not "mass psychotherapy" designed to acclimatize the individual to those conditions. Instead, inequality should be reduced to make society more livable.

There are, of course, many policies that have led to low inequality. Some countries (and US states) have high levels of taxes and transfer payments; others have relatively equal pretax income due to more profit-sharing or stronger unions. The authors recommend one in particular: Greater employee participation in ownership and management of their business.

As state-run socialism failed in most respects, and the current version of capitalism resembles an abusive spouse - financial markets have periodic liquidity binges and crashes, then take it out on other people - a true "Third Way" is needed. As inequality increases over the last 3 decades have been tied (especially in the US) to stagnating hourly wages combined with upwardly spiraling pay for CEOs and top management, this would be a logical first step towards mitigating inequality. But it's not an unproblematic step.

Simply put, employee ownership-and-operation will only work on a grand scale if stable long-term employment is the norm. It can work locally, in special situations - co-ops are actually fairly widespread in the US, but you wouldn't know if from reading the financial press. But under such a scheme, what would happen to temp workers? Would they get a share of the business for the three months or a year they worked there? And if so, how would they transfer it upon leaving? (Selling company shares or trading them on open markets would presumably be disallowed, as that would tend to erode employee ownership.)

This seems to be the appropriate point to mention an advantage to flexible/precarious work: It makes the individual more mobile. If you've got a temp job, you can pick up and leave after a few months - and spend the money backpacking Europe or moving to the city of your dreams. You can swap jobs often, making it easy to get out of a bad one. (Of course, individual workers tend to have less power in such a workforce - they are battered by recessions and have little power to negotiate for wages.)

Employee ownership may not make sense under the common irregular working conditions. Furthermore, without an easy way to transfer ownership rights or retain them when moving between jobs, many people might experience it as a barrier to mobility. As a recommendation, it relies on an outdated idea of work that dates from what we might call the "Fordist" period from 1945 to the 1970s, in which capitalism relied on stable employment and consistent institutional settings. The world has changed since then, and capitalist enterprise now thrives on irregularity, eclectic production, and geographically and temporally fragmented value chains - what David Harvey calls "flexible accumulation".

Second, legality. French jurist Alain Supiot, the author of a 1999 report entitled Beyond Employment, echoed Pickett and Wilkinson's point above, noting that:

European institutions did not take up the simple idea [the report] embodied: that there is no wealth other than human beings, and that an economy which ill-treats them has no future. The new conceptual frameworks we outlined with regard to professional status or to ‘social drawing rights’ all flowed from this basic idea. But of course this ran directly counter to the credo that holds sway in Brussels, according to which the problem is not that of adapting the economy to the needs of human beings, but rather the reverse—adapting human beings to the needs of markets, and especially to the needs of financial markets, which supposedly create harmony by making self-interest the basis for all human activity. ["Possible Europes", NLR 57]

Supiot notes that existing legal structures - and derivatives of them such as the employee ownership model - increasingly fail to respond to social realities. Consider unemployment insurance and health care in the US - the rules were thought up in the "Fordist" period (and modified by the neoliberals, of course). You can collect unemployment for a limited period if you are fired without cause from a permanent, full-time job. But you're not eligible if a temp contract runs out and you can't find more work. No less jobless, of course, but you slip through the cracks. Similarly, healthcare is tied to certain types of permanent jobs.

Supiot advocates an overhaul of employment law designed to preserve the flexibility of the new system while not allowing individuals to go unprotected due to the irregularity of their work. The new system would be founded on the principles of " freedom versus flexibility, capability versus employability, labour-force membership status versus human capital."

In Beyond Employment our response was to propose that this new pact—unlike its predecessor—be founded on the freedom and responsibility of human beings, not on their subordination or their ‘programming’. We emphasized the idea of a ‘labour-force membership status’ which would allow people to exercise real freedom of choice throughout their lives: to move from one work situation to another and to reconcile their personal with their professional life. Approaching the question in these terms led to a fresh reading of the old concept of ‘juridical capacity’, expanded to include individual and collective capabilities.

... In one case, the starting point is human creativity, and there follows an attempt to construct a system of laws and an economy that will allow people to express themselves and satisfy their needs; in the other, the starting point is the supposed infallibility of the market, and the aim is to provide businesses with a human ‘resource’ that will respond to their needs. ["Possible Europes", NLR 57]

Accomplishing this will be partly a work of rebuilding old protections (e.g. minimum wages that keep pace with inflation, the 40-hour work-week) and partly of designing new ones. The process starts by expanding the definition of work beyond permanent, full-time employment with contractual benefits - to encompass the irregular and temporary. That in turn allows us to recognize that (in the US for example), we need healthcare that doesn't depend upon employment status, and some form of minimum income independent of our situation. More widely accessible education is also absolutely necessary.

It's difficult enough to do that in the rich countries, of course. In the OECD, we have abundant wealth, and grapple over its distribution. The Third World, by contrast, must allocate in conditions of poverty. As I alluded to earlier, the problems of irregular work are much more savage in the global South. And employment is central to a burgeoning social problem - slum growth. Cities are growing rapidly in the Third World - the biggest construction boom of the last decade may have been in shantytowns, not American exurbs.

In brief, we can think of slums in terms of irregularity: They happen when a large mass of people is displaced from its traditional means of subsistence and social networks in the country, and move to the city where they cannot find stable, well-paying work. They are comprised of (or comprise) an irregular space that does not conform to our expectations of a planned city. Materials and street plans are irregular. And they break traditional paradigms of war and insurgency, forcing invading armies into asymmetric or irregular battles. (Israel's army turned at one point to postmodern theory to try to come to terms with Palestine's subterranean mazes.) Irregular work, irregular space, irregular war.

Kick out the jams!

Tonight, I discovered three guys loudly playing the MC5 inside the gym of the local elementary school. Poked my head in to talk to them. It was awesome.

The bar refused to give us a giant Jenga set, so that was kind of a disappointment.

Nipple mannequins

Womens' fashion is not tremendously advanced in New Zealand (or Wellington at least). Most often, something will have gone catastrophically wrong with an outfit in between concept and realization - usually, this takes the form of a hideous top.

I wonder if this has something to do with the fact that window displays are genuinely awful. There's one shop across from one of our bus stops that has a new laughably bad clothing selection every week. Despite the recession, it's still in business. Do people look at these displays and think, "Huh. Well, if that's what's in style right now..."

The mannequins themselves may foster this collective delusion. They're usually headless, smooth and white, of course, but they all seem to have pert breasts with well-defined nipples. Nipples! On a mannequin! It's almost as though they had decided to install penises on the male mannequins - you know, for realism in pants fitting. (I have seen one headless male specimen modeling spandex with a dildo fitted down his leg - but that was more of an aesthetic choice.)

It's really distracting, is what I'm trying to say. It's not as though I haven't seen my share of nipples - it's more that their existence perplexes me.

So I was walking through the CBD today, minding my business and watching the shop-fronts. Then, going by another one of these poor-taste womens'-clothes shops, I saw two hands slide past the waist of the middle mannequin and pull its shirt up and over, revealing two perfectly white, perky breasts tipped by the usual bewildering nipples.

It was an alarming sight - until I realized that the mannequin itself wasn't moving.

Feet on the ground again

Q: How does it take four and a half hours to fly from Auckland to Wellington?

A: Well, it's normally a one-hour flight, with some turbulence and strong winds at the Wellington airport, but if you want some variety try this: Board plane in Auckland, fly to Wellington, notice heavy fog covering the runway. Try to land, three times. Fly back to Auckland. Read forecast suggesting that the weather will improve. Change crews, and let the more pessimistic passengers off the plane. Fly back down to Wellington. Land.

To the credit of Air New Zealand's staff, they did a good job keeping a cool head throughout the ordeal. I muttered, swore beneath my breath (not that it would have mattered, as I was sitting next to a deaf woman), finished watching V for Vendetta, finished reading another Nicholas Mosley novel, decided that Michel Foucault became really tedious after a certain point, realized that I should have had a shower while I could, and played approximately 300 games of solitaire on my iPod.

My mood lifted upon arrival. I'm back without Anne, unfortunately, and Harry and his girlfriend are staying in my tiny flat, but I'm weirdly positive about being here. Even if it is on the wrong side of the world from her. Riding through the small city - past the hillside lights reflected off Evans Bay, careening around corners on the one-and-a-half-lane roads, listening to the Talking Heads, up the hills and explaining the topography to Harry's girlfriend - I know that I'm home for now.

There's good points, some bad points.
Oh it all works out, you know I'm a little freaked out.
Find a city, find myself a city to live in.
I will find a city, find myself a city to live in.
-Talking Heads, "Cities"

Bulldozing America

Hopefully Flint, Michigan will be the future of American urban planning. Flint epitomizes rustbelt decay: it was the former home to GM and has shrunk to half its former size since the 1970s. Most recently, it has been demolishing itself, as the city buys up empty or blighted properties on the cheap and resells them or tears them down to create parkland. From the Telegraph (UK) article:

Local politicians believe [Flint] must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

...

Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that "big is good" and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

He said: "The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there's an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they're shrinking, they're failing."

But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

If the city didn't downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

Flint's recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

The local authority has restored the city's attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

While Flint, like its fellow decaying rust-belt towns, is "pruning" itself due to a loss of heavy industry (to the Sunbelt and then to Asia) rather than a shortage of gasoline, we can expect more Flints as the automobile continues its decline. America has over-sprawled. As the car culture runs out of gas, further-flung suburbs will become unsustainable. People will be unable to live in places without easily-accessible shops, schools, and workplaces and efficient public transportation. And the suburbs that don't work will have to be reengineered or bulldozed.

In this context, it's an extremely good thing that the Obama administration is taking the Flint plan national:

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

...

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

With luck, we may see Flint come to California before too much longer.

In other news: Back in New Zealand.

Limits to California

I am buzzing with ideas. I want to go to graduate school. That’s what I’d do with that billion dollars. As I don’t have that sort of money, it would be cheapest to do so in California, preferably at UC Berkeley.

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.

California dreaming

Back in CA for a week and a half. It feels strange, phantasmagoric. As though I have traveled back in time.