Californians are sinking themselves
An inflexible right wing is allowing the Golden State to drown in
debt. But it's not alone

By Gary Kamiya

Jul. 02, 2009 |

The world's eighth-largest economy has just gone belly-up. When
midnight tolled on Tuesday night with legislators and Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger still deadlocked over how to resolve the state's
staggering $24 billion budget shortfall, California became unable to
pay its bills. The state will have to begin issuing IOUs to its
creditors as early as Thursday. It is the worst budget crisis in the
state's modern history.

There is an unreal, almost dreamlike quality about this moment.
Dreadful things are about to happen: Hundreds of thousands of children
will lose their healthcare. Five thousand state workers will be laid
off. Massive cuts will decimate education at every level. Social
services will be slashed. Two hundred and twenty-nine parks, out of a
total of 280, will be shut down. Even some of the state's landmarks
may go on the auction block to raise money.

Yet as their state prepares to go over the cliff, California's
citizens seem weirdly oblivious, or resigned, or numb. Like
inhabitants of a corrupt third-world country who have utterly lost
faith in their government and in politics itself, or ostriches
sticking their heads in the sand, Californians are behaving as if the
whole thing is out of their control. Or even that it isn't happening
at all.

Californians are not directly responsible for the state's budget
debacle. They are not the legislators who are so ideologically
polarized that on Tuesday they could not even agree on an emergency
partial budget fix that would have saved the state $5 billion. But in
a larger sense, Californians are indeed responsible for today's
crisis. The cumulative weight of their decisions, over decades, and
their inability to reach consensus on the fundamental issue of what
government should do and who should pay for it, are squarely
responsible for the historic mess this unruly nation-state finds
itself in today.

It is a truism that California is a national bellwether. From John
Muir's founding of the Sierra Club to Prop. 13, the 1978 tax revolt,
from Mario Savio to Ronald Reagan, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley,
California has time and again proven itself to be a national and
global trendsetter. The least American of places, a piratical
exception to East Coast gentility on the far end of the continent, it
is also the most American of places, with its brilliant, selfish and
wanton extremities mirroring the oldest and still-unresolved
contradictions of the American spirit. As Kevin Starr, dean of
California historians, writes in his superb 2003 book, "California: A
History," California has "long since become one of the prisms through
which the American people, for better or worse, could glimpse their
future." And right now, what they see isn't pretty.

The immediate source of California's financial problems is a lethal
combination of ideology and rules. It is deeply politically divided,
and its governmental mechanisms are completely broken. Bay Area
leftists stare at Orange County conservatives across an unbridgeable
abyss; a large and potent group of anti-government libertarians faces
off against an equally powerful group of pro-tax, proactive government
liberals. If California, like most states, required only a simple
majority to pass its budget, the disagreements between these camps
could be worked out; after all, the Democrats control the Legislature.
But California requires a two-thirds majority, which gives the GOP,
now dominated by anti-government, anti-tax ideologues, veto power over
the process. The result is deadlock.

Compounding this problem is California's notorious initiative process,
which allows voters to bypass the Legislature and place initiatives
directly on the ballot simply by gathering enough signatures. The
initiative process was originally passed by voters in 1911 to
circumvent the power of the oligarchic railroad trusts by restoring
direct democracy. And it still offers citizens a chance to take
control of important issues. But it has gone out of control, abused by
powerful interests who hire people to collect signatures and ram
through bills that no ordinary citizen can be expected to comprehend.
By sidelining elected officials, it achieves the worst of both worlds:
It gives ordinary citizens, who lack requisite expertise,
institutional memory and accountability, too much power, and then
forces legislators to clean up their mess -- except that because of
ideological gridlock and the supermajority requirement, they can't.

A classic example is the 1994 "three strikes" initiative, which
mandated harsh prison sentences for repeat offenders. The bill was
cathartic for citizens who wanted to get tough on crime, but it had
serious budgetary consequences. As a result of the initiative and
other tough crime laws, California's prison population has increased
82 percent over the last 20 years. State institutions now house a
mind-boggling 170,000 prisoners. Corrections costs California $13
billion a year -- a fivefold increase since 1994, and more than the
state spends on higher education. Former Gov. Gray Davis gave the
powerful prison guards union a 30 percent pay raise from 2003 to 2008.

But the most momentous initiative was Prop. 13, which slashed property
taxes. By voting for Prop. 13, while not demanding a reduction in
public services, Californians were in effect saying they wanted to
have it all: low taxes and social services, subsidized public
education, infrastructure and the other things provided by government.

This was, in effect, a mass outbreak of cognitive dissonance, an
up-yours delivered to government with the public's left hand, while
its right hand reached out for Sacramento's largesse. Now, 31 years
later, the bill has finally come due. There is no free lunch. If you
want good roads, parks, decent schools (California's schools, once the
best in the nation, are now among the worst) and adequate social
services, you have to pay for them.

For some reason, Californians have never come to grips with this fact.
Some citizens who voted for Prop. 13 and other anti-tax measures are
hard-line right-wingers who are ideologically opposed to government
and don't care if state programs die. They are the soul mates of the
current Republicans in the Legislature, who see the current crisis as
a golden opportunity to get rid of government programs they have
opposed for years. But they are the minority. Polls show that most
Californians are more centrist. They are not absolutely opposed to
taxes or government programs. They want compromises that work. The
tragedy of California is that its political system no longer speaks
for them. The center has not held. It no longer exists. It is a
self-reinforcing problem: The more the public perceives politicians as
ineffectual, the more it dismisses politics altogether.

As historian Starr points out in his new book, "Golden Dreams:
California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963," this was not always the
case. During what now looks like a Golden Age, moderate Republicans
and Democrats worked together to get things done. Republican Govs.
Goodwin Knight and Earl Warren and Democratic Gov. Pat Brown were
masters of the art of the possible, reaching across the aisle to
hammer out effective legislation. Even Reagan was more pragmatic than
later GOP myth-makers claim. As governor, Reagan pushed through the
largest tax increase in the state's history to pay for government
services. It was during these years, Starr points out, that the
infrastructure that allowed California to grow was built -- an
infrastructure Californians are still living off today.

What happened? Why did the center fail? Why has California, a place
famous for giving birth to cutting-edge ideas that changed the world,
proved humiliatingly unable to manage its own affairs? Why can't
California do politics as well as it does technology, biotech, movies,
music and social justice movements?

Beyond the state's dysfunctional system, the short answer is the rise
of the hard-right GOP. Pushed far to the right by ideologues like Newt
Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and their ilk, California
Republican lawmakers have staked out an absolutist line against taxes
that makes governance nearly impossible. Lawmakers who believe and act
on Reagan's famous line that "government is not the solution to our
problems, government is the problem," are walking oxymorons. Why
expect anti-government Republican legislators to resolve a budget
crisis when that crisis will result in their goal: the destruction of
government? The floundering Governator may not be an extremist, but he
remains in thrall to the members of his party who are.

But Californians themselves, of all political stripes -- or, more
likely and significantly, none -- also are responsible. The fact
remains that self-centered California has yet to come to terms with
what it is. This is a state that was built with government programs,
financed by massive federal military and aerospace spending and state
funding of local projects, and yet still has not decided what it
thinks about the New Deal, or government itself. Of course, those
opposed to government tend to be on the right. But the fact that many
leftists, chasing the chimera of perfection, disdain the world of
practical politics is also damaging.

Will California be able to pull itself out of its current hole?
Certainly it has done so in the past. Its history is nothing if not a
tale of reversals and unexpected triumphs. It will no doubt muddle
through. But in the long run, to overcome its structural problems, it
must transform some of its most cherished values. Without abandoning
its individualism, utopianism and radicalism, it must learn how to use
them in the world -- with all the compromises that requires. Like an
aging starlet, the Golden State is clinging desperately to its
glorious youth. But it is past time for it to grow up.