California Fights Back. Peter Schrag

a year in additional gas and other vehicle taxes: precisely what Trump promised the nation in his campaign and which he still isn’t close to delivering. In Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and in the influential devices, systems, and designs—in clothes, cars, phones, games, on the web—often emanating from the melding of the two, California is probably the nation’s most powerful cultural influence, and perhaps the world’s, and a driver of technological change as rapid and profound—and for many not educated or trained for it, no doubt, as unsettling—as any in history.

      California’s majority Democrats labeled the state spending plan enacted in June 2017, with its $45 million in taxpayer funding for the legal representation of undocumented immigrants facing deportation, their “protect and persist” budget. “While the $183.2-billion spending outline only rarely veers into direct confrontations with federal policy,” in the words of John Myers of the Los Angeles Times, probably the most insightful California political reporter today, “legislative leaders nonetheless see it as a national example—an alternative view on the role of government.” Indeed, the entire 2017 legislative session, from January to September, was laced with anti-Trump bills, budget items, resolutions, and rhetoric, among them an education grant program linking the wartime internment of Japanese Americans to Trump’s travel ban on “immigrants and refugees from Muslim-major ity countries.” California, the Democratic leaders in the legislature declared within a day of Trump’s election, would now be “the keeper of the nation’s future.” In the view of optimists like the late California historian Kevin Starr, of course, it always had been.

      Two decades after the state voted for Proposition 187, 85 percent of Californians, including 65 percent of California Republicans, now tell the pollsters that if undocumented immigrants meet certain conditions they should be allowed to stay legally and become citizens. In 2016, Hillary Clinton, carrying even such long-time GOP strongholds as Orange County, beat Trump in California by more than four million votes, with a margin of 61–39, greater than any other state’s. Without them, she would have lost the nationwide popular vote. California, in effect, voted one way while the rest of the nation voted another way. On the same day, with Proposition 58, the voters repealed the barriers to bilingual education they’d voted for in 1998.

      Because of the state’s diversity and mixed economy, most Californians now understand intuitively that their southern border, with its thousands of binational institutions and activities—in commerce, in water management and energy resources, in health, in environmental policy, in education, and with its tens of thousands of cross border families—is no longer a line that can be marked by a “wall,” but a region. Every day in this bilingual, bicultural region, uncounted thousands cross the border to attend American schools. Hundreds of thousands cross to work, shop, get medical care, for entertainment, or to visit. Goods worth tens of millions cross daily in both directions. Talk about building a “wall” along that border is a bit like King Canute trying to stop the waves. In a survey conducted in 2017, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), found that “solid majorities” of all California ethnic groups (82 percent of Latinos and African Americans; 60 percent of non-Hispanic whites; 72 percent of Asians) oppose Trump’s wall.

      Governor Pete Wilson was reelected in the anti-immigrant wave of 1994. But with the exception of the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the bizarre recall in 2003 of Governor Gray Davis, a man who was deeply disliked even in his own party and politically battered by the industry-manipulated electricity crisis of 2000–2001, California has elected no Republican to a major state office since Schwarzenegger’s reelection in 2006. In 2017, both houses of the legislature had two-to-one Democratic supermajorities. All the constitutional officers, from governor and attorney general to insurance commissioner and state school superintendent, are Democrats. Both U.S. senators are Democrats.

      And while both parties have declined in registration, the Republicans, thanks to Wilson’s immigrant bashing, and to the party’s decades-long inhospitality to women and ethnic minorities, have lost far more voters to other parties, or to “decline to state,” than the Democrats. In 1992, 39 percent of the state’s voters called themselves Republicans. By 2016, that number had declined to 26 percent. California’s delegation in the House is now composed of thirty-nine Democrats and fourteen Republicans. Of those Republicans, all of whom voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, as many as six or seven could lose their seats in 2018. And that Democratic edge comes without partisan gerrymandering. In California, a nonpartisan reapportionment commission now draws both legislative and congressional districts.

      II

      THE PARADIGMATIC TURNAROUND MOMENT, ironically, came in 2005 under the Republican who sometimes called himself “the governator.” There was no way to predict at the time that a dozen years later Arnold Schwarzenegger would taunt Trump as sharply as he taunted Democrats in his first years as California’s governor. But his political conversion came long before, and represents a little-recognized watershed event.

      With one major exception—that unlike Trump, Schwarzenegger (almost literally) had made himself, without help from his father’s millions—Schwarzenegger in many ways was very much like Trump. A bodybuilder and movie actor, he was a narcissistic show business celebrity who had never held public office before; a misogynist with a trail of sexual harassment and groping accusations behind him (he later grudgingly apologized for his behavior on those “rowdy movie sets”); and a man who, in that pretweet era, had a mouth sometimes as much out of control as Trump’s would be a dozen years later: In his first years in Sacramento, he called the Democrats “girlie men.” He referred to the state attorney general, the treasurer, and state superintendent of schools, all Democrats who opposed his measures, as the “Three Stooges.” He labeled public-sector workers, members of powerful unions—nurses, cops, firefighters, teachers—“special interests.” He echoed Grover Norquist, the nation’s most vociferous anti-taxer: “We don’t want to feed the monster (of public spending),” he told the editorial board of the Sacramento Bee. “We want to feed the private sector and starve the public sector.” He drove his gas-guzzling Hummer in defiance of all the environmentalists’ calls for conservation. He loudly proclaimed his intention to “blow up the boxes” of the government bureaucracy and “clean house.”

      Unlike Trump, he began his first term with high public approval ratings, but in less than two years they sank from nearly 70 percent to 40 percent. And as things turned sour, he took a cue from his predecessor Pete Wilson’s immigrant bashing just a decade before. He called for closing the border and endorsed the work of the minuteman group of vigilantes who were patrolling it.