Essayists call for an America remade in California’s image

Last month, Jack Dorsey, the Twitter chief executive, tweeted out as a “great read” an article series urging national Democrats to seek the kind of final victory they’ve won in California, in which the Republican Party is reduced to a rump under one-party Democratic rule.

Dorsey’s seeming endorsement of the thesis prompted some unhappy conservative reactions, but he was quite right to recommend the series: The California essays, written by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira across several months last fall and winter, offer a useful framework for thinking about one way that our current ideological deadlock might give way to a new political dispensation. Leyden and Teixeira’s theory holds that a coalition of younger voters, socially liberal professionals and minority voters would deliver the Democrats to long-term power. This hasn’t come close to happening nationwide, save in the unusual Great Recession election of 2008; instead Republicans currently enjoy more power than at any moment since the New Deal. But it has happened in California, in a seemingly pretty durable way.

The current Republican advantage, in this argument, is based on an antique policy agenda that has no appeal to rising cohorts; and it’s now linked to an unpopular and erratic president who poisons everything he touches. Unlike in the 1990s, when Clinton Democrats had to imitate Reagan Republicans to succeed, there is nothing in the present GOP worth appropriating or imitating or triangulating toward; instead, mobilization and boldness together can break the Trump Republicans.

I think a lot of this is quite plausible; indeed its plausibility is one reason among many why I thought conservatives should resist the lure of Trump — lest he govern badly, alienate widely and act as a kind of accelerant toward a Californian future.

To begin with, you can’t understand the political transformation of California without understanding how much it has been shaped by a longterm middle class exodus — the out-migration, across years and decades, of the kind of people who in the Trump era tend to vote Republican: the native-born petit-bourgeoisie. This out-migration has been compensated for by in-migration, but the new arrivals are more likely to be either immigrants or well-educated professionals: Since the 1990s new Californians are disproportionately likely to make around $200,000 a year, ex-Californians are disproportionately likely to make around $45,000.

This trend, and the extremity of inequality it has encouraged, is palpable. I can drive through the neighborhoods of Santa Monica where my father grew up, and see the one-story mission-style house where my grandfather raised three kids as a struggling salesman and small-business man. Or rather, I could until recently — because it was finally torn down to make way for the more lavish residences that now squat in what was a middle-class paradise two generations back.

To visit the West Coast, now and always, is to be overwhelmed by its beauty — the blue water and blue skies, the temperate air and the beaches. But to imagine America remade in California’s image is to imagine the state’s social and political order — its upper class/service class/ underclass hierarchy — expanded to landscapes that lack the balm of all that beauty.