California keeps lid on wedge issues
Golden State avoids being culture war battleground
California, have you noticed? Across much of the country, the culture wars have cranked up to broil over a trio of issues whipping up political tensions in the red states of post-President Trump America.
From school board meetings to statehouses, emotions are running high over conservativeled efforts to make it tougher to vote, restrict transgender athletes and condemn the teaching of the legacy of racism in our schools.
Democratic legislators fled the Lone Star State this past week to block their GOP counterparts from making Texas one of more than a dozen states that have enacted new voting restrictions this year. More than 35 states also are considering bills to limit the rights of transgender people, according to the group Freedom for All Americans, which tracks antitransgender legislation.
But the debates have barely registered a blip in large swaths of the deep blue Golden State. So why is that?
“The culture wars are dead in Sacramento,” said Thad Kousser, a UC San Diego political science professor.
More than 5 million Republicans call California home — nearly a quarter of the state’s
voters — and more than the number in Wyoming, South Dakota and South Carolina combined. While there is no lack of partisan fight in the state’s GOP — they’re trying to recall the Democratic governor, after all — the wedge issues fueling a frenzy on cable news are largely absent west of Nevada.
Matt Shupe, Contra Costa County GOP chair, recently sat through a four-hour party committee meeting focused on the recall and 2022 elections and “quality of life” issues like crime and the cost of living.
“Not once did anything within that realm of things pop up,” Shupe said of wedge issues dividing other states. “We’re not even having conversations about the conversations.”
That hasn’t stopped Republican firebrands like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from trying to bring the culture wars to California. But last week, the two were forced to abruptly move their America First rally from Orange County to Riverside when the first venue canceled. And it was canceled again there. Illustrating the GOP divide, Riverside’s Republican Party Chair Don Dix told the Orange County Register: “It’s a sad state of affairs in the Republican Party when a major rally comes to the county and I don’t know anything about it.”
Of course, party leaders — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — are not sitting by idly despite their California roots.
Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, has been talking across the country in recent days as she pushes for federal voting rights legislation. McCarthy, a Bakersfield Republican, this past week met with Trump, who has continued to falsely claim that the presidency was stolen from him through widespread voter fraud. McCarthy also recently blasted critical race theory during a national media appearance.
“Critical race theory goes against everything Martin Luther King has ever told us — don’t judge us by the color of our skin — and now they’re embracing it,” the lawmaker said on the conservative streaming service BlazeTV, a remark that was picked up by national outlets like The Hill but largely overlooked in much of California.
Florida recently moved to bar the teaching of critical race theory, a decadesold set of ideas that began with the notion that the legal system has fueled racial inequality and expanded in some circles to include the concept that racism is baked into policies from housing to health care. Sunshine State Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested without evidence that critical race theory “teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other.”
Over the last several years, California has gone the opposite way, developing an ethnic studies curriculum that asks students to study the ways different systems oppress certain people and how those systems are maintained. But while the issue isn’t sucking up much oxygen in the state Capitol, Kousser said, it’s one that still divides communities, with debates playing out in conservative pockets at the local level at school board meetings and within city councils. Parents in San Diego County, for instance, protested an ethnic studies curriculum recently at a school board meeting.
Republican lawmakers have in dozens of states advanced legislation that would limit transgender students’ ability to participate in school sports. In California, students have been able to participate in school activities according to their gender identity since 2013.
The Golden State is also the home of Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender reality television star and decorated Olympian who is running as a Republican in the recall election. Jenner has said barring transgender athletes in girls sports was fair. But that hasn’t endeared her to Taylor Greene, who accused those backing Jenner in the upcoming recall election of “playing the left’s stupid identity politics game” and also made derogatory comments about Jenner being a “man in a dress.”
Former San Diego City Councilmember Carl DeMaio, a gay Republican, took to Twitter to blast Greene’s attack.
“The conservatives I’ve heard from don’t care that she’s transgender,” DeMaio said in an interview. “It’s 2021. Tell me where you stand on taxes.”
In the fight over voting, conservatives have repeatedly blasted voting by mail, which expanded during the pandemic, as ripe for corruption. But in the Bay Area, local GOP officials have encouraged Republican voters to cast their ballots by mail. And the state has long had policies in place aimed at making it easier for voters to participate in elections, including not requiring ID to vote and allowing same-day registration.
There are still conservative pockets of the Golden State where these conversations are happening, said Mark Martinez, a political science professor at CSU Bakersfield, but they’re not as ubiquitous as in other parts of the country.
“It’s resonating,” he said, noting that critical race theory has been a hot topic on local radio shows in Kern County of late. But, he said, people are still more interested in talking about oil prices or agriculture.
That’s because California has “moved to embrace diversity and that’s largely what we’re seeing people, especially conservatives and far-right extremists, fight back against in other states,” said Samuel Garrett-Pate, a spokesperson for Equality California, which has helped build coalitions and push for rights for LGBTQ people in other states like Nevada.
The tactic “to brand change and positive transformation as these scary bogeymen of the quoteunquote America everyone knows and loves disappearing” isn’t a surprise, he said. “In reality, it’s just the nation progressing the way it was always designed to.”