Politics in Postwar
California
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| Political Culture and Politics in Postwar California |
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What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the side-streets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garda Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home in our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
—Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” from Reality Sandwiches. Reprinted by permission.
The term political culture describes shared beliefs, values, and attitudes about how government should function. Researchers have sought to explain how political culture accounts for variations in the behavior of individuals and institutions, as well as the public policies of states and nations. American political culture emphasizes the values of classical liberalism, including individualism, freedom, equality, democracy, and capitalism. But these values often collide, as they did in the California tax revolt of the 1970s. Debates over public spending often mask conflict over more fundamental values.
Contemporary ideologies such as liberalism and conservatism represent popular belief systems that emphasize competing values within the same political culture.1 They offer a prescription for the appropriate role of government in society. Liberals tend to place more of an emphasis on equality, tolerance, and aid to the disadvantaged, for example, while conservatives tend to emphasize order, economic growth, and preserving what they perceive as “traditional values.” Even when accounting for variations in the variables that explain voting patterns such as race, income, education and religion, Californians are more likely to hold liberal views on social issues than residents of other states.2
Individualism is a central tenet of California’s political culture. Since statehood, California history has been written by an eclectic cast that includes frontier explorers and exploiters, opportunity-seeking migrants, and progressive reformers with a strong belief in the active, virtuous citizen of the polis. This unique history has produced a political culture that encourages policy innovation by politicians, mistrust of large traditional organizations such as political parties and big business, and a strong belief in direct democracy. The political successes—and failures—of state government between the 1940s and 1990s reflect California’s iconoclastic, and often conflicted, political culture.
After World War II California’s political culture was transformed as the two major parties adapted to changing conditions. Rapid growth and change upset the balance of state politics, invigorating the Democratic party and ending the dominance by moderate Republicans such as Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight. In the late 1950s, California’s post-Progressive, nonpartisan politics gave way to the more competitive, ideologically charged politics of two-party rivalry.
California experienced unprecedented growth in the postwar period. The promise of prosperity attracted migrants from all over the country and the world. Here they found warmer climes, inexpensive housing, and well-paying jobs in a booming economy, particularly in the Cold War defense and aerospace industries. By 1962 California had become the most populous state in the nation. During this period, increasing ideological polarization of the parties upset the equilibrium in state politics that had rested on a consensus on several bipartisan issues, including government efficiency, weak parties, citizen participation, and popular New Deal social programs. Bipartisan support was instrumental to the success of Republican Governors Warren and Knight, since Democrats held a substantial voter registration edge from the time of the Great Depression. The Republican party had dominated state government for most of the century, from the Progressive Era until 1957. During this time, Republicans had the winning edge in all but one election for governor. They also controlled both houses of the legislature, except for a brief period in the 1930s when Democrats controlled the assembly.
One factor that impeded the Democrats’ success was cross-filing, a reform mechanism left over from the Progressives. Cross-filing was based on the logic that voters of California should have the right to elect the most qualified individual for an office and not be swayed by the candidate’s party label. A single ballot was distributed in California primaries, allowing candidates from one party to seek the nomination of another party. Under this confusing system, Democrats could run as Republicans and vice versa, and nominations were consequently won on the basis of a candidate’s ability to spend on his or her campaign. This sometimes had odd results. In 1952, for example, Republican Senator William Knowland was the nominee of both the Republican and Democratic parties.3
Although registration numbers favored the Democrats, party loyalty was weak. It was a common strategy for Republican candidates to appeal to Democratic voters. The system of cross-filing was modified by a 1952 statewide initiative, requiring candidates to list their party affiliation on the ballot. A sunset provision ended cross-filing altogether in 1959.4
Republican Governor Earl Warren was elected in 1942, carried into office by his commitments to restoring the nonpartisan spirit of the Progressive tradition and reforming state government. Warren was less conservative than his Republican predecessors, bringing to Sacramento what seemed like a Democratic agenda (although it could be called a “nonpartisan” agenda), including such statutory priorities as unemployment insurance, better pensions, and increased health insurance coverage. Thus, Warren had established himself as a moderate-to-liberal executive even before he was tapped by President Eisenhower to join the Supreme Court. As Chief Justice, Warren was criticized by some conservatives for controversial decisions in cases ranging from school desegregation, to school prayer, to the rights of the accused.
Eisenhower’s appointment of Warren more than midway through his third term as governor left the incumbent lieutenant governor, Republican Goodwin Knight, to assume the governorship. Knight governed as a moderate, supporting legislation popular with labor and other Democratic constituencies, while keeping much of Warren’s agenda alive. He successfully preserved his predecessor’s bipartisan electoral base, winning election in 1954 in his own right. With increasing party polarization, however, Democrats turned out in force at the next election to send Democratic state Attorney General Edmund G. “Pat” Brown to the governor’s office.5
The 1958 election was a turning point in California’s political history. Pat Brown’s victory and Democratic majorities in the legislature began an era of Democratic dominance of state politics. The professionalization of the state legislature bolstered the party by bringing in candidates with working- and middle-class backgrounds, who would never have run as candidates in a part-time, or “amateur,” legislature that favored wealthy candidates and those with outside sources of income. The effect of this reform was to help Democrats attract better candidates and retain good legislators by making politics a practical career alternative.
This era was marked by an ideological struggle between two competing strains of liberalism. Long excluded from governing, California’s liberals now saw an opportunity to fulfill the promises of the New Deal, which they felt had been compromised by a generation of Republican leadership. However, conditions had changed since the 1930s, and there was little agreement on exactly how the New Deal should be applied in the more prosperous—and populous—California of the 1950s and 1960s.
The intraparty tension over competing visions of the proper role of government was personified by the political rivalry between Brown and the assembly’s powerful speaker, Jesse M. Unruh.6 Brown represented the traditional view of liberalism in California: the need for an activist government to invest in the state’s future through large-scale capital projects and social programs. Unruh, on the other hand, was a pragmatist concerned with the future of the Democratic party in a post-New Deal world. Brown’s ideology was an “emotive,” or “soft” liberalism, strongly committed to advancing the agenda of the New Deal, while Unruh represented more of a “rational,” or “hard” liberalism designed to sustain the party’s majority by adapting the New Deal agenda to contend with changing realities.7
Pat Brown may best be remembered as the “master builder” of modern California. He pushed for a large bond measure funding the construction of the State Water Project to bring Northern California water to the aqueducts of the Central Valley and to the cities and suburbs of Southern California. The measure passed by a slim margin. The Brown administration wrote the “Master Plan for Higher Education,” expanding college admissions to all qualified children of California residents, as well as expanding the physical infrastructure of the entire system by building more accessible regional campuses for the University of California and the California State University systems. As the process of suburbanization took hold, Brown oversaw the transfer of federal transportation dollars to the state, aiding in the construction of hundreds of new miles of freeways and the funding of public transit. Brown signed the Unruh Civil Rights Act, a state version of the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, preventing discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and housing. At great political peril, he also opposed a ballot measure to repeal the 1964 Rumford Fair Housing Act, a law banning racial discrimination in the sale of homes. The repeal passed overwhelmingly, only to be declared unconstitutional by the courts.
Unruh stood for a new liberalism that was less interventionist and less generous than many of his fellow Democrats wanted. He recognized that it was becoming increasingly problematic for Democrats to adhere to an ideology that vilified big business and greedy capitalists in an age when workers enjoyed unprecedented economic opportunities and a rising standard of living. It was also problematic because of the numerous partnerships that had developed between government and business during the Cold War. Furthermore, he understood that the depression era logic of appealing to the interests of the disadvantaged and minorities could no longer guarantee enough votes to win elections in a large state. So many people had benefited from postwar prosperity that the old Democratic strategy seemed like a recipe for failure.
A World War II veteran and son of a sharecropper, Unruh was elected from an assembly district representing Inglewood and south-central Los Angeles and ascended quickly to the leadership. After becoming speaker in 1961, Unruh became known as the “Boss” and the “Big Daddy” of California politics because of his strict control of the assembly and his use of the institution as a vehicle for his own legislative agenda. His strategy was to manage the state’s panoply of programs as efficiently as possible, while continuing to champion the working poor. Thus, Democrats could claim for themselves the banner of “good government,” which had been the property of the Republicans ever since the Progressive era.
In contrast to the expansive policy proposals of the past, Unruh’s Democrats advanced a much more limited, incremental policy agenda. Even as he shepherded Brown’s legislative agenda through the assembly to build aqueducts and universities, Unruh himself favored a more modest role for government. Through progressive civil rights and consumer protection legislation, Unruh sought to make life easier for “the common man.”8
Unruh’s brand of liberalism created tension among the party faithful. In particular, Unruh’s approach was at odds with the volunteers of the California Democratic Council (CDC). The CDC was a political club founded by Alan Cranston to overcome the confusion of cross-filing by endorsing candidates, providing Democratic voters with information and direction prior to election day. The CDC favored stronger bonds between organized labor and the party, as well as an activist role for government, including an expanded welfare state and détente with the Soviet Union. While Brown was content to enlist their support, Unruh sought to curtail the influence of CDC volunteers in state Democratic politics, fearing that their presence might jeopardize the party’s appeal to the mainstream.9
Pat Brown lost his bid for a third term in 1966. Though Brown had defeated former Vice President Richard Nixon to be reelected in 1962, he lost four years later to a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan by more than a million votes. At the time, the state and nation were undergoing profound social and economic changes. The Democratic party was wounded politically by civil unrest, including opposition to the war in Vietnam and racial strife in urban enclaves such as the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point. While the election was in some part a referendum on the social turmoil of the late 1960s, the voters were losing their taste for the government activism that Brown symbolized.10 Two years later, the Democrats lost their majority in both houses of the legislature. After more difficult lessons at the polls, the hard liberalism of Jesse Unruh would come to be embraced as the dominant ideology of the party. This conversion took place both in California and nationally, as Democratic leaders from Dianne Feinstein to Bill Clinton took up the cause of “good government,” calling for fiscal conservatism while advancing modest legislative agendas designed to make life easier for the average working person. Unruh himself would play little part in the party’s changing ideology. He served the remainder of his political career as California’s state treasurer after losing his own bid for governor in 1970—to the incumbent Ronald Reagan.
Part of Ronald Reagan’s appeal was that he appeared to be an outsider unsullied by Sacramento politics, much like his early predecessor Hiram Johnson. An effective manipulator of symbols, Reagan emulated the cowboy heroes of his western films, riding into Sacramento for a showdown with big-spending Democrats in the legislature. With the Republican success in the 1968 election, driven in part by Californian Richard Nixon’s successful bid for the presidency, Reagan was able to partner with a Republican-controlled legislature. But that Republican majority was short-lived.
Reagan’s style of conservatism was as different from the Progressive and Eisenhower era Republicans as Unruh’s liberalism was from the New Deal Democrats. Like his Republican predecessors, Reagan supported conservative causes such as low taxes, deregulation, anticommunism, and self-reliance over government aid. He also tapped a reservoir of frustration by railing against government itself, criticizing lawmakers and the bureaucrats in public service as contributing to the problems they purported to solve. He gave voice to popular frustration with the state’s rapidly expanding welfare system, striking a moral tone in his attacks on recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Reagan’s mean-spirited attack on AFDC recipients as financially irresponsible and sexually promiscuous “welfare queens” polarized the discourse. The “welfare queen” stereotype reinforced a populist view that welfare recipients were not like you and me and were undeserving of government largess. After his loss to Reagan, former Speaker Unruh predicted that conservative politicians would have an easy time dividing the white working class in future elections.11
Reagan had some success in trimming the state budget. Much of this was accomplished by passing on the demands of the growing population through unfunded mandates, or requiring county governments to provide services without offering financial assistance to pay for them.12 By the end of his two terms as governor, however, California’s taxes and the state budget had increased dramatically. Even if he lost those battles, Reagan eventually won the war. His fusion of conservatism and populism became the dominant ideology of the right wing in state and national politics. After leaving office in 1974, Reagan mounted a strong primary challenge to President Gerald Ford. Later, Reagan’s populist-conservative message resonated nationally, helping him win two terms as president.
The election of Reagan as governor in a year when Democrats retained their majority in the legislature began what seems to have become a permanent fixture of contemporary California politics: divided government. When no single party controls the apparatus of state government, either during a particular legislative term or over the long haul, internal divisions make policy innovation extremely difficult. Control of California’s executive and legislative branches of government has often been divided. Except for the periods of unified Republican government (1969–1971) and unified Democratic government (1975–1983 and 1998–2003), California has lived with divided government since 1967. For much of the past four decades, there has been a Republican governor and a Democratic majority in at least one chamber of the legislature.
California is not unique in this respect. Since the 1950s, divided government has become an increasingly common outcome of state and national elections.13 Divided government disappeared temporarily in California after 1974, a banner election year for Democrats. The Watergate scandal had not only brought down the Nixon administration, but Republican candidates nationwide were wounded politically in the fallout. When Governor Reagan decided not to seek a third term, Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke hoped to succeed him but was indicted (and later acquitted) for perjury in a scandal of his own over campaign finance. Amid a powerful anti-Republican tide, the Republican nominee, State Controller Houston Flournoy, lost by just 180,000 votes to Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown, Jr.
The son of former Governor Pat Brown, Jerry Brown represented a new generation of Democratic leaders. His philosophy of government was more akin to the hard liberalism of Jesse Unruh than the soft liberalism of his father. Unlike Democrats of an earlier era, Brown rejected traditional big-government approaches to public problems, although he shared their commitment to the values of fairness and equality. Brown’s campaign for governor received a boost by a wave of popular support for campaign finance reform in the aftermath of Watergate. As secretary of state, he drafted the political reform initiative Proposition 9, which appeared on the 1974 primary ballot. This measure required full disclosure of contributions to and expenditures by campaigns for state and local office, as well as campaigns for ballot initiatives. The successful linkage of his candidacy to the creation of his popular “citizen’s initiative” captured the sentiments of the time and would come to be a model for many subsequent candidates and other ambitious politicians in California.
Brown, who had studied for many years as a Jesuit seminarian, thought in global and environmental terms and connected well with those traditionally marginalized from the political process. He understood the plight of the United Farm Workers and helped move the legislature in establishing the Agricultural Labor Relations Board as a state arbitrator between the rights of field laborers and the production goals of agribusiness. He opened the door to executive appointments for women and people of color on state boards, commissions, and the judiciary. He worked hard for the expansion of education, the health and safety concerns of all workers, and the environmental movement. But his efforts to balance his policy agenda often put him at odds with his traditional allies. In the name of environmental protection, Brown cut the state transportation budget for highway construction, diverting funds instead into mass transit development, and even bicycle paths. And, though a strong proponent of higher education, Brown earned the ire of state university professors by suggesting that their intellectual satisfaction with their work constituted a type of “psychic income,” making an actual salary increase less necessary than for other state employees.
The 1970s saw an extended period of high inflation, economic stagnation, and high unemployment in California and elsewhere around the nation. Ironically, as the state’s fiscal health deteriorated, the tax system continued to reap large surpluses. Property taxes soared during the mid-1970s, as average property values in the state increased at an annual rate of 12 percent. As consumer prices and salaries increased, so too did revenues from sales and income taxes. By 1978, the state budget had accumulated a $6 billion surplus. Property tax reformers Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann read the popular frustration with this state of affairs and successfully petitioned to have Proposition 13 placed on the June 1978 primary ballot. The initiative cut property taxes by 60 percent and limited future taxes to 1 percent of assessed real estate value. Governor Brown backed a more moderate proposal, which failed at the ballot box. Proposition 13 passed by a two-to-one margin.
Proposition 13 represented a contest over political culture as much as it was an effort to provide taxpayer relief. Under the surface of the tax revolt were deep-seated attitudes about the proper role of government in society. As Table 3.1 suggests, the strongest support for Proposition 13 came from white, middle-aged, fully employed male homeowners. Minorities and the poor were less likely to support the initiative, even though they were the most likely to suffer the effects of high taxes. Supporters were more likely to believe that there was a problem with government waste, and this view was strongly related to a desire to cut welfare and other public assistance programs for the poor. At the same time, supporters were against cutting fire and police protection, education, mass transit, and mental health services. This paradox suggests that the support for the tax revolt was motivated, in part, to restrict government activism in specific unpopular policy areas. This observation led researchers David Sears and Jack Citrin to term the movement a “revolt of the haves.”14 As we will see in Chapter 5, Proposition 13 led directly to the reduced capacity of California’s local governments to provide services to its burgeoning population.
Jerry Brown’s two terms in office stand as proof that political paralysis and tension can be a problem even when the governor and both houses of the legislature are of the same party. One of Brown’s strengths during his first term was connecting directly with the voters and bypassing the established rules and leadership of the legislative establishment. By his second term, this became a liability, as his relationship with his Democratic colleagues soured. His opposition to Proposition 13 and his administration’s philosophy of imposing an “era of limits” added to this tenuous relationship. His campaigns for the presidency in 1976 and 1980 left his supporters feeling abandoned. Brown made some noteworthy achievements, yet he could have done more if he had worked to cultivate the support of his own party in the legislature, rather than grandstanding alone for policy change. His popularity waning, Brown was defeated by San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson in a 1982 bid for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Republican S. I. Hayakawa. Brown remained active in politics, including a third unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Later, after two terms as Mayor of Oakland, Brown was elected to his father’s old job of Attorney General in 2006.
TABLE 3.1 SUPPORT FOR PROPOSITION 13, BY DEMOGRAPHIC GROUP, MAY 1978
| GROUP | % IN FAVOR | GROUP | % IN FAVOR |
| INCOME | AGE | ||
| Less than $10,000 | 52 | 18–24 | 49 |
| $ll,000–$20,000 | 59 | 25–34 | 56 |
| $2l,000–$30,000 | 67 | 35–49 | 62 |
| More than $30,000 | 69 | 50–64 | 7l |
| 65+ | 69 | ||
| EDUCATION | |||
| Less than high school | 74 | SEX | |
| High school | 68 | Male | 66 |
| Some college | 64 | Female | 59 |
| College grad | 69 | ||
| Beyond college | 49 | ETHNICITY | |
| White | 66 | ||
| RESIDENCE | Hispanic | 60 | |
| Bay Area | 64 | Black | 18 |
| Other Northern California | 59 | ||
| Other Southern California | 58 | ||
| LA & Orange Counties | 66 | ||
| Homeowners | 69 | ||
| Renters | 46 |
Source: May 1978 California Poll, reprinted in Sears and Citrin, 1982. Entries are the percentage of respondents from each demographic group expressing support for Proposition 13.
Republican Attorney General George Deukmejian ran a strong law-and-order campaign and squeaked into the governorship in 1982, defeating Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley by fewer than 100,000 votes out of approximately 7.8 million cast. In a surprising rematch four years later, Democrats again fielded Tom Bradley against the incumbent Deukmejian. This time, Deukmejian won a smashing landslide over Bradley, by more than 1.7 million votes. It was in many ways a battle of ideological extremes: Bradley, a liberal African-American big-city mayor against Deukmejian, a conservative, law-and-order veteran of the Sacramento “beltway.” The governor was helped by a high turnout of conservative voters, drawn to the ballot box to defeat a gun control initiative. With Proposition 62, an enhancement of Proposition 13’s property tax reform, also appearing on the ballot, the gun lobby and the tax reform lobby were given a strong incentive to mobilize conservative voters.
A former attorney, Deukmejian had a style that was rather bland compared to his charismatic predecessors, Reagan and Brown. But he possessed important managerial skills necessary for the chief executive of the nation’s largest state. At times his leadership style could be partisan, as when he battled for the creation of a redistricting commission (Proposition 39) to oversee the state reapportionment process then controlled by the Democratic legislature. On the issue of the judiciary, he was uncompromising. He successfully campaigned for a ballot initiative for the recall of California Supreme Court Justices Rose Bird, Cruz Reynoso, and Joseph Grodin (all appointed by Jerry Brown) for their reluctance to enforce the death penalty. Following their removal by the voters, he was given a windfall opportunity to name three new justices who reflected his own judicial philosophy. All the same, Deukmejian at times found common ground with Democrats and the legislative leadership. He signed legislation for a bold experiment to mandate new welfare-to-work rules by establishing the GAIN (Greater Avenues for Independence) workforce program. An American of Armenian heritage and personally sensitive to issues of human rights, Deukmejian also pushed for a $5 million state allocation for the Los Angeles-based Museum of Tolerance to educate future generations about ethnic diversity and genocide.
The mood of the electorate in 1990 was one of dissatisfaction, if not rage. California’s economy was sliding into recession, and several state legislators were implicated in scandals such as “Shrimpgate.”15 The most visible response by voters was the passage of Proposition 140, which created a constitutional amendment to limit legislators’ terms of office, end pension benefits for future legislators, and cut legislators’ personal office budgets by 40 percent.16 Proposition 140 was an unambiguous expression of the public’s displeasure with the legislature, both for the ethical breaches of individual members and for their collective inability to get things done. Term limits as an instrument for enacting better public policy and getting “new blood” into the system will be discussed in detail in Chapter 7.
In 1990 Republicans nominated U.S. Senator Pete Wilson to replace the retiring George Deukmejian. Wilson went on to defeat the Democratic candidate, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, by 3 percentage points (49 to 46 percent) after she survived a bruising primary battle with Attorney General John Van de Kamp. Initially, Wilson’s election as governor in 1990 was marked by some Democratic lawmakers with a sigh of relief and as the end to gridlock partisan politics in Sacramento. Wilson was known in his party as a “traditional moderate,” a pragmatic middle-of-the-roader, pro-business and pro-choice. Early in his first term as governor, Wilson demonstrated his willingness to work with Democrats. For example, faced with unrelenting budget crises, he agreed to a round of new taxes. Wilson also supported policies protecting the rights of gays and lesbians. He supported legislation that prohibited discrimination by private-sector employers, and he continued an executive order, first issued by Jerry Brown, to protect state government workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation.
But by 1994, with his public approval plummeting, Wilson had moved from the center to the right and adopted a more confrontational style. He frequently clashed with the Democratic state legislature. He battled over reapportionment, threatening to veto any plan that he found unacceptable.17 He also pushed controversial initiatives on hot-button issues including crime (e.g., Three Strikes (Proposition 220), illegal immigration (Proposition 187), and affirmative action (Proposition 209)).18 Wilson won reelection by a wide margin over the Democratic challenger, State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, a victory he parlayed into a brief campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Although much of Wilson’s tenure in office was marred by a recessionary fiscal crisis, a booming economy in his second term freed up resources to repair the state’s infrastructure. When the state received an unprecedented $4.4 billion windfall, Wilson called for more spending on education, public works, and social programs.19 Wilson directed new state dollars to education to reduce class size (see Chapter 13) as well as to augment the state’s child care budget, in anticipation of lifting poor, single working women out of welfare by providing support for their children while they are at work.
Wilson’s successor for his party’s nomination in 1998, Dan Lungren, hoped to capitalize on the successes of the Wilson years but was unsuccessful. A conservative Republican, Lungren had trouble drawing support beyond his ideological base. An additional liability for the Republican standard-bearer was Wilson’s support for Proposition 187 (illegal immigration), which angered many Latino voters. As attorney general, Lungren had led the state’s appeal of the controversial initiative after its most restrictive provisions were struck down in state court. After 16 years, the Democrats recaptured the Governor’s mansion when Lungren lost by a 20-point margin to Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis. A former chief of staff to Governor Jerry Brown, Davis emerged as the last candidate standing after a bruising primary battle with two strong opponents, and then sailed to victory in the fall election.
By the close of the twentieth century, California was no longer the conservative bastion that launched the careers of Nixon and Reagan. Decades of population growth and social change had produced a more diverse electorate, which seemed to favor moderate leaders. In every way, Gray Davis seemed to be the right kind of politician for this new California. His centrist politics evoked the hard liberalism of an earlier generation of California Democrats. Davis campaigned on a strategy of “triangulation,” positioning himself in between the Republicans and the more liberal members of his own party in the legislature.20 Davis avoided ideological fights and polarizing issues, although his support for California’s controversial “three-strikes” law and the death penalty, as well as his neutrality on Proposition 187, irked many liberals but won support from moderates and independents.
At the dawn of the new century, the state was facing serious problems, and the safe approach to politics that Davis favored had fallen out of favor. A perfect storm of the sagging economy, the energy crisis, and an exploding budget deficit was already brewing before his reelection victory over Republican Bill Simon. As conditions worsened, Davis failed to reassure the voters that he could effectively deal with the state’s problems. Just eight months after he was reelected, the bland, experienced, and cautious Davis was recalled and replaced with someone who was in many ways his opposite, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. The former bodybuilder and action-movie star was no conventional politician, but his ascent was the latest example of a tradition of outsider-governors in California. Like Ronald Reagan in the 1960s, Schwarzenegger traded on his celebrity name from the movie industry and rode a wave of voter discontent with the state’s handling of social and economic problems. Like the Progressive Republican Hiram Johnson, Schwarzenegger promised sweeping reforms in Sacramento; and he came into power with the help of one of the instruments of the Progressives—the recall election. (The recall will be discussed at length in Chapter 7.)
Political culture in California is a contested terrain. The policy approaches emerging over the past 50 years are as much about defining the cultural nature of politics as they are about mitigating specific problems. Republicans from Reagan to Wilson have worked to reduce the scope of governmental regulation in the lives of Californians, arguing consistently that most problems are better resolved in the private sector. Democrats from Pat Brown to Gray Davis have sought to build statewide consensus on traditional liberal values such as public education, infrastructure investment, civil rights, and broad social safety nets. There are different approaches—from the New Deal approaches of Brown to the cautious approaches of Unruh and Davis—but Democrats continue to see an important role for government in meeting the state’s challenges. Schwarzenegger, the outsider, has fluctuated between conservative and liberal approaches to solving public problems.
This chapter has shown that California politics is as much a contest over values as a vehicle to solve problems. As the state experienced phenomenal growth and change, the centrist, non-ideological politics of postwar California gave way to competitive, highly partisan politics by the 1960s. Then, for several years, Republicans were largely on the sidelines as Democrats battled over two competing visions of liberalism. The emotive liberalism of Pat Brown envisioned an active government to preserve and advance the New Deal agenda in a new age, while the bureaucratic liberalism of Jesse Unruh envisioned a limited government, one with more modest goals, which would still protect the interests of the disadvantaged. Before this debate was settled in favor of Unruh’s vision, a new generation of California Republicans emerged with a drastically different prescription for the role of government. By infusing conservatism with populism, politicians such as Ronald Reagan promoted an appealing new style of conservatism, more “anti-government” than the old “good government” philosophy of previous Republicans. This anti-government sentiment was felt in the passage of Proposition 13, which severely curtailed activism by local governments. The tension between these competing strains of political ideology redefined the boundaries of the state’s political culture. And yet, the contest remains unfinished. It is likely that Californians will continue to use the apparatus of state government to push specific visions of political culture. And, as the state’s demographic makeup continues to shift, this contest is likely to become even more passionate.
1. See Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
2. Robert S. Erikson, John P. McIver, and Gerald C. Wright, Jr., “State Political Culture and Public Opinion,” American Political Science Review 81 (1987): 797–813.
3. For more on the problems associated with cross-filing, see James R. Mills, A Disorderly House (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books), pp. 204–205.
4. Cross-filing re-emerged in 1998, in the form of the blanket primary, after voters approved Proposition 198.
5. Republican U.S. Senator William Knowland decided he wanted to win his party’s gubernatorial primary, rather than defer to Knight, the incumbent, who had expressed interest in running for re-election. Hoping to avoid a political bloodbath, a “big switch” deal was brokered by another native-son Californian, Vice President Richard Nixon. Knight would simply run for the Senate seat, and Knowland would run for the governorship. The switch failed, and neither Republican won election, handing the statehouse to Brown.
6. For a broader account of the political feud between Brown and Unruh, see Ethan Rarick, California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
7. Garrin Burbank, “The Ambitions of Liberalism: Jesse Unruh and the Shape of Postwar Democratic Politics in California,” Southern California Quarterly 21 (1997): 487–502.
8. James Mills, A Disorderly House: The Brown-Unruh Years in Sacramento (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 1987).
9. Ibid.
10. Of course, other factors contributed to Brown’s loss. These included a falling out with the party’s left wing over his handling of antiwar protests on college campuses, the refusal of the CDC and organized labor to endorse him, and a primary challenge by Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, which weakened him politically.
11. Burbank, “The Ambitions of Liberalism.”
12. Before the passage of Proposition 13, the counties still had the capacity to absorb some of these additional expenses.
13. For an analysis of this phenomena at both the national and state levels, see Morris Fiorina, Divided Government (New York: Macmillan, 1992).
14. David O. Sears and Jack Citrin, Tax Revolt: Something for Nothing in California (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
15. Shrimpgate was an FBI sting operation that created a fictitious shrimp-packing company willing to trade money for members’ votes. Several Sacramento lawmakers and lobbyists were snared. In its aftermath, the public became much more pessimistic about the state’s campaign finance system and about state politics in general. See Steve Scott, “The Legacy of the Capitol Sting,” California Government and Politics Annual 1995–1996 (Sacramento: California Journal Press, 1995), pp. 35–38.
16. See Chapter 6 for a complete discussion of Proposition 140.
17. A. G. Block, “The Reapportionment Failure,” California Journal 22, no. 11 (November 1991): 503–505.
18. See Chapter 6 for a full discussion on these initiatives.
19. Dan Morain, “Upbeat Wilson Sees More School Spending,” Los Angeles Times, 15 May 1998, A1.
20. Dan Walters, “Davis Again Needs Help from Liberals He Once Shunned.” Sacramento Bee, July 21, 2003, A3.