LOS ANGELES -- There's a certain kind of anti-California prejudice that has
always chapped my rear: "home of the fruits and nuts," "Berserkeley," "San
Francisco Democrats." As though Alabama weren't a trifle strange and Utah
didn't have its moments. Even (ahem) Texas ... On the other hand, you have
to admit that something is happening here, and what it is, is entirely
clear.
The peculiar sickness of California politics has been apparent for some
time. Peter Schrag's book Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's
Future examines that illness closely.
Not that it is startlingly new -- all friends of California have been
muttering for years now: "You fools, you fools. You had the finest system of
public education in America, perhaps even the world. From kindergarten
through graduate school, you had great schools, and you just threw them
away -- the schools and everything else government used to do here. All
because you wanted property tax relief."
And needed it -- admittedly, they needed it. But they didn't have to do the
stupidest thing imaginable: create a weird system of property tax relief
that not only produced hideous unfairness but also gave most of the relief
to huge corporations. In the annals of Dumb, this is a pip.
Perhaps I wrong the Los Angeles Times, but it seems to me that its recent
retrospective on the 20th anniversary of Proposition 13, California's
original "tax revolt" initiative, was curiously flaccid. It was a throwback
to that gutless form of journalism we used to excuse by calling it
"objective"; one side says this, and the other side says that, therefore, we
will give them both equal space. The much-maligned San Francisco Chronicle
actually did a far better job than the august Times in its three-part series
on the anniversary of Prop 13.
How much intelligence does it take to conclude that Prop 13 has been a
disaster for the state? For that matter, how much objectivity does it take?
The results of Prop 13 are easily quantified.
The state has almost doubled in population since the early '60s. In the
last two decades, it has built 20 new prisons but not one new campus of the
University of California. Freeways, libraries, parks and schools (above all,
the schools) are battered, dilapidated and shrunken. And in the eerie new
politics of California that Schrag calls "neopopulist," the voters are about
to respond by nuking bilingual education. That'll help.
Even Schrag admits that Prop 13 is "sacrosanct" -- that "no politician dare
criticize it." It is the third rail of California politics. One reason it is
impervious to criticism is precisely because its effects are so
far-reaching. It gets blamed for everything short of El Nino out here, so
the criticism becomes easier to dismiss. One of its side effects has been to
make government less accountable and more distant. People know their
potholes aren't being fixed, but it's much harder to figure out who is
responsible now.
Schrag also notes a concomitant disaster, another idiotic proposition that
passed due to "neopopulism": term limits. Just as we always suspected, this
anodyne nostrum (I always wanted to use the word "anodyne"; it means
soothing) has hideous unintended consequences. Because no one in the
Legislature has any expertise anymore -- and the staff has been cut as
well -- the lobbyists and special-interest groups now run the place.
Says Schrag: "When major fiscal committees handling billions of dollars or
trying to deal with the intricacies of insurance regulation, school finance,
welfare policy or water law are chaired by people who have been there for no
more than six months; when the speaker of the assembly will necessarily be
someone with four years' experience or less, and when the professional staff
is as thin as it has become, the quality of the work is almost certain to
decline."
Schrag writes around the issue of racism, as though it were the sin that
dare not speak its name. Fortunately, Susan Rassky of Cal Berkeley, an
expert on the politics of initiatives, is more blunt: "Of course racism is a
part of it. Initiatives are a game where only white people play. It's a
parallel universe, having no resemblance to the real population of the
state."
But Schrag may be onto something even larger than our old reliable sin,
talking about "a different kind of political impulse, not because it is
primarily a populism of the right whose prime objective is the enervation of
government itself, but because it is not particularly interested in civic
engagement or in increasing the effectiveness of the citizen in government
at all. ... The new populism also reflects and reinforces the declining
stature of, and respect for, virtually all major public institutions and
establishments, from the judicial system and the media, to the universities,
to the ideal of commonweal itself." (Emphasis added.)
It turns out that this is not so much a new populism as a very old American
problem. In, of all places, a book review defending John Quincy Adams
(written by Eric McKitrick for The New York Review of Books), I found this
gem:
"An inevitable and probably necessary but ultimately pernicious legacy of
the Revolution was the persuasion that government should be seen as an alien
force. Those of the founding generation had done what they could to change
that view, and the sovereignty of the people held the potential for a course
substantially different from the one it eventually took. Government as the
people's own instrument, the figurative extension of themselves and the
agency that embodied their highest and deepest aspirations, was one way; the
other was to see government as an encroaching presence, which the people's
representatives must be ever vigilant to ward off from taking any
consequential part in shaping the people's private or collective concerns."
In the anti-communitarian, market-oriented ethic of our current politics,
Schrag notes, is a terrible irony: "As the public trusts the system less and
less, it becomes ever more susceptible to untested, quick-fix remedies that,
instead of resolving the problems of the moment, limit public choice and
make long-term solutions even more difficult."
Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers
and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com
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