Book Review/Heather Seggel

Blue Waves in the Golden State

On a recent episode of Rachel Maddow’s show, Joy Reid, filling in for the host, described how California moving their state primary elections to “Super Tuesday” (March 3, three months earlier than usual) made the state even more of a left-wing powerhouse. Since 2016, California has filed 44 lawsuits attempting to block or mitigate the worst effects of Trump administration policy changes. The election of Gavin Newsom as governor, and the midterms flipping Orange County from red to blue for the first time in decades, bear out Reid’s description of the state as “the tip of the spear” in the resistance movement. Now it’s also a big-stage player in electoral politics.

Written before most of these changes had come to pass, California Fights Back: The Golden State in the Age of Trump (Heyday Books) helps to contextualize them. Author Peter Schrag speculates in the prologue that by now Trump may well have been ousted from office (no such luck). He points to the president’s “bratty threat, quickly withdrawn, to shut down the government if Congress did not approve his wall at the border.” As I write, we’re in the midst of a shutdown for that very reason with no end in sight. It’s unlikely Trump will be removed from office by any means save the ballot, though anything is possible. But he is facing pushback, and glaring moral contrast, from California.

At just over 100 pages, this compact and attractive broadside dives into state history, which has not always been the progressive source of pride it is today; we consigned the Japanese to internment camps, discriminated against the Chinese who built our railroads, and murdered countless indigenous people. “Liberal Hollywood” was once willing to out Communists and blacklist them. Today, income inequality and a housing crisis have made remaining in the golden state a gamble for many. And yet.

Look at how one of our biggest assets gives the lie to Trump’s politics at every turn. Silicon Valley, a euphemism on par with “Texas tea” for the ongoing gold rush that is the tech industry, brings global talent to California. Schrag notes a study showing that, contrary to the #MAGA mindset, these immigrants do not take American jobs; in fact, their work creates jobs and also fosters economic development here and in their countries of origin.

Schrag reflects on how Arnold Schwarzenegger, the famous political novice, was elected governor after a recall election that devolved into a media circus. The “governator” blew his modest stash of political capital almost immediately, then pivoted to a much more progressive and positive stance on issues ranging from infrastructure to stem cell research, to avoid his own harsh reckoning at the polls. Were the president capable of absorbing and reflecting on this approach, there are things he could do to soften the harshest corners of his dismal time in office. Instead, we have gone from American carnage to children in cages to, now, yet another completely manufactured border crisis.

Allowing for past failings in the state and offering a warning against infighting among the Democratic majority, Schrag nevertheless remains hopeful. “What America is to the world, it’s sometimes been said, California is to America — and so it often has been.” While some may not like it or agree, the Golden State is more reflective of the country at large than the red hat brigade supporting the president. Perhaps we’re modeling what America could be, at least in our finest moments, and bringing that dream into being for more people can’t happen soon enough. While the broadside is well reported and soberly written, there’s a delightful Easter egg on the very last page that ends things with a humorous surprise.

We don’t know where things go from here. Newsom just took office, and it’s hoped he will improve on some of the failings of Jerry Brown, notably a cozy relationship with the oil industry that allowed for fracking and other extraction methods that disproportionately harm the poor and communities of color. It bears repeating: Orange County went blue! The midterms made it clear that miracles are attainable if you’re willing to work like hell for them. California Fights Back is a concise history of the first wave of resistance in the state, a useful guide for those wanting to create more ripples of resistance wherever they live, and a reminder that the fight is both worth it and ongoing.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019

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