| The short version of what I'm going to explain below is this: the collapse of the backlash is due to a more diverse electorate and to an economic crisis that is now consuming the white middle-class, eliminating previous economic privileges they turned to conservatives to defend.
The underlying economic and demographic rationale for Republican anti-tax backlash politics in California is now gone, making multiracial coalitional politics based on expanding government in order to provide badly needed services and jobs a very real possibility, and likely the seed of a new political framework in California. More services and more spending, not less taxes, are now the overriding concern of California voters. Our politicians will have to catch up to be viable.
One of the most lauded political books of 2008 was Rick Perlstein's Nixonland showing how Orange County's contribution to presidential politics exploited the resentments of white middle class strivers against a liberal elite that both the strivers and Nixon held responsible for the upheavals and dislocations of the 1960s, and how those politics have dominated America ever since.
A similar book for California politics was published in 2003 by Robert Self, a historian now at Brown University. The book is called American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. It is to my mind the best book on California political history I've ever read, as it shows how the anti-tax politics that came to dominate California in 1978 are fundamentally rooted in racial backlash.
Using Alameda County as an example, Self shows how Howard Jarvis' rhetoric resonated because more and more suburban Californians believed they were being taxed to death to pay for social programs benefiting undeserving people of color in inner cities like Oakland and Los Angeles. They believed they could vote for Prop 13 and cut property taxes without hurting themselves because, in their mind, the tax cuts would force social spending on the inner cities to be cut, but preserve their own suburban services.
This was only made possible by the economic struggles of the late 1970s. Before then conservatism had few successes in state policymaking. In the 1960s Reagan himself pushed through the largest (in percentage increase) tax increase in state history to preserve Pat Brown's legacy of using government to provide widely shared prosperity. 1970 saw Democrats take control of both houses of the Legislature for good (although Dems had temporary setbacks in 1978 and 1994). Reagan's anti-tax efforts never fared well at the ballot box and in 1974 Jerry Brown was elected governor to lead a new era of California liberalism.
But by 1978 underlying conditions had changed. Persistent inflation made the suburban California dream seem less attainable. Rising property taxes and rising land values combined with a stagnant economy threw a scare into the white middle class. That was exacerbated by conservative paranoia about racial integration, a state budget supposedly being spent on "welfare queens" in Oakland and South Central LA.
Another, less widely known but equally important aspect of the Prop 13 backlash was concern that Jerry Brown was using state government to end suburban sprawl - his push for sustainable growth, his early efforts at studying greater urban densities, and his talking up of mass transit was taken by many in the white middle class as an attack on their version of the California Dream. Those efforts were often racialized by their opponents - some said urban density brings crime and poverty, others were afraid Brown wanted to force them to ride the train with people of color (who were seen as carriers of poverty and crime).
By 1978 many white Californians began to believe their economic privileges were under assault. And so they struck back at their supposed enemies - a 'liberal elite using taxes and government planning to destroy their suburban paradise by forcing mass transit and social programs benefiting people of color down their throats.'
Prop 13 was at root an effort to protect those economic privileges - low taxes, easy homeownership in a white community remote from the problems of a multiracial inner city. Prop 13 created a homeowner veto over state government, ensuring that the white homeowner class would never again be abused by that damn liberal elite (or so they put it).
This reckless act would have destroyed their own prosperity much more quickly had it not been for 30 years of easy credit. College, affordable before 1980, was unaffordable afterward - unless you took out loans. Student loans, mortgages, and HELOCs enabled higher education to continue to meet California's creative, innovative, and economic needs, but that all depended on access to credit. As housing values soared in the 1980s, and again in the 2000s, credit again was the vehicle to homeownership, to car ownership (now that the conservatives had succeeded in strangling widespread mass transit investment this was necessary for prosperity), to paying your medical bills - to a semblance of prosperity.
It wasn't working. In 2007 the California Budget Project released a landmark study A Generation of Inequality showing that since 1979 middle-income jobs have vanished, and young people in particular have faced worsening economic prospects. As long as credit was cheap and plentiful this could be masked. But for how long?
The answer turns out to have been "30 years". Easy credit enabled California to stagger on after 1978 but that is no longer the case. With a hollowed-out economic base the California of 2009 is a very different place from the California of 1979, with much worse economic prospects.
Government spending to reorient our economy away from sprawl, oil, finance and service jobs, and toward more sustainable green jobs, is badly needed. And that means we have to confront the tax monster.
For 30 years anti-tax politics dominated using a logic of backlash: liberal elites want to tax you out of your suburban dream to give a handout to undeserving people of color. That backlash survived on credit - on vapor, really. But now that the credit is gone and 1930s-style deflation and mass unemployment is here, the economic logic of the backlash is gone. The privileges of the white middle class are vanishing, and while they're not yet struggling as working-class and poor Californians have, the distinctions are quickly eroding.
A quick look at immigrant bashing proves the point. Even last year you could still see people arguing that if we somehow cut benefits to the undocumented, California would be in the black. That has vanished with a $40 billion deficit. Hardly anyone aside from the racist hardcore believes immigrants are responsible for that scale of a deficit.
The demographic basis of the backlash is vanishing too. A funny thing happened to the white suburbanites - their kids, even we who grew up in ultra-conservative Orange County, became used to diversity. The great influx of Asian and Latino families affected us profoundly, as did the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and greater interaction with African Americans. California was 80% white in 1970 - today only 43% of us are non-Hispanic whites. Some of us have even entered into mixed-race marriages. And young people strongly opposed Prop 8.
Chris Bowers has argued that a progressive coalition of pluralist voters, no longer defined by and thus not animated by race, has shown up to determine the outcome of the 2006 and 2008 elections. That movement has dominated California politics since 1996 - in the last 12 years Republicans have consistently lost ground at the ballot box, with Arnold Schwarzenegger being the sole exception. Obama won California by one of the largest margins any presidential candidate has won in our state.
But as long as cheap credit greased the economic wheels, the anti-tax backlash could be sustained. The economic crisis now offers the second necessary condition for blowing up the Republican politics of backlash. As schools fire teachers, cut science classes, as more and more in the middle class lose their jobs, their homes, their health care, and see their children losing their future, tax cuts recede in importance.
What Californians in economic distress need aren't more tax cuts, but government services to provide a safety net, to provide growth, to provide prosperity. Just as in the 1930s, just as in the 1960s. Without the racial backlash, Republicans' only argument against that kind of government spending is hard right ideology that seems absurd in the face of a severe crisis. When little Johnny and Maria aren't able to afford college or even go to school, voter resistance to new taxes will melt away.
If that sounds like a fantasy to our conservative readers, 2008 proved the point. When gas prices soared, threatening basic prosperity, California voters in LA County, Santa Clara County, and Marin-Sonoma voted to tax themselves for mass transit. The votes were by landslide margins; only the 2/3 rule made it look close.
Republican backlash politics - the racialized anti-tax backlash - are dead. All Republicans now have are legalistic defenses and structural gimmicks - the 2/3 rule, Arnold's line-item power, Arnold's own possession of the Governor's office. Those still hold considerable power. But the underlying logic is gone, and the public support, such as it existed, is gone too, even though few have noticed.
All that remains is for Democrats to walk through the open door and more aggressively assert a social democratic politics that is no afraid of the anti-tax bogeyman. That's no small task, especially for a California Democratic Party that for 30 years survived by following Jerry Brown's "born again tax cutter" complicity.
If Democrats want to win elections they need to understand we live in a new era in which the old rules of the last 30 years no longer apply. If we want to save California we need to recognize the new coalitions that are possible, that are emerging, that have shown their power since 1996.
California can't afford the Republican backlash any more. And it looks like slowly, they're starting to understand that. |
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