Notes from a Once-Golden State

“If the Pilgrims had landed in California instead of back East, nobody would have bothered to discover the rest of the country.” — Ronald Reagan

“Move to Texas.” — Pete Wilson, when asked his advice for a young Republican who wanted to go into California politics

One snowy day when I was a kid in upstate New York, I came across a shoebox in the back of a closet that contained a perfectly preserved specimen of the California dream: a century-old sheaf of letters that a cousin had sent back to his parents after moving to Los Angeles. The cousin had described endless sunshine, vast citrus groves, and weather so temperate that the only snow he ever saw lay glistening on distant mountaintops. “Do not spend another winter back East,” he had written. “Move to California!”

When I moved to California in the late 1980s, I found myself thinking often of my distant cousin. California struck me just the way it had struck him. The place seemed almost dreamlike, an ideal that had achieved reality, America’s own land of milk and honey. My distant, long-dead cousin and me. As it happens, I see now, we bracketed the California dream. The state began to acquire its special place in American life about the time my cousin moved here — and to lose it about the time I arrived myself.

Notes from a once-golden state.

i.

“What went wrong?” asks Pete Wilson, who served as the Republican governor of California during the 1990s. “Hell, what didn’t?”

A native of the Midwest, Wilson moved to California in 1959. Seven years later, he began a political career during which he would spend four years in the assembly, a dozen years as mayor of San Diego, eight years in the U.S. Senate, and eight years as governor. The California that kept voting for Wilson — he never lost a general election — possessed a functioning two-party system. As late as 1999, Wilson’s final year as governor, the GOP remained competitive. Registered Republicans accounted for 36 percent of the California electorate. The GOP held 37 of the 80 seats in the state assembly, 15 of the 40 seats in the state senate, and 24 of California’s 52 seats in the House of Representatives. Today? Registered Republicans account for just 24 percent of the California electorate. The GOP holds 19 of the 80 seats in the assembly, nine of the 40 seats in the senate, and eleven of California’s 53 seats in the House of Representatives. The two-party system has collapsed.

Wilson names three causes.

The first: public employees’ unions. In the 1970s, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation giving collective-bargaining rights to public employees, including state employees. This expanded the power of organizations such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “Jerry claimed it was just a minor change,” says Wilson. “I said, ‘The hell it is.’ ” Then, in 1988, Proposition 98 amended the state constitution, ensuring that each year a certain portion of the entire state budget — typically at least 40 percent — would go to public schools. This gave the California Teachers Association (CTA) a reliable source of income. Since then, the SEIU, the CTA, and other public employees’ unions have built a political perpetual-motion machine. The unions back Democratic candidates. The Democrats, once in office, spend public money to the benefit of the unions. Then the unions back more Democratic candidates.

The second factor: changes in the state’s economic base. Over the last several decades, the aerospace and energy industries, which tended to be centrist or Republican, surrendered their dominance of the California economy to an entirely new industry, Big Tech, which is totally woke. From staunch Republican business leaders such as David Packard to thorough liberals such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey — for the GOP, this was not progress.

The final factor: immigration. In just the last few decades, more than 10 million immigrants have come to California, the majority from Mexico or Central America, many of those illegally. This huge inflow quickly placed the GOP in a bind — and note that it was a principled bind. The GOP sought to welcome legal immigration. “Hell, if you come here the right way, you’re American, and we want your vote. It’s as simple as that,” says Wilson. At the same time, it insisted on opposing illegal immigration. “Illegals are overwhelmingly good people,” Wilson says. “If I were a Mexican with a family to support, I’d try to come here myself. But the federal government was failing to enforce the border and sticking the state with the bill.”

When he ran for reelection as governor in 1994, Wilson supported Proposition 187, which would have denied illegal immigrants an array of services, including schooling. Again and again during the campaign, Wilson insisted that he was opposing only illegal behavior, not Hispanics themselves. “We even ran an ad showing men and women in uniform being sworn in as American citizens,” Wilson says, “and most of them were Hispanic.” It didn’t work. Although Proposition 187 passed — a court would later set it aside — Hispanic support for the GOP plummeted. It has yet to recover.

Democrats in the pocket of the public employees’ unions, an economy dominated by woke Big Tech, and immigration, much of it illegal, at such high levels that between 1970 and 2018 the Hispanic share of the population rose from 12 to 39 percent. “The Republican Party in California was never really defeated,” Wilson says. “It just packed up and moved out.” Texas, Arizona, Idaho, and half a dozen other states all now harbor a lot of good California Republicans who couldn’t take it anymore.

ii.

Although busy running the San Francisco law firm that she founded, Harmeet Dhillon volunteers for the Republican Party, serving these days as a member of the Republican National Committee. She has a brisk, no-nonsense manner, and, since she’s hardly one to waste her time on useless causes, I expected her to be able to present a plan for restoring the California GOP to competitive status. When I tell her that, she laughs. “If there were a professional code of ethics in politics, the first rule would be against telling Republicans they can turn California around any time soon,” Dhillon says. “Right now, we’re only a regional party.”

Only a regional party. The eleven out of California’s 53 congressional districts that the GOP still holds bear her out. Almost all lie in the mountains of the north, where you might almost suppose you were in Idaho, or in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, which looks a lot like agricultural Nebraska, or in the suburbs of Orange County and San Diego, which appear similar to the commuter towns of Arizona. To put it another way, the GOP remains competitive only where California resembles other places. Where the state appears most distinctively itself, in the densely populated coastal belt that runs from the piers of San Francisco to the sound stages of Hollywood, the Republican Party holds not a single seat. In a lot of coastal California, for that matter, voters seldom see a Republican congressional candidate on the ballot. (Proposition 14, the 2010 ballot measure, mandated that the top two vote-getters in each primary would go on to compete in the general election, even if they were both members of the same party. The result? Contest after contest in which voters could choose only between two Democrats.)

The recall of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom? Now that the organizers have gathered 2 million signatures, half a million more than needed, it appears that a recall election will indeed take place. Couldn’t a Republican win? In a recall election 18 years ago, after all, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger replaced Democratic governor Gray Davis. “Arnold had total name recognition and enough money to fund his own campaign,” Dhillon says, again refusing to console me. “To succeed in this race a Republican is going to need $50 million. And if the Dems decide to try to save Newsom, they’ll pour money into his campaign. Then the Republican will need $100 million.” If a Republican capable of raising that kind of money intends to run, he has yet to say so.

“Why do I support the Republican Party?” Dhillon asks. “Because you can’t live here and do nothing. But California is like an alcoholic. We’re going to have to wait for it to hit rock bottom before it turns around. Until then we have to focus on the races we can win.”

iii.

If the California GOP had designed the perfect candidate for Congress and the perfect district for him to contest, the candidate would have looked exactly like Mike Garcia, and the district would have looked exactly like the 25th. The son of Mexican immigrants, Garcia attended the Naval Academy, flew more than two dozen combat missions during the Iraq War, and then returned home to become an executive at Raytheon, one of the quintessential California aerospace companies. Still in his forties, Garcia is handsome, warm, and well-spoken in both English and Spanish. The 25th congressional district, for its part, is the most Republican congressional district in Los Angeles County. It encompasses both agricultural towns of the kind that tend to support Republicans and suburbs such as Simi Valley, a place so congenial to Republicans that Ronald Reagan chose it as the site of his presidential library.

“I went to the district to campaign with Mike,” says Pete Wilson of Garcia’s campaign for reelection last November. Garcia had first carried the district in a special election last May, after the Democratic incumbent had resigned as the result of a sex scandal. Garcia could carry the district comfortably in November, the GOP reasoned, if he simply held on to traditional Republicans while attracting the support of as little as one-third of the district’s Hispanics. “Mike worked his ass off,” says Wilson. “And then he ended the day by giving one of the best damn political speeches I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Garcia did carry the district, but there was nothing comfortable about it. Out of almost 339,000 votes, his margin came to just 333, or less than one-tenth of 1 percent. Therewith the California GOP. It can put forward the perfect candidate in the perfect district — and still barely eke out a win.

iv.

“I’ll be keeping an office in California,” said one of the two friends who called in January to tell me they had decided to move to Texas, “but a lot of the dynamism in Silicon Valley has shifted to Austin.” This was new. Over the last decade, I’d grown used to hearing friends of retirement age announce that they had decided to flee California’s high taxes, but this friend was still in his twenties — and never mentioned taxes. Even for a tech entrepreneur, he said, California was now a place to leave behind. “Texas is just so much more welcoming to business.”

The second friend offered another new reason — one I found still more unsettling. Although he had lived all his life in California, he explained, he had decided to depart for the sake of his conscience. “I used to be able to ignore the progressives who run the state,” he said. “Not anymore.” My friend cited the identity politics, the draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, and the trans agenda. (An example of the latter: A bill is now under consideration in the California state legislature that would require department stores to sell toys for boys and girls together, placing firetrucks and ballerina dresses in the same gender-neutral sales areas.) “Some of what goes on is just evil. I have to leave the state or I’d feel complicit.”

v.

California’s decline is easy enough to overstate, of course. Almost 40 million people still choose to live here, and the economy remains so robust that if California were an independent nation, it would boast the fifth-biggest GDP on the planet. But the Golden State, the land of opportunity within the land of opportunity, the California of a large, contented middle class, good public schools, affordable housing, and an abundance of jobs — that California no longer exists. With 12 percent of the nation’s population, California now has one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients and, on reasonable estimates, the same proportion of the nation’s illegal immigrants. The surest index of the erosion in the quality of life here: Last year, for only the second time in decades, more people moved out of the state than moved in.

Which brings me to last summer’s wildfires.

As the wildfires burned — altogether they would claim more than 4 million acres — vast plumes covered much of the state in a haze. Then, in mid September, the meteorological conditions shifted, drawing smoke up into the high atmosphere. In Northern California, the smoke obscured the sun. Communities from Napa to Palo Alto to Santa Cruz glowed for days on end with a weird coppery light — it reminded everyone of the light on Mars in the Matt Damon movie The Martian — while the sky itself shone a sulfuric yellow-brown.

A chain of causation ran through my mind. It came to me idly, but I had to conclude that there was something to it. First the collapse of the GOP had ceded to the Democratic Party complete control of the state government, including the entities responsible for forest management. Then the progressives who dominate the Democratic establishment had replaced traditional forest management with new, supposedly better environmental techniques — whereas state agencies used to subject some 30,000 acres a year to controlled burns, those agencies now burn less than half that amount. With federal land-management agencies adopting similar techniques, vast quantities of undergrowth and deadwood had accumulated, enabling the wildfires to become some of the biggest in California history.

Watching the state grow more and more dysfunctional, I had always supposed there was one aspect of California that politics could never impair. Now I saw I was mistaken. Politics had even blotted out the beauty of the California sky.