End State

California is a mess, but I love it all the same–especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962–a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn’t go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door.

Immigrants from Europe had come to America seeking happiness and a break with their unhappy pasts. But many Americans–from the ’49ers of the Gold Rush to Mark Twain to a young Ronald Reagan–had gone to California to find renewal. California was part of the American frontier, but, as Carey McWilliams points out in California: The Great Exception, it developed outside the framework of the American frontier. It was not an extension of the East or Midwest, but became a state in 1850 before other Western states. It was an island in the sun without Pilgrim winters or windswept prairies. It nourished its own dream of wealth and well-being. It was the American dream all over again, but dreamt within America.

California has fulfilled many of those dreams. It has extended and enhanced the promise of America–from the discovery of gold to the introduction of the movies and television, the aerospace industry, Silicon Valley, and the Central Valley’s giant farms that supply a quarter of America’s food. It has also been a political and cultural vanguard–from John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party, to Progressive Governor Hiram Johnson, Socialist Upton Sinclair, old-age-pension agitator Francis Townsend, and down to Richard Nixon, Earl Warren, and Reagan. The New Left staged its first mass protests in Berkeley. Gay rights came out of Los Angeles and San Francisco. And the New Right was spurred by California’s tax revolt and by the backlash against illegal immigration.

[More]

Notes:

John B. Judis is a senior editor of New Republic, where he has worked since 1984. As a visiting scholar at Carnegie, Judis wrote The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Judis’ articles have appeared in American Prospect, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Washington Monthly, American Enterprise, Mother Jones, and Dissent. He has written five books, including The Emerging Democratic Majority (with Ruy Teixeira), The Parodox of American Democracy, and William F. Buckley: Patron Saint of the Conservatives.