04.01.13
California says ‘Good riddance, Whitemanistan’
Today Paul Krugman devoted his twice-week opinion column in the New York Times to California and the demographic that has made the Republican Party dead, dead, thoroughly dead, here.
The demise of the GOP came not a moment too soon. The party, gone extremist, had figured out how to destroy the state’s government from a minority position due to the requirement for super-majority votes in the state legislature.
And what is now going on at the federal level is exactly what everyone living in California has had to deal with for most of the last decade.
Modern movement conservatism, which transformed the G.O.P. from the moderate party of Dwight Eisenhower into the radical right-wing organization we see today, was largely born in California. The Golden State, even more than the South, created today’s religious conservatism; it elected Ronald Reagan governor; it’s where the tax revolt of the 1970s began. But that was then. In the decades since, the state has grown ever more liberal, thanks in large part to an ever-growing nonwhite share of the electorate …
The point, however, is that these problems bear no resemblance to the death-by-liberalism story line the California-bashers keep peddling. California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.
And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct …
Krugman summarizes the history of the state.
I arrived in California when Pasadena and the San Gabriel Valley were still Republican territory, still part of WhiteManistan. The Pasadena Weekly, an alternative publication, actually had a column called “The Compassionate Conservative,” in which a crabby old rich white guy, the head of Jacobs Engineering on the Arroyo Parkway, recited the platitudes of Ronald Reagan each issue.
I saw the story about teaching-a-poor-man-to-fish-rather-than-giving-him-a-fish way too many times.
However, the growing population of Hispanics and Asians in the San Gabriel Valley turned Pasadena blue. And the Republicans never made it back.
This occurred for the same reason it happened throughout the rest of California. The party thought it had a winning hand in attacking brown people.
In so doing it loudly pursued cruel public initiatives and legislation to punish illegals. And the people who live here, in the most populous areas, slowly but inexorably turned on them.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, could not even govern. Although elected to two terms, his own party disowned and destroyed him. He could no more be a part of it than Abraham Lincoln could if he were alive today.
California remains two states. The important part, the California that means something in the world economy, the one with the image, although tarnished, that still beckons, the most populous cities (LA County!) and the coast, firmly rejected the GOP.
The small towns in the interior, up and down the state, the empty counties near the Sierras, are still WhiteManistan. There, like in the rest of rural white America, they cling to the delusion that they can persecute everyone not exactly like them and get away with it. And that they have a majority ruling class on their side.
Krugman points out California still has problems, a deeply damaged infrastructure and public education system. But no one is fleeing, the census statistics do not support it.
WhiteManistan’s death grip has been pried loose.
“[California’s] political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too,” writes Krugman.
“So is California still the place where the future happens first?”
Time will render WhiteManistan into dust except in the places that don’t matter. But will it happen fast enough?
It’s dripping venom of old white guy nationalism and entitlement was made clear by the Times in a piece on Hazleton, Pennsylvania, an old coal town near where I was born and raised, one whose representation in the nation’s capitol encompasses all that is bad.
This working-class city in the Poconos (Hazleton is not in the Poconos — me) passed the country’s first law aimed at making life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they would pack up and leave.
The city’s crackdown in 2006 was led by Lou Barletta, then the mayor and now a congressman. On Wednesday, he wrote to a bipartisan group of eight House members working on an immigration overhaul bill to criticize them for heading “down the path of proposing some form of amnesty …???
“Why are we even talking about a pathway to citizenship when our borders aren’t even close to being secure???? said Mr. Barletta, vowing to fight a plan that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to compete legally for jobs.
Not everyone in Hazleton and the surrounding area is with that, the Times makes clear.
But there are more than enough like this man:
“The people in this town, we’re becoming a minority,??? said Chris DeRienzo, 30, a wedding photographer who opposes a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. “It hurts. I grew up here. It’s not what it used to be.???
“You want to scream.???
I’m 27 years older than this fellow. How did we both grow up in about the same place and wind up so different, with nothing in common except, perhaps, a mutual repulsion? What went so off the tracks?
“Despite Hazleton’s reputation as one of America’s toughest cities toward illegal immigrants, the Hispanic population there has surged,” informs the newspaper. “The 2010 census showed Hispanic residents totaling 37 percent of the population, up from 5 percent in 2000.”