By Tim Redmond
Calitics is awash with talk about the new Field Poll on California demographics And although the SF Chron has ignored it, ol’ Dan Walters at the Sacto Bee is all over it, lamenting that the poll shows “the division of a once-cohesive society into its many component parts.”
Robert Cruikshank takes issue with Walters:
California’s society has never, ever been cohesive. Not in the 20th century, not in the 19th century, not even during the dozens of millennia of Native American settlement. Certainly our electorate hasn’t been cohesive. Until the 1950s state politics were defined by an urban-rural split with a crosscutting cleavage (apologies for the poli sci jargon) of intensive racial division. Even after the legal barriers of racial exclusion came down at mid-century segregation and discrimination persisted.
All of which is certainly true. He continues:
Some fragmentation is likely to continue. Californians are continuing to self-segregate according to political preference, leaving only the newer and affordable exurbs as the few places in the state up-for-grabs.
And blames the political structure:
What I see as the main problem facing California is obsolescence. Our government and our politics are still stuck in 1978. We’ve had fragmentation and a well-governed state, and fragmentation and a badly-governed state. That suggests to me we need to look at a system of governance that has remained almost unchanged since 1978 despite all the demographic changes reported in the Field Poll.
Again, true — and getting rid of the two-thirds majority for budget approval would make a big difference. It wouldn’t, however, undo all of the other awful things about state politics, including Prop. 218, which makes it almost impossible for local government to raise taxes, and Prop. 13, which is in many ways the root cause of the state’s total economic meltdown.
Paul Hogarth at Beyond Chron imagines
a California where the state legislature passes a budget by majority rule, and you can register to vote on Election Day. Three Strikes has been reformed to require the third “strike” to be a violent felony, and we have single-payer health care. The wealthy pay a higher income tax rate, and – just like in Alaska and Texas – oil companies must pay a modest tax for the privilege of extracting oil.
And Hogart argues that the progressives need to take back the initiative process to make that happen.
For once, I’m going to be the downer here: I don’t see progressives winning a whole lot of major statewide initiatives that make structural reforms in California government. We can win one or two — we can certainly overturn Prop. 8, and maybe repeal the two-thirds tax rule.