Those who have lived in California, and appreciate something of that state's history, know that Texans have it wrong.
Texans always say everything is bigger (and better) in their state. In fact, California has more people, a much bigger economy (the world's fifth-largest), the tallest mountain in the continental United States, the most agriculture, more ethnic diversity (it will soon be the first U.S. state where non-Hispanic whites will be the minority), and politics that, even by !
Texan standards, are the zaniest in the country.
You can't understand the Arnold Schwarzenegger phenomenon — he's already leading in the polls and on the cover of this week's Time and Newsweek magazines — without grasping the fact that California represents populism gone wrong.
Populism, or progressive politics if you prefer, began early in the last century with the noblest of ideas. The state's economy was run, and its legislature controlled, by a handful of barons who owned the railroads, mines, timber and ranches.
Populists sought to wrest control, at least of the state government, from the barons and they succeeded. Over the decades, California politics began to feature citizen-sponsored initiatives, a mandatory two-thirds legislative majority for budgets and taxes, term limits, and recall of politicians, the device now being used against Governor Gray Davis.
Populism, however, led to the politics of millionaires and interest groups, including powerful trade unions. The "people," in other words, became synonymous with individuals, and groups with the money and organizational clout to use these "progressive" political devices for their own purposes in the name, of course, of the "people."
The result in recent years has been to cripple effective government, proper public finance and sound public policy. Compromise and moderation became dirty words, or at least virtues that could not compete with mobilized special interests.
In a television-saturated and star-struck culture, political success also meant money — huge amounts of money — to buy the television advertising and pay the organizers to win electoral or initiative campaigns. Mr. Davis spent $70-million (U.S.) getting elected last time. A congressional candidate needs at least $15-million; a serious senatorial candidate many times that amount.
Only millionaires, or politicians with access to them or powerful vested interests, can compete in California politics, a development those noble populists of yesteryear never contemplated.
Between 1978 and 2000, 118 initiatives appeared on California ballots, and 52 passed. Some of them (for conservation, for example) made sense; others were cripplingly stupid.
The two worst were those requiring mandatory prison terms for three-time criminal offences, no matter how small the offence, and the infamous Proposition 13, organized by wealthy businessman Howard Jarvis, that capped property taxes. The "three strikes" initiative burdened the government with the cost of new prisons. Proposition 13 gutted education funding, so that the California system, once the nation's pride, became one of the worst.
The two-thirds majority to pass a state budget produces annual gridlock in Sacramento. Democrats, in cahoots with organized labour, resist spending cuts; Republicans insist on more tax cuts despite dreadful fiscal news. Ideologies clash, and nothing gets gone. The high-tech boom of the 1990s obscured the state's problems as Republicans pushed for lower taxes and Democrats for higher spending. Gridlock meant that when revenues fell, as they did when the high technology sector fizzled, the legislature fiddled, fussed and resorted to gimmicks. That's how Governor Davis and the legislature papered over this year's $38-billion deficit.
The appeal of the outsider in such a system is considerable — the allure of someone who can rise above the legislature, the vested interests and break gridlock. It's the paradoxical result of the populist instinct: the search for someone clean, fresh and capable of putting the "people's" interests first. Ronald Reagan, the B-grade movie actor, fit the populist bill perfectly and governed the state from 1967 to 1975. George Murphy, a Hollywood song-and-dance man from the 1930s, became a U.S. senator in 1964. Mr. Schwarzenegger, an actor of limited talent, but large pectorals and a propensity to kill hundreds of people on screen, is the latest outsider from Hollywood pledged to defend the interest of the "people."
California's fiscal predicament is worse than most but not unusual. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that this year 31 state governments are cutting spending, 29 are drawing down reserves, 18 are raising taxes or fees, 13 are tapping "rainy day" funds, and eight are using tobacco-settlement money to pay operating expenses.
President George W. Bush's United States is a fiscal Alice-in-Wonderland, awash in budgetary red ink as far as the eye can see. California is in political wonderland, as it often is, courtesy of the perversion of progressive politics. Hence:
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
