How California Politics Became So Blah

[Celerity]

The only truly passionate players in today’s election appear to be the corporate moguls funding the anti–Tom Steyer campaigns.

https://prospect.org/2026/06/02/how-california-politics-became-so-blah/



It’s Election Day in my home state, and it raises a meta-question that’s not before the voters as such, but that nonetheless depresses both them and their turnout: How did California politics become so lackluster? My colleague David Dayen and I have both offered some partial answers. David pointed a finger at the once-vibrant Bay Area–based machine now run by spiritless consultants with no interest in addressing issues around which today’s movements could arise. I singled out the way the jungle primary compelled everyone to become a tactician rather than a values-driven voter. But there’s something more—a hollowness that’s descended over this year’s campaigns that amounts to a betrayal of California’s political traditions.

At least as far back as 1910, when Progressives swept to power and remade the state, California politics have been movement politics and oppositional politics. At times, those movements have had definite crackpot aspects, emerging, as did the 1930s groundswell for governmental benefits for the aged, from furious transplanted Midwesterners who could have come straight out of Nathanael West’s lumpen mob in The Day of the Locust. Some of their rightward-moving children dominated Orange County, swelled the ranks of the John Birch Society, and took the Republican Party away from its Eisenhower establishment, with its resigned acceptance of much of the New Deal, and bestowed it on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who sought to remove such socialistic blots from American life.

Transforming national parties wasn’t exclusively a California Republican project; it defined California Democrats as well. During the Popular Front period of the 1930s, when lifelong Socialist Party member Upton Sinclair won the Democratic gubernatorial primary and California’s unusually savvy Communist Party members realized they had become the left flank of the New Deal, the state’s Democratic Party developed a social democratic tinge, with a social democratic wing, that persisted for the rest of the century. The battles that the onetime Socialist Party and Communist Party members waged in the ’30s and ’40s were chiefly economic. But the huge buildup of industry in the state during World War II and the Cold War (from 1940 through 1990, the largest private-sector employers in the state were Lockheed, Douglas, North American Rockwell, and other aerospace companies), and the fact that those companies were all unionized, meant that the broadly shared prosperity of postwar America was particularly broad in California, as well as shinier and newer than it was in the rest of the nation.

As early as the 1950s, liberal California began to focus on issues other than wages and hours, just as conservative California did as well. Civil rights laws were enacted in advance of their federal counterparts. A confrontational New Left reached UC Berkeley in 1964, four years before it hit Eastern universities. Across the bay from Berkeley, the founder of California’s enduring Democratic machine, Rep. Phil Burton, managed to single-handedly abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. He also opposed the Vietnam War, and the state’s Young Democrats (led by two UCLA law students, Henry Waxman and Howard Berman, who were to found the SoCal branch of Burton’s machine) became the first official party organization in the country to go on record against the war. The 1968 anti-war, anti-LBJ presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy marked the first campaign involvement of a young Jerry Brown, whose anti-war sentiments, as well as his support for the fledgling United Farm Workers, were defining issues for the young Democrats who came to dominate the state party.

snip

[lame54]

1. So, mean and deceptive is passionate?

[Celerity]

3. It can be if done with vigour (and of course the article is having a go at the corporate moguls).

[msongs]

2. steyer is a corporate mogul funding a campaign lol

from his wikipedia page - hedge fund manager steyer:

Said one former investor with his fund: “He [Steyer] made us a lot of money and his attitude has always been ‘whatever it will take to make money.’”[19]

he didnt get to be a billionaire by being nice