Reaction to the Field Poll’s study of California’s changing political demography is starting to come in quickly. One of the first and likely to be the most prominent is that of Dan Walters, who sees in the results a recipe for fragmentation:

California, it’s been observed, is a canary in the socioeconomic mine, telling the rest of the nation what to expect in the future, for better or worse.

If so, then the rest of the nation had best be prepared for fragmentation, which is the only word that fully captures the division of a once-cohesive society into its many component parts….

This fragmentation, coupled with ever-lower levels of voter participation, means politicians must cater to an electorate that reflects an ever-narrower slice of the socioeconomic whole while trying to meet the needs of an isolated, nonvoting underclass.

It manifests itself in such things as a chronically unbalanced state budget and political gridlock.

Walters is not wrong when he points out that California is characterized by a prosperous, older, and white group of regular voters whereas most people who actually live here are not prosperous, are younger, are not white, and are not regular voters.

That is perhaps the most important takeaway from the poll, and it shows Democrats and progressives that our #1 organizing task in this state is to turn those “nonvoters” into regular voters.

But Walters takes a different lesson from the poll results – that it reveals a “fragmented” electorate, as opposed to one that was supposedly unified in a mythical earlier period.

I question that entire assumption. 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.

Within the white electorate that dominated the state there were also divisions, particularly as a significant bloc of the white working class deserted Pat Brown, seduced by Ronald Reagan’s politics of right-wing backlash. The shift of the state’s corporate and political leadership to an embrace of that politics took much longer to complete, leaving plenty of fragmentation in its wake.

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. Younger Californians of all races are much more likely to be comfortable with racial diversity, meaning that the California Republican Party, with an old white anti-diversity base, does not have a bright future ahead of itself. The post-1994 phenomenon of diversity producing Democratic dominance is likely to continue for some time.

Walters likely acknowledges all of this. But his core point in today’s column is that somehow, this fragmentation is responsible for our crisis of governance.

I don’t buy it. 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.

Most Californians live our diversity every day. That’s not to say we live it well, fairly, or equitably. But we live it, and one should not assume that a majority-minority state automatically produces ungovernable fractiousness.

The problem is instead that our political institutions are designed to effectively exclude the nonwhite, the young, those who are not affluent. The 2/3rds rule creates a conservative veto, which in practice hands veto power to the small cadre of older white voters who comprise the shrinking Republican electorate. It also happens to, not coincidentally, disempower Democrats, the party of the demographic change over the last 30 years.

The lack of same-day registration, or universal registration, makes it extremely difficult to allow younger, more diverse, and less affluent voters to actually cast a ballot. Our broken constitution, especially the befouled initiative process, hands power to those with money and prevents everyone else from playing a meaningful role.

So when Dan Walters sees high unemployment, a state with lots of residents on public assistance, low academic achievement scores and high incarceration rates, I see not a product of fragmentation, but a deliberate outcome of an obsolete government that has totally failed to adapt to the fact that 2009 is not 1978.

In short, California is no longer a democracy. It is fast becoming an aristocracy, where those who have affluence (particularly white homeowners in coastal cities who bought before 1996, who are typically in their 40’s or older) have access to power and the ability to implement their political views and goals.

As for the rest of us, we are shut out of government almost entirely. We bear the brunt of the budget deals because there are no institutional pathways that allow us to address our needs or implement our political views. This ongoing exclusion is deliberate, and it is no accident that those who most desire its maintenance are Republicans, who best represent what I have previously called the homeowner aristocracy.

California’s demographic changes doesn’t produce more fragmentation. What it produces is more polarization between the have-nots and the have-mores, between those who have access to political power and those who do not.

And ultimately those demographic changes don’t imply more and worse misrule. What it ultimately portends is dramatic political change, to our institutions and our political behaviors. Power concedes nothing without a demand, as Frederick Douglass aptly noted 150 years ago.

California is about to hear a lot of demands in the coming years, as the disempowered demand fundamental change in how California operates.