Fellow Orange County native Ezra Klein picks up on a point we’ve been making a lot here at Calitics over the last few years:

Polarization isn’t a new story, nor were California’s budget problems and constitutional handicap. Yet the state let its political dysfunctions go unaddressed. Most assumed that the legislature’s bickering would be cast aside in the face of an emergency. But the intransigence of California’s legislators has not softened despite the spiraling unemployment, massive deficits and absence of buoyant growth on the horizon. Quite the opposite, in fact. The minority party spied opportunity in fiscal collapse. If the majority failed to govern the state, then the voters would turn on them, or so the theory went.

That raises a troubling question: What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?…

The lesson of California is that a political system too dysfunctional to avert crisis is also too dysfunctional to respond to it. The difficulty is not economic so much as it is political; solving our fiscal problem is a mixture of easy arithmetic and hard choices, but until we solve our political problem, both are out of reach. And we can’t assume that an emergency, or the prospect of one, will solve the political problem for us. If you want to see how that movie ends, just look west, as we have so many times before.

Ezra’s column shows how the looming dysfunction in the Senate, where the Republicans are preparing to block all solutions to our problems that are not deeply ideologically conservative, is a tactic perfected here in California. I wish he had pointed out that “polarization” is a natural outcome of a 50-year political process that has seen public opinion evolve to a point where there is clearer distinction between the two parties, and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Personally I welcome polarization, voters deserve a genuine choice, especially when the “bipartisanship” people yearn for was itself a very temporary phenomenon of the 1950s, a product of an economic boom the likes of which we’d never seen before and will never see again.

Although Ezra doesn’t offer clear solutions here, he is pointing out that both California and the US Congress have the same problem: rules that empower a minority are a rule for catastrophe in a polarized politics. By implication, you basically have two options: eliminate those rules, or eliminate the polarized politics.

Again, since “polarization” is the product of very deep and fundamental historical forces, ending it is going to be rather difficult anytime soon, and may not be desirable anyway, since a less polarized politics generally means more corporate politics, cramming down working people in the name of bipartisan comity so that the rich can get richer. Calitics and most California progressives have frequently embraced a restoration of majority rule – let the majority make policy and let the chips fall where they may.

Predictably, large corporations don’t like that option, and still believe they can and should produce more corporate-friendly politics. So instead of supporting a restoration of majority rule, they’re going to try to manipulate the process to reduce the polarization that voters repeatedly embrace.

That’s the takeaway from an extremely revealing profile of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group in today’s New York Times. The article is one of Dan Weintraub’s first pieces since moving to the NYT from the Sacramento Bee, and it’s quite good, showing how the SVLG thinks about “reform”:

With nearly 300 companies on its roster, from Accenture to Yahoo, the group stands out as a small island of ideological diversity in a sea of partisan polarization….

One is a June measure that would create open primaries in California elections. If the proposal passes, voters would be able to choose among all candidates in the primaries without regard to party affiliation. The top two finishers would advance to a run-off election.

“The open primary,” [Carl] Guardino [head of SVLG] said, would help “free well-meaning legislators from the grips of the party caucuses.” The result might be a Legislature that looks a little more like Silicon Valley and less like Orange County or Marin County.

That last line is probably Weintraub’s spin, but it is telling. Guardino and the SVLG haven’t noticed that Californians have self-selected themselves into communities of shared political philosophies over the last 30 to 40 years. If they have noticed, they think it’s somehow a bad thing that voters in San Francisco or Mission Viejo have decided they share some deeply held values and prefer their representatives reflect that. I call that a genuine example of “representative democracy.” What does Guardino call it?

Apparently he calls it something crying out for technocratic manipulation. Since it’s not possible to draw districts in California that are competitive without truly massive gerrymandering and diluting the preferences of the electorate, which is much more strongly Democratic than anything else, Guardino and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group are throwing their weight behind Abel Maldonado’s top two primary, which he got on the June ballot only through an act of blackmail.

The top two would do two things that Guardino wants. First, it would push primary battles out into the general election in most CA districts, which will always be drawn to favor one party or the other, since that’s how Californians have chosen to self-associate. The SVLG’s members can then play a bigger role in determining the outcomes of those races, where money will play a bigger role. They can also use a few of those races to distract progressive activists while the big boys focus on even bigger races, such as California governor.

Second, it would give a boost to conservative Democrats in some key districts by enabling Republicans and other right-wingers to choose the outcomes of a Democratic primary. Let’s take AD-27, my assembly district, which includes the  very progressive electorate of Monterey and Santa Cruz. If SVLG decided to fund a “centrist” Democrat, they’d probably garner enough votes to make it to the general election against a more progressive Democrat. That would give them the ability to combine some conservative and Republican votes to try and sneak the centrist in, combined with spending to sell the centrist to a more progressive electorate as the only winnable candidate. It might not work in every district, surely many progressive voters would see through the ruse, but in districts where the Democratic electorate isn’t as strongly progressive, the strategy could swing some seats to corporate-friendly right-wing Dems. Which is exactly the opposite of what we want as progressive Californians.

This is what you get when large California corporations see the natural outcome of the right-wing policies they’ve endorsed and funded for decades: they don’t like the “polarized” politics, don’t like the collapsing infrastructure and inability of government to fund a competitive job climate. But since they also can’t accept that they’d have to give up a measure of their own power and some of their money in order to have more stable economic growth – after all, these are fundamentally greedy people – they won’t admit their earlier error and try to destroy the right-wing’s power by restoring majority rule.

Instead they’ll try and one more time revive the “bipartisan centrism” that had worked so well at growing their power and wealth in the late 20th century. And they’re willing to massively manipulate the state’s political system in order to do it.

Eventually they will learn the same lesson every other corporation learns: when you help build a right-wing political movement, you are creating a Frankenstein monster that you will be unable to control and that will cause so much damage and chaos that you’ll lose more than you’ve gained. But since corporate neoliberal centrist politics and Doctor Frankenstein share something fundamental – an unending belief in their own god complex – they’re going to keep on trying it until its failure is beyond doubt, and until the populist masses take up pitchforks and torches and clean house.