Today’s Paul Krugman column exploring the apparent end of Republican racial backlash politics has been getting some excellent commentary across the blogosphere, including friend of Calitics thereisnospoon’s excellent take at Daily Kos:

For the longest time, the progressive economic agenda was held hostage to vaguely economically progressive but socially retrograde racist Dixiecrats in the South.  When truly progressive economics required that all our nation’s people have equal opportunity to share in the nation’s wealth, those erstwhile allies became strained or broken.  But today Democrats are no longer dependent on the likes of Zell Miller and his Dixiecratic friends to enact a progressive economic agenda.  The Republicans have painted themselves into a corner as the Party of the South, and Democrats have largely cleaned our own house of the racists.

All that leaves for us is the question of whether enough of our Democratic officials will recover from their Battered Wife Syndrome and the reject the temptations of corporate corruption to truly herald the advent of a 2nd New Deal.

Krugman and spoon’s points are especially applicable to California, where the Republican politics of backlash was born and perfected. From Reagan’s 1966 campaign that took many white working class voters from Pat Brown and the Dems, to Howard Jarvis’ 1978 Prop 13 campaign to cut taxes he argued were being misspent on people of color, to Pete Wilson’s 1994 campaign won by scapegoating immigrants (also true of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2003 recall campaign, to a lesser extent) California Republican ideologies and political success have been built on exploiting white voters’ resentments. As both Krugman and spoon point out, the base wanted the Great Society undone, and the real power in the Republican Party wanted to undo the New Deal.

As the state of California enters the most serious fiscal crisis in its 150-year history, it’s worth looking at how the collapse of Republican backlash politics may provide the necessary opening to fix this state and move beyond 40 years of destructive and failed conservative ideology.

The short version of what I’m going to explain below is this: the collapse of the backlash is due to a more diverse electorate and to an economic crisis that is now consuming the white middle-class, eliminating previous economic privileges they turned to conservatives to defend.

The underlying economic and demographic rationale for Republican anti-tax backlash politics in California is now gone, making multiracial coalitional politics based on expanding government in order to provide badly needed services and jobs a very real possibility, and likely the seed of a new political framework in California. More services and more spending, not less taxes, are now the overriding concern of California voters. Our politicians will have to catch up to be viable.

One of the most lauded political books of 2008 was Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland showing how Orange County’s contribution to presidential politics exploited the resentments of white middle class strivers against a liberal elite that both the strivers and Nixon held responsible for the upheavals and dislocations of the 1960s, and how those politics have dominated America ever since.

A similar book for California politics was published in 2003 by Robert Self, a historian now at Brown University. The book is called American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. It is to my mind the best book on California political history I’ve ever read, as it shows how the anti-tax politics that came to dominate California in 1978 are fundamentally rooted in racial backlash.

Using Alameda County as an example, Self shows how Howard Jarvis’ rhetoric resonated because more and more suburban Californians believed they were being taxed to death to pay for social programs benefiting undeserving people of color in inner cities like Oakland and Los Angeles. They believed they could vote for Prop 13 and cut property taxes without hurting themselves because, in their mind, the tax cuts would force social spending on the inner cities to be cut, but preserve their own suburban services.

This was only made possible by the economic struggles of the late 1970s. Before then conservatism had few successes in state policymaking. In the 1960s Reagan himself pushed through the largest (in percentage increase) tax increase in state history to preserve Pat Brown’s legacy of using government to provide widely shared prosperity. 1970 saw Democrats take control of both houses of the Legislature for good (although Dems had temporary setbacks in 1978 and 1994). Reagan’s anti-tax efforts never fared well at the ballot box and in 1974 Jerry Brown was elected governor to lead a new era of California liberalism.

But by 1978 underlying conditions had changed. Persistent inflation made the suburban California dream seem less attainable. Rising property taxes and rising land values combined with a stagnant economy threw a scare into the white middle class. That was exacerbated by conservative paranoia about racial integration, a state budget supposedly being spent on “welfare queens” in Oakland and South Central LA.

Another, less widely known but equally important aspect of the Prop 13 backlash was concern that Jerry Brown was using state government to end suburban sprawl – his push for sustainable growth, his early efforts at studying greater urban densities, and his talking up of mass transit was taken by many in the white middle class as an attack on their version of the California Dream. Those efforts were often racialized by their opponents – some said urban density brings crime and poverty, others were afraid Brown wanted to force them to ride the train with people of color (who were seen as carriers of poverty and crime).

By 1978 many white Californians began to believe their economic privileges were under assault. And so they struck back at their supposed enemies – a ‘liberal elite using taxes and government planning to destroy their suburban paradise by forcing mass transit and social programs benefiting people of color down their throats.’

Prop 13 was at root an effort to protect those economic privileges – low taxes, easy homeownership in a white community remote from the problems of a multiracial inner city. Prop 13 created a homeowner veto over state government, ensuring that the white homeowner class would never again be abused by that damn liberal elite (or so they put it).

This reckless act would have destroyed their own prosperity much more quickly had it not been for 30 years of easy credit. College, affordable before 1980, was unaffordable afterward – unless you took out loans. Student loans, mortgages, and HELOCs enabled higher education to continue to meet California’s creative, innovative, and economic needs, but that all depended on access to credit. As housing values soared in the 1980s, and again in the 2000s, credit again was the vehicle to homeownership, to car ownership (now that the conservatives had succeeded in strangling widespread mass transit investment this was necessary for prosperity), to paying your medical bills – to a semblance of prosperity.

It wasn’t working. In 2007 the California Budget Project released a landmark study A Generation of Inequality showing that since 1979 middle-income jobs have vanished, and young people in particular have faced worsening economic prospects. As long as credit was cheap and plentiful this could be masked. But for how long?

The answer turns out to have been “30 years”. Easy credit enabled California to stagger on after 1978 but that is no longer the case. With a hollowed-out economic base the California of 2009 is a very different place from the California of 1979, with much worse economic prospects.

Government spending to reorient our economy away from sprawl, oil, finance and service jobs, and toward more sustainable green jobs, is badly needed. And that means we have to confront the tax monster.

For 30 years anti-tax politics dominated using a logic of backlash: liberal elites want to tax you out of your suburban dream to give a handout to undeserving people of color. That backlash survived on credit – on vapor, really. But now that the credit is gone and 1930s-style deflation and mass unemployment is here, the economic logic of the backlash is gone. The privileges of the white middle class are vanishing, and while they’re not yet struggling as working-class and poor Californians have, the distinctions are quickly eroding.

A quick look at immigrant bashing proves the point. Even last year you could still see people arguing that if we somehow cut benefits to the undocumented, California would be in the black. That has vanished with a $40 billion deficit. Hardly anyone aside from the racist hardcore believes immigrants are responsible for that scale of a deficit.

The demographic basis of the backlash is vanishing too. A funny thing happened to the white suburbanites – their kids, even we who grew up in ultra-conservative Orange County, became used to diversity. The great influx of Asian and Latino families affected us profoundly, as did the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and greater interaction with African Americans. California was 80% white in 1970 – today only 43% of us are non-Hispanic whites. Some of us have even entered into mixed-race marriages. And young people strongly opposed Prop 8.

Chris Bowers has argued that a progressive coalition of pluralist voters, no longer defined by and thus not animated by race, has shown up to determine the outcome of the 2006 and 2008 elections. That movement has dominated California politics since 1996 – in the last 12 years Republicans have consistently lost ground at the ballot box, with Arnold Schwarzenegger being the sole exception. Obama won California by one of the largest margins any presidential candidate has won in our state.

But as long as cheap credit greased the economic wheels, the anti-tax backlash could be sustained. The economic crisis now offers the second necessary condition for blowing up the Republican politics of backlash. As schools fire teachers, cut science classes, as more and more in the middle class lose their jobs, their homes, their health care, and see their children losing their future, tax cuts recede in importance.

What Californians in economic distress need aren’t more tax cuts, but government services to provide a safety net, to provide growth, to provide prosperity. Just as in the 1930s, just as in the 1960s. Without the racial backlash, Republicans’ only argument against that kind of government spending is hard right ideology that seems absurd in the face of a severe crisis. When little Johnny and Maria aren’t able to afford college or even go to school, voter resistance to new taxes will melt away.

If that sounds like a fantasy to our conservative readers, 2008 proved the point. When gas prices soared, threatening basic prosperity, California voters in LA County, Santa Clara County, and Marin-Sonoma voted to tax themselves for mass transit. The votes were by landslide margins; only the 2/3 rule made it look close.

Republican backlash politics – the racialized anti-tax backlash – are dead. All Republicans now have are legalistic defenses and structural gimmicks – the 2/3 rule, Arnold’s line-item power, Arnold’s own possession of the Governor’s office. Those still hold considerable power. But the underlying logic is gone, and the public support, such as it existed, is gone too, even though few have noticed.

All that remains is for Democrats to walk through the open door and more aggressively assert a social democratic politics that is no afraid of the anti-tax bogeyman. That’s no small task, especially for a California Democratic Party that for 30 years survived by following Jerry Brown’s “born again tax cutter” complicity.

If Democrats want to win elections they need to understand we live in a new era in which the old rules of the last 30 years no longer apply. If we want to save California we need to recognize the new coalitions that are possible, that are emerging, that have shown their power since 1996.

California can’t afford the Republican backlash any more. And it looks like slowly, they’re starting to understand that.

The details of Arnold’s budget plan are in and it is even more insane than we thought. His budget includes large cuts to public schools, which are bad enough in their own right. But the specific kinds of cuts are going to trigger a snowball effect that could destroy public schools in California – and I don’t believe that’s an exaggeration.

California schools could eliminate a week of instruction and increase class sizes next year under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new plan for solving the state’s budget crisis.

Vowing to give schools maximum flexibility to cut costs, the proposal unveiled Wednesday also would allow districts to eliminate one of two science courses required for high school graduation.

Schwarzenegger’s plan would provide no teacher salary increases, eliminate a program providing subsidies to overhaul low-performing schools, and suspend participation in a program encouraging teachers to obtain national certification.

In and of themselves these cuts are damaging and reckless. California students need MORE science instruction, not less, if they’re going to be globally competitive. Cutting instruction isn’t going to help students learn more, and will lead to corner-cutting by teachers and administrators alike.

Those damaging cuts become catastrophic, however, in the context of No Child Left Behind. Arnold’s proposals are likely to cause numerous schools to fail to meet federal standards set by the law, especially when subsidies to low-performing schools are cut. Because NCLB mandates the closure of low-performing schools, Arnold’s budget if enacted as-is would virtually ensure the closure of numerous schools in this state.

Arnold’s budget also leaves schools facing their own cash crisis during the school year (and in prime testing season):

The governor has proposed to ease the pain, in part, by accounting transfers involving state transportation funds and by deferring $2.8 billion in school payments from April to July. Wells said the state, by deferring payments for three months, would place an “awful” new burden on school districts to secure short-term loans.

It will be extremely difficult to secure those kinds of loans, but Arnold continues to delude himself into thinking the private sector is interested in lending to state government or its affiliated agencies.

There are plenty of other ridiculous elements to Arnold’s budget but the kinds of education cuts proposed are a good example of just how badly Arnold has screwed up our state. One has to wonder whether this is a shock-doctrine style plan to force mass privatization of public schools in California by starving them of revenue and forcing them to close when they inevitably are unable to meet NCLB standards.

Two years from now a new governor will be sworn in. I wonder if California can wait that long.

2008 was the year change came to California. And by that I don’t just mean the successful Obama campaign. 2008 was the year the 20th century model finally broke down on the side of the road, as the privatized, financialized, sprawlconomy collapsed. California has been hit harder than almost every other state by the economic crisis, which has shown Californians the desperate need to move in a new direction.

The dominant political development in the state was the battle over that future. The budget crisis, which took up all of 2008 and will likely do the same in 2009, isn’t just about taxes and spending, but about what kind of state we will live in.

The one thing all sides agree is that the future will not look like the past. Arnold Schwarzengger wants to roll back 40 years of environmental and labor laws, while his Republican legislative colleagues want to go back to the early 19th century before even public schools, in their desire to destroy state government. The Yacht Party is openly rooting for a Depression, which they believe will enable them to finally destroy their liberal enemies. If that requires sacrificing the middle class, so be it – Republicans only ever saw them as easily manipulated fellow-travelers anyway.

Democrats have not articulated a future as clearly as their opponents, but Californians have done this on their own. In a year that saw some bitter electoral defeats, voters pointed the way forward by approving nearly every mass transit proposal put to them, including those that required a 2/3 supermajority to raise taxes. Whether it’s high speed rail, the Subway to the Sea, BART to San José, or the Marin-Sonoma train, Californians showed that anti-tax Hooverism has its limits.

In one of the most important speeches of the year, Van Jones called for progressives to move from opposition to proposition. The only way we can defeat the New Hoovers among us, those who want to despoil our environment and make working Californians suffer worse during this economic crisis, is for progressives to clearly articulate and defend a better alternative. The successful mass transit votes show how powerful that effort can be when it is made.

It also shows that Californians are now ready to redefine the California Dream for the 21st century – they are beginning to understand that the 20th century model of an economy built on sprawl has failed them and cannot provide broadly shared prosperity. Since so much of our politics stems from that sprawlconomy, Californians’ willingness to look beyond it is a much-needed shift, even if the old ways die hard.

If that better, sustainable and prosperous future is to be realized, California progressives need to be better organized. The other great lesson, and the most important single political event of the year, was the passage of Proposition 8 – which showed how totally the old ways of politics had failed.

Many Caliticians have dissected the failure of the No on 8 campaign, laying the blame at a top-down consultant-driven media-focused campaign that did not speak clearly about the issue, about who would be impacted, and did not reach out to those Californians we need to reach. When we fight this battle again we will fix those mistakes. If Obama showed how a grassroots effort can change the country, Prop 8 showed how the lack of one can hurt the state.

The battle over Prop 8 also showed the maturation of the gay rights movement, which is the direct descendant of and now the heir to the Civil Rights Movement. It showed that even California is not immune to successful gay-bashing, but also showed how wide and deep support for equal rights has become. Prop 8 has galvanized a new generation to become politically organized, has turned average people into committed activists, and has united the progressive movement around a plan to bring communities together to organize for everyone’s right to marry.

2008 was not a good year for California, and we enter 2009 with enormous challenges, with at least one wheel over the edge of the cliff. But 2008 has also shown us the way forward, how a grassroots, bottom-up politics centered on full equality for all and a sustainable model of prosperity can break through the failed politics of the 20th century and renew California’s promise as a progressive, free, and beautiful place to live.

Crossposted at Daily Kos
I work for the Courage Campaign

As I mentioned on Sunday Arnold Schwarzenegger benefits from some very favorable media coverage – casting him as some kind of tough-minded leader, a moderate post-partisan man of the people.

We know that’s not true – that in fact he is a deeply right-wing governor determined to destroy the safety net and public services. So how do we push back against the flawed media narratives?

It’s time we started framing Arnold for what he really is – California’s Scrooge. A man who delivered a huge lump of coal to state residents with his veto threat of the Democratic budget. A governor who after 5 years has left California in worse shape than he found it.

The Courage Campaign, in partnership with Donkey on the Edge and with the support of Cheri and Naren Shankar, put together this video of Arnold’s “California Carol” – Arnold is visited by the ghosts of California past, present and future, showing him the error of his ways.

Unfortunately, California’s Ebenezer Scrooge isn’t going to have a Christmas morning change of heart and suddenly decide to provide funding for schools and health care. Not unless we the people demand that he stop cutting and start saving California by signing the Democratic budget deal.

We’re going to deliver a holiday card to Arnold which you can sign here – a first step in pushing back against Arnold’s media enablers, against his efforts to bankrupt California.