In 1949, a Los Angeles lawyer and journalist named Carey McWilliams published California: The Great Exception (“California: The Great Exception”). The book details the peculiarities of the state of California so skillfully that it has never gone out of print. McWilliams’ reasoning can be summed up as follows: California is such a strange thing that it is impossible to explain it.
“It is not yet possible to know exactly how California fits into the overall scheme of the United States,” McWilliams wrote, in words that remain apt. “To understand this tiger, you have to set aside the rules. You have to forget all the textbook slogans. California is not just another state. It is a revolution among states. It is an anomaly, a rare phenomenon, the great exception.”
California’s exceptional character has made it a target of attacks by Donald Trump and Republicans in the campaign against his Californian rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump’s camp says the Democratic presidential candidate is typical of a California that is too crazy and progressive for ordinary citizens in the rest of the country (in a national poll, half of Republicans have said that California “isn’t really America”). Trumpists also accuse her of being to blame for the state’s high cost of living and homelessness; “she destroyed California,” Trump says. Harris, the Republican campaign says in a statement, is “the California radical who completes the leftist takeover that Joe Biden began.”
But such criticism is not working, precisely because California is known to be an exception. It is a state so big, so crazy and so diverse that it is not credible to say that there is a single person who embodies it. And, of course, no single leader can be blamed for his policies or his failures.
The other problem with attacking California and its exceptionalism is that it is too old a tactic. Indeed, the first Californian to run for president—Republican John C. Fremont in 1856—was the target of the same kind of attacks now being leveled at Harris. “We know of no country where there is so much corruption, villainy, criminality, intemperance, licentiousness, and every variety of crime, folly, and meanness” as in California, Hinton R. Helper wrote in a best-selling book that same year.
Helper also highlighted the number of homeless people in San Francisco, as Trump and other California critics do today. “We encounter at every turn degradation, waste and vice,” he wrote. “Dozens of penniless vagrants … wander endlessly through the city doing nothing and mired in misery. They have no place to rest or bed but bales of hay in which they wrap themselves for shelter and sleep during the long hours of the night.”
These tirades against the West Coast state and its politicians have been constant. McWilliams argued that California was moving too fast for the slowness of the rest of the United States. Higher education spread in this state before it did in the rest of the country (in 1912, the University of California at Berkeley was the largest in the world). In 1962, it became the most populous state and today it has eight million more inhabitants than Texas. And its economy has never stopped growing, with a GDP comparable to that of Germany.
California has huge problems: a housing shortage, the highest number of homeless people in the country, and a skyrocketing cost of living that makes it one of the poorest states in the U.S. Population growth has stagnated, not because people are leaving (it has the lowest emigration rate in the country), but because so few Americans can afford to live here.
At the same time, though, California has done more to address those problems than other states: It has devoted tens of billions of dollars to homeless services, passed a minimum wage that is twice the average, and, as of earlier this year, became the first state in the country to offer health care to all its residents, regardless of immigration status. Californians live more than two years longer than other Americans. It also has the strictest gun control laws in the country.
In this context, we Californians have learned to take criticism from other states as disguised envy. Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was governor, liked to respond to detractors with a smile and this phrase: “Everyone feels sorry for the weak. Envy has to be earned.”
Arnold’s confidence is justified by California’s current situation. But when it comes to the future, California faces a fundamental problem for which Harris bears some responsibility.
The problem is the state’s increasingly broken system of government. For decades, California’s tendency to enact new rights, new regulations, and new constitutional amendments, often through voter-approved measures, has made the state too rigid to govern. The state’s education, prison, and infrastructure systems have been weakened. Constant emergencies caused by climate change put more and more communities at risk.
The need for structural change has long been clear. But Harris, during a political career in California that included positions including San Francisco district attorney, state attorney general and California senator, skirted these issues and refused to engage in political or governance reform movements.
She simply did her job carefully and pragmatically, leaving no great legacy. There is no program or institution that bears Harris’s imprint in California.
That caution has turned out to be smart politics. Harris managed to win three tough elections — the 2006 race for San Francisco district attorney, the 2010 race for state attorney general and the 2016 race for the U.S. Senate — against better-known rivals. Those victories propelled her rise to the vice presidency.
In the current presidential campaign, Kamala Harris likes to say she wants to achieve “what can be, unencumbered by what has been.” But both the California she left behind and the America she wants to govern are severely burdened by old norms, outdated systems and debt.
And there is nothing in her California career, or in the few policy proposals of the campaign, that suggests that, as president, Harris will have a clear vision for the country, or the will to change the country’s shaky systems, or that she will tackle the planet’s major problems.
Harris’s caution and restraint are undoubtedly serving her well in the campaign, reassuring voters who are frightened by the unpredictable and authoritarian Trump. But if she wins, Americans and citizens around the world may end up wishing she weren’t such a conventional politician.
The problems facing the United States will surely require someone in the presidency who can act quickly, who is unconventional, and who has the scale and exceptional character of California.
Joe Mathews is a columnist in California of Zócalo Public Square, researcher on democracy and founder and director of the publication Democracy Local.
Translation of Maria Luisa Rodriguez Tapia.
