As a pal of mine in San Francisco put it, “The liberal atom has been split.”Īt the top of a hill in Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library looks out on a dramatic rust-colored landscape out of a John Ford Western. But California, by any measure, is undergoing a vibe shift. Trying to write about the whole of California is akin to the proverbial blind man trying to describe an elephant. And how do you do that, respectful of people’s rights, but also respectful of their safety?” “Whether you want to call it homelessness or drug use or whatever it is,” she says, “safety is the oath we take to protect and defend-yes, the Constitution, but the people. “It was terrible on the issue of safety.” “They lost four seats and the governor came within four points,” she notes. And the “biggest challenge” to California, she says, is “safety.” Democrats, says Pelosi, might have captured the House last year if New York’s governor hadn’t misread the political winds on the issue of crime. Increasingly, among Democrats, there is a call for greater toughness.
People living under bridges and climatological disasters are sobering counterfactuals to the California Dream and also wrenches in the liberal machinery. If, as one Democratic consultant told me, California is the “coming attractions for America,” it looks like a trailer for Mad Max: PCH. As a model for America, however, it’s giving off decidedly mixed signals: encampments of homeless people, floods and mudslides, drought and wildfires, earthquakes and depleted waterways, home invasions and mass shootings, tech layoffs and entertainment and teacher strikes, drained government coffers and spooky economic shudders. The Golden State has always been as much an idea as a place, a fantasyland for Easterners to pine for and put down. “But we”-California-“certainly lead the way in everything.”
“I would like to think of our whole country as a freedom country,” she says. I ask Pelosi what she makes of the motto. Newsom, perhaps teasing a future White House bid, offers California as the left-wing alternative, a liberal’s shining city on a hill, where diversity and tolerance, science and innovation, money and opportunity form a cutting-edge vision of America. Governor Gavin Newsom has upped the ante by branding California the “True Freedom State,” a rejoinder to Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Freedom State” slogan, pitching Florida as a kind of anti-woke protectorate.
“I mean, so many people just flock here to raise money and find kindred souls in terms of the environmental, the LGBTQ, the fairness, health care, you name the subject, saving the planet, whatever it is,” she continues. And ever since Speaker Pelosi began muscling more seats into Congress decades ago, California has shaped progressive policy, from the environment to gun control to gay and trans rights. Setting aside that California started with the decimation of Indigenous people by those missionaries following their cattle, it’s also the engine room of the modern Democratic Party, soon to be the fourth-largest economy in the world, bigger than Germany’s, and lousy with tech billionaires and Hollywood honchos.
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