And if American democracy is going to be saved, that rescue needs to start in Southern California.

This may come as news to Americans who, when they worry about the nation’s democratic future, obsess about developments in Washington, pronouncements from Mar-a-Lago, or election-related legislation in purple states. But the truth is that it is L.A.—America’s most populous county—that best demonstrates the most fundamental failure of our democracy.

Democracy in this country starts with elected representation, and we Angelenos have less of it than Americans in the other 49 states. Angelenos are often accused of not paying attention to government and politics. But perhaps that’s because our politicians don’t pay attention to us. They are too distant from us to represent us effectively.

The core problem is that American elected bodies have not expanded, even as population has grown. This is true at all levels of government, and especially in Tinseltown.

In the city of Los Angeles, population four million and counting, there are just 15 city councilmembers. That means each councilmember represents 270,000 people, the highest such ratio in the country.

At the county level, Los Angeles is even less democratic, with just five elected supervisors to represent 10.3 million people. Those local districts, with one official per two-million residents—are by far the most populous local jurisdictions in this country, and among the largest anywhere in the world.

At the state level, Angelenos have the misfortune of being Californians, who suffer under the least representative state government in the country. Our state Senate has just 40 seats for nearly 40 million people—giving us the most populous Senate districts in the country. Our Assembly, the lower house, offers just 80 seats, with 500,000 Californians represented per district. That’s nearly three times more people per member than any lower house in the country, and five times the national average.

And if that’s not outrageous enough, look at the federal government. Suffice to say, Californians, with just two senators, have the lowest level of representation in the democratic fraud scheme that is the U.S. Senate. The House of Representatives, by guaranteeing one seat to even small states, gives Wyoming and Vermont residents more than three times the electoral power of Californians. It’s also worth noting that, with San Francisco kid Stephen Breyer’s retirement, there is not a single Californian on the nation’s real ruling body, the unelected U.S. Supreme Court.

This sorry state of democratic representation hurts Angelenos, and Californians, and dangerously undermines our trust in government. In order to get elected in districts of such size and scale, our representatives must pay attention to those who can fund their massive campaigns. Our relative lack of representation thus allows big-money politics to co-opt our interests. And that, in turn, explains why people with less wealth or fewer connections—especially women and people of color—are so badly underrepresented in our governments.

The answer to this problem is straightforward: massively expand the number of our representatives at every level. That way, each elected official would represent a smaller number of people. And creating more positions would open doors for more regular people with more diverse backgrounds and less attachment to political careers to join our governments.

The good news is that there is real momentum for such change, including in Los Angeles. L.A. city attorney Mike Feuer, now running for mayor, has called for doubling the size of the Los Angeles city council—an idea that has been endorsed by the Los Angeles Times.

And at the county level, the new Citizens Redistricting Commission, even as it discharged its duties to draw those five giant supervisorial districts, issued an unsolicited public plea to increase the number of supervisors. There are too few supervisors to truly represent the diversity of Los Angeles, they argued. With more districts, supervisors would be “more responsive to their communities’ needs” and citizens would “have greater opportunities to have their voices heard,” wrote the commission.

At the state level, recent years have seen debate around a proposal to increase the size of the legislature to as many as 10,000. But that idea has been hurt by its association with the failed Republican gubernatorial candidate John Cox, whose 2018 initiative to expand the legislature narrowly failed to qualify for the ballot.

The momentum for expanding representation has been quietly growing at the federal level, too, and on both sides of the political spectrum. In December, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued The Case for Enlarging the House of Representatives.

The proposal would lift the 1929 cap on the House of 435 representatives and add 150 seats. (California might get 13 new seats under the proposal, and close the gap in representation with smaller states.) Such an increase in House representatives would also increase the number of Electoral College members—mathematically making it more difficult for the loser of the popular vote for president to win the election.

In recent months, I’ve heard people as different as Ace Smith, a top Democratic political strategist who has worked for Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom, and Paul Jacob, a Libertarian-minded activist for term limits and direct democracy, argue for a larger House of Representatives. Lately, I’ve been joining conversations among Californians and other Americans about expanding representation, as part of a national campaign for more democratic representation by the organization Citizens Rising.

One crucial lesson: If you want to go big in democratic representation, it’s essential that you think small. Adding a few districts to our city council, or even a few hundred to the House, won’t bring people that much closer to their representatives. Instead, the country needs a real commitment to keeping districts so small—between 30,000 and 50,000—that we actually know our democratic representatives.

Yes, that might give the county board 200 supervisors, and create a House of Representatives of 6,000 people, a huge number of people to gather under one roof and make decisions. But such numbers will allow for more oversight of government, and the pandemic has shown that large legislative bodies can meet and effectively make decisions via digital technologies.

An America with larger city councils and county boards and more legislators would offer many more opportunities for people to serve, and makes money less determinative of who wins elections. Indeed, such larger bodies might be filled not just by elections but also by lot, in the manner of citizen assemblies that are now used around the world to bring everyday people into decisionmaking.

Such changes would make the biggest difference in Los Angeles and in California, where our democracy deficit is largest. So, the next time you hear public officials here talk about the need to save American democracy, please ask them to start by giving us more democracy right here at home.

The post What If Everyday People Ran Los Angeles? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My first answer: Get my head examined.

For 40 years, the state government and California voters have steadily reduced the revenues and limited the discretion of municipal governments; anyone who starts a new city in such conditions is insane by definition. Our newest cities—like Jurupa Valley and Menifee in Riverside County—have struggled to survive.

Then I reconsidered. No, I don’t believe in the advanced dream cities that technologists at Google parent Alphabet or startup accelerator Y Combinator want to conjure. But maybe you could form a workable California city—by exploiting California’s present-day realities, rather than bowing to them.

I certainly know how I wouldn’t start a new city: by electing a city government, building expensive housing, or hiring the police and firefighters whose salaries and retiree benefits swallow municipal budgets whole.

Instead, I’d start my California city—let’s call it Joeville—by bringing on board the most important person in any California city: the developer.

Spit out your coffee if you must, but cities thrive or wither by the quality of their developers. California laws on politics, open meetings, and open records so greatly restrict the power of our public officials that they often can’t talk freely and legally to each other. As a result, developers don’t just create projects—the good ones become the hubs of communication, the head coach through which all the players in a city talk and plan.

What would my developer develop first? Certainly not streets, houses, or businesses. Those can come later. If you want a great California city, you should start with a big research university.

It’s no accident that California’s most successful post-war city—Irvine—got a University of California campus in 1965, six years before the city incorporated in 1971. Or that Stanford started in 1891, three years before Palo Alto incorporated in 1894. Universities also can transform small and sleepy towns. Look at La Jolla: Once a retirement village for Navy people, it became an international center for research and technology after it got a UC campus.

Universities perform many roles in building community: They are economic engines, provide a look for the city, and attract talented people from around the world. The good ones work to address social challenges, too. And California needs more of them, given our shortage of college graduates.

If you doubt their impact on cities, consider San Bernardino and Riverside, as James and Deborah Fallows do in their terrific new book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America. “Riverside and San Bernardino were similar-sized cities with similar economic prospects at the end of World War II,” they write, but now Riverside is 50 percent bigger. “Their prospects began diverging in the 1960s—Riverside’s up, San Bernardino’s down—when Riverside was chosen as the site of a new University of California campus and San Bernardino was not.”

Only with a university would Joeville be viable. I’d put mine in the city center, not on the outskirts as was done, mistakenly, with the new UC campus in Merced. I’d also put my university in charge of the local school district—creating a teachers college in the process.

With the schools in place, the developer could turn to developing a tax base. Under California’s misbegotten tax system, the best-off cities often are those that collect the most sales taxes. That’s why retail-poor San Jose, despite having so many rich homeowners, has a weak city government, while the city of Cerritos, with its auto mall, is rich.

My city would be designed around two highly attractive retailers that produce huge sales and taxes: Costco and an Apple store. I’d attach the Apple store to a luxury hotel so that I could tax its rooms, too. And since those retailers pay well, many of their employees could become, along with the university students, my city’s first residents.

You probably think that, at this point, we’d establish a city government to set up services. Think again. Local officials in California are so weak as to be useless. Better to have citizens take the lead.

California’s preeminent expert on local participation, Pete Peterson, dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, offered a number of suggestions for Joeville. First, it should be a charter city with its own mission statement, drafted by citizens, that answers the questions: What are we for? Why are we doing this? These ideas would help the town form its own distinct identity. Joeville could have its own local holiday—Founding Day—in the town’s public square, called the zócalo (which happens to be the name of the media nonprofit where I work), at which the mission statement would be read.

Peterson suggests that since the citizens would be leading the governance of their city, residents should attend a multi-day “Citizens Academy” where they would learn the basics of municipal government, including budgeting. Then citizens would be asked to serve on government commissions and local nonprofits.

Peterson says that Joeville could increase citizen engagement through its design. To encourage neighbors to get to know each other, city code might require porches to be built on the fronts of houses, with no attached garages.

Once Joeville’s citizens are engaged, we’d be free to set up whatever municipal departments are required. Joeville wouldn’t be afraid to contract out services, especially police and fire, given the expense, so as to have more money for libraries, parks, and civic forums. In this, Joeville would be typical: Fewer than one-quarter of California cities are responsible for all of their own municipal services.

Now, by this point, you’re thinking that Joeville is fantasy. Wouldn’t Joeville be stopped in its tracks by California’s regulation and litigation? Yes, which is why we’d lobby state legislators to have the entire city declared to be a stadium—not for sports, but of civic experimentation. The state, you see, routinely gives environmental and regulatory exemptions to stadiums, if little else.

Of course, Joeville still needs to find financing. In the meantime, California’s nearly 500 cities, struggling with state restrictions on funding and governance, might adopt Joeville’s civic motto: “You’ll Never Win If You Play By California’s Rules.”

The post My Plan for Building the Perfect California City appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California could use a concert hall like Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie.

The signature structure of 21st century Germany sits atop an old pier above a dramatic bend in the Elbe River. Its creative design features performance space for the philharmonic, a dramatically curved escalator, and a dozen different public spaces for people to gather and enjoy spectacular city views.

But what California needs more than this stunning new piece of architecture is the scandal that built it. Originally planned in 2007 as a 186 million Euro project, financed with 77 million Euros from taxpayers, the Elbphilharmonie was so dogged by delays and overspending that its final price tag approached 1 billion Euros, with taxpayers paying 789 million.

The good news: The concert hall, as a fiscal embarrassment, inspired a furious public reaction that in turn produced one of the world’s most advanced government transparency laws.

And that law, unlike the hall, can be transported to California, where our transparency rules mostly produce frustration.

In California, the onus—and much of the expense—of getting access to government papers and people is put on citizens, who have little leverage to force governments to comply. Our open records laws often force citizens to identify records and bear the burden and expense of requesting documents, fighting for access, and obtaining copies. And because of deep mistrust between California’s people and our governments, our open meetings laws involve putting restrictions on the power and discretion of our government representatives—we dictate when they can meet, when they can talk to each other, when they can email one another.

As a result, California’s law, by limiting the power both of citizens and their government officials, actually empower wealthy players outside government, especially developers and unions, because they are not limited by the same restrictions as government officials.

Hamburg’s transparency law works differently because it empowers everybody, both citizens and government officials. The law sets a default of openness by requiring government officials to make their documents—contracts, memos, deliberations—viewable on the internet, almost as soon as they produce them. Citizens in Hamburg—or anyone really, anywhere in the world— can access records simply by going online and searching through an online portal.

I learned about Hamburg transparency on a recent visit to the port city, where I was the guest of local journalist Angelika Gardiner and farmer Manfred Brandt, who let me sleep in his barn. I’d gotten to know the two of them in recent years while serving as co-president of the Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy, a network of journalists, scholars, activists, and election around the world.

For those who work in the Rathaus, the seat of Hamburg’s state government, transparency is automatic and immediate. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Twenty years ago, Gardiner, Brandt, and other citizens began using direct democracy to reshape the constitution of Hamburg, which is both a city and one of Germany’s 16 states, giving it a special double status. They wanted to bring transparency to Hamburg government, which used opaque public-private contracts for many building projects. Germany’s federal freedom of information law, which like California laws put the onus on citizens to identify and seek records, wasn’t very effective.

Elbphilharmonie’s cost problems offered an opening. In 2011, using photos of the construction site with the slogan “Transparency Creates Trust,” several groups—from Transparency International to the Chaos Computer Club to Brandt and Gardiner’s More Democracy—drafted a ballot initiative to establish a transparency law. Their idea was to create an information register online where the government would have to publish all its documents; citizens could then search it anonymously, free of charge.

Modeling the sort of government they sought, they used a public Wiki to develop their ballot initiative for transparency. A retired supreme court judge helped complete a legally sound draft on an unpaid voluntary basis. Such an open drafting process is uncommon in California’s more corporate initiative process, which is dominated by wealthy individuals, massive interest groups, and professional political firms.

The initiative was a sensation. After the groups gathered 15,000 signatures to put their measure on the ballot, the Hamburg parliament, bowing to the inevitable, adopted their proposal before a public vote could be held. The law went into effect five years ago this month, in October 2012.

It took until 2014 to get everything online, but the Transparenzportal is now a treasure trove—contracts, reports, plans, grant awards, proposed resolutions, spatial data, permits, even payments and benefits for senior officials are available for your perusal.

The law guarantees “immediate” access, which usually means documents must be published within a week of their creation. About 60 percent of the documents involve permits and decisions around buildings of some sort. In the last two years, the portal has been accessed nearly 23 million times.

The transparency has not been total. Smaller contracts (those less than 100,000 Euros) aren’t always published online. An expansive exemption for personal privacy requires redaction of some information that would seem relevant—at least to this cynical Californian—for holding local officials accountable. And some companies that do business with Hamburg have fought disclosure, arguing that the aggressive transparency forces them unnecessarily to disclose trade secrets.

But an evaluation of the law, required after five years, concluded that things are working as intended. Among the most intriguing findings: Hamburg’s government officials, who once worried about transparency’s costs, are now some of its biggest fans. Indeed, while citizens do use the law (and large majorities in surveys say the transparency has enhanced political participation), some of the most aggressive users of the transparency are Hamburg officials trying to figure out what people in other departments are doing. In this way, the transparency law may be most effective as a force for efficiency within the government, breaking down bureaucratic silos. The links hand now knows what the recht hand is doing.

That’s the lesson of Hamburg: With ordinary people so consumed with their own work and lives, the best check on government abuses and corruption are city officials themselves.

On a visit to the Rathaus, I asked Andreas Dressel, who leads the governing Social Democrats in the Hamburg parliament, how the transparency law might be adapted for a California city. “The best thing to do is to translate it into English—and put it right directly into your law,” he said proudly, and added, while noting the Trump administration’s chaos, “You need it not just in California but for the entire United States.”

Dressel may have been exaggerating, but the merits of a switch to Hamburg-style transparency are apparent. A law that makes disclosure an automatic online default should be more effective than California’s records and meetings laws, which are all but designed to create conflict between public demands for access and government desire for secrecy.

Such transparency would jumpstart the nascent open data movement, which has seen the state and some cities put up data sets so that tech-savvy citizens can help solve government problems. And it’s not hard to see how a transparency law might make government responses to crises faster and more effective.

In San Diego, officials in different city and county departments failed to communicate effectively for months earlier this year as a deadly hepatitis epidemic spread, according to the nonprofit Voice of San Diego. If officials could have seen their separate work and information online, it’s quite possible that a fuller response—which included a declaration of emergency—might have come earlier and saved lives. So far 17 people have died.

Of course, such transparency would be opposed by government contractors, public employee unions, and the local governments over which they exert too much control. But it is for situations like this that we have direct democracy in California. And in Hamburg.

The post The Delicious Transparency of the Hamburgers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Is California abandoning its poorest students?

That question would be dismissed as absurd by our state’s education leaders, especially Gov. Jerry Brown and the State Board of Education. For years, they have been building a new educational architecture they say will do more for the poorest kids in the poorest schools.

But as the many elements of this architecture are put in place slowly—and I do mean slowly—they have begun to look like a Winchester Mystery House, so full of complicated rooms that the structure doesn’t fit together coherently. On its current path, the emerging educational architecture of California seems likely to undermine public accountability, resist meaningful parent and community engagement, and make it difficult to figure out whether disadvantaged students and the schools they attend are benefiting.

The new architecture is built on a foundation known as Local Control Funding Formula, a multi-piece formula that is designed to give more money and authority to local school districts, especially those with concentrated poverty. That formula was approved in combination with the establishment of new Local Control and Accountability Plans, intended to give parents and communities more say in how money is spent. The state also adopted Common Core standards for math and English that emphasize critical thinking, and combined the standards with a computer-based testing system to better track individual students.

And last month, the state wrapped all of these elements together in a new accountability system to track the progress of schools and students on new measures that go far beyond test scores.

The governing theory is that all these new educational structures—in concert with social programs to raise the wages, improve the health care, and provide more social services to poor Californians—will make it easier for a greater number of disadvantaged students to prepare for college and careers.

But examining the pieces in detail, the architecture is so hollow and unsteady that it’s hard to understand how students will benefit.

Consider the new accountability system, approved by the State Board of Education in September. The board passed it in a meeting that was heavy on self-congratulation, and light on detail.

The system introduces six indicators for measuring schools (such as college and career readiness, and the progress of English language learners) as well as local factors, like parental engagement and school climate. This was hailed as an improvement on a previous system that the board abandoned three years ago and had not replaced, leaving Californians in the dark about how their schools were doing.

But, at least for now, this new approach to accountability offers more clouds than sunshine. It could be years before data for some of the new measures exists. There are also real questions about how you could reliably measure parental engagement and school climate, or whether the effort would be worthwhile, given all the other demands on California districts.

Even worse, the board resisted urgent calls from many education and child advocacy groups to boil down this new system into something that the public might be able to understand. Instead, the board, defiantly, released a sprawling draft built around a confounding color-coded grid that deserves immediate induction, without the customary five-year waiting period, into the Hall of Fame for Bureaucratic Idiocy. “Making sense of it is practically impossible,” the Los Angeles Times editorialized.

Fixing this accountability system isn’t just a matter of redesign, which the board is saying it will do next year. The trouble is that the accountability system is built upon the other pieces of the new architecture, and those are similarly confusing. The new local control formula encompasses eight priorities, many of them hard to measure, and myriad sub-priorities and different grant formulas under those. And the Local Control and Accountability Plans required by the new formula are like the Holy Roman Empire—they aren’t local, they don’t really provide control or accountability, and they aren’t even plans. They are longwinded, technical answers to longwinded, technical questions required by a state template. School districts, naturally, have struggled to get parents and community members to participate in drafting these documents, which in many cases run to hundreds of pages.

And if all that doesn’t give you a headache, the new system could soon get even more complicated. The federal government is in the process of developing its own plan to help the worst-off schools, under the new Every Student Succeeds Act, the successor to No Child Left Behind.

The federal law requires states to identify the bottom 5 percent of schools and figure out ways to improve them. California’s emerging architecture doesn’t provide any easy way to identify those schools. Instead, state leaders are lobbying against the new federal system, and continue to design the state’s system in ways that are at odds with the federal law. Last week, Gov. Brown vetoed a bill, overwhelmingly passed in the legislature, to require the California system to align with the federal one.

In the end, it’s possible there will be not one but two accountability systems for California schools—one answerable to Sacramento, the other to Washington.

In watching this process, I can’t help but wonder if all the confusion isn’t cynically deliberate. Throughout, the state has followed the advice of its powerful teachers union, the California Teachers Association, which has opposed any system that offers coherent ratings, and thus meaningful comparisons, of schools. The union prefers to have as much evaluation as possible done at the local level, where they are most powerful. By enacting a state system that no one can manage or understand, California may effectively leave things in the hands of the locals.

What does that mean for making sure poor kids are actually making progress? It may mean that we never know. Gov. Brown gave the game away in an interview with CALmatters earlier this year when he questioned whether the achievement gaps between disadvantaged and other students can be closed, even with the help of his Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF).

“The gap has been pretty persistent,” he said, “so I don’t want to set up what hasn’t been done ever as the test of whether the LCFF is a success or failure. I don’t know why you would go there.” Closing achievement gaps is “pretty hard to do,” he added.

The defenses of the emerging system are equally lame. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson has argued that the complexity of the new system is a virtue—since education, and life for that matter, is complex.

The State Board of Education president Michael Kirst, a Stanford scholar whose writing on educational systems is distinguished by its clarity, has in this instance taken to issuing uncharacteristically foggy pleas for patience and delay. We’re still ironing out the kinks and the whole system will evolve continuously, he argues. “Concluding now that the system is too complex,” he wrote for the website EdSource, “would be no different than arguing that people would not be able to use a smart phone based on the engineering specifications when the device is still in development.”

Professor Kirst is right about the need for patience, in a way. It will take at least until 2019, when California finally gets a new governor, before Californians will have any chance to stop construction on this incomprehensible mess, and to focus coherently on our poorest students.

The post California’s New Education Architecture Is Already Failing appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the 2013-14 school year, the state suspended the Academic Performance Index, or API, the chief tool Californians had for seeing how their kids’ schools stacked up among schools across the state. API wasn’t a perfect measure, but it offered a clear and consistent language for judging schools that could be understood by anyone in your neighborhood—from parents to real estate agents. And, for the many communities and schools that hung API banners boasting of school improvement in the rankings, the index provided a point of pride.

At the time the API was first suspended, our state’s leaders said they would give us a better, more useful index of schools. Three years later, they haven’t given us anything at all—except a promise that a new index will be in place for the 2017-18 school year. And there are reasons to doubt whether a useful index will ever be produced.

I am trying not to take this personally. The oldest of my three sons started kindergarten in our local elementary school in 2014. Under the current schedule for the new index, he’ll be heading into fourth grade—and his two younger brothers will be enrolled as well—before I can see how the school stacks up.

To be fair, state education officials had plenty of reasons for creating a new method for measuring schools and their progress. The old index was far too dependent on test scores. The federal government is transitioning out of its No Child Left Behind regime for a new accountability system. Charter schools, many of them founded by parents, are spreading. And California schools are adopting the new Common Core standards and adapting to the state’s new Local Control Funding Formula and its accompanying Local Control and Accountability Plans—which give parents and communities the new bureaucratic burden of developing school goals and monitoring school progress

Given all these changes, our leaders asked, shouldn’t there be a new index aligned with this new education universe?

Of course, there should be. So where the hell is it?

The state’s answer: these things take time and we’re making progress. Last week, the State Board of Education approved new metrics that it wants to include in the new system—including test scores, graduation and suspension rates, college and career readiness, and school improvement.

Which is great. But no changes and no process justify three years—and counting—of keeping Californians in the dark about their schools.

The state had better options than having no index at all. It could have kept the old index alive until it was ready to switch to a new one. Or, even better, the state could have used the previous years to experiment by compiling and releasing to the public a new draft index each year.

This public development of an index—a real-time, rolling rollout, if you will—would have drawn broad feedback each year, and kept parents and communities in the loop. Instead, the state chose to stay dark—keeping the conversation about any new index for school accountability contained in the usual silos of education insiders.

Which is why the darkest, most cynical view of this transition is almost certainly the right one. Is the real goal of state leaders less accountability for themselves and for California’s public schools?

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson used the suspension of the old index as justification for his failure to publish a legally required list of the state’s 1,000 lowest-achieving schools last year (he finally did so this January under threat of lawsuit, but built his list from 2013 data). And state officials have eliminated half of the standardized tests students are taking; they also have suspended the High School Exit Exam. Such steps have been taken in the name of leaving more time for actual instruction. But that’s hard to take at face value, given how low a priority instructional time has been in California schools. The number of school days was cut during the budget crisis and the state hasn’t added to the length of the school year since, even as charter and private schools, following research showing the benefits of more instructional time, do just that.

Then there’s the California Teachers Association, the state’s most powerful teachers’ union, which has been arguing against having any index that can be used to rank schools (and, they fear, punish laggards). In a recent letter to the state, CTA president Eric Heins protested against “a single one-size fits all numeric goal”—an API-style index simple enough for parents to understand—and argued in favor of a “locally based, iterative process of district review, reflection and improvement.”

What would the local iterative process look like? CTA has cited the Local Control and Accountability Plans—which were supposed to include meaningful input from communities and produce useful documents for the public—as models for what a new accountability system could be. But an index that looks like those accountability plans is exactly what we don’t need—those plans are monstrously long and confusing documents that run hundreds of pages.

The union’s “statewide ignorance is bliss” logic looks even uglier in light of Governor Jerry Brown’s recent comments that Californians shouldn’t expect the state’s work to close the achievement gap between black and Latino students and other students. “The gap has been pretty persistent,” Brown told CALmatters, so his educational reforms shouldn’t be judged on closing it.

Such educational fatalism isn’t just dispiriting—it’s at odds with California’s own record of educational progress. In 2013, more than 80 percent of schools scored above 700 on the API; only 31 percent had scored that high a decade earlier. The same decade saw big declines statewide in the dropout rate, big advances in the number of students taking challenging courses (especially math and science), and significant increases in the school performance of English-language learners, migrants, special education students and kids from low-income families.

Some of the children’s and educational groups who pushed for that progress are now putting forward legislation—AB 2548—to guarantee that the current process produces a coherent index that parents and communities can understand. But the teachers’ union and some politicians are dismissing this legislation as premature. Their strategy seems to be delay—and then try to get away with producing an index so complicated it isn’t really an index at all.

State officials will object that this assessment is terribly unfair. But after three years, they’ve lost the benefit of the doubt. If they want to restore their credibility, the state should take on a make-up assignment: Produce an index of all California schools for each of the past two years—the academic year now ending, and for 2014-15. The state has testing and the other data to do it. And we parents sure could use the information, even belatedly.

But I bet they won’t. They’re too busy coming up with excuses for keeping Californians in the dark.

The post Why California Keeps Failing to Grade Its Schools appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Greater Fresno, with 1.1 million people and growing, is in the process of becoming California’s next big metropolitan area (it’s already fifth—after L.A., the Bay Area, San Diego, and greater Sacramento). But, perhaps because of its poverty, it still has the low civic self-esteem of the smaller town it used to be. And so Fresno hasn’t managed to conjure up a defining, unifying narrative that could galvanize it to build the infrastructure and institutions its population needs.

Good news: Such a narrative may finally be emerging. In recent visits to Fresno, I am hearing Fresnans begin to talk with obsessive pride about their city—and the subject that stirs that pride is tacos.

California is a state of great tacos, and let me stipulate now that you readers are justifiably proud of tacos in your hometowns. But it has long been hard to beat Fresno when it comes to both quantity and quality of tacos. Taquerías—either brick-and-mortar shops, trucks, or pop-up stands—seem to be at every corner, as ubiquitous as gas stations in L.A. or coffee shops of laptop-open entrepreneurs in the Bay Area. The competition and the nearness of agriculture keep the quality of the food high, and the diversity of taco styles reflects how the agriculture industry, over the generations, attracted people from every corner of California and Mexico to the San Joaquin Valley.

What’s new is how Fresno is now recognizing and celebrating its taco riches, in ways that blur traditional divides within the city.

This mainstreaming of the taco culture has been pushed by taco truck owners with the savvy assistance of Mike Oz, a local journalist, and a marketing whiz named Sam Hansen, who works for the Fresno Grizzlies, the city’s popular minor league baseball team.

In 2011, Oz and Hansen began what has become an ongoing search for taquerías and taco trucks in every corner of Fresno County. (Like deep-sea exploration, it’s a massive search, and they’re still finding new species, they say.) To show off all that diversity, they launched an annual Taco Truck Throwdown at the Grizzlies ballpark. Last year’s throwdown became a citywide sensation, with a crowd of nearly 17,000 fitting into a stadium with 12,500 reserved seats. Attendees gobbled up 38,000 tacos in one night from 24 trucks. Fresno Tacos baseball caps became a popular fashion accessory.

This year, the Grizzlies will change their name every Tuesday to the Tacos, and introduce a taco mascot. During each of these Taco Tuesdays, the Grizzlies will use the stadium entertainment system to tell the story of a different Fresno-area taco truck and its owners, thus spotlighting only-in-Fresno stories that celebrate roots in the fields (“This truck started in tiny Fowler in 1973”) or south of the border.

“It’s inspiring Fresno to open its eyes to a huge part of what Fresno really is,” said Hansen. “People thought Fresno needs to be like L.A. or the Bay Area. We’re starting to look inward and see everything we need is here already. We don’t need someone to validate or co-sign for us.”

The throwdowns have inspired taco tours and imitation taco throwdowns and even a ham-handed effort by Taco Bell to co-opt the movement. Is it only a matter of time before a neon taco is hoisted to the top of the Fresno Pacific Towers high-rise downtown?

The taco is not merely tasty. It feels like the right metaphor. Tacos are a poor man’s food just as Fresno is a poor man’s city. And what is Fresno if not a loose and overstuffed tortilla full of colorful and diverse ingredients?

Taco obsession seems to be binding the city together. On recent trips, I’ve heard everyone from hotel maids and convenience store clerks to elected officials and business leaders wax rhapsodic about local tacos. (Memo to future opponents of Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin, who has statewide political ambitions: The fastest way to get her off-message is to bring up tacos.)

Tacos may be blurring the city’s longstanding dividing line: Shaw Avenue. White and middle-class Fresnans have traditionally lived and stayed north of Shaw, but now they must trek south of Shaw, where 90 percent of the taco stands are. Also south of Shaw is the city’s downtown, which shows signs of revival. Just recently, ground was broken on a project to remake downtown’s Fulton Mall.

Tacos also connect increasingly urban Fresno with the fields and smaller towns outside it.

Inside Tacos Marquitos, one of Fresno’s beloved taquerías.

On a dark and cold weeknight, Mike Oz picked me up at my hotel and offered me a taco tour. Taquería El Premio Mayor was closed after the tragic death of the son of the owning family; the death received significant local media coverage, a sign of how taquería owners have become Fresno celebrities.

Oz then took me south of Fresno to the small city of Selma (pop. 24,000) and its Highway 43 Taco Corridor, with several trucks parked in open fields. The first two were very good, and the third—Taquería Los Toritos, a truck wedged between Highway 99 and a truck scale—offered the freshest-tasting carne asada taco I can ever remember eating.

Oz, who grew up in Fremont in the Easy Bay, came to Fresno to write for the Fresno Bee. He was a music writer, then a columnist who looked for ways to celebrate the city. “I was always surprised how Fresno has so many people who hate Fresno,” he said, especially since it’s now a big city with a lot to offer. “Fresno is like the kid who has his favorite clothes, grew out of them, but refuses to take them off.”

The next day, at Oz’s suggestion, I drove myself to La Elegante, a taquería in Fresno’s old Chinatown. From the outside, the place almost looked abandoned. Inside, it was warm and wonderful and full of people.

The tacos were so good (also be sure to order the birria) that I began to wonder if La Elegante could alter the geography of the state all by itself. The site of the high-speed rail station in Fresno is just two blocks away, and the rail authority’s infamously high ridership projections might come true once Californians elsewhere get a taste.

The post Is Fresno California’s Taco Capital? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the question Henry George sought to answer for California in his famous 1868 essay, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” on the eve of the transcontinental railroad’s completion. The renowned political economist’s vision—that the railroad would help make California a global giant of business and trade—was so prescient, it was taught in California schools well into the 20th century.

Now the question is timely again for Californians, as Metro in Los Angeles County opens two new light rail connections—one through the San Gabriel Valley this Saturday, the other connecting downtown L.A. to a station four blocks from the beach in Santa Monica on May 20.

That Southern California, of all places, is leading the way in building new rail links (and there will be many more new lines, funded by local sales taxes, opening in the years ahead) suggests we have entered a new era of California transit. It also raises questions about the rest of the state

Will the Bay Area further develop its expensive and union-plagued BART system, including adding a second tunnel under the bay? Will San Francisco ever revamp its embarrassingly slow and dirty MUNI system? How can San Diego best expand its trolleys, and Sacramento its light rail? Can the Inland Empire, the 13th largest metropolitan area in America, raise its transit game? And when will greater Fresno, more than one million people and growing, realize it’s a major American city in need of a real urban transit system?

For now, progress outside L.A. is slow. Maybe that’s because as we consider the possibilities, Californians are asking questions the wrong way. Journalists, environmentalists, and other boring people obsess over the math—what new rail lines might cost us in dollars or what they might save us in traffic or car trips. That’s a losing game—traffic is driven by large, hard-to-predict trends—in the nature of work and technology, in telecommuting patterns, in immigration levels, in the aging of the population, and in the price of gas.

The smarter, more inspiring question about transit projects is George’s old one: What new things do these new rail lines bring us? Do they connect us to places and events in powerful new ways? Do the trains provide comfort and reliability? Is riding the rail a compelling experience in itself that it changes us?

For me, these questions are urgent and personal. I spend as many as four hours a day commuting by car. But the new rail lines could change my life. I live five blocks from the Metro Gold Line, which is opening its 11-mile extension through the San Gabriel Valley to Azusa this weekend. And my office is in Santa Monica, seven blocks from the terminus of the Expo line extension that opens in May.

What might the light-rail bring me? The promise of a healthier, more productive, and more fun routine.

Riding the trains to work could take 90 minutes, with two changes between lines, but that’s no different than driving takes me many days. If the trains are on time, the commute will be more predictable than it is now. And so I’ll start riding the trains with the following hopes. I hope I’ll get more exercise from the extra walking to get to the stations. I hope I’ll be able to read and get work done in transit. And I hope that, as I don’t have to spend as much time in the evening working, I can sleep more and spend more time with my family.

On weekends, I want to ride the new Gold Line to the east with my three train-crazy boys, and explore places near the new stations. Tops on my list are playtime at the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area and Friday nights at the Family Festival on Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia. I could even see an old-school date night for surf-and-turf at the Derby (the horse players restaurant once owned by Seabiscuit jockey George Woolf) if the owners were to grant me and other rail riders a special exemption from the dress code.

This is what the light rail could bring us. The Gold Line extension could make Azusa Pacific, an ambitious Christian university at the end of the new line, a bigger factor in civic life here. It should allow more people to discover, or re-discover, the enchiladas at La Tolteca in Azusa, the Justice Brothers Racing Museum in Duarte, the old movie theater (now a 12-plex) in Monrovia, and the Santa Anita Park race track, and the 626 Night Market in Arcadia.

The Expo Line could be even more transformational. It’ll get you to the beach or the Santa Monica Pier without a car. The delicious Japantown along Sawtelle Boulevard, a spot to be avoided if you drive, should see a surge in customers with the nearby Pico/Sepulveda stop. And more people will find their ways to art shows and studies at the Bergamot Station arts complex, which has its own stop on the new line.

Of course, none of this is guaranteed. Metro needs to make sure the trains are safe, reliable—and, most of all, fun. The new Gold Line cars looked great in a recent preview, with big windows and comfortable seating. And on the Expo Line, those trains better have strong Wi-Fi and maybe tables for us working commuters.

I’m most excited about the surprises that these new rail lines—and other lines under construction—will bring us in the future. What new communities, new downtowns (the city of Duarte sure needs one), new businesses, and new friendships might emerge of which we can’t conceive? What new ideas might come from, say, a doctor riding to her job at the City of Hope meeting a Caltech computer scientist on a Gold Line train?

Re-reading “What The Railroad Will Bring Us,” I was struck by how George, even in making grand predictions about California’s future, underestimated the cultural and economic impact of the railroad. Yes, he correctly saw San Diego becoming a vital second city of California. And he was right that the Bay Area would become a future global capital of commerce.

But he never once mentioned Los Angeles. It was unimaginable then that such a small town could become our greatest city, now featuring the best public transit in the state.

The post How Riding the Rails Can Change Cities and Lives appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And not for babysitting purposes, or to fill holes in your lesson plan. As our state considers new frameworks for the history and social science taught in each grade, now is the time to incorporate that signature California art—film— into classes at every grade level. And the most important movies should be placed at the center of our efforts to teach history—especially the history of California.

Have a problem with that? Well, I suppose I could quote a former mayor of Carmel and state parks commissioner and suggest that you “Go ahead, make my day.” Or I could utter a single word: Rosebud.

You’d be surprised how many people have no idea where those references come from. As someone whose life revolves around dealing with young Californians—as father, coach, occasional teacher, and journalistic colleague of millennials with fancy college degrees—I’m struck by how little they know of films, and thus of California’s history, cultural and otherwise. The film critic and historian Neal Gabler has warned that movies that once united the generations now divide us, “leaving us with an endless stream of the very latest with no regard for what came before. Old movies are now like dinosaurs, and like dinosaurs, they are threatened with extinction.”

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. (Cool Hand Luke.) And this is not a trivial matter; it is the loss of the essence of our state’s history. The California we know—in reality and image—was made and remade by the motion picture. Hollywood remains a signature industry (one supported by state taxpayers at that). And our greatest films are California monuments. To be ignorant of them is akin to being Chinese without knowing of Confucius, or to being German without having read Goethe.

So let the education begin now. “Rosebud” is the signature word of the 1941 film Citizen Kane, ranked No. 1 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest films of all time.

Any Californian who does not know the film intimately simply does not know their state. Citizen Kane is a fictionalization of the life of a towering figure of American and California history: the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. His story remains relevant today, in a state of new media titans with outsized appetites. The Hearst Corporation now owns the San Francisco Chronicle, and his mansion, the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, is a public landmark that every California child should visit.

But when you look through the state standards for class content—what all California children are supposed to learn—you won’t find one word about Hearst or Citizen Kane. Indeed, in the 68 pages of standards for history and social science classes, there is exactly one sentence that mentions the entertainment industry.

The good news is that there is now an opportunity to fix the problem. In the midst of creating new instructional frameworks, California now has a draft of the new history and social science framework—long outlines of what California student should be taught in each grade and subject—available for public comment through February 29.

The bad news is that the draft on California history says nothing about film, movies, or Hollywood. (There are the briefest of mentions of film in the U.S. and world history drafts—but only in reference to the Cold War-era black list, ’60s counterculture, and globalization). And the draft framework on California history focuses far too much on the era before statehood and the diverse racial and ethnic origins of the people who came to California in different eras—to the detriment of focusing on what the children and grandchildren of those migrants did once they came here, and the culture that bound them together.

To this inexcusable omission of film from California history, my reaction is the memorable line from Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” (This line has been a staple of California political discourse, from Prop 13 through the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis, and might be heard during the tax fights on the ballot this November.)

Any California content guidelines worth a damn, my dear (Gone With the Wind), must include films that shaped America’s very conception of itself, from Casablanca to The Searchers. (They also should require California history in high school, not just elementary school, so more mature themes can be taught.)

And no one should get a degree from a California high school without seeing the classics that are signatures of our state’s history. These should start with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo—the essential film of Northern California—and Chinatown—which still explains, better than any other document, Southern California’s dark view of itself. Other California movies that should be in the canon, along with Shakespeare and great works of literature, include Sunset Boulevard, The Graduate, Some Like It Hot (shot at the Hotel del Coronado), The Grapes of Wrath, The Maltese Falcon, Annie Hall (to understand why New Yorkers are so dismissive of us), and Blade Runner. I’d also add, for cultural relevance, California movies like El Norte, Stand and Deliver, Pulp Fiction, and The Joy Luck Club.

Incorporating film into class is not a new idea. My own quick search found electives in film—taught in both art and history departments—in dozens of California high schools. Websites for teachers are full of lesson plans built around movies from High Noon to 12 Years a Slave, with advice on how to present movies (with the class lights on, so no one goofs off or nods off). Films illuminate historian Kevin Starr’s juxtaposition of “the California of fact and the California of imagination.” For example, you could teach California’s essential water history by comparing the fictions of Chinatown with the very different facts from any number of books.

“Schoolchildren should be taught how to ‘read’ films just as they are taught to read literature,” writes Ronald Bergan, author of the compendium The Film Book, in arguing for teaching film so young people can decipher the visual propaganda that deluges us today. “They should learn how films systemize time and space and communicate ideas and emotions; how the patterns and structures of film genres allow us to engage specific historical and social rituals.”

Of course, basing California history in films will require overcoming the prejudice that movies are entertainment, not educational tools. I’d point out that, if you look for places showing classic films, you’ll find yourself near our finest institutions of higher education. I was glad to see Laura, the 1944 film noir, and The Philadelphia Story, the 1940 romantic comedy, playing at the Stanford on University Avenue in Palo Alto last weekend.

Let’s also keep in mind the words of Audrey Hepburn: “Everything I learned I learned from the movies.” And if you’ve never heard of her, get yourself to the next classic movie night at the Vine Cinema in Livermore. They’ll be showing Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

The post Schools Aren’t Giving California Kids Enough Screen Time appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

California has taller mountain ranges, more famous mountain ranges, even more beautiful mountain ranges. But no mountains here are tougher—or more important—than the Tehachapis.

A mishmash of mid-sized peaks that extend some 40 miles across southern Kern County and north Los Angeles County, the Tehachapis effectively form the wall that defines our state. This is their paradox: The Tehachapis at once separate and connect California’s regions—north and south, valley and desert, Sierra Nevada and coastal range.

As a barrier, the Tehachapis—the name is often attributed to the Kawaiisu Indian word “tihachipia,” meaning “hard climb”—boast an undefeated record. They have been penetrated—by I-5, by great aqueducts, by power lines—but they have never been truly conquered.

Recently, the Tehachapis emerged at the center of one of California’s most stubborn debates, over whether to complete a landmark high-speed rail project. Plans to build high-speed rail first from the Central Valley to Southern California have survived lawsuits, changes in governors, relentless media attacks, bipartisan political opposition, and waning public support. But last month, spooked by the financial and engineering challenges of finding a way through rock and earthquake faults of both the Tehachapis and the neighboring San Gabriel Mountains, the high-speed rail authority said it might make a U-turn, and start by connecting the Central Valley to the Bay Area first, while delaying the challenge of tunneling through the Tehachapis to L.A.

Of course, the high-speed rail builders would hardly be the first people to lose their nerve at the prospect of crossing the mountain range. Is there any more fear-inducing drive in our state than traversing the Tehachapis on that scarily steep and windy stretch of I-5 known as the Grapevine? And the off-interstate roads are even more treacherous at this time of year, when snow covers roadways and rain can cause mudslides. I recently skidded off the road there (hitting nothing, thank goodness and doing no damage to my car) when an unexpected snow squall hit me during a bit of exploring.

Freight trains still go over the mountains as slowly—less than 25 miles per hour—as they did in the 1870s. Amtrak has all but given up on train service through them. And a Southwest Airlines pilot once explained to me how planes almost always hit at least a bit of turbulence going over the mountains, a product of shifting wind patterns.

In this, and in other ways, the Tehachapis represent Californians as we really are: difficult, stubborn—and shorter and wider than we appear in our publicity stills. (Not everyone can look like the Yosemite Valley or Angelina Jolie.)

And scientists and conservationists will tell you that, in their diversity, the Tehachapis are the most Californian of mountains. As Bob Reid, Michael White, and Scot Pipkin of the Tejon Ranch Conservancy patiently explained to me, the Tehachapis are the only place in the state where four varied regions converge—the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, the coastal range, and the San Joaquin Valley.

And so the Tehachapis, like California, are full of places where very different things thrive in close proximity—desert scrub and Joshua trees next to Sierra Nevada forest, or coastal chaparral near Valley grasslands. This biological diversity, in combination with the Tehachapis’ varied topography (from peaks to plains) may make species there more resistant to climate change. And it means the mountains, like our state, are full of surprises; the adobe sunburst and the California jewelflower are among the plants that have turned up there.

The Tehachapis, so little talked about despite their importance, used to loom larger in the public imagination. Read newspapers and books from 19th-century California, when most of the state’s population was in the north and crossing the Tehachapis was a life-threatening undertaking, and you’ll find Southern California routinely described as “South of the Tehachapis” in the tone one might speak of a renegade province or an uncivilized hinterland.

But in the 20th century, California tilted south, and the Tehachapis became less prominent, serving as a wall to prevent Southern California from sprawling too far north. Another reason the Tehachapis were not talked about so much: They are mostly privately owned (for ranches), and not so easily explored by California’s nature seekers.

That is beginning to change. The last decade has brought the promise of a new era to the Tehachapis—and that involves more than just the highly publicized restoration of a California condor population in the Tehachapi region after near extinction.

The Tejon Ranch, a 422-square mile property in the Tehachapis, has pursued commercial, retail, and housing development on some of its property (perhaps notably the Outlets at Tejon along I-5 north of the Grapevine), while also striking, in 2008, a historic agreement with environmental organizations to protect 90 percent of its land. Now the Tejon Ranch Conservancy is working to conserve, explore, and provide public access. There are wildflower viewing stations, bird watches, community hikes and drives, student trips, naturalist classes (based on the University of California’s famous naturalist program), and citizen science projects. This spring will offer more opportunities for Californians to get to know this hard-to-know mountain range.

Private conservation efforts like Tejon don’t draw headlines like presidential declarations of new national parks or forests. But they are more representative of the future than the flashier conservation of public lands, which has become more difficult given the higher costs of land, the pressure on public budgets, and political polarization around eminent domain and property rights.

The conservation of the Tehachapis means more Californians may connect to the range, and not merely through it. Californians will want more of both kinds of connections, and we’ll need to be careful to minimize their impacts. The Tehachapis, once again, will have to hang tough.

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Oui. But it’s not the end of the world.

Indeed, apocalyptic French philosophy may finally provide clarity for those of us long puzzled by that great California mystery: What is the meaning of Jerry Brown?

In recent years, our governor’s statements have taken an end-of-days turn, Jerry channeling Jeremiah. The governor has warned of nuclear holocaust, wildfires consuming the entire state, the demise of Silicon Valley if his water plans aren’t adopted, and the apocalypse if we don’t curb carbon emissions. Last month, the governor went to Palo Alto for the latest of unveiling of the Doomsday Clock, a timekeeper for the annihilation of mankind. (It’s just three minutes to midnight, humans.)

Where is he getting all this angst? Here’s one answer: Brown is a longtime friend of the French techno-philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who practices what is called “enlightened doomsaying” from academic perches at Stanford and Paris’ École Polytechnique.

Dupuy’s long-running conversations with Brown have become more high-profile lately, with Dupuy joining him at events in Paris during December’s climate change talks.

I am neither French nor a philosopher. And I’m no fan of Brown, whose governorship I’ve criticized as too small and cautious, given the size of California’s challenges. But before Christmas, I started reading everything I could find that Dupuy has published in English. And I’m very glad I did.

Dupuy’s work not only provides reassurance that there is a coherent philosophy behind our governor’s ramblings. The work itself is irresistibly thought-provoking, connecting history, science, religion, economics, and art in an open (and sometimes bitterly funny) spirit little seen in scholarship. I’d go so far as to recommend that Californians—as citizens of a global hub for both apocalyptic and utopian thinking—read his most accessible book, The Mark of the Sacred. It should be required for anyone who works in or around state government.

Here is my best attempt to summarize Dupuy’s argument: Humanity is doomed to destroy itself because we have lost our sense of the sacred. We no longer recognize the way our sacred origins—not just faith and religion, but other rituals and traditions that remind us how many things are beyond human control—shape us and all our modes of thought, even reason and science.

This hubris creates two problems. First, we no longer understand our own limits, and recklessly reshape the world without anticipating the consequences of our own inventions. Second, without sufficient respect for the sacred, we can’t convert our knowledge about the threats to our existence—from nuclear weapons to climate change—into the visceral belief necessary to galvanize humanity to save itself.

“It is my profound belief that humanity is on a suicidal course, headed straight for catastrophe,” Dupuy writes. “I speak of catastrophe in the singular, not to designate a single event, but a whole system of disruptions, discontinuities, and basic structural changes that are the consequence of exceeding critical thresholds.”

Dupuy’s solution: a new metaphysics called “enlightened doomsaying.” We must try to imagine ourselves in the unthinkable future, to peer into the black hole of nonexistence so that we might understand our limits and sacred origins. “To believe in fate is to prevent it from happening,” he writes.

That may sound awfully French, but he grounds his philosophy in a classic California story: Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo, a tale of humans falling all over Northern California, from the Golden Gate Bridge to Mission San Juan Bautista. Dupuy calls the film “the womb from which I am issued,” and sees humanity’s rush into Armageddon in the fictions within that movie’s fictions, particularly Jimmy Stewart’s attempts to impose a false reality on Kim Novak’s character.

So now—at the risk of repeating Jimmy Stewart’s mistake—I am compelled to read Dupuy onto Governor Brown.

Brown’s famous skepticism of great plans and new programs makes sense if you believe, as Dupuy argues, that man has become blind to the consequences of his own belief in progress. Brown’s focus on avoiding catastrophes—the strategy linking his budget rainy day fund to his prioritization of climate change—reflects Dupuy’s “prophet-of-doom” calls to focus on postponing the apocalypse.

Brown, like Dupuy, holds deep respect for the sacred—he quotes from various religious traditions and invokes his time in Jesuit seminary, without embracing any particular religion. And just as Dupuy mourns the “loss of difference between levels that characterize hierarchy,” Brown has sought to reestablish hierarchy, removing himself from many daily debates, relying on powerful elder wise men to pursue policies from water to high-speed rail, while keeping an unusually small staff.

Some of Brown’s most puzzling statements—his criticism of “desire” and consumerism—echo Dupuy. The French philosopher argues that as we lose our sense of the sacred, we fill the void with our own desires—and that creates envy that leads to conflict. Here’s Brown, speaking at the Doomsday Clock: “California is so full of low-priority needs. In fact, I have to tell you something about needs, because needs are the whole issue. What I have found is, and I have developed a hierarchy: First we get a desire; and then the desire is transmogrified into a need; and then we get a law; and then we get a right; and then we get a lawsuit.”

Of course, Dupuy, as philosopher, poses questions you’ll never hear on the stump in Stockton: Has Christianity preserved the sacred—or obliterated it by replacing so many traditional religions and rituals? What are the virtues of scapegoating? And which would be worse: the annihilation of the human race, or the eco-totalitarianism that might be instituted to prevent said annihilation?

There are obvious objections to Brown, and to Dupuy. There is a dissonance between the care with which governor and philosopher advise respect for the unknown and the certainty with which they predict Armageddon. I find it unsettling to be governed by someone so focused on the apocalypse. (Of course, my anxiety may be the reaction doomsayers want.) Reading Dupuy, I felt relief that Brown, for all his virtues, will never be president and have access to the nuclear launch codes.

But we also should be comforted that our governor’s aphorisms and warnings lean so heavily on such deep thinking. Dupuy suggests in his writings that we think in the “future perfect” tense—as in, by tomorrow, the apocalypse will have happened. From there, we work backward, as if the end of our existence were already fated, to find the limits that might save us.

To govern is to choose, and to prepare for the future. And while there are certainly happier ways to confront the dangers ahead, there may not be a smarter one.

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