If you’re ever inside the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale and hear laughter ringing through the hallways, it’s probably me visiting the tomb of Culbert Olson.

Olson is perhaps the most anomalous figure in California political history. During our long era of Republican dominance (1896-1958), he was the only Democrat to serve as governor. And he was an unapologetic atheist in our god-crazy country, refusing to say “So help me God” while taking the oath of office in 1939. After an ineffective four-year term and re-election defeat at the hands of Earl Warren, he went on to run United Secularists of America.

In this century, Olson is an unknown, forgotten by all but the kookiest connoisseurs of Californiana, like your columnist, who cracks up every time he encounters our late, great god-denying governor in that cathedral-like mausoleum, just steps from a stained-glass reproduction of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. This state is a bottomless lavabo bowl of contradictions.

Culbert Olson is almost never quoted, much less invoked, by powerful Californians today.

Which is what made Gov. Gavin Newsom’s June 25 State of the State speech shocking for those few of us who know Olson’s story.

Newsom started his speech by invoking Olson’s January 2, 1939 inaugural address—a document that not even I had read previously—and its opening call for California to stand up “in the face of ‘the destruction of democracy.’” Back then, with Europe sliding into war, Olson said:

As we witness destruction of democracy elsewhere in the world, accompanied by denial of civil liberties and inhuman persecutions, under the rule of despots and dictators, so extreme as to shock the moral sense of mankind, it seems appropriate that we Californians, on this occasion, should announce to the world that despotism shall not take root in our State; that the preservation of our American civil liberties and democratic institutions shall be the first duty and firm determination of our government.

Confronted by economic and social crisis, are we going to move forward toward the destiny of true democracy, or slide backward toward the abyss of regimented dictatorship?

Though he only directly quoted one Olson line, Newsom noted that in 2024 we face the same choice. Newsom continued:

The California way of life is under attack. For conservatives and delusional California bashers, their success depends on our failure. They want to impeach the very things that have made us successful, as a tactic to turn America toward a darker future.

Then Newsom pivoted to a more familiar speech, including blasts at Republicans, and long lists of progressive policies.

What Newsom didn’t mention—or, more likely, didn’t know—is that Culbert Olson is a very good model of how not to behave when democracy is under attack. Newsom isn’t an Olson clone. He is Catholic, for starters. But he has enough in common with Olson—each was the most progressive governor of his respective era—that he might reflect on this particular predecessor’s failures.

Olson won the governorship because he had the good fortune to run against the corrupt incumbent Frank Merriam. But his luck ran out there.

In retrospect, Olson appears cursed, almost as if a higher power were punishing him. Four days after Olson gave that inaugural speech, he collapsed, from a heart ailment. Three months later, his wife Kate Olson died at 56. She remains the only California First Lady to die in office.

Olson not only had a massive agenda (including public pensions, universal healthcare, and government takeover of the utilities), he was unusually strident in pursuing it. Like Newsom, he had a taste for public feuds. Where Newsom targets Fox News, Olson battled William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire. Newsom has usually been wise enough to make enemies of non-Californian politicians (like red state governors). But Olson got into local fights that frustrated his agenda, battling Republican and conservative Democratic legislators, and the Catholic archbishops in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Olson, like Newsom, was criticized for pursuing too much. That 1939 inaugural speech resembles a Newsom speech in stating way too many progressive ambitions to accomplish. Olson’s many legislative enemies in both parties blocked almost all of his broad agenda. Newsom, instead, often finds his grand ambitions foiled by mismanagement and a complicated and restrictive state governing system.

Newsom, like Olson, has made warnings about democratic decline a major talking point. What should be sobering for him is Olson’s utter failure to protect liberties and democratic practice.

Notably, when World War II came, the governor failed to defend civil liberties—most obviously, with the incarceration of Californians of Japanese heritage.

Olson knew this was wrong and warned against it publicly. He wrote his confidant President Roosevelt, asking him to defend Japanese Americans as loyal citizens, and lobbied General John DeWitt against forced relocation and incarceration. But when DeWitt imposed the policy, Olson, as governor, stopped fighting and embraced it.

Similarly, Newsom, after years of pursuing pro-immigrant policies, has recently bowed to the political winds and President Biden’s rights-violating restrictions on immigration and asylum seekers, which mirror Trump’s policies.

Olson’s rhetoric about democracy did very little—and ultimately may have caused harm when he didn’t back it up with action. We are learning this lesson again now. When elected officials claim they are defending democracy—as Newsom and Democrats do most loudly—they make democracy look like just another talking point or political issue. When elected officials issue warnings, they spread not hope but fear, and fear is an ally of authoritarians and dictators.

Purity, progressivism, and strong faith (or Olson’s strong lack of faith) are not nearly as convincing as affection and hope. Political rhetoric that taps our fears doesn’t encourage democracy nearly as much as the hard work of building solidarity and compromise with our political opponents.

And nothing is healthier for democracy than ensuring that everyday people have the power to make decisions for themselves. In other words, keeping our democracy is not up to our governors, but to the people.

Heaven help us.

The post Why Is Gavin Newsom Invoking a Failed World War Two-Era Governor? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In our era of one-party rule by complacent Democrats, California might benefit from a coherent and compelling political opposition.

Instead, we keep getting John Cox.

You probably don’t recognize Cox’s name. This goes to the heart of the problem.

Cox, a businessman and former congressional and Republican presidential candidate from Illinois who moved to the San Diego area more than a decade ago, has been the most prominent opponent of ruling Democrats during their 14 years and counting of total political control in the Capitol.

Cox spent millions of dollars running twice against Gov. Gavin Newsom—losing to the governor in 2018’s regularly scheduled election and again in the 2021 recall. Over the past dozen years, Cox has also proposed provocative and attention-grabbing ballot measures, including initiatives to increase the size of the legislature, limit gas taxes, and force elected officials to wear the names of their top donors on their clothing.

None of Cox’s initiatives passed. And he made no lasting impact on political debate, much less the actual governance of this state.

He recently wrote a book that, mostly unintentionally, demonstrates why.

The Newsom Nightmare: The California Catastrophe and How to Reform Our Broken System, published late last year, pulls back the curtain to offer some insider takes on California politics. Cox details, for example, how talk show host Larry Elder’s entry into the 2021 recall race, with the support of the politically toxic Donald Trump, hurt any chance of a Newsom recall passing by allowing the governor “to make Elder, along with the former president, the face of the recall and shift the debate from Newsom’s failures.”

Cox recounts scandals over regulating the utility PG&E, which the state bailed out even after it killed people in fires and a gas explosion. And he offers vignettes of California small businesspeople and mid-level officials frustrated by the overregulation and official secrecy of a state that is great at many things—but not governance.

But like so much of the political conversation in our state, Cox’s book doesn’t add up to very much. Cox offers no future-focused opposition narrative that would pressure Democrats to improve their performance or create public demand to cast them out of office.

Maddeningly, Cox clearly understands the perils of an absent opposition. “Having a single-party supermajority govern every branch of government throws the checks and balances crucial to representative democracy off kilter. It renders democracy impotent,” he writes.

And he correctly points out structural problems in the governing system that give power to rich and powerful people and interest groups. He shows how California legislative districts are so big—by far the most populous of any in the U.S.—that every lawmaker must raise millions to run for office. He details a “pay to play” campaign finance system that allows businesses, unions, and rich people with state contracts to give money to the very same lawmakers who make financial decisions. And he recounts how the outsized power of donors prevents Californians from turning their grand ambitions and good intentions for better education, health care, and housing into reality.

“The key to solving these problems,” he writes, “is to fashion solutions that reflect good practice and policy, forged by intelligent and well-thought-out tradeoffs, that have the effect of helping the vast majority of our people rather than favoring a narrow interest or group.”

But you’ll read in vain for a detailed Cox proposal full of well-thought-out tradeoffs or compromises on major issues. And that’s not the only contradiction in the book. Cox rightly bemoans the politics of personal attacks—personality and cultural wars distract us from deeper problems. Yet he still chose The Newsom Nightmare as his title.

The bigger problem is that Cox can’t elucidate what a California opposition could stand for. His book is all over the place—there’s Ronald Reagan nostalgia, blasts at local bureaucracy, contradictory calls both for tougher regulation and lighter regulation of business, and a bunch of word salad about immigration that might only make sense to frequent Fox News viewers.

There’s also a confusing ending about the national peril of what Cox calls “Californication,” which seems to be about many things but does not have anything to do with an old David Duchovny series about sex in our state.

Cox does draw some blood when he writes about the abusive tactics of trial lawyers and the distorting power of the state’s public employee unions, which saddle government budgets with unsustainable pensions. But he never offers a clear solution to the tricky question of how to take away benefits that are legally guaranteed.

He also takes a few swipes at his own party but doesn’t explain how someone might bring Republicans back to relevance in California.

Cox’s failures of coherence wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except that there is another gubernatorial election scheduled for 2026. And already, a half-dozen Democratic politicians—all with long experience in politics and little record of governing success—appear to be running for the office.

There is, as of yet, no clear opponent to these insider Democrats. And there is no one offering a clear prescription for how to change California’s structure so that people in our progressive state finally get the progressive solutions they’ve been promised—higher wages, high-quality healthcare, stronger schools, and affordable housing.

Perhaps someone will step forward to provide real opposition and offer a compelling vision for how to fix the state’s broken governing system and deliver more and better services.

Or perhaps Californians who want a change will be stuck with someone like John Cox, again.

The post California Democrats Need Real Opposition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Many of us aren’t old enough to remember it, but Steve Garvey, now the leading Republican candidate for California’s U.S. Senate seat, started his career on the left.

The left side of the infield, that is. When the Los Angeles Dodgers first called up Garvey to the majors at the end of the 1969 season, he played third base.

Soon, however, Garvey on the left became a defensive disaster. He had a powerful arm, but he was dangerously inaccurate. He so often threw balls over the first baseman’s head and into the stands that fans began bringing gloves—not to catch a souvenir, but to defend themselves.

In 1973, the Dodgers moved Garvey to first base, where he only had to catch the ball (first basemen rarely throw). With his defensive liabilities hidden, he could focus on his excellent hitting. He’s stayed on the right side ever since.

In baseball, as in politics, success is often a matter of positioning. You may fail in one spot, but flourish in another where your weaknesses are less apparent.

That’s also the strategic thinking behind Garvey’s current campaign for Senate. At 75, the former first baseman is a first-time political candidate for a powerful office. He has little record of public service, and a post-baseball record with some ugly errors.

But he may well be in the right position. He’s the only Republican with a recognizable name running for U.S. Senate in the March election, which is enabling him to consolidate support on the right side. He also has the good fortune to be running in California’s peculiar top-two election system—which makes our state’s politics a lot like baseball, and less like democracy.

Baseball is often described as a team sport, just like American politics, which is a contest between Democrats and Republicans. But in reality, baseball is an individual sport: The sport’s fiercest battles are between individuals—the pitcher vs. the hitter—and within teams, as teammates compete against each other for positions and playing time.

California’s top-two system makes party politics more like this—it sets up clashes between individual politicians who are members of the same team, usually the dominant Democratic Party. Currently, three ambitious Democratic members of the House of Representatives—Adam Schiff, Katie Porter, and Barbara Lee—are fighting each other for the U.S. Senate seat, and dividing up votes.

Garvey is using that dynamic to his advantage. With his consolidated GOP support, he has a good chance of winning the most votes in the March primary. At the very least, he is all but certain to be one of the top two candidates in the returns, allowing him to advance to the November election against one of the three Democrats.

Garvey, a Republican who has said he voted twice for Donald Trump, would be a heavy underdog in November against any Democrat. But simply getting Garvey to November would be a huge victory for the Republican Party, in California and nationally.

In previous elections, when two Democrats advanced in the U.S. Senate races, the GOP saw drops in turnout among its voters, hurting Republican candidates for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. But with the well-known Garvey on the ballot, more Republicans would show up, which would, in turn, boost the Republican congressional candidates in House races.

That’s significant because the results in several California swing districts could determine which party controls the House of Representatives.

Garvey’s ability to draw votes may depend on how well he can hide his weaknesses. He has kept an unusually low profile so far, and up until the first televised debate of the campaign last night, he’s avoided media scrutiny that could bring up many embarrassing moments from his past.

At the end of Garvey’s playing days in the late 1980s—he retired from the San Diego Padres after spending most of his career with the Dodgers—he went through a public divorce; his first wife, Cyndy, wrote a tell-all book that tarnished his ‘Mr. Clean” image.

Also in this period, two different ex-lovers filed paternity suits, revealing Garvey had fathered two children out of wedlock. The scandal inspired a famous bumper sticker on disappointed fans’ cars, across Southern California: “Steve Garvey is Not My Padre.”

Since then, Garvey’s notices have not been much better. Early in the 2000s, the Federal Trade Commission pursued penalties against him, alleging he made more than $1 million through “flagrantly false and deceptive claims on behalf of a weight-loss program in infomercials.”

In 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that Garvey and his second wife, Candace, were living extravagantly while dodging debts—bouncing checks (including at a grocery store), and failing to pay phone and electric bills. Garvey stiffed his gardener, his pediatrician, his nanny, and his church. One attorney to whom he owed money told the Times: “Once a Dodger, always a dodger.”

At the time, Garvey acknowledged financial problems, but blasted his creditors for attacking him in the press.

Memories of those reports have faded. As a candidate, Garvey hasn’t really explained these problems or how he overcame them. His web site portrays him merely as a successful businessman and philanthropist.

He hasn’t said much to the press about much of anything else. He’s done few public events, and offered little detail on his policies or what he might do for California in the Senate.

Garvey’s campaign visuals and videos are mostly about his baseball career. They emphasize the days when he helped lead Dodgers and Padres to the World Series. His interactions with voters, too, are often about his glory days at first base.

After all these years, he’s still hiding his weaknesses over on the right side of the field.

The post Republican Candidate Steve Garvey Started His Career on the Left (Infield) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why are so many Georgians still supporting Herschel Walker’s bid to replace Democrat Raphael Warnock in the U.S. Senate?

The easy answer seems to be the vast reservoir of good will that derives from Walker’s legendary exploits on the gridiron at the University of Georgia (UGA) in the early 1980s.

But the lingering afterglow from what he accomplished 40 years ago is not what’s keeping Walker competitive in the face of multiple disclosures of the sort that have torpedoed many a political campaign. Instead, conditions on the ground in Georgia and survey data suggest the key to understanding Herschel Walker’s staying power lies in the shifting demographic and political landscape that has left Georgia Republicans fiercely determined to defend the increasingly shaky ground they occupy.

Walker hasn’t made it easy for his supporters. His off-the-wall takes on air pollution in the U.S. (China foisting its bad air on us) and on evolution (the mere survival of the ape proves that Charles Darwin had it wrong) should amount to major alarm bells in and of themselves. Then come the outright fabrications he has offered concerning his achievements in education and business, his civic and charitable contributions, and, most notably, his personal life. Beyond that, it now appears that despite his stern public stance against abortions, in 2009 he persuaded a woman he impregnated to have an abortion and footed the bill for it. Walker’s son Christian blasted his father’s efforts to dismiss this allegation, accusing him of serial adultery and numerous threats to harm him and his mother, who had already described Walker holding a gun to her temple. For his part, Walker links his violent impulses to a multiple “identity disorder” that he has since overcome.

The standard campaign tale about overcoming adversity plays out in a candidate’s early years. Walker has one of these stories too, and it’s a doozy: a variation on the theme in which, rather than eventually discovering that he’s a swan, the bullied and shunned “Ugly Duckling” forces himself to become one.

Walker, who grew up in tiny Wrightsville, Georgia, has described himself as an awkward, overweight child, taunted for his stuttering. He exchanged fat for muscle through a physically extreme daily regimen of thousands of situps and pushups and exhausting sprints down a dusty path near his house. Equally relentless verbal drilling took care of the stuttering.

The payoff for his superhuman exertions was superhuman speed and strength and a physique so stunning that, by the time Walker was 17, a sportswriter reckoned it was as if “God just reached down and chiseled this guy differently.” At 6 feet 2 inches and 220 pounds, Walker was a monumental mismatch for hapless high-schoolers and later collegians, whose numerous contusions bore witness to the rigors of bringing him down. In only three seasons at Georgia, Walker broke 11 NCAA and 16 Southeastern Conference rushing records, led his team to a national championship in 1980, and put it in position to claim another in 1982. As a junior, he won the Heisman Trophy that many thought should have been his as a freshman. So deep was the gratitude of the University of Georgia faithful that he was even forgiven for forgoing his senior season to sign a precedent-breaking, multi-million-dollar contract with the New Jersey Generals of the newly minted United States Football League. There he would make the acquaintance of one Donald J. Trump. Meanwhile, his marriage to a white UGA coed caused barely a ripple in a state where interracial unions had been illegal only a decade before.

The special place Walker occupied in the hearts of so many white Georgians of that era was not based entirely on his athletic achievements but also on a carefully crafted public persona marked by a disarming humility and a deafening silence on all matters pertaining to race. As an already-famous high school senior in 1979, he frustrated fellow Black students at Johnson County High School by refusing to join their outcry against the alleged racial insensitivity of the school’s white principal. At the same time, he steered clear of any involvement, either as participant or peacemaker, in Black-white community confrontations. He said he did not feel the need to “represent my people”; he had been raised to believe he “represented humanity,” rather than any particular segment of it.

His views may have endeared him to whites, but did not play well with Black people in Wrightsville, where even today, reportedly, the only Black residence displaying a Walker campaign sign is his mother’s. Statewide, Black support for him hovers around 5%.

Meanwhile, demographics alone suggest Walker’s storied athletic career is not the primary reason why so many white Georgians refuse to abandon him. Nearly half of the state’s current residents were born elsewhere, and regardless of where they hail from originally, scarcely a third of them are old enough to remember his glory days. Trump’s endorsement doesn’t explain Walker’s staying power either. His anointed candidates for the Republican nominations for governor and secretary of state of Georgia failed miserably in the primary election. Only one in five of those who support Walker tell pollsters they are doing it out of loyalty to the former president.

These and other findings in recent polls by CBS and Monmouth University suggest that many likely voters are not buying into efforts to put Walker’s warm and fuzzy side forward. Nor are they willfully blinding themselves to his shortcomings. In the CBS and Monmouth surveys Walker is viewed unfavorably by roughly 48% of respondents compared to 44% for his opponent. Meanwhile, 58% say that they like the way Warnock handles himself personally, while the same share say precisely the opposite about Walker. A similar disparity shows up on questions of moral character. In fact, six in ten Warnock backers profess to be voting for him primarily because they like him, while only one in five who support Walker make this claim.

To understand why this race is still so close, we need to flash back to 2020. Although Democrat Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 gubernatorial race by just 1.4%, Georgia Republicans seemed utterly dumbfounded when Joe Biden carried the state in November 2020 and Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff unseated the state’s two GOP senators in a January 2021 runoff. Less than three months later, an angered and energized Republican majority in the state legislature pushed through SB 202, arguably the most sweeping suffrage-restriction measure enacted anywhere since the 2020 election.

SB 202 signaled that those Democratic victories left Georgia Republicans not only smarting, but scared. Census figures indicate that persons of color account for more than 90% of the 1.6 million-person increase in the state’s voting-age population between 2010 and 2020. The Republicans’ majority in the lower house of the state legislature shrank from 66% to 57% between 2014 and 2020, while their margin in the upper house dropped from 20 to 12. Painfully aware of how quickly Georgia turned purple, they aren’t sitting idle as it trends blue.

In the CBS survey, 86% of Walker’s supporters—more than four times the percentage of Walker supporters who say they actually like him—say they are voting for him primarily to help Republicans regain control of the Senate. A similar share say they see voting for him as voting against President Biden. A squad of nationally prominent GOP politicians will be arriving shortly to shore up these sentiments.

Should Herschel Walker still manage to eke out a win in November, he will owe it to voters who acted out of blind loyalty, not so much to the greatest Georgia Bulldog ever, but to the party that made him their standard bearer despite his manifest unsuitability for the position he would be assuming.

The post Herschel Walker Is a Football Legend. But That’s Not Why Republicans Are Sticking With Him appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The idea of “staying woke” became an important refrain among Black Lives Matter activists after a spate of police killings of Black men, including Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. These debates over “wokeness” are the latest in a long history of Republican efforts to win over white Democratic swing voters with racially conservative attitudes that political scientists call “racial resentment.” Democrats have often tried to maintain support from these whites by staying silent on racial issues.

But my research shows that racial resentment among white Democrats is at all-time low and by failing to take stronger positions on racial justice—out of concern they could alienate moderate whites – the party is missing a historic political opportunity.

Since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Democrats have taken gradually more progressive positions on racial justice issues, social welfare programs, and immigration policies than Republicans. As a result, majorities of racial and ethnic minorities have increasingly supported the Democratic Party and self-identified non-Hispanic white voters have steadily allied with the Republican Party. According to data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), in 1968, 52 percent of white Americans identified as Democrats and 37 percent as Republicans; by 2020 those values had reversed: 53 percent of white voters were Republicans, while only 37 percent of white voters aligned with the Democratic Party.

By comparison, 80 percent of Black Americans and nearly 60 percent of Hispanic Americans currently identify as Democrats.

But even as the party’s non-white voter base grows, Democrats have continued to express concerns about losing white voters because of racial positions. In 2017, a former Bill Clinton pollster blamed identity politics for weakening the party’s electoral chances. Earlier this year, racial justice activists like Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, chided President Biden for omitting racial justice issues in his State of the Union Address, even as he addressed his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

My research suggests, however, that when Democrats stay silent on race to appease white moderates, they are making a tactical error. It’s a lose-lose situation for Democrats who are soft on racial justice because Republicans will still attack them for being too liberal. In Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia, and elsewhere, Republican candidates aligned with former President Donald Trump continue to take aim at Democratic positions on identity politics, regardless of Democrats’ reluctance to raise the issue. Additionally, when Democrats avoid racial issues, they fail to address the needs of their large, and growing, constituency base of people of color and risk alienating their own base of support.

Social scientists such as Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders introduced the concept of white “racial resentment” to describe the more subtle forms of racial prejudice that emerged after the civil rights movement. Instead of extreme beliefs about biological inferiority and preferences for segregation, racial resentment addresses a more covert type of racism that is expressed in the language of personal responsibility and denial of racial discrimination.

Researchers measure this form of prejudice primarily through survey research. Respondents are asked questions about perceptions of work ethic and personal responsibility. For example, respondents are asked how strongly they agree with statements like, “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should do the same without special favors.” And: “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for Black people to work their way out of the lower class.” Individuals who deny the consequences of racial discrimination and blame Black people’s poor work ethic for racial disparities receive a higher “resentment score.”

Using data from the ANES, which has routinely measured whites’ levels of racial resentment since the 1980s, Duke University graduate student Trent Ollerenshaw and I analyzed how white Americans’ levels of racial prejudice have changed over time. Our findings showed that racial resentment among white Democrats is at an all-time low.

This suggests that Democrats have an historic opportunity to advance more racially progressive policies. By leveraging burgeoning white progressivism on race, Democrats may also serve the interests of—and thereby, attract—another crucial constituency: people of color, whose support for the Democratic Party appears to have eroded somewhat in recent years.

We find that during the 1980s and 1990s, white Democrats had only slightly lower levels of racial resentment than white Republicans, and both were more politically conservative than now. The two groups began drifting apart in the early 2000s, a trend that accelerated at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency in 2008 and became a gulf by 2016. By 2020, the two parties were further apart than ever. While white Democrats’ resentment scores declined dramatically, white Republicans’ racial resentment scores in 2020 had not changed much since 1986, the same year Howard Beach race riots in Queens, New York, killed a Black man and the state of Arizona rescinded the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

There are two likely explanations for this trend: More racially prejudiced white Democrats have left the party in recent years, or they have substantially changed their views. Multiple surveys of the same individuals between 2011 and 2020 provide evidence for the latter explanation: they show that whites who remained Democrats have expressed less racial resentment over time.

The next critical question for political researchers and Democratic strategists is: Does declining racial resentment among white Democrats suggest there is greater support for specific policy solutions?

Our analysis shows that many white survey respondents in 1980s and 1990s opposed policies that are perceived to benefit Black people, disproportionately, such as affirmative action and welfare spending increases.

During the Obama era, however, white Democrats’ support for these policies increased substantially. A 2020 poll by the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute revealed that more than 73 percent of white Democrats supported affirmative action policies in college admissions and more than 66 percent supported them in hiring practices. More white Democrats support affirmative action now than ever before.

Our analysis suggests that the Democratic Party’s reluctance to take stronger positions on racial justice due to concerns about racially resentful whites is a lost opportunity. There is empirical evidence that Democrats could see gains if they embrace the progressivism of their core constituencies: racially liberal white voters and people of color.

The post Why Are Democrats Reluctant to Be Woke? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On the phone, I was gruff, sarcastic, dismissive. Don’t you know, smart-rich guy, that California’s governmental dysfunction is built on top of ballot initiatives that don’t work? Passing more initiatives would make things worse; it’s like trying to fix the Winchester Mystery House by adding more rooms, dude. California needs a change in its thinking and its system, with a new constitution, I told him, before signing off.

Of course, I didn’t tell him how you convince enough people to change the system because, well, no one has figured that out yet. A few hours after the call, I found myself re-reading a book, How America’s Political Parties Change (and How They Don’t), by the incomparable Michael Barone, who edits the Almanac of American Politics. The book, on top of the call, inspired a flurry of thinking and reporting that led me to email the Silicon Valley guy: If you want to make a big systemic change in California, or in the U.S., you probably need to build a new political party.

According to the conventional wisdom, I had just given the tech dude terrible advice. As Barone points out, America’s political parties are history’s most enduring; the Democrats, who got started in 1832, are the oldest political party in the world. The Republicans, dating to 1854, are the third oldest. (The U.K.’s Conservatives rank second). These parties survive because they change and reshape themselves with the country, and because our constitutional system incentivizes having just two parties. Rare is the moment in this country when another party could take power and alter the American system.

Of course, we are now in a very rare moment in history. These might even be the craziest times ever in California. But are they crazy enough to birth a true unicorn—a political party—the sort of institution rarer than a $1 billion tech start-up?

I dare to say the answer is yes, in full knowledge of how loopy this will sound to our state’s governing and political professionals.

California history tells us that new parties can bring the greatest changes—be they the early Republicans who helped form our state’s institutions in the 1850s, or the short-lived Workingmen’s Party that established our constitutional structure in the late 1870s, or the Progressive Party, which split from the Republicans and established women’s suffrage, our state’s system of commissions, and direct democracy in the 1910s.

Our present circumstances cry out for new parties. The Republicans have cracked up, with reasonable members departing, and the remains reconstituting themselves as a social club for conspiracy-mongering. Meanwhile the dominant Democrats, obsessed with national politics and owned by labor unions, pursue narrow policies instead of providing the very basics Californians are lacking: education for all, reliable and affordable healthcare, sufficient housing, a stable economy, dependable emergency response, and energy that doesn’t constantly shut off.

Neither party seems capable of delivering the essentials of 21st-century life. Which is why we need a new political force to do that.

We need a Water Party.

Why Water? Because it’s something we all require, regardless of region or occupation or ideology. Because water puts out fires, which would be useful right now. And because, most profoundly, it defines our state, and its dysfunction.

Water—our rivers, our coast—connects us and divides us; water is all around us, and yet we manage it so poorly, and create such confusing laws around it, that we don’t have nearly enough of it. Water, like housing and jobs and energy and health care and education, is artificially scarce here. If we could fix the water, and make this a place of abundance, we could fix the state.

But mostly, water is the metaphor that shows us the way out of our nasty contradictions.

Californians cling to old infrastructure and systems, even ones that aren’t working. But water can wash away the past.

California is split up between regions and thousands of local governments. All those pieces don’t fit together. But water naturally fills in such cracks.

In California, we often prefer to let decisions be made by algorithms and formulas. Perhaps we should leave more of the decisions to humans, whose bodies are more than half water.

Indeed, our state, so full of constraints and limits, needs to re-dedicate itself to the value of flexibility. Because we will need to be fluid to deal with the difficulties and horrors of the future. In this, the Water Party would do well to adopt the practical philosophy of the San Francisco-born martial artist and film star Bruce Lee, who famously advised:

Be formless, shapeless—like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

The people now in charge of California will dismiss the idea of a Water Party, just as I dismissed that Silicon Valley caller, but their actual behavior betrays their desperate wish that they could be more like water. Look at Gov. Gavin Newsom, who, caught in the inflexible vise of state government, keeps forming task forces, strike teams, and special commissions that have more freedom and fluidity to dig into the big problems and respond to all of our current emergencies.

Forming the party itself wouldn’t be so hard. Under state regulations, you must first hold a party caucus or convention, and then qualify as a party either by collecting enough voter registrations, or sufficient signatures on a petition.

By starting from scratch, a Water Party wouldn’t have to follow the practices of the Democrats or Republicans; it could forge new ideas and new practices to fit our age of apocalypse. The Water Party could experiment with “liquid democracy,” a system in which voters can either vote on issues themselves, or turn their vote over to a personal proxy. Or, like Italy’s Five Star Movement, it could build an online environment to allow its members to determine candidates and policy positions directly.

In Barone’s book published last year, he predicted the continued dominance of the Democrats and Republicans, arguing that “the parties have been a force for stability.” But right now, the parties themselves feel unstable, with some of the most bitter fighting happening not between the parties, but within them.

Around the world, traditional parties of left and right have split apart in recent years. It’s no longer hard to imagine the Democrats dividing between Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats, and the Republicans splitting between White Nationalists and Never Trumpers.

At a time of such uncertainty, a flexible, California-centric party, devoted to water and the other basics, would have enormous value. The nation’s rigid divide might crack up, but California would have a force fluid enough to shape a better future.

Be water, my party.

The post Californians Need a New Political Party That Can Keep Us Afloat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even a generation ago, before the internet reached everyone, “one world” was an expression of idealism, signifying easy and carefree participation in a panoply of world cultures, all accessible by way of a flight, a screen, or a just-in-time supply chain. Think, for instance, of the Western vogue for so-called “world music” with its spirit of sentimental and nebulous togetherness: “One world is enough for all of us” went the refrain in Sting’s “One World (Not Three)” on his 1986 live album, Bring on the Night.

But now that the bloom is off globalization’s rose—world connection is just as likely to spur thoughts of climate change, inequality, or the spread of COVID-19 as global fellowship—we would do well to recall the longer, lost history of “one world.” Whether we know it or not, any modern use of the phrase, in both its hopeful and fearful senses, is indebted to the Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and his 1943 bestseller, One World.

If you’ve heard of Willkie, it’s likely because of his 1940 campaign for president against Franklin Roosevelt. A relative newcomer to politics, Willkie was drafted by business-friendly Republicans because he opposed FDR’s New Deal. He is often celebrated for his decision not to side with the so-called “isolationists” in the Republican Party—some of whom claimed the badge of “America First!” to resist American involvement in another European war.

Willkie is also revered for what happened after he lost that election. Instead of remaining in opposition, Willkie stepped up to support Lend-Lease, the President’s effort to send American war supplies to Britain. Willkie, it is said, helped FDR prepare America to save the world from fascism.

These stories, while powerful, actually slight Willkie’s true significance. He should be remembered more for his particular vision of “one world.” Specifically, Willkie argued for “one world” as a global call for a world free of the racism and imperial exploitation fostered by nationalism. His ideals may appear naïve at first, but they might give us some idea of what a visionary globalism is still good for in a time of resurgent nationalism and planetary fragility.

Willkie was not the first to use the phrase “one world.” Writers and thinkers had previously used it to describe how the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the stock market, and the radio all shrank space and sped up time, bringing far-flung places and cultures into greater contact.

These forces unleashed chaos and disintegration, too, as war and conquest swept the globe. Nationalist leaders rose, offering stories of shared purpose and common destiny as balms for disruption. But nationalism marked territory with myths of blood and belonging, sparking competition for patches of soil on the map.

By contrast, internationalists countered nationalism’s primal pull with rational plans for cooperation between states. Fashioned properly, internationalism would ride the new networks of global communication and finance and transportation. It would have to, the internationalists said, or the future held only war and privation.

Willkie became an internationalist early on. Born in 1892 in Indiana, his first political inspiration was President Woodrow Wilson, hero to many internationalists for his call to “make the world safe for democracy” and his advocacy of the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. Much to Willkie’s dismay, however, many Americans, bitter about World War I, rejected the League, and the U.S. never joined.

As he built a career as a lawyer for the power industry and activist in the Democratic Party (he wouldn’t switch parties until just before the 1940 campaign), Willkie hoped for an American internationalist revival on more equitable terms than even Wilson, a racist and imperialist, imagined. But as the Great Depression deepened and war spread in Asia and Europe again, Willkie and other internationalists believed that nobody could now doubt that full international cooperation was necessary—and inevitable. In that spirit, Willkie supported Lend Lease in 1940. He also visited Britain in 1941, during the last days of the Blitz, and his genial, iconoclastic personality did much to lift spirits there.

By the late summer of 1942, the U.S. was in the fight, but active only in the Pacific. While the U.S. supplied aid and munitions to European Allies, the Nazis held Western Europe and occupied great swathes of Russia. Several American journalists working in Kuibyshev—the Soviets wartime capital—cabled Willkie to suggest he visit the beleaguered country to boost morale. Working with Roosevelt again, Willkie planned a much bigger undertaking: a closely watched, seven-week, 31,000-mile flying journey around the world that would take him to 13 countries on five continents.

The journey followed recently opened and occasionally un-scouted air lanes over Africa, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China, a route that skirted Axis-held territory—well within range of enemy aircraft—and brought Willkie face to face with everyone from Soviet factory workers and Siberian peasants to Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Charles de Gaulle. Millions followed his route via the papers and newsreels, discovering a world that had become, as Willkie would later put it, “small and completely interdependent.”

FDR saw the trip as a fact-finding mission and a morale-building effort. But his former opponent made it much more than that. Across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Willkie discovered, the war was not just a struggle against Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism, but potentially a colossal turning point in world history. A whole generation of anti-imperial nationalists saw a war fought for democracy and freedom as a chance to persuade the great European empires to finally relinquish their hold on the globe.

This meant the U.S. was at a crossroads too. America would become the next great power—but what kind of power would it choose to become?

Here, in the midst of worldwide terror and destruction, Willkie discovered a fleeting opportunity: The United States had a chance to lead the planet to a new era of cooperation—but only if it would truly embrace its own ideals in an effort to end colonialism and colonial thinking. To win a lasting peace and a future of global cooperation, Willkie came to believe, Americans would have to accept a more cooperative relationship with the rest of the planet.

“There are no distant points in the world any longer,” Willkie announced in his book describing his journey. The volume was initially going to be called One War, One Peace, One World, but Willkie soon realized that the last third said it all. A planet shrunk by aviation and total war was unified by technology, and could be brought together politically, too, if only Americans would put in the work. The U.S., he argued, had to forego “narrow nationalism” or the “international imperialism” practiced by the European powers. Americans had to choose instead to support “equality of opportunity for every race and every nation.”

Millions read One World—some called it the fastest-selling book in American history to date—even though it was critical of America and the West. In fact, one of the chief lessons of his trip, he argued was that the linked forces of racism and empire were hampering the Allied war effort. “The moral atmosphere in which the white race lives is changing,” he wrote, conveying the demands he heard across the globe. People everywhere were “no longer willing to be Eastern slaves for Western profits. The big house on the hill surrounded by mud huts has lost its awesome charm.”

Americans were not exempt, either. The U.S., Willkie wrote, had long “practiced inside our own boundaries something that amounts to race imperialism.”

However, Willkie was less critical of American imperial power. In general, he saw the United States as crucial to a global solution rather than part of the problem, a perspective that suggests how Americans tended to discount the negative impact of their power abroad. The idea of “one world” would become broadly influential during the war years, but a current of resilient nationalism would eventually undermine his hopes. Willkie’s bid for the 1944 Republican nomination never got off the ground. He argued for a fully democratic structure for the United Nations—one that would give smaller nations equal power and open a clear path to freedom for colonized countries. But FDR’s preferred plan—dominance by the Great Powers in the Security Council—won the day.

Tragically, Willkie never saw the U.N. convene. He died, unexpectedly, in October 1944 at only 52.

Before long, “Willkie” began to seem like a name from another time. One World has often been recalled as an oddity of wartime life, a naïve statement of wishful global harmony, and Willkie was remembered as an almost-President who helped Roosevelt save democracy in 1940. But if Willkie’s own name has faded, the phrase he made popular lived on, inspiring a host of global visions down to our own time.

“One world or none!” declared pacifists, world government advocates, and anti-nuclear activists in the 1940s and ’50s. Anti-imperialists like Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India claimed it as a slogan, too, as they harnessed the U.N. to help usher colonialism off the world stage. Later it resurfaced as an environmentalist credo, echoed by the early astronauts who first saw the Earth from space. “When you’re finally up at the moon looking back at the Earth,” Apollo 8’s Frank Borman mused in 1968, “all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.”

With the precipitous globalization of the 1980s and ’90s the idea came rushing back. Global capitalism, some argued, was leveling barriers to opportunity everywhere. But this new “one world” felt like a threat to others. One World, Ready or Not, announced journalist William Greider in his 1997 expose of the borderless world of free trade and finance. Greider observed that Willkie’s idealism had been replaced by “the manic logic of global capitalism,” which would doom local industry and community and drive inequality to new heights.

Since then, of course, the perils of “one world” have swamped any lingering promise the phrase once held. Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, the resulting “war on terror,” the financial crisis of 2008, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic: all spring from the precarious state of a planet in which all of us are inescapably joined in a web of communications, market transactions, greenhouse gasses, possible pandemics, migration routes, and interlocking political alliances, resentments, and inequalities. Globalization, we are told, continues to lift more people out of poverty than it immiserates, but that’s statistics, not perception.

When another political outsider—like Willkie, a former Democrat from the world of business—took the presidency by storm in 2016, he promised to turn back the clock, invoking the name of his predecessor’s bête noir. “From this moment on,” Donald Trump declared at his inauguration, “it’s going to be ‘America First.’”

Trump is not alone, of course. The worldwide retreat into nationalism is spurred by both inequality and xenophobia. And it denies what Willkie—were he still with us—would surely say: We are one world made out of many creatures—human and nonhuman—living together on a single fragile earth.

The post When Americans Fell in Love With the Ideal of ‘One World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But few people look back far enough: to the pivotal election 60 years ago that unintentionally spawned his father’s governorship and the Brown family dynasty.

In 1958, two of California’s most powerful and popular Republicans tried to swap jobs—the governor ran for a U.S. Senate seat while the Senator tried to be elected governor. The epic failure of the “Big Switch” opened the door for an ambitious San Francisco Democrat named Edmund G. Brown, who seized the unusual moment to change the political narrative in California—and in the United States. The ramifications of Brown’s victory have resonated ever since, not only through his own political career but that of his son, Jerry, the longest-tenured governor in California history.

Although California today is considered reliably Democratic, in the 1950s, it was a Republican stronghold. On paper, Democrats outnumbered Republicans in rapidly growing postwar California, but state government had been solidly Republican for decades. Between 1896 and 1958, Culbert Olson was the one Democrat elected governor, and he left office in 1943, a one-term chief executive of little note.

One of the mechanisms that helped Republicans stay in power was the open primary. Candidates could run in both party primaries, and party affiliation was not even noted on the ballot until 1954. As a result, incumbent Republicans could win both lines and run unopposed in the general election.

Edmund G. Brown, known to all but his mother as Pat, had been elected attorney general in 1950, the only Democrat to hold statewide office. He rejected entreaties to run for governor in 1954 against the well-liked Goodwin “Goodie” Knight, who had moved up from lieutenant governor when Earl Warren was appointed chief justice of the United States. Attorney General Brown played it safe, coasting to re-election with the second-highest vote total in state history.

The top vote getter in California was also a Bay Area politician: Republican U.S. Senator William Knowland. He was scion of a prominent Oakland family that owned the Tribune, the majority leader in the U.S. Senate, prominent conservative, and presidential hopeful.

In January 1957, Knowland upended the political calculus in California by announcing he would give up his Senate seat the following year to challenge fellow Republican Knight for the party’s gubernatorial nomination. Knowland’s strategy was to defeat the moderate Knight, move the party to the right, establish himself as the state’s favorite son, and thwart the presidential aspirations of another California Republican, Vice President Richard Nixon.

Knowland’s daughters later confirmed in oral history interviews the widespread speculation that accompanied his surprise decision: Knowland believed he could not be elected president from the Senate. So his ambition drove him to run for governor, even against a well-liked incumbent of his own party.

Democrat Pat Brown agonized for months. Should he run for reelection yet again as attorney general, a safe bet and a job he loved? Or jump into the governor’s race and hope to exploit the Knight-Knowland fight? Or run for the U.S. Senate seat now open because of Knowland’s run for governor?

Many of Brown’s backers, especially his financial supporters, were Republicans. Like Brown, they were friends with moderate Republicans, including Knight; they urged Brown to run for Senate. So did his son, Jerry, cloistered in the Sacred Heart Seminary at Los Gatos, but still managing to follow politics. He warned his father that Knowland would be a formidable opponent with great fundraising ability and an enormous stake in winning. “You should weigh your chances very carefully,” Jerry wrote his father. He also thought the Senate had advantages. “As Senator you would have six uninterrupted years, untroubled by election entanglements, to devote to your work.”

But Pat Brown had earlier made a secret pact with Congressman Clair Engle, a Democrat from California’s far north: If Engle ran for Senate, Brown would run for governor. Engle had announced his candidacy for Senate. After months of indecision, Brown declared in October 1957 that he would run for governor.

Then came what Democrats gleefully dubbed “the Big Switch.”

Although Knowland was a potential rival, Nixon intervened in an effort to unify the fractured party. He began backdoor overtures to force Knight to pull out of the gubernatorial race. Knight’s wife, Virginia, bitterly and vividly recalled years later the rainy night that Clint Mosher, political editor for the San Francisco Examiner, came to visit the Governor’s Mansion. Mosher was friends with both Knight and Nixon. He came to deliver a message to Knight: If he stayed in the governor’s race, Nixon would campaign against him in every county.

As Knight later described his predicament: “I had no choice. I was like a man in the middle of the ocean, standing on the deck of a burning ship.” In November, he announced he would run for Knowland’s Senate seat.

Democrats had a field day with the Big Switch: Knowland was a gubernatorial candidate who knew more about Taiwan than Sacramento, and Knight was a Senate candidate forced into a race he never wanted to make.

Though Democrats were initially dismayed when Knight pulled out and Republicans avoided a bitter primary fight, the Big Switch turned into a fiasco for Republicans. Knight was treated so shabbily that Republicans abandoned Knowland in disgust, and the beneficiary was Pat Brown.

The primary results revealed the depth of the defections: Brown won 22 percent of the Republican vote, while Knowland only won 14 percent of the Democratic vote. Since Democrats outnumbered Republicans to begin with, that meant Knowland faced an uphill climb in the general election.

The bad blood between Knowland and Knight worsened, driven in part by Knowland’s support for an anti-union “right to work” ballot proposition, which would deny unions the right to require membership as a condition of employment. In the end, Knight refused to endorse Knowland.

“My husband knew that if the Republican party went against labor, the working people, it would lose,” Virginia Knight recalled in her oral history for the state archives. She remembered her husband warning, “in speech after speech: ‘Don’t do this, Republicans! It’s a blueprint for disaster!’” Not only did California labor unions throw their support behind the Democratic candidate; Brown benefitted from a $1 million campaign waged by national labor organizations that viewed California as a bellwether.

In one of the campaigns’ oddest twists, Knowland’s wife, Helen, sent 200 California Republican leaders a vitriolic, seven-page letter in which she called Knight a tool of labor with a “macaroni spine.” Knowland’s victory was essential, his wife wrote, because “California may be the last hope of saving our country from the labor-socialist monster which has latched on to the Democratic Party and to some Republicans as well, ‘poor Goodie’ being a perfect example.”

She also distributed 500 copies of a pamphlet, “Meet the Man Who Plans to Rule America,” which smeared Walter Reuther, vice president of the AFL-CIO and head of the United Auto Workers, as a Marxist, pro-Communist, “pseudo-intellectual nitwit.”

The internecine warfare among Republicans made Pat Brown’s nice guy image even more appealing. As they fought with each other, Brown barnstormed the state; he believed there was no one he could not win over if they met face to face.

On election day, more than 79 percent of the registered voters showed up at the polls, a California record for a non-presidential election. Brown won the governorship by a million-vote margin, led a Democratic sweep, and ushered in a new political era in the Golden State. For the first time since 1889, Democrats won six out of seven statewide offices and the U.S. Senate seat, which went to Engle, control of both houses of the state legislature, and majority of the congressional delegation. The victory also gave Democrats control over reapportionment in 1961, when the state would add seven congressional seats.

In retrospect, the election would be viewed as the inflection point when California became a two-party state and Pat Brown became a national figure, who would leave an enormous imprint on his state.

On the night of Nov. 4, 1958, as the results became clear, the authorities at Sacred Heart Seminary made a rare exception to the rules that barred newspapers, magazines, television, or any news of the outside world. They allowed 20-year-old junior seminarian Edmund G. Brown Jr. to watch the lone television, to see his father’s victory speech.

The post The 1958 Governor’s Race That Launched a Dynasty appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

No state is more dominated by a single political party than Hawai‘i. Today, there are no Republicans in Hawai‘i’s state senate and there are only five Republicans out of 51 members in the house. And Hawai‘i’s beleaguered GOP appears poised to lose yet another seat after November’s election.

This is nothing new. The Democratic Party has more or less governed Hawai‘i since 1954. That was the year when labor leaders and returning Asian-American veterans of World War II overthrew the ruling oligarchy of sugar planters.

Although individual Republican candidates—including two Republican governors—occasionally have found success by emphasizing their independence from the reigning Democrats, the nationalization of American politics is making that strategy less tenable, and not just in Hawai‘i. Republican and Democratic parties in each state are increasingly unable to distinguish themselves from the national parties in Washington. And in a diverse state like Hawai‘i, with the second-highest rate of union membership in the nation, the Republican Party’s shift to the right has made it nearly impossible for the local party to win state-wide elections.

So what happens to a state when there’s no opposition party?

One sobering answer: not nearly as much as most voters would hope. For many Democrats, especially liberals, the dominance of Hawai‘i’s Democrats might seem like a cause for celebration—things could get done. And, yes, the Aloha State has an enviable progressive record on many policy issues. It became the first state to legalize abortion in 1970. Just four years later, it adopted an innovative health care law that requires most employers to provide health insurance.

But in recent years, the lack of vigorous, two-party competition has led to a culture of complacency among politicians and apathy among voters. Hawai‘i once had some of the highest voter turnout rates in the nation, but today the Aloha State consistently ranks dead last among the 50 states. In the 2016 presidential election, only 43 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot—a rate that was seven percentage points lower than West Virginia, the 49th-worst state.

As voters have disengaged, they have also become critical and distrustful of state government. One poll taken before the primary election this summer by the University of Hawai‘i’s Public Policy Center, which I direct, gave the Hawai‘i State Legislature a 21 percent approval rating. What is more troubling, only 30 percent of respondents thought they could trust Hawai‘i’s state government to do what is in the public’s interest most of the time.

Part of the problem is that voters are rarely presented with a choice between different policy agendas or governing philosophies—even in major statewide races. In the most recent gubernatorial primary, the two candidates, incumbent Gov. David Ige and U.S. Representative Colleen Hanabusa, spent much of the election bickering over small policy differences and forwarding vague arguments about their superior leadership abilities. The lack of public debate often becomes even more acute during the general election. Indeed, Democrats are so confident they will win in November that Governor Ige, who won the primary, has agreed to only two televised debates with his Republican challenger.

With the decline of the Republican Party, the two-party system has been replaced by Hawai‘i’s unique brand of factionalized politics. Unlike political parties, these factions are held together through personal relationships and the legislative favors doled out by powerful committee chairs, rather than shared ideology or policy preferences. Today, the state legislature is run by shifting coalitions of Democrats that go by obscure names like the “Chess Club,” for legislators who consider themselves policy wonks, or the “Opihi”—the Hawaiian word for local saltwater limpets that cling to rocks, thus designating how faction members stick together, no matter the issue.

This has led to a political process that is almost entirely opaque. Without an opposition party to force public debate, even seasoned political observers struggle to understand why some bills are passed and others fail. The problem is compounded by the legislature’s frequent use of tactics such as “gut and replace,” where bills that have moved through the review process are stripped of their original language and replaced with entirely different bills at the last moment.

Finally, the dominance of a single party means that many urgent public policy challenges remain unaddressed. Although incumbents are solicitous about the welfare of reliable Democratic voters such as the members of public-sector unions, they pay scant attention to the problems faced by increasingly disaffected young voters and working families. Unlike many other left-leaning states, Hawai‘i still has no publicly-funded pre-kindergarten education or paid family leave for working families. Its general excise tax is very regressive because it indiscriminately affects all consumers, placing one of the highest tafx burdens on low-income families in the nation.

How to bring back the light of transparency and the pressure of competition to Hawai‘i politics? There are no easy solutions, but publicly funded elections and institutional reforms like California’s “top-two” primary or European-style multi-member legislative districts might provide opportunities for more people to get involved and for more voices to be heard.

Regardless of one’s political affiliation, Hawai‘i’s experience suggests how detrimental one-party rule can be for voter engagement and policy responsiveness. No democracy can remain healthy for long without a loyal opposition.

The post Why Single-Party Domination of Hawai‘i Politics Is Harmful to the Aloha State appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the big takeaway from an August 10th Zócalo panel discussion at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo district. Titled “Is the Republican Party Dead?” the conversation amounted to a kind of autopsy not only of the GOP, but also of the American two-party system as a whole.

“I think you’re seeing the lug nuts come off and the wheels are starting to rattle,” said panelist Mike Madrid, a political consultant at the Sacramento-based public affairs firm GrassrootsLab, who previously served as the political director for the California Republican Party.

Madrid’s dire assessment of the donkey-elephant dyad that has dominated American politics since the Civil War was largely shared by his fellow panelists: Cassandra Pye, a public affairs strategist who was the deputy chief of staff to former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Leslie Graves, publisher of Ballotpedia, the Encyclopedia of American Politics.

The panelists concurred that American voters increasingly define their politics by what they’re against, not what they’re for; by the politicians they hate, rather than the politicians they admire; by the party they revile rather than the one they identify with.

If American voters are united in anything these days, it’s in their bipartisan contempt for both major parties, along with most major institutions, the panelists suggested. For many voters, as for many politicians and their cheerleaders in the increasingly partisan and echo-chambered mass media, winning simply means that the other team loses, as if politics had no higher stakes—and no more broadly shared idea of a greater public good—than a Giants-Dodgers double-header.

“You could say the [Republican] party is in the most trouble—except for the other one,” Graves said.

When moderator Christina Bellantoni, assistant managing editor, politics, at the Los Angeles Times, asked the panelists how they would sum up what the Republican Party stands for to space aliens landing on Earth, Graves responded: “It’s that they’re not Democrats.”

Bellantoni was the first to mention Donald Trump, and the discussion turned to the furiously anti-establishment, drain-the-swamp sales pitches that won him the White House. The panelists agreed that the anger that propelled Trump to the presidency went deeper than mere disgust with Washington’s legislative dysfunction. The nation is suffering from a deeper malaise, the panelists said, because many Americans feel that the political system has failed them, and that neither of the two major parties is going to be able to solve the problems of stagnant wages, rising homelessness, and other challenges that voters experience in their daily lives.

While the media obsesses over “culture war” issues, voters are preoccupied with what Pye called “real-people stuff”—the fear of not being able to attain better lives than their parents, for example, and the lingering ripple effects of the Great Recession.

“We’re at a time when both parties are dealing with very serious cleavages in their base,” Madrid said. “The populist dynamic that is driving both parties is really across the spectrum.” For the Republicans, those fissures resulted in the multi-candidate “clown car” of the 2016 Republican Party primary season, Madrid said.

If the national picture for both major parties is jumbled and increasingly bleak, the picture for Republicans in California at the state, local, and federal level is as poor as it is for Democrats across large swathes of the Deep South and the Great Plains.

“One has got the impression that there is at least a nail or two in the coffin in California” of the Republican Party, Pye said. For a California Republican to have a viable chance of winning a statewide office, she added, “It’ll take a great candidate, it’ll take a lot of cash, it’ll take some good timing, and a little bit of luck.”

But Madrid said that recent low turnout in California shows that, although many voters know they really dislike the Republicans, they’re not strongly motivated to show up at the polls to back Democrats.

And Graves pointed out that, although it’s conventional wisdom that voters are clamoring for change, congressional incumbents keep getting re-elected in droves, and have huge advantages over first-time challengers.

In that same vein of reasoning, Graves questioned the idea that Trump is going to drag down California’s seven most vulnerable Republican Congress members, who’ve been targeted by Democrats for 2018. After all, she pointed out, those Republicans did manage to win in 2016 with Trump at the top of the ticket, even in congressional districts that went for Hillary Clinton.

Madrid said that when he first became active in politics, the Republicans were the party of rich old white people. “That party is now the Democratic Party,” Madrid said. “The Republican Party is now the party of poor white people,” who now regard themselves as an oppressed minority in need of protection. But while economic issues remain paramount, appealing to racial hatred is not a good—or effective—strategy for the GOP, panelists agreed. Pye said she thinks that one reason Trump’s approval rating is so low is that he repeatedly has flirted with white nationalists.

When the evening opened up to the audience Q & A, a Green Party supporter asked why there isn’t more discussion about backing measures that would dismantle the “winner-take-all” system that favors the major parties and stifles third-party alternatives. Graves said proposals for such measures may get onto a few state ballots next year, but such a serious shake-up to the status quo won’t happen overnight.

Another audience member asked how the major parties could be restored, and kept from being hijacked by the extremes of right and left.

“I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that the system doesn’t work for a rapidly growing segment of our society,” Madrid replied. It was a disquieting conclusion to an evening that offered little cause for optimism for Republicans—or their main rivals.

The post The Two-Party System Is Not Working—and Not Going Anywhere appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.