The Southern Californizing of Our Politics

Conventional wisdom has it that Northern California is finished as a statewide force. At first glance, the current race between two Southern Californians for the governorship only reinforces this perception.

Close analysis of the emerging political culture of California, however, reveals not a north/south dichotomy but a dialectic between the California Consensus and the California Alternative. This dialectic, moreover, is not exclusively defined by geography; nor is it exclusively determined by party preference. Both the Consensus and the Alternative, however, receive their fundamental strength and authentication in Southern California. In this sense, the politics of California have been Southern Californized.

The old argument--that Northern California was politically finished--had much in its favor. Take, for instance, the matter of the governorship. American California has had 35 governors, including the incumbent--20 Republicans, 14 Democrats and one Know Nothing. Of these 35, 10 were San Franciscans, but only one of them, Edmund G. Brown Sr., was elected in the 20th Century. Fourteen of the 35 were from Southern California--five in the 19th Century, nine in the 20th. If the other Northern California governors are counted--four from Sacramento and one each from Stockton, Yreka, Alameda, Berkeley, Eureka, Oakland and Marysville--there is a total of 21 Northern California governors, but all except four were elected in the 19th Century. Of 20th-Century governors, two-thirds have been from Southern California.

To judge from the governorship alone, Northern California would seem to have become increasingly suppressed as a statewide political force. A trend, however, is not an inevitability. Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, a Democrat from San Francisco, manages to maintain himself in the midst of a Southern Californian Republican Administration. The Speaker of the Assembly, Willie Brown, is likewise a San Francisco Democrat. And a Northern Californian, Rep. Ed Zschau (R-Los Altos), beat out a formidable list of Southern California opponents for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate.

Communities such as San Jose, the 3-million strong suburban East Bay, Sacramento--today a million-plus suburban conglomerate--and Fresno, with a metropolitan area population of more than half a million, are dramatically reflective in sociology and values of Southern California. The mainstream citizens of this region--despite their propinquity to such bastions of Alternative thinking as Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz--all basically share the same values and life-style of Californians south of the Tehachapis.

Sacramento, for example, has more in common with San Diego in broadest social and cultural terms than it has with Berkeley, just 75 miles southwest. Fresno has more in common with Riverside. Centered around such communities as Concord, Walnut Creek, Livermore and Pleasanton, the inland Contra Costa and Alameda County neighborhoods are the Orange County of the north in terms of suburban style, affluence and growth. Concord, for example, now has its own jet service to Southern California.

Put into this perspective, Northern California should not be judged, socially or politically, through the prism and metaphor of Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. These are fundamentally Alternative communities at war with the mainstream sensibility of California.

Mayor Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco, for instance, wisely elected not to try for statewide office this year because she realized that being mayor of the Alternative capital of Northern California put her at political disadvantage, not just south of the Tehachapis, but in large pockets of the Bay Area as well.

Long service in Sacramento as Speaker of the Assembly has de-San Franciscoed Lt. Gov. McCarthy. Perceived as a Sacramentan, McCarthy has become acceptable to the entire state. The lieutenant governor remains discreet as to his political origins and residence in San Francisco. The current Speaker, Brown, has his personal political base in Alternative San Francisco, but has masterfully forged a statewide parliamentary coalition. It is a parliamentary coalition, however, not dependent upon direct popular election. For all his brilliance, Brown--a quintessential San Franciscan--would have a tough time winning direct election to statewide office.

Conversely, pockets of Southern California--especially among embattled inner-city leaderships, alternative life-stylers and the liberal intelligentsia--inhabit the same Alternative political culture that can be found in pockets of the Bay Area. Areas of Santa Monica, West Los Angeles, West Hollywood and sections of the ethnic Eastside of Los Angeles are, in political terms, closer to Berkeley, San Francisco and Santa Cruz than they are to Orange County, San Diego or even Riverside.

The statistics quoted earlier regarding the Southern Californian Republican ascendancy in the 20th-Century governorship must be balanced by the presence and force of the Consensus. To win statewide office, Democrats and Republicans alike must receive the support of the California Consensus. It is sad, incidentally, to witness the spectacle of Mayor Tom Bradley, one of the leading U.S. Consensus politicians, challenging George Deukmejian from an Alternative platform. Bradley, by temperament and expertise a healer and conciliator, is visibly uncomfortable in this role, and it shows.

Not only must the Consensus be wooed, the statewide candidate must pass through Southern California-based structures and controls, if that candidate has any hope of raising enough money to run the sort of cash-devouring statewide media campaign that functions as California’s only effective form of grapevine. Southern California thus functions as the political matrix of people, money, ideas and energy for the rest of the state. This is becoming increasingly necessary for Alternative causes and candidates as well, as Los Angeles replaces San Francisco as the Alternative capital of California, in terms of numbers and money, if not symbolic significance. West Hollywood, after all, has a larger per capita gay population than San Francisco. The action in either case, Consensus or Alternative, is controlled out of the south.

Despite north/south demographics and the statistics regarding the increasingly Southern California Republican nature of the governorship, Consensus candidates from Central and Northern California, Republicans and Democrats alike, can still win statewide offices, including the governorship. It is not because Dianne Feinstein is from the north that she cannot win Consensus approval. It is because she is from San Francisco.

By contrast, Zschau, a Northern Californian, can be in the process of giving Alan Cranston (a Northern Californian turned Southern Californian) the run of his life because Zschau in the primaries did well among Consensus Republicans in the entire state. Both Cranston and Zschau must now compete for the approval of Consensus California. Just as Consensus candidate Pete Wilson proved that a San Diegan can speak directly and powerfully to the Consensus North, so too is Zschau now seeking to prove that a Consensus Northerner can win the approval of the Consensus South.

There has been only one serious attempt to divide Northern and Southern California, in 1860. Two other minor efforts, together with all subsequent talk, must be considered mere dream wish and/or rhetorical gesture. The fact is, there is a Consensus California. It exists in the south, center and north of the state. It constitutes a fundamental political unity. It is basically a Sun Belt conservative sensibility, enamored of the good life but also crossbred with an unexpected environmentalism and softened by an embattled but still persistent tolerance (but not outright approval) for Alternative modes of life-style and thought.

The Consensus also shows a surprising ability to encompass the loyalties of middle-class blacks, Asians and Latinos--who lately turn to Alternative modes of political expression only when confronted with explicit hostility based, in their opinion, on racial prejudice.

The Alternative is thus constantly threatened by the shifting allegiances of the assimilated. These realities of class identification make it increasingly necessary for the Alternative to focus upon foreign affairs--South Africa, Central America--as a source of moral outrage rather than local issues. The Berkeley City Council and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors conduct their own foreign policies. Apartheid is currently a hotter issue among the Alternative than unemployment among American blacks or the soaring high school dropout rate among Latinos.

Any candidate speaking to this Consensus who has secured the approval of Southern California can attain statewide election. This means, of course, that Southern California exercises a form of veto power. So be it. But it also means that California has achieved a political culture--conservative yet sympathetic, Sun Belt but generally tolerant, tire-kicker country but, by force of circumstances, cosmopolitan--that makes political distinctions between north and south increasingly irrelevant.