The Recession Obsession : The Politics of Apathy Remains the Real Danger

When California’s historians look back at 1993, they may well reach two strange conclusions: First, that, after its worst recession since the Depression, California’s economy turned the corner at the beginning of the year. Second, that the state’s economy was--as always--the least of its problems. Recessions come and they (eventually) go. California’s deeper illnesses, particularly its cancerous political malaise, are embedded in the fabric of the state.

California led America out of its last recession in the early 1980s. This time, it seems sure to lag behind. Nonetheless, there are a few signs that the state bottomed out of its tailspin at the end of 1992. Since December, its payroll employment has held steady at around 12 million. California’s official unemployment rate, based on different statistics, recently edged down from double digits to 8.6%. Officials reckon retail sales have picked up and even the anemic construction market is showing signs of life.

To many Californians, this will seem like economic smoke and mirrors. Even if the employment statistics are accurate--a big if--the state is still some 800,000 jobs shy of its 1990 high. The defense industry could well bleed jobs for another five years. California’s recovery will surely be slow--perhaps barely visible in Southern California for another year.

In California, this gloom is deepened by nostalgia. The uncongested middle-class paradise of the 1950s and ‘60s cannot be recreated, but it has left Californians with absurdly high standards. Set beside countries like Britain or Italy, where unemployment rates above 10% have been the norm, California’s claim to be enduring the mother of all recessions seems far-fetched. More fundamentally, California’s economic base is rooted in futuristic industries, like technology and communications, that are the envy of its peers.

In other words--and this has to be broken gently--the historians of the future will certainly record the damage wrought by California’s early-1990s recession; they will also note the added pain caused by the end of the Cold War. But most of their ink will be devoted to the state’s deeper social and political challenges. Nearly all these issues--crime, gangs, poor schools, urban poverty, governmental paralysis, racial conflict--have been thrown into high relief by the recent economic downturn. Yet, they were all present before 1990, and they will certainly not go away when the economic picture brightens.

Last year’s riots already provide a model for the debate. Many liberal intellectuals blame the “rebellion” on the economic conditions of South Los Angeles, but none argues that the area’s problems began in 1991: They stretch back into the hardhearted Reaganite 1980s, back even to the Watts riot. Conservatives prefer to blame declining moral standards and the breakdown of family values, but they also trace these evils back to the 1960s. More significantly, neither side of the debate expects the underlying causes to go away when the recession does.

Turn toward California’s deeper social wounds and a similar trend emerges. Crime, drugs and gangs rose steadily throughout the prosperous 1980s. Immigration has (however incorrectly) worried whites for far longer. For 30 years, public investment has grown less in California than any other state. The recent round of budget cuts have not helped the state’s education system, but, for a state with so many non-English-speaking immigrants, California has long neglected its high schools. During the 1980s, California poured more money into prisons than universities.

However, California’s greatest challenges lie buried within its moribund political system. What would Aristotle, who once declared, “Man is by nature a political animal,” have made of the Golden State? Perhaps, no other place in history has thrown its talent and enthusiasm so lopsidedly into the private sector as has late 20th-Century California. No other people has hated government more determinedly. Nowadays, the decline of Californian politics has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Government in California fails on two levels. The first is bureaucratic logic. Most of California’s political institutions date back to the day when the state was a small agricultural community, with a population only a shade bigger than modern Fresno. The state’s governmental map is a contradictory mess of overlapping cities, counties and special districts.

At a local level, this chaos is multiplied. Only a master criminal--Jack Nicholson’s “Joker” in “Batman” springs to mind--could have designed a city with as many different police forces as Los Angeles.

The second test is electoral interest. The customers of California’s political institutions have been voting with their feet. The rich hide in gated communities, the modern equivalent of medieval Italy’s fractious city-states. The poor secede in a different way: by not voting. This creates an electorate that is older, whiter and richer than the state’s population. Latinos and Asians, who together make up half Los Angeles’ population, supplied less than one-tenth of the voters in the mayoral primary. In the runoff, the two mayoral candidates spend their time chasing the votes of one-half of the city in order to rule the other.

Ironically, the one serious attempt to reform California politics--the proposition movement--has made the situation worse. Shorn of property-tax revenues, city and county governments have depended on state government, which is now clawing its money back. While this intergovernmental cannibalism continues, responsibility is as hard to find as money. Take, for example, a leaking roof at a public school. Who is to blame? The principal, the local school district, the mayor, the county supervisor, the superintendent of public instruction, the education secretary or the governor?

Or maybe it is Californian voter’s suicidal passion for direct democracy over representative government. Ballot initiatives have taken roughly 85% of the state’s general fund out of the hands of the governor and the Legislature. Few businessmen would agree to run a company if they could only control a sixth of it.

As last year’s 64-day wait for a state budget showed, the recession has played a role in this farce, but it is not the star. Indeed, in some ways, California’s electoral paralysis seems immune to current events. After perhaps the most eventful year in Los Angeles’ history and the hardest economic times in recent memory, barely one in 10 of the city’s inhabitants turned out to vote in the mayoral primary. Whoever wins City Hall may end up with a popular mandate no greater than a Communist Party boss from the old Soviet Union.

This is bizarre. Unrepresentative political systems usually rely on brutality to enforce discipline. California’s is the first to use apathy as a coercive tool. In the long term, some form of constitutional reform looks inevitable. In the modern world, states--like companies--survive and prosper by competitive advantage. California’s list of economic advantages remains relatively long, but they are being undermined by the state’s social and political fault-lines.

Those who think that politics does not matter might care to look back 100 years. Many Europeans at the end of the 19th Century wondered if Argentina, not the United States, was the country of the future. However, the former’s inequitable political system never kept pace with its economic potential. Eventually, it stumbled down the dictatorial road to Peronism. Peronism aside, California is a still a long way from such a debacle. But it is closer than it once was.