CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY : The ‘Can Do’ State Can Be Again : Dynamism drives our culture, which sees society as an evolving process without a preconceived outcome.

In 1931, a Los Angeles woman wondered “how soon the wheels of progress are going to stop rattling long enough for us to hear ourselves think, catch our breath and develop some sort of cohesive social organism.” Sixty-three years later, the answer appears to be never. Or maybe, soon.

Her question still hangs in the air, more potent than ever. In post-Cold War America, the most significant division isn’t between left and right but between dynamism and stasis.

It is between those who see society as an evolving, experimental process with no particular end state and those who seek to impose a single best “cohesive social order.” It is between those who prefer choice and those who prefer control. It is between those who value growth and change and those who long for a “steady state.”

This division explains the odd political alliances we’ve seen in recent years: Pat Buchanan and Jerry Brown opposing free trade with Mexico, National Review and Paul Ehrlich opposing immigration, Jeremy Rifkin and neoconservative cleric Richard John Neuhaus opposing biotechnology. They are the partisans of stasis.

In economic good times, their platform manifests itself most clearly in growth controls and environmental regulations--the laws that are choking California’s industry. In recession, the rage for stasis comes out in attacks on immigration and trade, the pillars of the open economy. The party of stasis is strong in today’s California.

California is, or has been, the capital of dynamism. “It has no past,” wrote Charles Dwight Willard in 1886. “Its future reveals nothing but an ignominious scramble for dollars, its politics are odious and its population mongrel.” He later changed his mind. But his description, however pejorative, wasn’t far from the truth.

Dynamism assumes that individual identities are not fixed. Class is fluid; so even are race and ethnicity. One estimate holds that nearly a quarter of California babies are born to parents of different races. A recent Daily Bruin article about ethnic organizations at UCLA highlights the experiences of two students active in Raza Women, a Latina group. The students are an Indian woman and an Iranian man. The reporter, who quotes no Latinas, treats their membership as unremarkable.

California’s dynamism commits it to an open society in which the past matters less than the present and the future, in which it’s not who you know but what you know that counts. Feminism works here; California treats women as competent. Merit matters more than tradition. Or such is the promise--truer in Silicon Valley, perhaps, than in Hollywood, but truer in California than in many other places.

If dynamism is the core of our culture, then, why have so many Californians recently fallen for stasis?

The current static backlash is just that, a reaction. It springs in part from California’s contradictory promises of paradise. California’s paradise is not really Lotusland, a place of hedonistic fun in the sun. It is, rather, a peculiarly American paradise, not a utopia but a place where striving is both easier and more rewarding. “My father,” writes James Fallows of his childhood in Redlands, “never felt for a moment that the gentle climate was an excuse to slack off. It let him do more, not less, and in that way it represented the general license he’d earned, by moving west, to invent a new life for himself.”

The rewards of the dynamic paradise are bourgeois: social mobility, a home, two cars, education for the kids, “the barbecue culture.” And bourgeois rewards bring their own insecurities--the tension between appreciating home values and affordability, the stresses of crowded freeways and crowded classrooms, fewer wide open spaces, the feeling that “they keep coming.” California’s dynamic past produces the static pressures of the present.

And politicians are rewarded for action, for imposing controls, for shaping change from above. Their incentives run contrary to a dynamic vision. So Kathleen Brown switches sides on NAFTA because “it does not sufficiently address the wage gap between our two countries.” She’d hoped to dictate Mexican wages by treaty, to keep them higher and less competitive. NAFTA promises more jobs, but its beneficiaries are unknown. Californians who lose their jobs to trade will punish the politicians. It is safe to maintain controls.

And it looks better to fight post-Cold War restructuring with mandates than with markets--to “do something” rather than trust dynamic processes. Instead of treating displaced aerospace workers as individuals finding their own places in the world, politicians vow to keep them together by requiring an electric-car industry.

The politicians’ zeal for directing change from above is a vision incompatible with the California culture that MIT’s Charles Ferguson used to condemn as “chronic entrepreneurialism.” A more suitable policy would remove barriers to new industries such as medical instruments and biotechnology--industries that this fall’s single-payer health-care initiative threatens to gut.

Despite the politicians, California’s dynamism persists. As University of North Carolina sociologist John Shelton Reed has pointed out, strong regional cultures have a way of reinforcing themselves. California pulls in people who share its dynamic vision, whether they hail from South America or South Carolina. People who prefer stasis leave.

California is still a place where people remake themselves, where unabashed self-improvement is the norm, where change is as central to the culture as tradition is to Vermont or Virginia. It is still a place where you can walk into a shop to get acrylic fingernails and find a woman reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in Vietnamese.