A Chance for a Return to Working Democracy

California is starting the next century with characteristic optimism. We believe we are destined to be the leader of the 21st century and the center of the Pacific Rim.

It is the kind of expectation that has always drawn people to California, indeed, always drawn them to America. It is the spirit that comes from those accustomed to following their dreams: entrepreneurial, individualistic and freedom-loving.

Pessimists read the predictions of growth and projected importance with distrust and frustration. They worked hard to create the paradise of their dreams and they do not want it spoiled by congestion on the freeways, environmental damage or anything resembling urban sprawl.

Reflecting libertarian notions, they do not trust government and have almost succeeded in creating a nonpolitical culture, going a long way toward taking the job of governing out of the hands of elected officials through the initiative process. They want what they had, or at least what they recall of an ideal middle-class life in a safe, comfortable, homogeneous setting.

The differences between optimists and pessimists reflect different values, experiences and expectations in life, and they are a challenge to any consensus on the issues before us: Will we be able to agree on expansion of airports, new freeways, mass transportation--all deemed necessary to handle expected growth? Will we develop a way to sustain good relationships among ethnic groups? Will we be able to blunt class divisions in a technological society, especially when the educational system seems locked into an older order that may not serve the coming needs? What balances can we strike between notions of living in a major metropolitan region and a more bucolic environment of mountains and seashores and open spaces in between?

How we answer these questions in the next decade or two will depend on the mechanisms we have to resolve disputes, generate a shared vision and come to terms with a world guaranteed to change at an increasingly rapid pace that is likely to alter even our notions of place and home.

A catalog of the recent past that will have an impact on the future includes:

* Intensely drawn lines between growth and slow-growth advocates.

* Ethnic hostility, or at least uncertainty as new populations have moved into the region in the last quarter of the 20th century and changed the region in a way that has not been matched since Europeans overwhelmed the Native Americans.

* A very different economy, based less on heavy industry and more on entrepreneurial technology.

The most controversial reaction in Los Angeles to the changing world around us has been the call for secession. The recent charter reform was in direct response to the frustration simmering in the San Fernando Valley, but the call for secession--the urge to divide up into more coherent or homogeneous bodies--is hardly just a local phenomenon. It is a worldwide trend even though its causes are many and varied.

The common threads are change and the fear of losing place. In Eastern Europe, the issues between ethnic groups vying for place go back centuries. The historical memories pushing and pulling these recently freed societies are no more unique to them than the pressures of change here. It’s just that they are older and we do not have the ability to remember that far back.

I recall a conversation with a woman who came from Hartley-Poole, a small working-class city in northeastern England known best for the time the people found a monkey on the beach after a shipwreck during a French war and hanged it as a spy. She spoke of the days when the Scots came down to raid their village and carry the residents off as slaves. “We appealed to the King of England, but he was slow in responding. And,” she continued with bitter determination, “we haven’t trusted that family since.” By her expression and certainty of view, it could have happened three months ago, or three years. Certainly not 300 years ago.

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Family memories are tightly held because they give us our identities. Because Americans move about so frequently, we do not tend to hold our prejudices about others as tightly as they are held in other lands. We don’t recall who lived next to our grandparents or, if we still hold a grudge against them, we do not necessarily expand it to include a whole group.

Our national ideology recognizes and cherishes pluralism, even as we recognize and cherish our own ethnic origins. It was laid down in the Declaration of Independence and modified by wars and the great movements for civil liberty. For that reason, we clothe our uncertainty about change not in racial or ethnic terms but rather in other phrases of “efficiency and economy,” or democratic longings for small communities where citizens come together to decide their public issues.

The fear and the change felt by the white population that dominated Southern California for several generations is real. So too is the frustration with a slow, unresponsive political and governmental structure that seems beyond the control of any but a small business elite. The combination of uncertainty and the feeling that no one is listening may make for serious volatility in the coming years.

There are two ways to respond to the issues facing us: We could get bigger (assuming “bigger” also means more important economically and socially, thus making us the leader of the 21st century, etc.); or we could become smaller relative to other regions, breaking into smaller communities, giving each group more direct influence over its political leaders and, hopefully, over the directions their communities take this century.

Both directions reflect a perennial tension between wanting to belong to a strong community and wanting control over our own lives. Both directions, as it happens, are reflected in the new charter the city of Los Angeles passed in June: a stronger mayor and neighborhood councils. And both reflect a change in the way the old charter handled those questions, which is perhaps the best news because it offers an explanation for the anger and frustration.

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Amy Bridges, a political scientist at UC San Diego, wrote a book published last year called “Morning Glories,” about municipal reform in the Southwest. She wasn’t looking at Los Angeles but her observations about the reforms--and why they took locally and failed back East--are valuable for us. The title comes from a comment from Boss Tweed, the New York City machine boss, who noted that political reformers are like morning glories: They bloom in the morning and are gone by the afternoon. Bridges notes that in the Southwest, not only don’t these bright flowers die quite so quickly but they are actually weeds that take over everything.

Reformers failed in New York and elsewhere because they had effective enemies in the machines and the poor and immigrant populations those machines served. Although there were poor and minority populations in the Southwest, they weren’t organized and their interests--and the interests they might have expected government to pursue--were not protected. Without effective institutional opposition, Southwestern reform cities eliminated these interests from the agenda and promoted a uniquely homogeneous body politic created and sustained for growth.

The voting population shrank to the white middle class and local government became an administrative body, devoid of politics, surrounded by public organizations (although lately those public groups also have lost members and influence). The result throughout the Southwest was low participation and limited public dissent. Most important decisions were made by a small coterie of the business elite. Disparate voices were excluded.

What happened since the Progressive Era, however, was the emergence of a middle class population that carried over assumptions of homogeneity--given its overwhelming origins in the American heartland--but turned against growth. Although urban reformers of the early part of the 20th century made growth possible for the entire region through public investment in water and power, the harbor and later freeways, urban dwellers at the end of the century had had enough of it.

The earlier generation used the public sector to advance its agenda and closed it off to others who might not have agreed. The later generation was only able to capture government through the initiative process.

What is lost through initiatives is the ability to affect compromise and develop consensus. It is a winner-take-all approach to public issues--unless, of course, it is later overruled in the courts, which only adds to the frustration that propelled the issue in the first place. It replaces oligarchy with a kind of orderly anarchy: Anything goes as long as there is money to put it on the ballot no matter what happens afterward.

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The new city charter’s ability to bring us back to a working democracy, resolving the problems of unresponsiveness and the inability to develop consensus, will depend on the ability of a new mayor to project a broader vision and the energy and commitment neighborhood councils bring to the table. It isn’t a sure thing. It is an opportunity. But it is an opportunity that was not available before.

The new charter won’t take effect until July, and the neighborhood councils will not be formed for at least a year. Even then, a few more years will be needed to show what they can do: whether they can bring opposing stakeholders to the table and develop consensus around goals for communities; whether they can improve the delivery of city services (helped now by a rising economy, unlike the early ‘90s, when we were in a deep recession); and whether they can develop sufficient political clout to have an impact beyond their neighborhoods.

As a political institution, the councils offer something that hasn’t existed since the days of local party machines: a link that can be sustained between communities. Ethnic leaders, environmentalists, those interested in development can reach across their local communities to the larger city and eventually to the larger region. The new leaders are apt to come out of these councils rather than serve their apprenticeship on the staffs of incumbent officials. By being responsive to the neighborhood councils that, by definition, include all the stakeholders of the community, these new leaders will relate differently to the voices that have dominated local government in the past.

Los Angeles--with or without secession--is likely to remain the 800-pound gorilla in Southern California. Secession will determine whether the region is able to become the 800-pound gorilla of the 21st century or the Pacific Rim.