A Battle of Civilizations

The inauguration of George W. Bush as president raises profound questions about the balance of regional power in post-industrial America. For nearly a generation, California has been the cutting-edge nation-state, the dominant shaper of the nation’s political, economic and social culture. But now, with Texans firmly in command of the White House, a shift toward the Lone Star State may be in the offing.

This is more than merely a contest between battling political elites. California’s political class, both Republican and Democrat, has been losing national influence ever since Ronald Reagan left the White House in 1989. But the real battle is a clash between two competing civilizations--one Texan, the other Californian--that seek to steer America’s destiny in the next century.

Until the late 20th century, California and Texas shared two important things. They both had histories as independent countries before joining the Union, and each, in its own way, had battled the East Coast establishment for primacy. Today, that struggle is essentially over. California and Texas clearly dominate 21st-century America in virtually all the essentials, from high technology to manufacturing, from trade to popular culture. Eastern dominance is destined, as shown by the latest census, to fall further because of declining population.

Yet, as they have become preeminent, the differences between the two states have become more evident. California’s ascendancy has been more pronounced, yet it has been tinged in ambiguity. Californians have sought greatness even as they seem to recoil from it. As residents of the biggest and most powerful state, Californians worry about losing their place as the best place to live.

This attitude is largely a product of the state’s geography. Blessed with peerless natural beauty, California has inspired philosophers, artists and poets. Walt Whitman wrote evocatively of “the flashing and golden pageant of California.” The state’s spectacular setting has prompted many a utopian scheme.

Texas has stirred no such rapture for America’s dreamers. Stephen Klineberg, professor of sociology at Rice University, says that “California belongs to all of America. Texas does not.”

History also dictated Texas’ individuality. The state’s independence was achieved in a bloody and uncivil war, whereas California’s required little more than a quick coup and intervention by an acquisitive United States. Unlike California, which quickly was absorbed into the Union, the Lone Star State functioned as a country for almost a decade, with its own congress, president and foreign policy. This helped create the basis for a more finely developed sense of state identity.

This history still resonates in the state’s political culture. Texans often approach issues as Texans first, Americans second. In contrast, Californians rarely agree on what the state’s interests are, or even whether there is such a thing. “The California delegation [in Congress] cannot even agree on what to have for lunch,” says Barry Munitz, president of the Getty Center and, for 14 years, a prominent business and cultural leader in Houston. Munitz says that Texans generally set aside differences to bring the “bacon” to their state. Texans pride themselves on self-sufficiency, but they owe much to former President Lyndon B. Johnson and House Speaker Sam Rayburn, who delivered gobs of Pentagon pork, the Space Center and tax breaks to the energy industry.

The same pattern, albeit somewhat more subtle, repeated itself under President George Bush, who never had much interest in or liking for California. Once the Bush paterfamilias was in command in Washington, recalls Maureen Reagan, he cleared out most of the Californians from positions of influence.

A second Bush administration is likely to continue the same pattern of Texas nationalism, in alliance with the state’s congressional delegation. “It’s not so much that the Texas people are out to get us,” says Tom Kranz, a California attorney who served in the Defense Department during the Reagan presidency and briefly in the Bush White House. “They are simply out to be the preeminent state.”

But not all the struggles between California and Texas will be political. Some will stem from the distinct economic and social cultures of the states.

Issues of environment and lifestyle, for example, have never had the primacy in Texas that they have in California. Forged out of an often unpleasant, harsh and vast landscape, the Lone Star State still worships at the altar of human conquest over nature.

The kind of ambivalence over development that is so evident in California, notes Klineberg, has only recently surfaced in Texas, largely in liberal pockets around Austin and gentrifying sections of central Dallas and Houston. Even now, he suggests, Texans worry about cleaning up their cities and preserving the countryside not so much out of ecological conviction but as part of a strategy to attract high-end information workers and companies that have replaced oil and gas as the key fuels of its 21st-century economy.

Much the same can be said about social welfare. In contrast to California’s increasingly powerful, union-led social-democratic impulse, Texas’ predominant ethos has not been about using the public sector to ameliorate class or racial divides; instead, it has emphasized free enterprise and expanding opportunity. Lower taxes, minimum regulation, the creation and preservation of wealth--all have a near-religious significance in Texas.

In the likely event of an economic slowdown, the Texan formulation may help accelerate the state’s expanding new-economy sector. Computers, among other things, run on electricity, a commodity that California can’t take for granted anymore. To the extent that environmentalism and political ineptness impede California from regaining control over its energy destiny, the Lone Star State will benefit.

Even downward shifts in the stock market, Texans believe, work to their favor. The need for high-technology companies to show actual profits, as opposed to ones in the future, may lead more of them to shift operations from California to Texas. “When companies plan to be profitable, they care about taxes, and [they] will want to come here,” claims Houston real estate developer and major Bush contributor Andrew Segal. “On the other hand, if you have a great idea and intend to lose money, you might as well be in Santa Monica. I would.”

Texas now seems to many entrepreneurs what California once was: the ideal place for an ambitious newcomer to make a mark. “Don’t convince yourself that [Dallas] is a city of country bumpkins; it’s a very sophisticated place,” observes Dallas developer Bob Petrucello, a Brooklyn native. “There’s just this tremendous ‘can do’ spirit here. You are judged on your character, and capable people can have a real effect.”

With their confidence stoked by the successful seizure of the White House, many Texans increasingly see California not so much as a powerful rival than as a fading power. The state’s electricity crisis has reinforced the notion that California, as a civilization, is becoming dysfunctional.

Yet, it is much too early to write off the state. As Klineberg points out, California still has the lead over Texas in many areas critical to the new economy, such as environmental quality, higher education and culture. He believes that Texas’ obsession with quantitative growth, often at the expense of aesthetics, could harm its appeal to talented, creative people.

This is why, despite the state’s myriad problems, the two creative centers of America’s economic civilization--Silicon Valley and Hollywood--remain firmly ensconced in California. But even these advantages can be lost, particularly when a rival nation-state, armed with superior political power and a more vital economic culture, sets its mind to assaulting California’s most strategic industries.

What can California do to meet this challenge? Perhaps the most important thing is to recover its sense of statehood. Since the progressive era and the governorship of the late Pat Brown, Californians of both political parties have become increasingly--and obsessively--narrow in their concerns. They are environmentalists, feminists, libertarians, labor activists, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, seniors or consumer advocates first, and Californians next to last or not at all.

This mentality will not get it done in an era in which competitors, foreign and domestic, are more focused, more motivated and able to collaborate more effectively. Somehow, out of California’s fractured political, economic and social culture, there needs to emerge a new kind of progressive agenda, one that recognizes the preciousness of the state’s natural heritage yet is aware that only economic growth can provide a decent future for the vast majority of its residents.

The Texas challenge shows that other regions, other states, are ready to seize preeminence in 21st-century America. California may have invented the future, but, if it does not act, others will harvest it.