A rant: national pundits don't get California -- here's one who does

We're different here and there are good reasons.

Gov. Gavin, who I don't consider the sharpest bulb around, is trumpeting our state's freedom from Republicans.

“California in the 1990s is a lot like America in 2019, 2020, 2021. And here’s the real story. The Republican Party was walked off a cliff. They’re third party status. That’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing, and Mitch McConnell, who is completely complicit, is doing to the Republican Party nationally. They don’t even know what is about to hit them.”—Gov. Gavin Newsom, speaking to Axios’ Jim VandeHei ...

Calmatters

In outline, he's right. Why California became a solidly blue state is complex and I am not going to offer my opinionated slant here. The libertarian Cato Institute leans on the idea that the bigotry of Republican Governor Pete Wilson's Prop 187 drove Latinx voters out of the GOP -- for decades. Manuel Pastor's State of Resistance provides a more multi-faceted analysis. In any case the Republican Party is vestigial here, not only unable to elect statewide officers since the early '00s, but also down to just 7 Congressional reps out of 53 total.

Finally -- a major writer for a national publication which, like all of 'em, usually seems to peddle an East Coast perspective on the country's politics, has taken note of how the Trumpian Republican Party is repeating its California reaction to racial and ethnic demographic change, enfleshing this reaction by abusing migrant children. Adam Serwer is a worthy successor to Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, writing about U.S. history and race brilliantly in a forum where the audience might need a lot of educating. (I'll cop that I do.) He gets where California fits in Trump's cruel politics.

Though the president himself is from Queens, New York, as Jane Coaston [of Vox] has written, the ideological engine of his administration is rooted in California, once the Reagan heartland, now a conservative wasteland. Trump advisers such as Stephen Miller are convinced that they lost California not through persuasion, but through demographics—that an influx of Latinos forever doomed conservatism. Cruelty toward migrants, even children, is justified as necessary to preserve the republic against what these advisers see as a foreign invasion. That Trump’s own home borough, once the home of Archie Bunker, is now one of the most diverse areas in the country likely only increases the resonance of this argument for the president.

On Fox News, which exercises unparalleled influence over Trump, conservative pundits warn that they will “lose the country” because of a “demographic shift” driven by Latino immigration, echoing warnings of “race suicide” from a century ago. Presenting Latino immigration as an existential threat allows both the president and his supporters to justify anything they might choose to do in response.

Yet this is not an inevitability, but a choice—conservatives in California made a political decision to demonize immigrants and paid the price. ...

Serwer is a moral writer. What I think of as Serwer's Sermons are always worth pondering.