It’s over. It’s over except for the exercise of trudging to the polls on Tuesday, to the inevitable. A march to scaffold, on which the voters of California will be asked – again – to ritually cut their own throat. And we will, as we have repeatedly done in the last 30 years.
So who won the May 19 special election? Surely not California’s defeated electorate. Not the state’s defeated governor. Nor the legislature, perennially defeated by its collective incompetence, its made-to-fail political culture.
The winners are those who imagine the California of the future as a kind of utopia. Only, it’s not one in which most Californians would care to live. It’s a utopia as imagined by Republican operative Grover Norquist and lesser advocates of a “final solution” for government.
“Cutting the government in half in one generation is both an ambitious and reasonable goal,” Norquist said in 2000. “If we work hard we will accomplish this and more by 2025. Then the conservative movement can set a new goal. I have a recommendation: To cut government in half again by 2050.” Norquist is perhaps best known for summarizing his political views as “I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
(Actually, Norquist’s views aren’t political. Politics evokes the Greek word polis – a body of citizens and their bond to the state they govern. A sacred union . . . to the Greeks anyway.)
California and Californians are about to see what kind of a utopia is created by those who have only contempt for the idea of citizenship, who see the role of governance solely as the application of force against those who would threaten them and their property. Who consider the rest of us chumps for investing any loyalty in the notion of community, for any sentimentality toward the bonds that tie us – even unwillingly – to our neighbors.
It will be a hard, coarse, Hobbesian utopia. A mean, grasping utopia in which fees for aged and disabled residents living in veterans homes throughout the state will add $2.8 million to the state budget, in which support for Medi-Cal and In-Home Supportive Services will permanently cut, and in which off-shore oil leases are reopened and more will be sold for another $100 million. I’ve already written about the impact on cities and counties – and your neighborhood.
And we have been led to this utopia by being promised, each time we mark a ballot bloated with propositions, that we will make a better California. How easily we’ve been used to make our home ungovernable and now, as a consequence, nearly unlivable.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Bryon Realey. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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This is so sad to read. Greek tragedy indeed! There doesn't seem to be way out. I don't even want to recall the Gov; he will just be replaced by another ineffectual leader.
I move to CA after the proposition and recall systems were in place and I have always found them baffling. Is this an argument for too much democracy? This state must have the most votes per year, and as wonderful as CA is, I don't see all this citizen input leading us anywhere except gridlock. Maybe the "freedom" we are offered by our beloved cars is like the "freedom" in our political system to weigh in on every single policy and funding decision?