The California Dream and its Waning

Reading Mike Davis' City of Quartz I was surprised to find the extent to which Los Angeles is a product of real estate boosterism--the vast metropolis emerging before its industrial base, rather than the industrial base emerging first to become a foundation for a metropolis (with, contrary to what we may imagine given California's association with aerospace, computers, and so much else, manufacturing only blooming late in the state). Surprising, too, was the extent to which that boosterism was politicized in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Southern California was promoted as a "refuge" for old-stock WASPs from the newer waves of immigrant, with their very different ethnic and religious backgrounds, with an element of health faddishness mixed in to produce a vision of "racial revival under a Mediterranean sun." It was also marketed as an "open shop" alternative to trade-unionized San Francisco.

In short it was a thoroughly right-wing vision, compounding a multitude of Victorian prejudices. And indeed, while the "Left Coast" stereotypes have a long history, southern California has long had its right-wing streak, with this evident not only in San Diego or the "Inland Empire," but in Los Angeles itself (certainly evident when one considers its elites, its social divisions, its policing).

Of course, for many on the right the vision of southern California as an ideal has long since given way to a view of it as a "Blue" wasteland exemplifying all it dislikes about the direction in which the country has been moving, such that rather than refuge it has in their view become a place to flee (for "Redder" territory inland). Meanwhile they have not been alone in watching, wondering, worrying, if for different reasons. Davis, coming from the opposite end of the political spectrum, called into question the viability of a metropolis built in that precise geographical location, with its susceptibility to earthquake and fire. He pointed, too, to the distinctly human-caused problem of the deindustrialization of what had once been one of the country's, and the world's, greatest industrial centers (at its height reputedly the second-biggest carmaker in the world after Detroit in its fabled heyday), with all that implied for its social sustainability. Amid an epoch of (likely climate change-amplified) drought, with water short and each summer the fires more horrific than in the last--as deindustrialization and its associated social stresses have mounted--one wonders if that writer, so often sneeringly dismissed as a catastrophist but vindicated by events, was not as right on this score as he has been on so many others.