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It's sometimes sobering to see your situation through the discerning eyes of another.
That's certainly the case with the Economist's appraisal of politics' critical contribution to California's never-ending budget crisis. The facts cited by the magazine's Andreas Kluth are well known to even casual students of state government, but the context and perspective are bracing — and suggest both a short- and long-term way out of the morass. The former ought to begin with Gov. Jerry Brown walking away from his campaign promise to submit any tax increase to a popular vote.
The Economist correctly labels this state as "an experiment in extreme democracy gone wrong." The problem, of course, is our reckless recourse to direct democracy and there the record is plain: In the 1960s, voters were asked to decide on just nine ballot propositions; in the '70s, 22; in the '80s, 46; in the '90s, 61; and, in the decade just completed, an astonishing 74. Some of these were products of passing popular enthusiasms; many simply were the tools of special interests. Over roughly that same period, California's credit rating has fallen from a flawless AAA to the worst among the 50 states.
California’s democracy is not at all like America’s, as conceived by founders such as James Madison. The federal constitution is based on checks and balances within and among three and only three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial. That is because Madison feared that popular “passions” would undo the republic, that majorities might “tyrannise” minorities, and that “minority factions” (ie, special interests) would take over the system. America’s was therefore to be a representative, not a direct, democracy. “Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” Madison wrote, “and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
California is also unique, in America and the world, in treating every successful initiative as irreversible (unless the initiative itself says otherwise). The legislature cannot change it. In effect, this makes initiatives a higher class of law. In California they often amend the constitution. And whereas Switzerland ensures that different initiatives are mutually compatible, California makes no such effort. A single ballot can contain directly contradictory initiatives, in which case the one with the most yes votes wins.
Direct democracy in California is thus an aberration. It has no safeguards against Madison’s tyranny of the majority. It recognises no saucer that might cool the passions of the people. Above all, it is not a system intended to contain minority factions. Instead, it encourages special interests to wage war by ballot measure until one lobby prevails and imposes its will on all. Madison and Hamilton would have been horrified.
But cities, counties and schools were not going bust after all. The state had a budget surplus and decided to bail out local governments by passing to them roughly the amounts they had lost in property-tax revenues. The following year that one-off transfer turned into a permanent financing mechanism. Even the remaining property-tax revenues would henceforth be allocated by the legislature in Sacramento.
In effect, cities, counties and school districts thus lost their funding independence. Instead of local governments setting their own taxes, they became tentacles of the state octopus. The resulting flow of payments is notoriously opaque—and also ironic, given that Mr Jarvis and his supporters thought of themselves as small-government conservatives. A central tenet of American conservatism is to decentralise power. But one unintended consequence of Proposition 13 was “the centralisation of virtually all finance in Sacramento”, says Lenny Goldberg, director of the California Tax Reform Association.
Today this centralisation is one of the biggest differences between California and other states. Bruce Cain, at the University of California, Berkeley, and Roger Noll, at Stanford University, identify it as the “distinctively dysfunctional element”. California transfers about 71% of its state revenue to local governments. Because the money comes from the state, local administrators no longer have much incentive to spend it efficiently.
The withering branch: How the initiative process has redistributed power
Clearly the legislature suffers from some problems unrelated to the initiative process. For a start, it is almost comically small, given California’s size. America’s most populous state has the 35th-largest legislature, with 120 legislators (80 in the assembly, 40 in the senate) representing some 37m people. A Californian legislator thus represents three times as many people as does his counterpart in New York or Illinois. This must be a bad thing. Voters in California tend not to know their representatives.
For candidates it means that money becomes a crucial issue. Politicians cannot shake enough hands and therefore need to saturate the media to make themselves known. This costs money and makes them beholden to big donors. That is why Democrats in Sacramento are often in the pockets of the teachers’ or nurses’ union and Republicans in those of the prison guards’ or cops’ union.
That dependence is one explanation for the hyper-partisan animosity in the capitol. This exists all over America, but California has more than its fair share. It did not help that primary elections have for years been partisan affairs in which candidates on each side are chosen by their respective extremists before advancing to the general election. Gerrymandering, the practice of legislators drawing their own district boundaries to suit themselves, made things even worse. (It might also explain why the same voters who claim to loathe their legislators re-elected every incumbent on last November’s ballot.)
The initiative process, in this case, may prove to have done some good. Last November voters approved a measure to adopt a so-called top-two primary system in which all voters, irrespective of party affiliation, vote in the same primary and the winners, also irrespective of party affiliation, proceed to the general election. In another initiative, voters handed the power of drawing district boundaries to an independent commission. In time, these two steps may help moderate candidates.
In other respects, however, initiatives have made partisan gridlock worse. Until last November an initiative required two-thirds supermajorities in both chambers to pass a budget (although yet another initiative has now returned this threshold to a simple majority). And Proposition 13 added the requirement of two-thirds supermajorities for any tax increase. Until very recently, California was thus the only state that required supermajorities to decide both revenues and appropriations.
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But there were also, as usual, unintended consequences. A supermajority requirement means that one “no” vote in the legislature counts the same as two “yes” votes. It thus doubles the power of the minority party, as long as that party has more than one-third of the legislature and can force its members to vote as a block. In California the Republicans are in that situation.
Messrs Mathews and Paul argue that the Republicans have become what game theorists call “hostage-takers”. They discovered that, although they could not pass laws by themselves, they could block the most important ones, including the budget. Simply by stalling, they could thus paralyse state government until the majority party made some concession to one of the Republican lobbies. This is the main reason why California has so often had late budgets. The Republicans gambled that voters would blame either the majority party or the entire legislature. The Democrats rejected blame as though they were the minority party. The initiatives that imposed the supermajority rules thus made the legislature less, not more, accountable.
At the same time many other initiatives, incrementally and stealthily, usurped power from the legislature through “ballot-box budgeting”. More than 100 of the initiatives of the past two decades promised something for nothing, such as cutting a tax or expanding a service. Of those initiatives, about two-thirds passed. Who could be against better mental-health care, or against locking up criminals longer to keep the streets safe? Public parks sound good, as does pristine nature. And so forth.
More and more of the budget thus became allocated before the legislature ever sat down to negotiate. Karen Bass, the previous leader of the state assembly, says that “we have control of only 10% of the budget.” Whatever the precise percentage is, voters long ago seized most power of appropriation from their legislature. This is highly undesirable. The mandate of representatives in a Madisonian republic is to analyse the trade-offs inherent in any policy. For example, an inmate in a Californian prison costs about $47,000 a year to keep. If that inmate is non-violent, would this money be better spent on educating several children (who might then avoid becoming prisoners a decade hence and instead pay taxes)? The ballot box does not allow for such deliberation.
Voters, however, see things differently. They do not blame themselves but their legislature for California’s recurring budget crises. In this, they resemble “the boy who murders his mother and then complains that he’s an orphan”, as Messrs Mathews and Paul put it. Increasingly irate, voters then want to chastise the legislature even more.
The best example was Proposition 140 in 1990, which made California one of the first three states to adopt term limits for legislators. Fifteen states now have these in some form, but California’s are among the strictest: six years in the assembly and eight years in the Senate. At a casual glance on a ballot paper, term limits might seem like a great idea. If legislators can’t be trusted, why let them get entrenched? Fixed terms might bring in fresh faces.A lesson in mediocrity: California’s schools show how direct democracy can destroy accountability
In practice, however, term limits too have had unintended consequences. First, they banish expertise from the capitol on a regular basis. In the days when William Muir praised California’s “school for politics”, new lawmakers often spent years learning their trade in various committees before becoming leaders of their party or chamber. They had well-paid permanent staff who researched the various policy areas.
Such learning has become impossible. In every election cycle, at least ten senators and 27 assembly members are termed out. So term limits, says Ms Bass (who was termed out last year and is now a national representative in Washington, DC), really mean that “the first two years you’re trying to figure out where the bathroom is, the last two years you’re running for something else. That leaves two years in the middle.”
This once again contributes to partisan rigidity. “Knowing they won’t be around for a long time, there’s no incentive to compromise,” says Gary Moncrief, an expert on legislatures at Boise State University in Idaho. With so little time, every vote counts as legislators try to repay their debts to the donors who put them in the job and prepare their next career move. They need not worry about a politically convenient vote that has long-term costs because those will be the problem of a different set of legislators.
In 2002 Idaho’s legislature became the first to repeal that state’s term-limits initiative. Legislatures or courts in five other states have since followed. But California does not allow initiatives to be amended, so they remain until the issue comes to the ballot box again (which may be next year).
The net effect of all initiatives is that the legislative branch of California’s government has been split in two. The initiative process, originally meant as a safety valve, has in reality become a rival to the legislature. Two law-making bodies—the voters and their representatives—are in open competition. The tragedy is that this undermines democracy by eliminating one of its main purposes: accountability. Schools have suffered the most.
EVERYTHING ABOUT CALIFORNIA’S school system is complicated, starting with the question of how bad its public schools are. Comparisons show that students in California fare worse than the national average in mathematics, reading, science and writing. But the numbers are unfair, says John Mockler, an expert in Californian education who has been following its fortunes since the 1960s. For instance, half of California’s pupils are Hispanic, and 40% of those hardly speak English. Most other states don’t face this problem.What do you know? Citizens are not as well-informed as they think
Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus that California’s public schools are not what they could be, nor what they used to be. California ranks 47th among the 50 states and the District of Columbia in spending per pupil ($7,886, against an average of $11,397). It ranks last in the number of students per teacher: California’s legislative analyst estimates that most classes have 28-31 pupils. And it ranks 42nd in the proportion of pupils who graduate (63%, against a national average of 69%).
Indeed, it would appear that California, at some point in the past generation, must have decided to disinvest in its children and to reallocate resources to such things as prisons. When Mr Mockler first started examining school finance in the 1960s, California spent about 5.6% of personal income on schools. It now spends 3.5%. For a state that sees itself as a pioneer of the global “knowledge economy”, that seems bizarre.
So who made this decision? Or, as John Syer, a professor at California State University, puts it sardonically: Who might be accountable for the bad schools? Is it local school boards, or the state board, or the education secretary, or the superintendent of public instruction, or the governor, or somebody else?
Start with the governor, who is elected, as in all 50 states. He appoints a secretary of education, a member of his cabinet. Oddly, however, that secretary (and thus the governor) does not have much power in this area. For the state’s education department is headed by a superintendent of public instruction, who is directly elected and thus answers only to voters, not to the governor. He in turn chairs a state board of education (the other members of which are again appointed by the governor).
Californians, in fact, insist on this sort of confusion in their entire executive branch. Thus they directly elect eight statewide officers (governor, lieutenant governor, attorney-general, secretary of state, controller, treasurer, superintendent and insurance commissioner). Often these officers are at war with one another. For the two decades starting in Jerry Brown’s second term, and again during most of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tenure, the governor and his lieutenant even belonged to different parties.
In this respect California is again unusual. Only 14 states separately elect a superintendent of public instruction, 12 a controller and ten an insurance commissioner. If democracy is about holding elections, the Californian mantra is: the more the merrier. This is especially true for education. Most power over the day-to-day running of schools belongs to the roughly 1,040 school districts. These are separate jurisdictions from cities and counties and have their own boards whose members are elected locally.
Yet in allocating responsibility for the prevailing mediocrity, all of these officials can plausibly point accusing fingers at voters. After all, they adopted Proposition 13, which cut the schools’ main revenue source (property taxes). Voters, for their part, usually shrug and say that they only voted against the taxes, not against the services those taxes paid for. To prove that point, whose irony often eludes Californians, voters passed still more initiatives to restore the school spending whose tax financing they had cut.
The main such measure, on the 1988 ballot, was called Proposition 98. Its main sponsor was the California Teachers Association, the largest spender in Californian politics, which hired Mr Mockler to draft it. His original text, as he now describes it, was still simple enough to be comprehensible: “You [ie, schools] get what you got last year, adjusted for the increase in students and the increase in personal income per capita.” So school spending would generally rise in line with demand and affordability. Mr Mockler added a provision that, following good fiscal years, the base would be reset at a higher level so as to put a floor under school spending yet allow the possibility of additional growth.
Proposition 98 narrowly passed, sending yet another challenge to the beleaguered legislature. It now had to find money in the budget to comply with Proposition 98, even though Proposition 13 and other initiatives had taken away most of the main revenue source and now required supermajorities to raise other revenues. So in a sort of capitulation to the ballot box, the legislature itself put yet another measure, Proposition 111, on the 1990 ballot. Its intent was to make Proposition 98 more flexible so that the legislature would be able to pass budgets once again. But that is not quite how it turned out.
According to Mr Mockler, it was Proposition 111 that finally made the overall structure for education funding incomprehensible. It multiplied by six the “data sets you need to know” to calculate education spending, he says. He compares the resulting package of legislation to the general theory of relativity, quantum physics and the federal tax code in complexity, and reckons that he is currently one of ten people alive who understand Californian school finance. In a typical budget season, the state’s nonpartisan legislative analyst dutifully produces tomes analysing whether “test 1” or “test 3” applies, and whether the “maintenance factor” might kick in. Nobody really knows what that means, as the legislative analyst concedes in the official primer.
There is a lot to contemplate in this tale. First, what made voters think that they understood enough to pass any of these initiatives, given that nobody understands their results? Second, why did voters not become concerned about the ever denser thicket of unintended consequences? As Mr Mockler says, the need for Proposition 111 arose only because of Proposition 98, and the need for 98 arose only because of 13.
The unintended consequence of that overall bundle has been to invert the stated purpose of Proposition 98. Originally designed to be a floor under school financing, it has instead become a ceiling. No legislature will nowadays raise school spending any more than necessary, because the formulas would then require even greater increases the following year. (Journalists usually take a shortcut through all the calculations and simply say that Proposition 98 requires “about 40%” of the general fund to go to schools.)
Mr Mockler has been thinking about all this for decades. He drafted one of the most important ballot measures ever. And yet he calls the entire initiative process “mob rule” and blames it for keeping the state’s schools down. “If you put an initiative on the ballot that repealed every initiative of the past 40 years, I’d vote for it,” he says. The question of who is accountable for California’s mediocre schools has a surprisingly simple answer: everybody, which is to say nobody.
This implies that voters are reasonably confident in their own understanding of the state’s affairs. Indeed, in another poll in January a majority of likely voters told PPIC that they have either “some” or “a lot of” knowledge about how state and local governments spend and raise money.
But when presented with a list of the state’s four biggest spending categories, only 22% of likely voters correctly named public schools as the largest. The most guesses (41%) went to prisons, which are actually the smallest category of the four. More specifically, the largest group among those who expressed confidence in their own knowledge incorrectly chose prisons as the biggest item.
Their grasp of state revenues was no better. Only one in three likely voters correctly named the personal income tax as the main source of money, with many choosing motoring charges (a paltry 2% of state revenues). Only 9% of likely voters correctly identified both the largest revenue source and the largest spending destination. As PPIC drily summarises, “most Californians’ views about the budget are not based on an understanding of where the money comes from and where it goes.”
This was a very general knowledge test, but individual ballot measures require much more detailed understanding. So a different survey, the Field Poll, on two occasions in recent years asked specifically about the most famous initiative of them all, Proposition 13. Since voters passed it in 1978, it has remained in the news constantly because it touches every aspect of state policy and finance. One of the most basic facts about Proposition 13 is that it applies the same tax cap to all property, whether residential or commercial. A recurring reform proposal would introduce a “split roll” so that commercial property can be taxed differently. Proposition 13’s defenders then hit the airwaves to denounce the proposal. In short, it is hard to miss the fact of equal treatment for all property. So the Field Poll asked what it considered the easiest question: whether Proposition 13’s tax reduction applied “only to residential property taxes, only to commercial property taxes, or both”. Only about one in three respondents correctly answered “both”.Burn the wagons: California must move before its next crisis
However, the main surprise was hidden in the details. Political scientists normally assume that the older, more educated, wealthy and attentive voters are, the better informed they will be. But Kimberly Nalder, a professor at California State University in Sacramento, discovered that in this instance the opposite was true. The factors that usually indicate greater knowledge instead predicted “not only a lack of accurate understanding but actual misinformation”.
Thus Ms Nalder found that the best-educated (those with more than a master’s degree) were most likely to answer incorrectly that Proposition 13 applies only to residential property. Those with the least education (high-school dropouts) were most likely to get it right. Similarly, those who were already of voting age when Proposition 13 passed were most likely to answer incorrectly and the youngest correctly. The same pattern held for income, with wealthier respondents being more likely to be misinformed. Perhaps most intriguingly, the largest group among homeowners (who directly benefit from Proposition 13) were misinformed, whereas the largest group of renters (who do not benefit) answered correctly.
These results are puzzling and troubling. As Ms Nalder suggests, perception (as opposed to knowledge) of issues such as Proposition 13 appears to have more to do with “self-interest and a potential blindness to issues outside of one’s own experience” than with the content of the legislation. This would explain why those respondents who were “non-citizens” or “registered elsewhere” (probably recent arrivals) were more likely to give the correct answer than voters who are registered where they live.
It’s all too difficult
The longer that people live in California, it seems, the more likely they are to be misinformed, and possibly brainwashed into ignorance. The supporters of Proposition 13, says Mr Nalder, have for three decades framed the debate as the “little guy versus the established powers”, with images such as that of a grandmother being taxed out of her home. Homeowners who are happy with their low property taxes might therefore ignore the fact that large firms, trusts and hedge funds which own commercial property benefit just as much, because that would “disrupt that clean narrative”. They also ignore the fact that property taxes elsewhere are high.
In theory, the solution to this misinformation already exists. It is the official voter-information guide issued by the secretary of state before every election. It is genuinely impartial and thorough. But it is also daunting. Depending on the number of ballot measures, it can be a tome and the perfect way to spoil a weekend. Only one in three voters told the PPIC that it was the “most helpful” information source in their decision. (Moreover, they did not specify how much of it they had actually read.)
The rest said they relied on advertisements, the internet, media coverage and the like. What this mostly means is attack ads, financed by the opposing campaigns and their proxies. In the run-up to an election all of California turns into a shouting match, with union members (or environmentalists, or marijuana lovers, or whoever) taking to the roads and shoving signs (“Yes on 19!”, “No on 23!”) under windscreen wipers. At home the robocalls continue the onslaught. In such an atmosphere Ms Nalder’s findings about misinformation should not be all that surprising. For amid all this confrontation, there is virtually no deliberation and analysis.
Many voters are conscientious. They try to read the wording of the initiative, but find it forbidding. The language is dense legalese, often containing double or triple negatives. And the measures have inexorably been getting longer. In the 1980s each typically contained between 1,000 and 3,000 words, which seems more than long enough. But nowadays they often exceed 10,000 words apiece. Two measures on the 2006 ballot weighed in at more than 17,000 words (half as long again as this special report). And one ballot can contain a dozen of these.
So it is surprisingly common for a voter to cast a yes ballot when he means no, or vice versa. In one notorious example from 1980, the label on a measure was “rent control” (later changed to simply “rent”). It was in fact an initiative by landlords who wanted to get rid of rent control. A later study revealed that 23% of voters wanted to preserve control but mistakenly voted yes, and that 54% were against rent control but voted no. The initiative was thus lost when it should have been won.
Indeed, voters constantly complain that initiatives are too complicated. Two out of three told the PPIC poll in December that the wording of the initiatives was confusing. But over-complex language is only one worry in a process where every statute and constitutional amendment interacts with every other to shape policy in this huge state. It raises the more general question of how large, diverse and dispersed populations filter information and arrive at decisions. “If those most likely to think they have a grasp on political information are in fact wrong,” says Ms Nalder, there may be a need to “think twice about the wisdom of direct democracy”.
CALIFORNIA IN THE 21st century faces a question that would fascinate the classical and Enlightenment thinkers who influenced America’s founders. Most of them stipulated that participatory democracies must be small. Their populations should be culturally homogeneous. And they must be virtuous.
California, though, is the most populous and diverse state in America, and no more or less virtuous than any other modern society. The historical achievement of America’s federal constitution was to create a republican structure that would preserve liberty and stability even in a large and diverse society. The price was to make democracy indirect and less participatory. Can California avoid paying that price?
This special report has shown how one of the three ingredients of direct democracy, the initiative process, has, cumulatively over the past three decades, caused much of the dysfunction that paralyses California whenever it suffers an economic shock, as it is doing at present. Does it follow that California must get rid of the initiative process?
It is a moot question because Californian voters would never agree (in what itself would have to be an initiative) to end initiatives. Ronald George, California’s former chief justice, says that “people will never vote to give up their own power.” The best we can hope for is to make the process “less extreme”.
That, indeed, may be all that is required. In Switzerland, whence California imported the idea, the initiative process works well. In some of the other 23 American states that practise some variant, it works better than in others. So the problem is not direct democracy as such, or even the initiative process, but the details of its Californian variant. It needs to be fixed, not eliminated.
The main goal of reform must be to make the initiative process and the legislature work together, rather than against each other. That is the only way to stop what Bruce Cain at Berkeley and Roger Noll at Stanford call the “downward cycle of legislative failure and initiative reaction”. The idea is to allow and encourage dialogue in law-making—between voters and the legislature, and among the special interests.
One option is to encourage referendums and to discourage initiatives. Referendums, by passing popular judgment on acts of the legislature, do not subvert representative democracy but hold it accountable. Initiatives, which are themselves legislation, can damage representative democracy. California would not be in its current mess if referendums, not initiatives, had become the main expression of direct democracy in the past century.
Initiatives should not only be rarer but also shorter, argues Bob Stern, the president of the Centre for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. Their language should be simpler, so that more voters understand what they are deciding. As in Switzerland, the legislature should get a first look at any draft and be allowed to respond with its own alternative, or to refine the wording.
Once an initiative has run through these filters and succeeds on the ballot, the legislature must be able to revisit the subject in due course. California should consider allowing initiatives only to enact statutes, as many other states do, not amend the constitution. Another practice used in other states is to “sunset” all initiatives—after a decade, say—by requiring explicit reauthorisation from voters or the legislature. This, too, offers protection against unintended consequences that usually reveal themselves only with time.
Together, these steps are likely to minimise the greatest problem with the initiative process, ballot-box budgeting. But reform must make this goal explicit. All initiatives must be clear about their effects on taxation and spending. A measure must indicate where the necessary revenues are to be found, or what other programme is to be cut. Today, “people vote for initiatives out of emotion, they do not realise that initiatives cost money,” says Karen Bass, the former assembly speaker. Once they understand the economic trade-offs, their emotions are likely to cool.
Because problems in the initiative process and the legislature are like chicken and egg, any reform must simultaneously deal with the representative arm of democracy too. That part, in fact, has already begun. Gerrymandering has ended as an independent commission is due to redraw the map for candidates for the first time this summer. The next primary election will be open to all voters irrespective of party affiliation. And an initiative to modify, if not eliminate, term limits on legislators will be on a ballot next year.
But reform should go further. Its aim should be to re-invest the legislature with the credibility it once had. Californians should make it bigger so that each lawmaker represents roughly as many constituents as his counterparts in other states do. And they should make the legislature unicameral, as Nebraska’s already is. America originally imported the idea of two chambers from Britain, where the bicameral system balanced two inherently different social classes (commons and lords). At the federal level, America applied that system to balance different sources of legitimacy (the people and the states). But California has nothing analogous to balance between the two chambers, so they just cause confusion.
The executive branch, in turn, must become more accountable. It might seem, but is not, paradoxical that this means electing fewer statewide and local officers and giving them more power. “I currently have 22 people I elect to represent me at all levels of government, and I can’t name them—and I’m president of the California Voter Foundation,” laments Kim Alexander, an expert on voter education. Ideally, Californians should elect just one statewide executive, the governor, and let him appoint the other seven. The people can then re-elect or fire the governor for his choices.
The recommendations above are essentially the same as those The Economist made in 2004 when it last examined California in a special report. It is encouraging that some of these steps (such as redistricting and open primaries) have already been taken, others are well under way and yet others are attracting increasing support among the policy elite.
But the urgency of reform has increased since 2004. Then, California was bouncing back from an economic shock (the dotcom bust) and entering several fat years when reform might have been less painful. Because the opportunity was (mostly) squandered, California remained unprepared for the current, and more severe, shock. It must not wait for another cycle to turn.
Because so many reforms—in the initiative process, the legislature and the executive—must be tied together to have a chance of working, it is tempting to call a constitutional convention. America as a whole has not had one since 1787, but many of its states hold them quite frequently. Alaska, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana and Rhode Island are among those that have had at least one since the second world war. California has not had one since 1879. The risk, however, is that in California such a convention would deteriorate into the same old food fight among the special interests, which tend to oppose reform.
The alternative is to use the same ballot box that has caused so much of the trouble. Indeed, many of the recommendations made above are being discussed by a new group called the Think Long Committee for California. Funded by Nicolas Berggruen, a wealthy international investor, this committee, half a year old, already has unrivalled cachet. George Shultz and Condoleezza Rice, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Google’s Eric Schmidt—all the state’s great and good seem to be part of it. Their deliberations will result in a string of initiatives that will be put before voters in 2012 and beyond.
Change has a better chance of coming about this way than through a constitutional convention. Thanks to Mr Berggruen’s support—he has already committed a first dollop of $20m—the effort will not fail for lack of money (the fate that befell a push for a constitutional convention last year). The risk is instead that voters will pass some reforms but not others, not realising that they must be integrated.
One way or another, the next few years in California might see perhaps the liveliest debate about freedom and governance since Federalists and Anti-Federalists argued in 1787-88 about whether or not to ratify America’s new constitution. Lovers of democracy and liberty everywhere still study that old debate. They will now also pay attention to California’s, for it will provide lessons for everyone.
Such a global spotlight may elevate the debate as Californians are reminded of their responsibility. They may even rediscover the spirit of pioneers such as August Schuckman, the current governor’s great-grandfather—the man who came to California in pursuit of his life dream but had to brave the unforgiving deserts during his wagon trek, losing oxen, horses and mules along the way. When it became necessary, his group burned its abandoned wagons, then moved on and built a state. After the past few years of hardship, Californians might just be ready to do something equivalent today.
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