After a slow start, California ranks 10th in the nation for coronavirus vaccinations. It’s down to about three cases per 100,000 residents. Its economy is booming. According to Bloomberg, the state “has no peers among developed economies for expanding G.D.P., creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds.” State coffers are flush: The governor’s office estimates a $76 billion budget surplus. The Legislative Analyst’s Office puts it at $38 billion. (The difference turns on the definition of the word “surplus.”)
So what is California doing in this moment of plenty? Deciding whether to recall its governor, of course.
Californians can trigger a recall election by collecting signatures equivalent to 12 percent of the votes cast in the previous election. Since 1913, there have been 55 attempted recalls of governors in California, though only two have qualified for the ballot. Both have been in recent decades — a result, in part, of a cottage industry of recall consultants and professional signature-gatherers eager to separate the politically incandescent from their money.
The current recall election is now scheduled for September, and the candidates to replace Newsom include Caitlyn Jenner, best known for her work as a bit character in the Kardashian cinematic universe, and John Cox, who lost to Newsom by 23.8 percentage points in 2018 and has been campaigning with a live bear to drive home the slogan that while Newsom is a “beauty,” he is a “beast.” I wish I were kidding.
Most Californians want no part of this nonsense. In May, the Public Policy Institute of California found that 54 percent of likely voters approved of Newsom’s performance, and 57 percent opposed recalling him. But a more worrying number was tucked into the cross tabs: Those who want Newsom gone were 15 points likelier to be following the recall closely.
That makes sense. If you loathe Newsom, the recall is your sole hope for relief. If you like him, the recall is a distraction you’d prefer to ignore. But it means California could see a popular governor ousted not because a majority think he’s failed but because they tuned out an unusual midcycle referendum they didn’t ask for and weren’t paying attention to.
“If you look at the pattern of who’s most interested as an indicator of who’s likely to vote, it’s possible you have an outcome where an electorate that’s small and not representative of the public will make that decision,” Mark Baldassare, the president and chief executive of the P.P.I.C., told me.
I grew up in Orange County and now live in San Francisco, and the recall reflects a deeper pathology afflicting the state I love: California is littered with well-meaning ideas to increase democratic participation that have decayed into avenues that organized interests use to foil the public will. We have become what Francis Fukuyama, the Stanford political scientist, calls a “vetocracy” — a system defined by how easy it is, and how many ways there are, to block action.
Many of these rules date back to the Progressive Era, when railroad interests dominated the California Legislature, and reformers needed a way to end-run their own representatives. I wonder what they would have thought watching Uber and Lyft, the transportation juggernauts of our day, spend millions to pass Proposition 22, which exempts them from legislation classifying their drivers as employees and requires lawmakers to come up with a seven-eighths supermajority to amend the measure.
Others are more recent. The California Environmental Quality Act was passed under Gov. Ronald Reagan to make sure new public projects passed a minimal environmental review. Those reviews were originally short documents and only for actual public projects. But then the courts decided a public project was any project, public or private, that required government approvals — which is in California basically every project of even modest size. And anyone has standing to sue and can even do so anonymously.
In other words, CEQA (as it’s known) has perversely become a weapon against projects that would better the environment. A Chapman University study found that the most popular target of CEQA lawsuits are multifamily housing projects, while industrial, mining and energy projects collectively accounted for fewer than a quarter of the lawsuits in 2018. A more banal use of CEQA is to block or blackmail anyone trying to build anything, which has raised the costs of construction, and degraded the quality of infrastructure, for everyone.
“The original idea of CEQA was to strengthen the California planning process by informing the public,” M. Nolan Gray wrote in an excellent Atlantic piece. “Instead, what we’ve ended up with is a system that subjects even humdrum infill proposals to obtuse multibinder reports and shady dealings, leaving a housing-affordability crisis in its wake.”
Look deeply into the pathologies of blue states and you’ll find two troublings of the Democratic soul. The first is frequently missed because we define political movements in relationship to their opposites. Democrats are the party that wants to do big things through government; Republicans are the party that wants to stop government from doing anything. These are caricatures, and they miss as much as they reveal. The Democratic Party, in particular, is a coalition between strains of liberalism that delight in government power and forms of progressivism that fear that the government is a tool of rapacious corporate interests. State power is often fractured and checked in blue states in ways that reflect this ambivalence.
There is, in theory, a way to unleash public power without letting it serve the whims of deep-pocketed donors: let the people control government directly. But populist reforms of this sort are often built atop a mythic version of the people, one that yearns to be involved in the ins and outs of every policy debate and shows up en masse to local planning meetings.
In practice, that describes relatively few of us. Most of us just want the politicians we elect to do a good job so that we can live our lives. These new levers of power, then, are quickly captured by those with the money, time and resources to wield them. “Average citizens will sporadically give input to government when something really matters to them,” Bruce Cain, a Stanford political scientist, writes in “Democracy More or Less.” “Organized interests are a constant presence.” That is roughly the story of California, where a slew of populist processes have led to anti-populist realities.
This is a particularly hard problem for Democrats to solve. To admit that these processes are failing is to call into question treasured beliefs about democracy and to put yourself on the wrong side of the rhetoric of democracy, which remains a potent weapon even when wielded in defense of systems that are profoundly undemocratic in effect.
“I don’t see any political space for making a principled argument against more participation,” Fukuyama told me. “This comes up in primaries. There’s no question in my mind that the move toward popular primaries abetted the rise of extremism, particularly on the right. I think we were better off with professional politicians in smoke-filled rooms nominating candidates. But try to make that argument today and you’ll get your head handed to you.”
And so, for now, Californians will have to act as the populists intended. They may not want this recall, but the only way to kill it is to participate in it.
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