State of resistance? What is California’s role in the new American reality?

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Quick Take What is to happen in deep-blue California now that red-state power in Washington has been restored? We sat down with two of California's sharpest thinkers, writer Steve Kettmann and sociologist Manuel Pastor, to look into some scenarios.

Up and down the blue-state enclaves of the West Coast, as people search their sock drawers for their long-forgotten pink pussy hats, a sense of nostalgic depression is roaring in like a psychological atmospheric river.

Suddenly many are reliving 2017, more with PTSD than dreamy nostalgia. You remember 2017 — Women’s March, Charlottesville, Kaepernick takes a knee, #MeToo. Fun times, huh?

As we brace for 2025 and Donald Trump’s Grover Cleveland-esque return to the White House, memories of 2017 don’t provide much guidance. But one question has been forefront in my mind: What of California? What does Trump the Sequel have in store for the Golden State?

To more fully grok that question, I arranged a coffee klatch with my friend Steve Kettmann, an accomplished journalist who has mulled on California’s unique role in the national narrative for years, and Manuel Pastor, a professor of sociology and American studies at the University of Southern California and author of “State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future,” published in 2018.

Steve is a longtime Santa Cruzan who co-directs the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods writers retreat in Soquel. And Manuel is a proud Slug, having done his undergraduate work and later taught at UC Santa Cruz.

Groping for some way through the darkness, I encountered a disturbing but convincing election post-mortem in The Atlantic by writer Jerusalem Demsas, which has particular relevance to the woes we’re all experiencing here in Santa Cruz County. Demsas argues that the second election of Trump was largely driven by a growing realization that the Democratic Party had no effective answers for the central crisis of our time and place: the lack of affordable housing. The piece said that all those people leaving California to settle in red states such as Florida and Texas where they can buy a house will have a lasting effect when the 2030 census weakens California’s electoral muscle.

It all makes for a pretty bleak picture here on the Left Coast, and with visions of National Guard soldiers with deportation orders in their pockets charging into the strawberry fields of the Pajaro Valley, I sought counsel with those wiser than I am.

Kettmann said that the idea of a mass exodus from California is largely a myth. “If you take the long view, California always absorbs the people first, then they go elsewhere. That’s the traditional pattern. So, there was a slight downtick [in population], but last year California’s population increased. So, this idea that we’re doomed in the next census because of some kind of exodus strikes me as being a bit alarmist.”

“The really key thing,” said Pastor, in reference to the Latino swing toward Trump in recent years, “is that, although this is a really immigrant-friendly state, you can actually buy a house in Texas. And people are willing to move into potentially more hostile territory, politically speaking, if they can get a little piece of the American Dream.”

There is a critical and even tragic irony that the election exposed. The Democratic Party had taken it as an article of faith that it was the party of competent governance and that the GOP was interested only in culture wars and power grabs. The 2024 election, contends Pastor, is a clear signal that voters feel otherwise.

“Aside from just the economics of high housing costs,” he said, “there’s a sense that the Democrats just can’t govern, that criminal justice reform has led to drugstores where everything is under lock and key, that the commitment to equity hasn’t extended to generating sufficient housing production. It’s about speaking to people’s everyday lived experiences, and their everyday lived experience is that inflation is a bitch, it’s hard for [young people] to buy a house. You shouldn’t have to go out and find your catalytic converter has been stolen for the third time. Nobody telling you to [defund the police] is going to get your catalytic converter back.”

The key to understanding America’s Latino voters is, said Pastor, to see them as a fundamentally working-class cohort deeply connected with three sectors of the economy: construction, agriculture and service industries. Talk of bringing back manufacturing means little to them. Silicon Valley chatter leaves them cold.

“The left often looks at our economy,” he said, “says, ‘We’re very wealthy, there’s enough to go around.’ Yeah? I think the better message is, ‘There’s enough work to go around.'”

As for 2025, can we expect a return to 2017? Having to re-experience that form of political strife is stressful enough. What if it’s even more intense?

“For one thing,” said Pastor, “Trump is bringing in more loyalists and keeping out the people who put in guardrails, so I think you’re going to see a far more aggressive and somewhat better thought-out attack on immigrants, labor unions, the climate, etc. But California, at the same time, is much more prepared.”

The day after the election, activists launched a website called “We Are California,” designed to mobilize and organize grassroots support to resist what it sees as a rush to authoritarianism.

There is, of course, also the question of leadership. In 2017, when Trump took office for the first time, California’s governor was Jerry Brown, just beginning the fourth quarter of his term. This time, it’s Gavin Newsom, in the same position that Brown was. Newsom’s term in office will end in 2027.

Kettmann, who has interviewed Newsom, said he thinks the governor will rise to the challenge. “I feel like he really, really wants to make a mark as California governor, for as long as he has left. Making some progress on some of these huge California problems, it’s just fundamental to what he cares about right now.”

Evoking sci-fi author William Gibson’s aphorism, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” Pastor said Californians have only to look to other states to see that authoritarianism isn’t merely coming, it’s already arrived. “In Florida, it’s frightening to be a woman there in terms of reproductive rights. The universities are being censored. Books are being banned. Texas is using its own rangers to enforce immigration law. Mississippi and Alabama have got some Draconian stuff going on around immigration. Then you have California, Oregon, Washington pulling left, though this election might moderate that a bit. But you have an effective war between the states, and that’s now in a slightly different context than the first Trump term. But that chasm has gotten wider and wider, and that’s going to be different as well.”

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