The Day of the Locust

The mobs howled again in California, rattling windows on the Potomac. Are the barbarians marching eastward, as they did after the famous tax revolt of the late 1970s, or is this just another West Coast full-moon episode with little national consequence?

The larger meaning of Schwarzenegger's triumph of the will, of course, depends on how you interpret the grievances that provided the recall's extraordinary emotional fuel. But I must warn you that analyzing this election is an adventure in a realm of stupefying paradox and contradiction. All the same, it may tell us a great deal about the emerging landscape of American politics.

The hardcore ideologues of zero government and McKinley-era capitalism are trumpeting the recall as a new populist revolution in the spirit of Howard Jarvis's Proposition 13 in 1978. They echo local Republican claims that a venal Democratic governor, in league with big unions and the welfare classes, was turning off the lights of free enterprise and driving the hardworking middle classes to Arizona with huge, unfair tax increases. Gray Davis, in a word, was the anti-Christ, wrecking California's golden dream on behalf of his selfish constituencies of school teachers, illegal immigrants, and rich Indians. The Terminator, they assure us, has literally saved California from the yawning abyss of "tax, tax, tax; spend, spend, spend."

From the outside, this seems rather ridiculous. Davis, to begin with, is an autistic centrist in the Democratic Leadership Council mode who has governed California for the last five years as a good Republican. In fiscal policy, as well as in prisons, education, and the lubrication of corporate interests, there has been no significant departure from the paradigm of his predecessor Republican Pete Wilson. Indeed, Davis has been such a raving executioner and prison-builder that crime-and-punishment has disappeared as a right-wing wedge issue.

Moreover, if California's middle classes have any cause to feel raped and pillaged in recent years, clearly the culprits are Arnold's eminence grise, Pete Wilson, who deregulated the utilities to begin with, and the Bushite power cartels like Enron which looted California's consumers during the phony energy crisis of 2000-01. And it is the Bush administration that has told bankrupt state and municipal governments everywhere to "drop dead" while it shovels billions into the black hole it has created in Iraq. Fiscal crisis should be an issue owned by the Democrats.

Strange, then, that almost two-thirds of the voters in the mega-state that supposedly belongs lock, stock, and barrel to the Democrats either endorsed the stealth return of Pete Wilson -- the mind whirring within Arnie's brawn -- or voted for a right-wing quack, Tom McClintock. These are the kinds of election returns you expect to see from GOP bedrock states like Idaho or Wyoming, not from the vaunted Left Coast.

When you peer at the dynamics of recall rage up close, the whole phenomenon becomes stranger still. Here in San Diego, where I live and the recall originated, the Schwarzenegger blitzkrieg seemed to suck anger out of the clear blue sky. This, after all, isn't Youngstown or even Stockton or San Bernardino. Republican voters, as far as I know, are not being evicted en masse from their homes or forced to steal milk for their staving babies.

Far from it, the value of the median family home soared almost $100,000 last year and the area is once again awash with Pentagon dollars. The freeways are clogged with Hummers and other mega-SUVs, while those with luxury lifestyles, carefully tended by armies of brown-skinned laborers, bask in the afterglow of Bush's tax cuts.

Enlistment in Arnie's army of "hell no, we're not going to take it anymore" tax protestors visibly bore little relationship to actual economic pain. Yet, for weeks, suburban San Diego has been contorted into visceral, self-righteous rage over the supposedly satanic regime in Sacramento. Indeed exit polls show that, in San Diego as well as statewide, support for Schwarzenegger increased with income and topped out at the country-club and gated-community level.