California is torn between clashing Anglo traditions?

Anglo-Saxon in the sense of the article is principally referring to a political and cultural tradition that can be traced back to a certain place and time, the original dynamics of which continue to reverberate and resonate. Its association with any distinct ancestral ethnicities (i.e. something like "race") is in an important sense merely coincidental. Contemporary liberal politics is strongly essentialist in its discourse, so much so that people are starting to forget that such terms like Anglo-Saxon have alternative, more nuanced meanings (albeit not exclusively--there's also a race-essentialist history, to be sure). The essence of identity politics is to fuse and fix, e.g., ethnicity and culture. It's why the American left assumed for decades that the growing demographics of minority groups with strong Democratic affinities would naturally result in ever growing Democratic majorities. The notion that, e.g., Latinos would begin to adopt "white" social and political viewpoints with different historical roots was incomprehensible.

I think it's difficult to dispute that the principal political and social structures of the US, including California, are primarily derivative of the Anglo-Saxon model and its various facets, both in its core structures (e.g. how its democratic institutions function, economic life is organized, etc) but also in its relationship with oppositional groups (e.g. the Irish experience that continued to unfold in North America, and which also shaped how new groups assimilated into oppositional positions). This is most obvious in the context of our legal systems, but you can see it in both national and local political and social structures. Germans, Jews, Native Americans (to the extent they chose to engage), and everybody else assimilated into this system. They shaped it, to be sure, but the essential outlines remain distinctly identifiable as derivative of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the British Isles going back to before William the Conquerer (most periods of which also involved clashes of culture and synthesis of foreign and domestic!). Could you persuasively argue that California politics is more like Mexican politics than it is the politics of other so-called Anglo-Saxon systems like the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, or even South Africa? Also, don't forget that in most ways Californian politics is indistinguishable from that of Washington and Oregon, neither of which have strong Spanish or Mexican legacies that have persisted into the present day.

That said, I think the author overstates the explanatory power of Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage. It's impossible to understand contemporary American politics without understanding the contribution of mid 20th century French deconstructionists, or early 20th century Jewish intellectual immigrants, on both the left and right. Or even that of the American experience--when it comes to the prevalence of endemic societal violence, for example, North and South America altogether stand out distinctly from the rest of the world, for a multitude of reasons rooted in shared historical phenomena (e.g. slavery, frontier ethos, etc), few of which relate back in a distinctive, useful way to the particular history of the British Isles. Likewise, many countries, including Mexico, also saw similar French and Eastern European Jewish influences. And at this point there's an argument to made that it's more productive to set a new fixed point rooted in 19th and 20th century Western modernity, and US cultural hegemony that filters disparate influences as they take hold elsewhere in the world.

Further to your point the Scots and Irish aren't even Anglo-Saxon. You could make the argument for calling them Anglo-Celtic now but not so much at the time of the settlement of the US.

Yeah but from a policy perspective, which specific influences do you see from those groups on California politics?

Even if Anglo-Saxons are now a minority, as a founding population they can exert disproportionate influence. New immigrants want to fit in to their new home, so they adopt majority views, thereby reinforcing those majority views for subsequent immigrant waves.

City centers are being ruined even with places with stricter drug enforcement. I’m not entirely convinced the two are linked. If anything cost of housing and wealth of an area are better predictors.

Activists don't get listened to, they get clipped. They prescribe some set of policies X, Y, and Z; someone in power hears Y and likes it, and ignores the rest.

In the case of drug enforcement, the idea was to decriminalize and destigmatize drugs so that persons addicted to them could seek treatment and rehabilitation. Problem is, that also requires public money be spent on rehabilitation programs. It's cheaper for the state to just get people high and let them die.

Same thing with "defund the police", which had an implicit "and use the money to fund mental health programs" at the end of it, along with prescriptions to fund deescalation training for whatever cops we still needed. All the Twitter activists heard this, they chanted "defund the police" as if everyone else had too, but that memo didn't reach the desk of any of the mayors who actually tried these programs. To make matters worse, a lot of city police departments took this literally, deliberately, to discredit anti-police activism. So the cops effectively punished the city for speaking out against them.

The underlying problem is that communicating these problems in a way that's succinct enough to resist malicious interpretation, without it coming off as a way to dodge the blame for your own problems, is very difficult. You are not entitled to make others think or speak the way you do. Concepts you invent will be reinterpreted however people like unless you drown them in so much French that only your own apparatchiks can understand them[0]. In other words, these are shibboleths - terms that exist solely for an in-group to identify themselves to one another.

Here's the thing: this is great for MEGO[1] and terrible activism. When Louis Rossmann wants to point out how companies are retroactively changing the deal, he doesn't say it's wrong to do that, he says the CEOs have a "rapist mentality". When Cory Doctorow wants to talk about how Internet platforms get worse and worse, he talks about "enshittification[2]". These coinages work because they leverage the listener's existing understanding of those concepts. Semantic drift works to their advantage: someone misusing "enshittification" to refer to, say, inflation, rather than the gradual demise of Internet platforms, is continuing the analogy.

[0] More generally, habitual insistence on the use of one's idiolect - especially one crafted to motte-and-bailey your unsavory opinions - is a sign of an abusive personality. Yes, that's a dig at RMS.

[1] "My Eyes Glaze Over", aka "disguising heinous shit behind boring language"

[2] Enshittification is a particularly funny one, because it's exactly the sort of fancy French word you'd expect, but with a nice Anglo-Saxon swear word in it.

What specific Spanish influence do you see on California politics?

An underrated aspect of California, I suspect, is that California's "political class" is not all that representative of the state at large. For example, I seem to recall that Prop 16 was endorsed by numerous major figures, and opposed by none, yet it lost by a large margin in the general election.

If you look at the Latinos and Asians who are politically involved in California, I would predict that they are far from typical, and they're much more likely to be assimilated into the state's progressive political traditions.

My read of Albion’s Seed and American Nations is that they’re more about how a regional culture was germinated and founded, under the idea that the culture (including legal and economic systems) is even more durable than a specific group. So it’s not exactly connected to current demographics.

That is todays numbers.. obviously the article is taking a historical view.. not that I necessary agree with it.

What makes you say that? California had a problem with attracting homeless drifters as far back as the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Why did all those homeless former farmers from Oklahoma and Arkansas trek all the way to California? Why not stop in, oh, say, Arizona, or scamper on down to cozy South Texas?

I haven’t read Albion’s seed, so maybe I’m missing something. But… I don’t see any evidence for anything in the piece. Just because you can make a narrative about the similarities between puritans and certain facets of California policy doesn’t mean that one caused the other. I could point out parallels between the puritans and Japanese culture too, or Venezuelan culture. This doesn’t seem like history to me so much as fiction writing.

> The Okies in this case would be Borderers.

Okies were not uniformly Scotch Irish - it was a generic term for internal migrants from North Texas and Southern Oklahoma which was very ethnically diverse with German, Czech, Russian, and Southern settlers along with Native Americans and Hispanics.

The immigrants, in this case, were all the anglos who showed up after the original hispanic settlement, and filibustered their way into Statehood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Republic

Not really. Much of Texas and Oklahoma was/is a cultural mixture of southern settlers, Central Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, and Native Americans that turned into it's own culture.

There's a reason why bock bier (eg. Shiner Bock), dryland farming (a Russian German thing), frybread (from the Bureau of Indian Affairs era), Cowboy culture (a merger of older Hispanic Ranchero culture with southern settler culture), etc became a thing in Texas and Oklahoma