California is torn between clashing Anglo traditions
35 comments
·October 26, 2024skissane
I understand the phenomena the article is talking about – being authoritarian about some things while hands-off about other (possibly much more major) things – but I'm sceptical that the proposed historical explanation is correct.
Here's my own take: the recent history of the West in general, and the US more particularly, has been a conflict between two competing worldviews – one relatively "traditional", the other calling itself "progressive". And go back to the 1960s, the competition between the two worldviews seemed relatively coherent – the "traditionalists" controlled most of the power structures in society, the "progressives" were (by and large) an anti-authoritarian rebellion against those structures. But, 50-60 years later, now the "progressives" (and their heirs) have come to dominate large sections of those same power structures, and they've swapped their prior (relatively consistent) anti-authoritarianism for an inconsistent mixture of authoritarianism about some things and anti-authoritarianism about others.
You can see the same thing in other Western countries – even if not to quite the same degree – who have rather different ethnic histories. That's part of why I'm sceptical that appeals to the history of different Anglo subethnicities really works as an explanation.
jltsiren
When I moved to California some years ago, I also found the default combination of political positions weird. The best half-serious description I could come up with was that California is a country of conservative libertarian social democratic hippies. Those words don't make sense together, but neither does California. At least to someone from the left/green end of the European political spectrum.
I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article, but at least it's an explanation for the weirdness.
pj_mukh
"I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article"
Yea I don't know if the writer has ever talked to a progressive activist. Drug enforcement isn't poo-poo'd out of some Libertarian ideal (let alone a Scottish one). It's poo-poo'd because it's seen as an ineffective fix for addiction. This is largely true, but the activists forgot that a lack of drug enforcement can ruin city centers.
Reform should start in our incarceration system not in crime enforcement but I digress.
alephnerd
The article is fairly off and overindexes Anglo-Saxon influence in a state where the largest influences tended to be Hispanics, working class central/southern/eaatern European settlers, Okies during the Dust Bowl, Asians of all walks of life, and post-WW2 immigration globally.
California is just "California", and an "Anglo-Saxon" tradition or lens just doesn't track back west - be it California, Texas, Washington, etc.
Just think about it - Kearny Street is named after a racist Irish immigrant. Levi and Haas were the most prominent businessmen in that era and were German Jews. Gold was found in Sutter Fort - a hacienda owned by a Swiss German. Much of the settlement in Central California was farmers from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Asia, Armenia, etc. Chinatowns and Japantowns dotted much of California, and Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese fishermen were overrepresented.
murrayb
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.
zachrose
Applying Albion’s Seed to California misses out on Spanish missionary culture and the shipping merchants who came from New York City, which does not have the same puritan roots as New England.
American Nations is a more recent book that describes more of the United States, though with less depth.
defrost
The absence of Spanish culture is boggling - it's delibrately avoided ..
A third were born in California,
and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”.
And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures
reissbaker
In general I think as a majority-minority state, applying a primarily UK-focused take on California misses a lot. The largest group in CA is Hispanic-Latino (40% of the population), and that's a group with neither Puritanical nor Scots-Irish background ideology. And 15% of the state is Asian-American... A very small percentage of CA descends from either Puritans/WASPs or Scots-Irish!
muglug
The article feels like it's grasping at tenuous historical straws trying to explain a mental health crisis in SF that's only really gotten out of hand in the past 5-10 years.
The anti-puritan strain isn't necessarily Scots-Irish, either. It's common in anyone who's had to suffer under puritanism.
DidYaWipe
I respect the effort here, but it's a bit like a school paper trying very hard to support a tenuous thesis.
I don't really buy the notion that California's modern web of seemingly endless hypocrisy can be traced back to centuries-old ideologies.
Then again... what does account for it? In the USA, California's "liberalism" does appear to be unique in its scope and pervasiveness. After two and a half decades in California, I can call it out for its FAKE liberalism. There's a lot of grandstanding, pontificating, and self-congratulation... but in the end it's a bunch of corrupt politicians and anti-citizen handouts to special interests, just like anywhere else.
Even worse, these handouts are couched in an annual parade of "ballot initiatives" that CA voters are dumb enough to fall for over and over. BILLIONS of dollars to "combat homelessness," with essentially zero results. And that's just one egregious example. Everyday life is hampered by other idiotic, do-nothing laws.
One example: One of the cleanest-burning fuels you can buy anywhere is denatured alcohol. Welp, that's illegal in CA. So you have to burn dirtier isopropanol.
Online shopping for Californians is a pain in the ass, because after researching and comparing and then finally selecting an item, you see: "Can't be shipped to your area." I saw this recently with plastic gardening tubs. WTF.
Meanwhile, CA mandates the inclusion of cancer-causing MTBA in all of its gasoline. Which the oil companies use as an excuse to jack CA's gas prices yet higher than CA's obscene taxes already do.
The hypocrisy is crushing.
potato3732842
It wasn't what he was aiming for but the bits about Massachusetts are fairly spot on, he was a little too charitable in his characterization of the Puritans.
patrick451
There is a book called American Nations written about a decade ago that tried to explain the different cultures in America through the nationalities of their early settlers. This article seems like an application of that book to specific policy oddities in California.
It's an interesting idea, but in both the book and this article, the connections are spurious. For example, it's a good soundbite that one can draw a through line from the Scots-Irish individualism to the libertarianism of California, but little real evidence of this actually provided.
alephnerd
An article about California's political culture but only mentions Hispanics only once and doesn't mention Oakies or Asians at all.
Methinks it might not be the most representative of California's political history.
California is just California, and trying to apply an "Anglo" lens is dumb and ahistorical.
VoodooJuJu
In order to truly understand this article, it helps to have read Albion's Seed.
It's true that Spanish influence isn't taken into account enough in this article, but the article is still pretty sound in the importance it puts on Puritan and Borderer (Scots-Irish) cultural influence, as these are the two foremost cultural forces at odds with one another to this day, not just in California, but across the United States. The Okies in this case would be Borderers.
And again, although we see other non-Anglo cultural forces, immigrants typically align and integrate more or less with either the Puritan or the Borderer ethos.
082349872349872
The immigrants, in this case, were all the anglos who showed up after the original hispanic settlement, and filibustered their way into Statehood.
alephnerd
Also, Anglo (as in Anglo-Saxon) settlers aren't even that prominent demographically in California.
Irish (eg. Kearny), German (eg. Haas, Levi, Sutter), Southern Italians, Russian, and Chinese settlers were much more prominent than Anglos during the frontier era along with the obviously large Hispanic population in a region that has been under Spanish rule longer than it has been under American rule.
Gimpei
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.
VoodooJuJu
Right, this article doesn't make a case tracing Puritan and Borderer settlement to modern day California, but the book Albion's Seed does, and it makes a very convincing case.
The book examines a variety of folkways, naming conventions, and lineages in the cultural regions throughout old England, discovers those same things present in regions throughout America, and then follows the continued expression of those folkways and lineages all the way up to the present day.
And although we can find similarities between Puritans or Borderers with other cultures around the world, we can't make a convincing case that, for example, the Japanese had a significant influence on American culture and politics, because again, the primary sources revealing the folkways examined in Albion's seed are quite distinct and can be accurately traced from old England, to American settlement, and again up to the present day. Puritan architecture, food, naming conventions, and ancestry is quite distinct and well-understood, and we see evidence of those things throughout the United states, whereas there's not much Japanese architecture, food, place-names, or influential dynasties here in America.
Anyway, Albion's Seed is a very good book that I highly recommend reading.
alephnerd
> 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.
blast
Agreed about the others but wouldn't the Okies be part of the Scots-Irish strain he covers?
alephnerd
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
082349872349872
There is to this day a Californio-derived "vaquero culture" in CA which considers TX-style "buckaroo" cowboys (who dally their lariats, have cow savvy pintos, etc.) to be a cheap knock-off.
(and to your point about italians: I'm not sure but suspect the use of snubbing posts in round pens came via swamp italians. Also, don't forget the portuguese: not as prominent as on HI, but still pretty common, eg Devin Nunes)
anarchotyranny
The word is anarcho-tyranny. Anarchy for the regime-aligned underclass. Tyranny for for everyone else.
emmelaich
About to comment similarly. Penalties are higher and more intrusive for those that can pay for it. Anything goes if you can't.
jacobolus
Edit: Deleting this comment. After being removed from the moderator's post it was replying to, it serves no purpose.
dang
Ok. In that case there are 29 other threads on HN's front page to look at, and perhaps have curious conversation about.
"Dumb", "laughably wrong", "couldn't make it past the first few", "whatever the point was supposed to be", "going to have a tough time reaching any", "drunk the koolaid", "I certainly wouldn't trust", and "completely indifferent to correctness" are all markers of the kind of conversation we're trying to avoid here.
dang
Since this discussion is growing distracting, I've detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41958544.
Perhaps it's not worth your trouble to discuss the article substantively, and that's fine—but please don't post shallow dismissals, name-calling, or snark as an alternative. The site guidelines ask commenters to avoid all of those.
christophilus
Your comment made me go have a look. I must confess, the first few paragraphs seem fine to me. I’m with dang. It would be helpful if you explained what you find objectionable.
null
grensley
California is (mostly) populated with the descendants of people that ran and ran and ran until they hit an ocean and couldn't run anymore.
Then they ran inland again, or into the metaverse, or space, or into their own minds.
potato3732842
That's far more true of the remote parts of the continental interior than it is about CA.
The gold rush, farming, ww2 industry, tech, CA is a catch basin for people who want to get rich quick.
michaeldh
Get rich quick by farming?
potato3732842
Get rich quick by buying land and investing in irrigation. The farmer doesn't get rich.
All: diffs are what's interesting on HN, not generics. The diff with this article is the historical analysis, so please let's focus on that and avoid generic culturewar fodder, which leads hellward.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...