YESTERDAY, we discussed something I’ve long hoped for and others now fear and wish to prevent: The decline of the New York/California duopoly on pop culture in America (and, hence, the world).
Meanwhile, in the sociopolitical realm, some misguided guides still insist that we all will become just like California. As Newsweek claims, “California, as always, shows us our future.”
The magazine’s specifically claiming that all of the several states are going to repeat what that state’s gone through; as an emerging “majority of minorities” racial makeup realigns old political coalitions and fuels an Anglo reactionary retreat from multicultural ideals.
But not all of America has the major corporate-agribusiness lobby that helped give California the political careers of Nixon, Reagan, et al. Northwest “progressive” politics had some of its roots in family farmers fighting the big banks and railroads. California Republicanism was hugely influenced by factory-farm interests who’d been in cahoots with the banks and the railroads.
This, along with the Hollywood-bred schtick of hyped-up and dumbed-down “populist” campaigns on behalf of those already in power, led to the peculiarly divisive, reactionary breed of politics that have bogged down the most populous state lo these past three decades or more; and which have been exported to the nation via Nixon, Reagan, Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet” advisors, et al.
(It also might explain a political left-of-center up here that, during of the first half of the last century, tried to build organizations and institutions; and a political left-of-center down there that, by the end of the last century, seemed to define protesting as the limit of what it would or could do.)
We must also go beyond simplified notions of “whiteness” for a closer look at our ethnic past. European immigrants may have come in vast numbers through NYC, but they didn’t all move on to other places in the same mixes. German and Irish Catholics helped settle the Great Lakes; Nordics came to Minnesota (and eventually from there to Washington); Hispanics are still more numerous along the southern-tier states than elsewhere, except for the Puerto Rican component in NYC. California’s blessed with Mexican and other Latin American immigrants; Washington’s proportionately more blessed with assorted Asian newcomers.
The U.S. is definitely going to become a nation of “a majority of minorities.” But which minorities are more influential in which parts is going to help keep things lively.
Even the Newsweek article acknowledges that these emerging ethnic voting blocs don’t vote alike. It doesn’t, but could’ve, noted the big wedges between blacks and Cubans in Florida as well as the rift it did note between Latinos and Asians in California.
If we’re lucky, Washington (the first mainland state to elect an Asian-American governor) and the other states will learn to avoid some of the divisive rancor California politics has gone through.
The nation, as a whole, is becoming less uniform. But it won’t become less uniform in one uniform way.
(An aside: In the ’60s, legendary ad designer George Lois made a campaign with the faces of New Yorkers of every possible ethnicity, each clutching a slice of bread in his or her own portrait above the slogan “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s Jewish Rye.” The campaign was dropped after market research showed everybody loved the ads featuring their own ethnic groups, but hated the ads with everybody else.)
TOMORROW: Is incomprehensible “political” writing really necessary?
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