Jane Coaston: How California Conservatives Became the Intellectual Engine of Trumpism: "The California GOP got wiped out in the midterms. But the heart of California-style conservatism is stronger than ever.... 'They keep coming': The story of conservative fears over demographic change in California began long before Trump. Take Proposition 187, a ballot initiative passed by voters in November 1994 that would have cut off undocumented Californians from public education and health care services and require teachers and health care providers to turn over the names of undocumented people to authorities (it was known as the “Save Our State” initiative), and to efforts to end bilingual education and establish “three strikes” laws. (A court ultimately found the initiative un-Constitutional.)...
...187... would ultimately go a long way in turning the California Republican Party into an increasingly irrelevant power in the state, as Latino Californians enraged by the initiative and its backers became increasingly politically active. “In the 20 years since Pete Wilson’s successful anti-Latino dog whistling,” Haney López told me, “California has turned out state-level office Republicans all across the state. There is no Republican who holds a state-level office in California anymore. The Republicans in California are in areas of the state in which their jurisdiction is overwhelmingly white, [and] even they are increasingly endangered.”... This, to conservatives—and particularly to California conservatives—is the nightmare scenario: an America in which they are powerless, demographically swamped, where the particular virtues and ideas that made America great for so long are uprooted by a surging left. Trump speaks for, and to, this conservative movement, the one that sees demographic changes as a “national emergency”....
What the future holds for a movement that appears largely united by its opposition is anyone’s guess. The California-style politics—in short, a laser focus on culture, immigration, and race—that helped Trump win the White House have not healed the schisms within the Republican Party, nor have they defanged their liberal opponents. Perhaps that’s the real strength of California-style conservatives: By feeling like a besieged minority lacking in real power, they can enjoy the best of both worlds, shirking the responsibilities of governance while still wielding real power.
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