California Explains It All
Politics tamfitronics Politics / October 8, 2024To understand US politics—for better and for worse—look to the Golden State.(Illustration by Tina Zhou)In the preface to California: A HistoryKevin Starr writes that California is perhaps “the most American of American places” and that it has long “become one of the prisms through which the American people, for better and for worse, could glimpse their future.” Starr, often called the dean of California historians, wrote this in 2005 and died in 2017—but his insight is perhaps most obvious today.California’s long-brewing housing crisis is now a national phenomenon, and so is the mass homelessness that has been its inevitable consequence. For years, the state’s wildfires and heat waves have given Americans a vision of the country’s disastrous climate-change fate. Show business and Big Tech, having colonized the state’s...
