City of Quartz is so good it's actually making me get my shitty Seventh Party System/The Many States ripoff off the ground.
The Eagle's View, part 5: Pacific Overtures
Party politics in the state of Colorado
[Out-of-universe note: I can't do maps, so I'm just going to have to describe what bits of OTL America this state is. Anyway, something broadly similar to the Pico Act goes through thanks to a slightly delayed ACW, but then after a more successful Confederate campaign in the West, (complete with some soft Californio collaboration), the state loses its southern appendage of Baja California and the bits attached to the important Fort Yuma "just in case". In OTL terms, it's everything in between the 37th parallel and the north border of San Diego County. Following me? Good.]
"The East is the coast of cities dominated by their states; the West, the coast of states dominated by their cities.". While Larry Godwin's assessment of the Pacific and Atlantic's differences was no doubt coloured by his own experiences in Duke University, there is a grain of truth in there. Unlike the many multi-metroplian states of the Eastern Seaboard, Pacific states tend to revolve purely around their major cities, if they have one. Portland dominates New Massachusetts, San Diego reigns supreme over California, and, of course, our own state of Colorado cannot be understood without reference to Our Lady, the city of Los Angeles.
Indeed, the unique character of Los Angeles is what determines the unique character of our state's politics. Let me make it clear that I do not say this out of malice--L.A. is the
backwards city of a backwards state.
The deeper roots of the latifundia barons, preserved by seperating themselves from the anti-Californio vigilantism of the north, entrenched a feudal elite that could not be displaced by a civic bourgeoisie, but merely accomodated with. The continued Anglo-Hispanic conflict may have been why, under the rule of its Anglo elite, Los Angeles' main import became the image of itself, sold to colic-struck and restless Midwesterners along with little plots to call one's own--Manifest Destiny, Round 2. With its industrial economy drawn north to the railroad's captive port of Santa Monica (the only battle the
L.A. Times ever lost), and a handy labour supply of imported WASP burghers with aristocratic pretensions, little stood in the way of the vigourous campaign for Clean Living and the Open Shop that would make Los Angeles the most conservative city in these United States. Indeed, so little stood in the local elite's way that they began to fissure amongst themselves.
In the modern day, Colorado is contested over by two right-wing parties, and the attendants who flit between them for spoils. There is a veneer, carefully laid, of this battle being ideological. The
Republicans are the party of simple, clean, faith and the good old flag, defending the right of free enterprise and the suburban way of life. Meanwhile, the Progressives are the party of efficiency and those who look forward, fighting corruption and trusts while preserving individual rights. These distinctions are, frankly, nonsense.
The Republicans are the party of the WASP conservative, Downtown-oriented, Old Guard, a small coterie whose families have been taking in rents since Southern Pacific came to the city. On the other side, the Progressives are the party of the "Westside set", a heterodox alignment of old-money Jews, goo-goo oilmen, and suburban development entrepreneurs, only united by the Downtown power centre's dislike of them. While there might be a slim amount of difference between them--the open shop versus the company union, satellite suburbs versus autonomous suburbs, barring immigration versus welcoming foreign capital--both parties are the political wings of petty aristocracies, and their political agendas are set accordingly, agreed upon in the Committee of 25 and laid out in the L.A. Times. More militarised police keeping the barrios down, more money injected into real-estate development and the freeways and aqueducts, more importation of foreign capital, cultural and economic--all to keep L.A. alive. The rest of the state is free to go to hell.
The original elite power grouping of Colorado--the Californio ranchers and land-owners, and their ambitious Anglo sons-in-law--still holds on in the state's east. The Unidos por Californios continues to run up ludicrous margins in exchange for blocking developments and keeping the large landowners subsidised, with a charming frankness about this agenda and a willingness to support any party that will have them. Those seeking a genuine Chicano politics should look elsewhere--while Raza del Bronce Unida are largely marginalised in the state, and being eaten from both the left and right, their entrenchment in the poorer areas of the Inland Empire and some solid second places in Bakersfield keeps la causa alive. Vigourous fearmongering and at least one police assassination has kept this form of ethnic political organisation out of most of Los Angeles proper. African-American politics is likewise moribund, with the more conservative groups absorbed into Westside, the true cultural revolutionaries terrorised out of existence by the police, and the last stub of the class revolution--the infamous Continued Revolutionary International Movement--waylaid by its focus on mobilising a revolutionary lumpenproletariat into becoming a criminal organisation with pamphlets.
The only ethnic group that can truly be said to be politically mobilised in the state today are WASPs. The outer suburbs of LA had long been the haunt of groups like the White Camelia Society and the Redhoods, but with Downtown's lock on WASP political power, actual far-right political organisation remained limited to crank papers and minor candidates, unable to spread their wings. What saved Frank Buckley's Individualist Party from this fate wasn't their greater pretensions of intellectual rigour, but the revolt of said suburbs against Downtown's economic engine--development. The success of the Individualists' later campaigns, rallying suburbanites for lower taxes and against mandatory school integration, all stemmed from their initial harnessing of the movement to preserve suburban property values by blocking low-income housing. With the county-run zoning boards generating new future representatives for the Individualists and their uneasy allies in the more ecologically-justified Conservation Party, development in the San Fernando Valley is now even slower than the traffic. Fortunately for Downtown and Westside, despite hysteric coverage of these "suburban Bolsheviks", the new tribunes of the suburbs reliably nod through any forms of capitalism that happen to not disturb their back yards.
Any actual leftist movements have only been allowed into the state on sufferance, quarantined into localised bases of support before they can reach Our Lady proper. The first exile was, uniquely, by choice. After Job Harriman's repeated failures to break into the city's politics, most of L.A.'s Socialist Party decamped itself to the "new town" of Llano del Rio, to build a new city on Bellamyist lines. Llano is still reliably socialist, and was indeed a key founder of the
Union of Communard Forces, but is unlikely to overthrow capital in this state any time soon. While the party's high-minded rhetoric narrowly distinguishes it from other local "residential independents", it tends to behave like them in the legislature, endlessly voting for more pork and less principles. The more milquetoast left-wing parties have been slower in coming. The wartime boom and the Square Deal brought Labor to the Santa Monica dockers, where they have desperately clung to life ever since. Likewise, the United Farmworker's Movement persists in the political microclimate that is Bakersfield and the surrounding San Joaquin, but its southern progress was halted by a near-military campaign of suppression on behalf of the latifundia barons. Lupe Martinez's body is still missing.
The revolutionary movements of Colorado are thus those that arise among the enfranchised Coloradoans--in other words, ones that share the state's character. This can be clearly seen observing the state's native revolutionaries, End Poverty In America. Founded as an alliance between a plethora of groups to support Beale Sinclair's doomed run for Governor, the movement's demands have always been far less radical than they're painted. Their calls were for universal old-age pensions, seizing idle and "unimproved" land for the public, and a restored and renewed small-business utopia, far from worker control of the means of production. EPIA's primary appeal is to a downwardly-mobile white middle class who wish to regain their status, and its forebears can be found not in industrial Chicago and Milwaukee, but in the farmsteads visited by William Jennings Bryan. In the harshest possible analysis, they represent a leftward version of the Coloradoan dream, burying class conflict under prosperity and resolving capitalism's contradictions with One Weird Trick. Their modern representatives may have shifted their Werid Tricks to land value taxes and tramways, but the desire to hide from class consciousness in a middle-class wonderland remains.
These modern representatives are, however, irrelevant, since EPIA's period of providing token opposition is thoroughly over. The new opposition to the machines is endowed with both national-level money and a form of group consciousness, but its rhetoric still approaches the radical. If you'd asked an L.A. Times reader in the Sixties to identify them, he'd probably still pick out the Union for a Democratic Society, but he would hardly recognise the modern party as a descendant of his bogeyman. The student radicals have cut their hair back and stuffed themselves into suits; the veterans of Black Power who faced the LAPD down now talk about a revolution via small-business loans and eliminating gang violence. This is all despite--or perhaps because of--their policies remaining at the leftward edge of acceptability in Our Lady. The rightward turn of the UDS is often overstated in popular accounts, but in Colorado, its origin, it is very real.
To understand this, you need to understand what motivates political parties--their bases of power. The early UDS had a vast and largely untapped potential voter base in L.A.'s multicultural working classes, but this base was largely unmobilised. With the Open Shop enforced practically at bayonet-point, the workers of Colorado couldn't leverage their economic power within the political system. The failure of any class-based coalition caused the UDS leadership to turn towards culture-based coalition building, with minority capitalists recast as a mechanism to pull the community up with them. Suddenly, the party was flush with donations, and the realtors of Monterey Park and shopping-centre owners of Watts turned out for the former long-haired radicals in droves. Despite the tone of their rhetoric, the UDS are not going to break the power centres of Colorado--they're merely capitalising on an untapped one, a coalition of non-white business both within Our Lady and (with the zhongyang increasingly concerned about the wellbeing of their American cousins and potential customers) without it.
I'm not trying to paint Colorado's politics in a cynical light. Every state, right across the country, conducts its politics in the same way, with class and culture groups vying for power. The only difference in Colorado is the length of time across which the same elites have maintained themselves. With the frontier myth and its corresponding social effects tamping down a mobilised working class, the elite groupings of Colorado have been free to grow ever more incestuous and strangely-defined, the periphery groups themselves contorting in their shadows. The political system has ossified, dominated by the machines of centuries ago. The UDS might have abandoned much on their rise to power, but what they represent--a genuine breakthrough into this frozen political sphere from the outside--is still potent.
Colorado is a backwards state. With any luck, it is at least pointed in the right direction.
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Imogen Tsai is a professor of political philosophy and ethnography at the University of Colorado, Los Angeles, and the author of
Fabulous Ancestors: The Strange Life of Wang Shenfu,
Suburbia and its Discontents, and the essay collection
A Thousand Mammoth Feeders, which won the 2007 Brandeis Prize for Ethno-political Writing. Her latest book,
Faultline One: A New History of the Sea of Cortez, is serialised in
The Anvil.
The Eagle's View is a trademark of Common Sense.
