As a model for America, however, it’s giving off decidedly mixed signals: encampments of homeless people, floods and mudslides, drought and wildfires, earthquakes and depleted waterways, home invasions and mass shootings, tech layoffs and entertainment and teacher strikes, drained government coffers and spooky economic shudders. The Golden State has always been as much an idea as a place, a fantasyland for Easterners to pine for and put down. “But we”-California-“certainly lead the way in everything.” “I would like to think of our whole country as a freedom country,” she says.
I ask Pelosi what she makes of the motto. Newsom, perhaps teasing a future White House bid, offers California as the left-wing alternative, a liberal’s shining city on a hill, where diversity and tolerance, science and innovation, money and opportunity form a cutting-edge vision of America. Governor Gavin Newsom has upped the ante by branding California the “True Freedom State,” a rejoinder to Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Freedom State” slogan, pitching Florida as a kind of anti-woke protectorate.
“I mean, so many people just flock here to raise money and find kindred souls in terms of the environmental, the LGBTQ, the fairness, health care, you name the subject, saving the planet, whatever it is,” she continues.
And ever since Speaker Pelosi began muscling more seats into Congress decades ago, California has shaped progressive policy, from the environment to gun control to gay and trans rights. Setting aside that California started with the decimation of Indigenous people by those missionaries following their cattle, it’s also the engine room of the modern Democratic Party, soon to be the fourth-largest economy in the world, bigger than Germany’s, and lousy with tech billionaires and Hollywood honchos.
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