Years of obstructionism has destroyed the GOP in California

A common state politics nerd tattoo

There's been a lot of Republican soul-searching since the election, mostly focusing on how the party needs to rethink its xenophobic approach to Hispanics. No where is this more true than in California, where Hispanics comprise around 38% of the population, which is about parity with whites. Romney lost here in a landslide, and at the state level Republicans fared no better.

Columnist George Skelton in the LAT ticks off a list of Republican defeats:

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein drew only token Republican opposition and won by 23 points. 

Democrats, at last count, were gaining four congressional seats in California.

The stunner was the state Assembly, where Democrats apparently achieved a historic supermajority to match the party's similar feat in the Senate.

I think what you're seeing here--total Republican irrelevance in California--is the inevitable result of what has been poisoning California politics for decades, namely the conversion of the legislature to a supermajoritarian body on any law involving budgets and revenue. By requiring a 2/3 majority in the legislature in order to raise taxes, the state constitution has effectively granted the minority party the power to control the political agenda via obstruction. This has led to gridlock and insolvency over the years, and to what almost everyone agrees is a dysfunctional state government unable to make hard budgetary choices.

But it has also atrophied the Republican party, rewarding anti-tax extremists with real power and removing any incentive for striking deals and compromises. Ideologues thrive in this environment as they are able to portray themselves as heroic last lines of defense--and show results--but moderates are gradually purged from the party, their ability to make deals useless so long as the party is successful with obstructionism. Over the years the Calfornia GOP has evolved into an institution optimized for obstruction, very good at ideological purity and solidarity but completely clueless when it comes to bipartisan compromise and the art of cobbling together an ideological diverse constituency to support it.

Now--due to a combination of growing alarm at dysfunctional state government, rejiggering of district boundaries, and the continued demographic shift away from "establishment whites", Republicans find themselves completely ousted and on the wrong end of a Democractic supermajority that they can no longer obstruct, and that no longer needs to seek their bi-partisan acquiescence.

In a way this will be healthy for the Republicans, as now they will once again have the political incentive to make bargains and extract concessions from inevitable Democratic legislation. I predict a move towards more moderation and deal-making in the state legislature in the coming years--and far more functional government than we've seen over the last few decades.

I hope that in addition to solving California's eternal budget problems, both sides come to see the harm of supermajoritarian requirements in the legislature and return to the days where a budget--or a tax increase--can be passed with a simple majority, subject to the subsequent approval of the citizens come election time. That's how it's supposed to work.

Review: The Beach

A few months ago I decided to take a break by watching The Beach, which someone had put on in the common area of the hostel I was staying at in Thailand. The choice was apropos: the movie is all about a young traveler Richard (Leonardo DiCaprio) who visits Thailand but spurns the commercialized experience and boorish, ugly-American behavior of the typical tourist.

Playing the familiar archetype of an idealistic young man discontented with the world and seeking the authentic, Richard rails against the "cancers" and "parasites" that spend their time in Thailand binge drinking out of large plastic cups and whooping and shouting obnoxiously. He does this in a self-important, monotone narrative that cinematic convention--from classic noir to Apocolypse Now to Terminator 2--has deemed the appropriate way of conveying a cynical protagonist's world-weary pronouncements about the human condition. Helpfully, in the world of The Beach, figurative ugliness and beauty are reinforced by the actual, physical kind: the good tourists, who are either basically decent or amiable eccentrics, are invariably good looking (Richard, his French friends, most of the inhabitants of the commune), whereas the bad tourists, who are seldom seen without a drink in hand, nonsensically shouting, are invariably plain or cartoonish (the surf dude interlopers, the various shots of revelers). At one point the beautiful DiCaprio looks with disgust at a fat, hairy tourist as a Thai masseuse forcefully massages his buttocks. An ugly American indeed! The audience is all but asked to shake its collective head at the shame of it.

Eventually Richard finds himself on a real adventure: mysterious map in hand he sets out to find a paradise, a rumored island with surpassingly beautiful beaches, ample supplies of marijuana, and--most important of all--no tourists. When he gets there he finds that in fact there is a community of like-minded travelers who have settled there and have, over the years, created a sort of hippy-commune for themselves, where they frolic and do hedonistic things during the day, along with a healthy dose of chores like hunting for fish, doing carpentry work around the commune, and light gardening. However, interestingly, Richard himself recognizes that this utopia, for all its alternative-lifestyle trappings, is in substance no different than the sort of mainstream tourism he despises. It was, in the end, "just a beach resort--for people who don't like beach resorts". And throughout his stay, he only refers to his life in the commune as one dedicated to "pleasure" and "fun"--there is no overriding pretense of anything more important going on, either religious/spiritual or ideologically (the place is not connected with environmentalism, for example). For Richard, we are led to believe that--while certainly an improvement over the obnoxious drunken hordes of Koh Phangan, and an interesting and unique enough experience in itself--it has not satisfied his search for the truly authentic and meaningful travel experience. Our protagonist, surprisingly shrewd, has retained his cynicism.

All of which makes what follows so baffling: for even though Richard has admitted the underlying frivolity of his supposed utopia, he goes ahead and jettisons all notions of morality and common decency in order to preserve it. It begins with his indifference to the painful cries of a member who is denied permission to leave the island to visit a dentist, and who has the tooth forcibly removed by the commune's carpenter; and accelerates quickly as he passively allows the murder of four innocent tourists, and soon after goes ahead and deliberately murders an injured man in cold blood by suffocating him. All of these actions, to one degree or another, are motivated by the desire to keep the secret of the commune from leaking--for the commune can only exist in isolation from the hideous tourist-industrial complex that has ravaged the rest of Thailand. His actions--cold blooded murder to preserve what he himself refers to as mere "fun"--render him a monstrous character who ought not to have a shred of the audience's sympathy; yet the movie continues to treat him as the same credible narrator who not long ago encouraged us to judgmentally leer at a tourist merely for receiving a massage in a tacky bathing suit.

This is where I have trouble with The Beach. At first it seems to treat the problem of tourism, of authenticity in travel, with a surprisingly subtle handling: we are hit over the head with the awfulness of the typical drunken partier only to have this complicated by the observation that even the antithesis of this--the alternative life-style hippy commune--is morally no better, both being exercises in vapid hedonism by Westerners who are incurious about and insulated from the authentic native culture they are purportedly there to explore. But Richard's reaction is not to reject the commune and continue his search for the authentic, perhaps by, I don't know, interacting with some locals--no, instead he abruptly leaves the commune and runs around like an idiot in the jungle for a while. What is he doing in there? It is difficult to say. Sometimes it feels like he has rejected all of society in a contented Robinson Crusoe sort of way; other times it feels as if he has reverted to some kind of Rambo-style Vietnam commando mode that the audience had not previously been informed about. Watch him slowly eat a bug! Watch him unblinkingly track his human prey! He even sets a rudimentary jungle booby-trap that seriously maims a druglord's henchman. It is, to me, a nonsensical mish-mash of various Vietnam/jungle tropes that don't connect with the first part of the story.

Eventually he wends his way back to the commune, where--after the aforementioned cold-blooded, first degree murder of a fellow member--he collects the original friends he arrived with and flees the imploding mini-world he had killed to defend, as the druglords run them out by force and their charismatic, murderous-psychopath leader is exposed as a murderous psychopath. Time passes, and we end on a winsome, sentimental note: back in civilization, presumably Bangkok, Richard is checking his email (with the improbable user name "Richard"--but we'll look past that), and has received a photo from his friend he had gone to the island with: it is a group photo of everyone in the commune, jumping and cheering in merriment. The movie insanely asks us to sigh along with Richard at those great times they once had, even though one of the pictured men was killed by a shark and another one was murdered by Richard himself. The movie shows no sign that it is aware of this startling juxtaposition; there is neither wink nor nod, at least that I can detect.

So for me The Beach begins promising but ends in frustration, seeming to fall into thematic incoherence just when it starts getting interesting. Interesting problems are posed, but not only is no remedy or resolution forthcoming, but the latter part of the movie doesn't even seem aware that the problems were posed in the first place. Lame.