The California Revolution: Death of Middle-Class Optimism : Governance: Up and down the state, one hears notes of retreat, of secession, of unresolvable problems, of impotent government.

SAN FRANCISCO —  There is a class war being waged in California. It is not, however, of the sort Karl Marx described--not rich against poor. It is the middle class that is in revolt, at war with the rich, at war with the poor.

Was it only three months ago that we watched the lootings in Los Angeles? The riots were not, after all, the French Revolution--it was not the palace of the king the looters were after so much as free diapers and VCRs. Of more lasting significance for our politicians certainly, both Democrat and Republican, is middle-class discontent.

The middle-class revolution is national. Middle-class Americans are angry as hell and are not going to take it anymore. You can hear their anger all day and into the night on talk radio--crabbed voices, thin, determined voices. They are as apt to be angry with congressional perks and with the savings-and-loan boondoggle as with welfare dollars.

Most of the energy behind the ill-fated Ross Perot campaign derived from middle-class anger. As Perot acknowledged in his exit speech, both political parties seem to have gotten the point. There in New York last week, in any case, was the spectacle of Democratic Party officials trying to distance themselves from spend-thrift liberalism in favor of a “middle way.”

One can, of course, date the beginning of the middle-class revolution with the passage of Proposition 13 in California. Californians wanted to protect their homes against skyrocketing property taxes. If the goal was creditable, and in a recent opinion of the Supreme Court legal, the effect of Prop. 13 was to benefit those who had already bought into California at the expense of those who were to come later. And what began as an attempt to protect California’s elderly has ended up costing the young and the poor.

California is growing older, that is what is behind the middle-class revolution. And those Californians who vote are growing older, while those Californians who don’t vote are growing younger. The voters of California are interested in keeping their taxes low at a time when they no longer have children in school; they speak not of investing in the future, but in freezing time, protecting the past.

The irony of the middle-class lament is that California has always been very good to the middle class. California sustained the middle-class dream. Here, land was cheap, water was cheap; here, highways were freeways.

Middle-class California reached its apex in the postwar years. The state matched the largesse and the vision of the GI Bill by building a most extraordinary system of higher education. And why not? There were no potholes in California. Gasoline was as cheap as the winters were mild. We were a people made optimistic by California. The middle class was flattered by California.

Listen to the middle class today. The middle class prides itself on paying its own way. But in truth, California sustained middle-class lives. Here was a bountiful land. (Has anyone imagined what California would have been without gold in its hills or oil in its desert or a generous soil in the Central Valley?) California flattered the middle-class sense of achievement, made platitudes easy. In fact, the hard work of building California fell as often on the poor--such as the Chinese and the Oakie. In the capitol of California’s middle-class ambition, which is Los Angeles, the water was brought in from up north, and jobs depended on Washington deal makers, and cheap labor was brought up from Mexico and then tossed away--declared “illegal”--when Californias tired of the arrangement.

In 1992, it is suddenly clear that middle-class California--despite all its platitudes of self-reliance--did not create its own success. The first thing I would tell those mad-as-hell Californians is this: They are not the only ones who have paid taxes.

On the other hand, I share the middle-class’ impatience. I am, after all, a middle-class Californian. I am appalled by the fast boys in Washington and Sacramento, the lobbyists in their private planes, the university bureaucrat’s salary, the check-bouncing representatives in Congress, the politicians in expensive silk suits. I am discouraged, too, by a public system of elementary and secondary education that gets worse and worse. And a welfare system that is little more than an attempt to buy off the poor.

It does not follow, however, that if tax monies have been improperly spent, we should rebel against the idea of taxation. Nor does the corruption of government absolve us from civic responsibility.

But this is exactly what one hears now in California--notes of retreat. Californians in their villages up north speak of seceding from the state; the elderly retreat from the responsibility of educating the young; the homeowner retreats from the homeless. The problems are too large, people say. Government, in any case, cannot do anything, people say.

What was best about the middle class in California used to be its faith in the future. It was an audacious faith, often ludicrous. Middle-class California defied gravity! We made water run up the side of a mountain. Those Californians who today wearily speak of California’s decline seem to me the biggest betrayers of California. For California used to be a state--they have forgotten their youth--of dreams.

Do not tell me California is finished. My California, just a block away, feels young and optimistic. The woman who owns the beauty shop is black. The coffee shop is owned by a Lebanese. The laundry is owned by Koreans (with a Christian calendar telling the date next to the cash register). Palestinians run the grocery store up the block that is open late. In my California, Mexican and Salvadoran women walk by every morning on their way to “baby city,” the children of the blond middle class. My California entices a man from New York who then promptly opens a cheese store two blocks away.

The problem is that we have no Walt Whitman to give voice to the optimism in the daily lives all around us. Who among us can even dare imagine the music of optimism that moves immigrants to come to this place? Our politicians tweep like mice.

Meanwhile, lucky, always-lucky California, is uniquely positioned as the U.S. meeting point of Asia and Latin America. There might be here in California a new kind of America, an economic and cultural melding such as has never existed. But the governor is sorry to announce that there isn’t money enough to care for the medical needs of illegal aliens . . . and there at the Democratic convention, Barbara Boxer, check-bouncer, New Women’s candidate, announced: “We cannot allow American jobs to be put on a fast track to Mexico, a slow boat to China, or a jet plane to Taiwan.”

If you want to consider a more optimistic possibility for California, I advise you to consider Tijuana--”TJ,” Americans use to call it in those innocent days when we thought it was our own private joke, a dirty little border town. Tijuana today is a city of nearly 2 million, a factory town, a city that recognizes its advantage in being located next to the United States and at the edge of the sea. Tijuana is crowded with young Mexicans who have journeyed from the less prosperous interior of Mexico and with Japanese businessmen.

Travelers. The true travelers I meet today are not middle-class tourists who visit India on cheap packaged deals or burn red for a week in Cancun. The true travelers today are international businessmen and migrant workers. Multilingual, multicultural, men and women who cross borders, they recognize that the future is always only beginning.

I think of Tijuana as the city of the future, the capital of some new California. Dusty, as raw as 19th-Century California, Tijuana is not afraid, while the other California, the California of politicians debating in Sacramento, promises only cutbacks and closures and a lowering ceiling.