The first time Kamala Harris won more than a citywide political contest was in the summer of 2010. Jerry Brown had just decided not to run for another term as California’s attorney general and instead try for a third term in the governor’s office he’d occupied from 1975 to 1983. Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney, decided to join the race to succeed him as AG, and she came out easily on top of a crowded Democratic field. Then, that fall, she barely nosed out her much better-known Republican opponent. It was the beginning of her career as a national figure.
Back during that 2010 campaign, the newly-hired MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell picked out Harris as the candidate Republicans should fear as “the next big Democratic star” and “the female Obama.” He ran a clip of her speech at the victory celebration after she won the primary for attorney general, which I happened to see. Harris, then in her mid-forties, looked and sounded surprisingly similar to the presidential candidate before us now, who turned 60 two weeks before Election Day. But she said something that has stayed with me.
“We are the state that creates leadership for the rest of this country,” she told a cheering crowd of Californians, “based on our belief that we can be tough, and we can be smart—and all the time be dedicated to our history, while being empowered to know our destiny.” It was rhetoric that tapped deep into a shared awareness of California’s outsize role as a trendsetter and model-builder in American life.
That is not the way Kamala Harris talks these days. Unless I’ve missed it, she hasn’t discussed a California “model” or its success stories, the way Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott do about their states, and as her running mate Tim Walz does about his own Minnesota. Her mentions of her time as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of the state are largely grim: sex predators, drug traffickers, domestic abusers safely prosecuted and sent away. Her California background seems to be something she is running despite, rather than running on.
Of course that’s understandable. Harris’ audience now is bigger than the one in 2010. And unlike DeSantis, Abbott, and Walz, she’s never been a governor, with a list of programmatic accomplishments to tick off. But it’s also an obvious tell about California’s changed place in the national and global mind.
California has at many points been held up as an American paradise. Now it’s widely seen as closer to hell. Runaway housing prices, tax burdens, homelessness, congestion, fire, drought, flood. The best sides of tech innovation, and the worst of tech-bro greed and narcissism. These are the state’s hallmarks. This perception is particularly rampant among Republicans: Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans say this one US state has done more damage than good for the country, and that almost half of them don’t consider it “American” at all. Beyond political party, fully half of adult Americans say in polls that California is in decline. As a recent headline put it shortly before Harris became the Democratic nominee, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her as a candidate.
Never mind that one in every eight Americans still lives in California—a population larger than 21 other US states combined—and that its economic output is bigger than any entire non-US country except China, Japan, or Germany, and that it’s the birthplace of an disproportionate share of the world’s most familiar and valuable brand names. The overwhelming sense is that the California miracle is over, its reservoirs of dynamism as tapped out as the Central Valley’s aquifers during recent years of drought.
As a Californian who has spent most of his life in other parts of the United States, and as an American who has lived for more than a dozen years in other parts of the world, I’ve often been struck by the ways declinist alarmism about my home state can feel like a displaced version of declinist alarmism about my home country as a whole.
I’ve been around long enough, and reported on enough of America’s recurring crises, to be familiar with this pattern. The United States, it seems, is always about to collapse or tear itself apart—because of war and turmoil in the 1960s, oil shock and stagflation in the 1970s, the Reagan recession and the Japanese menace in the 1980s, and on through all the other decades’ predicaments, right up to its political divisions today. But just as each wave of declinist certainty sets in, the US somehow wriggles, or struggles, or innovates, or immigrates its way to a quicker rebound than any other country—as it has most recently in its economic growth since the pandemic. America’s long history has been a seesaw between facing dire problems (often of its own creation) and lurching toward solutions. And in this respect above all, what’s true of the United States is true of its most important state: It’s like the fulcrum of the seesaw.
“California is America, but sooner,” the USC sociologist Manual Pastor has said. That goes for huge cultural and demographic shifts (California was the first mainland US state whose diverse population became “majority-minority,” back in the 1990s, a full generation ago) and for era-defining crises, self-inflicted and not. And most importantly, it also goes for solutions—the kind that can redirect the momentum of American life, and life around the world, with a leverage no other state possesses.
Just take the area of gasoline-powered transportation. After World War II, when American car culture was famously getting minted in Southern California, the state used a gas tax hike to build out one of the first modern freeway networks. In the ’50s, the US federal government borrowed that same model to construct the interstate highway system. Then, starting in the 1980s, California led the fight against leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale in 1992, four years before the US as a whole did the same. In 2019, after Donald Trump’s administration rolled back emissions standards for cars, California struck a deal with the world’s leading carmakers, from Ford to Honda to VW and BMW—to make existing standards even tougher in the face of climate change. The size of the California market made this a de facto national standard (which the Biden administration later ratified).
It would be one thing if this were just a history lesson. But the same kind of dynamic is playing out right now in a few crucial arenas that virtually no one beyond California is talking about. And I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for.
I was bullish on these emerging transformations even before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president. If she wins, what she knows from California will presumably affect her approach to the country and the world. Her California-ness is one of the least-discussed but most important aspects of her, including the upbeat approach to today’s diversity and tomorrow’s opportunities that is such a contrast to Donald Trump.
But if she doesn’t get that far, California is likely to chug along with all the more purpose, maintaining its nation-scale example of how else things can be done. Whoever guides national politics, California deserves new attention as the “reinvention state” rather than a “resistance state.” Even under Trump, there’s still a good chance that as California goes, so eventually goes the country, and eventually much of the world. Here are a few illustrations of where it’s headed. None of these is “the” solution to California’s many problems. But each of them illustrates the creative spirit from which solutions have always come.
Train to Somewhere
For starters, let’s return to the thread of transportation: By now, of course, the pioneering freeway system California built in the 20th century is a maxed-out, congested mess. And the state cannot build more freeways; where they’re needed, there’s no more room, and any that are built fill up as soon as they’re opened. Without new forms of transportation, the state will become increasingly paralyzed, and all its other problems will become worse. Which is why, back in 2008, California voters approved a nearly $10 billion initial bond issue to build a high-speed rail line eventually running some 500 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco, through the Central Valley corridor. That was 16 years ago. If you’ve heard anything at all about this project since then, it’s that it is a white elephant, a doomed relic, a cautionary lesson, and any other metaphor for failure you might choose.
And yes, the complaint list is long. The project is way over budget (to the tune of $100 billion) and far behind its original schedule. Parts of the line were supposed to be up and running already. As it is, the first service isn’t projected to begin until 2030—and then only on the 171-mile segment from Merced, in the northern half of California’s Central Valley, to Bakersfield, on the southern end. This abbreviated initial route has been dubbed a “train to nowhere,” a stock insult that grates on people in the Central Valley but captures the frustration of people stuck in LA or Bay Area traffic. And given how the entire funding-hungry project has become an object of the culture wars, it is little wonder that for many, the project seems as remote and implausible as human settlements on Mars.
But I’ve been following the back-and-forth for more than a decade, and I’ve started to see California’s high-speed rail project with a new clarity. In the aviation world, pilots are trained to recognize the “point of no return,” when you’ve gone so far that you’d only lose by going back. That’s where California is with high-speed rail. Consider the weight of a few recent facts: This summer the project received full “environmental clearance” for the entire 463 miles from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco, with clearance for a further 31 miles from LA to Anaheim expected next year. Nearly all of the thousands of necessary land parcels have been secured. Construction in the Central Valley is much further along than most people realize: Some 12,000 people have long been at work there, and test trains should be running in three or four years. And what hasn’t sunk in is that, when done, this will be among the very fastest mainline high-speed rail systems running anywhere on Earth. (At 220 mph, it would beat the 200-mph range for European trains and the famed Shinkansen in Japan, or match the fastest stretches of the Beijing-to-Shanghai line in China.) Not only that, in a worldwide first, California’s system will use solar-generated electricity the entire way.
Over the past decade, I’ve visited Fresno, the biggest city along the initial route (population 545,000), about a dozen times. There and in surrounding areas you can see the rail taking shape month by month, mile by mile. You see the kind of gigantic, heavy-industrial construction projects I remember from living in China, when a new subway line seemed to be opening every month. You see earth movers bigger than school buses; concrete bridge-supports as long as airliners.
“If you listen to California’s political class, the high-speed rail project sounds like a textbook boondoggle,” Yousef Baig wrote on the nonprofit news site CalMatters in January. “Yet in communities across California’s farm belt, the discourse is refreshingly different. It’s a symbol of transformation for a region that’s already bursting with activity.” In part because of housing costs and traffic in the state’s biggest cities, communities in the Central Valley are the fastest-growing in the state; they are also some of the poorest, and the ones hardest hit by drought, particulate pollution, and climate change. These are the cities that will be the first to benefit from these futuristic new trains.
The logic of opening a semirural section of the larger project as soon as possible—and not waiting for the state’s big population hubs before any trains start running—is pretty clear at this point. “I’m firmly convinced that the first time the first customer buys a first ticket for the first true high-speed rail trip on US soil, there will be no going back,” I heard Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg say this spring in Washington. “People will expect and demand it everywhere.”
And lest Americans assume they will remain relegated to the kids’ table of railway systems, the world truly is watching California. At an international gathering of high-speed rail officials this year, I heard officials from France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and even the home of the Shinkansen, Japan, speak eagerly and admiringly about what they hoped to see and learn from California’s system. “It will be an incredible feat of civilization,” Ezra Silk, of the US High Speed Rail Coalition, told me. “It is something we should celebrate as visionary.”
Over the centuries, there’s a consistent pattern: Most big projects seem doomed before they’re done. Being over budget and behind schedule doesn’t prove that a huge infrastructure project will succeed. But it fits a familiar pattern. The Erie Canal. The Transcontinental Railroad. The Panama Canal. Those are just a few of the projects condemned as follies, boondoggles, or cesspools of corruption during the long years before their completion. The jewel of Sydney’s waterfront, its stunning Opera House, was widely ridiculed before its opening. Late, over budget, and the subject of bitter political and legal battles. Now it is hard to imagine the city without it.
The state also doesn’t have an alternative. Not only are new freeways off the table, California will also never open another big airport. Through most of each day LAX and SFO are already landing as many planes-per-hour as they ever will, and San Diego and San Jose are nearly as busy. (I speak as a longtime pilot, and one who has studied peak-capacity issues at the airports.) And if the state tried to meet its transportation demands with new highways and air nodes, they’d be even more expensive than the trains, to say nothing of the climate effects. With high-speed rail, it's time to get all aboard.
The Next Peace Corps
California’s new rail system is meant to set a model for addressing a fundamental “hardware” problem for the state and much of America. What is the main “software” problem for modern America? Disconnection, loneliness, the withering-away of “social capital,” the conversion of neighborhoods and real communities into mere lodging sites, whose residents have as weak a common bond as guests at a crowded hotel. The idea of an atomized America may be overstated—when my wife, Deb, and I spent several years reporting from smaller-town America through the 2010s, we found enough examples of reconnection and civic-mindedness to have made Alexis de Tocqueville proud. But polls, news accounts, and the hell of national politics all suggest that the problem is real.
This is the challenge against which California may be creating its most original and ambitious model, and the one which, in contrast to high-speed rail, is already widely recognized as a success. It’s also the one you’re least likely to have seen covered in the news.
The official name for this five-year-old project—a big, sprawling set of programs—is California Volunteers, or CalVolunteers for short. It is already bigger than the entire Peace Corps. Its programs have more applicants than spaces to fill and are limited only by how quickly the state can expand funding. And states across the country are embracing the model, with credit to its California origins.
CalVolunteers falls under the purview of the state’s chief service officer, a new position in the governor’s cabinet that Gavin Newsom established early in his first term. Since the start of the program, its director has been Josh Fryday, who, like his friend Pete Buttigieg, is in his early forties and has similarities in background and role as “chief explainer” and advocate for his programs. Fryday, from the small Bay Area town of Novato, graduated from UC Berkeley and its law school, then served as Navy JAG officer (and handled Guantanamo cases), then returned to Novato and was elected mayor. He was named to Newsom’s cabinet five years ago, at age 38.
Long before Newsom’s arrival as governor, California—like most states—had a variety of public service and volunteer programs under the CalVolunteers label, many of them in partnership with the nationwide AmeriCorps system. Newsom’s innovation was to elevate them to cabinet level in a new department, with more funding, and to make them a personal trademark issue. (His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, plays an active role as honorary chair of CalVolunteers.)
I began to pay serious attention to this new program in the early stages of the pandemic, when it quickly organized ways around the state for volunteers to fill suddenly-emerging needs—for instance, delivering food or medical supplies to people who were quarantined or unable to go out for it, or working in shelters or other crucial facilities that had lost their normal staff.
I had happened to meet Fryday just before the pandemic lockdowns, when I was visiting my Southern California home town and he was launching a tree-planting program for student volunteers there. As the scope of CalVolunteers programs has expanded since then, my wife and I have been to visit more than a dozen CalVolunteers worksites. Teenagers training for new job skills in downtown Oakland and starting urban gardens in places that had been “heat islands.” Young artists in a beaten-down part of Riverside helping to restore and beautify buildings. Grade-school children around the state learning how to plant and tend to trees.
One of the best-known and largest programs is the California College Corps. It combines the main element of the original GI Bill—namely, rewarding service with educational benefits—with a Peace Corps–like ambition of fostering lifelong connections and a habit of looking for ways to serve. College Corps members commit to spending up to 450 hours on projects in their locality, tutoring and mentoring younger students, assisting in eldercare, working in food banks, doing environmental work, and so on. In return, they earn up to $10,000 toward their college expenses, plus other support from the partner schools themselves, all toward creating a “debt-free path” to a college education. Why $10,000? That’s a typical amount that recipients of Pell Grants, the main federal financial-aid program for college students, provide toward college costs, which often requires their taking out a loan or getting a part-time job. “Ten thousand dollars is a very intentional number,” Fryday told me. “It’s a way to have a debt-free path to an education. It makes the difference between working in a coffee shop to raise the money or serving the community.”
The groups we met were “majority-minority” and in that way representative of the state’s population as a whole. Nearly all said they were the first in their families ever to go to college—and that the financial support and organizational structure of the College Corps had made that step more practical for them. In this third year of operations alone, the College Corps program received 10,000 applications for 3,000 available slots. Fryday’s goal is to have 10,000 graduates of the program by the end of its fourth year. And the number of “partner schools” has expanded from eight the first year to 44 now, ranging from the flagship UC Berkeley campus to small-town community colleges.
If there’s any program more popular than the College Corps, it would be the California Climate Action Corps, which in its latest cycle had six applicants for each of the 400 spaces it could offer. The people in the program improve waterways, plant native drought-resistant trees, restore marshlands, develop urban gardens, equip homes for fire-resistance. This year its members committed to planting 90,000 trees across the state—the sort of long-term, public-benefit project you would associate with Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.
People who have read about the death of civic culture and the despair of screen-bound young Americans should see and meet some of these corps members. One example of hundreds: Chiena Ty, now 27, came to northern California at age 3 from the Philippines with her parents, who were from Manila and southern China. She graduated from California High School in San Ramon and went to college at UC Riverside. But she was attracted to the Climate Action Corps and the chance to serve back in the Bay Area, near her family. We met her at the White Pony Express food reclamation site in Contra Costa County, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. Volunteers ranging from teenagers to retirees spend hours there sorting through expired food from major grocery chains or restaurants and repacking it for food banks, homeless shelters, assisted-living facilities, and other places of need—rather than sending it to a methane-producing landfill. Chiena spent part of each Climate Corps day on the sorting line and part making videos or giving public presentations about the climate consequences of wasted food.
Last year, Deb and I asked the governor why he had put so much emphasis on CalVolunteers. “What are the two driving forces in life?” Newsom responded. “They’re inspiration and desperation, and in this case it was probably the latter.” The worsening polarization of public life made him wonder, he said: “How do we reconcile our differences? How do we soften the edges and tone it down, since divorce is not an option for the country and we have to live together?”
Newsom said that one of his heroes was Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy, who is best known for leading the Peace Corps through its celebrated founding years in the 1960s. Shriver, like so many American civic and cultural leaders of that era, had been a combat veteran of World War II and was forever affected and inspired by the enforced sense of civic connection through the Depression, New Deal, and wartime years.
“The fact is, we no longer have these widely shared experiences,” Newsom told us, referring to Shriver’s time in uniform. In those days, nearly every family had some direct exposure to military service. Now comparatively few do. The point is not that the US needs more wars or more people in uniform but rather that it has dramatically fewer people routinely exposed to fellow citizens of different backgrounds.
“Everyone longs for a sense of belonging, of meaning, of purpose and mission,” Newsom told us. He said that his goal was to make public service so attractive and available that it became “universal”—not mandatory, as with a draft, but normal, natural, and expected, as part of growing up and even as part of growing older. And by “universal,” Newsom also means people in other states. “Absolutely, our ambition is to export this,” Newsom told us.
In the summer of 2023, a few weeks after Chiena Ty guided us through the White Pony Express food reclamation site, she introduced another visitor for a look around another Bay Area conservation site: President Joe Biden. This summer, Biden swore in the inaugural class of the American Climate Corps, citing California as an example for the nation. Half a dozen governors have started projects similar to California’s climate corps and college corps in their states: Vermont, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa, and more, with Republican-led Utah probably next on the list. Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, has explicitly credited CalVolunteers as an inspiration for her new statewide service program. In Maryland, Wes Moore, now in his first term as governor, has launched a new program for volunteer service. “I don’t think we would have been able to do it at this scale if not for the work of California, and other states,” he told me this summer.
Moore is, like Fryday, a young veteran of the “long wars”-era military. He was in the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. “I believe that in a time of divisiveness and vitriol, service will save us,” he said. “Service is sticky. If we can serve together we can thrive.”
A Tech Company That Gives Rather Than Takes
This is California, so we’ll end with a tech story. But it’s not about one of the famous companies that, for all their benefits, are always taking. Taking your particulars. Your preferences. Worst of all, your attention. Instead we’ll talk about a company most people have not heard of.
My parents were part of the great post–World War II migration from the East Coast to California. I grew up with my three younger siblings in the small inland California town of Redlands. Its main business then was orange-growing. It was the kind of place Joan Didion wrote about as being repeatedly blasted by the unforgiving, furnace-hot Santa Ana winds.
As our family kept growing, we kept moving to slightly bigger houses. Many weekends, we drove to the local nursery to buy seed, sod, and supplies. It was run by the Dutch-immigrant Dangermond family. My dad, a small-town doctor, gave some of them medical care.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was my introduction to one of the most powerful, least publicized tech tycoons of our era: Jack Dangermond, son of the immigrant nursery owners, and Laura Dangermond (a couple since they met in the early 1960s at Redlands High). After Jack’s time in college at Cal Poly Pomona and his time in graduate school at the University of Minnesota, followed by Harvard, the couple came back to Redlands. They started a company in an unlikely location, with an entirely novel mission, that has quietly provided the operating system for much of what you do each day.
Esri, short for the original name of Environmental Systems Research Institute, is the most commercially successful entity worldwide in the field known as “GIS”—geographic information system, which is both a precursor of Waze and Google Earth and a vastly more powerful version of either of them. If you have ever done anything involving location—having a package delivered, having a gas or electric or sewer line outside your house repaired, having an ambulance or fire truck or police squad routed to your neighborhood—you have almost certainly relied on software developed by Esri.
Almost every city and state government around the entire world has licensed and used the company’s GIS software for decades to understand where things are and how they interact. National governments use it for climate-forecasting, disease-tracking, regional-planning, and other purposes, including national defense. The United Nations relies on Esri software to track where drought or food supplies are becoming most critical, where the natural environment is most under attack, where global conservation efforts can make the most difference. When Tim Walz was announced as Kamala Harris’ running mate, my reaction was “well, sure” rather than “who’s he?”—because I had heard him talk several times at Esri’s huge international User Conferences, about the way geographical information had guided his policies as governor of Minnesota.
The annual subscription fees for Esri’s software can cost corporations and government agencies many thousands of dollars. The company, still privately owned, is very profitable. But from the start its founders have believed that technology gave their company a responsibility, as well as an opportunity. They’ve made the software available free to K-12 schools around the world and have put more than $10 million into training and curriculum programs for the schools. TechSoup, a site that guides nonprofits to free or discounted technology, has featured Esri software. Jack Dangermond told me recently that, in part through TechSoup, the number of nonprofits using the company’s tools has doubled in the past year and is now more than 10,000. Environmental groups in Brazil and Colombia protecting forest reserves; public high school students in Los Angeles mapping patterns of health, pollution, and poverty in their communities; farmers in Africa mapping climate trends to choose their crops. More than 100 city, county, and regional jurisdictions across Southern California coordinate their transportation, land-use, and zoning programs with Esri software. “It’s a unique, coordinated effort,” Damian Spangrud of Esri told me. “If you’re zoning and you run up against the city boundary, you need to know what’s happening on the other side.”
“A lot of the tech companies take data from their customers and monetize it themselves,” Jack Dangermond said. “What we do is ask our customers to share their data with other customers.” When I talked to Dangermond this month, he said that his users had created more than 73 million online maps from their own data, and more than 120 million counting those on their own local systems, with the total growing by thousands per day.
The “geo-analysis” part of the GIS toolkit includes ways to combine weather data, animal records, flood or fire patterns, and other information to identify the places that really matter for species survival. The NatureServe nonprofit group in the US has created an Esri map of hot spots for “biodiversity importance.” The UN Biodiversity Lab has done it for lands and oceans around the world.
And in California, Governor Newsom signed an executive order kicking off an initiative, involving Esri’s tools, for what he called “Thirty by Thirty,” or 30x30. The idea was to recognize and protect the most biologically important 30 percent of the state’s lands and water, or roughly 6 million acres of land and half a million of coastal and inland waters. It’s an international goal, but California is setting an example in putting it to the test. “This is the first place that has taken it seriously,” Jack Dangermond told me. He said that the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a leading worldwide sustainability organization, has “modeled conservation programs for the globe on what California has done.”
California’s high-speed rail ambition is infrastructure in its most tangible sense. CalVolunteers addresses the civic infrastructure that distinguishes a society in collapse from one renewing itself. Esri’s software provides digital connective infrastructure between the two.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Jerry Brown’s father, Pat Brown, was a two-term governor of the state. He took office intending to do a lot, to do it on a grand scale, to do it fast, and to do it for the long term. It seems incredible in retrospect, but within less than a decade, his plans helped build and open three entire new campuses of the University of California system: San Diego, Santa Cruz, and Irvine. I was a schoolchild through those years and took this pace of expansion in my home state for granted. Now we’d associate it only with overnight-infrastructure projects in China or maybe one of the Emirates.
The story of America involves continued rediscovery of its potential. That is the story of the most American state as well. “I’d give anything to trade for America’s problems,” a senior Chinese bureaucrat told me in 2008, when I was living in Beijing and the United States seemed to be in free fall. America had emergencies; China, he explained, had more threatening long-term weaknesses—as has become clear in the years since then. As I write, America’s immediate political prospects are uncertain. But however this year’s election turns out—with a president who was born in California, or with a California girding itself to show that it still represents the future—the state demands attention for its many innovations, and not just its travails.
“The best minds in the world call California home because they’re liberated from the constraints of conformity and tradition,” Gavin Newsom said in his latest State of the State address. “California has figured out a way to make it work time and time again, decade after decade.”
Is this boosterism? Of course. But it is also an important constant in the American story, and California’s. I’d bet on it again.
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