Ezra Klein writes for the New York Times (behind paywall) a column syndicated to the Salt Lake Tribune with this intriguing title, “California Is Making Liberals Squirm.” Indeed, check out this example Klein gives.
San Francisco is about 48% white, but that falls to 15% for children enrolled in its public schools. For all the city’s vaunted progressivism, it has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country — and many of those private schools have remained open.
Fascinating ... “segregation academies” in liberal California ... who knew? You’d think them normal in Atlanta or Dallas. This is a good example of a CA tendency Klein notes (emphasis added).
There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. In California, the same split political personality exists, but in reverse: We’re often symbolically liberal, but operationally conservative.
Klein has good examples. He describes CA environmental protection laws being used by homeowners to kill development in their neighborhoods.
During the 30-some years we lived in rural NorCal, the DrsC experienced two separate ad hoc neighborhood efforts which did exactly this NIMBY thing, quite cynically. One killed a subdivision, the other stopped the establishment of a new Indian reservation. Why? Because each would have damaged the rural experience.
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Pro tip: because many paywalled NYT opinion pieces are syndicated to other papers, it is often possible to read them online as we did here. Some papers running syndicated NYT material are not behind a paywall. Web search the NYT title for alternate venues.
