In this case, the subject of my title is a must-read column by Paul Krugman, titled Lessons from a Comeback
He points out California is the birth of much of the modern Conservative Republicanism, dating back to Reagan, a conservatism that has loved to bash California. Except most of what it likes to say has been proven untrue, and the problems the state does have bear little if any relationship to the charges Republicans like to make.
You can and should read that. Then there is what he says in conclusion.
California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.
And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.
And if this agenda is successful, it will have national implications. After all, California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too.
So is California still the place where the future happens first? Stay tuned.