The Unspoken Cause of “California Disease”

In my recent series “On the Elites and Counter-Elites,” I proposed that “California was progressive to begin with. There must be no doubt, whatever, about that.” Therefore, theories of demographic change driving political change influenced by The Emerging Democratic Majority were overstated, and using them to influence broader politics would lead to a deranging “California Disease.”

This thesis has two major “bad facts”: California Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Both rose first to California statewide office and later to the presidency of the United States in the 20th century, a feat no California conservative or Republican looks remotely likely to repeat anytime soon.

How can I be confident that neither a demographic surge of immigrants nor the supposed racism of former California Gov. Pete Wilson (R) and the immigration-restrictionist Proposition 187 that he backed in 1994 turned a red state blue? I propose that anti-communism—both ideological anti-communism and the de facto anti-communism of the Cold War–era defense industry—powered the Nixon-Reagan-era GOP in Big Labor’s Golden State. Therefore, Mikhail Gorbachev did as much to kneecap the California Republican Party as a political force as any other person.

Red California

Perhaps understandably for a progressive state, California had a powerful Communist-aligned movement during the high-water period of American communism from 1935 to 1948. Culbert Olson, an open atheist at a time when irreligion was rare, was elected governor on a left-wing platform in 1938, partly in response to his predecessor’s unpopular crackdown on striking longshoremen. Olson, unlike his predecessor as left-wing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair (yes, that Upton Sinclair, the muckraking journalist), enjoyed support from the Communist Party through the Democratic Federation for Political Unity. After 1935, the Soviet Union had encouraged Communist Parties in the democratic West to align with mainstream left-of-center politics during a period of high tension between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. (See “Popular Front” in the InfluenceWatch profile of the CPUSA.)

Gov. Olson proved to be a one-term wonder, defeated for reelection by moderate Republican Earl Warren. But Olson was not the only Communist-backed Democrat of the Red Decade and the World War II years. Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, two of the most accomplished scholars of American communism, identified as Communist allies Ellis Patterson, a one-term U.S. Representative in the 1940s and lieutenant governor under Olson, and Robert Kenny, state attorney general during World War II, unsuccessful challenger to Gov. Warren in 1946, and later defense attorney for the 10 Hollywood figures held in contempt of Congress during inquiries into Communist activities in the film and television industries.

But during the run-up to the 1948 presidential election, with direction from Moscow-aligned foreign sources, the Communists made a gigantic tactical error. Rather than continuing its support for left-wing forces within the Democratic Party, the CPUSA and its allies supported the third-party candidacy of former Vice President Henry Wallace against incumbent President Harry Truman. That decision drew the ire of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) labor union federation president Philip Murray, who while not a communist himself had made common cause with them during the Red Decade. Combined with Soviet repression of democracy in Eastern Europe, this tactical disaster brought American—and Californian—Communism’s high times to an end.

Red California’s Discontents

Moderate liberals like Gov. Warren were not the only beneficiaries of public reaction to Communism’s influence on domestic politics in California. Richard Nixon won a seat in Congress from Los Angeles County in 1946 while pounding the Democratic incumbent over his votes in alignment with the CIO’s political action arm, the CIO-PAC. The CIO-PAC would later be revealed to have been inspired by capital-C Communists.

Rep. Nixon would make a name for himself as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), aiding HUAC’s investigation into Alger Hiss, a former State Department official and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was identified as a Soviet spy by CPUSA defector Whittaker Chambers. (Hiss was later convicted of perjury. After the Cold War, declassified surveillance material conclusively confirmed Hiss’s guilt.) Nixon also supported the Taft-Hartley labor legislation, which included provisions requiring union officials to swear or affirm that they were not Communists, which contributed to the success of non-communist CIO officials in ousting Communists in that union federation.

Nixon parlayed his prominence as an anti-communist first into one of California’s U.S. Senate seats in 1950. Running against left-wing Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas (D-CA), a former Hollywood actress, Nixon portrayed his opponent as a Communist sympathizer aligned with socialist Rep. Vito Marcantonio of New York. Nixon won, and in 1952 he was chosen as the right-wing counterbalance to the perception of Dwight Eisenhower as a moderate on the Republican national ticket.

Another major figure discontented with the presence of Reds in California was a Democrat and trade-union president, Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). SAG and other old-line film-industry unions had fought the Communist-influenced Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). CSU had risen to prominence before the U.S. entry into World War II after a corruption scandal in the stagehands’ union and after leading a successful strike to organize animators at the Walt Disney Company. SAG and the other non-Communist American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions would ultimately win a protracted battle with the CSU after World War II that forms the basis of Hollywood labor organization to this day. For his part, Reagan was summoned to testify before HUAC on his fight with Hollywood Communism alongside Walt Disney himself.

Almost two decades later, Reagan—who had left the SAG presidency in 1952 except for a one-year stint from 1959 to 1960 that involved a five-week strike against the studios—was a law-and-order Republican candidate for California governor in 1966. Reagan trounced Progressive New Dealer incumbent Pat Brown in a landslide. Brown had ridden the coattails of a union-led effort to defeat a right-to-work ballot initiative and of President Eisenhower’s “six-year itch” to the office in 1958 and had won reelection over Nixon in 1962.

Reagan would govern the most recent Republican “trifecta” in California history. (The “trifecta” is defined as single-party control of the governorship and all houses of the state legislature.) The California GOP’s 54-year trifecta drought (as of 2024) ties for the seventh-longest active streak among state-level Republican parties, an indication of the state’s deeply progressive political “bones.”

After the Wall Fell

The last Republican to win a statewide federal election in California as of 2024 was Pete Wilson, who was re-elected to the U.S. Senate in 1988 over sitting Lieutenant Gov. Leo McCarthy (D). Three years later, anti-Communism, which had given fuel to the Republican Party in the state since the 1940s, culminated as a political force with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But politics is not so much about “what have you done for me lately” as “what will you do for me tomorrow.” With anti-Communism seeing its mission completed and the government-funded defense-industry infrastructure that created new generations of anti-Communists no longer needed and subject to the “peace dividend” military cuts, an important pillar of California Republicanism just ceased to exist—sometimes literally, as former defense-industry workers left the state to seek new employment opportunities.

Without the fear of foreign-directed Communist operatives again rising through the ranks of labor and government as they had in midcentury, Big Labor’s Golden State felt free to indulge its formerly somewhat checked progressive id, especially since tax increases on middle-class Californians remained checked by the dead hand of Cold War California’s Proposition 13.

The results can be seen in exit polling, when media outlets bother to conduct them in the now-noncompetitive state. Non-Latino white Californians voted a majority for President Joe Biden in 2020. A larger majority of non-Latino white Californians voted to retain Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in office in 2021. This makes sense, not as the effect of shifting Demographics, but rather as the indulgence of the long-standing progressivism of a state that saw the principal reason for the existence of its Republican Party completed.