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California’s woes were born in England The state is torn between clashing Anglo traditions

Is this freedom? Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

Is this freedom? Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images


October 21, 2024   9 mins

The more time you spend in California, the less sense its politics make. It’s progressive, of course. But the style of progressivism in the West Coast is distinct from that in the East, in roughly the same way that Silicon Valley-style capitalism differs from the Wall Street variety. The West Coast species is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent. On the one hand, it’s the same schoolmarmish, nanny-state liberalism you can find in any blue state: bans on plastic straws, quotas for women on corporate boards, mandated gender neutral toy aisles. On the other, it’s the exact inverse: permissiveness verging on criminal negligence.

In San Francisco, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as “progressive”.

What California does, the rest of the country tends to follow. In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?

We can start by tracing its roots to medieval England. In his 1989 book, Albion’s Seed, the historian David Hackett Fischer describes four distinct American political traditions that originated in four waves of migration to the New World, each from different regions of England. The most famous of these groups were the Puritans from East Anglia, who believed in community and the power of the state. Then there were the “Scots-Irish” from the Scottish-English borderlands, who shunned any form of authority whatsoever. Together, these two groups would come to shape the politics of contemporary California.

“How can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?”

The Puritans who sailed into Massachusetts Bay in the early 17th century were pious middle-class artisans and yeoman farmers fleeing religious persecution in England. Their leaders dreamed of establishing a Christian utopia in America. The Puritans had a bleak view of humanity. They believed in Original Sin, and in mankind’s infinite capacity for evil. But this cynicism was offset by their reverence for community, through which people could be steered toward godliness. Their faith in the common good manifested itself in the town hall, a centuries-old institution that the Puritans brought from the Old Country. Every adult male could participate in a town meeting, where the goal was to achieve consensus, rather than a mere majority. New England townships voted for high taxation, and their level of public spending was two-to-four times that of other North American colonies.

All this meant that the modern American understanding of “liberty” was alien in Puritan New England, where individual rights were not really rights at all, but privileges bestowed by the commonwealth. Puritans spoke not of liberty, but of liberties: discrete permissions granted by the government, such as the liberty to fish in a particular river. Fischer describes these liberties as “specific exemptions from a condition of prior restraint”, suggesting that the natural state was one of state discipline, not personal freedom. In other words, it was the role of the government to regulate the behaviour of its citizens, not vice versa.

In the centuries that followed, the Puritan social ideal would spread from New England across the continent and become one of the foundational elements of American politics. This was no accident: the Puritans believed it was their God-ordained duty to expand Christian civilisation and save lost souls. Their evangelical spirit became part of the secular worldview of the Yankees.

This worldview would eventually come to embed itself in California. The Yankees were the first Americans to explore the Pacific Coast by ship, as fur traders. They feared that, without their spiritual example, California would be lost to the Catholicism of French rival fur trappers and Spanish-speaking “Californios”. That threat only grew with the discovery of gold in 1848, as Americans flocked West seeking anything but Christian enlightenment. Yankee ministers began preaching against the Gold Rush in New England, discouraging their kinfolk from making the trek; then, they took to the road themselves, spreading the Word in the saloons and brothels of California. By 1849, almost half of the vessels docked in San Francisco’s port had arrived from New England.

The Yankee elite dreamed of turning California into a Massachusetts on the Pacific, and New Englanders into “the founding race of California”, in the words of the historian Kevin Starr. They went about founding civilising institutions, through which they could assert their influence. New Englanders poured money into new Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches all over San Francisco. They founded the city’s public school system. Across the Bay, they established the College of California, which would later become the University of California at Berkeley. But while the Yankees dominated the state’s emerging cultural establishment, they did not make up a majority of California’s population. This meant they were denied the political hegemony they had achieved in the Northern states, from Boston to Minneapolis.

According to the US Census, less than 30% of Californians in 1860 were born in Yankee-dominated states. A third were born in California, and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”. And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures: the Yankees and the Scots-Irish emigrants of Greater Appalachia.

Unlike the community-minded Puritans, the Scots-Irish were fierce defenders of personal liberty. Their love of freedom was born in the rugged borderlands between England and Scotland, a contested region of unremitting warfare throughout the Middle Ages. Vicious military raids on behalf of a stream of duelling Scottish and English monarchs were a routine part of life. The poor grew used to watching their homes razed to the ground, their family members tortured or killed. Without a government to lean on, families aligned themselves into warrior clans and waged blood feuds to settle disputes. So despised were the inhabitants of this border region that in the 16th century the parliaments of both Scotland and England passed a law declaring that “All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock.”

In the 17th century, with the two kingdoms unified under James VI, the borderlands were finally pacified through a campaign of state-sanctioned mass murder. Many of the borderland’s ruffians headed to Ireland, from where they were banished once again to the colonies. Many more fled voluntarily, seeking freedom in America.

These fugitives arrived primarily through the port of Philadelphia, but quickly fled to the backcountry. In the mountains and hollows of the Appalachian wilderness, they could at last enjoy their independence — and continue in their violent folkways. Fischer describes one traditional Scots-Irish “rough and tumble” match between a Kentuckian and a West Virginian. Even after the Virginian gouged out the eyes of the Kentuckian, Fischer narrates, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the “Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears and nose, gave in”.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, as America drove relentlessly West, the Scots-Irish acted as the new nation’s advance guard. Instead of waiting for the US military to defeat the Indians before moving onto their land, as the Yankees did, the backcountry settlers waged war upon the natives by themselves. They were driven, however, less by a desire to expand American civilisation than to escape it. Fleeing the government’s encroachment upon the frontier, they pushed West — and eventually wound up in California, Oregon, and Washington.

They brought their belligerent folkways with them. California in the 19th century was one of the most violent places on the continent. As the historian Elliott West has noted, this was a period of racial re-ordering in the state, during which Anglo-Americans asserted their place at the top of the hierarchy. In the middle decades of that century, lynchings in California — of Hispanic Californios, principally — were at least as common as lynchings of black people in the Jim Crow South. In 1854, the murder rate in Los Angeles was 56 times that of New York City.

As on the Atlantic seaboard, the Scots-Irish settled in the mountains and valleys rather than in the coastal port cities. To this day, their individualistic worldview continues to shape the politics of rural California, with its populist agrarian politics, its small-government conservatism, and its distrust of the coast-dwelling liberal elite. But their influence wasn’t limited to the inland regions. The Scots-Irish pioneers infused California’s hegemonic brand of progressivism — which one might describe as fundamentally Yankee — with a touch of backcountry libertarianism, and in doing so, transformed the politics of the state.

Perhaps the clearest example of this ideological fusion was the apotheosis of California progressivism: the Sixties. The closest the Yankees ever got to uncontested national political power was the New Deal era, which brought the entire country into alignment with the Yankee vision of liberty. Yet the Sixties saw a generation of young people seek to dismantle the social and political machinery that the New Deal had built — and that spark was lit on the campus of that hallowed Yankee institution, the University of California, Berkeley.

The Berkeley student revolutionaries were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, but after facing resistance to their civil rights activism from university administrators, their cause transformed into something more personal. The University of California system was the pinnacle of Yankee social engineering: a massive, egalitarian government institution that transformed the individual into the ideal citizen. Against the backdrop of Jim Crow and then the Vietnam War, however, that system became odious to the post-materialist, middle-class agitators of the New Left. Mario Savio’s plea in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in 1964 was an explicit rejection of Yankee social conformity:

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be […] made into any product! Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organised labour, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”

Over the next decade, Berkeley’s libertarian strain became ever more central to the evolving counterculture. Activists resisted not just the politics and the mass industrial economic structures of the era, but mainstream American culture altogether. They grew their hair, renounced all forms of authority, and eventually fled the cities to establish self-sufficient agricultural cooperatives in the countryside. In this, they followed the well-worn path of the Scots-Irish settlers of the Appalachian backcountry. The conservative, rural Californian communities that those settlers had established a century before may have had little affection for their new hippy neighbours, but they were, in fact, animated by the same American spirit and the same animosity for Yankee authoritarianism.

As the New Left faded in the Seventies, its anti-establishment zeal was absorbed into Silicon Valley’s startup culture, and into a distinctly West Coast style of progressivism. This is reflected in liberal California’s instinctive contempt for the police, its high tolerance for visible social disorder, its celebration of cultural non-conformity, and its theatrical embrace of hedonism, all of which are antithetical to the Puritan ideal. At the same time, Californian progressivism has retained its Yankee predilection for top-down social regulation, government activism, moral surveillance, and cultural evangelism.

From time to time, as in the Sixties, this ideological hybrid yields a politics that is vital and new. But more often, it manifests as a distinctively dysfunctional kind of progressive politics that sets the state apart from its Yankee cousins. There is no better example of this than the way that the state manages its mental health crisis. California once ran a vast Department of Mental Hygiene, but in 1967, shocked by conditions in its 14 asylums, state legislators all but banned involuntary commitment of the insane in a law they characterised as a “Magna Carta” for California’s mentally ill. In doing so, the state swung from an excess of Yankee-style social control to the opposite extreme: a hardcore civil libertarian regime that has left the mentally ill languishing on city sidewalks. This right to suffer from drug addiction and psychosis on the street without intervention from the government may constitute “freedom” in the Scots-Irish backcountry, but a traditional Yankee would not recognise it as such.

“The right to suffer from drug addiction on the street may constitute freedom in the Scots-Irish backcountry, but a traditional Yankee would not recognise it as such.”

Drug policy is another case-in-point. California’s libertarian attitude toward recreational drug use began in the Sixties. Today, its ramifications can be seen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and South of Market districts and Skid Row in Los Angeles, where not only drug use but open drug dealing is decriminalised, in part as a result of Proposition 47, a progressive ballot initiative that California voters passed in 2014. In San Francisco’s influential activist circles, drug-dealing is hardly considered a crime at all, and drug enforcement is deemed an act of state repression against the poor. The assumption, which would be right at home in the Appalachian backcountry, is that the government is nothing more than a malign apparatus of coercion. Those same activists, however, also believe in the government’s responsibility to provide expansive services and treatment to those who want it — reflecting the political philosophy of colonial New England.

California’s convoluted policies toward drugs and mental illness have combined to exacerbate its colossal homelessness problem, setting it apart, once again, from progressive Yankee states. California has the highest rate of unsheltered homelessness, followed by Oregon, whose settlement history and politics are very similar to those of Northern California. By contrast, New York City, whose upstate region was settled by Yankees, has the third lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness in America. Its success in bringing its homeless population indoors is thanks to its “right to shelter” law — a classic top-down Yankee solution to an urgent social problem. Neither California nor Oregon has such a law. What’s more, homeless advocates on the West Coast fight to prevent city governments from infringing on homeless people’s freedom to sleep in tents on the street, a liberty that would be easily understood by the Scots-Irish of Appalachia but would perplex the Puritans of New England.

The result of this inscrutable ideology is a state that fails to fulfil the most elementary obligation of government: the provision of basic social order. You see it everywhere in California, in the tent encampments that line the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica and the dusty sidewalks of Fresno and Bakersfield. California is where two fundamentally incompatible Anglo traditions merged, yielding a unique kind of social dysfunction that’s as indelible a part of the state as the coastal cliffs and the redwood forests.


Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, California.

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J Bryant
J Bryant
18 days ago

I don’t know if the author’s interpretation of Californian history is correct, but his article is certainly fascinating and offers a more-or-less plausible explanation for a state politics that is becoming increasingly incomprehensible.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
18 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

I agree. I’d add though, that a more accurate header would have been “born in the British Isles” rather than in England, which is a needless diminution of the range of ethnicities involved, and would actually help explain some of the inherited conflicts of world-view.

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
17 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Yes, the title does not reflect the argument of the article.

Simon Diggins
Simon Diggins
17 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

I agree. One should not forget the emigration of the Irish, not just the Scots-Irish (ie Ulster- and Galloway- men and women); the Highland Scots, who were ‘cleared’ from the land by the tartan-wearing aristocracy; the single largest group to emigrate to USA after the American Revolution, the Germans. All brought their characteristics with them but how much they ‘melted’, in the ‘melting pot’ may have more to do with circumstances they found themselves in, rather than the strength of their imported behaviours.

I’ve met many Protestant Murphys in America, but I doubt there is a single one in Ireland; in other words, many immigrants consciously chose to eschew their previous characteristics.

Craig Strachan
Craig Strachan
17 days ago
Reply to  Simon Diggins

Pretty sure the late, not-so-great Lenny Murphy was a Prod.

Eamonn Toland
Eamonn Toland
17 days ago
Reply to  Simon Diggins

I know what you mean, and I think your point is right. You could argue that the stubborn determination of Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland to cleave to their faith despite the denial of the most basic civil rights by the Anglican Ascendancy was a quintessentially British act of defiance, which wasn’t necessary in the New World. Ironically, many of the lawless Scots-Irish Border Reivers who were dumped in Ulster after the Plantation went on to a life of Anglican respectability in Fermanagh and Tyrone.
I appreciate the Protestant Murphy comment was a throwaway line, but as it happens, one of the most notorious Protestant loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland, a leader of the Shankill Butchers, was called Lenny Murphy. Many Protestant politicians have Gaelic antecedents, including Arlene Foster (nee Kelly). Similarly on the nationalist side you had John Hume and Gerry Adams.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
17 days ago
Reply to  Simon Diggins

My mother’s family were protestant Kelly’s from Alabama and the panhandle of Florida.

Michael Cavanaugh
Michael Cavanaugh
14 days ago
Reply to  Simon Diggins

Andrew Greeley discovered some time ago that a slight minority of Irish-Americans were Prod. (The Irish spread across the US, not just the cities. The church was unable to supply enough clergy. Many Irish migrated over to Prod churches by default.)

Alan Day
Alan Day
12 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Indeed. Scots-Irish surely takes in Northern Ireland/ Ulster where many Scots emigrated during the plantation of Ulster (Scotch-Irish our Ulster-Scots). The Border Reivers were the folk on the Scottish/English border.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
17 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

It’s interesting how American writers will do almost anything not to acknowledge that their politics, like ours, are driven almost entirely by the growing parasitism of the suburban graduate class.

Boston Al
Boston Al
17 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Actually the author does acknowledge more or less exactly that in an earlier piece that he wrote here:
https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/inherit-the-earth

General Store
General Store
17 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

It’s a great article…..except for this ‘scots-irish’ thing. The borderland between England and Scotland is the fabled ‘debateable lands’ the last bastion of tribalism outside and hostile to the emerging central nation-state(s)..North or South. But why he keeps on say these are ‘Scots-irish’ is beyond me. Those would Northern Irish protestants….or Irish- ancestored catholics in South west Scotland….but nothing to do with England surely.

anthony henderson
anthony henderson
17 days ago
Reply to  General Store

He’s talking about the Border Reivers of Northern England and Southern Scotland, exiled first to Ulster after the union of the Crown, many of them then went on to Appalachia in the US. they were mainly Protestant. The Irish and Highland Catholics came later settling along the east coast and the Boston area.

General Store
General Store
17 days ago

I don’t think they were from the east side or the northumberland/cumbria….all Scots.

anthony henderson
anthony henderson
16 days ago
Reply to  General Store

Have a look at some of the place names in the Appalachian area, the name ‘Cumberland’ is one of the most prominent.

Alan Day
Alan Day
12 days ago

Lots of Scots voluntarily went to Northern Ireland during the plantation of Ulster under the Scottish Lords Hamilton & Montgomery etc in the 1600’s

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
17 days ago
Reply to  J Bryant

Well he sticks with the traditional narrative that “The Puritans who sailed into Massachusetts Bay in the early 17th century were pious middle-class artisans and yeoman farmers fleeing religious persecution in England.”
I think more accurately they left England so they could engage in religious persecution which the old country would not accommodate.

Eamonn Toland
Eamonn Toland
17 days ago

Britain can be justifiably proud of its pioneering contributions to the development of civil and religious liberty. Having said that, the rights and privileges of the Glorious Revolution were mostly reserved for members of the Anglican communion.
Linda Colley in her book Britons goes so far as to characterize the shared Protestantism of Anglicans and Non-Conformists as foundational to the formation of a British identity – an island of enlightenment in a sea of popery. Yet religious minorities such as Quakers were excluded from the economic and social levers of power wielded by the landed gentry, much to the benefit of the Industrial Revolution.
The formation of the United Kingdom in 1801 was supposed to relieve Catholics and Presbyterians in Ireland from the last of the Penal Laws they had endured for more than a century, yet it would be nearly another three decades before a Catholic was allowed to sit in Westminster as an MP.
I have no doubt that the Pilgrim Fathers who were intent on building a new Jerusalem in Massachusetts were more than happy to impose their views on others. That doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer persecution themselves.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
17 days ago
Reply to  Eamonn Toland

Very good points.
Puritans moved to the USA because their type of society was opposed in England,
James Burke stated that the Non Conformists could not enter grammar and public schools and universities which taught classics, law, Hebrew and maths they set up Dissenting Academies where they learnt, maths, book keeping, surveying, modern languages and educated at least half of those who created the Industrial Revolution.
France murdered the Protestants in 1581 who constituted most of the silk weavers and bankers . Silk weavers were the most advanced craftsmen, who fled to England . The modern equivalent would be killing those in silicon valley and forcing them to flee overseas.

David McKee
David McKee
17 days ago
Reply to  Eamonn Toland

You’ve read Colley? Good choice – she’s an excellent historian.

Still, we should not get too hung up about the reivers or the Scots-Irish. The outer reaches of the British Isles were places where civilisation was a little primitive until comparatively recent times.

Migrants from these parts helped to form the distinctive culture of Australia. (Free emigrants far outnumbered the convicts in the penal colony.) So it’s reasonable to suppose they made an impression on America.

However, they migrated to Canada too. So where is the equivalent impression in modern Canada?

Ian Wigg
Ian Wigg
12 days ago

They also left England and went to The Low Countries where they possed off the Dutch as well. It was from there that they subsequently headed to America.

T Bone
T Bone
17 days ago

Probably overly reductive but extremely enlightening. Every locale picks a balance of top down order and rugged individualism. California just found a very poor and contradictory balance.

That’s probably why they’re trying to spread progressivism so desperately. If everybody else embraces libertarian authoritarianism and it gets federally universalized than they’re not only relevant as trendsetters but off the hook for their debt ridden balance sheet.

Hugh Jarse
Hugh Jarse
17 days ago
Reply to  T Bone

But at some point there will be a reckoning. Suspect the dysfunction will become worse before it reaches a turning point. Perhaps another decade or so, following middleclass and corporate flight that has eviscerated the tax paying base….?

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
17 days ago
Reply to  T Bone

Lack of commmon sense . As Commander Ericson says ” One can do a lot with common sense at sea, but little without it. “

Jeremy Bray
Jeremy Bray
17 days ago

I have not read “Albion’s seed” but I notice it’s theme seems to bear similarity to Thomas Sowell’s “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” where he attributes the character of “Black culture” to the white Anglo-Irish cracker culture absorbed by the blacks of the American Southern States. According to Sowell the greater propensity to criminality within the black community is derived from blacks having absorbed the violent and unruly culture of the Southern Anglo-Irish whites.

John MUllen
John MUllen
17 days ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

I was thinking the same thing. I usually like Sowell, but on this I found his preference for the teacher’s pet of New England over the subculture that created bluegrass music and bourbon whiskey baffling.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
17 days ago
Reply to  Jeremy Bray

“Is this a private fight or can anyone join in ?”

Bernard Hill
Bernard Hill
17 days ago

An interesting thesis, which has support from Thomas Sowell, where the Scots-Irish Borderers are concerned. His book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” highlights their influence on southern Black American culture.

General Store
General Store
17 days ago
Reply to  Bernard Hill

The borders are not Scots Irish…..they are anglo-scottish…if anything …..but actually were hostile to states on both sides …and ethnically…..all Anglo-Saxon as opposed to Celtic. ….Nothing whatsoever Irish….There is an Irish community in Newcastle…. but they came much later…18th /19th century ,,,

Ned Costello
Ned Costello
17 days ago
Reply to  General Store

After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the mid-1600s thousands of people from the Anglo-Scottish border areas were invited to move to Ireland, particularly Ulster, to settle the land there and establish a loyal Protestant community in what had been the most Gaelic part of Ireland. 100 or so years later many of their descendants for various reasons emigrated to the American colonies where they became known as the “Scotch-Irish”, it would be an misleading to refer to them as English. their descendants became some of the most famous characters in American history such as Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson and several of the early American presidents.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago

Incredibly shallow interpretation of various aspects of California history and sociology resulting in a narrative that mostly does hold up to scrutiny.

Richard Riley
Richard Riley
17 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Could you suggest more reading?

John Ellis
John Ellis
17 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Yes, care to explain your view, UR?

AC Harper
AC Harper
17 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Agreed. The article omits the fact that in 2020 over 39% of California were Hispanic or Latino. That’s another migration to consider.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago
Reply to  AC Harper

The social issues involved in California liberalism were not submitted to the voting public, and there have been no candidates offering clear alternative visions of morality expressed through law that a more socially conservative Mexican population could choose. Nor across America now. Neither party reflects a coherent moral position. The Democrats would legalize marijuana and the Republicans protect pornography.

Magdalena Algarin
Magdalena Algarin
16 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I think you got this partially correct. But it is dems who are into both legalizing drugs while making the addicted persons victims (and they are to a certain degree), but there is something called freedom of choice. I also think the Dems are the ones pushing child pornography and sex abuse, and in more ways than one.
The following might sound a bit simple, but I see the dems as the controllers of the American people and Trump, a republican, as the freedom defenders, overall.
Listen to Jen Jakielek interviews (American Thought Leaders) on Epoch Times. I can only speak for him because I only watch American Thought Leaders episodes.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago
Reply to  AC Harper

The author pretty much ignores the incredibly cosmopolitan nature of 20th Century migration to California, especially post WW2 migration. It is absurd to posit that current attitudes about homelessness, crime, or treatment/lack of treatment for mental health and addition arise from a migratory duality that probably ceased to matter much in California by the early 1900s. The author’s contention that the de- institutionalization of mental health services arose solely from a state legislature eager to end barbaric conditions in mental hospitals is to ignore the role that effective psycho-tropic drugs and legal doctrines emerging at the national level enshrining the notion of “least restrictive environment” for the care of mentally ill individuals played in closing most in-patient mental facilities in California and elsewhere. The failure of the outpatient model for treatment of sever mental illness that followed hospital closure was largely a matter of inadequate funding/resources and misguided legal decisions regarding involuntary commitment that impacted jurisdictions around the entire country. The presence of so much visible homelessness in California is a product of many things. Certainly the benign climate which makes it possible for people to live outdoors year round is probably the single most important factor determining whether a homeless person is willing to seek shelter indoors with all of the restrictions and limitations to personal freedom that might entail. The lack of available affordable housing also plays a pivotal role. Most people in California, progressive or otherwise, don’t feel ambivalent about issues surrounding homelessness or crime. It is a real stretch to suggest otherwise. At any rate, the current misguided progressive impulses that impede solutions to the present disastrous social conditions in California can hardly be ascribed to the the Scots-Irish mindset of a settler class that no longer really matters in California scheme of things. Try to sell that to Jewish, Italian, Asian, African-American, and Hispanic elected officials who make up the majority of California legislators at the state and national level.

AC Harper
AC Harper
17 days ago

If we are being reductive then take it a step further… political ideology is not paramount as it only (at best) modulates the local society. If ‘the four waves of migration’ are still discernible then political thought has not achieved as much as the politicians would have you think.
Me? I blame the Romans, what did they do for us?

Jeff Dudgeon
Jeff Dudgeon
17 days ago

Ulster Scots blamed again for the world’s ills, second only to the Serbs and the Jews.

Craig Strachan
Craig Strachan
17 days ago
Reply to  Jeff Dudgeon

As a Scots-born Californian with family roots in Co Down I endorse this sentiment.

David McKee
David McKee
17 days ago

What a beguiling interpretation! I suspect Fischer was right about the Puritans, but I’m not convinced about the people from the Anglo-Scottish borders. They were known as reivers, and they were a lawless pain in the rear end for everyone.

I strongly doubt if anyone wanted them to move to Ulster in the plantations of the early seventeenth century. They would hardly have been a pacifying influence, which was the whole point of the exercise. My ancestors (I was born in Belfast) probably came from peaceable and loyal Ayrshire. There are lots of McKees there, just as there are in Northern Ireland.

The Irish migrants to America (Catholic and Protestant) were at the bottom of the colonial social heap. Either they became servants, or they were pushed to the edge of the colonies to tame the wilderness. Examples include Davy Crockett and Sam Houston. They were a pretty tough breed- they had to be.

From that point, I think Fischer is pretty well on the money.

Eamonn Toland
Eamonn Toland
17 days ago
Reply to  David McKee

A lot of the “Anglican” settlers of western Ulster, especially Fermanagh, came from Reiver stock. Long before Australia was available for the transportation of outlaws, the opening up of Ulster was seen by Francis Bacon, among others, as an excellent way of reducing the challenges of overpopulation in England and Scotland, which hadn’t seen a cull of the young male population through warfare for some time.

David McKee
David McKee
17 days ago
Reply to  Eamonn Toland

Really? I didn’t know that. Interesting. But it would not account for the impact of Irish settlers generally. The Irish (Protestant and Catholic) formed the backbone of the Continental Army. They could not possibly all have been reivers.

It might be better to think of the less civilised parts of the British Isles – western Ireland, the Scottish highlands (think of the Glencoe Massacre), and north Wales, as well as the border between England and Scotland.

Eamonn Toland
Eamonn Toland
17 days ago
Reply to  David McKee

You’re right, they weren’t all reivers. As well as providing troops for the Continental army, Irish soldiers probably represented a third of the British Army at Waterloo (including Wellington himself).
The Ulster Plantation threw up some oddities. One of the leading Planters of Scottish Protestants was the Catholic Earl of Antrim, Randall MacSorley MacDonnell. Many of the Scots settlers in Antrim and Down migrated from Ulster to America in the eighteenth century.
In Fermanagh two of the most prominent planters were John and Alexander Hume, who encouraged Reiver families to move to the area.
Jonathan Bardon’s book the Plantation of Ulster has a lot of fascinating insights on the period.

Stuart Adams
Stuart Adams
17 days ago

Fishcher intended Albion’s Seed to be the first volume of a history that spoke of other influences on American culture. Conspicuosly, it does not get around to talking about Dutch, French, German, Scandinavian and Scottish Protestant influences on the political culture of the Middle Colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware) and how people from those colonies/states moved west and did a lot to influence, for example, the unique political cultures of Illinois and it’s state capital, Chicago. Post-Revolution, of course, there were wave after wave of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Ukraine and so on. And lets us not forget, that Ashkenazi Jews were among the early settlers New Netherland/New York. Born on the west coast of Canada in 1946, by the way, I can report that student radicals seriously interested in politics were a deadly serious lot who did not have a whole lot in common in hedonistic hippies. And let’s not forget that Hilary nee Rodman was Goldwater Girl during that era and, at the time, probably thought Ayn Rand was a serious political thinker.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
17 days ago

Border Reivers is the correct name for those on the Scottish English Border.
div > p:nth-of-type(2) > a”>Clan Armstrong – Wikipedia
Family motto – I remain unvanquished.
div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>Walter Scott of Harden – Wikipedia
I would suggest the reivers are a mixture of Scot, Pict, Viking, Anglo Saxon and Norman. Basically a warrior breed. Many of the best rugby players come from this area. Some settled in Ulster , hence Scots Irish. Wllie John McBride and Richie McCaw.
As Orwell said
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
The Californian hippy is of no practical use in defending people but the Reiver is superb. Jason Fox , formerly a sergeant in the SBS said the British special forces are superb because they train in hilly, wet, windy and cold conditions for which Reivers have been bred. Many of the best and toughest members of the USA Armed Forces are of Reiver stock.
div > p:nth-of-type(9) > a”>William H. McRaven – Wikipedia

Glynis Roache
Glynis Roache
17 days ago
Reply to  Charles Hedges

Absolutely, that’s how Reivers were bred. Coming from the North East of England and partially descended from a ‘clan’ of border Reivers that still carry the name (a grandfather’s name, I use my married name)as per the non fiction book ‘The Steel Bonnets’ by George MacDonald Fraser, I can attest to the fact that not only culture but genetics, even diluted, will out in certain circumstances. Scattered descendants of ‘our’ clan are frequently auburn haired, frightened of nobody, endlessly loyal to family and friends but, downside, occasionally prone to the modern equivalent of a bit of sheep stealing.
   I believe that across the pond, the University of Michigan once did some psychology experiments comparing the effect of insults on northerners and southerners. I must admit that, to help a friend who was doing a psychology PhD, I took part in a similar thing at Bristol Uni around 1970. It was a little more complicated than straightforward response to insult, but, horror of horrors, my results had to be taken out of the finished paper for spoiling the graphics. Amiable future professional that I thought I was and subsequently became, I am apparently something approaching a closet psychopath. Comes of being tested alongside a bunch of southern wussies.

David McKee
David McKee
17 days ago
Reply to  Glynis Roache

Awww, I bet you’re as soft as butter, you!

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
17 days ago
Reply to  Glynis Roache

I think one ignores the Viking influence. Under Danelaw there was little serfdom. Also the Vikings were larger, stronger and more violent than any other race. Rowing on a fixed seat in open boat will produce strong hardy men. Arab writers marvelled at their physiques when they served the Byzantium Emperors.
Much northrn dialect is close to Danish, water is pronounced watter, bairn for stream.
Just walking across moorland into the face of a gale carrying a load will produce strong people. Also the cold wet windy conditions induce hyperthermia quicker than colder dryer and less windy conditions because of greater heat loss. There was always plenty of protein and eating oats and root crops combined with the cold are evolution drivers for producing larger stronger people. One has to keep moving when out of doors, especially in winter.
Dry stone walling in winter at altitudes above 1000ft in Northumbria will toughen one up.

Tony Price
Tony Price
17 days ago

For someone who obviously hates California as he does, it’s strange that he chooses to live there! I have no idea of current conditions myself, but I was annoyed that he talks about four waves of migration from England, then just mentions two, of which one wasn’t even English! I also thought that there was plenty of migration west across the US from the European (ie German, Scandinavian etc) migrants, especially in the 1930s.

anthony henderson
anthony henderson
17 days ago
Reply to  Tony Price

The other two were the minor aristocracy of Virginia and the Quakers of Pennsylvania.

Jon Barrow
Jon Barrow
17 days ago
Reply to  Tony Price

You need to read or at least read about ‘Albion’s Seed’.

blue 0
blue 0
17 days ago

I grew up on the Oregon coast in the 70’s. Oregon was very much a F the government state. It was one of the last to implement the 55 mph nationwide speed limit. After implementation the fine for exceeding the 55mph was a passive-aggressive act.
Now Oregon, much like CA is totalitarian state for law-abiding citizens and a free for all for criminals and addicts.
This the authors explanation is not correct IMHO.
It is 40 years of one party rule. The last time when Oregon had a GOP governor was 1986.

Magdalena Algarin
Magdalena Algarin
17 days ago
Reply to  blue 0

I can’t RELATE to this article. It doesn’t feel or look true. I see a lot of Soviet Union Stalinism like policies, ideologies, and a lot of brainwashing going on in America and throughout the West… freedom of speech being violated and guns. Boy, do we need more guns more than ever, to protect our free speech and ourselves in general from this surveillant state of affairs. The left (ideologies) is a perfect adjective for what is going on, as they have left and are leaving the American people out in the cold, and this mixture of neo- liberalism and the left- woke ideologies are nightmarish. The blatant lies and switching back and forth on what Kamala will do differently and more, shows her and the dems lack of respect for the American citizens. And they don’t care that they are being obviously deceptive. Why is that??? I also see the neo -liberalism aspect– wars and globalism. I don’t see libertarian or puritan theories or practices, at all. Perhaps it is my ignorance….

Mike Rees
Mike Rees
17 days ago

I love being told by Americans that the Puritans left because they were persecuted. As I recall they left because the English refused to persecute Catholics sufficiently for their tastes. The fact that the English state tolerated Catholics in public life and society provided they kept their religion private and paid the fines and various “Catholic” practices in Anglican churches drove the Puritans out to found a “better” England elsewhere.

Eamonn Toland
Eamonn Toland
17 days ago
Reply to  Mike Rees

I would love to see your source for saying the Puritans left England because the state wasn’t hard enough on the Catholics.
This would be the same state that repeatedly killed between 10% and 40% of the Catholic population of Ireland in various scorched earth campaigns in the seventeenth century. Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton probably killed 200,000 on his watch alone. (His contemporary, the surveyor Sir William Petty, thought it was closer to 600,000.)
Vestigial manifestations of decency, such as Captain Trevor’s attempts to stamp out cannibalism among Irish Catholics, would have been all the more laudable had English troops not destroyed the food supplies of the Catholic peasants in the first place.
At least the idea of defeating your enemy by destroying his food supply was considered standard practice during the Wars of Religion, but at a time when statesmen were busy disentangling different religious persuasions throughout Europe, English courtiers came up with the wheeze of establishing a Protestant colony in Ulster “to extirpe the very root of rebellion.” I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps the Puritans should have stayed around throughout the eighteenth century to see the impact of the Penal Laws, that denied Catholics and Presbyterians basic civil rights relating to inheritance, education, taxation and political suffrage. If they waited until 1829 they could even have seen a Catholic MP.

Mike Rees
Mike Rees
16 days ago
Reply to  Eamonn Toland

Would that be Mr Cromwell the Puritan MP for Huntingdon then?

Mike Rees
Mike Rees
16 days ago
Reply to  Mike Rees

Finally they, the Puritans, got the whiphand in England and could do some proper governing!

Eamonn Toland
Eamonn Toland
16 days ago
Reply to  Mike Rees

The thing is, “proper governing” had been happening for decades before the Puritans acquired power. There had been an Act of Uniformity in England since 1559 that mandated attendance at Anglican services.
In Ireland the Protestant Plantation of Ulster by James I/VI from 1609 onwards was preceded by a scorched-earth campaign during Elizabeth’s reign that killed about 100,000 Catholics. While some of the leaders of that campaign felt remorse for what they felt they had to do, others were less patient. The second-in-command, Chichester, famously bludgeoned unconscious an elderly Catholic gentleman who had second thoughts about crossing the threshold of an Anglican church, dragging him inside for the service before he “gave his soul to God” a couple of hours later.
The poor Protestant colonists who were lured to “fayre Ulster, her soil unmanured” after 1609 were later ethnically cleansed by the survivors of the previous massacre – a quarter of the adult planter population died in 1641, mostly as a result of starvation and hypothermia after being forcibly removed from their homesteads in the bleak midwinter. Ireton’s campaign in the 1650s after the end of the English Civil War was seen as payback throughout England for the massacres in 1641.
The Restoration did not lead to a relaxation of “proper governing” in Ireland. Nor did the Glorious Revolution. Penal Laws would remain in force from the 17th to the 19th century.

Mike Rees
Mike Rees
16 days ago
Reply to  Eamonn Toland

As a Catholic I don’t dispute the fact that English protestants murdered or persecuted Catholics in the C17th. Protestant England facing Catholic France, Spain and Ireland etc could get very paranoid. Puritans objected to the limited tolerance shown to Catholics in England. They were Protestant fundamentalists, any tolerance was anathema to them. That’s why they left for the New World. To build a society without Popery. A New England. They were “persecuted ” in England because they were a fractious and troublesome fundamentalist sect who couldn’t live with the compromises and realpolitik of the age.

Damon Hager
Damon Hager
17 days ago
Reply to  Mike Rees

I believe Presbyterians quite enjoyed persecuting Baptists and Congregationalists, and Anglicans too, when given the chance.

James Kirk
James Kirk
17 days ago
Reply to  Mike Rees

In the modern day some would dearly love to escape to a New World; would love a dumping ground for criminals and recalcitrants on the other side of the world. Come on Musk, gee up!

Michael Lynch
Michael Lynch
17 days ago
Reply to  James Kirk

Britain did that in 1788 when Cook claimed Terra Australis, and they took over Australia which became a penal colony. Didn’t turn out too badly for the Aussies in subsequent generations!

Magdalena Algarin
Magdalena Algarin
16 days ago
Reply to  James Kirk

uhhhh?

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
17 days ago

Seems a bit overboard to blame England for California’s self-inflicted problems. It also does not explain why many of the other 49 states have avoided that level of political idiocy-cum-malevolence, though some are trying.

mac mahmood
mac mahmood
17 days ago

Don’t see why living in tents on the beaches should be seen as dysfunctional.

Steve Houseman
Steve Houseman
17 days ago
Reply to  mac mahmood

Made me laugh. Thanks for that.

Ben Hekster
Ben Hekster
17 days ago

Writing from the Left Coast:

There is no need at all to go back quite that far in history in order to make sense of California politics. The apparent contradictions are in fact completely logical and consistent when seen through a Stalinist lens of aiming to weaken the ‘oppressor class’; defined superficially in the usual progressive ways, but in essence anyone with economic power that might become a threat to the State.

This explains the death by thousand cuts of nanny-state regulation and the more serious high-caliber lawfare directed against its productive citizens; and why those actually in need of help are left to wallow and rot: because they present no threat to the power of the State but rather lend justification to it.

Chauncey Gardiner
Chauncey Gardiner
17 days ago

The hubristic impulse to design a city on a hill, to exercise our instinct to impose one’s concept of tikkun olam, predates the Puritans. (Plato’s Republic would constitute an example.) And it is not a very sophisticated impulse. The evidence is everywhere and over all time: The Khmer Rouge, The Soviets’ First Five-Year Plan, the vacuous Rousseauianism of a Woodrow Wilson, Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren …

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
16 days ago

Every Man is a World, according to Jewish thought. To fix the World, is first a reference to fixing oneself (i.e. the World). People will be influenced by your righteous character, and improve their own behaviours, simply by example and taught lovingly.

Kevin O'Keeffe
Kevin O'Keeffe
17 days ago

Interesting. A bit simplistic for me, but interesting all the same.

Kent Ausburn
Kent Ausburn
17 days ago

My father’s side of the family were of Scotts-Irish descent from the southern US who migrated to Sorthern California in the early 20th century, before WWI, apparently contributing to the cultural mish-mash the author describes.

Ruari McCallion
Ruari McCallion
17 days ago

““Scots-Irish” from the Scottish-English borderlands”

They were from Ulster.

Jon Barrow
Jon Barrow
17 days ago

Where do you think Ulster Protestants originally came from? Many were forcibly removed Borderers, or ‘border reivers’. Reiver surnames are common among ‘Scots Irish’ (in GB the term is unknown) in the US.

James Kirk
James Kirk
17 days ago

Goes no way towards explaining the Marxism and identity politics in that part of the world today. Extreme wealth vs extreme poverty and lawlessness. As far as I can see no warrior clan (as stated, gone inland) would tolerate tent cities full of lost pride and self esteem. Only a delinquent local government.To relate it to Britain would be to paint the picture of the poor and diseased locked outside the castle keep walls, not seen here for an age. The tent cities in Bangladesh and the refugee camps of Calais are not down to barbarian tribes, more Oxford and Yale.

Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
17 days ago

I’d like to do an Ike and make the problem bigger. Let’s not just blame Puritans and rednecks. Let’s blame the entire educated class, the most unjust and murderous ruling class in history (Hey Mao: how yer doin’ pal). Here goes.
Back in the Age of Parchment only monks got to write. By hand.
But then came the Age of Gutenberg. All of a sudden a rising educated class could publish its wise words to the whole of Europe. In the Age of Revolution this class came to political power. Vibrant cities like Paris feature up-and-coming intellectuals like Marx. What could go wrong? Totalitarianism and the administrative state, that’s what.
Next came the Age of Mass Media, when the educated ruling class imposed its unjust and murderous ideas on a middle class and a working class that could not talk back. Because Mass Media is a one-way street, you peasant.
Now we have the Age of Talk-Back, where ordinary people — commoners, bitter-clingers, deplorables, far-right ultra-MAGA extremists — can mix it up with the lords of expertise on the Internet. The lords of expertise don’t like it. Not one bit. They call it “a threat to democracy.”
I wonder what happens next? Will all candidates for high office be required to do a fake stunt as a fry cook at McDonald’s?

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
17 days ago

The Scots-Irish are so-called because they came to the province of Ulster in the early 17th century to replace the native Catholic Irish as part of what is known in Irish history as the Plantation of Ulster but also to help bring an end to the trouble on the England/Scotland border that was endemic until James 6th/1st put an end to it after 1603. The Unionists in Northern Ireland today are their descendants. Some of the planters came from England but the majority came from the Scottish Borders. Tough people, certainly, who voluntarily left Ireland for America in the 18th century. Anyone claiming to be Scots-Irish in the US today (and possibly Canada too, I’m not sure) has to have written evidence of their Scottish ancestry and that their ancestor(s) spent at least one generation in Ulster.

stoop jmngould
stoop jmngould
16 days ago

“This right to suffer from drug addiction and psychosis on the street without intervention from the government may constitute “freedom” in the Scots-Irish backcountry, but a traditional Yankee would not recognise it as such.”
Snide comment in an otherwise interesting and informative article.

mike flynn
mike flynn
16 days ago

Been conscious if the dichotomy of America’s origin groups for some time. Good analysis, as far as it goes. Ultimately, neither one of these tribal philosophies are self destructive. However, insert corrupting influence of Chinese ideology and cartel cash, and one can see potential for what California has become.

nigel roberts
nigel roberts
14 days ago

As a resident of California for the last 20 years I’m not completely swayed by this argument. The author massively overestimates the influence of Anglo-Saxon culture and underestimates the influence of Hispanic and Asian cultures.

Before 1850 Hispanic culture was unchallenged in the territory and during the goldrush and its aftermath immigrants from Asia and Northern Europe and a good number of Australians were collectively at least as abundant as Anglos. The hegemony of “white” culture was fixed during the Second World War when the department of defense and the naval and aviation industries (and their white “boss” class) expanded rapidly.

These days Spanish is at least as widely spoken in California as English.

So bottom line: I feel that the author had a hypothesis and went looking for supportive evidence rather than examining the evidence and deducing a hypothesis.

YMMV

Shantanu Patni
Shantanu Patni
14 days ago

Wow. What a piece!

Martin Johnson
Martin Johnson
12 days ago

Good article. The only thing I would add is that the author overlooks the Okie migration from the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, which added a large number of Scots-Irish, especially in southern California. A generation later this tipped the balance in California politics as their children integrated into the broader society. You can see California politics change in that period, roughly 1965-1985, most obviously but not limited to Reagan’s election as Governor in 1966.