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