Somewhere in Malibu, a mortician prepares Brian Wilson for his last performance. The California of the Beach Boys is long gone. The California of Silicon Valley is going — to Texas, where Elon Musk has moved Tesla’s headquarters; to Washington, where Big Tech is now fusing with Big Government; and down into a spiral of debt, dysfunction and disorder.
California used to be the world’s blue-sky future. Now it is America’s darkening present. The scenes from downtown Los Angeles are shocking but not surprising. If, as I did, you lived in a Democratic city in a Democratic state in the decade between the advent of the Occupy movement in 2011 and the apotheosis of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, you are accustomed to rioters burning cars and throwing stones, looters ransacking the Adidas and Apple stores, and police firing tear gas. This is how American politics now works.
The face mask is on, again. The specific causes — racial justice, social justice, climate justice — have morphed into the Omnicause, an all-purpose script for mobilisation. Augmenting the now-generic Palestinian keffiyeh with a Mexican flag is like getting the legendary and sadly discontinued Hella-peño burger from the Californian chain Jack in the Box: it adds a twist of local flavour but it’s basically the same meal, coast to coast. Civil disorder is now as much a part of big city politics as ethnically targeted voter registration drives and bilingual election videos — providing, that is, you live in a Democratic state.
• David Charter: LA protest crackdown offers Trump two victories — and one big risk
Look at Los Angeles. On June 6, agents from ICE, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, began arresting illegal immigrants in raids across southern California. The first protesters gathered in mid-afternoon as ICE agents led handcuffed suspects from a garment factory in downtown LA’s fashion district. The protesters tried to block ICE’s vehicles. That evening, a larger group attacked the Edward R Roybal Federal Building and US Courthouse, and hurled bottles and other objects at police. Police retaliated with tear gas.
To the Trump administration, sending in ICE honours an electoral promise while flexing the authority of the federal government in the Democratic Party’s citadel state. To California Democrats, it’s a violation of their turf. So there was a degree of procedural inevitability about what happened next. The disturbances spread. President Trump ordered in 2,000 members of the California National Guard over the head of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom. The governor went to court.
The National Guard is a volunteer force of part-time citizen-soldiers, a legacy of the colonial militias that fought the American revolution. Each state has one, answerable to the governor. When Newsom said Trump had failed to secure his approval, he accused the president of striking at the foundations of American democracy.
On the streets, disorder grew. By June 9, LA’s police chief, Jim McDonnell, said his officers were “overwhelmed” by the number of rioters and “the types of things that they’re doing”. By June 10, about 4,000 National Guard troops were on duty. And Trump went further, putting the US Marines on standby. A 700-strong battalion has undergone a crash course in crowd control. If they go in, it will be the first such deployment in an American city since George Bush Sr sent marines into LA to quell the Rodney King riots of 1992.
Alongside the battle for control of the streets was a fight for the narrative. Newsom called Trump’s move a “serious breach of sovereignty” and the “deranged fantasy of a dictatorial president”. At a press conference on June 11, mayors and officials from 30 Democratic-run cities backed Karen Bass, the LA mayor, as she said the protests were “provoked by the White House”. The Trump administration, she claimed, was conducting a “national experiment” to test how far “the federal government can go in reaching in and taking over power from a governor, power from a local jurisdiction”. She did not denounce the rioting.
Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential elections on promises to restore border controls, crack down on illegal immigration and deport violent criminals. To deliver on all this, he will have to beat the California Democratic Party.
Immigration policy used to be a bipartisan failure by design. In the good old days of bipartisan dysfunction, Republicans wanted cheap labour and Democrats wanted to grow their voter base. The result was a permanent multigenerational underclass whose numbers are restocked each time a Latin American regime goes south. There are currently at least 11 million illegal immigrants in America. They do the dirty work that citizens don’t want to do. As the senior California Democrat Nancy Pelosi said in 2022 in her capacity as Speaker of the House, “We need them to pick the crops.”
Today, immigration is as polarised as any other issue. In a June 2019 debate for the Democratic presidential nomination, only one of the ten candidates opposed reducing illegal border crossings from a criminal to a civil offence. The number of illegal border crossings, which had declined under the Trump presidency, rose sharply under Joe Biden. Biden’s crisis of open borders was Trump’s opportunity in 2024. Now Trump’s crisis of domestic order is Newsom’s opportunity as the California governor lays the ground for a presidential run in 2028.
Newsom’s lawsuit in the California courts argues that Trump has violated states’ rights under the 10th amendment of the US constitution. A presidential order to “federalise” a state’s National Guard, Newsom said, must be issued via the state’s governor. The judge, Charles Breyer, happens to be the brother of Stephen Breyer who recently retired from the Supreme Court after decades of consistently liberal jurisprudence. On Thursday, Breyer ordered Trump to transfer his “illegal” control of the guard to Newsom. Hours later, a federal appeals court blocked Breyer’s order. The next hearing is scheduled for June 17.
The White House argues that the rioting in LA is obstructing federal law enforcement and is thus a “form of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States” under Title 10 of the US Code, which codifies US statutes. The code allows the president to deploy National Guard units in federal service if there is “rebellion or danger of rebellion”, or if he is “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States”.
Claims by LA authorities that Trump’s federalising of the National Guard is “unprecedented” are valid only if you ignore history. In 1957, President Eisenhower ordered the Arkansas National Guard, over the head of Arkansas’s racist governor Orval Faubus, to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1965, President Johnson sent the guard to protect civil rights marchers in Alabama. In 1970, President Nixon used the guard to break a nationwide postal workers’ strike.
Similarly with the deployment of US troops to an American city. In 1967, Johnson ordered the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions, famed for their first-wave drops on D-Day, to Michigan after the National Guard failed to control riots in Detroit. In 1968, the rioting in Washington after Martin Luther King’s assassination was so severe that 13,600 soldiers were sent in, the largest military presence in the national capital since the civil war. In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which erupted after the police beating of the black motorist Rodney King, 10,000 national guardsmen required the support of hundreds of marines.
For a young city, Los Angeles has a long history of racism, brutal policing and mass disorder. All of it was home-grown in California. The phrase “thin blue line”, which characterised civilian policing in military terms, was coined by William Parker, LA’s police chief in the 1950s. Another quasi-military refinement, the Swat team, was pioneered in LA by Parker’s successor Daryl Francis Gates and his colleague John Nelson.
LA’s long history of violent riots
In 1965, heavy-handed policing sparked riots in the heavily black Watts area. Some 14,000 national guardsmen were mobilised and 34 people were killed. The Rodney King riots were the worst in American history: a six-day orgy of destruction and theft that killed 63 people, injured 2,383 and caused $1 billion of property damage. LA’s contribution to the George Floyd disturbances of 2020 was relatively mild. Marchers merely blocked freeways, attacked Jewish-owned stores and vandalised synagogues. The homicide rate rose 250 per cent in a week before the National Guard arrived.
Trump versus Newsom, and the perennial American struggle for power, involves mobilising bodies on the street as a complementary strategy to marshalling legal arguments for the courts. It is also a sure way to undermine the sovereignty of the government. It happened in Weimar Germany in the 1920s. Is it happening in “Weimerica” in the 2020s?
The Democrats have a better ground game. The party of Silicon Valley pioneered digital campaigning in 2008. They led the Republicans in voter registration for years until the double absurdities of 2024: the senescent Joe Biden and the incompetent Kamala Harris. The Democrats still lead the Republicans in what the academics call “extra-parliamentary mobilisation”.
Congressional Republicans see the fearsomely armed but numerically feeble white militias of the backwoods as a liability, and almost entirely disown the neo-Nazi fringe that rioted in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Congressional Democrats have grown accustomed to seeing the feebly armed but numerically fearsome cohorts of the urban #Resistance as an asset. They are correspondingly loath to disown them.
“They’re not going to let up, and they should not,” Kamala Harris said as the George Floyd protests turned violent in the summer of 2020. This week, while police and rioters faced off in the streets of her city, Nancy Pelosi appeared to suggest that burning cars “may be the exuberance of the moment” as much as “anarchists” exploiting a “large gathering of people”. The Democrats have a high sensitivity to pronouns, but a higher tolerance for certain kinds of violence in the name of “our democracy”.
Some of the initial protesters in LA might have rallied spontaneously after clips on social media showed ICE agents chasing suspects across the parking lot of a Home Depot. In the week of disorder that has followed, most have come prepared. They wear Covid masks and other face coverings. They carry flags and home-made banners, to push home their message on social media. They recite grad-school slogans about “imperialism” and “fascism”. They don’t have Latino accents.
They do know how to deploy a parking bollard to disable a tear gas canister. They carry drills to deflate the tyres on sixteen-whetoelers. They carry picks for breaking up the concrete slabs of pavement into missiles. They know how to make petrol bombs, and how not to blow themselves up once the fuse is lit. They know how to turn an overpass into an ambush for police cars, by dropping chunks of pavement onto their windscreens. They throw what LA’s police chief calls “unknown liquids” at officers. They are comfortably settled in LA as in Seattle and other Democratic cities with a large student presence.
The three states with the highest populations of illegal immigrants are California, Florida and Texas. There are no riots in Florida. Under Ron DeSantis, its governor, Florida has become the anti-California, a testbed of Republican futurism. Texas is a Republican state too, though its suburbs are increasingly havens for those fleeing high-tax, high-crime California. On Wednesday, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, deployed more than 5,000 National Guard troops in advance of today’s nationwide anti-Trump rallies under the “No Kings” banner.
The No Kings website lists dozens of “partners”. They include single-issue causes with names such as Don’t Frack Your Mother and Bulletproof Pride, radical groups such as Sunrise Movement and Rise and Resist, influential and Democratic-aligned NGOs such as the ACLU, the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood, and the pro-Democratic mega-PAC Move On. This is not a grassroots political movement. It is a well-coordinated and well-funded exercise in extraparliamentary mobilisation. As in Weimar Germany, it depicts its enemies as illegitimate and has a strategic interest in creating a political “permacrisis”.
Costume theatre of BLM protests
The Democrats rode their street coalition and the costume theatre of the Black Lives Matter movement to victory in the 2020 elections. If party elders assumed they could control their foot soldiers, they were wrong. The Biden administration struggled to dismount from the tiger. The radical Omnicause kept going: attacking Jews in the name of “Free Palestine”, accusing the Supreme Court of licensing a “genocide” of trans people, even declaring Trump’s victory in 2024 illegitimate. Cosplay or not, the radical dynamic has a force of its own. It has yet to reach its final extremity, and it may drag the Democrats to the electoral brink.
After Biden’s forced retirement and Harris’s failure to launch, the Democratic Party is in disarray. Formally, its effective leaders are the congressional veterans Nancy Pelosi, who is 85 years old, and Chuck Schumer, who is a perky 74 but is politically a relic of the Clinton era. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, the man who would be king, is barnstorming around the country in a May-to-December double act with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that looks like a passing of the baton. If the Democrats’ young radicals take command, they will drive the party into the kind of electoral exile they endured in the 1980s.
Newsom is a mere 57. Like JD Vance, he is a member of Generation X, the generation held back by the Boomers’ death grip and then bypassed by internet-savvy millennials such as Ocasio-Cortez. There is no doubt that Newsom wants the nomination in 2028. A California Democrat does not submit to a bromantic podcast with the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk unless he realises his party has not so much lost the middle ground as torched it. But the path to the nomination runs through the Democratic base.
Americans are sick of crime and chaos, whether perpetrated by illegal immigrants with neck tattoos or students with blue hair. Trump’s deportation drive allows Newsom to claim the party’s leadership, but it also forces him to side with the Democrats’ least electable elements.
If Newsom, the governor of a corrupt, debt-ridden and crime-rich Democratic fiefdom positioning himself as the defender of norms and procedure, wins the 2028 nomination, he may struggle to untangle himself from his record — unless Donald Trump bungles it.
As Brian Wilson sang when California was young and happy: “God only knows what I’d do without you.”
Dominic Green writes for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner
