California Isn't Just in the News for Its Troubles — It's Still Reinventing America's Future
Kamala Harris’ first electoral win beyond city-level politics came in the summer of 2010. That cycle, Jerry Brown opted against seeking re-election as California’s attorney general, instead launching a comeback bid for a third term as governor — a job he first held from 1975 to 1983. Then serving as San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris jumped into the race to replace Brown, and easily claimed the top spot in a crowded Democratic primary. That fall, she eked out a narrow win over a far better-known Republican opponent, launching what would become her career as a national political figure.
Early in that 2010 campaign, newly minted MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell flagged Harris as a candidate Republicans should fear, calling her “the next big Democratic star” and “the female Obama.” I happened to catch the clip of her primary victory speech he aired that night. Then in her mid-40s, Harris looked and sounded strikingly similar to the candidate we see on the national stage today, who turned 60 just two weeks before the 2024 election. But one line from that speech has stuck with me ever since.
Speaking to a cheering crowd of California supporters, she said: “We are the state that creates leadership for the rest of this country, based on our belief that we can be tough, and we can be smart—and all the time be dedicated to our history, while being empowered to know our destiny.” That rhetoric tapped straight into California’s long-held self-image as the United States’ trendsetter and policy model.
That is not how Kamala Harris talks about California today. Barring any remarks I’ve missed, she has not framed California as a national model or highlighted its policy success stories — the way Republicans like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott do for their home states, or even her running mate Tim Walz does for Minnesota. When she does reference her time as San Francisco DA and California AG, her focus is almost exclusively on the gritty work of prosecuting dangerous offenders: sex predators, drug traffickers, and domestic abusers. Her California background reads more like a liability to downplay than a credential to campaign on.
That choice makes a lot of sense. Harris’ current audience is a national one, far larger than the California electorate she appealed to in 2010. And unlike DeSantis, Abbott, and Walz, she has never served as governor, so she doesn’t have a long list of statewide policy achievements to point to. But it also reflects a stark shift in how California is viewed across the country and the world.
For much of its history, California was held up as an American paradise. Today, it’s widely portrayed as something closer to a dysfunctional hell: out-of-control housing costs, exorbitant tax burdens, widespread homelessness, crippling traffic, catastrophic wildfires, and alternating drought and flood. It’s known both for groundbreaking tech innovation and the worst excesses of tech-bro greed and self-absorption. These are the stereotypes that stick most widely.
This negative view is especially widespread among Republicans: polls show two-thirds of Republicans believe California has done more harm than good to the country, and nearly half don’t even see it as “truly American.” Across party lines, half of all U.S. adults say California is in terminal decline. As one headline put it shortly before Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, “California’s image will be a weapon” against her campaign.
None of this changes the reality that one in eight Americans calls California home — that’s a larger population than 21 U.S. states combined. Its annual economic output outpaces every entire country on Earth except China, Japan, and Germany, and it’s the birthplace of a disproportionate share of the world’s most recognizable and valuable global brands. Still, the dominant narrative holds that the California miracle is over, its well of dynamism drained dry, just like the Central Valley’s aquifers after years of drought.
As a California native who has spent most of his life living elsewhere in the U.S., and as an American who has lived abroad for more than a decade, I’ve long noticed that doomsday talk about California often mirrors doomsday talk about the U.S. as a whole. I’ve covered enough of America’s repeated cycles of crisis to recognize this pattern. The U.S. is always supposedly on the brink of collapse: torn apart by 1960s war and social unrest, felled by 1970s oil shocks and stagflation, undermined by 1980s recession and Japanese economic competition, and so on through every decade’s challenges, right up to today’s deep political divides.
But every time a new wave of declinism takes hold, the U.S. somehow bounces back faster than any other developed nation — through adaptation, struggle, innovation, and immigration, as we’ve seen most recently in the country’s robust post-pandemic economic growth. America’s long history is a seesaw, swinging between confronting serious problems (many of our own making) and lurching toward solutions. And in this, more than anything else, what’s true of the U.S. is true of its most influential state: California is the fulcrum of that seesaw.
As USC sociologist Manual Pastor has put it, “California is America, but sooner.” That’s true for massive cultural and demographic shifts: California became the first mainland U.S. state to reach “majority-minority” status back in the 1990s, a full generation before the rest of the country is projected to hit that milestone. It’s true for defining national crises, both self-inflicted and out of our control. And most importantly, it’s true for solutions: the kind of policy innovations that can redirect the trajectory of American life, and even global life, with a leverage no other U.S. state can match.
Take transportation and climate policy. After World War II, Southern California birthed the modern American car culture, and the state used a gas tax increase to build one of the first modern freeway networks in the country. Just a few years later, the federal government adopted that same model to build the interstate highway system. Starting in the 1980s, California led the push to phase out leaded gasoline, eventually banning its sale statewide in 1992 — four years before the ban went into effect across the entire country. In 2019, after the Trump administration rolled back national vehicle emissions standards, California struck an agreement with every major global automaker — from Ford and Honda to Volkswagen and BMW — to adopt even stricter standards to fight climate change. The sheer size of California’s auto market turned this state-level rule into a de facto national standard, which the Biden administration later formalized.
This isn’t just a history lesson. Right now, the same pattern of California-first innovation is playing out in several critical areas that barely get national attention outside the state. And contrary to conventional wisdom, California is once again developing new solutions far faster than most analysts acknowledge.
I was optimistic about these emerging changes long before Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee. If she wins in November, her decades of experience in California will almost certainly shape her approach to national and global policy. Her background in the state is one of the least discussed but most important parts of her profile — including the optimistic view of diversity and future opportunity that stands in such sharp contrast to Donald Trump.
Even if she doesn’t win, California will continue pushing ahead with these experiments, serving as a national-scale example of what a different approach to governance can look like. No matter who leads the country next, California deserves new attention as a “reinvention state,” not just a “resistance state.” Even if Trump returns to the White House, the old maxim still holds: as California goes, so eventually goes the nation, and much of the world beyond it. Below, we break down three key areas where California is blazing a new trail. None of these are silver bullets for all of California’s many problems, but each showcases the creative spirit that has always produced the solutions America needs.
Train to Somewhere
Let’s start back with transportation, the sector we just explored historically. By now, the pioneering freeway system California built in the 20th century is a maxed-out, congested mess. The state can’t build more freeways to solve the problem: there’s no available land where new capacity is needed most, and any new freeway fills up with traffic almost immediately after it opens. Without new forms of mass transportation, California will only grow more gridlocked, making every other problem it faces worse.
That’s why back in 2008, California voters approved an initial $10 billion bond to build a high-speed rail line that will eventually run 500 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco, cutting through the Central Valley. Sixteen years later, if you’ve heard anything about the project, it’s that it’s a white elephant, a doomed failure, a cautionary tale of government waste, and every other insult for a botched public project you can think of.
It’s true that the list of missteps is long. The project is massively over budget — now projected to cost more than $100 billion total — and years behind its original schedule. Initial segments were supposed to be up and running years ago. As it stands, the first passenger service isn’t expected to launch until 2030, and that will only be on a 171-mile stretch between Merced in the northern Central Valley and Bakersfield at the southern end of the valley.
This truncated initial route has been mockingly dubbed a “train to nowhere,” a jab that annoys Central Valley residents but perfectly captures the frustration of commuters stuck in endless traffic in LA and the Bay Area. The project has also become a culture war punching bag, so for most people, it feels as remote and unlikely to ever succeed as a permanent human settlement on Mars.
But I’ve followed the project’s ups and downs for more than a decade, and I’ve come to see it in a new light. In aviation, pilots are trained to identify the “point of no return”: the moment you’ve progressed so far that turning back would cost more than pushing ahead. That’s exactly where California is with high-speed rail now.
Consider a few key recent milestones: this summer, the project received full environmental clearance for the entire 463-mile route between downtown LA and downtown San Francisco, with clearance for an additional 31-mile extension from LA to Anaheim expected next year. Nearly all of the thousands of land parcels needed for the route have been acquired. Construction in the Central Valley is far further along than most people realize: some 12,000 workers have been on site for years, and test trains are on track to begin running in three to four years.
What most people don’t realize is that when complete, this will be one of the fastest mainline high-speed rail systems on Earth. Trains will travel up to 220 mph, faster than the 200 mph top speed of most European trains and Japan’s iconic Shinkansen, matching the fastest segments of China’s Beijing-Shanghai line. Even more groundbreaking: California’s system will be fully powered by solar energy the entire route, a first for any large high-speed rail network in the world.
Over the past decade, I’ve visited Fresno, the largest city on the initial route (population 545,000), roughly a dozen times. There and in surrounding communities, you can watch the rail line take shape month by month, mile by mile. The massive heavy-construction work here reminds me of what I saw living in China, where a new subway line seemed to open every month. You see earthmovers larger than school buses, concrete bridge supports as long as commercial airliners.
“If you listen to California’s political class, the high-speed rail project sounds like a textbook boondoggle,” Yousef Baig wrote last January for the nonpartisan nonprofit news site CalMatters. “Yet in communities across California’s farm belt, the discourse is refreshingly different. It’s a symbol of transformation for a region that’s already bursting with activity.”
Driven by sky-high housing costs and crippling traffic in California’s big coastal cities, Central Valley communities are the fastest growing in the state. They are also some of the poorest, hit hardest by drought, air pollution, and climate change. These are the communities that will be the first to benefit from these new high-speed trains.
The logic of opening the Central Valley segment first, rather than waiting to connect the big coastal population centers before launching any service, is clear at this point. “I’m firmly convinced that the first time the first customer buys a first ticket for the first true high-speed rail trip on US soil, there will be no going back,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said this spring in Washington. “People will expect and demand it everywhere.”
And it’s not just domestic observers paying attention: the entire global rail industry is watching California. At an international gathering of high-speed rail officials this year, I heard leaders from France, Italy, Germany, Austria, and even Japan, home of the Shinkansen, speak eagerly and admiringly about what they hope to learn from California’s project. “It will be an incredible feat of civilization,” Ezra Silk of the U.S. High Speed Rail Coalition told me. “It is something we should celebrate as visionary.”
There is a consistent pattern across history: most transformative large-scale projects seem doomed until they are done. Going over budget and behind schedule doesn’t guarantee a project will succeed, but it fits a familiar pattern of American public innovation. The Erie Canal. The Transcontinental Railroad. The Panama Canal. All were dismissed as reckless follies, wasteful boondoggles, and corrupt sinkholes during the years before their completion.
Sydney’s iconic Opera House, the crown jewel of its waterfront, was widely ridiculed before it opened, years late and way over budget, mired in bitter political and legal fights. Today, it’s impossible to imagine the city without it.
And California truly has no other option. Not only are new freeways off the table, the state will never build another major airport. LAX and SFO are already operating at maximum capacity for most of the day, and San Diego and San Jose’s airports are not far behind. (I speak as a longtime pilot who has studied airport capacity issues extensively.) Even if California tried to meet growing transportation demand with new highways and airports, they would end up being even more expensive than high-speed rail, to say nothing of their far worse climate impact. For California, high-speed rail is the only way forward — and it’s time to get on board.
The Next Peace Corps
California’s new high-speed rail system is designed to serve as a national model for solving a core “hardware” infrastructure problem for the state and the rest of the country. What is the biggest “software” challenge facing modern America? It’s disconnection, loneliness, the erosion of social capital, the shift of neighborhoods and real communities into little more than places to sleep, where residents share no stronger bond than guests at a crowded hotel.
The idea of an increasingly atomized America may be overstated: when my wife Deb and I spent years reporting from small-town America in the 2010s, we found no shortage of community reconnection and civic engagement that would have made Alexis de Tocqueville proud. But polls, news coverage, and the toxicity of national politics all confirm that this problem is very real.
This is the challenge California is addressing with what may be its most original and ambitious model — and unlike high-speed rail, this program is already widely recognized as a success, even though it has barely gotten national media attention.
The five-year-old initiative, a sprawling network of programs, is officially called California Volunteers, or CalVolunteers for short. It is already larger than the entire Peace Corps. It has more applicants than open spots, and growth is only limited by how fast the state can expand funding. States across the country are already adopting its model, crediting California for paving the way.
CalVolunteers is led by the state’s chief service officer, a new cabinet position Governor Gavin Newsom created early in his first term. Josh Fryday, who has led the program since its launch, is in his early 40s, like his friend Pete Buttigieg, and serves as the program’s main advocate and public face. A native of the small Bay Area town Novato, Fryday is a UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley Law graduate who served as a Navy JAG officer (including handling cases at Guantanamo Bay) before returning home and being elected mayor of Novato. He was appointed to Newsom’s cabinet five years ago at age 38.
Before Newsom took office, California, like most states, already had a patchwork of small public service and volunteer programs under the CalVolunteers umbrella, many run in partnership with the national AmeriCorps system. Newsom’s innovation was to elevate them to a standalone cabinet-level department with increased funding, and make expanding service opportunities a core policy priority. His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, serves as the program’s active honorary chair.
I started paying close attention to the program early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when CalVolunteers quickly mobilized volunteers across the state to fill gaps created by lockdowns: delivering food and medical supplies to people quarantined or unable to leave their homes, and filling staffing gaps at emergency shelters and other critical facilities that had lost most of their regular staff.
I had met Fryday just before pandemic lockdowns began, when I was visiting my Southern California hometown and he was launching a student tree-planting program there. As CalVolunteers has expanded over the years, my wife and I have visited more than a dozen of its work sites. We’ve seen teenagers training for new careers in downtown Oakland and planting urban gardens in former “heat islands” where asphalt covered once-green spaces. We’ve met young artists in a struggling neighborhood of Riverside helping restore and beautify blighted buildings. We’ve watched elementary school students across the state learn to plant and care for native trees.
One of the largest and most popular programs is the California College Corps. It combines the core idea of the original GI Bill — rewarding public service with educational benefits — with the Peace Corps’ mission of building lifelong connections and a habit of community service. College Corps members commit to up to 450 hours of service per year on local projects: tutoring and mentoring K-12 students, supporting eldercare facilities, working at food banks, completing environmental work, and more.
In return, they earn up to $10,000 toward college costs, plus additional support from their colleges, all to create a “debt-free path” to a college degree. Why $10,000? That is the average gap between what Pell Grants, the main federal need-based college aid program, covers and the actual cost of attendance for low-income students, who usually have to take out loans or work part-time jobs to make up the difference. “Ten thousand dollars is a very intentional number,” Fryday told me. “It’s a way to have a debt-free path to an education. It makes the difference between working in a coffee shop to raise the money or serving the community.”
The participants