The state government is powerful but remote. State senators, ordinarily an intimate link between people and politics, have bigger districts than members of the US House. Rather than a state in the traditional sense of an American political entity, California seems to be reconstituting itself as a federation of local autonomies. Even so, California has a distinct political culture, with roots in the progressive movement that brought Hiram Johnson to the fore in 1910 and brought the initiative, referendum, and recall to the state Constitution in 1911. Today, for example, Californians are voting on a ballot question to determine whether the legal word ''marriage'' should be restricted to the formal union of a man and a woman.
People go to the extremes here because of a lack of stability, a lack of history.
The state remains the ultimate destination for the new start. Indeed, today the import of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 isn't the disaster it wreaked but the opportunity it offered. A newspaperman, Frank Leach, said he ''saw the debris of wrecked chimney tops sailing past our bedroom windows.'' There would be new chimney tops soon, and they would be higher. That, too, is the California way. So many people responded to the lure of the new start that in the Great Depression the state Legislature actually tried to close the state's borders.