|
Santa Monica Politics
My column is about politics in Santa Monica more than anything else, and in the course of writing the column I have done a lot of thinking about the subject and spent time learning about the city’s history. After my book, Urban Worrier: Making Politics Personal, came out in 2009 I gave a talk at the Santa Monica Main Library about what happened to politics in SaMo after the Left, in the form of Santa Monicans for Renters Rights, took power in 1981. My thesis was that the Left was gradually co-opted by anti-development elements that acted more like right-wingers than genuine left-wingers. At the library talk I received feedback from audience members, including two council members from the ’80s and ’90s, which helped me refine the argument. I later gave a new version of the talk at a California Studies monthly dinner in Berkeley in spring of 2010. At that point, the editor of the California Journal of Politics and Policy contacted me about writing the talk up as a “commentary” for the journal.
This resulted in an article, “Santa Monica: the Left in Charge,” that the journal published in June 2010. The article can be downloaded for free from the journal’s website, at: http://www.bepress.com/cjpp/vol2/iss1/14/. (I have been told that the “guest” downloading procedures are
tricky; apparently the website will ask you for an academic,
non-profit,
or corporate affiliation. According to the publishers, however, if you
don't have an affiliation, you should nonetheless click the “academic
or non-profit” button and then you don’t in fact have to input
information
about an organization.)
|
|
