"The consequences for education of Proposition 13 go far beyond the fact that, as Friend puts it, the law “in effect, broke the government.” Equally destructive was that it did away with taxation based on representation. By making property-assessment increases contingent on a super-majority legislative vote that could never be mustered, it projected an image of a politics free of negotiation or argument. This sham politics, which mirrors the sham “direct democracy” of the ballot-initiative system itself, draws its strength from the fiction that prosperity depends upon the outcome of a hand-to-hand struggle between beleaguered property owners and some predatory group of “have-nots” (the poor, the uneducated, the young, and immigrants) who must be stopped by law at the edge of the front yard. This fiction has encouraged millions of Californians to think that unless they profit directly from a public service they have no obligation to support it. Against this background, the students who are fighting for a decent and affordable education are also fighting for a politics of shared responsibility."
Timothy Hampton
Professor of Comparative Literature and French... See More
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, Calif.

February 22 at 10:49am ·