I think that the real problem with California, both sides all sides politically, is the goddamned referendums.
Some rich guy with a wild hair up his ass, left right or centre, hires a bunch of college kids to harass you in front of Albertsons to sign the fuck*ng petition... it gets on page 256 of the vote, heaven help us if its on an off-year election, and depending on how much money's behind it, how confusingly its written and how many people show up to vote, all kinds of fuck*ng crazy things can take a spot in the law.
Even if there's no funding for it, even if it turns out that the thing eventually isn't constitutional, even if it ends up doing the opposite of what it intended because it was poorly thought through.
It brings all the wackos out of the woodwork all the fuck*ng time and it gums up the process to no. fuck*ng. end. You try to find a pragmatic solution to something with no easy answers, you finally fuck*ng hammer it out and get it on paper... and holy crap, here come 15,000 AM radio hacks with recall petitions and blah blah blah, they don't even believe in the things they're saying, they're just tweaking the actual process of law making to pop their fuck*ng Arbs.
The guy from "Twins" is our fuck*ng governour because radio douches thought it would push ad-revs to throw the seated dude out who, while certainly a middling figure, actually had some grasp of governance.
And the left wing's just as bad as the right wing. For every racist immigrant hating dealy and "lets shut down the schools so I can save my tax money and buy a summer house in Palm Desert" tax recall hossshit, there's some unenforcable tobacco ban or three trillion dollars for a public transit project that'll never happen.
It's just too big a political unit for all the work of a whole class of middle-of-the-road experienced technocrats that HAS to happen to make a state work to be constantly undermined by a new utopian plan by some dick living in a fallout shelter in Palmdale or whatever every third day. There's a reason why you need representative democracy once you get over maybe 800 people.
Direct democracy is great for electing your class president in the fourth grade but... holy shit.
I swear to God that if this state could just have a legislature and a governor and they made the laws and if you didn't like what they were doing, you could vote them out every two-to-four Novembers, about half of the problems with dissipate like candy floss in a January drizzle. I realize there's all kinds of problems that wouldn't be fixed, of course, but at least you could make real efforts at fixing them, with continuity to the process, if not for the goddamned referendums.
Some plan goes wrong for more than two weeks, idiots start drafting recall petitions and everyone gets the piss shivers.