Brian Wilson’s California Died Decades Ago

The sad news that Brian Wilson, the musical genius behind the Beach Boys, died last week at 82 carried with it a strange and foreboding symbolism. His death came as Los Angeles was reeling from a series of riots — and poised to plunge into a period of sustained civic unrest.

The immediate cause of the unrest is violent opposition to the legitimate enforcement of federal immigration law, especially among Mexican nationals and Mexican-American residents of Los Angeles. In recent days we’ve all heard impassioned declarations from anti-ICE protesters, rioters, and many in the corporate press along the lines that “Los Angeles belongs to Mexico,” or that California was “stolen” from Mexico.

At the heart of these protests and riots we have seen, in short, the assertion of a specifically ethnic and Mexican national identity over and against an American national identity — immortalized in the striking images of masked rioters waving the Mexican flag amid burning vehicles, rubble, and beleaguered police.

That all this was happening in California, and that Wilson passed away in the middle of it all, underscores just how much California has been demographically and culturally transformed by mass immigration from Mexico since the 1960s. Put bluntly, the California that Wilson sang about died long before he did. Through the mass immigration regime established by the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, what was once a stable bastion of American life and culture — that for many people epitomized the American dream — was replaced by an inherently volatile and fractured polity built on the unstable foundation of multiculturalism and competing ethnic identities.

When the Beach Boys released their first album Surfin’ Safari in 1962, and in quick succession released follow-ups Surfin’ USA, Surfer Girl, and Little Deuce Coupe in 1963, California was about 90 percent white and its Hispanic population was rather small, about 7 percent (today those shares are 34 and 40 percent, respectively). The culture, industry, and infrastructure of California were the creation of non-Hispanic whites who settled there from the late-19^thto early-20^th century. Neither Los Angeles nor California at large in any sense “belonged to Mexico” or was even Mexican in a cultural sense.

California in the 1960s was more racially and ethnically diverse than many other states, owing partly to its geographical size and unique history, but it was nevertheless overwhelmingly white and Christian — like the rest of America at the time. In contrast to the fractured identities and split loyalties of our time, mid-century Americans had a shared identity and culture — and shared loyalties and loves.

No wonder, then, that the country was adept at assimilating a relatively small number of immigrants through the maintenance of norms around citizenship, social cohesion, and national interests. We had not yet severed a tradition of patriotic assimilation stretching back 200 years that allowed us to incorporate newcomers into a robust and confident American polity. George Washington’s hopes had been vindicated, that immigrants, “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.”

That we were in fact one people with a common culture could be heard in the popular music we produced. The iconic sound cultivated by Wilson and the Beach Boys during their most popular and influential period, from their debut album in 1962 to Pet Sounds in 1966, was sometimes called the California Sunshine Sound, and it evoked an innocence, optimism, and playfulness appropriate to a society with every reason to be confident and hopeful about its place and the world. California, as Michael Anton writes in his book The Stakes, “was the greatest middle-class paradise in the history of mankind. Yet, in barely one generation, that California was swept away and transformed into a left-liberal one-party state.”

How did that happen? It began with the passage of Hart-Celler in 1965, which transformed the basis of immigration and ushered in a period of rapid demographic change in America. The new immigration regime created by Hart-Celler abandoned the quota-based immigration system that had prioritized immigration from European countries that shared closer cultural, religious, and ethnic ties to the United States. Instead, immigration under Hart-Celler would be based on family reunification, the need for workers, and the protection of refugees.

At the time, Democrats like President Lyndon B. Johnson and Sen. Ted Kennedy assured voters that Hart-Celler would not, in Kennedy’s infamous declaration, “disrupt the ethnic composition of our society.” They were wrong. 

Indeed, the long-term effects of Har-Celler cannot be overstated. In short, it worked a radical demographic transformation of America in a matter of decades. Prior to 1965, about 84 percent of all immigrants to the U.S. came from Europe, with only about 10 percent from Mexico and Latin America. Today, nearly half of all immigrants hail from Mexico and Latin America, with around 30 percent coming from South and East Asia, while immigrants from Europe and Canada make up only about 12 percent.

Hart-Celler was of course not the only factor in the massive cultural upheavals of the 1960s, which included urban race riots, the sexual revolution, and the anti-war protests connected to the Vietnam War. But Hart-Celler worked its changes over decades, such that by the 1990s, California in particular had gone through a massive demographic shift, with huge numbers of Hispanic immigrants — many of whom attained legal status thanks to President Ronald Regan’s 1986 amnesty to nearly three million illegal immigrants.

These sweeping demographic changes heralded profound political changes. Reagan, a popular former governor of California, swept the state in consecutive presidential elections in the 1980s. But by the early 1990s Democrats had come to dominate California politics, and they have since cemented their control over the state.

When Democrats were taking control of California, however, they were not the champions of open borders and mass immigration they are today. Voters in both parties recognized the deluge of immigration unleashed by Hart-Celler was a destabilizing force in civic life, and they wanted to do something about it. In 1994, California residents overwhelmingly passed Proposition 187, which denied state benefits to illegal immigrants.

Opponents of the measure, including the president of Mexico and the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Gray Davis, who succeeded Republican Pete Wilson, claimed it was xenophobic and racist. Mass protests ensued that explicitly appealed to ethnic identities and divided national loyalties, with student demonstrations and walk-outs featuring marchers waving the Mexican flag — a controversial move at the time that many establishment Democrats and opponents of prop 187 denounced, arguing that protesters should be waving American flags. The measure was eventually struck down by a federal judge, sealing California’s demographic fate. 

The subsequent success of California Democrats has come in part from pandering to the state’s large Hispanic immigrant minority, promoting a concept of citizenship that rejects assimilation and patriotism in favor of what Mike Gonzales has called the “transnational multicultural movement,” which champions “the novel idea that immigrants should reject assimilation, retain loyalty to their country of birth, and become active participants in the American political process.”

The result of this reckless and indeed revolutionary idea is what we now see playing out on the streets of Los Angeles: Mexican flags flown in defiance of U.S. law enforcement amid rioting and looting, fractured political identities among an immigrant population that maintains loyalties to foreign nations, and a social order without cohesion or stability.

A nation cannot survive under these conditions. It will eventually come apart. Sixty years after setting the policy conditions in place, California — and by extension, all of America — is doing just that.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.