California’s Progressive Mosaic: “Does California’s shift leftward signal

progressive change nationally?

California is more than just the Democrats’ electoral anchor, however. Increasingly, a number

of its cities are coming to look like Justice Louis Brandeis’s “laboratories of

democracy”–enacting minimum wage, health care, and worker-rights ordinances that would

normally be the responsibility of the federal government (if only the feds could be interested in

the conditions of working-class life). In city after city, a civic left has emerged in California,

with the state’s new-model labor movement–the most dynamic in the country–at its core.” The American Prospect