Politics Across the Country: California

A note for liberals and radicals who have decided to give politics in America yet one more “last chance,” as well as for those committed for the duration, win or lose: Jess Unruh’s campaign against Ronald Reagan is the most important contest we have going for us in 1970. For the following reasons:

• No other victory would represent a more direct repudiation of that mixture of hawkery, racism, student-baiting, corporate patronage, and patriotic piety through which Nixon governs and Reagan out-Nixons him. Reagan’s administration is a holding company for monied interests that perpetuates itself by creating and exploiting violence among students and black people. (A “ministry of fear,” Unruh has called it.) It would be tonic for American politics to show that that sort of thing won’t work anymore, that it can be defeated by political participation.

• Unruh, from a Texas tenant-farm background, is running a distinctly populist c...