Diane Feinstein - 8 June 1990

"Westward the course of empire takes its way". It's a quotation which, in this country, is as well-known as any tag from Shakespeare or the Bible.

But I find that if you mention it and wonder idly where it came from, most people guess that whoever said it was talking about California and repeating, in another form, the advice of a 19th-Century American editor to "Go West, young man!"

The surprising truth is that it came from an English divine, or rather an Anglo-Irish bishop writing in the early 18th century. None other, in fact, than the great Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher after whom Berkeley College at Yale was named.

By the way, it's pronounced Berkeley [Burk-lee] in America because that was the normal pronunciation of that and many similar words when the American colonies were founded. It was only later that in England the pronunciation gradually shifted from, for instance, clerk into "clark", and "sturve" into starve and the Middle English "sur-gent" into sergeant.

Well, what Bishop Berkeley was writing about, with remarkable foresight, was the prospect of planting arts and learning in America, and the line comes from a poem with that title. The whole short passage, four lines, goes like this, "Westward the course of empire takes its way, the first four acts already passed, a fifth shall close the drama with the day, time's noblest offspring is the last".

If he were alive today, he would no doubt foresee a sixth act in the human drama and see the course of empire, by which he meant power, being played out alongside the Pacific Rim – Japan, China, Korea. Or perhaps, if he was more clairvoyant still, he would foresee the next great convulsion in Eastern Europe and only after that settles, then Asia taking over.

But we're brought back to what most Americans assume was meant by the famous phrase by a newspaper piece, just published, which uses "Westward the course of empire" as the headline on the dramatic news last Tuesday that came out of California.

Not the royal tour of Mr Gorbachev which ended in San Francisco to a cheering tumult of citizens, the like of which has not been seen since the San Francisco Giants paraded through the town after winning the National League pennant. By the next evening, the Tuesday, Mr Gorbachev was gone and half forgotten in the excited anticipation of what was going to happen to a state-wide election.

The governorship of California may seem to strangers very much of a local event but California, it has been calculated, handles an economy that is surpassed by only eight other nations in the world. And in America, California, as I hinted from out there a few weeks ago, has become the most progressive state in the nation.

On second thought, progressive is the wrong word, it suggests ideology, but I mean the state which moves first on the big issues which engross, or divide, the republic. Call it rather, then, the most politically active state.

Well, today, Washington and most of the states watch which way California is going. Because, firstly, it holds its primary elections early in the spring, but mainly because California is the most powerful and most populous state, with more members in the lower house, the House of Representatives, than any other state. Ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty years ago, it supplanted New York State as a barometer of national political opinion. So what was the big news?

Superficially, last Tuesday, for the first time in the history of the state, a woman won the Democratic nomination for governor. The election, of course, is in November. Dianne Feinstein, a handsome brunette who was the first woman mayor of San Francisco, set her sights higher so long ago as 1984, when she hoped and tried to become the chosen vice presidential running mate of Jimmy Carter's vice president, Mr Mondale.

Remember him? Mrs Feinstein came to be mighty glad she was not chosen. Instead Mr Mondale picked Mrs Geraldine Ferraro of the New York borough of Queens. And they were both massacred and lost to politics for ever in Mr Reagan's second landslide.

So, last fall, Mrs Feinstein announced she was going to try for the governorship. She was, of course, very well-known in San Francisco and northern California which is noticeably more liberal in its bias than the rest of the state.

Most of the California votes, over 60%, are concentrated in a few, teeming counties in southern California, in Los Angeles County, most of all. And down there, Mrs Feinstein was an outlander, almost a stranger. But she campaigned all through the winter there against a more moderate conservative Democrat and she hammered away at her strong belief in the right to abortion.

This remains a crackling issue everywhere and, if the results of two other primaries are anything to go on, the Pro-life movement has its back against the wall.

However, what other states were watching, most of all in Washington, the House of Representatives, which is the body responsible for the final national budget, was another issue altogether. And it was decided on Tuesday in a typically Californian way.

I've talked before about California's devotion to what are called "propositions", issues put down on the ballot forms, to be decided by popular referendum. The crucial item this time was Proposition 111. It was stark and simple. "Ought California to double the state petrol tax?" It's now 9 cents on the gallon. Were the people willing to have it go to 18 cents?

Outside California even, I think, here in New York, it's difficult to sense the magnitude of this proposal. California has more cars than people. In a state that, planted on a map of Europe, would stretch from Birmingham to Naples, those cars burn up more miles of driving than any other five states in the union.

The suggestion of a petrol tax has come up in many other states, 15 have passed it. In some of the prairie states, it has been angrily rejected by the people on whom the burden would fall disproportionately, on farmers, who have to drive 60 miles to the nearest town, and in some places – in Kansas and Nebraska – run up about 100 miles a day just patrolling their enormous acreage.

But the vote on Proposition 111 was being watched nationally because of its symbolic significance. Would it tell President Bush that the country no longer cared to "read his lips". That, finally, the long Reagan paradise of lower taxes, or none, was over?

I ought to say at once that Mr Reagan managed to impose quite a wad of new federal taxes but they were called by other names – revenue enhancements, mostly. It has been the triumph of Mr Reagan, prolonged by Mr Bush, to have the people define taxes as income taxes.

And not even the Democrats have moved to propose what many people now believe is bound to come, a frank rejigging of the federal income tax code, an increase in the taxes of the top third of the taxpayers.

Well, the Californians answered 111 with a pretty resounding "yes". Every gallon of petrol will go up gradually over the next five years from 9 cents to 18. It's going to cost every California motorist about $60 a year and in the next five years will add to the state treasury several billion dollars.

For what? Ah – there might have been the reason for the vote. The money is to be used exclusively for the repair and maintenance of the state's highways and to support more mass transport. They're even beginning to rehabilitate the railways, to take the appalling load of traffic off the motorways.

This, in a state that was the first to build eight-lane freeways. In the late 1950s, the Los Angeles Freeway was one of the wonders of the country. People used to boast about how they could get from this suburb on the coast to another suburb far inland in 20 minutes instead of an hour or more.

Well, after 30 years, the whole state is laced with freeways and overpasses and colossal spaghetti patterns of motorways. But a study, which also may have had something to do with the vote, came out last week predicting that if things stood where they are today, by 2000, only 10 years from now, the average speed of the working commuters – who are just as plentiful both ways, from the central suburbs into the valleys, from the valleys home to the central suburbs – the average speed during the three morning rush-hours and the three evening rush-hours would be just over seven miles an hour.

Pollution, of course, was a factor in the approving vote. Only recently, the California legislature passed the toughest law controlling the emission of pollutants. And the motor car is a famous emitter. It may be wrong to deduce too much from Mrs Feinstein's victory – she is, you understand, only halfway there.

She will meet in November as her Republican opponent a popular moderate conservative senator, a United States senator. And nobody at the moment is saying how that race will go. But the petrol tax decision is likely to have as much of an effect on the country as the vote on any other issue that will immerge from other coming primaries.

There was, incidentally, a section of Proposition 111 that loosened previous limits set on the power of the state, California, to spend public money. So the famous Dr Arthur Laffer, author of The Laffer Curve which claimed to show that lower tax rates brought in more revenues – this theory inspired Mr Reagan's drastic lowering of taxes.

Dr Laffer has been heard from. He lamented the California vote and mourned for its future. "It is," he said, "a wholesale elimination of the tax revolt." He confidently predicted the slowing down of California's economy and, if more states follow its lead, a return to the old Democrats "spend and tax" days. And, after that, no doubt, the end of the republic.

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