Editor's Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
UC Berkeley History and American Studies Professor Mark Brilliant's research examines the historical context of California's most pressing public policy concerns, including housing, affirmative action and income inequality, tracing them as far back as World War II and the Civil Rights Movement.
Brilliant uses his research to draw connections between California's past and present-day challenges. He is currently working on a book that explores how the post-New Deal politics of the 1960s–1980s contributed to the rise of California's current technology-driven economy and the acute income inequality that has grown up alongside it.
Berkeley Social Sciences spoke with Professor Brilliant about his research and how history can inform today's public policy issues. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Can you talk about how your research and published works relate to the history of CA public policy topics such as education, housing, race and class?
Mark Brilliant: My historical research and writing tends to use present-day public policy issues as a springboard for diving into the past to understand how/why we got to where we are; what were the paths taken and not taken; the opportunities seized and missed; the unanticipated or ironic twists and turns; and, sometimes, how good intentions can go awry — if not pave the way to hell. Among the public policy topics whose history I've delved into are: school segregation and desegregation, school finance, school vouchers, bilingual education, fair housing, affirmative action, public pensions, unionization and de-unionization in both farming, electronics and teaching — all in relation to their contributions to race and class equality and inequality.
Can you discuss your current book, Gilded State: California and the Origins of America's New Gilded Age, and how it explores CA public policy?
Mark Brilliant: In April 2023, New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein described California as "a land of contrasts." What he had in mind was the state's "staggering wealth [and] world-remaking tech companies," on the one hand, amidst its "immense income inequality," on the other hand. This jarring juxtaposition could not be pinned on partisan "division and gridlock." After all, as Klein noted, Democrats are — and have long been — "at the wheel."
My book Gilded State seeks to trace and unravel the historical roots in the 1960s–1980s of this ostensible paradox. To this end, it explores the ideological expressions, policy manifestations and dynamic interplay between what I refer to as techno-optimism (the belief that technology can solve any problem in society) and state-skepticism (a skeptical view of the government's authority).
In the context of the time, the confluence of techno-optimism and state-skepticism made good sense. It no doubt helps explain the increasingly bipartisan embrace they received. An increasingly post-industrial economy and the people propelling it could solve the pressing problems of the day that government was popularly perceived across the ideological continuum as either complicit in and/or ill-equipped for. Techno-optimism, in other words, promised to fill the vacuum created by state-skepticism. In retrospect, however, the combination of techno-optimism and state-skepticism would have the unintended and largely unforeseen consequence of transforming the Golden State into the Gilded State. Policies reflective of state-skepticism — often fueled by the state skepticism of techno-optimists themselves — checked the full realization of the promises of techno-optimism, including perhaps its ultimate promise to promote widespread prosperity.
Are there any key findings from your published works that you would like to highlight?
Mark Brilliant: Well, my first book, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978, examined how the multiple "race problems" (as opposed to singular "race problem," as it was typically described in the 1940s by social scientists like Gunnar Myrdal in reference to the South) found on America's so-called "racial frontier" shaped and complicated the efforts of California civil rights reformers from World War II to the Bakke case — a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that upheld affirmative action in the college admissions process.
This history stands apart from — and compels a rethinking of — the conventional North/South, black/white, Civil Rights Movement narrative. Different axes of racial discrimination, I argued, translated to different avenues of legislative and legal redress, exposing a racial landscape crisscrossed with color lines, rather than bisected by any kind of singular black/white or non-white/white color line. Put another way, viewed from the perspective of California, the "problem of the color line," as W.E.B. DuBois famously characterized the problem of the 20th century, has, in fact, long been one of color lines. California's multiracial civil rights past thus helps illuminate America's increasingly multiracial civil rights present and future.
Is there anything else you would like to share about your work and how it connects to CA public policy?
Mark Brilliant: Rarely, if ever, is there a straight line that connects the historical past to the policy present, as a kind of "ergo, here's what history says the policy should be." History does not repeat itself. However, it does rhyme or echo. Because of that, history can serve as a kind of lantern we grasp from the past for illuminating our stumbling through the present and into the future. That lantern, however, can complicate, as much as it can clarify, especially when it comes to what it is we think we know and ought to do.
Ultimately, historical work is built upon the equivalent of what a net — a set of holes tied together by string, to paraphrase author Julian Barnes — cast into an ocean can reveal about what lies in the depths below. This sense of fragility about the limits of evidence ought to engender a tone of humility about the knowledge claims built upon it which, in turn, ought to promote disposition of civility with which we engage in disagreements over knowledge claims themselves and what policies the past points to. Fragility, humility and civility. Our contemporary political discourse could benefit from these habits of the historical mind.
