She arrives, queenlike, in a designer Italian overcoat, high collar, and sunglasses, lipstick smile at once warm and fixed. An aide guides her by the elbow, security detail in tow, to the dining room of Pier 23, an old-school San Francisco tavern in the Embarcadero with a stuffed marlin on the wall and a multistory cruise ship idling outside. Two workmen in dayglow safety coats crane their necks from the bar to see Nancy Pelosi, Madam Speaker, doyenne of San Francisco, bête noire of the right.

Pelosi removes her shades and requests a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce on top. “A lot of chocolate,” she orders.

I ask her if she’s been briefed on the subject of today’s interview. Her press man told her I was writing “about California,” she says with a knowing twinkle, “and how magnificent it is, and how it is the leader in the world.”

Yes. And no.

Once in a while, an East Coast journalist will come out to California to find out what’s happening in the land of dreams. As Los Angeles goes, so goes the nation; if San Francisco loses its charm, what then? “It’s what’s coming next for you,” Pelosi says, portentously.

Earlier that afternoon, I’d walked through the Tenderloin and seen drug addicts splayed out on street corners and a hundred human tragedies strewn across UN Plaza, City Hall looming helplessly in the background. Dickens meets Dante. “Oh, it’s sad,” Pelosi remarks. “It’s worse now.”

That morning, after a freak snowfall, I’d hiked to the top of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County to survey the preposterous beauty of California and found a snowman with a frown carved into its face. “A couple of days ago was the coldest day in, like, 150 years,” Pelosi notes. “Well, it is what it is,” she shrugs, and tells me how the Spanish missionaries used to follow their livestock to the warmest grazing area with water and then build their settlement, which is how San Francisco got the Mission District. No snowmen down there.

“We consider it heaven on earth,” she says of her kingdom. “Just start at the beginning. The Gold Rush, the movies, agriculture throughout. And now technology. And technology is just—we haven’t seen nothin’ yet. Technology continues to grow. So, economically, for our country, this is where most of it starts.”

Setting aside that California started with the decimation of Indigenous people by those missionaries following their cattle, it’s also the engine room of the modern Democratic Party, soon to be the fourth-largest economy in the world, bigger than Germany’s, and lousy with tech billionaires and Hollywood honchos. And ever since Speaker Pelosi began muscling more seats into Congress decades ago, California has shaped progressive policy, from the environment to gun control to gay and trans rights. “I mean, so many people just flock here to raise money and find kindred souls in terms of the environmental, the LGBTQ, the fairness, health care, you name the subject, saving the planet, whatever it is,” she continues. “It’s not really pragmatic money.”

Governor Gavin Newsom has upped the ante by branding California the “True Freedom State,” a rejoinder to Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Freedom State” slogan, pitching Florida as a kind of anti-woke protectorate. Newsom, perhaps teasing a future White House bid, offers California as the left-wing alternative, a liberal’s shining city on a hill, where diversity and tolerance, science and innovation, money and opportunity form a cutting-edge vision of America. I ask Pelosi what she makes of the motto. “I would like to think of our whole country as a freedom country,” she says. “But we”—California—“certainly lead the way in everything.”

The Golden State has always been as much an idea as a place, a fantasyland for Easterners to pine for and put down. As a model for America, however, it’s giving off decidedly mixed signals: encampments of homeless people, floods and mudslides, drought and wildfires, earthquakes and depleted waterways, home invasions and mass shootings, tech layoffs and entertainment and teacher strikes, drained government coffers and spooky economic shudders. If, as one Democratic consultant told me, California is the “coming attractions for America,” it looks like a trailer for Mad Max: PCH.

People living under bridges and climatological disasters are sobering counterfactuals to the California Dream and also wrenches in the liberal machinery. Increasingly, among Democrats, there is a call for greater toughness. Fear, as Pelosi knows, is contagious. And the “biggest challenge” to California, she says, is “safety.” Democrats, says Pelosi, might have captured the House last year if New York’s governor hadn’t misread the political winds on the issue of crime. “They lost four seats and the governor came within four points,” she notes. “It was terrible on the issue of safety.”

“Whether you want to call it homelessness or drug use or whatever it is,” she says, “safety is the oath we take to protect and defend—yes, the Constitution, but the people. And how do you do that, respectful of people’s rights, but also respectful of their safety?”

Trying to write about the whole of California is akin to the proverbial blind man trying to describe an elephant. But California, by any measure, is undergoing a vibe shift. As a pal of mine in San Francisco put it, “The liberal atom has been split.”

At the top of a hill in Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library looks out on a dramatic rust-colored landscape out of a John Ford Western. At the entrance stands a seven-and-a-half foot bronze statue of the 40th president in his iconic ranchwear, cowboy hat, and serenely vacant smile—a vintage vision of California’s manifest destiny.

At the foot of the same hill is Reaganism’s 21st-century progeny: a gun range operated by Taran Butler, a 57-year-old sharpshooting champion who has made a name training action stars and social media influencers to shoot high-powered pistols and semiautomatic rifles. Butler, who looks like a mash-up of Jack Black and Steven Seagal, grew up in 1970s Hollywood and became enamored with guns after seeing Magnum Force, the rogue cop flick with Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. His first gun was the same model Colt Python that Eastwood briefly used in Butler’s favorite scene. Butler set out to become “the fastest gun in the West” and has the trophy to show for it.

When the pandemic hit, crime fears spiked and lines formed at gun stores. A new generation of social media apps, Citizen (originally named Vigilante) and Nextdoor, let people report break-ins, smash-and-grab robberies, and home invasions as random violence, like the murder of philanthropist Jacqueline Avant in her Beverly Hills home, made headlines. Violent crime in LA County climbed 7.3 percent in 2020-2021, the Public Policy Institute of California noted, as police staffing declined.

“There are bad people in the world breaking into houses and they’ll take your stuff and they’ll shoot you whether you begged them not to or not,” says Butler. “So if the police can’t get there, the police are unable to get there—and people are wanting to not have police anymore, whatever—so now it’s just up to you to defend yourself.”

Butler asks me to imagine a scenario where I’m trapped in the corner of a room and someone is coming into the house to kill me. “What’s better?” he argues. “You just die? Is that a better end, like in a movie? Is that a better ending?”

That Hollywood logic has hit home with celebrities, who started showing up to the range in droves: Jamie Foxx, Dwayne Johnson, Rob Lowe, a bunch of Kardashians, James Cameron, Joe Rogan. Butler tools and sells boutique Glocks for the John Wick franchise starring Keanu Reeves, another frequent guest at the range. Donald Trump Jr. bought a John Wick Combat Master with his name inscribed on the handle. (At an NRA convention, Butler called it “an honor.”) Post Malone bought two.

When I show up to the range, Butler instructs me using the Pit Viper from John Wick: Chapter 4. He tells me to fire at human-shaped targets, and I pop off double bursts in quick succession as he narrates: “Nice shot, now get the next guy, that’s his brother and he’s mad.”

Butler also hosts a bevy of Instagram influencers, some aspiring actresses who make videos of themselves in skintight outfits blasting targets with John Wick–branded guns. A flat-screen TV in Butler’s open-air shed cycles through clips of his fiancée, a 29-year-old actor and influencer from Ukraine named Tetiana Gaidar, performing fight scenes. (Snoop Dogg once reposted a video of Gaidar doing eyebrow-raising splits.) But by far the most popular influencer in Butler’s orbit is Toni McBride, a 26-year-old officer in the Los Angeles Police Department with 122,000 followers on Instagram. I first saw McBride in a video wearing Daisy Duke cutoffs while firing two Glocks with shoulder braces and bump stocks attached, bullet casings spraying out in slow motion to the strains of Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D Minor” as McBride grins maniacally.

It was more than just a Quentin Tarantino movie come to life: While on duty one afternoon in South Central, in the spring of 2020, McBride killed a 38-year-old Latino man named Daniel Hernandez. Her body cam footage, later released on YouTube by the LAPD, echoes her posts from Butler’s range: McBride aims her Glock at her target—a man suffering a meth-induced mental break after attempting to kill himself with a box cutter—and pops off three double bursts, six bullets in all, the last a direct hit to the head, killing Hernandez as onlookers scream in horror from the sidewalks.

A month later, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and the Toni McBride case went viral, hashtag Black Lives Matter, hashtag police brutality, hashtag Hollywood, hashtag California.

In South Central, on the corner of 32nd and San Pedro, I meet Cerise Castle, a 30-year-old investigative reporter, who shows me the spot where McBride killed Hernandez. Middle of a quiet boulevard with a car wash and a bodega. A road sign nearby advertises Byrna Self Defense, a “nonlethal” gun that shoots plastic projectiles.

Castle, who writes for progressive hyperlocal news sites LA Taco and Knock LA, calls the McBride case “a classic example” of police brutality against Black and brown people, cops escalating violence, and no justice for families. “Any time the police kill someone, I think it’s unnecessary,” she says. “They’re not supposed to be arbiters of justice.”

McBride kept her job after a five-person commission determined that only the last two of her six shots were “out of policy.” The family of Daniel Hernandez sued, a judge threw the lawsuit out citing qualified immunity, and the case is now under appeal. Arnoldo Casillas, a lawyer for the family, told me the Hernandez killing was a direct result of McBride’s training at Butler’s range. Casillas later introduced me to Hernandez’s sister, Marina, who, through tears, asked, “How do you have this person, who’s an influencer, who’s promoting violence and high-powered guns? There’s only one use for them. That’s to shoot and kill people. That’s the message she’s giving. How is that tolerated? How is that just?”

The same week that a mass shooter killed 11 people in Monterey Park, Butler was at a gun show in Las Vegas presenting a new AR-15 rifle to Kyle Rittenhouse, the vigilante turned right-wing media star, alongside McBride, who applauded while Rittenhouse grinned with his new gun. Defending her, Butler asked, “Do you think it’s good that the police now are scared too? That recruitment’s way down? LA has got nobody coming to work and the police are scared to get involved to help anybody because they’re going to maybe lose their career, their whole livelihood, if they handle it the wrong way, accidentally.”

In California, crime is a battle of perception. Everybody has their own storytelling apparatus and their own stats. Castle dismisses LAPD crime numbers as “copaganda,” believing they’re padded to rationalize force or to pressure politicians to allocate more money. “I mean, they always want crime to be up,” she says. She puts little hope in the new mayor of LA, Karen Bass, who, despite being a liberal Democrat and former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, Castle says, “never really said that she was going to be an accountability figure for the LAPD. She campaigned on expanding the LAPD, on giving the LAPD more money.”

In the McBride case, critics like Castle also see a thumb on the scale of justice: McBride’s father, Jamie McBride, is a director of Los Angeles Police Protective League, infamous for his own six shootings in the line of duty and for inveighing against the Black Lives Matter protests. (His rallying cry for local police: “Hold the line.”) Incidentally, Jamie is also an actor and film consultant who worked on the last Michael Bay film, Ambulance. “He was the original cop influencer in their family,” Castle says. Another of his daughters, Jacqueline, also with the LAPD, was among the three officers who shot and killed a woman in the line of duty in February. Castle refers to them as “The McBrides” like they’re a clan on Yellowstone.

Three years ago, Castle was covering a Black Lives Matter protest for radio station KCRW when she was hit by a rubber police bullet. “Even though I identified myself as press—and I got this all on my phone—a police officer turned and shot me,” she recounted. “And the injuries that resulted put me on bed rest for about six months. I was in a cast, and the doctor told me I couldn’t work.”

While recuperating, she saw a TV report about a sheriff gang that allegedly required members to commit a murder to join. She became obsessed and created a 16-episode podcast series, A Tradition of Violence: The History of Deputy Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which details the culture of law enforcement social clubs with names like the Executioners, the Gladiators, the Banditos, and the Tasmanian Devils. After she published the podcast, “I had to go into hiding for a little bit,” Castle says. “I was just getting constant death threats, specific death threats.”

In February, Castle won the American Mosaic Journalism Prize and signed with Creative Artists Agency for future film and TV deals. Castle maintains a growing collection of “gang” memorabilia—sweatshirts, collectible coins—and has a Google Alert to track cop merch. Among her prized pieces: a signed black-and-white picture of Toni McBride in an LAPD uniform holding a rifle with the words “Hold the Line” underneath.

Octavia E. Butler was asked, seven years after the publication of her uncannily predictive 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, whether her visions of an environmentally ravaged Los Angeles, circa 2024, where the elite barricade themselves in walled fortresses surrounded by poverty-stricken encampments of drug addicts and illiterate poor, was something she really believed would happen.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” replied the writer, who grew up in Pasadena. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

“If somebody is saying the crime is down, they’re living in La-La Land,” declares Rick Caruso, the billionaire real estate developer who spent $104 million on his campaign for mayor of LA last year and lost. “I don’t think there’s a category of crime that’s down. I would challenge anybody to find one.”

I’m sitting on a veranda at Caruso’s palatial estate in Brentwood, a creamy Italianate compound of rolling grasses, waterfalls, a pond, a rowboat, a tennis court, and an outdoor bar. Caruso’s father was the founder of Dollar Rent a Car, and Caruso made billions more developing malls across the state before becoming president of the LA Police Commission in 2001. Caruso ran for mayor promising to sweep drug dealers off the street and to stanch the exodus of small businesses through sheer force of managerial chutzpah. Last year’s race was rocked by a leaked recording of three prominent Latino city council members making racist comments about Black people and darker-skinned Oaxacans. Caruso suspects someone in the Bass camp leaked the audio, which he says “embarrassed” Latinos, his ostensible base, and dissuaded them from voting. “Karen ran on identity politics, pure and simple,” Caruso says. “The subtitle was, ‘I’m a Black woman, and it’s time for a Black woman.’ That resonated with a lot of younger liberal voters.”

Not everyone bought Caruso’s conversion from registered Republican to Democrat. During his campaign, Caruso led media tours through Skid Row, the biggest encampment of homeless people in America, to show off the failures of the government. I meet him there one afternoon, along with a security detail and his personal videographer, for a ghoulish tour of makeshift tents and addicts shooting up on foldout chairs, the rank odor of garbage and human feces everywhere. A tattoo-faced dude gets in Caruso’s grill to complain about his application for Section 8 housing and another yells out to him, “Hey Mayor!”

“Maybe next time,” says Caruso.

Skid Row has existed since the late 19th century and expanded to swallow up 50 square blocks of Downtown LA, annexed by drug gangs selling fentanyl and meth. Our guide, a rep for a local business organization, refers to the area as the “Amazon fulfillment center for drugs.” The LAPD rarely ventures inside. “It’s basically a free zone,” Caruso says grimly.

Homelessness is driving business from LA, he says, where real estate is further blighted by the city’s new 5.5 percent tax on the proceeds of any real estate transaction over $10 million. “So you could sell something at a loss and still pay the tax,” he marvels. “It applies to every building, every commercial building, every residential building. So now why would you invest in LA? Why are you going to build something in LA?”

Before we leave, he tells me a story about his friend Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix (and son-in-law of Jacqueline Avant, the home-invasion victim), who put the media company’s offices downtown to try to revitalize an otherwise seedy neighborhood. “When the pandemic ended and people started coming back to office, they were bringing so much feces in that everybody was getting sick in the offices,” says Caruso. “So everybody had to bring extra pairs of shoes.” (A Netflix spokesperson says the anecdote is inaccurate but that Sarandos had related a similar story to Caruso about a different entertainment company.)

To put a fine point on it, Caruso’s aide offers me a Clorox wipe. I disinfect the bottom of my sneakers before heading to the Hollywood Hills for a dinner party at Susan Orlean’s house.

The home of the best-selling author of The Orchid Thief and The Library Book is an architectural marvel designed by maverick architect Rudolph Schindler and built in 1946 for Mischa Kallis, an art director for Universal Studios. The living room glows with an orangey hue that Benjamin Moore might dub Golden Dream, and guests ooh and aah over the angular beams, midcentury furniture, and breathtaking views of LA at night, including fireworks bursting over Universal every few minutes.

Over lemon chicken piccata and an Alexander Valley Cabernet, I recount my time on Butler’s gun range. Bari Weiss, the contrarian podcaster, is a relative newcomer to California, arriving during the pandemic with her girlfriend (now wife), the writer Nellie Bowles. “One of the things that has shocked me about living in Los Angeles,” Weiss says, “is how many people who are not at all politically conservative own guns here.”

Orlean points out that Bass, the mayor, owns guns.

“Karen Bass owns guns?” asks Bowles.

“Yeah, they were stolen from her house,” says Maer Roshan, the then editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine.

Bowles says her father bought the couple an “impractical home security device,” fearing for their safety.

“I, under no circumstances, want a gun at all,” says Orlean.

Roshan mentions that Butler’s range in Simi Valley is “always sold out.”

“It’s the finale of White Lotus, guys!” Weiss riffs. “Come on.”

Earlier that week, I’d heard from business owners in Sherman Oaks that crime is so rampant, everyone was developing a “home invasion plan.” An architect named Barbara and her daughter, Charlotte, who goes to Brown, say that’s ridiculous. They leave their front doors unlocked.

“You know what?” interjects Orlean. “We were very casual, and then we got robbed in Montecito.”

She and her husband, the financier John Gillespie Jr., were renovating another house when somebody ran off with $35,000 worth of plumbing materials, including two toilets. Their neighborhood WhatsApp group reports “disoriented” people roaming the hills. “Some people are saying, ‘I’ve paid this amount of money for my house and I don’t want to deal with a disheveled guy trying my garage door,’ ” Orlean says.

“We talk about crime all the time,” says Bowles. She receives regular email blasts about crime in her neighborhood. “There’s constant break-ins.”

“It’s almost every house,” says Weiss, adding: “When you see a guy walking down the street in broad daylight swinging a machete, and you call the police, and they say they can’t come, something is wrong in your city.”

Listening quietly is Nithya Raman, the city councilwoman who represents Orlean’s district. Raman, a Harvard graduate and urban planner whose husband was a writer for Modern Family on ABC, has been a lightning rod for her liberal views on homelessness, which less generous critics interpret as defending the rights of vagrants to live on other people’s porches. Last year, a restaurateur in Sherman Oaks sent Raman’s office a photograph of what the person called a “dirty, disgusting, drunken, naked homeless female” passed out on the entrance door and driving away customers. Raman’s office responded with sympathy—but also anger for triggering Raman’s staff with an image of a nude woman on the sidewalk.

“I talk to people all the time, constituents who are very worried about the state of Los Angeles,” Raman says. “I think the perceptions of crime are exacerbated by a feeling of disorder on our streets.”

Raman isn’t eager to talk about crime—she did, after all, call for defunding the police in 2020. She says the homelessness epidemic—nearly 42,000 people live outside in the city of LA alone—can make crime feel like an epidemic. “A story about crime is more believable when you feel like we don’t have a city that’s working well,” Raman observes. “That story falls on more fertile ground.” (A few months later, in advance of her reelection bid, she will complain of a cop shortage in Los Angeles, a sharp pivot that does not go unnoticed.)

Raman is focused on the lack of affordable housing, the issue everyone up and down California talks about. But she also points to the fragmented, internecine Los Angeles government in which city council members, lording over bigger constituencies than many members of Congress, defend their economic turf and battle adjoining districts for resources, which makes complex, citywide issues hard to manage from the mayor’s office. In last year’s infamous leaked audio, her Latino colleagues conspired to redraw Raman’s district and subvert her reelection. Raman backed Bass, who promised to unite the warring factions.

“I really have faith in government,” Raman says, “so, I think maybe I’m—”

“You have faith in government?” says Bowles, incredulous.

“I do,” she replies.

Oh look, fireworks over Universal.

“The housing crisis is caused by the government,” insists Bowles, who voted for Caruso. “If this were free market capitalism, there’d be enough housing to meet all the demand that wants housing.”

Last year, Bowles wrote an essay for The Atlantic entitled “How San Francisco Became a Failed City,” which argues that hyper-progressive policies on homelessness and education have helped destroy her hometown. Critics, including the LA Times, raked her over the coals for being a debutante rich girl from a vaunted farming dynasty. (“I’m not ashamed that my family, many generations ago, did cattle ranching,” she says to me.)

“Two blocks down from where we live,” says Weiss, “there’s people living in tents in front of people’s homes. Should that be legal? My answer is no.”

“There’s so many laws,” says Raman. “You’re not allowed to camp in parks. It’s always been true.”

“They’re not enforced,” says Bowles. “When you buy a house or rent an apartment, when you move to a place and you’re paying taxes to that place, you’re making a deal with the city, you’re saying, ‘I’m paying taxes to LA in exchange for sidewalks that I can walk down.’ ”

Everybody agrees that the apple-cranberry crumble is delicious.

Raman says the dinner conversation didn’t track with what she hears from people in LA, whom she deems more empathetic to homeless people. “This is the most conservative dinner party that I’ve ever been to,” agrees Barbara the architect.

Weiss sighs. “They don’t get out a lot.”

Jeffrey Katzenberg, Hollywood mogul, producer of Kung Fu Panda, is infuriated that Rick Caruso is still giving tours of Skid Row. “Caruso, you have $5 billion, why do you keep taking people to Skid Row?” he says to me. “You just pissed away $104 million on a failed campaign, why don’t you put that towards the homeless on Skid Row?”

We’re at the Polo Lounge inside the Beverly Hills Hotel, corner booth. Elon Musk may have moved to Texas, complaining of COVID lockdowns and taxes, but some of California’s superrich want to save California—personally. Trim and bespectacled, Katzenberg opens our conversation by asking me to imagine the year 2028: mass transit across Los Angeles, the airport transformed by an $11.5 billion capital investment, a new George Lucas museum, Microsoft billionaire Steve Ballmer’s $2 billion basketball arena in Inglewood, and the $750 million Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). And “the final piece of the puzzle”: the 2028 Olympics. Katzenberg is on the board.

With his tidy vision presented, he invites me to “tell me how I’ve got it wrong, because I don’t think so.”

If you’ve got a problem with California, Katzenberg has a solution. Two years ago he drew up 16 pages of what he calls a “Marshall Plan” to fix homelessness. “It wasn’t treating homelessness, it was solving homelessness,” he says. It became a personal mission after his car got stuck in traffic under an underpass on Interstate 10 on his way to a Lakers game. “I heard a child crying,” he says, “but crying loud, like hurt crying. And I turned and in a lean-to tent was a mom cradling a wailing child, maybe six years old, going like this”—he holds his ear in mock pain. “You know instantly that’s the international sign of earache.”

“It broke my heart that I could be looking at a human being, a child, here in Los Angeles, as I’m about to go sit in a $3,000-seat Laker game, who was probably going to lose their hearing for life,” he says. “I just went, ‘Oh, my God.’ It was one of the most heart-crushing moments of my life and I could not go home and go to sleep with that.”

The next morning, he called UCLA medical school and proposed he fund a street team of med students who would fan out around the city and treat minor medical issues. “This gave me the authenticity that I wasn’t just some rich guy talking about it,” he says, “but I actually was funding this with my millions of dollars.”

Katzenberg traces the city’s intractable problems to zoning. Los Angeles, like much of Southern California, was built as a series of suburbs, modeled on the fantasies of Midwesterners and zoned for single-family homes. Affordable housing was rarely built, and home valuations went higher and higher as people elected politicians to defend their valuations while working-class people were driven to the margins or off the margins altogether. The California Dream started killing the California Dream.

Last year, Katzenberg took his Marshall Plan to Bass, then a congresswoman, whom he considered a successful coalition builder. He asked her to run for mayor, promising to fund her campaign, and he followed through with $1 million. He took out negative TV ads blasting Caruso’s expensive promise to get 30,000 people off the street, build 100,000 houses, and add 1,500 new police officers and 500 sanitation workers to the city’s payroll. “And people went, ‘Oh, who is going to pay for that stuff?’ ” he recounts. “Where was he going to get the money to pay for that stuff?”

Caruso “got crucified,” Katzenberg says. “Lost by 10 points.”

Brittani Nichols doesn’t think billionaires should exist. The 35-year-old writer and producer for the ABC sitcom Abbott Elementary believes in wholesale wealth redistribution, the abolition of the police force, and the closure of prisons. She worked for Raman’s campaign three years ago and lives with Cerise Castle, who is her girlfriend, in a tiny apartment in Los Feliz with a Chihuahua mix and an albino python.

“Right now, the left in LA is comprised of a combination of people identifying as communists, socialists, and anarchists,” says Nichols, who is aligned with Ground Game LA, a progressive political group associated with three representatives on the 15-member Los Angeles City Council.

Over dinner one night at All Time, a restaurant specializing in “California cuisine”—fresh, unpretentious, expensive—Nichols tells me rich liberals of the type I’ve been seeing have grown conservative in recent years to protect their gains against the glaring reality of income inequality. “What you see here are people who are presenting themselves as liberal co-opting the tactics and language of right-wing people,” she says. “They politicize spaces like schools, that they know people have really strong opinions about, because they know that’s what will scare people.”

After graduating from Yale in 2011, Nichols moved to LA and achieved success in Hollywood—she recently won an NAACP award for one of her scripts—but she doesn’t think her success is replicable now because of stagnant wages and unaffordable housing. “The LA that I moved to doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. “I came here to be a television writer, not knowing a lot of people, not making any money, living check to check. And I just don’t know how anyone could do that. I don’t think that I could move to LA now and build a career in television. I don’t think it’s possible.” (Nichols subsequently became a prominent voice in the writers strike.)

When she got into politics, she discovered a city where leaders align themselves with corporate-funded business improvement districts and allocate taxpayer money to cronies while the poor stay poor, move out of California, or become homeless. A lot of the unhoused are people of color, she notes, and LGBTQ+. People living on the streets, she argues, are “the physical manifestation of the greed and corruption that has been happening in this city for decades.”

Until entitled Californians “cut to the truth” of income equality, Nichols says, the streets should count as a home—which is why she and many progressives insist on the term “unhoused” over “homeless.”

“There are ways to create a home outside of living in a building with four walls,” she explains. “When these encampments and communities that people have created to help protect themselves when they’re at their most vulnerable are destroyed, that is destroying their home.”

Before I meet Nancy Pelosi at Pier 23, I take a walk through San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the neighborhood most often held up as exhibit A of what’s wrong with California. For good reason: Hundreds of men and women are living on the sidewalks, passed out in doorways, or huddled in public parks, block after block. Intermingled with the homeless people are men in black jackets with green insignias who identify as members of a nonprofit called Urban Alchemy, a controversial group made up of formerly incarcerated people who act as de facto Guardian Angels. When a raving man menaces our photographer at UN Plaza, near City Hall, one of the jacketed men intervenes. Later, he identifies himself as Leslie Brigham, a former Oakland gang member who spent 33 years in prison for being an accomplice to the murder of a 14-year-old boy.

Brigham, who has been homeless before, is paid $21 an hour to spend five days a week hanging out in UN Plaza, checking pulses, directing the mentally ill to public services, and shielding local students from overly aggressive panhandlers. The concept behind the group, founded by Lena Miller, a former special assistant to former mayor Willie Brown, is that people who’ve been incarcerated have the street smarts, and empathy, to handle the down-and-out.

I ask Brigham to diagnose the homelessness epidemic, and he blames drugs—but also the police for failing to lock up fentanyl dealers. “They want to talk about, on the news, that they’re coming down on this fentanyl stuff, and stiffer sentencing, and things like that,” Brigham says. “From what I can see, it’s a bunch of crap, because I know guys that just got busted with fentanyl. Within a month, they’re out on the streets.”

The police department has a station around the corner, but Brigham complains that they’re just “hanging out and getting their paycheck,” letting Urban Alchemy “do their job.”

Urban Alchemy has a $39 million contract with San Francisco to manage public toilets and maintain a sense of order around large encampments. (Los Angeles recently extended a $2.6 million contract to cover Downtown LA, Hollywood, and Venice Beach.) They’re part of a trend of California cities employing civilians to manage what used to be the job of local police. In LA, the city council is considering relieving the LAPD of traffic duties and handing them over to non-deputized citizens.

“Some community members are disgruntled and feel like the police could do more,” says Artie Gilbert, who spent 26 years in prison for murder before becoming Urban Alchemy’s Bay Area director. “But the police are outspoken and the mayor done confirmed they undermanned…. They continuously communicate that to us directly.”

Urban Alchemy has come under scrutiny from critics, including the progressive Knock LA, who say the group collects millions from cities while overhyping its success, or worse, only adding to the chaos: Members have been accused of sexual harassment, assault, and even attempted murder. (Urban Alchemy says it investigates every accusation.) A homeless resident in Sausalito claimed she snorted crystal meth with one of the group’s street “practitioners.” “He handed me a rolled up 20-dollar bill with crushed up crystal meth,” she told a local paper. “After I was done, he let me keep the 20 dollars.”

A world away, in the Embarcadero, Pelosi says abolishing the police is ridiculous. She points to the failed attempt in Minneapolis to eliminate the police department after the George Floyd killing. “You don’t want that,” Pelosi says. “I’m going to call 911 and nobody’s going to come? What is that?”

Pelosi grew up in a Catholic political family in Maryland that admired and respected the police department. “They had a motto in those days, ‘Always be true to the men in blue,’ ” Pelosi says. “Now, there were no women at the time, but that was the police motto. And we probably had issues but didn’t realize it as much in terms of the abuses and the rest of that. But you can’t decide one against the other. There has to be a recognition because much of the crime is in the minority areas.”

Pelosi, for all her rah-rah, worries. Last year, her husband, financier Paul Pelosi, was attacked by a hammer-wielding madman in the Pelosis’ living room in Pacific Heights. He’d been looking for the Speaker (who’d soon after fork over control of the House to her right-wing antipode from Bakersfield, Kevin McCarthy). Since then, Pelosi’s reading of the political landscape has sharpened considerably.

“Some people said to me, ‘Why are you making a big fuss about safety? Nobody ever brings that up in my district,’ ” continues Pelosi. “I said, ‘Well, good for you. That’s wonderful. Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an ongoing [problem].’

“People just don’t want people on the street in their neighborhood,” she adds. “That’s just the way it is.”

She’s sympathetic to homeless people, even advising the unhoused who gather in front of her home to bring political picket signs to skirt vagrancy laws. “If they came in front of my house and were poor, they’d be arrested,” she says. “I said, ‘Go get a sign or something.’ ”

City leaders in LA and San Francisco and across California have tried different strategies to house homeless people, from Section 8 vouchers to using empty hotels to constructing tiny-house communities in parking lots. Bass vowed to house 4,000 people in her first 100 days, and Raman had some success putting people in hotels.

“We spent a lot of money, California did, during COVID,” Pelosi says. “And it’s a decision that everybody has to make. And decisions are hard. So communities will say, ‘Well, I don’t think they should take away the tents in the middle of the street.’ And other people are saying, ‘Are they doing them a favor by enabling them to live in tents?’

“But there are a lot of people who don’t want to come off this street,” she adds, “and that’s why I keep coming back to, it’s drugs and mental health. If we don’t get the mentally ill off the street, we’re never going to solve the homeless problem.”

I ask how she would advise fractious California Democrats to find common ground. For Pelosi, it’s not dissimilar to the challenge she faced in the far-left Squad, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“There are more ultra-left-wing elements that have come into the scene, and they are to be respected for what they want to do,” she says, but “what is your purpose? Your purpose is to be great on the social media, raise money there, have a name identity, that’s okay. That’s your decision. But if you’re going to pass legislation, you have to know what you’re doing.”

Which brings us to Gavin Newsom. Caught between the California promise of diversity and tolerance, and the chaos of California’s biggest cities, can Newsom build a national profile out of this mess? After an attempted recall last year for dining in a fancy restaurant during lockdowns and allowing homelessness to metastasize, he’s come back emboldened, but he’s also covered his flank by allocating more money to housing and pressuring mayors to clean up their cities.

Pelosi isn’t exactly unbiased on Newsom: Paul Pelosi’s brother was married to Newsom’s aunt, and Newsom’s grandfather worked for Pat Brown, father of Jerry Brown, who attended Catholic school with Paul, the same school Newsom attended. “All of our kids, they all grew up together,” she says.

“Yeah, I think he makes a good president,” she ventures, though Newsom has told Pelosi “he’s not interested” in running for president. She adds a caveat: “Whether people encourage him to do so, I don’t know.”

But Pelosi gushes about another presidential prospect in her midst: Adam Schiff, whom she is backing to fill Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat against left-wing progressives Katie Porter of Irvine and Barbara Lee of Oakland. “He is fantastic and has a vision,” she says. “He has knowledge and judgment to be president.”

In her final act as California’s most powerful pol, the Speaker would like to be kingmaker. She makes a point of calling Feinstein, whom she has known since the 1970s, a “marvel” and an “icon.” Feinstein’s fitness for office has seemed uncertain at best for months, but Pelosi’s eldest daughter, also named Nancy, has personally helped Feinstein in DC so she can make it to the end of the year.

As we’re departing Pier 23, a man in a Trump golf hat approaches Pelosi, raises his phone to shoot video and begins barking at her about her husband’s tech stock trades and US spending on the Ukraine war at a time when “we have homeless people in our own city that can’t eat.”

“Nancy, is your son involved with Hunter Biden?” he says as restaurant-goers yell at him to leave. The moment is not exactly what Pelosi means by public safety, but given what happened to her husband, it’s not the opposite either. Her security detail hustles him to the street.

“They don’t have a problem with me,” Pelosi says of her right-wing antagonists. “They have a problem with themselves and women.”

“The California of the new era will be greater, richer, more powerful than the California of the past; but will she be still the same California whom her adopted children, gathered from all climes, love better than their own motherlands; from which all who have lived within her bounds are proud to hail; to which all who have known her long to return? She will have more people; but among those people will there be so large a proportion of full, true men? She will have more wealth; but will it be so evenly distributed? She will have more luxury and refinement and culture; but will she have such general comfort, so little squalor and misery; so little of the grinding, hopeless poverty that chills and cramps the souls of men, and converts them into brutes?” —Henry George, “What the Railroads Will Bring Us,” 1868

Congressman Ro Khanna found out about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, which was in his district, on a Thursday night. By the next afternoon he was on a conference call with 600 freaked-out tech leaders begging for help. Khanna called a Joe Biden advisor and then Janet Yellen at the Treasury Department, and then he rotated through the Sunday political talk shows to apply public pressure on the White House to cover the bank’s deposits and stanch a panic. The following Monday, after the administration agreed, Khanna joked that the crisis was “turning tech millionaires and billionaires into FDR disciples suddenly.”

Khanna’s district, which stretches from Cupertino to Newark and counts Apple and Intel as constituents, is the richest in California. “We’ve got $10 trillion in market cap,” Khanna tells me over tikka masala at The Nawab’s Kitchen, in Fremont, a fluorescent-lit hole-in-the-wall of the kind you find in shopping plazas all over the state. “Apple has a $5 billion spaceship in my district.”

California’s tech industry is the canary in the coal mine for America’s economy. “I’m actually very bullish long-term,” Khanna says, describing the “exponential growth” in the tech “pipeline,” what with AI and cybersecurity and quantum computing. In the near term, however, interest rate hikes, which hurt companies built on pie-in-the-sky future earnings, have “hurt growth companies the most. They’re the first to face a slowdown.”

Khanna also presides over working-class cities to the south, sprawling neighborhoods of immigrants from India, China, and Mexico who service the lifestyles of the billionaires but can’t afford to live anywhere nearby. In Silicon Valley, socioeconomic diversity has evaporated. “There’s something that just seems out of whack,” he says.

There is, in Khanna’s analysis, a growing tension among California Democrats over the path through this squeeze. “On the cost of living, this has been failed policy in California,” he says. Immigrants, especially Latinos, who make up nearly 40 percent of California’s population, have become increasingly conservative when facing the fallout from progressive cities like San Francisco. While I was in the Central Valley, two hours east, I was told that homeless people from San Francisco were already showing up at the exits off Interstate 5. Santa Clara, which Khanna represents, initially resisted the extension of San Francisco’s BART rail system. “Who’s going to come here?” voters asked him. Khanna points to the former mayor of San Jose, Sam Liccardo, as a success story, in part for increasing the police presence. That California is a tolerant place is “wonderful,” Khanna says, “but that doesn’t mean that you can go smash into a Walgreen’s and steal stuff and not have consequences. There’s got to be that sense of ‘true freedom,’ but that’s got to be checked with the rootedness that other parts of the country provide.”

Khanna is critical of Newsom’s spending on attack ads last year against Ron DeSantis and Texas governor Greg Abbott, which spanked them over treatment of trans children and for banning abortion, while California’s Democratic candidates faced tight races, losing an uncomfortable number to Republicans. “We didn’t win more House seats in California because Gavin’s numbers were much lower, the margin, than they should have been,” he says.

Khanna offers a third way, pointing to his work on the CHIPS and Science Act, part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act package, which subsidized American chip factories to the tune of $280 billion. In a transparent jab at Newsom, Khanna questions whether California is a proper calling card for national ambitions. “I think the message that says ‘Make America California’ is not a winning message,” he says.

In November 1993, David Letterman called up a retired Johnny Carson in Los Angeles during his taped broadcast of The Late Show on CBS.

Letterman: How are things going there in California?

Carson: Pretty good, Dave, the mudslides are putting out the fires.

During the time I’m in California, the state is pummeled by a drought, torrential rains, floods, mudslides, two earthquakes, and deadly snowstorms, all following fire season. The ground, it seems, is always shifting under the feet of Californians. “Disaster is a way of life in California,” says Mary Nichols, the grand dame of California environmental policy for the last 45 years. “We are absolutely used to being knocked out. And that makes people unhappy and anxious,” Nichols says. “Sea level’s going to rise. The coast is going to crumble. There’ll be more floods. There already are more fires.”

Nichols was in Governor Jerry Brown’s first administration in the 1970s and ’80s, back when catalytic converters and lead in gasoline were the big issues (and Brown was dating Linda Ronstadt), and again in the 2010s, when Brown returned as a conquering hero to face down a $27 billion deficit. She worked for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to shape and pass the historic Assembly Bill 32 legislation that created a carbon cap-and-trade policy, and then for Newsom, who signed an executive order to end the sale of gas-powered cars in California by 2035. The campus of the California Air Resources Board, the most powerful environmental agency in the state, is named after her.

Californians get used to it, she says, which is itself a challenge. “People are more worried about the homeless encampments that they see, and whether the lights stay on, than they are about climate change overall, even when we have episodes of weird weather,” Nichols continues. The government has to be “able and willing to continue to persevere even when that isn’t what gets you the daily headlines.”

She points out that California faces the same urban-rural divides as the rest of the country, making it something of a scale model for national climate policy. It’s also a model for political gridlock. Perhaps nothing illustrates that better than the battle over water rights, with farmers in the Central Valley posting signs along Interstate 5 begging the governor to open dams to help irrigate crops for some of America’s biggest agricultural farmland, while Southern Californians suck up nearly 15% of the Colorado River, and Las Virgenes Municipal Water District has to issue warnings to Kim Kardashian and Kevin Hart for watering for their lawns during a drought. So dire is the situation that the Biden administration faces a Sophie’s choice over whether to divert more of the Colorado River to the swing states of Arizona and Nevada or protect the water privileges of squabbling LA Democrats.

When I ask Nichols for a prognosis for California, she takes a deep breath.

“Okay, death is inevitable, right?” she says. “Nobody’s figured out a way to prevent people from dying, but we can definitely prolong life and make life less painful. And I think that is what’s happening in California.”

Californians can get a little defensive about their paradise. Rachel Kushner, the novelist and essayist, says Easterners don’t understand the “ungraspable scope of the giantness of California.”

“I live in a place that is wonderfully unknowable and many different places at once,” she says one afternoon when we’re cruising around Echo Park in her mint 1964 Galaxie 500, the gleaming lowrider with white leather interior featured on the cover of her book of essays, The Hard Crowd. “So I think that’s something that people from New York City kind of miss. They come here and ride around in a car because they’re trying to see a bunch of things at once and they’re not getting a feel for what the place really is. But also they feel offended, especially if they come in December and they see that the lemons and the tangerines and the grapefruits and the oranges are all ripe. And that there’s snow on the San Gabriel Mountains and everyone has a yard. And they’re mad. They’re fucking mad.”

But on my sightseeing tour, Kushner also points to the lake where Jack Nicholson rowed a boat with Faye Dunaway in the Oscar-winning classic Chinatown—and which had a chain-link fence around it after the LAPD cleared a giant encampment in what Kushner describes as a “totally egregious, gross and idiotic, overwhelming display of force.”

Two days later, Kushner texts me from San Francisco, where she’s giving a reading and visiting her parents, a molecular biologist and a native-plant activist: “My parents are laughing hysterically that a journalist is asking if life in California is sustainable. They think it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard.”

The stand-up comedian Sheng Wang, a Berkeley grad with long hair, spectacles, and a laid-back hip-hop mien, may have the most sane reaction to modern California: He gets stoned and hangs out with plants. Californians, like their diverse flora, are survivors. “In the freaking desert, they’re doing it in one of the hardest places to do it, and they are doing it well,” observes Wang over dinner one night before a show in Santa Monica. “And they look good. They have such different looks, different styles. The desert plants, man.”

Wang, originally from Houston, moved to LA to write for the all-Asian network TV show Fresh Off the Boat, hired by Ali Wong, the stand-up comic and producer, whom he met in San Francisco in the early 2000s. During the pandemic, when comedy clubs were closed, Wang developed a slideshow of California plants to which he added narration about the “personalities” of a fiddle leaf fig or ponytail palm plant. He wanders Huntington Gardens in San Marino, in suburban LA, like he’s at the best party in all the land.

Wang’s closing bit on his Netflix special, Sweet and Juicy, is about the absurdity of trying to buy a house in LA with the financial prospects of “a 42-year-old Taiwanese American trying to make it as a stand-up comedian.” At minimum he needs $1 million. “They think I’m good for it!” he marvels. “They think I’m good for $1 million! Plus $900,000 in interest, that’s $2 million they expect me to provide them over my lifetime. They know something I don’t know.”

“I visited California in the year 2023, a time of great uncertainty and shifting paradigms. The state that once epitomized the spirit of possibility and untamed dreams now stood at the precipice of an ambiguous future. As I walked the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco, I couldn’t help but feel the weight of a collective restlessness, a yearning for answers in a world consumed by chaos.

“Gone were the days of the carefree California of my youth, where a sense of boundless optimism permeated the air. The Golden State had tarnished, its luster dulled by a relentless barrage of challenges that seemed insurmountable. The dreams that once flourished like wildflowers on the hillsides now withered under the scorching heat of reality.”

—ChatGPT response to the query “Write about the future of California in the style of Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

“Oh, please, come on,” says Pelosi at Pier 23. “California’s not dead.”

“Anybody who wants to underestimate the dynamism of California does so at their peril,” she says. “I think that we’re not only great, we’re a model to a country.”

A true freedom state, one might say.

Newsom’s slogan originated with his attempt to insert himself in the trans debate, positing California as a haven for those suffering under harsh anti-trans laws in places like Florida and Texas. The right has tried to use trans rights as a wedge issue, but California has always, proudly, been one-stop shopping for wedge issues, whether gay rights or reparations for African Americans (a San Francisco committee recently proposed distributing $5 million to every Black citizen of the city in compensation for slavery and redlining). The more California changes, Pelosi says, the more it stays the same. Squabbling among Democrats “isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength.”

“For those who say, well, it’s not what it used to be, thank goodness because we all should be growing,” she says. “And you have to learn from people. Don’t you think that more people are in favor of LGBTQ because they’ve learned from their family members, the next generation, from younger people to whom the future belongs?”

Politics can only fix so much. At the dinner party at Susan Orlean’s, faces go a little slack when you start talking about local politics. Roshan, the onetime editor in chief of Los Angeles magazine, said the talk of the town that week was the mountain lion that ran loose in the Hollywood Hills, a beloved local legend before it ate somebody’s dog and had to be killed. When Orlean complains about an encampment at the bottom of her hill, Raman, whom Orlean didn’t vote for, perks up and says, “I cleared that camp!” It’s a lonely job.

Hope for the future is perhaps California’s greatest unquantifiable resource. Khanna tells me the most “consequential” thing to happen to California, “that will dwarf probably anything else” and which future journalists will be writing about 50 years from now, occurred 45 minutes east of San Francisco: “The holy grail,” he says, “of replicating the sun.”

Near the end of my time in California, I drive to Livermore and witness a scene out of an Ursula K. Le Guin novel: a matriarchy of physicists and engineers presiding over a giant laser in pursuit of a new science that could save humanity from itself. Kim Budil, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, along with her top three lieutenants, all women, reported the first instance of fusion energy late last year, firing 2.05 megajoules of laser heat at a BB-size target and “igniting” hydrogen into a helium atom and a neutron, the “fusion” reaction that creates “more energy out of the target than we put in with the laser.”

“We’ve demonstrated the fundamental building block that says fusion is not impossible,” says Budil, who looks like the love child of Meryl Streep and Carl Sagan. She is in the business of applied physics, but she is also in the business of dreaming outrageous California dreams in what she calls her “magnificent palace of science.” Within 50 years, fusion, she says, could alter the course of the world, upending geopolitics as we know it, powering grids with clean, non-carbon-producing energy, adaptable the world over, “energy equity” for all. Unlike wind or solar energy, “fusion is a one-size-fits-all solution,” she says. “It could go anywhere.”

And as with the climate and the housing and the crime and the tech pipelines of Silicon Valley, all she needs is money. Budil dreams of financing a laser 50 times more powerful, one that could achieve “ignition” 10 times a second. “With a billion dollars a year,” she says, a twinkle in her eye, “you could have an amazing fast-moving freight train of fusion activity.”

For now, she resides in present-day California and rattles her tin can like everybody else, waiting for the future to arrive. Budil, originally from Chicago, does her yoga and her Spin classes and roams the high-security campus at Livermore listening to audiobooks, her latest, Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears. Budil manages a yearly Oscar pool and typically wins, she says, successfully predicting, before it happens, that Everything Everywhere All at Once will take best picture. It’s a no-brainer, of course. “I mean, where do you get the multiverse and the everything bagel converging?” she asks.

Only in California.

CORRECTIONS: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of LACMA. It is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It also misstated the profession of Rachel Kushner’s father. He is a molecular biologist.