kontextmaschine:

Oh one thing to think about: Los Angeles - the last place we had a religious revival from - has traditionally been significantly, substantially, literally one of the more pro-Nazi parts of America.

Has to do mostly with migration patterns, boomed with a lot of Scando-German midwesterners (and after WWI a lot of German-friendly ex-Ottoman immigrants).

Like, all this was masked by the way its WWII effort was locally understood as mainly against Japan (which helped align California’s substantial non-Japanese Asian population, identifying with lands colonized by the Japanese Empire)

Like there were actual Nazi cults in the hills, the whole surfer hippie thing was a recapitulation of German wandervogel with actual Nazi mystic elements, the Falling Down surplus store with the secret Nazi room (and kinda the Gimp in Pulp Fiction) and American History X reflected real LA things.

Police forces usually lag their local populations (an interesting exception is how the Boston Irish used it to push out the older WASPs) and like, “the LAPD is a bunch of Nazis”, no that was real (so is “they since retired and helped settle Northern Idaho as an armed white ethnostate”)

That means The Rocketeer, where the hero fights the Nazis from 1938 LA, is kind of a nyah-nyah from the 80s (punk, anti-Reagan) antifascist tendencies

Oh also it should be noted that with an oil-boom and buildout-boom economy and plenty of open space to expand into pre-WWII LA was known as a particularly middle-class city, a precursor to the postwar “mass middle class” California and American Dreams. And that it was also particularly nonunion, with the newspaper Chandler dynasty rallying a coalition of businessmen to keep them out.

Like, beyond the favorable ethnic mix it was a petit bourgeois society of union suppression, no surprise there’d be resonance there.

There were countertendencies. A West Coast port, there were Asian and maritime communities - Filipino sailors, Malay dockworkers, a Chinatown since way back. There’ve been Mexicans in LA since LA was in Mexico, and the wartime buildout of airplane and other materiel factories boomed its black population. Ideologically, the Chandlers were fighting someone on the labor side, and they sometimes fought back with dynamite.

The wave of Mexican immigration that seriously browned the city is popularly dated as late as the 1980 Olympics. Before that, the Southern California that gave us Reagan and received Nixon was key to why until the party’s collapse in the mid-90s, California was once a bulwark of Republican conservatism.