On Sunday afternoon, Senator Kamala Harris, promoting her memoir, “The Truths We Hold,” at a sold-out theatre in Los Angeles (and presumably gauging the public’s interest in her as a Presidential candidate), digressed from her prepared remarks to vent. Travelling the country before the midterm elections to campaign on behalf of Democratic candidates, she had repeatedly bumped into a troubling cliché. “There are all of these perceptions about who we are as Californians,” she said, as the audience tittered. “But it’s annoying! It really is. It can be really annoying because there are many stereotypes about who we are. One specific one that I’ll discuss: this idea that we are this state full of progressive people who are aligned with all matters that relate to social justice and civil rights.” She went on to list several pieces of retrograde legislation that voters had passed—limiting immigrants’ rights, instituting harsh sentences for repeat offenders, outlawing same-sex marriage—which had, until being overturned in court or amended through subsequent legislation, exposed the complexity of sunny California idealism. The paradox of bleeding liberalism and bone-deep conservatism lays at the secret heart of the richest, poorest state.

Standing near the stage was a woman dressed in white—the color of suffragettes, debate-mode Hillary Clinton, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at her swearing-in—holding a sign that read “We Stand With L.A. Teachers.” If I had to guess, I’d say that the problematic California law on her mind at that moment was Proposition 13, a ballot measure, passed in 1978, that rolled back property taxes for homeowners and commercial properties to their rates in 1976 and capped increases at two per cent per year, shrinking by a quarter the funding available for the state’s once strong public schools and gutting the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the country, after New York. The district has been in free fall ever since. (A revision to the bill, the California Schools and Local Communities Act, which would eliminate the tax freeze on commercial properties, is headed for the ballot in 2020, and, its proponents say, will generate eleven billion dollars for schools and other community services.)

The next day, Monday, that sign was everywhere—wielded like a shield, covered in plastic, against a driving, chilly rain—as more than thirty thousand L.A. teachers went on strike to protest abysmal conditions in their schools. Over the weekend, the school district made an offer that was half a per cent shy of the teachers’ salary demands but claimed to be constrained by a lack of funds from making lasting changes to address staffing and other needs. The teachers didn’t buy it, and, in any case, they had a greater goal in mind: the future of L.A.U.S.D. and of the public-school system nationwide. L.A.’s charter schools, which do not abide by the same regulations as traditional public schools, are funded with public money but are privately run. Attracted by their offerings, many students have abandoned the district, leaving its schools under-enrolled and six hundred million dollars poorer, a decline that teachers fear will lead to extinction. Eighty-five per cent of the district’s students now live below the poverty line, and the student body is roughly ten per cent white. (In Los Angeles, as in many places, whiteness and wealth are strongly correlated.) The strike, particulars aside, has an existential urgency. It forces the question: What would it mean for our democracy and our American self-image if the public schools in our second-largest city were only for the least privileged?

At Venice Senior High School—a school of two thousand students, where, according to a teacher who is the union co-chair, approximately thirty per cent of parents speak no English—teachers and students formed a picket line as passing cars honked brightly in support and an eighteen-wheeler let out a long, low, galvanizing bellow. The color of the day was not white but apple red, the primary color that says “Stop” and “Broke” and is the emblem of the national teacher walkout movement #RedForEd, which began in West Virginia, a year ago, and has spread to Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado.

“We’re riding on the coattails of Arizona and Oklahoma,” James Blackwood, an alumnus who taught at Venice for decades before retiring, told me. (He also sent his children to Venice, and has a grandson there now.) “You don’t expect strikes in those states; those are red states,” he said. “But we should never, with the fifth-largest economy in the world in this state, have class sizes of over forty. We can’t argue that we believe in equality of opportunity and not have it at our schools.” Sophie Sabbah, a physical-education teacher and a coach, held a large umbrella and a hand-lettered sign that said “Class Size Matters.” As a high-school senior, she had walked the picket line, in 1989, when L.A.U.S.D. teachers went on strike to protest low pay. “The first couple of days, I went to the auditorium and watched movies, and then I thought, I’m not learning anything, so I went out and marched with my teachers for the remainder of the strike,” she recalled. At Venice Senior High, she said, her P.E. classes sometimes have as many as a hundred students in them.

A chant went up on the picket line: “Beutner, Beutner, you can’t hide! We can see your greedy side!” Beutner is Austin Beutner, a super wealthy former investment banker with no meaningful experience in education who, in May, was named the superintendent of the school district, to the dismay of the teachers’ union. The union believes that Beutner aims to dismantle or “charterize” the district, a perception strengthened by the leak, in November, of a “secret plan,” developed with the help of Ernst & Young, to reduce the central bureaucracy, giving schools more autonomy while insisting on more accountability, in the way of charters. Responding to Beutner’s selection, which took place without meaningful stakeholder input, the union reported that he has “strong family and business ties to Amway, the business that Betsy DeVos’s family started and that made them wealthy,” and that “he met with DeVos last year.” A friend who works on education policy in Los Angeles told me that, so long as Beutner is in that role, the negotiations will be very challenging. “He is white, wealthy, privileged, male, and has a financial background,” she said. “Unfortunately, in this polarizing climate, he has become a symbol that fits the narrative that public education is being sold to the highest bidder.” Teachers on the picket line told me that, had the previous superintendent been in place, a strike would almost certainly have been averted.

Later in the morning, tens of thousands of teachers, students, parents, and supporters convened downtown to march on Beutner’s office at the L.A.U.S.D. headquarters. The Metro had offered free rides for strikers, and students and teachers rode side by side, dripping wet from the rain and chanting. In a coffee shop several blocks away from the district headquarters, a group of female students—tented, Handmaidlike, in red ponchos and jackets—took a break to warm up. They attended a public school in Silver Lake, a gentrified neighborhood where wealthy parents raise supplemental funding for the local schools. Sydney Kennedy, a junior wearing a red Eddie Bauer fleece, had blond braids sticking out from underneath a gray knit cap. She said that her math class had fifty-five kids in it. “And we’re the lucky ones in L.A.U.S.D.”