“Do you know what ‘metonym’ means?” he asked out of the blue one time. Unfortunately, I didn’t. (To spare you my embarrassment: it’s a name used as a reference for something else, like “K Street” for Washington’s lobbying culture, or “Silicon Valley” for the tech industry.) The surprise, coming from a politician, was that he was actually asking for information rather than testing me or pretending he already knew. “Me neither,” he said after my admission, “but I know it’s very big with the deconstructionists.” I did better when he asked whether I knew where the phrase “no country for old men” had come from. Yes! It’s the first line of Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which became the title of a novel by Cormac McCarthy, which was in turn the basis for a 2007 movie by the Coen brothers. Brown said that he was wondering because he’d just talked with a Washington media grandee who used the phrase without knowing that it had any history. “Jerry didn’t know there was a movie,” his wife said.

Another time he was telling me that “deracination,” and the loss of local loyalties like the ones he felt as a fourth-­generation Californian, made it hard to create political consensus. “But California was built by deracinated people, who keep on coming here—and America was too,” I broke in, being careful to add “Governor.” “Right, maybe I’m going too far,” he answered, thinking as he spoke. “But …” and he proceeded with a slight revision of his point.

Brown’s State of the State address this year, which he wrote with the help of his wife (he ad-libs most speeches and has no writers or “message people”), included an account of a party of Spanish explorers, led by Gaspar de Portolá, who in 1769 went from Baja California to Monterey Bay. Classing up a speech with historical nuggets is a standard political move. But usually speakers like to imply that the quote from Mark Twain or insight from the Punic Wars is something they’ve known since earliest tutelage rather than something they recently happened across. In speeches and in conversation, Brown emphasizes his ongoing discoveries. “I was just reading about Cicero, and did you know they chopped his head off and put it on a pike—and a lady put a pin through his tongue with a sign saying Enough of his eloquence?,” Brown, who was a classics major at Berkeley, said to me. “I’ve been reading a lot about how screwed-up the Roman Republic was.”

The State

As for the problems Brown and his state are wrestling with, they are America’s problems—but worse. Here we leave the governor for a moment to consider the environment he is working in, which is both emblematic of and surprisingly different from America as a whole.

You can go too far with the idea that California shows how all of America will look a few years from now. The state’s population is already more heavily Hispanic than the U.S. population might ever be: Hispanics, at nearly 40 percent, are about to overtake California’s “non-Hispanic white” percentage to become the largest ethnic group in the state. (Nationwide, Hispanics are about 17 percent of the population.) Relative to the country as a whole, Asians also make up a larger share of California’s population—­roughly 15 percent of the state, versus about 8 percent of the country—while blacks and whites represent smaller shares. (California is about 40 percent white and 6 percent black, versus 63 percent and 12 percent, respectively, for the United States.) Largely because of these demographic shifts, the Republican Party, which a generation ago relied on California as the largest element of its Sunbelt base, now barely bothers to mount statewide races except those self-financed by political-novice millionaires like Meg Whitman, who lost badly to Brown in 2010, and Carly Fiorina, who lost badly to Barbara Boxer for the U.S. Senate that same year. In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 3 million votes in California—and by only 2 million more in the other 49 states combined. In both houses of the state legislature the Democrats have, for now, a two-thirds “supermajority” that allows them to prevail even against California’s version of the filibuster. “The Republicans appear to have no power,” Jerry Brown told me. “Some of them are nice people, but they aren’t needed for any votes [in the legislature], and they don’t participate.”