It has recently been cold in California—not as cold as in New York, but a cold that makes lingering outside unpleasant. Weather anchors spoke about “these temperatures” and “a chill right down”; a weird, L.A.-like haze rested over the San Francisco Bay, and officials temporarily banned the burning of home fires. Everyone was waiting for the wind to change. It seemed apt in this moment that Senator Barbara Boxer, who has represented California in Congress for the past thirty-two years, confirmed what had been widely assumed: she will not seek reëlection in 2016. During her ten years in the House and twenty-two in the Senate, Boxer has been known for channelling the beliefs of a progressive mainstream—sexual equality, environmental preservation, and, often, anti-interventionism—at times when they seem to have too few powerful advocates. But she also embodies a particular generation of California liberal, and her retirement from Congress marks a shift in the progressive face of the state.

Boxer joined the Senate in 1993, after a ten-year term as the congresswoman for California’s District 6, which at that point included a large swath of Marin and Sonoma Counties. This was a young redoubt of merlot liberalism—comfortable, lefty, drawn to yoga and the raising of tomatoes—and Boxer entered politics representing its mores. Her first successful political campaign, for the Marin County board of supervisors, in 1976, promised “the new politics of the mid-70s, the politics of caring about people and their environment, with an equal concern about what happens to their money”—a perfect distillation of the region’s outlook, then and now. This local program became the template for her Washington years. In Congress, Boxer was known for her popularity at home. (She won seventy-four per cent of the vote in the 1986 congressional race and nearly seven million votes in her 2004 Senate run, a record at the time.) She was a candidate suited to Democrats seasoned by the sixties: those who took issues of identity politics and sexual rights as givens, who were categorically suspicious of big, wealthy institutions (less so of big, wealthy liberals) and who saw personal passion as more crucial to the course of civic life than coalition politics. The slogan of her first congressional campaign was “Barbara Boxer Gives a Damn.” She worked, from that moment on, to prove the point.

Her preferred theatre for this project has been the congressional floor. Though the Boxer voting record has its share of noteworthy outliers—she voted against the Iraq invasion, late-nineties financial deregulation, and the expansion of foreign surveillance, all of which placed her in opposition with the senior California senator Dianne Feinstein—her yeas and nays are not those of a maverick. Her reputation as a front-guard liberal rises instead mainly from her flair for the legislative process, which in many cases has involved causing a scene. Boxer is rightly celebrated for leading a march to call for a hearing on Anita Hill’s harassment allegations before the confirmation vote on Clarence Thomas. More than fifteen years later, she stirred up controversy with her verbal sortie with Condoleezza Rice during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the escalation of troops in Iraq. (“Who pays the price?” Boxer asked. “I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family.”) Her articulation of her era’s liberal conscience—she didn’t mention Vietnam in that hearing, but she made the connection elsewhere—rests near the heart of her political dynamism. And it helps to account for why, in California, where that conscience took its firmest root, she’s been heralded not just as a senator but as a kind of soldier for the cause.

In the past few years, however, the dominant liberal power culture in California has started to change. And, with Boxer’s exit from Congress, its role in national politics will change, too. The state’s rising progressives are post-sixties people. While their political genes are from the same family line—they, too, rally voters around issues like environmentalism, gun control, marriage rights, and immigration—the liberalism of today’s California has different features. Gavin Newsom, the state’s lieutenant governor, was eyed as a front-runner for Boxer’s seat until publicly declining to run yesterday (presumably to stay free for a gubernatorial campaign in 2018). He is the author of a book, “Citizenville,” that argues for, among other things, deregulation of the tech-innovation sphere. Kamala Harris, the California attorney general, who now may be the leading candidate, is famous for her center-seeking reserve and ideological circumspection; it is hard to imagine her leading a march anywhere. Whereas Boxer’s California liberalism was largely about identity politics, prickly public activism, and institutional safeguards, the new generation tends toward meritocratic logic, integrated privatization, and innovation. Boxer writes literary-esque novels in her spare time. Newsom has sought to bone up on Bitcoin.

In a bizarre self-produced video announcing her Senate exit, Boxer allowed herself to be mock-interviewed by her grandson, who is wearing shorts. “I am never going to retire—the work is too important,” she says. “But you know what? I want to come home. I want to come home to the state that I love so much, California.” Is it the state she knows? West Coast liberals like to think of themselves as a unified, chai-drinking front. The elections ahead will test whether, in the twenty-first century, that’s still true.