Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

SAN SIMEON, Calif. — To take in the gardens of Italian cypress and perfumed citrus, to sit at poolside under a Roman temple front, to stare at the infinity of the Pacific from 1,600 feet above the water is to realize that Hearst Castle was much more than the Xanadu that entombed a tragic giant in “Citizen Kane.”

Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill were among the guests to dine in the 60,645-square-foot main house of the press magnate William Randolph Hearst, though Churchill must have chafed at the two-drink limit.

What you feel in this gilded aerie, now part of the state park system, is another California — crazy, wildly hubristic, a place without limits. The audacity of latching fantasy onto earthquake-shaky bedrock has always been in the state’s DNA.

And right on cue, just as the chorus of California-hating naysayers have signed off on yet another obituary — It’s Greece! A liberal nightmare! Everyone’s leaving! — the Golden State is dreaming once again.

Following a tax hike backed by voters last year, California is projecting a budget surplus in the near future, and big pockets of the state are national leaders in job creation and population growth.



Of greater significance, two of the biggest public works projects in American history — a $68 billion bullet train that will speed people from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2 hours and 38 minutes, and a huge re-plumbing of the state’s biggest river and delta system — are moving forward. If they come together as planned, these ventures will lay the foundation for a California of 60 million people that may actually be more livable than the state that now has 38 million.

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Both initiatives have boatloads of critics. And given California’s decade of depression, doubt and debt, these skeptics deserve a healthy hearing. But at least the Golden State is looking toward tomorrow once again.

If the Pilgrims had landed in California, goes the line attributed to Ronald Reagan, the East Coast would still be wilderness. And yet, people love to hate this state, in the same way that people love to hate, say, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees — all that preening beauty, natural talent and golden glow.

I yield to no one in my longstanding, um, envy of California’s great bounty (and my ill feelings about A-Rod). Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I learned to loathe the “sunbaked barbarians” to the south, and not just because their teams almost always beat my teams.

But there is something irrational, indeed unpatriotic, in rooting for California to fail, as so many conservatives are now doing. Sure, they are upset that the Republican Party is dead in this state — R.I.P. G.O.P. And, among the fringes, there are those who cannot accept that California is a minority-majority state, with whites making up about 39 percent of the population. They’ve seen the future and don’t like it one bit.

When Cal-haters say people are leaving the state because of high taxes — its top rate is 13.2 percent on earnings over $1 million — they mean people like them. Or people like the golfer Phil Mickelson, who complained that the tax burden on the millions he makes hitting a little white ball may force him to look beyond his Southern California moorings.

Because, by any measure, the state is still growing. Nationwide, of the 10 counties with the largest numeric increase in population last year, three were in California. In that same period, the state added 256,000 people — nearly half the population of Wyoming. Also, in roughly the same span, California added 365,000 new jobs.

These metrics are not necessarily a validation of policies from Sacramento. The state’s bloated pension system is out of control, and the unemployment rate, 9.8 percent, is well above the national average. But California, the world’s ninth largest economy, is not Greece, which Mitt Romney compared it to last year.

The Great Recession cost the state 1.3 million jobs — a huge blow. And when Gov. Jerry Brown was sworn in for a long-interrupted third term in 2011, he inherited a budget hole of $25 billion. He cut spending, while convincing people to raise taxes. “Fiscal discipline is not the enemy of our good intentions,” he said, “but the basis for realizing them.”

And the same time, voters elected a Democratic super-majority in the Assembly, assuring that the Party of No would be irrelevant. Brown can crow — for the moment. “Against those who take pleasure singing our demise, California did the impossible.”

Brown is a seasoned visionary, becoming less prickly with age. In a memorable state of the state speech earlier this year, he tied the discovery of gold and the founding of Google to California’s “special destiny.”

The centerpiece of his vision is high-speed rail (also approved by the voters) and re-engineering the water system of the Central Valley to ensure that nature, agriculture and residential growth all have a future, no matter what climate change brings.

The governor notes that China has 5,000 miles of high-speed rail, and even Morocco is constructing a system. By building the nation’s largest transportation project, California would alleviate the need to spend $100 billion on 3,000 miles of new roads. That’s the premise. Construction is set to begin later this year.

All of it together — the rerouted rivers, the train moving at the speed of Superman, taxing the rich and welcoming a Latino majority — is a road not taken by any other state. You can laugh at the sunbaked barbarians, even wish them ill. But you should not fail to see in their fledgling renaissance another chapter in the American experiment, no less daring than the Golden Gate Bridge or the castle that Hearst erected at continent’s edge.

As Brown said, “What is this but the most diverse, creative and longest-standing mass migration in the history of the world — that is California.”