From Pitchforks to Proposition 13
David Kennedy put the current recall in historical perspective!

"To the extent that Californians — and Americans — subscribe to that view, they have confounded the predictions of countless theorists about the nature of democratic politics. Among those theorists, Alexis de Tocqueville is an exception, for he identified the peculiarities of the American case now so vividly manifest in California, that most American of states. The characteristic social class that American society nurtured, said Tocqueville, was composed of 'eager and apprehensive men of small property.' Though born in revolution, their country was unlikely ever again to undergo revolutionary upheaval. 'They love change, but they dread revolutions,' Tocqueville concluded, because 'they continually and in a thousand ways feel that they might lose by one.'
That social class of small property owners, and its attendant attitudes, are now ascendant in California, and perhaps in the nation at large. Their influence explains why the government from which Shays demanded relief, and the government that Johnson tried to place more firmly in the hands of the people, has now become the object of popular suspicion and hostility. Americans apparently prefer misgovernment that will leave them to their own devices to an effective government that might actually do something for them — or ask something of them.
We've come a long way from the Regulator to the Terminator."