Politics & Power Quote by Angela Carter

California sunshine becomes a political theory in miniature: indifferent, flattering, and quietly brutal. Carter’s line turns on a sly inversion. Sunshine is “democratic” precisely because it is not earned. It doesn’t care about status, talent, or, crucially, paperwork. In a place obsessed with deals, gatekeepers, and proof of belonging, the one thing that “shone on everyone” is the thing no one can control. That’s the joke, and the sting.

The phrase “whether they had a contract or not” smuggles in the real hierarchy: California as the land of contract culture, where legitimacy arrives via signatures, agents, and studios. Carter’s speaker sounds dazzled, but the admiration has teeth. If the most democratic phenomenon she encounters is weather, what does that imply about the social order underneath the glow? The sunlight becomes a kind of atmospheric PR, bathing winners and strivers alike in the same golden filter while leaving the actual distribution of power untouched.

Carter, a novelist steeped in gothic revision and feminist skepticism, often punctured the myths societies tell about themselves. Here she needles California’s self-image - open, free, newly invented - by granting “democracy” to something inert. The subtext is that human systems in that sunshine state are anything but. The line also catches the seductive danger of glamour: the light makes everyone look equal, even when they aren’t, and that illusion can feel like justice.

In one sentence, Carter delivers a postcard and an indictment, letting the sun do the smiling while she does the accounting.