Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine may be onto something here. Let’s hope he’s right.

California’s Radical College-Sex-Law Experiment

The Democratic Party has built what looks like a stable and demographically expanding national electoral majority. But coalitions can come unglued, and eventually, all of them do, when their policies fail or their elected officials push them too far from the center of public opinion. If you want to see glimmerings of this future unraveling of the Democratic coalition, look where the future is so often found: in California.

There Governor Jerry Brown has recently signed an “affirmative consent law,” which requires all sexual activity among college students to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” and requires such consent be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity.” It is a massive broadening of the legal definition of rape, and a new blow in the culture wars that will likely reverberate in ways liberals have barely begun to contemplate….

Obviously, failing to convict a guilty rapist is bad, too. There is no downside-free resolution that would avoid unfairness one way or another.

But people have certain intuitive beliefs about justice. If most college students today do not think that sex without continuous, affirmative consent is actually rape, and there is a law in place rendering it as such, soon enough, somebody is going to be prosecuted under these terms. And that person will become a victim of a standard of justice that offends the moral sensibilities of a large number of Americans, which is directly attributable to the actions of California’s elected Democratic officials. What will the law’s defenders do then?