At a Berkeley road intersection near the University of California's Sproul Plaza stickers on a newspaper box bear the hallmarks of a populace obsessed with leftwing politics. "Bring Democracy to America", says one. Others advertise the anti-war, long-shot presidential bid of Dennis Kucinich. But the slogans are among the few public hints of political discourse in Berkeley, a city once synonymous with protests, speeches, debates and riots.
Current leftwing causes, from the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriages to the war in Iraq, have remained largely unremarked upon in the run-up to today's Democratic presidential primary in California, one of 10 such contests that comprise Super-Tuesday.
At the Sufficient Grounds coffee house, David Kim, a politically independent fourth-year student, says: "Since September 11 it's been pretty quiet." Up the street, Tiffany Hsiang, a third-year student, says the usual tables and posters set up by political groups are missing from Sproul Plaza. "It's not a really important election," she says. "No one's discussing it."
Even a few years ago, such comments would have been unthinkable in this city of 102,000 people. The Berkeley tradition of resisting authority arguably began in 1950, when faculty members refused to take an oath of anticommunism.
Berkeley came of age in the 1960s, first with autumn 1964's Free Speech movement - a successful student resistance against a ban on political speech on campus. By the late 1960s, leftwing politics and hatred of the Vietnam war sparked the riots that gave the city its "Berserkeley" nickname.
But the city has changed. "What has happened in Berkeley has happened in a lot of places in the United States," says Tom Bates, a progressive Democrat mayor elected in November 2002. "A much more diverse population is now being priced out of the community." Minorities are disappearing: blacks, who once comprised about 20 per cent of Berkeley's population, now make up about 9 per cent.
Aaron Hurst, a graduate engineering student from Pennsylvania, who helped run the campus campaign of Howard Dean, the former Democratic front-runner, acknowledges "90 per cent of the people are not engaged [in politics] or not involved in the outside world. They do care, but they're students first, voters second."
Bruce Cain, a political science professor who arrived at Berkeley 14 years ago, points to the effect of legislative changes that have in effect cancelled the University of California's ability to consider ethnicity in its admissions policies.
He says the result is that generally poorer and more politically active black and Hispanic students have been replaced by many first- or second-generation Asian-Americans, who tend to steer clear of politics. Asian-Americans now comprise 41 per cent of Berkeley's 23,000 undergraduates, while black and Latino students together comprise just 15 per cent.
Tuition fees of up to $20,000 a year are also pushing Berkeley
beyond the reach of poorer applicants.
Current conditions also discourage political activity. "The war in Iraq and the president's pre-emptive policies are more an abstraction to today's students because the draft was abolished and therefore it doesn't affect their lives in the immediate way it did in the 1960s," says Prof Cain.
More prosaically, in the build-up to today's primary, Berkeley's calm reflects John Kerry's overwhelming lead in the Democratic race, as well as the left's unusually unified hatred of the current resident of the White House.
Mr Hurst, the Dean organiser, is sanguine about the 90 per cent of students he deems politically disengaged. "I came into Berkeley with the same stereotype that most people have. "That it was just this absolute hotbed," he says. "I was surprised to find it was different. But I don't think it was bad. Once you meet those 10 per cent, those are the people who affect change."