There was a time when everything “cool” started in California – but not any more. Youth culture and mavericks like Steve McQueen have been replaced by cancel culture and magpies like Bette Midler. I was once a Californian and observed its political groupthink. It was then real estate uber alles. It is now green energy uber alles. The Golden State’s politics du jour reflects an absence of bedrock values (e.g. Iowa’s are rooted in farm life), because California’s shifting demographics so disrupt its needs.
Today’s California is hostage to green Democrats at war with carbon-based energy. Not only has the war created higher energy costs and summer brown-outs, it’s left 60 million dead trees that fuel the annual wildfires and undo all carbon-reduction progress. These ICI (idiots claiming intelligence) progressives ignore the truth of over-population, blame utilities, and enrich green businesses. Hello? 40 million people cannot inhabit a high desert built on unstable tectonic plates.
By allowing over-population, California has drained rivers, located cities near fault lines, and pushed residential development onto arid grasslands. Golden State residents, after suffering the inevitable consequences, elected a nanny state to solve man-made wildfires fanned by El Niño winds, smog trapped by hot desert air, freeways collapsed by earthquakes, and ruinous landslides after Pacific rains soak grassy hills. Sad, but proof of ICI governance.
California is also hostage to bad demography; a mix of static liberal elites, shrinking middle class, and growing wards of the state (public employees and the poor). This resulted from progressives letting illegal immigrants displace native-born workers, triggering high taxes and state-provided welfare. A middle class, unable to afford California, began leaving in 2000. This left a failed state attracting mostly illegal immigrants (anything beat El Salvador). Today, 30% of America’s poor live in California, where 20% live below the poverty line.
Sadly, the Golden State is environmentally and economically unsustainable; thereby killing the American Dream for the middle class that was once the state’s economic engine. That dynamism is gone. Hard to describe California with a single adjective now, because it’s home to mad-liberal elites at the top and welfare-state immigrants at the bottom. The elites control state and local governments, and the immigrants vote for programs and protections. In a nutshell, that is California today – and it’s not pretty.
California’s liberal elites are sadly illiberal. Berkeley is no longer the cradle of free speech and political outliers, but the home of cancel culture and snowflakes. They think Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz’s Israel advocacy is hate speech and Hollywood’s anti-Trump threats are free speech. Not moderated by a middle class (either leaving or silently deplorable), California is haven to anti-Americanism. The Bill of Rights, citizenship, and two-party politics are anathema in Sacramento.
California’s public employees and poor immigrants are (sadly) left-wing foot soldiers, who vote the party line and turn out to scream the party narrative. Hard to fault them, because they are voting their self-interest – as long as Sacramento can tax and borrow the money. This kinda-sorta worked with un-limited federal income tax deductions, which is why Nancy Pelosi wants to (1) bail out California’s public employee unions and (2) end the cap on SALT deductions.
The issue for most of us is whether California Dreaming will infect the rest of the USA. The hope here is that (1) a red-state firewall keeps the insanity on the left coast, (2) California burns in its own fiscal malpractice, and (3) a new land of opportunity arises from the ashes. But for now, it’s screaming for reparations (and two cops to die), higher property taxes, a wealth tax, and 16% state income tax.
Sounds bad unless you’re liberal and elite – like Senator Feinstein (married to a billionaire), Governor Newsom (income supplemented by rich friends), and Nancy Pelosi (hair done wherever, whenever and however she damn wants). Honestly, I can smell the hypocrisy and mendacity here in Virginia.