Victor Davis Hanson
California has become for some time a one-party state: no Republican statewide office holders; supermajority of Democrats in both state legislatures; only nine Republican Congressional representatives out of the 52-member state delegation; no Republican governor in the last 15 years; and the majority of local and state judges leftwing Democrats.
Why the radical transformation from the nearly 32 years of governors Reagan, Deukmejian, Wilson, and Schwarzenegger? The answer is easily attributable to three realities.
One, over 300,000 upper-middle-class and entrepreneurial Californians annually leave the state for no-tax destinations like Nevada, Florida, and Texas. None seem unhappy after leaving and few return home. Their places are often taken by the domestic poor, the foreign-born impoverished, and half the nation’s homeless.
Two, half of the illegal aliens of the last 40 years have resided in California—where now 27 percent of the state’s residents were not born in the U.S.—an enormous challenge of assimilation, integration, and acculturation in an era where our elite does not believe in the melting pot.
Most came illegally, without English, a high-school diploma, capital, or skill sets, and thus required enormous state subsidies (half of all California births are paid through Medi-Cal; 40 percent of all state residents are on Medi-Cal, including newly arrived illegal aliens).
Three, a huge infusion of global capital warped the state’s politics after 2000. Silicon Valley alone boasted of having $9 trillion in market capitalization. Such unprecedented wealth went mostly to Bay Area and leftist politicians, coastal universities (Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, USC, etc.), and empowered a coastal elite with more wealth than at any one time or place in history. The new Bay Area money gave us the incompetent architects of California’s demise, the wealthy Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown, Willie Brown, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Kamala Harris—all leftwing, all affluent due to office-holding insider knowledge, inheritance, or marriage, and all liberal at others’ expense.
The result was medievalism, in which a dying or fleeing middle class bore the brunt of both the capstone wealthy and the costs of the vast subdivided poor (21% of the population lives below the poverty line; one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California; one-quarter of PG&E households do not pay their power bill, etc.).
And the result?
The record speaks for itself.
The wealthy and leisured coastal corridor dictates all sorts of utopian bromides that make it impossible for anyone but the subsidized poor to live: soon to be outlawing gas cars, EV mandates, dismantling natural gas and nuclear power plants, blowing up dams, not building new reservoirs, allowing “natural” forest management that ensures periodic catastrophic fires, DEI admissions, hiring, retention, and promotion, defunding the police, overregulating the insurance industry—already beset with massive fraudulent claims and high coverage costs—into flight from the state (leaving millions of people newly-uninsured), the high-speed rail $30 billion boondoggle, while sections of the 99, I-5, and 101 “freeways” (with long sections of a mere four lanes in total) are the most dangerous in the nation, and the highest electricity and gasoline prices in the continental U.S.
Why would a once affordable, excellently run, and orderly state so self-destruct?
Mostly, because an elite, protected by its wealth, zip-code residences, and influence was never subject to the baleful consequences of its own ideology—and so thought it OK to experiment on the rest of us, their lab rats.
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