Angelenos are in an abusive relationship with their government

You f****d it up! You f****d it up! Her life was in our hands, man!

My last post was titled “Don’t Screw This Up, L.A.”

L.A. screwed it up.

Thirteen years into an experiment with far left governance, Los Angeles is a city in chaos. The signs of decline are everywhere, from ubiquitous homeless encampments to violent street take-overs police often can only stand by and watch, to failing small businesses, rampant petty crime, vandalism, graffiti, dying trees and crumbling streets and sidewalks. The Aroyo Secco connecting L.A. and Pasadena used to be one of the most beautiful stretches of highway in the country. Today it’s beset by disintegrating tunnels, graffiti, dead landscaping and homeless encampments. Hell, L.A. even has a homeless dog crisis. For all of this, Angelenos pay some of the highest living costs and taxes in the country.

As of 9am this morning, when the County Registrar’s office updated the vote count,  it appears that L.A. voters, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the answer is … more, please.

Barring unforeseeable developments, come January L.A. will have a socialist mayor, a socialist city attorney, a socialist city controller and at least three, and possibly four socialist city councilmembers.

*Slow clap* Bravo, L.A. voters, bravo.

It’s time to call it what it is: an abusive relationship. Only a gaslit populace surveys modern Los Angeles and decides the solution is to give city government even more power and to put it in the hands of people who want to defund the police and for government to own large businesses. Only a voter block that’s brainwashed decides the problem is the city hasn’t gone far enough to the left. Welcome to the Democratic People’s Republic of Los Angeles.

It was always going to be a tough fight for moderate candidates like city attorney candidate John McKinney, one of the most respected prosecutors in the D.A.’s office, who lost to radical Democratic Socialist (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one) Marissa Roy by a staggering 2-1 margin. While incumbent Heidi Feldstein Soto, who lost in the primary, has made her share of mistakes, she’s also been one of the only calm hands on the levers of city power. Those levers will now be in the hands of a 34 year old who has pledged to transform the city attorney’s office into a “public interest law firm.”

Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass faced her own uphill battle. She never recovered from her catastrophic decisionmaking before, during and after the Palisades Fire. She didn’t move the needle on the issue that arguably won her the office in the first place, homelessness. She admitted in an interview with the Westside Current that her signature Inside Safe program has been largely a failure. She wasn’t as vociferous as Angelenos want their mayor to be when it came to federal immigration enforcement in the city.

The worst part of this election is that it augurs the return of Mike Bonin. Ever since he dropped out of his own reelection bid in disgrace in 2022 he’s stalked the fringes of L.A. politics like Gollum, seeking his precious political power back. Bonin was Raman’s mentor in the council. She is now his ticket back to the big leagues from the farm team at the Brown Center at Cal State LA. Don’t be surprised to see him in a senior advisor role in Raman’s administration.

Any resemblance is, of course, purely coincidental.

Part of me, watching the results trickle in, thinks, good. Let’s go, L.A. We’ve been flirting with socialism coquettishly for a decade. So let’s go. Enough foreplay. As H.L. Menken famously observed, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

L.A. is about to get a good, hard dose of Marxist government. It’s about to become the biggest socialist experiment in this country since the early 1910s, when socialists held around 1,000 seats at the state and local level (for comparison, today the DSA claims around 215 at all levels of government).

Make no mistake, like the weed many DSAers are fond of ingesting, today’s socialism is far more potent than the old stuff. More than half the DSA’s central national committee are avowed communists of one sort or another. DSA politicians only compromise when forced into it, and even then only for as long as necessary to achieve a broader goal. With a functional majority in L.A. they will have little incentive to compromise. It’s full steam ahead to the warm embrace of collectivism.

For all the comparisons between Raman and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, things are going to play out differently in L.A., and for the worse. Mamdani implemented vanishingly few of his grandiose campaign promises, and even then he’s done it at a small scale. His promised universal child care has produced a single pilot program that covers a few city staff. That’s largely because he only has four fellow travelers out of 51 members of the city council, a number of whom are conservatives and moderates from places like Staten Island, Queens and Long Island.

Raman, as noted, will have a functional majority of city officials on her side, not to mention a radicalized bureaucracy in thrall to the far left Service Employees International Union (SEIU). There will be few checks on her ability to push a radical agenda.

Possible saving graces

L.A.’s best defense against Raman’s DSA radicalism may prove to be Raman herself. In what amounted to a historic rebuke, 13 of her 14 council colleagues endorsed Bass, including her three DSA fellow travelers. Traci Park stopped short of a formal endorsement – her constituents would have balked at that after the fire – but stated that she would vote for the mayor. Whether she’ll be able to mend those fences will be a matter of her interpersonal skills, which seem to be her primary problem.

Another barrier to her agenda will be L.A.’s perpetual budget crisis. A look at Raman’s platform is to look into a spending tsunami. With a few vague exceptions, she doesn’t explain how she’s going to pay for everything from a renewed Vision Zero streets policy to sheltering half of the city’s homeless population by 2028, including robust services, street medicine teams in all council districts, on and on, far into the night.

My prediction is that Raman, assuming she wins, will struggle. She shows little aptitude for the grueling day-to-day realities of leading the country’s second largest and wealthiest city. She doesn’t inspire confidence and lacks charisma. Her debate performances, the first times Angelenos got a look at her, were largely cringe inducing, culminating with her bizarre “fuge state” comment after the final one.

Also – and I confess that this is based entirely on outside observation – she doesn’t come off as particularly smart. Yes, she went to Harvard and MIT. So do a lot of people who are good at taking tests and not much else. She struggled to answer basic questions throughout the campaign. She has no particular vision for L.A. other than “I’m not Karen Bass.” She essentially ran the Joe Biden 2020 playbook, and we all know how that worked out.

In the end, L.A.’s dysfunction may save it. The very chaos that the modern political class has sown may prove to be their own undoing. It’s often asked if L.A. is even governable in the first place.

Well, voters have handed the keys to people who believe government is the answer to all of life’s problems. Then again, answers aren’t the same as solutions.

Good luck, L.A. You’re gonna need it.

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