Last Friday, the California state senate passed a bill called SB 79. In a nutshell, it allows developers to build apartment towers up to 15 stories near certain kinds of transit stops. This is a bill no actual Californians asked for. What the state’s political class frame as a desperately needed tool in the box of solutions to the housing affordability crisis is in reality their latest giveaway to big real estate, big finance, and domestic and foreign dark money, the forces that control modern California. Nothing more, nothing less. As I and others have discussed extensively, upzoning bills like SB 79 actually make the affordability crisis worse, while inflicting irreversible harm on middle and working class neighborhoods.

History will view SB 79 as the handiwork of this new plutocracy. It’s not a stretch to assert that California is now barely a democracy, even in name. This is a one-party super state in which the vast majority of elections boil down to — oh, let’s call it a “choice” — between a progressive Democrat and an uber progressive Democrat, the latter increasingly wrapped in the garb of the “Democratic Socialists,” a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.

Average Democrat voters in California took to their fainting couches when Elon Musk proved not to be their savior but just another Silicon Valley robber baron. Of course, there wasn’t a damn thing average California Democrats could do other than slap puerile bumper stickers on their Teslas declaring that they’d bought the car before Elon went crazy. ‘Cause that’ll show him.

No doubt this keeps Elon up at night, wondering where he went wrong.

Musk didn’t change. It’s just that for a while he made the effort to try to fool everyone. Those hundreds of thousands of Californians bought those estimated one million Teslas back when toeing the progressive line was good for the bottom line. Musk didn’t change, he just dropped the act when Trump returned to the White House, because it was good for the bottom line. He went from hoovering up billions in tax subsidies for his companies to taking a metaphorical chainsaw to the selfsame government that had provided said largess. Subsidies for me and not for thee. There’s a reason most of us aren’t billionaires.

Even as Musk dropped the act the rest of the California plutocracy are keeping it up. They declare their “resistance” while quietly loosening restrictions on fossil fuel drilling (which, for the record, I entirely support). Every eight or ten years they declare they’re going to end homelessness in eight or ten years, then transfer tens of billions of the people’s dollars to the profiteering Homeless Industrial Complex as tens of thousands of homeless people die. And, of course, they say they’re fighting the housing affordability crisis while lining the pockets of megadevelopers and their financial backers. And so on, far into the night.

It’s not just hypocritical, it’s grotesque. It’s macabre.

Which makes Californians’ continuing fealty to the party either hilarious or pathetic. Despite overwhelming, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence to the contrary they continue to believe that Gavin Newsom and the rest of the political class in Sacramento somehow have their best interests, and the best interests of California as a whole, at the forefront of their every decision. Mind you, Newsom is the politician whose presidential aspirations led him to throw trans people under the bus faster than you can say Plumpjack.

It hasn’t been enough for this neo aristocracy to seize control of the state’s political, business, tech, financial, environmental, and bureaucratic regimes. The new scions are so deeply insecure, they’ve led lives of such consequence-free privilege, that they feel compelled to punch down on their opponents. Because that’s what insecure people do. They reflexively besmirch anyone who dares so much as question their worldview as ignorant, hateful, bigoted, selfish, and, of course, racist and “phobic.” Timorousness brooks no dissent.

This is gaslighting taken to its logical political extreme. The state’s ruling class is fixated on the singular goal of sustaining and expanding its wealth and power, at the expense of the 39 million Californians who aren’t multimillionaires or billionaires. Of course, they can’t come right out and say as much. Ergo, all the punching down.

California has become a land of inherited wealth and power. Many of the managing patterns at the most powerful Sand Hill Road venture capital firms are the children and grandchildren of founders. Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is getting ready to run for her mom’s Congressional seat. Partnerships at the most influential law firms are disproportionately second, third, and even fourth generation, the sons and daughters of former managing partners, judges, legislators, and commissioners of various stripes. David Ellison, son of the richest man in the world, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, is in the process of consolidating a business empire that “could eventually include, in addition to Oracle, Paramount Global, Skydance Media, MTV, CBS, Warner Brothers/Discovery (which owns HBO and CNN, among other properties), and Bari Weiss’ Free Press.”

Of course generational wealth is nothing new in this country. The Roosevelts and the Kennedys spring to mind. The key difference is our era. In the past, even the sons (back then it was almost exclusively sons) of privilege typically served their country. They learned sacrifice and hardship. JFK was a PT boat captain in the Pacific Theater in World War II who earned two Purple Hearts. John Kerry and Al Gore served in Vietnam (and never ever let anyone forget it). Even George W. Bush spent a few years flying fighter jets in the Air National Guard (granted, that was primarily to avoid actual combat service in Vietnam, but still).

Those levelers of the past are gone. Today’s scions know nothing of sacrifice and service. They know only their own wealth, privilege, and power, with no countervailing sense of duty. They are the metastasized manifestations of privilege married to helicopter parenting (or helicopter nannying). Gavin Newsom didn’t earn his own money. Turns out, and excuse my Sanskrit, that’s a big fucking problem for society as a whole.

Turns out as well, it’s hard to lead the world’s fourth largest economy when you’ve never so much as taken a punch in your life. Leisure is anathema to sagacity. The California plutocracy aren’t just all powerful, they’re soft. They’re endlessly malleable. They stand only for that which preserves their position. They don’t have vision, they sling talking points.

Actually, that last sentence isn’t entirely accurate. They do have a vision, it just isn’t their own. And it’s a pretty depressing vision at that. 

Which brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to SB 79. The bill, like hundreds of other housing bills the legislature has dutifully passed and two successive governors have dutifully signed, is the product of the so-called “YIMBY” agenda, which stands for “yes in my back yard.” It really should be called YIYBY, or “yes in your back yard,” but that’s another post. YIMBYism is a corporate backed astroturf movement. The movement’s singular goal is to open as many California neighborhoods to unchecked development. Not just any development: The YIMBYs want 39 million Californians living in small, densely packed apartment buildings in urban cores, connected by transit. Because sustainability, they say.

This vision would require the 83% of Californians who currently live in single family homes, duplexes, town houses, or small apartment buildings with nine or fewer units to radically upend their lives. It would require millions of Californians to decide, “Hey, honey, forget our spacious, 3,500 square foot two story house in the suburbs, with our front and back yards, trees, garden, flowers, quiet street, and the play structure we built for the kids with our own hands. You know, the dream for which we spent more than a decade working, sacrificing, and saving. Screw it! Let’s sell it and move to an 1,800 square foot shoebox on the third floor of a soulless downtown stack and pack next to the train tracks that lacks so much as some shrubbery out front! I know that I for one am sick of the songbirds and hoot owls, I want to hear neighbors having sex!”

Not even remotely the same.

Which is where things go from socially and economically unsustainable to downright frightening. Of course millions of people aren’t going to make that kind of decision. Not on their own. Not voluntarily. For the plutocracy’s vision to become reality there will have to be coercion. That’s why the skyrocketing price of a starter house isn’t a bug in the system, but a feature. The political class could start truly solving the housing affordability crisis by passing legislation making it easier to build the kinds of homes people actually want. They could enact down payment assistance programs and subsidize affordable new homes for lower income Californians. Rather than despoil thousands of square miles of pristine desert and mountain ecosystems with dirty, Chinese manufactured wind and solar farms that produce highly unreliable electricity they could embark on a Manhattan Project of clean, sustainable, reliable nuclear energy that would require 1% the geographic footprint. They could invest in transit that connects places where people actually live to the places they actually work — say, a high speed commuter rail system interconnecting Bakersfield, Palmdale/Lancaster, Victorville, San Bernardino, Pomona, Santa Ana, Long Beach, Los Angeles, West Los Angeles, Thousand Oaks, and Santa Clarita, a world class 200 mile ring that would serve some 20 million people.

The fact that they don’t do any of this, the fact that they insist on SB 79 and hideous wind and solar farms and a Central Valley bullet train to nowhere, tells you all you need to know. The plutocracy of neophytes is firmly in charge of the world’s fourth largest economy, and heaven help us all.