Part 2 of an occasional series about California’s political future

Over the last 15 years – call it the “Brown-Newsom Era” – California’s political class has tracked radically left. With Democrats enjoying veto proof supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature and controlling some 80% of city council and county supervisor seats in major metro areas, the state has become a laboratory for ultra-left policies on everything from crime and homelessness to education and business regulation. The Golden State is no longer a bastion of mainstream liberalism. These days it often feels more like Venezuela with celebrities. Our economy is a Frakenstein’s monster, a mash up of heavy handed state control and rapacious capitalism. We have become what might be thought of as a “socialized capitalist” society, in which everyone but the wealthy, powerful, and connected loses. Thus we have the perverse specters of crime and filth ridden illegal homeless encampments on Pacific Coast Highway, a few hundred yards from $10 million homes on the Pacific Palisades bluffs.

The results of the political class’s radical experiments are in, and they are indisputably disastrous. The world’s fifth largest economy has one of the nation’s worst poverty rates. Nearly a third of the state’s population lives in or near poverty. The state also has among the highest proportion of low-income and minimum wage jobs that don’t pay enough to cover living costs, which have spiraled out of control. A recent analysis by Claremont McKenna College’s Rose Institute of State and Local Government found California cities to be the least business friendly in the country, which helps explain the mass exodus of corporations large and small, with their well-paying jobs, to places like Nevada, Texas, and Florida.

With 12% of the country’s population California is host to more than half of the hardcore homeless population. More addicts, lunatics, and criminals arrive from out of state every day, even as the political class brays about downtrodden “unhoused neighbors” and claims, ludicrously, that 90% of homeless people are from the communities in which they reside (you can read my dismantling of that argument here). Cities from Yreka to Calexico are host to massive illegal homeless encampments, even as the state spent $20 billion in just the last five years, with billions more wasted at the local level. Officials from Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration recently admitted in a state Senate committee hearing that they have no idea where the money went, because they don’t bother to track it (unlike the Governor’s office, I can offer some answers here and here).

Meanwhile, contrary to official statistics, everyone outside the political establishment knows that crime is out of control. Smash and grabs, street takeovers, break-ins, assaults, and high speed pursuits have become downright quotidian. Even many violent crimes go unreported, much less investigated and prosecuted. The mentally deranged who roam communities at all hours of the days and nights, screaming at demons only they can see, are no longer so much as remarked upon. Our environment and open spaces are being ravaged by illegal dumping, illegal camping, illegal hunting, and drug manufacturing. Last month I went for a Sunday afternoon drive in Angeles National Forest, an environmental national treasure. A few miles up Big Tujunga Road I pulled over to let my dogs sniff around. I discovered hundreds of spent shell casings of different calibers in the dirt of a scenic overlook. The rocks across the street were riddled with bullet holes. Just another day in paradise.

With the exception of exclusive enclaves in West L.A. and the Bay Area, everyone is feeling the effects. I live in Santa Monica, one block from tony Montana Avenue. In just the last ten days my neighborhood has been targeted by three different prowlers, all of whom attempted to gain entry to properties on my block. Two were successful. Just yesterday afternoon my neighbors and I chased away a man who was trying doors and prowling around properties. That’s insane. It puts all of us in danger. In one instance the prowler was accompanied by an accomplice who sat in a dark gray car with black tinted windows with the engine running, barely twenty feet from my front door. Again, it was up to my neighbors and I to put ourselves in harm’s way to chase them away. Two weeks ago a homeless person was stabbed to death in a city park six blocks away. Last week it was reported in local news that a woman woke up in the middle of the night in her apartment to find a vagrant standing at the foot of her bed exposing himself and touching her. It’s just another September in Bay City.

Considering these new realities it’s wonder, then, that over the last couple of years California voters have taken a significant right turn on a range of issues. San Franciscans recalled their radical socialist District Attorney and three leftist members of the school board. Here in L.A., starting in 2020 voters on the Westside embarked on a two year crusade to politically destroy a city councilman who was overtly hostile to his own constituents as he pursued a radical leftist agenda that proved too much even for the famously liberal district. This year, L.A. County voters are poised to toss out another failed radical D.A., George Gascon, and replace him with an erstwhile Republican, Nathan Hochman. Hochman has outraised Gascon by a 10-1 margin and leads in a recent poll by a 25 point margin. Four years ago more than 2 million L.A. voters cast their ballots for Gascon over a popular incumbent, Jackie Lacey. If current polling holds, he will not break a million in November. The significance of this shift is hard to overstate. With the exception of exurban communities like Lancaster and Palmdale, there are no Republicans in any major office in Los Angeles County. The sole Republican on L.A.’s City Council, John Lee, became an Independent in 2020. Bucking this decades-long trend, voters are poised to elect Hochman as arguably the most powerful law enforcement official in the United States.

At the state level, a tough on crime ballot initiative, Proposition 36, has a commanding lead among all voters, including Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, with a recent poll showing 71% in favor despite vehement opposition from Governor Gavin Newsom and a majority of the political class. This is another stunning reversal from just a few years ago. Prop. 36 would undo key provisions of a previous “criminal justice reform” initiative, Prop. 47, which voters approved in 2014 by a 20% margin. It’s backed by law enforcement and the California District Attorneys Association.

Desperate political class resorting to anti-democratic dirty tricks

It turns out that, no matter your political persuasion and peccadilloes, a one party state is bad for everyone. Over the last 15 years, as California Democrats radicalized on a wide range issues, they also isolated themselves from the population. They have formed an insular clique that brooks no dissent, no longer beholden to the people but bought and paid for by an unholy alliance of big tech, big finance, and radical leftist causes. Newsom in particular – who began his political career as an establishment, Getty family funded, business friendly centrist – has attacked cities and counties on issues ranging from housing development and zoning to homelessness and even school room curricula. At times he’s acted like a well coiffed Napoleon, throwing his weight around to appease his corporate and political taskmasters at the expense of local democracy and autonomy. He has vigorously supported what leftists euphemistically refer to as “criminal justice reform,” in particular his opposition to Prop. 36 and his staunch and recalcitrant support for the disastrous Prop. 47. He wants people to disbelieve their lying eyes.

The political class’s response to the shifting political winds speaks volumes about the character of the people who comprise it. This summer, Newsom and the legislature resorted to a disingenuous and thoroughly feckless attempt to derail Prop. 36 with a package of 13 bills they claimed would accomplish much of what the initiative would do. Voters, following the old adage of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,” were unswayed and support for the ballot initiative continued to grow to historic levels.

In response, Newsom pressured legislators to add “poison pill” provisions to the 13 bills as they made their way through the process. Under these provisions, which are known legally as “inoperability clauses,” should both the bills and Prop. 36 become law, the former would automatically be invalidated. In other words, Newsom sought to punish voters for defying his will. This is how “democracy” works in California these days. One wonders, naturally, why the governor and the legislature spent all that time and effort when they could have just supported the popular measure itself, scoring some badly-needed political points in the process. That is an excellent question, and the answer goes a long way toward explaining the widening schism between California’s political establishment and the citizens they allegedly represent.  The good news is that after public outcry the bills’ sponsors refused to include Governor’s outlandish poison pills. On August 26, Newsom signed 10 of the 13 bills into law.

Not to be outdone, in August the legislature employed dodgy procedural tactics to sneakily revive several highly unpopular and controversial bills in the last two weeks of the legislative session. It was a brazen, shameless attempt to thwart public scrutiny and avoid unwanted press attention, another frontal assault on democracy in the Golden State. The most egregious was Senate Bill 94, which would have allowed murderers serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for particularly heinous crimes to petition courts for “resentencing” and potentially gain release. Their opposition to Prop. 36 and support for SB 94 reveal that California lawmakers have more empathy for homicidal psychopaths and rapists than average folks. Fortunately their ruse failed, as the press and the public did get wind, and they were forced to shelve it. Make no mistake, though, absent continued scrutiny and public pressure they will try again next year. Sacramento Democrats love them some rapists and murderers.

The fact that Newsom and the legislature, who enjoy unchecked political power, have resorted to these kinds of duplicitous maneuvers is astounding, not to mention repellent. It is a reflection of just how far they have strayed from the mainstream, and from political accountability. Democracy has become their kryptonite. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that a Californian, Vice President Kamala Harris, was recently installed as the Democrats’ presidential nominee despite having not won a single primary vote. No less a liberal than Maureen Dowd called the maneuver a “coup.” And rightly so. The increasing hostility of California’s political class to democracy now has national implications. That’s chilling.

The events of 2024 demonstrate that California voters, who otherwise are among the most tolerant in the country (not to mention among the most apathetic) finally are taking note. They are starting to pay attention, and they do not like one they see, not one bit. It’s one thing to give lawbreakers second and third chances and to treat transients who come here from other states with empathy and compassion. It’s something else to abide the methodical dismemberment of the most fundamental tenets of civilized society and democracy. Even a majority of Californians who otherwise sympathize with the situation in the Gaza Strip reacted with horror and disgust at the blatant anti-Semitism on display on UC and Cal State campuses and in the streets since the October 7 Hamas massacre. That may, in fact, have been the breaking point. Again, it’s one thing to empathize with people in a war zone, but something very different to call for the extermination of the Jewish state.

The corruption of power

Californians are discovering that our political class are not the progressives they pose as. They have gone mad with power, it really is as simple as that. They are arrogant, imperious, and scornful of any whiff of accountability. Some of them are depraved. Some have broken from reality. During a town hall in 2021, as the state’s particularly draconian COVID lockdowns were ravaging cities, I asked state Senator and New Jersey transplant Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) how the pandemic was affecting his thinking and his policy agenda. Looking me dead in the eye through his Zoom screen he replied, “COVID hasn’t changed anything.” That sort of delusional thinking is unsettling pervasive in Sacramento. Murderers are victims, law abiding citizens are racists. Black is white. Ignorance is strength.

Speaking of ignorance, frankly, a goodly portion of the state’s political class are dumb as rocks. I should know, I’ve interacted with a lot of them. They don’t have the capacity to think for themselves, they do as they are told. That’s why the establishment plucked them out of obscurity in the first place. They are endlessly malleable. When all is said and done, many of them are cowards.

To be sure, there are exceptions. The question is whether there are enough of them to make a difference. The question is whether the progressive supermajority will at last heed the will of the people and abandon the most extreme and destructive aspects of their agenda. To paraphrase Sheriff Ed Tom Bell from No Country for Old Men, the outcome is far from certain. Their hubris is almost impossible to overstate.

On the Golden State’s horizon is one of the greatest battles for democracy in American history. As President Joe Biden might say, it also will be a battle for the soul of California. Will the political establishment continue down the road of Venezuelan-style “socialized capitalism,” in which only the powerful and connected thrive while the majority struggle? Or will a new era and a new generation rediscover the dynamism, risk, and opportunity that once made this the greatest place in the world to call home? The stakes could not be higher.

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