America may have trended toward the GOP, but California seems determined to find its own direction. The only question is, simply, how much more progressive the Golden State will become, even in the face of a far more conservative country beyond the Sierras.
This election confirmed, if it was needed, the death spiral of the state’s Republican Party. Thanks, in part, to Donald Trump — and his magnetic anti-appeal among Latinos, women and the educated — the GOP did even worse here in the presidential race than in 2012, when it couldn’t muster 40 percent support, and has lost several legislative seats, allowing the Democrats to re-establish their coveted two-thirds supermajority in the Assembly — and possibly in the Senate as well.
The progressives also won most of the major propositions — most critically, the extension of a high income tax rate on the state’s affluent population through 2030. We may have more freedom to smoke pot, but it won’t be so easy to start a business, buy a house or build a personal nest egg, if you are anything other than a trustifarian or a Silicon Valley mogul, or are related to one.
Go any direction you want, as long as it’s to the left
Since the late 1990s, California has been moving leftward, with a bit of a bump from the Schwarzenegger recall election. By morphing into a liberal Democrat, the Terminator helped terminate the GOP as a serious force. Add to that the damage done by the residue of Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187, which permanently alienated the rising Latino electorate, and the GOP seems destined to further decline.
The only hope for sanity has been an alliance of the Republican rump with moderate Democrats, many of them backed by what’s left of traditional California business. But, increasingly, inside the party, it’s been the furthest Left candidates that win. In the Democrat-only Sanchez vs. Harris race for the U.S. Senate, the more progressive candidate triumphed easily, with a more moderate Latina from Southern California decimated by the better funded lock-step, glamorous tool of the San Francisco gentry Left.
Gradually, the key swing group — the “business Democrats” — are being decimated, hounded by ultra-green San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer and his minions. No restraint is being imposed on Gov. Brown’s increasingly obsessive climate change agenda, or on the public employee unions, whose pensions could sink the state’s finances, particularly in a downturn.
Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.
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California vs. Texas vs Florida
The central point seems to be that California is a bifurcated society, with the elite controlling not just the culture and the political power, but the money and other resources as well. You seem satisfied to blame this on liberal policies, but the same problems dominate the landscape in conservative states as well.
Texas has at least 40 billionaires and 50 fortune 500 companies, but the wealth trickles down at roughly the same pace as in California. Texas ranks consistently among the worst states for poverty, minimum-wage jobs and the uninsured. Texas ranks number 5 for income inequality, (or 7, depending on how you calculate the Gini index,) making it only one position better than California, (and 40 positions worse than New Hampshire.)
People complain about Texas less than other states, because people think they have an opportunity to rise to the top. Statistically, though, this is just a marketing tool. In Dallas, just 6.4% of children starting in the bottom fifth can expect to rise to the top fifth. Although Los Angeles is just as bad, in San Jose, the chances are comparable to Denmark, which is to say it is among the best in the world.
Income inequality and lack of opportunity charts in the United States are consistently dominated by Florida, which usually boasts five cities in the “bottom 10”. This has little to do with the state legislature, (where conservative Republicans hold supermajorities in both houses) and everything to do with an economy based on tourism, health care, homebuilding, and other low-wage endeavors.
America has mostly grown tired of the argument that if we simply eliminate environmental regulations, the economy will boom. It didn’t work in Florida, it didn’t work in Kansas, and it won’t ever work. It is a complete falsehood, yet Trump has managed to sell it to a new generation of gullible voters. California deserves credit for standing up to the silly idea and refusing to let corporations poison the environment in the name of a handful of low-wage jobs.
The rest of the United States will learn in the next few years that cancelling environmental regulations is just another form of subsidy for big business. Instead of creating jobs, it just funnels a larger percentage of the profit to the owners.
The results of this will be most obvious in cities like Miami, where the city streets now flood twice per month. If you want to know what effect global warming will have in the next few years, just Google the phrase “Miami flooding this week”. (This week is a particularly bad one, but feel free to pick any week.)
The billionaires are the ones in yachts in the bay. The bottom 99% are the people walking through filthy water to get to the grocery stores.
You seem to feel that Californians are stupid for paying attention to global warming. After all, Sacramento streets are not filled with human waste and raw sewage twice per month. Perhaps California should follow the example of Texas (and the rest of the U.S.) and simply deny the problem exists (or leave that problem for someone else to fix).
But maybe California is better than that.