A recent Politico article breathlessly reported on Kamala Harris’s enhanced standing as the newly anointed “favourite daughter” of the Bay Area political cabal, led by Nancy Pelosi, powerful Silicon Valley oligarchs, and progressive Hollywood moguls. But as this group celebrates its most recent political coup against the hapless and outmatched Joe Biden, few are examining what their policy agenda has imposed on my adopted home state. This could spell trouble for Harris in November.
Rather than being able to show real improvements, Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom and their backers specialise in virtue-signalling, particularly on issues of race, gender and climate. Their regulation-heavy approach has forged a neo-feudal state that now has the highest gaps nationally between the rich and the vast majority of inhabitants, who suffer severe housing shortages and the country’s highest levels of poverty. It’s no wonder, then, that four in 10 Californians are considering an exit.
More revealing, at the elite level, has been the emergence of the tech Right in Silicon Valley. Until this year, liberals such as Harris could rely on California’s uniform backing. But many, including people involved in startups, are beginning to switch sides. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who recently compared California to the declining Roman Empire, has joined Elon Musk and David Sacks in endorsing Trump. In fact, Musk has not only backed Trump but also announced he was pulling both X and SpaceX out of the state.
If this trend continues, California’s political climate could start to change. While that may not happen overnight, the Golden State could lose two or three House seats to the GOP. This should be a warning sign to Harris if she intends on implementing a California plan for the rest of America as president.
Members of the California cabal are only dimly aware of changes taking place outside their bubble. Newsom-backers such as economist Chris Thornberg even claim that the loss of SpaceX — arguably the most important exploration company in the world — is only a matter of a few C-suite jobs and “Elon being Elon”. This repeats earlier claims in the progressive media about the unimportance of 3.8 million net domestic migrants leaving since 2000.
The bigger problem, though, will be when the Harris campaign has to defend her efforts, in both California and the Senate, on open borders, race quotas, banning fracking, wiping out parental rights and the use of fossil fuels. If these policies are increasingly unpopular in California, just imagine how they will be received in Texas, Michigan or Wisconsin, or for that matter in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina.
To win in November, the Vice President will have to somehow place distance between the failures of her backers and her campaign. If not, we could see the second coming of Trump — their greatest nightmare and the ironic legacy of the cabal’s politics.
This piece first appeared at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Kamala Harris during her inauguration as Attorney General of California Wikimedia in Public Domain.
Email this Story
