Los Angeles authorities’ poor preparation for and lamentable response to the wildfires now devastating the city capture a broader problem – namely, the failure of governance across America’s Democrat-controlled regions. This pattern of incompetence has accelerated the shift of American economic and political power to regions outside the long dominant north-east and West Coast.
The reason for this shift lies in the clear failure of Democrats, writ large in the inferno now consuming large swathes of LA. In states like California, Democratic politicians no longer prioritise such things as public safety and key infrastructure, including roads, ports and, most importantly at the moment, water systems. Indeed, today’s ‘progressives’ generally shy away from things like building dams or maintaining water pressure in the name of protecting the environment. They are far more focused on climate change and ‘social justice’.
Of course, California progressives will justify this by blaming the fires on climate change, even though a leading fire expert at the US Geological Survey suggests this claim is unsupported. Fires have been a regular feature of life in southern California for at least 20 million years. Moreover, given the recent extremely dry weather conditions, LA should have been prepared for a conflagration. It was not. A councilperson representing the Palisades has noted the ‘chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure’.
Indeed, the devastating impact of the fires is largely a result of environmental policies that discouraged such safety practices as controlled burns. California governor Gavin Newsom has cut funding for fighting wildfires by over $100 million this past year, while demanding subsidies for electric cars. At the same time, California’s roads are among the worst in the US, and a planned high-speed railway continues to gobble up tens of billions of dollars.
There’s one word for this: failure. Unsurprisingly, conservative activists, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have all denounced Los Angeles authorities’ bizarrely slow and ineffective response to the fires, and with some justification. Some claims were off-base, such as the suggestion that California’s DEI policies are directly to blame. But the progressive complaint that the right is ‘politicising’ the tragedy also makes little sense. The reasons for the devastating impact of the fires are indeed rooted in conscious decisions taken by Democratic politicians.
The LA fires are likely to accelerate the shift in American politics, demography and economy away from the old centres of wealth – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, Chicago – and towards a new constellation of former laggard states, mostly from the South, the intermountain west and Texas. These provide the base for Trumpism. Indeed, the current ring-kissing at Mar-a-Lago in Florida symbolises this shift in regional power.
There are historical precedents for the shift in power we are now witnessing. At the 1829 inauguration of roughhewn Westerner Andrew Jackson, writes Arthur Schlesinger in The Age of Jackson, ‘people from faraway states came to Washington’. Drawing on the support of southern farmers and the working classes of the cities of the east and north, Jackson’s victory represented a blow against the power of the banks and the New England elites. Now, nearly 200 years later, we are seeing a shift in power just as significant, as the parvenues of the South, Texas, Arizona and Nevada challenge the established power centres.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
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. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: The Hurst fire, taken by P. Rivas, via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.
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