The second of two reported essays on the issues facing California. Read the first installment here.
California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change.
Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature, and almost two-thirds have told pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. That helps explain why California residents – including about 1.1 million since 2021 – have been fleeing to other states.
Unhappiness with the one-party state is particularly intense in the inland areas, which are the only locales now growing and may prove critical to any resurgence. More troubling still, over 70% of California parents feel their children will do less well than they did. Four in 10 are considering an exit. By contrast, seniors, thought to be leaving en masse, are the least likely to express a desire to leave.
In some ways, discontent actually erodes potential support for reform. Conservative voters, notes a recent study, are far more likely to express a desire to move out of the state; the most liberal are the least likely. “Texas is taking away my voters,” laments Shawn Steel, California’s GOP National Committee Member.
New Awakenings
Given the demographic realities, a successful drive for reform cannot be driven by a marginalized GOP. Instead, what’s needed is a movement that can stitch together a coalition of conservatives, independents (now the state’s second-largest political grouping), and most critically, moderate Democrats.
Remarkably, this shift has already begun in an unlikely place: the ultra-liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic Bay Area. For years, its most influential residents – billionaires, venture capitalists, and well-paid tech workers – have abetted or tolerated an increasingly ineffective and corrupt regime. Not only was the area poorly governed, but the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and other cities have become scenes of almost Dickensian squalor.
Over the past two years, tech entrepreneurs and professionals concerned about homelessness and crime worked to get rid of progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin. Last year, they helped elect Dan Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as mayor, as well as some more moderate members to the Board of Supervisors. Lurie, of course, faces a major challenge to restore San Francisco’s luster against entrenched progressives and their allies in the media, academia, and the state’s bureaucracy.
Similar pushbacks are evident elsewhere. Californians, by large majorities, recently passed bills to strengthen law enforcement, ditching liberalized sentencing laws passed by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Progressive Democrats have been recalled not only in San Francisco but also in Oakland (Alameda County) and Los Angeles, with voters blaming ideological-driven law enforcement for increasing rates of crime and disorder.
Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.
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.
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