The California Dream — back when that was still a thing — was just like the American Dream only better because it was in California. That's what California looked like in 1988, when, as a young man of 19, I did what so many other young men had done and pulled up stakes and headed West.
Six years later, the writing was on the wall, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I pulled up stakes once more and headed East to Colorado. (I'll cover Colorado's self-inflicted misfortunes another day; the topic is still too painful.)
A City Journal report this week by Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin details the tarnish tainting the formerly Golden State, which in the 30 years since I left "has become increasingly uncompetitive and unequal, losing both critical business and human assets at an astounding pace."
When California's most recent Democratic governor Gavin Newsom debated Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis on Fox News in November, Newsom flat-out lied when he claimed that "more Floridians [are] coming to California in the last two years than the other way around" when the opposite is true. California's population is shrinking for the first time since it joined the Union in 1849, despite all the famous scenery, climate, and amenities the state has to offer.
"Even the administration’s usual supporters," Toplansky and Kotkin wrote, found Newsom's boasts "dubious, given the state’s rising unemployment, declining number of high-wage jobs, soaring housing costs (not one California metro boasts housing prices below the national average), and onerous regulatory regime."
The economic costs of bad governance have piled up so high that Sacramento has a $68 billion hole to fill in this year's budget.
Citizens and foreign-born residents are leaving the state in unprecedented numbers, losing "a net total of 1.7 million people from domestic migration between 2016 and 2022," according to City Journal. "In 2020, California lost a congressional seat for the first time. If current trends persist, it could lose another four or five by 2030." If it weren't for foreign immigration, legal and otherwise, California's total population would be in free fall.
I had no idea in 1994 when I loaded up my U-Haul that I was an early trendsetter. What changed? California was once the state where young people went to make their fortunes. Now it's the state where the fortunate flee to find better lives in places like Texas and Florida. The middle class is being eviscerated as California becomes the Progressive model of neo-feudalism — the ultra-rich run the show for the "benefit" of a sprawling and permanent underclass.
"You almost have to try to mess California up," DeSantis quipped during their debate but there's no "almost" about it. We can pick apart destructive progressive politics from San Francisco's City Hall to the state capitol in Sacramento all day and all night but none of the griping would answer the question of how the Progressive Left achieved absolute political dominance in the state that gave us Ronald Reagan.
That's an easy one, a one-word answer: groupthink.
San Francisco's last Republican mayor, if it's still possible to even imagine such a thing, left office in 1964. When I left in '94, being a conservative or a Republican had become worse than a historical oddity. We were openly mocked and derided. There is no more loyal opposition in San Francisco politics because to be opposed to progressivism is to be disloyal or even evil.
Today, "Republicans currently comprise just 7% of the city’s registered voters," and the city is a cesspit. Coincidence? Hardly. Groupthink is choking the city on its own filth, the conceit that there are only progressive solutions to any problem or, worse, that people don't deserve solutions to the city's self-inflicted problems.
Statewide, conservatism's last hope in California came in the unlikely (and bulky) form of body-builder-turned-movie-star Arnold Schwarzenegger. He rode in on an antiestablishment wave against Democrat governor Gray Davis, a perfectly named party apparatchik of few notable skills outside of party politics.
Schwarzenegger quickly fell prey to progressive groupthink, all too willingly, just as soon as his conservative ballot measures failed. But that's the allure of groupthink. It's so much easier to go with the flow than face personal or political virtual exile — what we now call cancel culture.
As a result, California leads the nation in homelessness, drug addiction, income inequality, out-migration, tax burdens, regulation, and busted budgets. This is when voters might do something truly daring and take a chance on candidates from the party that didn't lead the state to ruin, but for the foreseeable future, groupthink probably makes choosing impossible.
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