What happens when one party gains total control? The inevitable. Victor Davis Hanson writes about the once-great state of California’s soaring costs, shrinking opportunities, and a governing body that no longer serves its citizens.
By any measure, California is a failed state, VDH points out in American Greatness. Yes, the state of California, this most richly endowed state, was once also the best governed state.
What Happened?
The Left took control after millions of the embattled middle class fled.
Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place. Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world, resulting in a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic.
The bottom is structured on millions of poor, as the beleaguered middle continues to shrink. So who rules? An ultra-rich apparat of left-wing coastal professionals and investors who rule from the top.
Upper-bracket taxpayers flee, so taxes rise on those who remain to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents. In turn, even more of the middle class leaves.
What Happened?
Yes, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit. Despite voters’ votes, bureaucracies, elected officials, and green activists blocked all new reservoir construction.
Adding Insult to Injury
Instead, Governor Gavin Newsom used $250 million from the Proposition 1 fund to blow up four dams on the Klamath River. The dams that once provided storage, electrical generation, recreation, and flood control.
Public universities continued their “diversity” options under new names. Left-wing elected officials and judges again ignored the will of the people.
By relying on supermajorities, Democrats ensure that they run the state. No tiny vestigial Republican congressional contingent to sully the day, and almost exclusively Democratic-appointed liberal judges.
The more Democrats control the state, the more socialist, anti-democratic—and autocratic—California becomes.
VDH looks at California as a 3rd world state now in danger of societal collapse.
• Fires rage—given ideologically driven prohibitions on brush and forest management, cuts in fire departments, and sheer bureaucratic incompetence. Multibillion-dollar boondoggle rail projects rust.
• Billions of welfare dollars are stolen with impunity.
• Meanwhile, illegal aliens, unable to speake or read English, are given passes to obtain commercial trucking licenses (California’s critical road signs are written in a language other than English).
• One quarter of the state’s residents are unable to pay sky-high power bills, correctly assuming the state and untility companies will foot their delinquent bills
• Half the state’s births are paid for through state-supplied welfare coverage.
• Now the homeless without addresses or IDs can determine elections.
In sum, writes VDH, import poverty, romanticize illegal immigration, demonize the middle class, and drive out private-sector capital. Exempt elites from the consequences of their own ideology.
What do you end up with? A state, along with everything else, where democracy dies.
