By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 31, 2019
More than 2 million Californians were recently left
without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric —
which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year — preemptively shut down
transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high
autumn winds.
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees
and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified
equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating
utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.
Californians know that having tens of thousands of
homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal
sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and
infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by
enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban
or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.
Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline,
and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on
antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift
repair.
Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon — the result of high
taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates — add insult to the injury of
stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway
expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed
rail project.
Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among
weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized
test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put their own
kids in private academies.
Californians know that to venture into a typical
municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno.
Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are
bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to
bring in an injured or sick child.
No one would dare to connect the crumbling
infrastructure, poor schools, and failing public health care with the
non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of
undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive
without fluency in English or a high-school education.
Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such
Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that
such “misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s permissive
laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco
now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.
Has California become premodern?
Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the
state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About
one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of
poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education,
legal, and law-enforcement services.
California is now a one-party state. Democrats have
supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Only seven of the state’s 53
congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no
credible check on a mostly coastal majority.
Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade, and
academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with
unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets
antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their
coastal enclaves. The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay
exorbitant power bills, and deal with shoddy infrastructure — all of which
resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.
California’s three most powerful politicians — House
speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Governor Gavin Newsom — are
all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes, and privileges bear no resemblance
to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided
policies and agendas.
The state’s elite took revolving-door entries and exits
for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful, and
well-endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue
up for the weather, the shore, the mountains, and the hip culture.
Yet California is nearing the logical limits of
progressive adventurism in policy and politics.
Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they
were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter
downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable
nation.
Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed
by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries
seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights
will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive
thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.
Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a
wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two
has been turning California into a wilderness.
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