Even California Is Tiring of Progressive Orthodoxy

By Judson Berger

Friday, November 15, 2024

 

For the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton’s generational anthem “What Happened” is as relevant today as it was after 2016. The answers are manifold with respect to 2024 — but, as the votes are finalized and the picture becomes clearer, California’s outcomes tell an important part of the story.

 

Not only did Donald Trump narrow the gap with the Democratic nominee there compared with 2020 and 2016, but progressive candidates and positions were rebuked in local contests up and down the state’s coast. For all the pundits sticking with the explanation that America itself is the problem and resisting internal calls for soul-searching, the California example should drive home how the Democratic Party is losing touch with its own traditional voters.

 

As National Review’s editorial notes with tact and subtlety in accounting for Democrats’ poor performance: “It’s leftism, stupid.”

 

California proves the premise, at least where leftism intersects with urban misgovernance. In Los Angeles, progressive prosecutor George Gascón was ousted in favor of a more moderate DA candidate; voters’ verdict wasn’t even close. In San Francisco, notorious poster city for the havoc that doctrinaire permissiveness can unleash, Mayor London Breed was voted out despite a belated turn in favor of more law enforcement. Oakland’s far-left mayor and DA were both ejected amid crime concerns. Here’s Ryan Mills on the environment in Oakland, in a piece written just before the vote:

 

Restaurant chains like In-N-Out and Denny’s closed their Oakland locations this year, specifically mentioning “ongoing issues with crime” and the “safety and well-being” of their customers and employees. Other chains have closed their dining rooms, because “some people sometimes make trouble,” a Taco Bell employee told a KRON4 reporter in March.

 

Major employers, including Clorox and Kaiser Permanente, hired additional security guards to protect their workers and urged employees not to venture out for lunch.

 

Rental-car companies warned customers against refueling near the airport, lest they risk being robbed by thieves who target tourists. Earlier this year, a construction crew refused to finish filling potholes because of safety concerns. In at least one instance, the city replaced broken traffic lights at an intersection with stop signs because homeless people kept stealing the copper wires and tampering with an electrical box.

 

No one can say real progressivism has never been tried. Farther south, one representative letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times, from a self-described former Gascón voter, complained that the city’s now-outgoing DA was too “radical” and didn’t seem to grasp the local outrage over “mass robberies,” stolen cars, and “human tragedy in plain sight” on the streets. Gascón’s successor, Nathan Hochman, used his victory speech to make a pledge to police: “Your hands aren’t tied anymore.” The room erupted in cheers. Again, this is Southern California, people.

 

Ballot measures told a similar story. As James Lynch reported, “More than two-thirds of Californians voted in favor of Proposition 36 to impose harsher penalties for repeat shoplifters and large-scale drug dealers,” reversing course a decade after the state passed a ballot initiative to lower penalties for such crimes.

 

Collectively, these were clarion rebukes to the pullback on policing and prosecution that has hurt the Democratic brand in cities across the country — and, to draw a fairly obvious conclusion from Election Day, at the national level too. As Dan McLaughlin observes, “Law and order is back, and if Democrats don’t get with the program as they did in the 1990s, the electoral beatings will continue.”

 

Criminal-justice policies are far from the only component of the modern progressive project overdue for an overhaul. But the backlash on the law-and-order front could hardly be as thoroughgoing as it was on the West Coast. The losses in San Francisco and Los Angeles “place an exclamation point on the wave of anti-progressive electoral results that have drowned the post–George Floyd ‘Defund the police’ movement,” Ian Tuttle writes. If these priorities no longer play in California, they sure won’t play outside of it.