Comatose California

California is in terminal decline.  Its malignant cancers were sixty years in the making.  It has degenerated to the stage of hospice care. 

We believe the case of Californian (once the eighth largest economy in the world) is salutary.  It has much to teach us, assuming we are prepared to learn. 

We need to begin sixty years ago, when the notion of Californian exceptionalism was first mooted.  California was to be the model of successful progressive modern government.  It was the harbinger of the future.  It was to lead the other 49 states of the Union to a higher secular humanist plane.
 

In 1949, Carey McWilliams, the state’s greatest journalist, called California “the great exception” among states: no textbook or precedent existed to explain its monstrous growth, its powerful labor movement, its superb education system, or its abundance-creating, super-exploitative farm system. “California has not grown or evolved,” McWilliams wrote, “so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fashion, by a series of chain-reaction explosions.” . . .

California’s reputation for being irredeemably liberal began to take hold in the ’60s, when three groups, all in frequent conflict with each other, held sway over the image of the state: liberal administrators, students, and labor. The last of these, relatively powerful ever since the Gold Rush, had developed its strength to the point that corporations tended to submit to its demands, and often suffered grievously when they did not. Professional administrators and politicians meanwhile sought to expand the public realm in prosperous California by any means necessary: agriculture would be heavily industrialized to feed the poor with cheap produce; under the auspices of a “Master Plan” for education, universities would be turned into tuition-free “multiversities”; cities would have their slums cleared for arenas, entertainment complexes, and mega-housing projects. Students, many of whom had served as Freedom Riders in the South, first demanded free speech rights, and then used these rights to demand others.

California was the Golden State.  Progressive secular humanism would deliver the gold.  Forever. 

Now, progressivism has proved to be a malignant tumour.  There is no cure, no respite.  Only a long, slow lingering demise.  Steve Rhodes, the writer of the piece cited above, ends by referring to a recent congress he had attended in San Francisco, convened to try to find some cure for the malignancy.  The congress, he reports, was full of hippie hope, of palliative care only.  He concludes:

In a more sober moment — it came with the first chill blast of Pacific wind — I realized that the congress had seen the future of California and shuddered; that its platform comprised a message to San Francisco, the only message the city was really prepared to receive: Save yourselves.

Why has this happened?  As Lady Thatcher said, all socialist regimes end up the same way.  Eventually they run out of other people's money.  And then they die.  Society cannot be built upon a foundation of theft, greed and envy.  Progressive secular humanism has no other foundation.  Eventually, secular humanism will die out.  The pain and cost of its passing will be enormous, but terminate it will, one way or the other.

Here is a summary of the attending doctor's report, after visiting the hospice: 

February 10, 2011 12:00

Jerry Brown, a Modern Sisyphus
The new governor must change his state’s philosophy.

California’s new governor, Jerry Brown, must rapidly close a $25 billion budgetary shortfall. Right now it seems almost a hopeless task, since the state’s disastrous budget is merely a symptom, not the cause, of California’s much larger problems.

Take unemployment. It currently runs at 12.6 percent in California, the second-highest in the nation. Take livability. A recent Forbes magazine survey listing the 20 most miserable cities in the nation ranked four California municipalities in the top five.

Take education. California public schools test near rock bottom in national math and science scores. Take the business climate. A recent survey conducted among CEOs ranked California dead last for jobs and business growth.

Take taxes. California has the highest gasoline tax in the nation, and its combined sales-tax and local and state income-tax rates are among the nation’s steepest. California incarcerates the highest number of prisoners in the nation. It costs nearly $50,000 per year to house each one, near the highest per capita cost in the country.

I could go on, but you get the picture: The newly inaugurated Brown has problems well beyond a massive budget shortfall.

Perhaps the state’s problems are not of its own making but arise from a deficit of natural riches? Hardly. California has the most fertile soil and the climate most conducive to farming in the country. Tourists flock to see the beauty of Yosemite, Death Valley, and a 1,000-mile coastline. San Diego and San Francisco Bay are among the most naturally endowed harbors in the world. The state is rich in gas, oil, minerals, and timber. It has the largest population in the nation at 37 million residents. . . .

California uses more gasoline than any other state and has the most voracious appetite for electricity. But Californians also enact the most obstacles to developing their own sources of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power. State referenda and the legislature have made it the hardest state in the nation in which to raise taxes and the easiest in which to pass costly new laws.

The state’s mineral and timber industries are nearly moribund. At a time of skyrocketing food prices, more than a quarter-million acres of some of the wealthiest agricultural land in California’s Central Valley lie idle due to court-driven irrigation cutoffs — costing thousands of jobs and robbing the state of millions of dollars in revenue.

Home prices stay prohibitive along the upscale coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego, even as millions of acres of open spaces there remain off-limits for new housing construction. Most refined Californians who regulate how the state’s natural resources are used live on the coast far away from — and do not always understand — those earthy people who struggle to develop them.

California does not ask its millions of foreign immigrants to arrive with legal status, the ability to speak English, or high-school diplomas, and then is confused when its entitlement and legal costs skyrocket. Billions of dollars in remittances are sent from California to Mexico — but without the state being curious whether some of the remitters are on some sort of state-funded public assistance.

Somehow, Jerry Brown must not only change the way Californians act, but also the strange way they now seem to think — persuading the present generation to produce far more private wealth while consuming far less in public funds. Otherwise, the revenue-strapped and reform-minded governor will be little more than a modern Sisyphus — endlessly pushing his enormous rock uphill, never quite reaching the top.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Terminal is what it is.