Many of those poor newcomers, it is worth pointing out, are Hispanic. California is now majority minority and it’s beginning to rattle some people.
But to cry racism – justified perhaps in some cases – cannot wish away the sense that something is wrong with the way the state is run. In particular, a law (designed to reduce the strain on prisons) that decriminalised thefts where less than a thousand dollars was taken, seems to have led to an upsurge in petty (ish) crime that has made life more unpleasant for many people of all races and income levels, in particular those who work in shops.
California’s Proposition 47, which was approved by nearly 60% of voters in 2014, reclassified small scale drug and property crimes as misdemeanours. Shoplifters have had a field day. This impression of lawlessness does not improve the nerves of people still trying to live decent Californian lives.
But California is still home to so much commercial innovation, so much private wealth creation.
It seems inconceivable that the Republican party can turn its back permanently on California and Californians. There is a list of post-Trump moves the party is going to have to make if it wants to stay in touch with the wider nation. It has to learn once again to respect faiths other than Christianity. It has to go back to respecting science. And I would add one more: someone sunny and western (a modern Reagan perhaps) needs to address Republicanism’s rampant Californiphobia.
And what of the Left, who, as I say, are nominally in charge? Well they seem to have fallen even further out of love with the state they run. Followers of the Left-wing potential Democratic nominee, Bernie Sanders, and particularly of fellow Leftie Elizabeth Warren, are so over the tech world of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The inequality that the tech crowd seem happy with does not sit well with the younger Democratic crowd.
In particular, the housing crisis in the San Francisco Bay Area, fuelled by mega-salaries in tech companies, has come back to haunt them. They are pouring money into housing schemes now — but it’s too late to rescue their reputation for careless breaking of social contracts, and something has undoubtedly broken in the bond between woke tech and the party it previously energised and funded.
How telling it was earlier in this year, when Amazon announced it was abandoning plans to build a much heralded headquarters in New York City. The Left-wing New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led a chorus of cheers: the tax breaks that would have gone to Amazon would be better spent on local schools she said. California style tech-dependence? No thanks!
This feeling that California is not a model of how life should be lived has been accentuated by news that’s made national headlines in recent weeks. A particularly bad season of wildfires have served to whip up a frenzy among environmentally sensitive liberal Americans with a penchant for morality tales.
So: California is burning because it has been so careless with its wealth. The rich who live along the coast have not thought about the poor who live further inland. Addicted to their fast cars and private jets, they are less keen on paying their taxes and as a result public transport and public housing have suffered from lack of investment. And worst of all, the rich who have starved California of tax cash and opposed public transport plans and got on with their multi car lives as if nothing has changed, have failed to think about climate change.
As one New York Times columnist put it, “California, as it is currently designed, will not survive the coming climate. Either we alter how we live here or many of us won’t live here anymore.”
The Atlantic agreed that the wildfire crisis was “raising the question of whether the country’s dreamiest most optimistic state is fast becoming unliveable”.
It would be hard for anyone to deny that California is in trouble. Homelessness blights its cities. Transport is inadequate. And farmers, starved of water from the sky, have been pumping groundwater at such a rate that towns in the central belt have been sinking into the earth. The huge farms that still produce around a quarter of all America’s food cannot carry on like this.
Meanwhile, politicians of every stripe conspire to talk it down, rather than talk of rescue. And by doing so they risk talking down the enterprise upon which they all depend: America’s foundational sense of optimism.
And Lord knows generations of Californians have needed that optimism to survive. The reality of life in this state has been as brutal – perhaps more so – than in any other. San Francisco was destroyed by fire over and over again in its early years, and devastated completely in the 1906 earthquake. The city flag depicts a phoenix.
Go to the ghost town of Bodie — on the border with Nevada — and you can still see what life was like for generations of gold-rush Californians. Bodie saw boom times and an eventual bust as mining ceased. The bust was so complete that the townspeople just left. Doors still swing in the wind. The cold dry climate has preserved the buildings where the hookers and chancers once mingled. You can close your eyes and feel their struggle for survival.
Struggling and overcoming adversity. It’s what Californians are. Yes, there’s the Beach Boys California Dreamin malarky, but the real California is an earthier kind of dreamin’. It’s about the foundational myths of America. It needs to live, or the idea of the whole nation could die.
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