January 19, 2025 - 4:00pm

After her election as mayor of Los Angeles in 2022, Karen Bass was a heroine of California’s Left. A former backer of Fidel Castro, she decisively defeated billionaire businessman Rick Caruso, who spent more than $100 million to try and defeat her. With a struggling economy, rising crime, and a high cost of living, Bass’s election seemed to confirm LA’s final transition from a place of political diversity to a single-party city dominated by a well-organised Left and funders from the public unions.

Now, though, Bass “is a dead woman walking”, as a union organiser friend told me this week. The revelations of incompetence, poor planning, and awful communication, combined with the fact that the LA mayor was partying in Ghana when wildfires started in her city, have worked against her, and yesterday angry protestors gathered outside her home. Some charges made by Donald Trump and Elon Musk tying the disaster to DEI and climate policies are exaggerated. But Bass’s lack of interest in public safety mirrors the new progressive script which prioritises “social justice” over actual justice, racial quotas over merit, and climate alarmism over common sense.

Naturally, Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom and their media supporters reject conservatives’ accusations of incompetence. They say opponents are using the fires as a political “piñata”, and blame the damage on climate change. Yet Steven Koonin, a respected physicist and advisor in the Obama administration, has argued that the real responsibility lies with a slew of bad policies which left the city unprepared for the scale of the disaster. Fires have been a regular feature of life here in Southern California for at least 20 million years. Given recent weather conditions, the city should have known what was coming.

Rather than help save our piece of the planet, proponents of the green movement have been consistent barriers to effective fire management. As far back as 2018, the Little Hoover Commission found that controlled burns and brush clearance were necessary to avoid catastrophic wildfires, yet not enough was done. Even as the state reacted to major fires in 2020, attempts at controlled fires have been hampered by environmental lawsuits that delay implementation, as well as fire management budget cuts. Bass also cut the fire budget.

California has been running huge deficits in recent years, but not enough of those funds have gone towards fire preparedness. Those in charge never made sure that fire engines were in place beforehand, that there was sufficient water pressure in hydrants, and that reservoirs were filled. To her credit, the LA council member who represents the Palisades, Traci Park, has consistently made these arguments.

Unsurprisingly, there has been a groundswell against Bass and the city’s bureaucrats. Some Hollywood stars — a group which has historically been the bulwark of the progressive movement — have even joined in. Celebrities including Maria Shriver, Justine Bateman and Dennis Quaid have now called on Bass to resign, as have the 150,000 signatories of a petition launched last week. As the journalist Michael Shellenberger notes: “They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.”

Whether Bass is kicked out in 2026 or sooner may not matter much, unless a new reform-minded mayor — as opposed to just a younger progressive — enters office. In 1993, following the LA riots, the city was fortunate to elect the late Richard Riordan, a Republican businessman, who also steered the city through the aftermath of a 1994 earthquake. Although the council was mostly Democratic, Riordan did much to fix the city and attracted capital to rebuild large swathes of the devastated areas. Much of northern LA now requires similar reconstruction.

All hope is not lost, though. Despite the obsessive pounding about climate change, less than one in three Californians approve of Newsom’s handling of the fires. Demands from Republicans in Congress could force the city and state to reverse the policies that exacerbated the fires. Perhaps the worst thing that could happen would be to follow a Bidenesque approach of handing out billions without reforming anything or imposing performance benchmarks.

But ultimately — and particularly in Trump’s second term — cities will have to save themselves. The fact that LA last year removed its Soros-financed District Attorney by a wide margin, replacing him with a moderate Republican, marks something of a departure from the current course. Progressives will push for rebuilding to focus on racial concerns, fearing the imposition of “apartheid”. If people truly begin to see how destructive the progressive agenda is, there may be an opportunity, as in San Francisco recently, to elect a moderate, practical, business-oriented mayor. But even with the city up in flames, that will still be a major political challenge.


Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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