It's difficult to find words to properly describe my admiration for an American treasure, Dr. Victor Davis Hanson. A student of history, a writer and columnist, an educator - in the original sense of the word - and a lifelong Californian, Dr. Hanson has long been one of my personal heroes, and I would love to just sit and talk with him for an hour; that would be a pearl beyond price. He's probably one of the most brilliant people on the planet, and an hour with him would be enlightening.
Dr. Hanson is also, as noted, a Californian, from a line of California farmers. His family farm has been in the Hanson family since the 1870s, and from his writing, he loves his home state - and is not happy about the direction in which its Democrat super-majority in Sacramento is taking it. On Monday, he released a typically eloquent column on that topic, and it merits consideration.
The collapse of the blue-state/blue-city model and those who work within and promote it reflects the radical environmentalism of the college-educated, as well as an array of high taxes, high crime, endless government regulations, housing shortages, massive homelessness, illegal immigration, critical-legal-theory prosecutors, ethnic and racial chauvinism, defund-the-police city councils, and, most importantly, chronic budget deficits and vast, unfunded pension liabilities and obligations.
In response to this progressive implosion that accounts for Democrat Party unpopularity, under the radar are historic demographic shifts. They reflect two insidious phenomena.
One, the blue-state, urban/professional/college-educated profile has become antithetical to fertility.
The future, as the saying goes, belongs to those who show up for it, and it seems that the classic blue-state progressives are opting out. That's not something we should be overly concerned with; if the blue-state progressives choose cultural suicide by apathy, it's not our part to question that stroke of good fortune. But there's more to California's decline than that.
Second, we are witnessing the greatest internal migration in U.S. history since the post-Civil War era. Millions are leaving California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, and other northern blue states. And they usually head to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, and other red, low- or no-tax states. So large have become the dislocations that conservative red states will in the next decade grab some 10-12 congressional seats away from liberal blue states along with some 10 or so votes in the electoral college.
The trends are not static but occurring at a geometric rate. The upper-middle and professional classes head to states with perceived lower crime, lower taxes, fewer regulations, better schools, and more affordable housing. Meanwhile, those left in blue states to pay the tab for the subsidized poor and expanding social welfare overhead shrink. For these remaining, the burdens per capita surge—in turn feeding even more exoduses.
There's always the problem, of course, that the people moving to Florida, Texas, Tennesee, South Carolina, and the other red jurisdictions will take some of their voting patterns with them. Colorado, a state where my wife and I lived for 30 years and loved, has now collapsed into this trap. When I moved to Colorado in 1989, it was South Wyoming, although even then the start of the rot was visible in Denver and Boulder. Now, it's East California, with the Denver/Boulder Axis having grown from an influx of migrants to the point where it overwhelms the conservative western slope and eastern plains.
We should never underestimate the capacity of humans to mess up their own nests.
Another issue Dr. Hanson brings up is this: Not only is California horrendously over-regulated, but it is made worse by a horrendous imbalance of regulatory enforcement.
The regulatory agencies of the state exempt the poor from their massive violations of housing and building codes. They compensate for their dereliction by redirecting their energies instead to auditing the shrinking number who follow the laws and will pay fines if cited—yet another reason why the more affluent flee California.
I once asked a building inspector who arrived to certify an upgraded solar breaker box whether he was aware that a mere half-mile away, twenty or so people were living in what was once a single-house compound. Sagging Romex wire without conduit was visibly strung to a number of parked trailers, all without toilet facilities. When I asked him why not venture into that complex, he flashed, “I’m not crazy, sir.”
But the people of California's coastal cities, most particularly the elites who live in expensive gated communities, are crazy - they keep voting for the politicians that allowed things to get to this point, and that's because of their wealth and position, which insulates them from the effects.
See Also: Gavin Newsom's Lies Have Become So Blatant, Not Even CNN Can Ignore Them
Another Failure: Gavin Newsom's Bankrupted Medi-Cal After Expanding Coverage to Illegal Aliens
In short, California is dying, and it's a matter of time before it hits the point of no return. Dr. Hanson knows this - he is a classical historian, so he is aware of all too many times throughout history when civilizations have committed suicide.
Dr. Hanson concludes:
In sum, America is entering a historic reversal.
The old traditional impoverished South is becoming the engine of American prosperity. The Northern Midwest, the Northeast, and the West Coast—for a century the font of American dynamism—have become stagnant and inert, and are shrinking.
These blue loci survive for a while longer on the fumes of the work of past generations who operated under completely different assumptions and models antithetical to those of the present—and thus are regularly damned by those who squandered their once-rich inheritance.
In other words, the blue cities and their surrounding satrapies are running on fumes.
It's a shame what's happening in California. Dr. Hanson has made this a regular theme in his work, and it's compelling, to read a man so calmly discussing the destruction of his home, of his family's home. I've seen it for myself. I've done a lot of business in California back in my jacket-and-tie days, including two stints of over a year each in which I actually maintained a second home there. Objectively, it's a lovely state. There is an enormous variety of landscapes, a pleasant climate, and much to see and do, from the beaches to the giant redwoods, the deserts, the mountains, and the rich lands of the Central Valley. I've spent time in the cities, I've wandered through the small towns named in Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," I've walked the beaches and hiked the mountain trails. In the winter of 2008-2009, while working in the Los Angeles area, I took a shotgun out with me and was amazed to learn that one could drive for a couple of hours from metro LA up to the Sespe Wilderness, where I walked for miles and shot sacks full of delicious mountain quail.
California was once a place of great promise. It could be again. I have friends and colleagues for whom, like Dr. Hanson, California is home. They are doggedly trying to reverse course; I hope they can. California could still be a great place. It's not too late.
