Victor Davis Hanson: California's collapsing Blue-State Democrat model

Towards the end of last week, in "California pols: Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and now... Mel Gibson?" Walt marvelled that Hock Ptui is the leading contender to move into the California state house. It's just another sign, IMHO, that the Golden State is beyond redemption -- truly an exemplar of the "failed state".

Today, our old friend Victor Davis Hanson takes up that theme in "California and Its Collapsing Blue-State Democratic Model", on the American Greatness site. Secondary headline: California’s high taxes, crime, and regulations are driving an exodus, shifting political power to red states as the once-prosperous blue-state model collapses under economic and social strain. I've selected a handful of key excerpts but suggest you click on the link to read the entire article for yourself.

While the media and the new Democrat Party grow hysterical over the Trump counter-revolution, they are missing some of the most revolutionary and insidious changes in American society of the last century. Much has been written about the collapse of the old orthodox Democratic Party, along with the growing irrelevance and dysfunction of the legacy media, elite universities, and state and federal agencies. But their growing unattractiveness is all related and was not just the result of top-down development. 

Rather, current Democrat Party radicalism, street theater, and violence were merely reflections of its own preexisting cultural antipathy toward the middle class. The party is now a pyramidal coalition of the very wealthy and professional classes comprising the capstone, resting atop a vast, expanding bottom of the subsidized and working poor, strapped pensioners and retirees, angry indebted students, 30s-something urban wannabees, impoverished immigrants—including perhaps 30 million here illegally—and, increasingly, trapped residents of a dystopian big-city America.

That, in Mr Hanson's words, is what Thomas Franks was saying in Listen, Liberal!, reviewed here earlier this month. Mr Franks predicted the downfall of the new woke Dimocratic Party, which (with a slight pause) played out in just the way Mr Hanson is now analyzing.

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.

We also may be witnessing soon the de facto implosion of a once affluent California—its growing poverty already visible in its decaying roads and infrastructure, dangerous and substandard public schools, soaring property crime, overcrowded, dysfunctional, and dangerous health care system, ethnic fragmentation, and the general bankruptcy and medievalism of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In the current conundrum, we have forgotten completely the old themes of a blue-state Democrat Party. The 1996 Democratic National Convention manifesto that spearheaded Bill Clinton’s successful reelection emphasized secure borders, legal-only immigration, tough crime enforcement and punishment, balanced budgets, fiscal responsibility, and “personal accountability.” 

That agenda today in California would condemn any adherent as a racist, xenophobe, or MAGA fanatic. In its place, the party became more intolerant, narrower in its cultural emphases, and uninterested in existential crises such as housing, secure borders, power generation, infrastructure, and crime. 

Without answers or correctives to the damage it inflicted, it instead focused on what was largely seen as irrelevant to the state’s struggling minority populations—LGBT advocacies, transgendered men competing in women’s sports, racial reparations, DEI-mandated programs, and boutique environmentalism.

In addition, the growing dysfunction and irrelevance of the mainstream media—from network news to the old print conglomerates—of elite universities and of the federal government itself are, in part, due to their location in and symbiosis with the dead-end, blue-state model of culture, economics, and politics. In sum, America is entering a historic reversal. [The emphasis is Walt's.]