JOEL KOTKIN: The Democrats Didn’t Just Take Over California, California Took Over The Democrats.
New York is only the fourth most populous state; its influence is waning while California, with all its problems, has a far greater economy, as well as greater cultural and technological influence.
Much as Ronald Reagan defined the Republican ethos until the emergence of Donald Trump, figures like Newsom and Harris will shape the post-Biden Democratic Party. Both come from progressive central casting in the deep-blue haven of San Francisco; both Newsom and Harris have built their careers around support from lawyers, tech oligarchs, progressive trust-funders, Hollywood and public employee unions, especially teachers.
Yet here’s the rub. Buying the California model today is increasingly like buying a lemon, and not the tasty kind we grow in our front yards. California today is not the land of opportunity that it was in the Reagan, or for that matter the early Jerry Brown, years.
Of course Newsom, Harris and other boosters claim the state as a social justice model. “Unlike the Washington plutocracy,” Newsom boasts, “California isn’t satisfied serving a powerful few on one side of the velvet rope.” But this view, still widely accepted by many progressives and their media acolytes, seems out of touch with reality. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.
The old ideal of California as the apex of the American dream has been shattered. Since the 1970s, middle-class incomes, once ebullient, have stagnated. The state may be home to the most billionaires in the nation, but it also suffers the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also faces a deep budget deficit, tepid job growth and the nation’s highest unemployment. The state is home to 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, with some now living in caves.
In contrast, key competitors such as Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have over the past three decades enjoyed considerably faster income and job growth. This reflects the sad fact that the lodestones of California supremacy, culture and technology, are clearly in decline. When Reagan was an actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, and even into his time as president, Hollywood reigned supreme. To be sure it was primarily liberal in its leanings, as Reagan himself was once, but its cultural product was tailored to conventional tastes. Today’s Hollywood prefers to impose a new race and gender orthodoxy, even at the once family-friendly Disney. Not surprisingly, the entertainment business, one of the state’s high-end industries, has also lost jobs, due to technological changes and incentives offered by other states and countries.
“The audience,” as one film historian recently told the Los Angeles Times, “has moved on.” And where are they moving? To places like Nashville and Austin whose country music more often reflects the primacy of patriotism, heterosexual relationships and the ethos, and pain, of hard, often physical labor. These messages do not stir the MFAs and MBAs who now dominate Hollywood and much of the cultural community.
Forget your audience.