The American paradise is lost. California, the source of, the power behind our latest version of liberalism, replaced gov’t with fantasies about the future a generation or two back, & is now failing in both enterprises. These are obvious truths, but rarely stated, partly because they are difficult to articulate—how can such a glamorous place with such vast wealth fail at meeting expectations in both regards!—but mostly because we no longer even bother to tell the truth, since we don’t think anyone cares. We have fallen below the level of political complaints because we have lost political knowledge in the ordinary sense—the people, habits, institutions, & beliefs involved in affairs. We cannot recover that political knowledge, however, without recovering first the hope of victory; we cannot look for that hope before we come to a political decision based on fear, to defend ourselves.
Do you want to live in a world where corporations enforce woke hysteria? If not, you should care about this California problem. Unless the dubious miracles of modern medicine come through for us, America could suddenly have a California president without the bother of an election: The kind of politician whose success comes from the favors of the powerful, the corruption that keeps organizations going, & the secret intrigues inevitable in a one-party state, ratified by elite money & support instead of popular approval. Unless by some miracle self-styled Republicans discover the spirit of fire that makes republicanism what it is, we will be overwhelmed by the liberalism of California, the tetrad of elites in media, administration, academia, & technology. This tetrarchy has advanced in California in a way it hasn’t anywhere else, because Hollywood, Silicon Valley, & the California Democratic party discovered astonishing synergies, made possible by a vast population & vast wealth for the elites. Indeed, California has almost solved the political problem & is in the process of installing a tyranny, making the rest of America look like frivolous, nostalgic veterans of a defeated army remembering the battles of a bygone era. Only in California do we see a serious claim being advanced that the social, cultural, & economic changes of recent generations can be organized politically rather than ignored. Misery, failure, & catastrophe, as much as power, seem to serve to make California more what its liberal elites desire. Compare California to the bastions of liberalism previously, New York & D.C., which now seem hopelessly naïve—even their successes are utterly dependent on what’s happening in California, including for votes, of course…
Yet, there is a weakness in California, inevitable in a period of transition—the politicians. A shocking development, Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing a recall election, even though he’s in his first term & had every reason to believe he would be a great success, that life would be one televised event after another, while arrangements among the secretly powerful are secured by his connections with the blessing of the suicidal California Republican Party.1 The other expression of this weakness is California’s falling behind the rest of the United States in population growth over the last decade, leading to the state’s first ever loss of a Congressional seat. The Democratic party now runs an ideological tyranny in California; electoral setbacks or political scandals don’t matter anymore & Gov. Newsom need not fear for his job, though he has lost his glamour. This weakness is important for another reason: It suggests Democrats could be destroyed politically in other states, even to the extent necessary to prevent the vast power of California from giving the Democratic Party national victories. This would mean recruiting men willing or even eager to do such things.
This brings me to my friend Matt Peterson, who has a wonderful piece of reporting at American Mind (where he is Editor). Skip over to the last section & learn about the impressive Alex Villanueva, the L.A. County Sheriff who stands against Black Lives Matters & the California liberal-woke alliance more broadly. Villanueva is pretty Progressive himself, but that’s less important—what’s more important is that he’s leading a campaign to recall L.A. County District Attorney George Gascon, the best example of liberal psychopathy when it comes to falling in love with crime & hating the middle class, at least South of San Francisco (there, the District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, is the child of terrorists, so it’s hard for L.A. to compete). They have the signatures, the recall election is this fall, so it may deliver a shock to L.A. elites, although it would only be a minor inconvenience to the California liberals that have transformed political activity into dreams in a death sleep…
If Republicans want to break liberal control of metropolises, first of all in states as red as Texas, they will need to put together a broad anti-woke coalition—like Trump, they will need a lot of votes from people liberals have taught us to call Hispanic or Latino & whom they are now trying to teach us to call LatinX. Politicians of the future must throw away this language & the way of thinking implied in it, learning in the process how deeply these mad categories are embedded not just in liberal rhetoric, but in civil rights law, administration, & any number of other parts of gov’t. We do not yet have any good name to describe these voters, since they’re not politically defined by either country of origin (America), race (i.e. ultimately continent of origin, Africa, Europe, or even Asia—not just the Americas), or the Spanish language. But some kind of city politics based on middle class aspirations about jobs, schools, & safe streets will get their votes, mixed with a tough & perhaps even harsh political rhetoric that defends them from arrogant liberal elites, & they may even prefer Christian politicians, though the voters are split between evangelicals & Catholics. So they could be part of a new Republican coalition, a populist version of the middle-class, which should suffice for political definition.
Republican attitude to California has passed through four stages in living memory. First, there was Reagan’s California,2 which was a somewhat nostalgic politics even at the time, since it meant running the nation’s largest most important state at the height of its prestige, before any decadence, when the middle class seemed to grow & grow stronger every year, peace & prosperity rewarding the most decent, law-abiding Americans there had ever been—but exactly at that moment, what we endearingly call the culture suddenly turned away from American aspirations to dreams of different futures which only had in common their tyrannical character. The collapse of the liberal university in the late 60s is the most obvious part of this problem—Reagan & people like him didn’t like it, but they were to some extent blind & to the greatest extent impotent. We may say, liberalism left gov’t to ordinary people while taking control of the national imagination & looking forward to the globalization of its ideas. This first stage was decisive & the other three are merely working out the drama then plotted, since liberals managed to gain control of California’s, then America’s elites through the colleges. Politics is fundamentally education, after all… Secondly, Republicans began to decline politically, but had enough victories to delude themselves—the most interesting figure at this time is Pete Wilson, who moved from San Diego Mayor in the ‘70s to US Senator in the ‘80s to Governor in the ‘90s. This impressively successful career turns out to have had little to do with the California Republican Party & nothing to do with California’s future. Briefly, the character of the political changes was ignored until it was too late to do anything about it without first radically changing the party itself. Thirdly, Republicans reacted to the sudden awareness of trouble with ever more ignominious ideas, most obviously the governorship of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man without principles or love of the American people, but a celebrity who at least wasn’t calling Republicans racist. At this time the abandonment of politics was obvious for all to see. The revelation of the ugliness of the Republican Party was accordingly quite a sight—above all, the belief that rhetoric is all there is to politics, on behalf of people who also did nothing to study rhetoric, since their hearts were as corrupt as their minds. Celebrities can indeed be said to be the perfect politicians if politics is reducible to televised events. Needless to say, the California Republican Party was not reformed, did not thrive during that time. Fourth & last is our time, when the Republican Party is too corrupt & weak to even care about elections. Whereas Schwarzenegger saw his opportunity in an unprecedented recall election which Republicans had done precious little to plan or bring about, in 2021 another such recall is not even imagined to be an opportunity. Only now, therefore, is it possible to see the character of the political problem presented by California to the rest of America, since hope is lost.
Of course, such a view of degeneration is enough to make the ignorant or cowardly despair. Winning elections seems to have been the way Republicans contributed to the installation of one-party rule & then ideological tyranny in California by their adversaries, leading also to very important national defeats! Let fools despair—the same history contains important lessons for those who want to win. First, in two generations, liberals have taken over California without being able to produce any notable politicians, in the state or in the nation—if anything, control over elections has made things worse from that point of view. This is the most important thing to learn about the character of the liberalism now in the process of installing a tyranny in America, because it reveals the electoral vulnerability of this oligarchy. Then, at the administrative level, California is a resounding failure—the state that embodied Progress through engineering, where hardware & software industries both were of great importance, there is a marked absence of a liberal imperial class administering the slave population in cities, towns, & counties. The infrastructure is crumbling, but so are the organizations that have replaced local politics. The alternative—colleges, activists, the various NGOs by which billionaires control the junction of society, law, & corporations, & the state administration are incompetent. Finally, the California model, a despotism in which politicians manage the annoyances for elites in the tetrarchy industries which organize the way of life of ordinary Americans but cannot get them to obey commands, has not attracted any other important state enough to cause imitators. Perhaps the very domination the tetrarchy has achieved in California leaves too few resources to conquer other states. This is the most hopeful lesson to be drawn. It’s America or nothing. Now, it is possible to see this model of gov’t at work, to defeat attempts to introduce it elsewhere, & to prepare a national contest between freedom & despotism. Men who love freedom must be grateful for the catastrophe which gives them the opportunity to win their freedom & the gratitude of their fellow citizens.
Until recently, the American prejudice was that despotism was unthinkable in America. This was the most important condition of the belief in Progress. Pressed, or in some cases even without pressing, Americans gave five reasons for this belief. In the first place, Americans did not know hunger, & California especially became in the mid-century an amazingly productive agriculture, so that Americans could never be desperate. In the second place, Americans had remarkable industries that by some secret necessity kept making or spurring the making of new industries, & California above all became the most industrialized state, so that Americans would have the tools to turn any problem into an opportunity, & wealth would itself became the cause of more wealth. In the third place, America was the most important military power in world history, & California was crucial even to the new technological military, so that the wealth & even the peace of mind of the Americans would be easily guarded. In the fourth place, America had vast quantities of money & California was the largest economy in America, so that no crisis, domestic or foreign, would cripple the ordinary operations of gov’t. In the fifth place, Americans had their religion, the chief institution of the democracy, & Christianity reminded people of God’s love as well as the demand that they live together in charity, following Christ. Of course, California is now in atheism as proud at America used to be of Christianity, & millions of Christians are themselves able to say they hate or despise God—but so with the other things, they have been corrupted until industry has created a psychopathic oligarchy, the police power of the state has created terrible crimes & burning cities, & the money has created unimaginable debts—even the paradise of food has led Americans to be fat, to suffer, despise themselves & each other, & to suspect they have been played for suckers. But all this misery is a condition for despotism, & the only question is whether people will put up with it.
If there is some good in all this, it will come when those who most hate despotism will become friends among themselves, because they are continuously humiliated by liberal elites, even in their private lives. Since there is so much suffering in America, there are many dissatisfied people who might want to fight their enemies. To see how California has fallen under despotism is also to see how to prevent it happening in other states. This is necessary, since liberal elites cannot stop attacking the institutions & beliefs of ordinary people without losing their title to rule, since not even the Californians love them. Defeat would be hard for those elites to survive, especially since they are not used to any suffering. They can be stopped; one day perhaps the people of California can be saved from the oligarchy, after a generation in which children suffer from the sins of their parents & learn to look for a better way of life by breaking up the state to govern themselves & seize most of the territory democratically, through organization, voting, & public opinion. But it is a different question whether those who now oppose liberal elites in Texas or Florida will imitate the tetrarchy industries of California in order to be as powerful, & whether they would avoid corruption or succumb to it by the competition now forced upon them. California more than any other state was an American paradise & this has led to much cruelty. Perhaps restoring California, a new California requires an education about a less mad way to deal with paradise.
11 of 53 California Congressmen are Republican (including 3 winners in 2020), they represent the majority of the territory (of course, the densely populated coastline votes Democrat), but not one of them is of any importance in America or in California, not even to the extent that they might become Senators or Governors…
The late great James Q. Wilson’s Reagan Country essay is worth your while.
Supplement this with chapter one of Michael Anton's The Stakes.
Blasted! I didn't read that one; I've read Anton on California over the years--was just reading some parts of The Stakes the other day before talking to him--but not the very first chapter...