Gavin Newsom has changed direction once again. After a brief feint as a Maga-whispering moderate, California’s governor has “woken up” in the wake of the LA immigration riots to become the self-anointed leader of the anti-Trump #Resistance.
At first glance, it doesn’t feel like the future will be made in El Segundo. A small city of 17,000, just south of Los Angeles International Airport, it’s the sort of place you glance at from your taxi as it whisks you on from arrivals to somewhere more exciting. Read more
Los Angeles is burning again, and it is not the Olympic flame. After riots in 1965, 1992 and 2020, Angelenos are bearing witness once more to a rash of violent unrest. Read more
The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration. A less widely remarked factor, however, is the emerging and complex nature of class in contemporary America.
Los Angeles has a long, combustible history — and it’s flaring up again. The current unrest, driven in part by political grievances, reflects a deeper dysfunction steadily eroding the city’s foundations. Read more
The latest broadside in the seemingly unending war between President Trump and California Governor Newsom came with a presidential attack on the state’s long-delayed, over-budget high-speed rail project. Read more
Recent revelations that the University of California received massive donations from organisations linked to China’s Communist Party — including a $220 million investment in Berkeley’s joint research project with Tsinghua University — may have elicited a harsh reaction from the Trump administration. But it should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the state’s increasingly dependent relationship with China. Read more
Never one to miss a reason to crow, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was out in front of the media at the weekend, bragging about how his state now boasts the world’s fourth largest GDP, surpassing Japan. This is a natural posture for a potential presidential candidate, a chance to show how under his leadership California has thrived. Read more
This is the second of two reported essays on the issues facing California. Read the first installment here.
California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change. Read more
This is the first of two essays on issues facing California.
“From the Beginning, California promised much. While yet barely a name on the map, it entered American awareness as a symbol of renewal. It was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.”
— Kevin Starr, “Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915”
California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood, a topic that has resurfaced with Trump’s presidency as it reflects, as a New York Times column put it, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”
Critics say this vision is at odds with the facts on the ground. Rather than the exemplar of a new “progressive capitalism” and a model for social justice, California both accommodates the highest number of billionaires and the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate. It has the third highest gap, behind just Washington, D.C., and Louisiana, between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state. Nearly one in five Californians – many working – lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates another one-fifth live in near-poverty – roughly 15 million people in total.
“California” is a model that no longer delivers. To be sure, California has a huge GDP, paced largely by high real estate prices and the stock value of a handful of huge tech firms. It retains the inertia from its glory days, particularly in technology and entertainment, but that edge is evaporating as tech firms flee the state and Hollywood productions are shot around the world. For all its strengths, California has the nation’s second-highest rate of unemployment with lagging job growth, particularly in comparison to its neighbors and chief rivals, notably Texas, Arizona, and Nevada.
The signs of failure are evident on the streets. Roughly half the nation’s homeless population lives in the Golden State, many concentrated in disease- and crime-ridden tent cities in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Barely one in three state residents – and only one in four younger voters – now considers California a good place to achieve the American dream. Increasingly, California is where this dream goes to die.
The roots of California are long and deep. In August, for example, the New York Times reported how its development into a one-party state controlled by progressive Democrats has made it the country’s center of political corruption. “Over the last 10 years,” the Times reported, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.”
Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Jill Siegrist via Flickr under CC 2.0 License
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