In the election’s wake, California remains part of the Left Coast, clinging to the western edge of Trump world, more an outlier than a trendsetter. Nearly 60 percent of Golden State voters picked the homegrown presidential candidate, and solid majorities voted “blue no matter who” in other races, as well.
Ever since the rise of Barack Obama, Democrats have seen themselves as destined to rule. With his presidential victory in 2008, they created a seemingly unbridgeable political empire. Read more
This time around, Hillary Clinton is not lamenting Republican ‘deplorables’. She has chosen instead, along with Kamala Harris, to label Donald Trump and his supporters as out-and-out fascists. Different words but the same meaning: anyone who backs the GOP candidate in next week’s US presidential election is an enabler for modern-day blackshirts or stormtroopers.
But for many Americans, the real ‘deplorables’ are to be found among Harris’s backers, such as the tech oligarchs who dominate the economy, the financiers of Wall Street or the moguls of mainstream media. Think of the likes of Bill Gates, who just forked in $50million to the Harris campaign.
Even more detested by most of the public are the ‘progressive’ activist class that has embraced Harris and shaped her past record. This group, as the author Musa al-Gharbi writes in his new book, We Have Never Been Woke, constitutes ‘a new elite’. Trained as ‘symbolic analysts’, these often flailing graduates and professionals now represent a revolutionary class pushing the Democrats towards the ideological loony bin. As long as Harris and the Democrats remain in thrall to the activists’ progressive ideology, they will be tarred with their widely unpopular views on everything from climate change to transgenderism, race quotas and immigration.
Their numbers are not too impressive. Overall, the woke make up roughly eight per cent of the electorate. But they tend to be politically motivated and dominant within the party apparatus, newsrooms and schools. They have long dominated local politics in cities like Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston and Boston.
Progressive influence has been far more evident in the Biden administration than in preceding Democratic regimes, especially those of Bill Clinton and even of Barack Obama. The current administration has welcomed ideologues with strident progressive views on the environment, gender, race and the Middle East. Biden and Harris have focussed on these woke constituencies over more traditional Democratic policies that embrace broad-based economic growth and opportunity.
Harris, more than Biden, epitomises the current version of the ‘left’ that is rooted in an increasingly gentrified base, rather than working-class or middle-class people. This has been financially rewarding for the Democrats. The ultra-rich and their progressive foundations have consistently outraised and outspent the political ‘right’ by a margin of nearly two-to-one. For Harris, long supported by these same people, this has helped build up an unprecedented billion-dollar campaign war chest, as much as three times the size of Trump’s.
Leftists like Bernie Sanders admit that Harris’s apparent shift to the centre during the election is a mere pragmatic feint. But as her campaign has lost momentum, his political action group, Our Revolution, now warns even the hint of moderation could limit turnout among progressive voters.
Yet there’s a problem here. Outside of the biggest cities and college towns, progressives are thin on the ground. Their views are far from popular with the general public (abortion rights is the main exception). The progressive, mainstream media – such as the New York Times and USA Today – insist that wokeness poses no big problem. But, as former New York Times opinion editor James Bennet put it, the traditional media now serve as the place where ‘America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist’.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
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: Rob Pegoraro via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
Support for the Democrats among black voters shows signs of some erosion, but it’s Latinos – now the country’s largest racial minority – who may prove the critical decider of the 2024 election. Read more
Kamala Harris has a plan to help America’s struggling home buyers by increasing the supply of houses. Her recently released 82-page policy book, “A New Way Forward for the Middle Class,” calls for clearing away the “regulatory burden” and “red tape” that constrains new-home construction. Tim Walz promoted the “three million new houses proposed” under Ms. Harris’s “bold forward plan” during the vice-presidential debate.
Yet like Ms. Harris’s scripted reversals on fracking, immigration and Medicare, her push to build more single-family homes contradicts her past positions. As California’s attorney general, she wielded the state’s environmental laws against new residential developments, exacerbating the affordability crisis that her campaign plan aims to address.
Years of excessive housing regulations and legal attacks on developers have left much of California unaffordable today. Median house prices in the Los Angeles, San Diego and San Jose metropolitan areas are more than 300% above the national average. In 2021 California had the nation’s second-lowest homeownership rate at 55.9%, slightly above New York.
California’s depressing homeownership rates are a direct result of the policies embraced by Ms. Harris and her fellow Golden State progressives. As attorney general, she put the interests of climate activists ahead of aspiring homeowners. She opposed regional plans that would have allowed for more growth on the suburban fringe, where housing is more affordable. In the end, restrictions on building on the periphery pushed millions of Californians to flee to more affordable states.
Shortly after taking office in 2011, Attorney General Harris issued a comment letter criticizing a plan to add 79,000 housing units in northern Los Angeles County’s Santa Clarita Valley. Rather than removing the regulatory burden around new-home construction, Ms. Harris directed the local planners to develop a “detailed” Climate Action Plan, set “binding emissions reduction targets,” and demonstrate that the plan would “curb low-density sprawl and increased driving.”
Ms. Harris also used litigation against planners. In 2012, the attorney general joined a lawsuit brought by two environmental groups against a plan to expand the highways around San Diego. The groups that initiated the litigation opposed the transit plan because it would “induce sprawl and reinforce the region’s dependence on car-oriented transportation.” Ms. Harris failed to convince the California Supreme Court that the climate assessment supporting the plan was unlawful, but the decision came six years after the suit was filed. It’s a familiar story in California. Developers face almost unlimited lawsuits from environmental and other interest groups, which can slow projects down for decades.
The biggest losers from the housing policies espoused by Ms. Harris have been millennials and minorities who aspire to own homes. Californian baby boomers and Gen Xers have homeownership rates closer to those in the rest of the country, but the rate is nearly half the national level for Californians under 35. Many of those now leaving the state are in their 30s and 40s—precisely the group that tends to buy houses. The African-American homeownership rate in California was roughly 36% in 2021—well below the national rate of 44% and nearly one-third lower than it was 20 years ago. California’s Latino homeownership rate ranks 41st nationwide.
Yet rather than support policies that have worked elsewhere, notably in Texas, Ms. Harris has embraced the Yimby, or “yes, in my backyard” movement, which seeks to nationalize progressive preferences for more rental and high-density living. The movement has a major problem: Public preference for single-family homes is “ubiquitous,” as Jessica Trounstine at the University of California, Merced recently found. Most Californians, according to a survey by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, oppose legislation that bans single-family zoning.
If Ms. Harris wins in November, young people and middle-income Americans may find their housing options, in contrast to her claims, ever more limited. It could be springtime for progressives but also for a greatly diminished American dream.
This piece first appeared at The Wall Street Journal.
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.
Michael Toth is a founding partner at PNT Law, based in Austin, Texas.
Great empires always fall, pushed by their own leaders. Just think of the role played in Britain’s decline by the Liberals who blundered into the First World War, permanently crippling the world’s dominant empire. Or the damage done to France by Napoleon III’s imperial blunders. Or the fumbling of autocrats in China, Russia and Germany in the last century.
In 16th century Japan, the Daimyo feudal lords, like their Medieval European counterparts, battled to secure control of the realm. Today, in the current US presidential race, a similar conflict has emerged, over an increasingly feudalised landscape.
North America, with its vast resources, may be in a position to save the economies of the west. But governments on both sides of the border seem more concerned with green virtue signaling than actually finding a workable approach to carbon emissions that does not undermine our economies and ability to defend ourselves.
It appears to be a rule of modern politics that politicians must pander to voters. The latest example of this is Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s proposed $100-billion manufacturing plan, in an obvious drive to win over Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Her rival Donald Trump’s grand claims about import tariffs — especially high for Chinese goods — are aimed at winning the same voters.
Trump can at least claim that manufacturing grew during his tenure, although his pro-industry rhetoric tended to be more effective than his bite. In contrast, Vice President Harris’s new enthusiasm for industrial growth belies her own record and ideological orientation. The Biden administration has spent billions and placed great rhetorical emphasis on sparking manufacturing growth, but the results have been modest at best. Over the past year, the US has begun losing manufacturing jobs — something rarely acknowledged in the mainstream party press.
More telling, however, is Harris’s own record. As Attorney General of California, she enforced climate policies that were devastating to factories and virtually every sector of the “carbon economy”. Over the past decade, California has fallen into the bottom half of states in manufacturing sector employment growth, ranking 44th in 2022. Between 1990 and 2021, according to the Census of Employment Wages, California saw a reduction of 795,879 manufacturing jobs. What growth that has taken place more recently has been largely in Sun Belt states.
More worrisome still, even the tech industry is losing jobs in California. Data shows that the state has seen its share of the nation’s advanced-industry jobs stagnate while lower-tax states benefit from the exodus. Particularly devastating is the recent loss of SpaceX to Texas, meaning California — the home of Silicon Valley and Big Tech — will play a diminished role in the future of space exploration.
Despite Kamala Harris’s attempt to be the tribune of “people of colour” or a representative of the working class, her climate zealotry has disproportionately impacted ethnic-minority workers. Latino workers are overrepresented in these industries nationwide but in California they account for more than half of all transport sector workers, as well as manufacturing and construction workers. At the huge Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, regulations seeking to terminate gas-powered trucks endanger the jobs of the primarily Latino workers as the port faces strong competition from places such as Houston in Texas, Tampa in Florida and Norfolk in Virginia, which impose no such regulations.
Green policies implemented by the VP have pushed California’s energy prices well above the national average, spreading “energy poverty” to many communities, particularly in the less affluent interior. With the recent departure of oil giant Chevron, California — once a rival to Texas as an oil capital — now has no major energy firms located there. Essentially, the economy of places like inland Bakersfield have been sacrificed to fulfill the climate agenda of Harris’s base in the progressive coastal locales.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
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. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: by The White House; Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks at a reception for Black business leaders, via Flickr, in Public Domain.
Overall, immigration has both positive and negative effects, something rarely acknowledged by advocates on either side. An intelligent approach would try to minimize the negatives Read more
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