California Plague: Blue Locusts

The implicit deal, which I’ve called the “San Francisco Compromise,” is that, first, the left does nothing that directly threatens oligarchic wealth or power. It can tax and spend all it wants, so long as those taxes are easily bearable—and, to the extent possible, legally avoidable—by California’s grandees. And so long as the other policies that increase oligarchic wealth are never questioned, so that at the end of the day it almost doesn’t matter what California tax rates are; whatever they are, the rulers can afford them. The lefties also agree to use their considerable rhetorical power to whitewash and lionize the oligarchs.

For their part, the oligarchs take their cues from leftists on matters of passionate conviction that don’t directly threaten said wealth or power and spend some of their lucre on lefty institutions and make-work jobs.

This works out tremendously well for the oligarchs who, like all elites, are outnumbered and need defenses and justifications for their privilege. And it works out very well for the lefties who are, for the most part, otherwise unemployable—certainly not in any profit-making industry that pays well enough to live in coastal California.

What about everybody else? Aye, there’s the rub. Most of them don’t have it so good. In my 2020 book The Stakes, I describe modern California as crowded, costly, congested, crumbling, incompetent, filthy, dangerous, rapacious, profligate, suffocating, prejudiced, theocratic, pathologically altruistic, balkanized, and feudal. Those interested in the details may peruse the first chapter, in which I attempt to demonstrate each of these claims.

Only four kinds of people put up with all that: those who can buy their way out of the pathology; those for whom California, with all its problems, still feels better than wherever they came from; those with deep roots in the state who can’t bear the thought of leaving; and those who believe they have nowhere else to go.