America’s Shadow Self: Ruinous policies have transformed California from a symbol of progress to a cautionary tale for the nation.

But such sensible reforms face fierce opposition from the ideologically extreme nonprofit organizations and public-sector unions that dominate California politics. Homeless-services providers make political donations to the same politicians who give them billions in contracts to help the homeless, creating a homeless-industrial complex that discourages real change. And the reason that California’s children had to stay home when other children went back to school during the pandemic, for instance, is the outsize influence of the teachers’ union. After former state senate president Gloria Romero passed a “parent trigger” law, giving parents the right to take over underperforming schools, in 2010, the California Teachers Association spent millions on ads to tank her bid for schools superintendent, derailing her political career in the process. Democratic state legislators, she recalled later, “always wanted to know where’s CTA” because that’s “their sugar daddy.”

Conflicts of interest aside, the leaders of these organizations tend to be motivated more by power than by money. Teachers’ union officials “walk around [in Sacramento] like they’re God,” observed Romero. A nonprofit activist named Jennifer Friedenbach, who runs the Coalition on Homelessness, has accumulated so much power in San Francisco through sheer ideological influence, manipulation of language, and bullying that she effectively controls hundreds of millions of the city’s budget spent on homelessness. L.A. County’s advocate-dominated Board of Supervisors controls both the city’s and the county’s spending on mental health and education and is thus more powerful than state legislators.

Or consider environmental nonprofits. Groups like the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Climate Works often dictate what infrastructure can get built and combine pro-scarcity environmentalism with woke identity politics. For half a century, these neo-Malthusians have blocked new housing, power plants, and water storage and desalination in the state.

Many of the advocacy groups support policies that license self-destructive behavior, the true driver of crime and homelessness. No city needs to have any unsheltered homeless. Shelters can be built; people can be required to sleep in them. California cities don’t do this because progressive politicians have, for decades, demanded that taxpayer resources flow to expensive apartment units rather than to low-cost shelter beds. Groups like Friedenbach’s Coalition on Homelessness protest, lobby, and sue to prevent the city from requiring that people sleep indoors. California’s progressive leaders, judges, and voters have disempowered the police, reduced the state’s jail and prison populations by nearly one-third, and allowed the spread of public camping, drug use, and prostitution.

The progressive defense of urban chaos is that it is cruel, racist, and immoral to insist that criminals, addicts, and the mentally ill obey the law. When a homeless man shot and killed an Oakland postal worker in January 2023, a local politician came to the aid of the criminal’s family, not the victim’s. Such behavior is typical. In California, addicts and the mentally ill are treated as sacred victims and permitted to take over large parts of cities. To victims, everything should be given, and from them, nothing required. Once labeled victims, they become blameless; if they harm others, it is the system’s fault. These ideas, once radical, are today the conventional views of the people who run California, from its legislature to its governor’s office to the myriad organizations that influence them.