Do you know what the problem is with California?
Democrats, or so I'm told.
If I write about broken sidewalks In Los Angeles, readers write to say that Democrats are to blame.
Homeless, crime public transport, Poverty: In all cases, the Democrats are to blame.
I recently wrote about the owner of Langer's Delicatessenwho is considering retirement due to the problems at MacArthur Park.
California is about to be hit by a wave of aging, and Steve Lopez is taking advantage of it. His column focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of advancing age, and how some people are challenging the stigma associated with older adults.
“Well, I hope he shuts down and flees the state,” wrote a reader named Thomas. “His governor, his mayor and the Democrats have brought his state to ruin.”
Former President Trump also loves to criticize the Golden State. He is calling Vice President Kamala Harris a local radical, if not a communist. He says She destroyed San Francisco As district attorney, he destroyed the entire state as attorney general and he will turn the entire nation into a hellhole like California, as my colleague said. Marcos Barabak recently observed.
A reader named Steve summed it up like this: “The democratic experiment has failed,” he wrote. “Study history, you are stuck in the liberal mire.”
Okay, I'm ready. Let's study history and current events.
People gather in an alley next to MacArthur Park, where drug use is rampant.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
First, I admit that Democrats deserve to be in the spotlight.
They hold every elected office in the state and dominate the legislature in a wealthy state that stands as the world’s fifth-largest economy (not bad for a hellhole). And yet California has massive poverty rates, skyrocketing housing costs that are forcing people to flee, and an embarrassing number of homeless people, many of whom suffer from addiction, mental illness, or both.
But none of this happened overnight or exclusively under Democratic leadership.
“The major problems and issues that surround us at the local, state and national level are more complex than simply looking at them and blaming those who now run the political shows,” he said. Jaime Regalado, Former director of the Pat Brown Institute at California State University, Los Angeles. “Historical context is important.”
I grew up in Pittsburgh, a suburb of San Francisco, long ago when the state's population was 10 million (today, 10 million people live in Los Angeles County alone). Many of the people I went to school with ended up working for the local industrial giants: US Steel, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical, and Johns Manville.
These jobs allowed them to buy homes, raise families and send their children to California's well-funded state and junior colleges. But they also existed in part because much of the world was in ruins after World War II and the United States had little competition. In the decades that followed, due in large part to changes in the global economy and cheap foreign labor, domestic blue-collar jobs in industry, manufacturing and aerospace disappeared.
The new economy — largely technology and services — has widened the income gap, and neither Democrats nor Republicans in California or beyond have found a recipe for rebuilding the middle class.
“There is simply an unrealistic expectation about what different levels of government, particularly local government, can do,” he said. Jack Pitney, Professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. “You can have the best mayor in the world, and that mayor is not going to be able to solve the problem of poverty.”
Not that we should let Karen Bass get away with it or forgive her when it comes to homelessness, but then again, those problems started long before Los Angeles City Hall.
A man sits outside the Fred Jordan Mission on a cold, rainy day in February 2023.
(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)
For decades, thanks to Democratic and Republican leaders, California made the mistake of not building enough housing to meet the flood of people moving here to take jobs in the state's booming economy. It's one of many factors contributing to rising home prices and homelessness today.
Another reason is that in the 1960s, civil libertarians and others argued that people with mental illness were being neglected and mistreated in the state's psychiatric hospitals. Three California state legislators, one Republican and two Democrats, drafted theLanterman-Petris-Short Actsigned by Republican Governor Ronald Reagan, which placed limits on involuntary psychiatric treatment and led to the closure of hospitals.
But promised community treatment centers failed to materialize, so for decades, untreated people with mental illness have ended up in jails and prisons, on the streets and in the morgue. Federal funding for mental health was Destroyed by Reagan When he took office, even as local governments struggled with the impact of Proposition 13, the property tax relief initiative that drained municipal treasuries.
“We rarely talk about the homeless crisis in the 1980s under the Reagan administration,” he said. Regina Freerwho teaches urban policy at Occidental College. “We always want to simplify and flatten really complex challenges. That’s why I’m in the classroom, because I don’t want my students to fall into some of those same traps of oversimplification.”
Another oversimplification is that Democrats are solely responsible for the number of undocumented immigrants in California and elsewhere.
Many of them come here to work in the largely conservative agricultural industry, which looks the other way while writing campaign checks for Republican lawmakers. Many more come to escape drug violence in Mexico, where even 70% of weapons They are originally from the USA.
It's more than a little hypocritical to criticize crazy, reckless California on public safety when there have been no mass shootings in the nation, including mass shootings at malls and schools (on Wednesday, two students and two teachers were killed in a shooting). Georgia High School), could loosen the gun lobby's iron grip on Republican lawmakers.
“What has changed in our society is that instead of people sitting down and trying to solve problems… it’s all about a blame game,” he said. Marco Baldassare from the Public Policy Institute of California. And people blame everything on “the political party or group they are not part of.”
You might be reading this and saying, “Okay, but Reagan, Nixon, and economic change are old news. California Democrats have been in charge for years, and they are soft on crime and the border, full of empty promises, and too progressive.”
Mario Blanco lived in a flood control channel in Downey in July 2022.
(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)
Okay, but if that's your perspective, whose fault is it that Democrats are in charge in California?
I have the answer for you.
They are republicans.
In a state that proudly celebrates inclusion and leads resistance to race-based scapegoating, climate change denial and the elimination of women’s reproductive rights, the out-of-touch Republican Party has been hell-bent on reducing its presence. Reagan, who signed an abortion rights law as governor and an immigrant amnesty law as president, would be ousted from today’s GOP.
The California Republican Party alienated many Latinos In the 1990s, with Proposition 187’s ban on services for undocumented immigrants and Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s “they just keep coming” television announcement, Republican Party Fall Convention Last year, an attempt to remove opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage from the party platform was rejected.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, left Sacramento in 2011, and no Republican candidate has won statewide office since. None have offered winning solutions to deep-rooted problems, and it may be too late for a party resurgence because, as the electorate has become more diverse, Republican voter registration has shrunk to about 25 percent.
You can't blame the Democrats for that.
