Hanson - The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction

The Decline and Fall of California

From Decadence to Destruction

Copyright 2015 by PJ Media.

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of PJ Media.

ISBN # 978-1-940331-32-4

Cover image copyright: Katherine Welles, Abramova Elena, Suphat Pengchan, Anne Greenwood EpicStockMedia, iofoto/Shutterstock.com

Table of Contents

Part 1:
Water

Part Two:
Immigration

Conclusion:
Versailles in California

Epilogue:
What Next?

The Decline and Fall of California is the second in a series of Victor Davis Hansons collected works, offered exclusively by PJ Media, LLC. Dont miss the other e-books in the Victor Davis Hanson Collection. Read the full list!

Collection One:

Seductions of Appeasement
Victor Davis Hanson examines the threat of terrorism and the backlash of failed foreign policy.

Collection Two:

The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction
Victor Davis Hanson tackles the worst issues facing California today, and how they predict a similar fate for the rest of America.

For the latest insights from Victor Davis Hanson, visit www.PJMedia.com

Forward
By Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.

As his editor at PJ Media, every Sunday morning, Im treated to being the first person in America to read Victor Davis Hansons latest column. Radical environmentalists like to say, hide the decline. In sharp contrast, at his Works and Days column at PJM , VDH has put a 1000-watt spotlight on Americas sad decline in a multitude of facets for nearly a decade. From his farm in Fresno and his office at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institute, hes seen Californias decline firsthand, and the disparity between the two extremes he inhabits is a frequent topic of his articles. The hardscrabble workaday lives of his agricultural neighbors are made all the more difficult by the conditions imposed upon them, typically first dreamed up by left-leaning university professors, and then implemented via the now virtually all-blue Sacramento.

During his time as governor of California, Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying, If the pilgrims had landed in California, the East Coast would still be wilderness, so great are the states abundant natural resources. Instead, in the decades since Reagan left Sacramento in 1975, those resources have been increasingly made more difficult to access. From the entrepreneur to the private industry employee, Sacramento sees the entire population of California as working for their benefit rather than the other way around. As a result, as Victor wrote in his PJ Media column in April of 2015, In our pyramidal state, there is a vast underclass (22% of the state lives below the poverty line, schools are rated 46th in the nation, and one out of three hospital admittances over 35 suffers from diabetes, etc., a disease for whose prevention California rates near last in expenditures). The base of the pyramid is growing, and now represents one in six of all American welfare recipients. Atop sits the wealthiest 1% elite in the United States, whose capital ensures immunity from the consequences of ones own ideology at least up to a point.

Fortunately for the rest of us, exploring the consequences of the California elites socialist ideology is also one of VDHs frequent topics. The declining statistics of the formerly-Golden State didnt happen by accident; they are a reflection of another form of declinein this case, of an intellectual and moral nature. As VDH wrote in a 2015 City Journal article titled An Engineered Drought , Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.

And logic hasnt returned to our leftwing betters in recent years, of course. As Victor wrote in the summer of 2015, We can all but write off todays university as a place of free expression. In the age of Obama, zealots in the university have clamped down on any thought deemed reactionary. Trigger warning is a euphemism for trying either to censure literature or to denigrate it. Safe space is another term for the segregation of campus areas by race, class, or ideology. Hate speech has become a pejorative for uncomfortable truth.

In the 1960s, Hollywood, NASA, and the US Air Force all saw California as the place where the future would be born. Curiously though, now that the 21st century has actually arrived, the New Frontier that President Kennedy optimistically spoke of is being strangled by socialist grandees in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento beholden to a late-19th century substitute religion that paradoxically describes itself as Progressivism.

If youre in search of a roadmap that charts how they delivered us to this strange and bewildering no-mans land, and some potential off-ramps that will lead us back to the future, Victor Davis Hanson will be happy to provide one, as youll see beginning on the next page.

Prologue
What Happened to California?

California is experiencing a rendezvous with the ramifications of its own lazy and unexamined ideologies. For decades, the state grew the population without commensurate investments in reservoirs, canals, freeways, bridges, and schools.

Ideology trumped reality. Sanctuary cities, open borders, diversions of water for baitfish restoration in the San Francisco Bay Delta, unfunded state-employee pensions, always higher taxes, and costly and impractical social mandates were pursued, as if lawmakers existed in a vacuum, cut off from reality. But the state is discovering that even Californias resort climate does not always ensure predicable rain and snow to facilitate the water needs of 40 million Californians (over 30 million of whom choose to live in arid and desert landscapes). They are also learning that someone elses money is not infinite.

Crime rates are still unacceptable and prisoner releases ensure that criminals are let loose amid the public. Human nature also now reminds us that the more we assure some California residents that there are no real consequences to their anti-social behavior, and instead proffer the refuge of race and class victimhood, the more the state finds itself unable to maintain a quality of life once taken for granted by more independent and self-reliant Californians for over half a century.

Californias proverbial tab has finally come due, and reality is setting in. California has the highest array of taxes, yet ranks among the nations worst states in infrastructure and schools. One in four Californians was not born in the United States. Nearly half the nations illegal aliens live in California, and almost a quarter of the population resides below the poverty lineat a time when assimilation and the melting pot are caricatured in the states schools and universities.

The decline that Californians see and experience, but which has always been downplayed by the politically-correct media and political elites, is now too omnipresent to discount. Innocent citizens are being killed and maimed by previously deported and convicted illegal aliens in sanctuary cities. Thousands of felons are being let go from overcrowded jails. A shrinking middle class is fleeing out-of-state. Nearly half of the states incoming revenue hinges on the income tax paid by a pool of less than 200,000 taxpayers. Ossified roads make driving an existential gamble.

The ostensible symptoms of decay are easy to chronicle. Illegal immigration, in an age of ethnic chauvinism and neglect of the rule of law, along with lack of confidence in American institutions and customs among the host, leads to chaos. Budgets can be temporarily balanced, but only by always higher income and capital gains taxes that shrink the tax base and hound the targeted affluent out of state.