Twilight in California – VDH nails it

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Twilight in California – VDH nails it

22 January 2019

George Rebane

Victor Davis Hanson, California farmer, premier academic, and syndicated columnist, has given a comprehensive analysis of California’s sunset – and I do mean comprehensive. We have covered the work of VDH many times on these pages (e.g. here), and in ‘Wealth, Poverty, and Flight: The Same Old California’ he takes us through a cold shower look at ourselves from multiple viewpoints, using hard stats on which to base his points. I was going to include this in the last Scattershots, and forgot. Then two friends emailed me a kick in the pants, and on second thought, this outstanding essay demands a post of its very own to draw readers’ attention to it.

California truly is the canary in our country’s mineshaft – “Insulated coastal elites, impoverished immigrants, and a fleeing middle class.” The Left has brought the state to its current condition of decline and decrepitude, and is now busy practicing the fine art of political taxidermy and ideological embalming to continue selling the image of what once was California. And as VDH points out, our share of the nation’s double dummies is so high today that almost any kind of socialist bullcrap is easily peddled and readily consumed – our own county is an illustrative work-in-progress as the progressive pandemic spreads into the Sierra.

This essay is a must read, if for nothing else than to take the measure of our Left as it denies chapter and verse of what is presented, while the state continues to sink under total one-party rule that is now going into socialist overdrive. There is no state that is more locked into the attempt to solve its every mounting problem by piling on regulations and increasing taxes.

Posted in Agenda 21, California, Critical Thinking & Numeracy, We the iSheeple

63 responses to “Twilight in California – VDH nails it”

Paul Emery

24 January 2019

George
We’re talking State law here I assume. Would not the intent of the Founders be to leave it up to the Sates?
Gregory
You are referring to State Senate districts right?

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Paul Emery

24 January 2019

Walt writes:
“800,000 homes burned to the ground state wide.”
Huh??? Walt, Can you provide a link for that? Never saw that number before. Try googling 800,000 homes burned in California and tell me what you get. I got nothing to verify that.

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Gregory

24 January 2019

Paul, once again: our state law was overturned in 1968 by the Reynolds decision from the SCOTUS. Before ’68, the State Senate “districts” were the COUNTIES of the state. Each County elected One Senator in exactly the way the US Senate is comprised of two Senators from every state.
After ’68, in essence, we had two Assemblies… both dominated by LA and ‘frisco. In fact some states with Bicameral legislatures just dissolved their Senate in order to comply.
Earl Warren was a dullard and while this decision was lauded by the Jacobins among us, Senator Dirksen did peg the future results accurately.

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Todd Juvinall

24 January 2019

It would be rich though if stari decisis was not invoked for Reynolds. And Constitutionally it would seem more likely the states should be electing Senators the same as the Us. But not likely. I can see how the left would fight that tooth and nail as they have the urban centers with democrat supermajorities. If a county had one Senator in California that would balance things really well.

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Gregory

24 January 2019

George 253pm
Eisenhower gave us Earl Warren as the SCOTUS Chief Justice… I was young during the whole “Impeach Earl Warren” kerfuffle, and was oblivious at the time about the Reynolds decision. How much of the call for impeachments was due to this, and how much was over Brown v. Board of Education, whose importance has held up well over time.
Forbidding states the same bicameral structure chosen by the Framers for the country as a whole is perhaps the worst anti-Federalist decision by the Supremes in the history of the high court.

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Todd Juvinall

24 January 2019

Agreed!

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Gregory

24 January 2019

I did get the senate districts pre-Reynolds a bit wrong… it was partially by population, with groups of up to three counties per district… but no district could be less than one whole county. So, LA County even after it grew like topsy after WWII could have only one state senator, but other small counties might have to share a senator with two other small counties.

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Todd Juvinall

24 January 2019

Thanks for the research!

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George Rebane

24 January 2019

Gregory – I was also a bit young and over-hormoned in the 1958 frenzy to ‘impeach Earl Warren’, especially over an issue such as apportionment, and that between federal and state legislative districts. But what the ‘one man, one vote’ argument missed was that the Founders in an operational sense did intend for real estate to also have a vote. That was entire purpose for a bicameral house with a Senate membership independent of population.

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Gregory

24 January 2019

In ’58 I was in pre-school but if the rumblings for impeachment date to ’58, that’s pointing to Brown v. Bored of Education as the cause…
I vaguely recall running jokes of “Impeach Earl Warren” in Mad magazine back when it was satirical and funny, used to impeach the sanity of the Bircher ‘ilk’, not sure when… mid ’60’s maybe. Unfairly or not.

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Scott O

24 January 2019

The humorous thing for me was that I can remember the “Impeach Earl Warren” bumper stickers and yard signs and lived long enough to see the “Save The Earl Warren” bumper stickers and yard signs.
OK – the later referred to the Earl Warren Show Grounds in Santa Barbara.
Right next to the 101 on the cross avenue where our daughter and son-in-law lived at the time. Brown vs Board was 54 and I remember the vitriol against Warren was years later. Integration wasn’t an issue in California until the busing BS started. Education for non-whites just got worse and housing areas started getting more segregated. Good job, good intentioned idiot white lefties! Now the left demands segregated education. Go figure.

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Russ

25 January 2019

The Bifurcated City
Koel Kotkin and Wendell Cox in City Journal
After drifting toward decrepitude since the 1970s, many core cities have experienced real, often bracing, turnarounds. Yet concern is growing that the revitalization of parts of these cities has unevenly benefited some residents at the expense of others. The crucial, and often ignored, question remains whether the policies that have helped spark urban revivals have improved conditions for the greatest number of residents. In a new study for the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, we found that, in most cities, unbalanced urban growth has exacerbated class divisions, while doing little to address the decline of middle-class households. Our analysis, which puts special focus on the urban cores of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Dallas, shows that the once-rapid growth of urban cores and their surrounding neighborhoods has slowed dramatically; net domestic outmigration, according to Census estimates, has increased from 10,000 in 2012 to 440,000 in 2017. At the same time, some of the most actively gentrifying areas, such as San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, have become increasingly plagued with social dissolution and rising homelessness.
Rest of the Article HERE:
https://www.city-journal.org/unbalanced-urban-growth?
Liberal Havens In decline, not enough focus on the middle-class taxpayers.

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George Rebane

25 January 2019

Russ 329pm – Good catch for additional data. And all this will continue since all these goings on are invisible to our state’s Democrat elites who know they are our lords and masters, and that they can now do damn near anything they want with the state. And they’re doing it.

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