Prescription for an Ailing California
Only a fool, or perhaps a politician or media pundit, would say California is not in trouble, despite some modest recent improvements in employment and a decline in migration out of the state. Yet the patient, if still very sick, is curable, if the right medicine is taken, followed by the proper change in lifestyle […]
California’s Politics of Farce
Karl Marx wrote, “History repeats … first as tragedy, then as farce.” Nothing better describes how California, with its unmatched natural and human riches, has begun to morph into what the premier California historian Kevin Starr has called “a failed state” – a term more usually applied to African kleptocracies than a place as blessed […]
California’s Demographic Dilemma
It’s been nearly 20 years since California Gov. Pete Wilson won re-election by tying his campaign to the anti-illegal immigrant measure Proposition 187. Ads featuring grainy images of presumably young Hispanic males crossing the border energized a largely white electorate terrified of being overwhelmed, financially and socially, by the incoming foreign hordes. The demographic dilemma […]
Is America’s Future Progressive?
Progressives may be a lot less religious than conservatives, but these days they have reason to think that Providence– or Gaia — has taken on a bluish hue. From the solid re-election of President Obama, to a host of demographic and social trends, the progressives seem poised to achieve what Ruy Texeira predicted a decade […]
The Blue-State Suicide Pact
With their enthusiastic backing of President Obama and the Democratic Party on Election Day, the bluest parts of America may have embraced a program utterly at odds with their economic self-interest. The almost uniform support of blue states’ congressional representatives for the administration’s campaign for tax “fairness” represents a kind of bizarre economic suicide pact. […]
Where Americans are Moving
The red states may have lost the presidential election, but they are winning new residents, largely at the expense of their politically successful blue counterparts. For all the talk of how the Great Recession has driven people — particularly the “footloose young” — toward dense urban centers, Census data reveal that Americans are still drawn […]
Off the Rails: How the Party of Lincoln Became the Party of Plutocrats
For a century now, Republicans have confused being the party of plutocrats with being the party of prosperity. Thus Mitt Romney. To win back the so-called 47 percent—an insulting description Romney doubled down after the election when he blamed his loss on Obama’s “gifts” —Republican might look farther back, past Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover to […]
For A Preview Of Obama’s America In 2016, Look At The Crack-Up Of California
Crossposted on Forbes Conservatives of the paranoid stripe flocked to the documentary “America: 2016” during the run up to the election, but you don’t have to time travel to catch a vision of President Obama’s plans for the future. It’s playing already in California. Some East Coast commentators like Jeff Greenfield saw the election as […]
The Biggest Winners From President Obama’s Re-Election: Crony Capitalists
Crossposted on New Geography President Obama’s re-election does not, as some conservatives suggest, represent a triumph of socialism. Instead, it marks the massive endorsement of an expanding crony capitalism that ultimately could reshape the already troubled American economic system beyond recognition. Nowhere is this clearer than in the President’s victory in the Great Lakes states […]
America’s Last Politically Contested Territory: The Suburbs
Crossposted on New Geography Within the handful of swing states, the presidential election will come down to a handful of swing counties: namely the suburban voters who reside in about the last contested places in American politics. Even in solid-red states, big cities tilt overwhelmingly toward President Obama and the Democrats, and even in solid-blue […]