Calling all conservative Californians (no, that’s not an oxymoron)
I can remember when California was a wonderful state; it wasn’t all that long ago. But recent decades have seen a steep economic decline, with no end in sight.
Yes, the decline has coincided with the vast influx of immigration (legal and illegal) from Mexico and the rest of Latin America, as well as a shift ever and ever leftward politically. The two are not completely unrelated, of course. Now, as this article describes, the state is effectively a one-party state, with Democrats so dominant and a Republican Party so marginal that it is largely irrelevant or embarrassing.
As with most one-party systems, the trend is towards corruption, special interests, and ever-escalating movement away from the middle. As these trends continues—and as the more conservative voters flee the state in response—the voting pool becomes more and more skewed:
Union members have an incentive to show up at the polls to protect their pay and pensions, and issue activists will vote for those who support their line. It just seems that the rest of us have given up.
It’s that “giving up” that makes a bad situation even worse:
As there is no real competition for power or for ideas, voter turnout, at both the local and state levels, has plummeted to the lowest levels on record. June’s primaries attracted barely 25 percent of the electorate, while the Los Angeles County turnout was just over 17 percent.
When I voted this month in my San Fernando Valley precinct, I brought my 9-year-old daughter, but she didn’t get to see democracy in action. She saw an empty church basement with a bunch of pleasant election workers sitting around with not much to do.
This lack of voter enthusiasm could be explained, in part, by a lack of competition between the parties statewide. But it goes deeper than that; even the nominally nonpartisan recent Los Angeles mayor’s race, while highly competitive, also broke modern records for low turnout.
It’s understandable. With no good candidates, why bother to vote? And yet it’s puzzling, too, because don’t people realize that the less they vote, the less likely the situation is to be improved? With such a low turnout, couldn’t a fairly small number of more conservative activists get together behind a better candidate in a local race and maybe even get that person elected by putting some time and energy into getting out the vote for them?
The problem is probably that people are so demoralized that they don’t see it as even possible, so why waste the effort? Apathy breeds defeat, which breeds more apathy the more widespread and entrenched it becomes. People must be saying, “So what if we manage to elect one or two more representatives for our side, when they only get swamped by a sea of blue once they reach the legislature? It’s a waste of time and money to try.” And then, as time goes on, more and more conservatives or even middle-of-the-roaders continue to leave the state for more business-friendly climes.
I don’t have the answer. But there’s something about that voter apathy that really gets me. I understand it; who wants to waste time in a quixotic and almost certainly losing battle? But unless that battle is fought, California remains lost, and it’s still a large and powerful state.
I fear that as California goes, so goes the nation.
You think I’m being too alarmist there? The way it works is this: as California itself becomes bluer and bluer, more people who are dissatisfied leave the state. But strangely enough they bring their politics with them; people who find California’s business climate too liberal and migrate for that reason still tend to be liberal compared to the population in their new states. They don’t seem to connect liberalism with the decline of California, and they vote reliably Democratic in the more conservative states to which they migrate, turning those states ever bluer over time.
This isn’t just happening in California and out west. It’s been part of the reason that people leaving Massachusetts or New York and heading out for states such as New Hampshire and Maine have helped to turn those states blue. Little New Hampshire, once a libertarian enclave, is now basically a blue state. New Hampshire is still business-friendly, and so small that the population affiliation can shift more easily, and libertarians have mounted a push to move there and take over the state—or you might say reclaim the state.
That won’t work with California (probably won’t even work with New Hampshire, either, although it has a chance). But I’d love to see Californians get more active in trying to at least give those conservatives who already live in California a few decent candidates to support, so that they might actually want to trouble themselves to go to the polls and vote.
Neo: “I don’t have the answer.”
I do: http://doingdemocracy.com/
The answer is a full-spectrum, multi-nodal, first, non-stop, and always, cuing, proselytizing, and spreading, Marxist-method activist social cultural/political movement by the people of the Right, led by genuine activists.
Your problem, shared by many of your readers, is the imagination-limiting fixation on electoral politics as the be-all, end-all. You raised my hope with the mention of “conservative activists” but then immediately disappointed me with the wrong, narrow, funneling turn to “get together behind a better candidate in a local race and maybe even get that person elected by putting some time and energy into getting out the vote for them”.
Elected office is a lesser included and important element of the activist game but it is not the telos of activism. In order of priority, elected office is a second order effect that is subsumed by a social activist movement.
The Left uses Democrats in elected office as means to their end; their end is not electing Democrats to office.
Until you recalibrate your perspective from elected office to social activist movement, you can define and even predict the problem, but you’ll be walled off from the necessary prescription to solve the problem.
And a lot of those people from California who stopped voting and let their state got to hell are moving to Texas. Combine that with the recent push by Dems to make Texas blue and this Texan is very worried.
All I can do is keep talking to my friends and neighbors about conservative values and hoping that Texas Repubs will have more of a spine than others. I am hoping that Ted Cruz is showing them all how it is done.
California is toast. I don’t see anything changing in the next 10 years. We’re going to leave. There is no hope here and voting isn’t going to change it.
Yankees moving south are doing damage to Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. They don’t seem to remember why they left those blue states. They vote liberal with no understanding of what wrecked their former state. They were smart enough to leave but not smart enough to see what they are doing.
The problem with Leftists is that they will use liberty to get rich at your expense, but when you disagree about what’s going on in your own state, you get no liberty but a boot upside the head.
Not enough publicity is given to *student voting* in NH.
UNH enrollment is *heavily* massachusetts natives.
Thanks to MTV, & dem activists these temporary residents are voting & in effect sabotaging the votes of
NH born citizens who live our lives here. They have skewed our voting for senator, governor, & referendum
votes. They were largely responsible for the 2 lame brain female House of Rep delegates that we have. One Anne Kuster was flummoxed at a Town Hall she set up to discuss the Middle East, when one of the constituents wanted to discuss Bhengazi, she retorted
“Benghazi is not in the Middle East!”
Dem geography or maybe Common Core geography!
I am not a Californian, but hold a number of “government obligation” muni bonds from California. Nearly all of them were upgraded a few days ago, and they were all investment grade to begin with. CAlifornia’s general outlook was upgraded, according to my fixed income bond trader.
I don’t quite know how to square this positive news with your bleak outlook. California must be doing something right.
In Los Angeles, Neel Kashkari won the GOP primary over Tom Donnellly and will face off against Jerry Brown in NOvember. He’s not likely to win, but you just never know.
He’s the candidate to back, if you’re looking to back “decent” GOP candidates. Even a good showing would help the GOP.
No system is ever so messed up, so broken, as when it is deliberately sabotaged by treacherous demolishers. Eff the courts and the government. The type of man who chomps at the political bit is the very type who should be excluded from being given political consideration. Mencken had the type dead in his sights:
” “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”
This is not a condition that applies only to the office of the presidency but all executive and legislative offices federal and state. The man who is not suspect, not corrupt, who gives any indication of being a moral man who will not compromise his principles could not be elected dog catcher if it was an elective office. In my state, Illinois, George Ryan was under investigation as was the department he headed before running for governor. Ryan, a Republican won handily over the Democrat in a Democratic state (Chicago and Cook County weigh heavily in that balance) because he was corrupt and would play the game. No need to go into Rod Blagojevich who would be a complete nonentity if he had not been preternaturally stupid. Voting is a mugs game. Vote and you’re little more than an accessory before and after the fact.
As the great unwashed that make up universal suffrage are the problem the only possible response by the rest, those who’ve anted into the pot, could be to rip a page out of the Leftist pamphlet or the Euro/French parliamentary tradition and stage a national strike. Those properly appalled by our circumstances should go all out truant — from work, shopping, traveling, etc., and make their presence known in the streets – peaceably. There’s nothing to be gained by anything other than commotion. Pay turmoil with turmoil. A government so set upon economic shenanigans propping up our present Potemkin village and the increasingly PoCo corporate world might listen if slapped with an economic gauntlet. Support your small business; barter, trade, with sympathizers – network simpatico.
The Tipping Point has been passed, as I have observed here from time to time, registering my pessimism to no personal avail.
Tipped and sinking California pours over into other states, tipping them. Extrapolate this and you see where we are all headed. Add the Mad Tippers inside the Beltway, who are sealing our national doom as we sit on the sidelines and wring our hands impotently.
I moved to California from North Dakota in 1965 at age 19. I always paid attention to politics and have worked, in LA and San Francisco in manufacturing, local governments, recreation (skiing), and computer companies near Silicon Valley. Neo, your hopelessness for California seems accurate. I somewhat blame Republicans for their suicide in their decades of their anti-abortion and war-on-drugs campaigns. The Boomers in their 20s and 30s identified Republicans as the enemy of freedom and pleasure and won’t reconsider now.
Pshaw, Alan F.
Anyone who is actually in California knows that large swaths of the State, with a fairly robust population are Republican. Like other states, they are swamped by the huge Democrat population centers. Those centers in the big cities are where free stuff has traditionally been available; or where those folks who thought they were “trendy” hang out.
I recently moved from Virginia. The disparity in political philosophies across the state are quite evident there. The state is going “Purple” as the media likes to say because of the huge population of government leeches in the DC suburbs, and the huge Black populations in Richmond and Norfolk. Outside of that it is still a Red state; but, it is politically overwhelmed.
So, what happens to all of the Democrat constituencies when the freebies run out? How many “unintended consequences” will it take before the “Trendys” begin to see that more government is not the answer?
I am in Riverside County, Ca. All of my local representation is GOP–except of course for the state wide offices, and the two Senators from SF.
The GOP did not lose Ca because they supported reasonable limits on Abortion, or opposition to drugs.
Nice try though.
Susan, it is hard to tell where California is and where it is going economically. The media are beating the drum for prosperity– right around the corner. Governor Moonbeam Brown is touting budget discipline. Yet, the facts on the ground all really seem to point in the other direction. Companies are still voting with their feet. Toyota just announced that it is closing down in Ca and going to Texas. They will see many of their former neighbors there.
You’re describing the spread of a virus.
Oldflyer, I don’t dispute any of these explanations; all these factors contribute. Nevertheless, very few of my educated, successful, Boomer friends and acquaintances will even entertain Republican ideas. That is especially true of women who have been concerned about an unwanted pregnancy. These people have been or are opinion leaders in LA, San Francisco and Sacramento. So, despite the demographic upheaval, they could have made a difference.
Axel Rose relates how he came up with the iconic words to his “Welcome to the Jungle” song. He was very young, got off the bus in LA, and an old black man ran up to him and said “Do you know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby. And you’re going to die.” That’s big city and people love it.
The virus is insanity, a nice little mental bug that is birthed in entitlement and bleeds you to death.
I believe it was Michael Savage who proposed leftism is a mental disease about 10 yrs ago. It is contagious. It roots itself in whatever part of our brains deal with denial, zeal and reality testing. Its polar opposite has a much lower transmission rate.
There is perhaps a vulnerability in the human brain that is comforted by collectivism. Leftism survives and thrives despite maybe 100 million humans sacrificed on its altar in the past century. As virulent as smallpox was among the Indians.
None of us knows how it is going to turn out.
But it is immoral to not vote because you think you are going to lose.
A million people who do not vote may not have made a difference in whatever election, but they make a difference in perception, regardless of how things are spun.
Heck, I see every vote as a hopeful sign, even a defiant sign.
Where there is defiance there is hope.
I lived in California from 1975 to 2011. Oldflyer has the right of it.
“something about that voter apathy that really gets me. I understand it; who wants to waste time in a quixotic and almost certainly losing battle? But unless that battle is fought, California remains lost, and it’s still a large and powerful state.” neo
It’s not apathy that accounts for the low turnout. It’s facing the reality that despite large swaths of the State having “a fairly robust population” of Republicans, “they are swamped by the huge Democrat population centers.”
Those huge Democrat population centers are not going away and because they are not going away, fighting a battle that cannot be won is an exercise in futility. California is lost as are nearly all of our major cities and that is NOT going to change until a very harsh reality arrives.
Neither facts, reason, logic nor even appeals to self-interest will suffice to persuade, they have all been tried… repeatedly.
“It is asking too much of today’s governing masterminds and their fanatical adherents to reform the product of their own fatuity–that is, the continuing disassembly of the Constitution and society.
After all, despite one credible source after another, both within and outside the federal government, ringing alarm bells about the nation’s hazardous track–describing it as unsustainable, desperate, and immoral–they are blinded to reason, experience, and knowledge by their political DNA and ideological invincibility and therefore are intransigent to effective ameliorative steps.
They long ago renounced by word and action their adherence to the Constitution’s conï¬nements since the Statists’ utopia and the Framers’ Constitution cannot coexist.” Mark Levin
“The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.” Vé¡clav Klaus (former Premier of the Czech Republic)
Those Americans who voted for Obama in 2012, “having turned their backs to the fire, will have to sit on their blisters”. That they will impose those ‘blisters’ upon those who did not vote for Obama is a sin upon their souls.
“Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” Poor Richard’s Almanac
“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.” C.S. Lewis
The tendency to turn Blue is entirely the result of urbanization.
The Democrat party ‘owns’ the urban vote — and has done so for over a century. It’s also strongly associated with immigrants — going back to the Irish.
Many, many, many Democrats are true believers…
As in believing that these new illegal immigrants will blend in like the Irish and the Italians and and Jews to become a counterweight to classic WASP America.
The kicker is that Latinos from Honduras are not European. The current agitprop ferment does not favor unification under English language and the US Constitution.
Zinn, et. al. argue that the way forward is to trash the (White) past and … ( adopt democratic socialism with a Zinn face?)
The Republican party ‘owns’ the rural vote — and has done so since 1860.
&&&
0-care note: Barry, the Orphan Grinder, is attracting the ill and infirm. For what parent of a seriously afflicted child is not considering this opportunity to drain the American health security net to save their baby?
%%%
OfA = Organizing for Anarchy — it’s the ticket.
%%%
The decline in California’s fortunes are perfectly correlated to the decline in its Smart Fraction ™ population.
The productive are fleeing; the needy are arriving — en masse.
So one should reasonably expect California to mirror Brazil.
&&&
The addition of yet more Latinos — who are totally at odds with Mexicans — means that America will be dealing with yet another inter-cultural gang war within a generation.
###
I expect the end game to be chaos, Detroit writ large.
I expect the MSM to remain dogmatic and obtuse straight to the end — like Goebbels in the bunker.
The re-boot should involve a starkly racist conflict — bloodier than most.
The pendulum will swing violently away from 0bamavision.
Historical examples: Bourbon France, Weimar Germany, Tsarist Russia, the Thirty-Years War, the Eighty-Years War, the English Civil Wars, …
The notion that classic White America is going to fade from the scene (sweetly) has no parallels in Western history.
The snap back has already begun in Denmark and Austria.
The upshot of ISIL/ ISIS/ IS as a caliphate could well be a European wide rejection of Muslim immigration.
Barry is setting the dark genie (fulsome religious war) loose upon the world. The blow-back figures to be epic.
Urban cities in the US need to be cleaned out by US Marines a lot more than Fallujah ever did.
But few people have the guts to consider that tactical problem for any sustained length of time.
We at least have that one moment of joy each year: Michelle Obama’s birthday when we can dance to Beyonce! Whee.
Geoffrey Britain:
I’m aware that they’re swamped by the huge population centers. But if overall voter turnout is 17-25%, if conservatives upped their voter turnout considerably they could win some elections.
California’s top two open voting system, that I opposed at first, may be the salvation for Conservatism in this most beautiful state. When the Republican label is removed, people like what they hear. It’s not Conservatism people fear/hate, it’s Republican. The brand has been so demeaned and damaged over the past 3 decades that people simply won’t vote for sanity.
In that very first open primary, many districts that had been voting Democrat simply because of the labels, suddenly voted for the Conservative candidate, sometimes shutting out the Democrats from the General Election. This past June, candidates where listed with a party preference label and voters went for the Democrat preference. That preference label should be removed. Right or wrong, the party label is destroying the State.
‘if overall voter turnout is 17-25%, if conservatives upped their voter turnout considerably they could win some elections.”
Yup they sure could. And that would (and has) accomplished exactly zip, nada… nothing whatsoever. When you have an overwhelming majority and Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco give the democrats a permanent and overwhelming majority… the result is utter dominance.
As far as California’s legislature goes it might as well be Chicago. The left is fully entrenched in California and there is nothing that can change that. Not even reality because they’ll blame consequence on ‘Bush’.
Indigo Red,
That’s encouraging. Question; now that democrats realize that the “top two open voting system’ is a threat, how long do you think it will be before California’s democrat controlled legislature ‘outlaws’ the top two open voting system?
Geoffrey Britain:
If turnout is that low across the board (including in the big Democrat-controlled cities), and if almost every conservative in town turned out and voted for the Republican (or conservative, or however the candidate defines him/herself), R’s could even win in some districts in some of the cities. That, added to more of the rural areas, might even end up being a significant amount of the state legislature. Maybe even enough to make a difference.
But I can tell you one thing: if conservatives stay home, it most definitely won’t happen.
I was born in CA. I’m not remotely liberal, even faintly so, since my salad days. I’ve always voted.
I’m old and getting older, and four years back I finally took the blinders off, and looked around at the situation and the prospects …and decided there was no hope at all in staying.
At 59, and 51, we uprooted our established lives, and fled. Yes fled.
At best (best, mind you), I think CA will look like Rio de Janeiro. Glittering enclaves of the uber wealthy surrounded by teeming slums of hopeless poverty …with the added allure of racially motivated gang wars fueled by drugs and despair.
…picture …the dystopian scenes from Blade Runner.
No middle will be left. If you’re not rich, you already don’t want to be white there in too many places. It’s not getting better with time.
We weren’t willing to hang around any longer to watch.
You want to “save” California?
You’re welcome to try.
…as for me and mine, we moved two states up (still a liberal West Coast state, but to a conservative region), and an hour and change from Canada.
We brought our conservative tendencies, deeply held religious philosophy, and secular voting record with us.
We couldn’t afford to move far (we didn’t sell everything, and moving is expensive: we loaded up with me driving a packed-full 34 foot Penske diesel truck towing the packed-full Wrangler on a trailer, and my darling bride driving a packed-full Cherokee XJ pulling a packed-full utility trailer …and we still left a lot behind …including family). So we did some basic research, and chose as wisely as was possible …and moved to an unknown where we knew no one. Hoping.
And we have thrived, even at our age.
You couldn’t pay us enough to have us move back to that hell-hole …from what – both of us agree – has in 3 short years become a far, far better life.
Let. It. Burn.
The welfare state creates dependents. People with few skills and little ambition.
If the system collapses, they will be the first to take to the streets, since they have nothing to rely on other than thuggery.
But that won’t save them.
In a warzone, nobody is going to risk trucking in food. Without someone to feed them like children, the welfare types will starve en masse.
Of course, they’ll burn the cities to the ground on their way out.
That’s California’s future.
And it’s a necessary one, because many people just won’t learn without massive bloodshed.
This would’ve been Detroit’s future, except the welfare checks were still coming the entire time.
As those experienced with CA will tell you, there is no hope for that state (see above).
Any Republican, let alone conservative insurgency will be met by race-baiting and fear-mongering until enough of the takers are motivated to beat back the challenge.
They will never give up their legalized thievery.
The system must collapse, because as GB and I constantly state, “it’s the people that are the problem.”
The people need to be confronted with naked, ugly reality before they will change.
Good for you, Davisbr. (Is the br from the HeeHaw BR549? Wondering?)
I very much needed the “thrived” part.
I refuse to give up. Today I got up and pooped. I’ll poop again tomorrow. And the next day. As long as there’s poop in me, I’ll fight the fight here in Orange County.
Look up : “Proposition 187 was the last gasp of whites in California”
I believe it is Marl Levin who describes liberal as “locust”, running up taxes in one area, then moving to another area continuing to vote for more taxes…
make that “Mark Levin”
Geoffrey Britain, 7:47 pm — “It’s not apathy that accounts for the low turnout. It’s facing the reality that despite large swaths of the State having ‘a fairly robust population’ of Republicans, ‘they are swamped by the huge Democrat population centers.’
And given that a certain proportion of Republicans are anxious to cooperate with the enemy, and will even undermine Republicans who see the enemy for what it is, . . . [Geoffrey Britain again] . . . “It’s not apathy that accounts for the low turnout,” it’s a realistic {don’t vote for them, you’ll only encourage them} — yes, with selected exceptions.
There are Tea Party grassroots organizations in California. However, to compete against Democrat power, certain statuses had to be acquired to fund operations. People don’t work for free, unless they are Democrat co eds that get paid nothing for volunteer work.
The Left counted on the IRS and ATF and SS to take care of that, however. If they failed, the Californian Dems have local agents they can use to suppress the vote.
Keep fighting. For instance,
|”McDaniel has only 1,800 votes to go…
That’s right, you, the Tea Party Leadership Fund, and over 25,000 fellow patriots helped convince McDaniel into his critical fight to expose the left’s fraud against conservatives.
With evidence of more than 5,000 illegal votes and climbing, we cannot stop now.
We must find at least 1,800 more illegal votes to beat Thad’s narrow lead of 6,800 votes.
How badly did Thad Cochran want to win?
Enough to engage in race baiting, vote buying, voter intimidation, and what may be an attempt to pull federal authorities into a state election. This all proves Thad Cochran is a good-old-boy who’s too deep in bed with the establishment to care about anything past the view of his Washington D.C. office.”
To move or not to move. It’s not the question. You keep fighting because to stop results in living in that no-where land. America is an idea, not a place.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender
davisbr Says:
July 8th, 2014 at 9:47 pm
That is the same future that Obama, his fellow travelers, and the Chamber of Commerce Republicans have in store for the whole country. It’s basically 21st Century feudalism.