The Selfish CalifornianThe Silicon Valley motto should be “I create inequality by hating inequality.”
By Victor Davis Hanson
June 12, 2022
We hear plenty of reasons for the perfect storm that imploded California. One-party, progressive government, of course. Decades of unchecked illegal immigration, without doubt. Years of mass flight out of state of the productive middle classes, certainly.
But perhaps the most important, but overlooked, reason has been the infusion of trillions of dollars of mostly tech capital into the state. Unimaginable sums of market capital warped politics and led to a top-down, feudal society, run by progressive elites who are shielded from the ramifications of their own toxic ideologies.
More specifically, the common denominator was the emergence in California of a selfish, monied, left-wing political class. In concrete terms, it cared little for others but masked that unconcern with abstract leftism, emulating medieval penance and indulgences to assuage guilt over its enjoyment of sheltered and very good lives.
California’s recent premier politicians at the local, state, and federal levels—Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, and Nancy Pelosi—all enjoyed wealth and power, whether by inherited money and family brand names, through marriage, or using their positions to leverage lucrative family and personal business with the Chinese.
Their lifestyles before, during, and after office-holding reflected both their privileges and the vast material differences between their own lives and the millions of Californians who suffered enormously from their utopian bromides. Yet a world away from their homes in Grass Valley, Kentfield, Lake Tahoe, Napa, Pacific Heights, or Rancho Mirage, the rest of the state’s residents who voted for them currently cannot afford a house, a full tank of gas, a chuck steak, or an air-conditioned afternoon.
At least the Church of the 15th century offered formal contractual indulgences and personal penance manuals for the guilt-ridden elite eager to abort their earned inferno-to-come. In California, however, to enjoy affluence and leisure without guilt or recriminations, left-wing power elites virtue signaled their progressivism, even as it wrecked the lives of distant others.
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The far-left Atlantic’s various contributors for years have been cheerleading most of the policies adopted by the Bay Area elite—defunding the police, decriminalizing an array of crimes, appeasing homelessness, ignoring dangerous drug use and dealing, and urging more redistributive taxation and entitlement.
But now Atlantic essayist Nellie Bowles warns us that San Francisco is a “failed city.” And she is correct in that the city is increasingly medieval. Its downtown is emptying, filthy, toxic, dangerous, and pre-civilizational—perhaps an unfair term since it was rare in pre-Roman Gaul or nomadic North Africa for tribal residents to sleep in the village pathways, fornicate and defecate openly among children, and violently attack random passersby.
In truth, the implosion of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and California more broadly is no accident. Destroying all the bounty that was inherited from far better and far-seeing generations was the logical result of deliberate policies—reflecting the self-interest of a few million rich, educated professionals. They apparently decided that their genius and superior morality had transcended worries over ancient challenges of food, water, shelter, transportation, and received law and custom.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/12/the-selfish-californian/
