By David Bittinger

May 1, 2024

California has become a bad movie. It’s a big-budget turkey produced by the state’s Democrat rulers for the two audiences they care about: the prosperous and fabulous in elite enclaves, the benefit-dependent most everywhere else.

Once upon a time, California’s large numbers of middle-class citizens were largely contented. But their ability to live comfortably and safely was gradually reduced by the political and social values of their superiors in government, show business, Silicon Valley, corporate news and other sectors with ample stocks of fine wine.

Traditionally, even Californians who weren’t wealthy felt adequately nourished by California’s sunshine, palm trees and hip attitudes. Unfortunately — especially on American coasts — powerful elites have gradually pushed aside powerless middlers.

Starting around the time when Republicans became Sacramento onlookers, middle class Golden Staters began to experience life in the Golden State as less golden. California’s expanding taxes and leftist decrees increasingly protected only the insularity of the rich, the dependency of the poor, the security of government employees, and governmental folly.

A theme song for California was effectively crooned in the opening lines of a 1979 Gatlin Brothers hit:

All the gold in California

Is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills 

In somebody else’s name

Many a Californian with a non-golden small business or a non-golden job has come to realize that he or she — or pick your pronoun — is an extra in a real-world movie produced for California’s elite class and dependent class. Middle class strugglers began fleeing in significant numbers from 2000 to 2019 and saw their status stressed even more over the past five years.

The term for a nation ruled by and for its wealthy is “plutocracy.” But the 21st century California plutocracy is unique. These Bolsheviks in sunglasses rule their state with single-party authority, maintaining a mutual admiration society with the state’s rich and supportive condescension toward its poor.

Of course, the rich love the feel-good production and are able to laugh off the taxes. The poor naturally rely on California’s supports and entitlements while increasing their squatter ownership of sidewalks. Needy reinforcements keep arriving in droves from states and nations that don’t incentivize poverty as California does (that is, is the entire rest of the world)

Unnoticed by Border Czar “Cackles” Harris, the largest wave of illegal immigration in American history keeps washing over the country. California keeps promoting the wave. On January 1, 2024, “migrants” (previously “undocumented aliens,” previous to that “illegal immigrants”) were even gifted California’s generous Medi-Cal insurance benefit. Why? Because it’s California.

So it progressively goes. One day you’re a Venezuelan citizen struggling in an economy ruined by socialist despots (for whom you once voted). A few weeks later, for the mere price of being indentured to a Mexican cartel, you’re provided free health care by California taxpayers even though they’re on the hook for a current-year state budget deficit of at least $73 billion.

California economics: Disneyland fantasies gone global.

As America’s leading trend-setter, California keeps promoting its Hollywood-heartfelt storylines while the whole country buys tickets. This creeping influence has been known as Californication. That term was created by Red Hot Chili Peppers in a 1990 song. The broad phenomenon of California political / cultural influence has been analyzed over many years by brave California citizen and genius writer Victor Davis Hanson. He did so brilliantly in a 2023 essay (whose repost contains a couple terms probably too crude for a classy classicist).

Californication has an accidental spokesman now: California’s governor of stylish incompetence, Gavin Newsom.

Have you seen Newsom perform on TV? He’s handsome as a mannequin, actually talks and preens like a mechanized mannequin. A master of failing up, Newsom was mayor of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011. During that period, “The City” (as the faithful still grandly call it) was still mostly safe for those living behind gated walls. Today San Franciscan elites need armed bodyguards as well, which some less self-deluded Democrat rulers have.

Newsom hasn’t been alone in leadership of progressive plutocracy. San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi long maintained a leadership position in Congress, saving enough time to be a brilliant stock trader. Behold her exquisite mansion in Pacific Heights, gleaming behind 12-foot walls. For many years she relaxed there when not casting a spell on the entire country as America’s Evil Queen Speaker of the House.

Sustained Democrat rule has transformed the city once serenaded as the dreamy place “where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars.” Transformed to — what is it now? Try the world’s most pricey outdoor toilet / drug house.

Newsom has special skills. He smiles while rationalizing civic decay. He concedes “problems” in California while promising a more successful national implementation of the same policies. He implicitly presents himself as a young, healthy replacement (for a president who has trouble speaking).

Newsom’s act would seem laughable, a weak leading man in a bomb movie. But in a time when a goofy plagiarist and unprincipled grifter has become a mumbling president and the vice president addresses major issues of the day with mindless baby talk, can America correct this administration’s disasters through Hollywood-style fantasies?

Newsom’s genre is less comedy than horror. It’s the type of fright movie that draws big audiences of not very bright people. He believes that his management of San Francisco and California qualifies him to be the next president. And he’s serious.

Californication is coming to the other 49 states, maybe 52 if Democrats achieve statehood for D.C., Puerto Rico, and Haiti.

This is the progress Democrat “progressives” keep producing:

• internationalized welfare flooding the country with maybe ten or twenty million non-citizens (nobody knows the number) demanding taxpayer support
• repeat criminals released to terrorize city streets in the name of social justice by Soros-funded D.A.s
• those streets now increasingly littered with syringes and worse
• mountains of debt produced by landfills of government.

The next catastrophic president might not be another stammering, stumbling old dunce. He might be a handsome, grinning dunce in his prime.

-30-

David Bittinger lives defensively in Packers country but still feels deep affection for the Chicago he moved from shortly after the kingdom of Daley The First.As a young advertising copywriter in Chicago, he was advised by the Tribune’s wise Managing Editor to write newspaper commentary. This good advice took 15 years to sink in. The great, open-minded Tribune Commentary Editor Marcia Lythcott published him a number of times. His op-eds were also published at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and elsewhere. Today he posts articles on his seldom-visited website curveballcommentary.com and political poetry on “X.”  He’s remained a faithful White Sox fan since the Louie-Nellie era, but is now embarrassed even to wear that fine logo.