For the last century, no state more epitomized the ideals of upward mobility and technological and cultural innovation than California. Once on the distant fringe of America, the Golden State has emerged as an economic powerhouse, with a gross domestic product larger than those of all but four nation states. As its economic influence swelled, California became a central locus of US political power. Its political clout arose first in the Nixon-Reagan era and later in the form of the progressive California elite—the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, George Clooney, and the tech oligarchs—who have now expelled “Scranton Joe” in favor of one of their own, Vice President Kamala Harris, at the summit of Democratic power.
Yet given the partisan fixations of most mainstream media, few look at the Kamalafornian reality. Since 2000, this state of unmatched attractions has managed to lose a net 3.5 million domestic residents. Critically, it ranks toward the bottom among US states in drawing newcomers, who have always been the critical fuel for its economy. Many of those leaving, according to an analysis of IRS data, are middle-income families in their childbearing years; many are college graduates. Forget Harris’s youthful “vibe”: The state, according to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, is aging 50 percent more rapidly than the nation—gradually ditching the surfboard for the walker.
When Biden was elected in 2020, an overjoyed Los Angeles Times gushed that his goal was to turn America into California. This reflected the reality that the progressive power center lies not in New York, now only the fourth most populous state, or even in the wider Northeast, but in California. With all its problems, the Golden State has a far bigger economy and wields far greater technological influence.
California’s wealth nurtured the careers of both Gov. Gavin Newsom and Harris, who pulled key support from elite Golden State lawyers, tech oligarchs, progressive inheritors, Hollywood, and public-employee unions. Harris, as Dan Walters has noted, was anointed by the same San Francisco-based cabal forged by the onetime assemblyman and redistricting guru John Burton. It’s a tight-knit bunch that includes Pelosi, Newsom, and Willie Brown, among others. Many of these people are linked by personal ties, funding, and political alliance; Harris’s emergence also came courtesy of an affair with a key cabal figure, the much older, highly gifted Brown, a former California Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor.
The cabal operates in large part with funds derived from Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Newsom, lavishly sponsored by the Getty Oil heirs, was largely seen as the cabal’s most likely political standard-bearer. But history, in the form of South Carolina’s James Clyburn and the acquiescent Biden, broke in Harris’s favor. In the current race, Harris, not surprisingly, is crushing Trump on the fundraising front.
“Harris’s successful debate performance last month was coached by a top Google attorney.”
Of course, Harris’s pitch includes a self-portrait as a middle-class kid with a blended ethnic heritage, Jamaican and Indian. But despite having a Marxian economist for a father, she is no class warrior or socialist, as the delusional right continues to insist. Instead, she reflects the worldview of California’s ultra-rich elites: executives at the Apples and the Googles and the big studio directors. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Harris’s successful debate performance last month was coached by a top Google attorney, who is litigating antitrust business in front of her own administration.
Even if somehow Trump triumphs, despite his own efforts, the cabal has another candidate in the wings: Newsom. Its mixture of woke progressivism and classic constituency politics seems likely to persist well into the next generation. Pelosi, in true feudal fashion, is said to be pushing her daughter to inherit her San Francisco’s House seat.
In the days before the cabal enjoyed total power, California boasted a remarkably diverse economy that included not only Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but also some of the country’s largest banks, a highly diversified industrial sector, and thriving oil and aerospace industries that employed hundreds of thousands of largely unionized blue-collar workers. At the turn of the millennium, California job creation was well-distributed in terms of regions, job types, and incomes. This economy proved to be a powerful engine for upward mobility and social progress.
But as the progressives, including Harris, completed their total takeover, California’s economy has been slouching toward what former Gov. Jerry Brown once warned would be a “Johnny-one-note” model, based almost entirely on returns to real estate, tech stocks, and the value of privately held startups. The progressive regulatory tsunami—notably on labor, climate, and energy—hammered all businesses outside the elite tech sector. Harris talks about creating an “opportunity” society by aiding small businesses, but according to the Small Business Regulation Index, progressive California has the worst business climate for small firms in the nation.
“Many large companies have simply picked up and left for other fields.”
Many large companies have simply picked up and left for other fields. A Hoover Institution report found that in 2020, California had only one-seventh the number of company-initiated capital projects than did the leading state, Texas. Since 2022, moreover, all the jobs created in the state were in government or supported by the public sector, while private employment dropped. With the state suffering deep budget shortfalls, even government employment is beginning to drop.
The companies that have left once symbolized the state’s remarkable economic prowess: Occidental Petroleum, Jacobs Engineering, Parsons, Bechtel, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Charles Schwab, and McKesson. With the recent loss of Space X, not a single top aerospace firm, the signature industry of late-20th-century California, retains its headquarters in the Golden State.
Increasingly, California fails to produce the mid-wage jobs that support families. The terroir of choice for tech billionaires, venture capitalists, and home to three of the world’s five leading tech firms, the state ranks near the bottom when it comes to creating jobs that pay above average. Since 2008, it has created five times more low-wage jobs than mid-wage ones.
More worrisome, even the tech and entertainment sectors have been experiencing a slump in job growth. The most precipitous drops between 2022 and 2024 took place in high-end sectors like information, finance, manufacturing, and business services. A study from Chapman University, in partnership with the University of California, Irvine, found that since 2005, California has seen its share of the nation’s advanced-industry jobs stagnate in 50 technology-driven industries, while jobs in advanced industries migrate to lower-income-tax states. Entertainment, the other large high-end industry, is also hemorrhaging jobs, including at Disney’s fabled Pixar, in large part as production moves to other states and countries.
But the biggest losers have been historically well-paying jobs in manufacturing, energy, and home building, all crucial employers for working- and middle-class Californians. In this case, the state’s climate diktats are most to blame. Any industry that uses carbon-based energy is targeted, including ports and logistics industries. At the huge Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex, regulations aimed at terminating gas-powered trucks endanger the jobs of the primarily Latino workers, as the port faces stiff competition from places like Houston, Tampa, and Norfolk, which impose no such rules. With the recent departure of Chevron, California, once a rival to the Lone Star State as an oil capital, now has no major energy firms. These tend to be heavily unionized firms with a workforce that is one-third Latino. California, like other blue coastal areas, has also seen a mass migration of non-college graduates seeking lower costs and more opportunities elsewhere.
California progressives like to hold up the state as a social-justice model, with establishment left theorists like Laura Tyson and Lenny Mendonca envisioning the state as the epicenter of “a new progressive era.” Others see California, as a New York Times column put it, epitomizing “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.”
This is a stretch of planetary proportions. Instead of becoming more of a social democracy, California is becoming ever more feudal: a place characterized by a two-tier economy, with a more affluent educated white and Asian population lording it over a Latino and African-American service class.
California may be home to the highest number of billionaires. Despite its enormous wealth, it is also home to a third of the nation’s homeless people. The Golden State also suffers the highest share of residents living in poverty and the widest gap between middle- and upper-middle-income earners of any state.
“Nearly one in five Californians—many working—lives in poverty.”
Nearly one in five Californians—many working—lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate). The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that another fifth of residents live in near-poverty, or about 15 million. Most tragic, roughly 20 percent of California’s children lived in or near poverty in 2016.
Perhaps nowhere in America is the velvet rope separating the upper tier from all others more relevant. California is evolving into the paragon of a new feudalistic future, with particularly poor results for the minorities Harris and the cabal rely upon as their most dutiful supporters. Poverty rates for California’s Latinos and African Americans, most of them working, are well above the national average, and considerably higher than in Texas, the Golden State’s primary competitor and one with a similarly diverse population. Overall, one in three California households, including half of all Latino households, can barely pay its bills, according to a United Way study. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political consultant and author Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
Climate policies—embraced by Harris as both attorney general and US senator—are major contributors to this ugly class warfare. A recent report from the California Air Resources Board, the primary executor of the state’s climate policies, projects that these policies, although largely irrelevant in terms of global emissions, are creating significant income declines for individuals earning less than $100,000 annually, while boosting incomes for those above that number. This is what Jennifer Hernandez calls the “Green Jim Crow.”
Perhaps the most dramatic impact of the climate policies, Hernandez suggests, has been in housing. Even as Harris has floated some relief proposal for prospective homeowners, as state attorney general she worked to limit building on the suburban fringe, something that has helped stymy production over the past two decades. Due largely to the restrictions embraced by Harris, California now suffers America’s second lowest homeownership rate, and has experienced an extraordinarily rise in housing prices.
On the housing front, too, California’s black and brown people suffer disproportionately. It isn’t so much racist intent as simple economics. One recent study found the median family in San Jose or San Francisco would need 125 years—150 years in Los Angeles—to save enough for a down payment; in Atlanta or Houston, it takes 12 years on average. Even the skilled, unionized working class doesn’t have much of a chance. Not one unionized construction worker can afford to buy a median priced home in any coastal California county, according to a recent study by economist John Husing.
When Biden was elected in 2020, he retained strong links to party traditionalists on the East Coast and Midwest. His instincts were still somewhat normative, as seen in his dogged appeal to unions and instinctive rallying to Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 pogrom. In contrast, a Harris administration would be cold to traditional US allies and untethered from the industrial economy and domestic energy. Under her rule, America would look more like failing Europe than itself, with the same tendency to raise taxes, regulate, and destroy the material economy.
“It won’t be a pretty picture, but it won’t be socialism.”
It won’t be a pretty picture, but it won’t be socialism, at least as conceived before today. Rather than confront key class issues, which might require real economic growth in tangible sectors outside the slowly imploding tech bubble, Kamlafornians will focus on gender, abortion, and race—virtue signaling that doesn’t threaten oligarchic elites. Expect to see a push, either through Congress or the executive, for such California legislation as mandates for stores to have gender-neutral baby sections or for allowing children to change genders without parental approval.
A Harris administration would be highly unlikely to embrace any changes in the increasingly dysfunctional educational system and may even make it worse. Like most progressive California Democrats, Harris opposes charter schools and has been a faithful backer of the state’s deteriorating education system. Nearly 3 of 5 California high schoolers aren’t prepared for either college or a career; the percentages are far higher for Latinos, blacks, and the economically disadvantaged.
Cabal-run San Francisco, ground zero for California’s progressive culture, suffers the worst scores for African-Americans of any county in the state. The need for remedial courses for approximately 40 percent of California State University freshmen upon entry to college reveals the low level of preparedness among our high school graduates—not exactly a good sign for future employers.
Kamalafornians also won’t do much to build the basic infrastructure critical to an industrial recovery. Once the state excelled at such projects, creating water, education, and road infrastructure that were the envy of everywhere else. The historian and state librarian Kevin Starr observed that, under the governorship of Pat Brown, California enjoyed “a golden age of consensus and achievement, a founding era in which California fashioned and celebrated itself as an emergent nation-state.” As the great liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted in 1971, the state was run by “a proud, competent civil service” that also produced among “the best school systems in the country.”
If California’s government was once a model for the country, today the state is ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. Even as the state budget has exploded, California has seriously underinvested in critical infrastructure like roads and water supply. The choice has been instead to spend more of its budget on welfare than virtually any state, twice as much per capita as Texas.
Working and middle-class people might soon realize there isn’t much of a future for them in a national Kamalafornia. Rather than good jobs and affordable houses to buy, handouts will be the order of the day, expanding what Marx described as “the proletarian alms bag” for the increasingly economically irrelevant masses. In her campaign literature, Harris pledges vast sums for starting business and buying homes, but she places little emphasis on the economy that would sustain them. Ultimately, most would most face a property-less, serf-like future in a system that resembles, as one Silicon Valley wag put it, “feudalism with better marketing.”
Nor should we expect a Harris administration to do much to address the country’s growing fiscal crisis (not that Trump would be much better). Kamalafornians usually don’t see fiscal probity as a priority; the state is a fiscal disaster that parallels that being promulgated in Washington. Despite its highest-in-the-nation taxes, California now faces a record $68 billion deficit and the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts continued operating deficits through 2028, a consequence of per-capita spending that has tripled on a cost-adjusted basis over the last 50 years.
In contrast, competitor states like Texas and Florida have grown their budgets while preserving large surpluses. A Harris administration is unlikely to look at these states as successful models. Rather, she would see them as examples of what needs to be crushed by Washington by such means as mandates on housing, diversity diktats, or by the planned demise of fracking.
Harris’s apparent tacking to the center is purely performative. Notwithstanding her flip-flops on climate policy, Harris will likely out-do Biden as a climate warrior. Her top environmental adviser, Camila Thorndike, comes from the hysteric wing of the climate movement, favoring such measures as banning gas stoves, electrifying everything, and embracing the idea that having kids is bad for the planet—a literally suicidal stance in a country faced with serious demographic decline. America’s global allies, which desperately need US natural gas, will likely find their needs unmet to service the green lobby’s sketchy economic plans.
California once represented aspiration. Today, the state seems more an avatar of national decline. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently compared California to the late, decaying Roman Empire, also characterized by low birth rates, ever greater regulation, and an ever widening class divide. Exactly right.
The prospect of Kamalafornia might be thrilling to members of the Democratic nomenklatura, Hollywood stars, TikTok influencers, tech oligarchs, and Wall Street moguls. But as those who live in the state know all too well, the sheen on the ground is far from golden.