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President Donald Trump loves to denigrate California – its "ridiculous" cities, its "sanctuaries", its "mismanagement" of its forests, even the "disgusting" streets of San Francisco. He also loves Californian liberals, such as Liddle House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Low IQ House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who "behaved so irrationally and went so far to the left. she is now officially a radical democrat. "On Wednesday, after Democratic governor Gavin Newsom decided to cut the state's troubled high-speed train project, the president would like to ridicule him like a green fiasco:" Return the federal government Dollars wasted!
Now that progressive Democrats are campaigning for a California-style Green New Deal to fight climate change and that progressive California Senator Kamala Harris has become a leading figure for the Democratic nomination that will challenge Trump, the The president's allies have begun to define 2020 as a last fight against the hippie-leftist Californication of America. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, warned that "Democrats want California to be the model for America," while Dan Patrick, the Texas Republican lieutenant-governor, suggested that the re-election slogan of Trump either: "I will not let the Democrats turn America into California.
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California has earned its reputation as the politically correct capital of Blue America, a highly urban and mostly minority coastal state where it is legal to smoke pot, but unlawful for retailers to provide plastic bags or cops to ask suspects their immigrant status. Taxes are high, the first year of community college is free and the driver's license offers a third option for residents who do not identify as men or women. But while California has a lot of problems, ranging from worsening wildfires to overbuilt housing construction going through this distressed bullet train project that has become the latest target of presidential mockery, the project The GOP aiming to make California a symbol of democratic dysfunction and socialist stagnation poses a serious problem: It is fundamentally prosperous.
"California makes impressive"Says Congressman Ted Lieu, an immigrant from Taiwan who co-chairs the House Democratic Caucus's Politics and Communications Committee. "It's a beautiful, welcoming and eco-friendly place that proves the government can work. Who wants to run against that? "
California is now the world's fifth largest economy, compared to eight in ten years. If it's a socialist hell, it's a socialist hell that has somehow fed Apple, Google, Facebook, Tesla, Uber, Netflix, Oracle and Intel, not to mention the pillars of the old economy like Chevron, Disney, Wells Fargo and the Hollywood film industry. California companies are still attracting more venture capital than the rest of the country, while their farms produce more fruit, nuts and wine than the rest of the country. During the Great Recession, when the state was plunged into a fiscal crisis so brutal that its credit rating was close to the junk and that it was giving IOUs to officials, the mainstream media announced the death of the government. California dream. But after a decade of steady growth that has consistently exceeded national goals, In addition to a significant rise in taxes on the wealthy, California is in a much healthier tax situation. As federal deficits rise again, the state has erased its red ink and has even accumulated $ 13 billion in a rainy day fund.
Of course, each state has a better economic situation than during the Great Recession, but California has experienced its renaissance while pursuing policies that Republicans associate with economic ruin. Its minimum wage is $ 11 per hour and is expected to reach $ 15 by 2023. Obamacare 's unusually aggressive implementation since 2013 has reduced its uninsured rate by 17% to only 7%. Its ambitious policies on clean energy and climate have inspired the Green New Deal in many ways; The state is committed to producing 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 100% by 2045. Its strict fuel economy standards explain why it houses half of its electric vehicles .
In general, California is flourishing while pursuing the opposite of the policy that Trump is pursuing in Washington. And he sued the Trump administration several dozens of times, not only taking the lead in the new lawsuit against 16 states against the emergency wall declaration by the president, but fighting for the same. Loan cancellation for students defrauded by for-profit schools, network neutrality and Obamacare guarantees. free birth control, while fighting to prevent the ban on traveling from several Muslim countries, banning members of transgender services and a lot of backtracking on the environment. For example, Trump is attempting to dismantle California's stringent fuel economy rules, which have become de facto national rules since other blue states adopted them and all manufacturers have complied with them. . California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is now fighting the administration. To protect them.
"If people want to call what California is doing with socialism, that's fine, but it does not have a negative impact on the economy," said political scientist Chris Hoene, Executive Director of the California Center for Budget and Policy. "Just about every measure of productivity, we are in the upper end of the spectrum."
That did not stop Republicans from making California their nightmare scenario. In 2018, Senator Ted Cruz warned that the Liberals wanted Texas to be "just like California, up to tofu, silicone and dyed hair." Democratic candidates for governorship have been accused of trying to turn Nevada and Florida into California and Colorado into RadiCalifornia. In the Georgia governor's run, Republican Brian Kemp was saying about Democrat Stacey Abrams that she was trying to import "California's radical values." The nickname of the Republican National Committee for Harris in its press releases is "California Kamala". and there is rarely any mention of her without mentioning her "San Francisco values".
California is so gigantic that it is difficult to determine what its values really are. There are huge differences between its cities, suburbs and rural areas, between northern California and southern California, between high-end coastal California and inland California. But it's undeniably a socially and politically progressive state, with laws forbidding pet stores to sell dogs that have not been saved, restaurants not to give plastic straw to their customers, and employers to ask jobseekers their current salary. Even the traditionally Republican suburbs of Orange County voted Democrats in 2018. And although economic conservatives consider its high-rate, regulatory-friendly anti-tax policies, researchers have not found proof that these policies push businesses to other states or block California's innovation, though they seem to encourage some retirees to relocate elsewhere. The president tweets on a platform created in California. It is a bit strange to describe the state that created the health clubs, jeans, Pandora and Hulu as Venezuela in the making.
In fact, the secret recipe of the California dream seems to have something to do with attracting entrepreneurs who want to change the world as well as their bank accounts. Christine Moseley, CEO of Full Harvest, a San Francisco-based start-up, was a member of the board of directors of a global logistics conglomerate, then a chain of organic fruit juices, before it became known. to settle in the Bay Area to create his own environmentally friendly business. She ended up developing a kind of Airbnb for ugly products, a platform that connects farmers who have fruits and vegetables that they can not sell to grocery stores, juice companies and businesses. other buyers who make fun of the quality of fresh food. America wastes about 40% of its food, contributing to hunger and global warming; In three years, Full Harvest sold 10 million pounds of products that would have been wasted.
"California was the perfect place to do that," says Moseley. "It's the global capital of technology and innovation, but it's also the place for people who care about food and the environment, as well as those who want to solve big problems. . "
Many of these dreamers come to California from abroad; More than 10 million of the 40 million state residents are immigrants and a quarter of these immigrants are undocumented. "There is a revolution in California," tweeted Trump during the legal battle against sanctuary cities last April, without complimenting him. Last month, in his speech at the Oval Office on the wall of his border, the president cited two murders committed by undocumented immigrants in California. Earlier this week, he complained on Twitter that California was fighting the fight against its national emergency declaration.
But illegal border crossings in California are at their lowest since 1971, and the state government does not consider its undocumented residents a threat. They are entitled to driver's licenses, subsidized health care for their children and tuition fees in the state, while police officers are prohibited from working with ICE to try to evict them. University of California Chancellor Janet Napolitano, who headed President Barack Obama's Department of Homeland Security, created legal aid centers across the system to help undocumented students.
"California recognizes their fundamental humanity," says Kevin Johnson, Dean of Law at the University of California at Davis. "And if you look at the job market, immigrants are one of the main reasons why California has such a vibrant economy."
Traditionally, another reason has been the government's investment; for example, the strength of its public universities has helped attract the aerospace industry, to create the mecca of technology in Silicon Valley and to make the San Diego region the national capital of "precision medicine". But the government has also helped fund the unfortunate solar manufacturer. Solyndra, as well as the besieged San Francisco, Los Angeles bullet train that Governor Newsom held back last week. Newsom is also reducing a water project of the same size designed to mitigate droughts and protect the delta of the Sacramento River. Sometimes Republicans quote misleading statistics to make California look uncomfortable – yes, it has "the most debt" and "most families on welfare", but sometimes it has exceeded the capacity of his government.
It was not necessary to exaggerate California's most serious problem, the exorbitant housing costs threatening its middle class, and, as Newsom warned in its state discourse, began "to define life in this state ". cities have blocked the development of new housing through zoning restrictions and "not in my backyard" activism; A five-year-old project to build 75 mixed income apartments in San Francisco's trendy Mission district was delayed again after opponents sought to protect a laundromat on the property as a historic monument. California's poverty rate is close to the national average, but according to a separate measure taking into account housing costs, it is tied to the worst. Overall, California has fallen to 49th place in per capita housing, a trend Newsom has pledged to reverse; He has already started suing cities in California that do not meet the state's affordable housing targets.
But if the problem of unaffordable housing hinders growth and threatens the social and economic mobility that drives the Californian dream, this is the kind of problem that only the most sought-after places have. There are many affordable housing in Siberia. "We attract people that places like Mississippi can not," brags Lieu. Nancy Pfund, a venture capital firm and "impact investor" in the Bay Area who took early stakes in Tesla and Pandora, said California still attracted talent because it remained fertile ground for disturbances. It is now investing in local companies like Zola Electric, which transports Silicon Valley's solar technology to Africa; Apeel Sciences, which has created natural herbal coatings that keep fresh produce longer, tackling the problem of food waste in another way; and even Real Real, the luxury consignment platform that helps consumers recycle their brand and reduce the demand for more.
"In California, we combine capital, innovation and regulation to reward ongoing investments," says Pfund. "And this has created an ecosystem of entrepreneurs who want to spread the word around the world."
She talks about entrepreneurs like Dawn Barry, president of Luna DNA, a San Diego-based Big Data community genomics platform, powered by blockchain, a collection of Californian words. Basically, it's a way for people to be paid for sharing medical data from genealogy services such as 23 and Me, as well as their iPhone, so that researchers can study them. It's complicated, but it's the kind of startup that makes sense in a place like San Diego, which has big research institutions like Sanford-Burnham, Scripps and UC San Diego, big corporations. technology like Qualcomm and genomic actors like Illumina, where Barry was a top executive.
"It's just the attitude that prevails here: we're going to reshape medicine," she says. "No one thinks it's crazy to want to do things totally differently."
This attitude did not work for Solyndra's avant-garde solar panels that look like mini-scales instead of rectangles, or for the high-speed train project that started construction in the Central Valley at low levels. population density in the middle of the line. dense urban centers at the end points. California's cap-and-trade program to reduce carbon emissions has also been a chaotic start, and its largest electricity supplier, Pacific Gas & Electric, has declared bankruptcy after the wildfires.
So the idea of California as a hell of the left is likely to persist. "California will go to hell," Fox News personality Tomi Lahren said in a recent report on the border. A conservative editorialist for Town Hall, in a 2018 essay titled "To Hell With California," urged the state to separate from the United States, although he said he did not want to destroy it. ("Well … OK, I do not do it.") There is already a Twitter member offering a new slogan for the Harris campaign: "Make America California".
California has the feeling of being a potential harbinger of a more multicultural and progressive US future, which could partly explain why Trump is so openly hostile to him, even threatening to deprive him of help. of his victims. Newsom is planning in California to counter what is happening in Washington. He wants to restore Obamacare's mandate for individual health insurance in California, expand health subsidies to undocumented adults in California, and pursue even more ambitious climate goals. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates to face Trump are pushing platforms that would put a lot of California politics on the national scene.
The history of California is the history of America: immigration, innovation, investment in what works, said Lieu. "Plus, we have beautiful beaches and Disneyland! How cool is that? "
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