The reader can only wonder at Mr. Ferguson’s – what reads like nostalgia for George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, of Prop 87? Oh! sorry he is just a late arrival to California, 2016, in its advanced state of ‘Decadence/Decay’ the idée fixe of the Political Romantic. With the aid of Victor Davis Hanson, another political refugee, at The Hoover Institution, where 1929 went to live!
The transgenerational economic/political sway of Neo-Liberalism comes home to roost, across the nation, in the face of the Pandemic, and the concomitant collapse of Robber Capital, even with the the American Political Class’ extravagant kowtowing Bail Out. In Mr. Ferguson’s telling the blame for the California’s ills are the Democrats, who are in fact New Democrats, the not so sub rosa allies, in fact, the enactors of the Reaganite Agenda! Jerry Brown is the political object lesson of that political de-evolution. Newsom is ‘Old Money’, who is subject to a cult:
Headline: When Gavin Newsom issued marriage licenses in San Francisco, his party was furious. Now, it’s a campaign ad
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-gavin-newsom-gay-marriage-20180515-story.html
The appearance of the political hysteric Ben Shapiro, who is moving out of California and going to the South. Its ‘as if’ C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America come to life.
Mr. Ferguson lards his essay with apt literary references, and the fact that many Corporations are leaving the state. Going to California is the story of my mother and father, and many of their families. Its the story of the state itself!
In the 70’s I applied for work at McDonnell Douglas, in Long Beach, California , and my sister’s daughter worked there before it went out of business. This campus, next to the Long Airport, was being turned into a housing development, and shopping complex, when I last drove by it in 2008.
The Myth of California entrepreneurship was built on being the subcontractors to the Defense Industries of the Cold War. Silicone Valley has replaced those Defense Industries, but with the difference that highly skilled workers are of value, as the manufacture of products have been off-shored: to China and other countries in Asia as America workers, and their Unions, were ‘greedy’ according to the Capitalist apologists like Ferguson and Hanson. Has The Pandemic illustrated the vital part an indigenous manufacturing capacity can play in the civic/political life of States and Nations?
Political Skeptic