California’s Woes Were Born in England
20th October 2024
The more time you spend in California, the less sense its politics make. It’s progressive, of course. But the style of progressivism in the West Coast is distinct from that in the East, in roughly the same way that Silicon Valley-style capitalism differs from the Wall Street variety. The West Coast species is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent. On the one hand, it’s the same schoolmarmish, nanny-state liberalism you can find in any blue state: bans on plastic straws, quotas for women on corporate boards, mandated gender neutral toy aisles. On the other, it’s the exact inverse: permissiveness verging on criminal negligence.
In San Francisco, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as “progressive”.
What California does, the rest of the country tends to follow. In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?