The following is an excerpt from "The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return" by Michael Anton.
Chapter One
A hoary—but not therefore inaccurate—cliché holds that as goes California, so goes the nation. That is to say, social and political trends that first appear in the Golden State eventually—and inevitably—take hold throughout America. Examples include the rise of capital-P Progressivism—Hiram Johnson was elected the nation’s first Progressive governor two years before Woodrow Wilson became president—the revolutions of the 1960s, and the tax revolt that in 1978 sparked California’s Proposition 13 and two years later swept another California governor, Ronald Reagan, into the White House.
If the old cliché remains true, then the rest of the country should be afraid—very afraid. My parents’ and grandparents’ California—the California of my own youth—is long gone. That California was the greatest middle-class paradise in the history of mankind. Its promise— which it mostly delivered—was nothing less than the American dream writ large, but better: freer, wealthier, sunnier, happier, more advanced, more future-oriented.
In barely one generation, that California was swept away and transformed into a left-liberal one-party state, the most economically unequal and socially divided in the country, ostensibly run by a cadre of would-be Solons in Sacramento and in the courts, but really by oligarchic power concentrated in a handful of industries, above all Big Tech and Big Hollywood. The middle class—what’s left of them—continue to flee high taxes, higher costs, cratering standards of living, declining services, deteriorating infrastructure, worsening quality of life, and an elite that openly despises them and pushes policies to despoil and dispossess them.
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