While California prefers to extort, humiliate, and harass its actual citizens—especially the law-abiding, tax-paying, productive ones—it rolls out a bright red carpet for everyone else. That passage in the U.S. Constitution where it says that the purpose of government is to serve “ourselves and our Posterity”? The California state constitution, despite being longer than a 1997 Los Angeles County phone book, makes no such promise—and the state government works to the opposite effect.

While California holds 12 percent of the nation’s population, it is home to anywhere between one-third and half of the nation’s welfare recipients. Finding an accurate count is hard, but even if the low estimate is true, it means that welfare recipients are overrepresented in the state by a multiple of almost three.

Similarly, and relatedly, the state is “home” to a quarter of the nation’s entire “homeless” population. The sneer quotes are necessary so as not to mislead: a great many of California’s “homeless” are not down-on-their-luck working stiffs who got laid off and then foreclosed on or evicted. They’re mostly people who choose to live on the streets, in a park, in a van—wherever—and most of them are unemployed either by choice or necessity (because they lack the skills and, above all, the temperament to do real work and get along with people). Many—perhaps a majority—are also mentally ill or petty criminals or on drugs or some combination of the three. A great many come from out of state knowing full well they could never afford to buy or rent in California and have no intention of even looking for a place. Or a job.

Partly these trends are functions of the weather: it’s a lot easier to be poor and/or homeless basking in the sun than knee-deep in snow. But nice weather isn’t the primary driver: foggy San Francisco has more than 900 homeless for every 100,000 residents, the highest rate in the nation; sunnier Miami has about a hundred. Overall, the Golden State’s homelessness rate is more than twice that of the Sunshine State.

California’s homeless crisis is to some extent driven by the punishing cost of living: it can be hard to live there on the prevailing wage, even with the nation’s second-highest (and soon to rise to number one) minimum wage. Overpopulation also plays a role: just as high demand and tight supply drive up housing costs, so too does the endless influx of labor drive down wages. Even a high minimum wage can’t fully overcome the downward pressure, especially in a labor market in which so many workers aren’t legally authorized to work in the country and thus are paid under the table.

But indigency and “homelessness” are also by-products of California’s fathomless generosity, which manifests itself in two principal ways. First, the state spends well over one hundred billion dollars per year—the highest in the nation by far—on welfare and other forms of means-tested public assistance. Human nature being what it is, the promise of free stuff is always and everywhere a magnet, a lure.

Second is state authorities’ absolute refusal to enforce any law aimed at maintaining public order. That would be to “criminalize homelessness”! Hence druggies, drunks, and dirtbags across the fruited plain know well that in California they can get away with virtually anything— and certainly with living on the streets. That used to be true only of a few lefty meccas, above all Berkeley and Santa Monica, but now it’s the case virtually statewide.

In hindsight, California’s last stand against street-sleepers was fought—and lost—more than two decades ago. In the early 1990s, a massive homeless encampment all but covered San Francisco’s elegant Civic Center Plaza. Leftist mayor Art Agnos—the West Coast David Dinkins—refused, as a matter of high principle, to do anything about the fetid tent city just outside his office window. In 1993, just as Dinkins was swept out of New York City Hall by Rudy Giuliani, so too was the one-term Agnos given the boot in favor of police chief Frank Jordan, who vowed to clean up the town. San Franciscans, it appeared, had finally had enough. Jordan began the cleanup but then lost four years later to Willie Brown, longtime doyen of California politics. Brown—no conservative but a pragmatist if ever there was one—did his best to keep the city reasonably clean. But après lui, le déluge. San Francisco—and the rest of the state—has elected only dippy liberals since, none of whom have ever lifted a finger to do anything about homelessness.

Except, that is, overspend on “housing solutions” that solve nothing and that few “homeless” ever set foot in. By one estimate, a single such unit costs the government $700,000—$100,000 more than the state’s median home price. A whole industry exists—a “homeless industrial complex”—ostensibly to “help the homeless” but really to pay their “service providers,” salve consciences, and perpetuate the problem. Nobody knows how much the state spends on homelessness overall. One mystified and frustrated state legislator has called for an accounting; the bureaucracy said they’d get back to him in about eighteen months. We do know that the governor’s last budget proposed spending $1 billion in direct relief, on top of another $1.75 billion for “affordable housing.”

But nothing illustrates better California’s pathological altruism than its wide-open arms for any and all illegal immigrants. This is the trend that contributes most to all the others: overpopulation, punishing costs, crumbling infrastructure, overwhelmed public services, rapacious taxa-tion, and two-tiered law enforcement.

To be sure, the problem is as much federal as state. The feds are supposed to control the southern border and, until the inauguration of Donald Trump, hadn’t—by design—for nearly fifty years. But California goes out of its way to compound the problem, which it doesn’t even consider a problem but a great boon. Whenever the feds try to enforce the law and protect the border—admittedly, not a frequent occurrence before Trump—California rises as one to “resist.”

Californians weren’t always so profligate with the precious right to live in the most bountiful spot on the entire planet. In 1994, 60 percent of the electorate—a landslide—voted for a ballot initiative denying welfare to illegal aliens. A federal judge quickly blocked the measure, and that was that.

Today, 55 percent of immigrants to California—legal and illegal— receive state benefits, compared with just 30 percent of natives. Victor Davis Hanson describes going to the grocery store near his Central Valley farm and being the only person there not paying with an electronic benefit transfer (welfare) card.

State law actually prohibits officials and agencies from distinguishing legal from illegal immigrants and mandates that welfare—along with driver’s licenses and other benefits—be granted equally to both. California pioneered the concept of “sanctuary cities”—nullification zones where federal law is openly flouted—and then took it to the next level by making the entire state a “sanctuary state.”

California is so pro–illegal immigrant that even its distaste for murder and hatred of guns can’t overcome its reflexive love of the illicit interloper. After a five-time deportee and career criminal shot an innocent San Franciscan in the back and killed her, he was acquitted of all but one minor charge, which was later overturned on appeal. California collectively shrugged. When Donald Trump voiced objection, California’s elites were finally roused to anger—at Trump.

Perhaps the urexample of California’s pathological altruism—its eagerness to reward any selfish insanity at its own citizens’ expense, so long as the grifter isn’t dismissible as “privileged”—is Nadya “Octomom” Suleman. The daughter of an immigrant of questionable legality (after his daughter’s rise to fame, dad fled back to his native Iraq to dodge bullets and IEDs as a driver for the Iraqi military), Suleman was briefly married but quickly divorced before having a single child. Then she proceeded to have six—all while single, unemployed, and on welfare. But she had always wanted a “big family” and six was not, apparently, enough. So—again, underwritten by taxpayers—she underwent extensive fertility treatments and soon after gave birth to octuplets. Suleman later parlayed her celebrity into a porn film and was convicted of welfare fraud.

Officially, California will acknowledge no limits to immigration whatsoever. Taking California’s leaders at their word, if a billion people were to arrive in the state tomorrow, they would insist that every single one has a fundamental right to stay—and collect welfare. And shoot innocent women in the back. And have octuplets as a single mom at taxpayer expense.

Partly to alleviate overcrowding in ERs, California recently extended free health insurance to illegal aliens between ages nineteen and twenty-five. In a state with such a massive illegal population, that amounts to around 100,000 people (the state’s no-doubt low estimate). And it’s estimated to cost “only” about $100 mil—all paid for by California’s state-level restoration of the individual mandate, which forces taxpaying Californians to buy insurance in part to underwrite illegal immigrants. It would be foolish to assume California will stop there. It’s the nature of such programs to expand; that’s what they’re designed to do.

The biggest stresses from illegal immigration fall on the public education system. Conservatives like to chide California for its “bad schools.” On one level, they have a point. California in the Brady Bunch era, and well beyond, had the finest public schools in the nation. Now its school system ranks thirty-eighth out of fifty. Factor out the super-wealthy super zips, and they drop to near dead last.

The typical ed-reformer blames the education code and the teachers’ union. No doubt there’s something in those complaints. But the single biggest factor—which no one dares name—is demographic change. Specifically, demographic change fueled by poor people fleeing poor countries, whose parents’ education stopped well before the equivalent of American high school and took place in classrooms much less functional than those in California’s alleged “bad schools.”

In fact, all things considered, California’s public schools aren’t that bad. They’re actually pretty good at teaching non-native speakers English, something they were required to do by the passage of Proposition 227 in 1998, which banned the idiotic practice of “bilingual education.” California’s schools are, however, unequal to the Herculean task they’ve been assigned: to take poor, non-English-speaking, culturally diverse immigrants from all over the world and bring their achievement levels up to the native-born American mean just like that. No school system in the history of the world is “good” enough to do that.

As for bilingual education, that particularly destructive California fad helped ensure that a generation of immigrant kids entered adulthood not proficient in English and hence unequipped to compete in the California job market—that is, apart from picking crops, but farmers prefer to give those jobs to the newest wave of illegal immigrants, who will work for much less. Banning the practice and teaching kids English accomplished the opposite: it helped them compete and slowed (for a bit) the further fracturing of the state along ethnic and linguistic lines.

Naturally, since English immersion worked, it was intolerable to New California, which in 2016 repealed Prop 227, ensuring that a big chunk of the next generation will never learn English but instead end up stuck on the lower rungs of California’s serf economy. The repeal also ensures that the state will become ever more fractured and distrustful.

All in the name of “justice” for sanctified out-groups. What’s good for those already in California is not only never considered, but to ask is to reveal oneself a monster, the quintessential non-Californian. The essence of California-ism is to care—ostentatiously—about everyone but Californians.

Balkanized

Except there are no “Californians” anymore; the term denotes only residency. The state has no common culture or civic identity. It is rather a polyglot economic zone dotted with myriad little “communities” that at best don’t care about or understand one another, in many cases can’t even talk to each other, and at worst hate one another.

Some degree of this fractiousness is inevitable when you cram, cheek-by-jowl, into a capacious but by no means infinite space people from literally every race, nationality, ethnic group, culture, subculture, and religion in the world. But on top of that, a lot of those groups harbor decades and even centuries of enmity against one another stretching back to the old country—enmity which California has imported by choice and now must live with and attempt to manage. New enmities arise among groups formerly separated by oceans, forests, jungles, deserts, and mountain ranges suddenly living in the same town and discovering—lo!—they have nothing in common and don’t much like each other. California’s theocrats insist that all this be celebrated as “diversity”

as they ride UberBLACKs into gated sanctuaries. Meanwhile, politics in the state becomes ever more nakedly Leninist: Who? Whom? Who gets to do, and take, what to, and from, whom?

Feudal

Californian-by-choice (one wonders “Why?” and “For how long?”) Joel Kotkin has taken to referring to his adopted home’s present and future as “high-tech feudalism.” He’s not wrong. Feudalism is the culminating feature of every trend thus far discussed.

The state is grotesquely unequal, with a tiny number of winners taking virtually all the spoils while a serf class of immigrants, legal and illegal, do much of the work beyond high-concept tech design and entertainment production, and nearly all of the grinding toil.

California now has the highest poverty rate in the nation. It also has, by some metrics, the highest income gap in the nation—but whichever study you look at, it’s never out of the top five.

For all of California’s self-congratulation about its new-age economy, over the last dozen years, its private sector generated five times more minimum-wage jobs than plum spots in Silicon Valley or Hollywood.

 Kotkin reports that 86 percent of California jobs created over this period paid below the U.S. median income, with half paying less than $40,000. That is a salary that, even if you were able to save the entire sum for an entire year, amounts to the down payment on a house costing one-third the statewide median.

Actually, the binary population asserted above is a bit simplistic. In reality, there are seven classes of people in modern, hip California (not counting foreign and out-of-state oligarchs who at most drop in on their manors from time to time and who outrank almost everyone below):

• Dukes: overlords whose wealth derives from IPOs, undertaxed stock grants, and capital gains, who leave the so-called 1 percent in the dust and dwell in the most exclusive slices of the state’s most exclusive zip.
  
  
• Earls: mere decamillionaires who seem rich by ordinary American standards but who can barely afford, on a million a year, their house in Seacliff or Pacific Palisades plus two private school tuitions, the right cars, and a home in Tahoe or, if you’re old, Palm Desert.
  
  
• Knights: highly paid servants—lawyers, managers, mid-level bankers, support staff (public relations and investor relations above all)—who help the wheels turn but don’t do anything that generates real Knights share the same tastes as their overlords but have a much harder time paying for them and so struggle to afford neighborhoods and lifestyles they deem worthy of their status; many go broke in the attempt and end up leaving the state in shame.
  
  
• Burghers: if we were to apply Plato’s “divided line” to contemporary California, we’d draw the first and fundamental division between the above three categories and these humble four, A California burgher earns in the low to lower-middle six figures, a sum that used to make one comfortably middle class or even upper-middle—and still does in the American parts of America—but barely allows one to hang on in California. If a burgher owns a home, she either inherited it or super-commutes from a distant exurb; forget about saving for retirement, or for anything, really. This class is shrinking fast—in the private sector it’s almost entirely gone—and Haute California has not even begun to think through what happens after the last teacher and firefighter move to Missouri or Montana after selling their house following the repeal of Prop 13.

• Indentured servants: H1-Bs and the like who serve the tech oligarchy; they’re decently paid, though not nearly well enough for a middle-class standard of living anywhere near where they Everything they have, they owe to their lord, and they know it.
  
  
• Serfs: this category is mostly made up of recent immigrants from Mexico and (increasingly) Central America, who work the fields for a lot less than H1-Bs get for writing code. They live mostly in formerly middle-class, if not particularly elegant, Valley There is a serf class in the coastal cities, too, who do all the menial labor, especially cooking and cleaning. The one advantage to being a serf is that you can actually afford to live within striking distance of the California you serve; the downside is that you live in very crowded conditions, often in dirty and dangerous parts of town. No one around speaks English, but for this class that’s not a problem, since they don’t either.
  
  
• But at least serfs work, something that can’t be said for millions of other Californians and “homeless” from other states who come west for the sunshine, welfare, and—in some California cities today—government- provided drugs and No joke, look it up. Sadly, this class also includes many of the serfs’ children, who have no recollection of escaping grinding poverty in Oaxaca or San Salvador and finding California a promised land, but who instead compare their California lives to those in the classes above them, resent their lot, and seethe that it’s the result of racism.

None of this—not one iota—is an accident. The Californiarati want things this way, like them this way. This societal structure preserves and augments the dukes’ wealth and power, which is the arrangement’s main purpose, while also providing a measure of influence to California’s lecturing lords of leftism.

How Did This Happen?

There were, fundamentally, four overlapping causes that turned California from ultimate middle-class paradise to woke, feudal dystopia in barely a generation.

First was (is) the vast influx of poor immigrants from Latin America that began in the 1970s and then exploded after President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty. Which was supposed to be coupled with strict border and workplace enforcement, but Hollywood liberals, Central Valley land barons, and the burgeoning tech elite helped ensure those provisions were never enacted. After that, voters made one attempt to get control of the problem—the aforementioned Prop 187—but it was promptly shut down. The feds in turn insisted that only they had the power to secure the border and then (and ever since) steadfastly refused to do so. Which was exactly the outcome elite California wanted. The resulting mass arrivals tipped the political balance of the state irretrievably, causing a snowball effect. More immigration makes the state bluer—and the bluer it gets, the more pro-immigration, legal and illegal, it gets, culminating in California’s declaring itself a “sanctuary state” with policies that effectively exempt illegal aliens from the laws.

Second is woke anti-assimilationism, the demonization of the “melting pot” and its replacement with the “salad bowl” or (to borrow from David Dinkins) the “gorgeous mosaic.” Assimilation stopped being encouraged, much less insisted upon, and instead came (and remains) under furious assault.

Third was the infusion of more than four trillion dollars (on paper, at least) into Silicon Valley and San Francisco that created the world’s richest elite, who enjoy advocating psychologically pleasing bromides, certain that they can exempt themselves from the real-world ramifications which fall only on distant others. Which—so far—has been entirely true. California can be a very traditional society for the very wealthy, who can—and do—wall themselves off from the dysfunction they cause, live in gated communities, and send their kids to private schools. Such families, of course, also all employ Hispanic help—gardeners, maids, cooks, nannies—and so have both pecuniary and conscience-salving reasons to advocate for illegal immigration: doing so is a public show of noblesse oblige that helps legitimize their privilege. This new wealth and the way its owners spend it thus only intensified the state’s hard-left turn as elites voted for—and, more to the point, financed—ever-more radical politicians and ballot initiatives.

The most important consequence of that turn was to cleanse the state of its old middle class. The people who voted Republican in six straight presidential elections and for Republican governors six out of eight times were chased out by high taxes, costly homes, terrible schools, indifferent law enforcement, smothering red tape, lousy services, and broken infrastructure. Many in the coastal corridor were fortunate enough to own homes that appreciated spectacularly over their lifetimes, which they could sell and reap a windfall—and then live like kings in low-tax states while escaping California’s vindictive utopianism, punishing taxes, and cratering quality of life for all but the very rich.

And it wasn’t just the Republicans—though they were the first to see the writing on the wall—but also the old blue-collar Democrats, the ones who tugged their party in a more moderate direction. Until around the mid-2000s, almost the entire western half of San Francisco was populated by old-style, working-class, union Democrats. They would, to one another, refer to the precise neighborhood where they lived by parish— and could assume that everyone whom they told knew exactly where they meant. Those people are all gone, of course, which isn’t surprising. What’s perhaps a bit surprising is that no one in the city today even knows they were ever there. It’s like these mostly Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics who worked construction, on the docks, and in the police and fire departments never existed, were never part of the scene. In modern San Francisco’s self-conception, there were the Native Americans who had the land stolen out from under them—then fast-forward to the hippies, the gays, the hipsters, the techies, and the oligarchs. American California isn’t merely gone; it never was.

A New Regime

Ultimately, what California is, or is in the process of becoming, or wants to be, is a new kind of regime. Who really rules is not entirely clear—which, I think, is the point. It’s “democratic” in that people vote—but they always vote for the same things or for a series of interchangeable hacks who all believe and do the same things. Elections mean nothing in the sense that the real rulers can never lose. Voting simply provides the veneer of legitimacy.

Those real rulers are the monied oligarchs, plus the funds and companies they run. Entertainment moguls, always looking for opportunities to virtue-signal, and agriculture barons, who before every harvest salivate for a fresh tranche of serfs to underpay, play supporting roles. Big Leftism—concentrated in the media, the universities, nonprofits, and government—is the servant, the instrument of their power.

The implicit deal—which I’ve called the “San Francisco Compromise”—is that, first, the left does nothing that directly threatens oligarchic wealth or power. It can tax and spend all it wants, so long as those taxes are easily bearable—and, to the extent possible, legally avoidable—by dukes. So long as the other policies that increase oligarchic wealth are never questioned, it almost doesn’t matter what California tax rates are; the dukes can afford them. The lefties also agree to use their considerable rhetorical power to whitewash and lionize the oligarchs.

For their part, the oligarchs take their cues from leftists on matters of passionate conviction that don’t directly threaten said wealth or power. They also spend some of their lucre on lefty institutions and make-work jobs.

California’s real rulers don’t exercise their power in the manner of the oligarchs of old. They wield it indirectly, by controlling not just the politicians who can’t win without their money but especially by controlling discourse. The real decisions are made in the communication between the oligarchs and the officeholders. And that “communication” is not necessarily—not even primarily—a Palo Alto grandee picking up the phone and calling Sacramento. (They have people for that.) It’s more using their complete control of all avenues of information—from grammar schools all the way up to prestige and social media—to tell only one cramped, constrained “story.”

All this is underwritten by the massive demographic change that ensures one-party rule in Sacramento and in the judiciary plus a lopsidedly leftist congressional delegation. Even today—after decades of middle-class exodus—millions of Californians still harbor red-state habits and political inclinations. But their preferences—like their votes—don’t matter because such people are overwhelmingly outnumbered. Stay and pay, suffer and be ignored—or leave. Either way, you’re not voting your way out of this. That’s the message Haute California hurls at dwindling Red California.

The corporations and their leaders tell the government what to do and as much as possible exempt themselves from its mandates. Apple is based in Cupertino but does most of its manufacturing in China and, until recently, paid the bulk of its taxes in Ireland. But even the Emerald Isle’s notoriously low corporate rates—Apple paid an effective tax rate in Ireland of 0.005 percent in 2014—designed to suck profits away from the countries where they’re earned, got to be too much, and the company moved its legendary pile of cash to the Isle of Jersey, which levies no taxes at all. Sacramento not only doesn’t try to stop that, it defers to Cupertino on every matter of importance. Who is the real sovereign?

We know why Apple’s factories are in China—cheap labor—and the money is in Jersey, but why is the mothership still in Cupertino? Partly it’s similar to the reason why, in Tom Wolfe’s explanation, “many chief executive officers kept their headquarters in New York long after the last rational reason for doing so had vanished . . . because of the ineffable experience of being a CEO and having lunch five days a week in Manhattan!” Jersey has ocean views but no good restaurants. Tech oligarchs envy Chinese despotism and censorship but don’t want to live there— wouldn’t even if they were in charge.

But that isn’t the whole story, nor even the most important part. It’s telling that many Apple products are stamped with the phrase “Designed by Apple in California.” In Apple’s conception of itself, the company is located not in “the United States” or “America” but in “California.” Apple makes this distinction for three reasons, which can easily be extended to the rest of the tech industry, and to all of Haute California. First, California oligarchs want to distance themselves from the notion that they are part of, or own allegiance to, any country at all. They are above such petty concerns, beyond—and in many ways more powerful than—the nation-state. It’s here worth pausing to note the irony of Governor Gavin’s self-congratulatory description of California as a “nation state.” California is not only in no respect a “nation”—a united people with a common lineage, language, and history—it has been deliberately reengineered to resemble a nation as little as possible. When Newsom and other California-boosters so describe their state, all they really mean is “big” and “rich.”

Second, the oligarchs want to distance themselves from all that is held by elite and world opinion to be bad about America: racism, sexism, Bible-thumping, guns, and so on. Third, they wish to evoke California not as an American state but as an idea: the Golden State, the California Dream, paradise, the future.

But it’s a very selective, exclusive paradise and future. Which is the fundamental reason why the lords still live there. Partly, of course, because the state’s natural beauty is so profound that even the worst human mismanagement can barely scratch it. More fundamentally, Haute California has become like one of those clean, pristine space stations to which, in sci-fi movies, elites escape a ravaged earth. The only people you will see are people just like you—or properly deferential servants who work for you. Life in La Jolla, Montecito, Carmel, Palo Alto, Woodside, and Napa has never been better. If you have several million and don’t mind the taxes—and the state has plenty who do, and don’t—you can insulate yourself from toxic California and enjoy the weather, natural beauty, and pricey, world-class amenities.

On the flip side, subsidized poverty in California is heaven compared to penury in southern Mexico or Central America. As bad as California’s crime, infrastructure, and dysfunction are by historic American standards, they’re all still orders of magnitude better than prevailing conditions in parts south.

These two realities explain why no one much cares about high-speed rail boondoggles, dumping precious water out to sea in a drought, homeless encampments, poop on the sidewalks, or rural Central California’s Wild West, where many laws are simply not enforced. High and low alike—the only demographics who matter—have it too good.

Escape?

Disgruntled Californians at least have an escape hatch, somewhere else to go. Indeed, so many people are leaving California that the state is likely, for the first time in its history, to lose a congressional seat after the 2020 census—even with the continued influx of illegal immigrants. Though it’s fair to ask whether other states should want any fleeing Californians, given that they have the nasty habit of pushing, in their new homes, the very policies that spurred them to flee their old one.

At any rate, Americans don’t have the luxury of fleeing a Californicated America. Where are we supposed to go?

Californians can also take for granted that the U.S. military, the Federal Reserve, and—until the events of spring and summer 2020 called these into question—federal cops and federal prisons will back them up and cover their mistakes. How well will any of these function when the entire country is as broke and broken as modern California?

For the last thirty years, at least, California has ridden a tech tailwind that has underwritten the state’s spending orgy and crazed utopianism. California has literally bet the entire existence of its “new regime” on that wind continuing. Will it? If and when Californocracy subsumes the United States as a whole, is a new high-paying, high-profit, high-margin economic sector waiting in the wings to carry aloft the entire country?

Yet Californication is what the broader left wants for America. It’s what I believe they were one election away from getting in 2016. They think so too. They desperately want another chance in 2020.

Michael Anton is a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College. A former national security official in the Trump administration, he is also a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is the author of "The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return" (Regnery Publishing, 2020).