The Scales Fell From Her Eyes

Ignoring decades of contrary experience, your humble blogger speculated last week that the LA fires "may well be the proverbial straw that breaks the back of Progressive dominance in government." Notable commentators across the political spectrum are coming around to that view.

(WSJ graphic)

Inside-the-beltway Republican and Trump-hater Peggy Noonan ("I don’t like the SOB, I think him a bad man") remembers when her family lost everything in a New Jersey fire in 1969:

you never get over a fire. It’s serious, it’s sobering. Losing what you have changes you, the precariousness and impermanence of things enters you in a new way.

And it will change California.

If your first thoughts during a catastrophe are political then maybe something in you has gotten too tight and reflexive, but if your thoughts don’t come to include the political then maybe something in you has gotten too unreflective and rote. All disasters have political reverberations. I suspect for California this will in a general way involve a new shift, a reorientation toward reality.

Government, on whatever level, exists first to keep citizens and their property safe. That’s the bottom line: keeping people and what they have in one piece. Safe from fire and from crime, safe within a criminal-justice system that works and protects people. People need an electrical grid that works, a clean water system, sufficient police. It is hard to do these primary and essential things, hard to see to them every day and improve them wherever possible. It takes concentration and focus.

In California as elsewhere ideology has allowed—and encouraged—unrealism about the essential responsibilities of government. It encourages a dispersal of forces and attention. But even though ideology and philosophy are a part of the California story, I want to focus on the practical. California’s political and governing classes have for decades been preoccupied not enough by the primary responsibilities of government and too much by unquantifiable secondary and tertiary issues—world climate change, notions of equity.

If even Peggy Noonan says that its governing classes have been suffused with "unrealism," then you know California is ripe for change.