The Soviet State of California

The California Post will challenge the Golden State's all-powerful commissar class.

I published the following op-ed in the new California Post, the Los Angeles-based spinoff of the iconic New York Post. I grew up in California and, over the years, have watched the state slowly fall into disrepair. My hope is that the Post will help shine a spotlight on both the peril and the promise of the Golden State. On a related note, I am currently helping the Manhattan Institute open a California office and we are hiring reporters, researchers, and editors. Let the California Reconquista begin. –CFR

---

In the waning years of the Soviet Union, most of the citizens in that cold tyranny could see that their system was irredeemably broken.

But for the most part, they marched through the same routines, repeated the same slogans, and lived their lives as if it could not be changed.

The commissars were in power, the poor were under control, and what was left of the middle class was mired in dysfunction, and, at times, despair.

The system, however, was not unbreakable.

The accumulation of corruption over the 20th century placed enormous pressure on the state. And brave individuals who overcame their fear of punishment began to tell the truth. In time, the Soviet Empire would fall.

There is a similar dynamic happening now in the state of California.

The Golden State was founded on the dream of the infinite frontier and the desire to build a civilization at the edge of the American continent. Now, the state is weighed down with enormous corruption.

The commissar class, which has insinuated itself within the governing institutions, has accumulated enormous power and stripped middle-class Californians of their freedom, their income, and, at times, their ability to discern truth from falsehood.

The problems in California are well known: unsustainable finances, endemic fraud, chronic homelessness, union corruption, DEI racialism, unchecked crime, and a web of NGOs that siphon taxpayer money toward partisan ends.

And yet the existing media, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Los Angeles Times, seems to have gone to great lengths to obscure these basic realities.

They have been captured by the same ideological fervors as the governing institutions and, in effect, become propaganda outlets for California’s permanent political class.

I was born and raised in California and have seen how the state has changed over the years.

There was the heyday of California conservatism from Nixon to Reagan, the contested years of Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and now, over the past decade, the rise of a one-party state, led by a progressive establishment that seems to deliver everything but progress.

California’s politicians promise to enact near-cosmic forms of “social justice” but cannot build a train track; they promise multimillion-dollar “reparations” to racial minorities, but cannot balance the books.

The political system is now Sovietized.

California Democrats act as if they cannot be challenged at the ballot box.

The ring of wealthy donors, newspaper editors, and political activists—the state’s commissar class—seems to believe that if they control the narratives of society, they can control the political apparatus indefinitely.

The flow of funds and votes has been organized in a way that provides a structural advantage to the Democratic establishment and its various clients and enterprises.

Many Californians have fled, but others have remained behind to fight. The question, then, is how to proceed.

As in the old Soviet Union, part of the solution is to simply tell the truth.

As I see it, that is the great potential of the new California Post, which has the opportunity to escape the straightjacket of political correctness and inform Californians exactly what is happening with their government and their money.

In a time of deceit, the public needs an honest newspaper and fearless reporters who are willing to peer behind the repetition of mindless slogans and to map out exactly how this corrupted system works.

If you read memoirs about the end of the Soviet Union, you will be struck by the sense that, even in the final years, most citizens believed that the collapse of the ruling regime was impossible.

They had grown accustomed to the corruption and believed that change was impossible.

Then, suddenly, the government broke apart and the Berlin Wall came down, and they entered a new era. What was later deemed to be “inevitable” was, in fact, a surprise.

However bleak it might seem in California, the same principle applies.

There is always the possibility of surprise, or victory against the odds, which should kindle a permanent sense of hope—in this case, that California might be golden once again.