Column: Are the Democrats to blame for California's problems? The Republicans are missing

Do you know what the problem with California is?

Democrats – or so I was told.

When I write about broken sidewalks In Los Angeles, readers write that the blame lies with the Democrats.

Homelessness, crime on public transport, Poverty – in any case, the Democrats are to blame.

Recently I wrote about the owner of Langer's Deliwho is considering resigning because of the problems at MacArthur Park.

“Well, I hope he shuts down and leaves the state,” wrote a reader named Thomas. “Your governor, your mayor and the Democrats have ruined your state.”

Former President Trump also loves to denigrate the Golden State. He brands Vice President Kamala Harris as a domestic radical, if not a communist. He says She destroyed San Francisco as District Attorney, destroyed the entire state as Attorney General and will turn the entire nation into a hellhole like California, as my colleague Mark Barabak recently noticed.

A reader named Steve summed it up this way: “The democratic experiment has failed,” he wrote. “Study history and you're stuck in the liberal mud.”

OK, I'm in. Let's study history – and current events.

People gather in an alley near MacArthur Park, where drug use is widespread.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

First of all, I admit that the Democrats deserve to be in the hot seat.

They hold every statewide elected office and dominate the legislature in a wealthy state that has the fifth-largest economy in the world (not bad for a shithole). And yet California has enormous poverty rates, horrendous housing costs that force people to flee, and embarrassing numbers of homeless people, many of whom suffer from addiction, mental illness, or both.

But none of this happened overnight, nor did it happen solely under Democratic leadership.

“The big problems and issues that surround us at the local, state and national levels are more complex than simply looking at and blaming those who are now running the political shows,” said Jaime Regalado, former director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State LA. “The historical context is important.”

I grew up in Pittsburgh, a suburb of San Francisco, when the state had a population of 10 million (today Los Angeles County alone has 10 million people). Many of my schoolmates went on to work for local industrial giants – US Steel, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical and Johns Manville.

These jobs paid them enough money to buy homes, raise families, and send their children to California's well-funded junior and state colleges. But they also existed because much of the world was in ruins after World War II and the U.S. had little competition. Over the next few decades, native blue-collar jobs in industry, manufacturing, and aerospace disappeared, largely due to changes in the global economy and cheap foreign labor.

The new economy – primarily technology and services – has widened the income gap, and neither Democrats nor Republicans in California or elsewhere have found a recipe for rebuilding the middle class.

“The expectations regarding the performance of the various levels of government – ​​especially local governments – are simply unrealistic,” said Jack Pitney, Professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. “You can have the greatest mayor in the world and that mayor will not be able to solve the problem of poverty.”

Not that we should absolve Karen Bass of responsibility or forgive her homelessness, but these problems began long before Los Angeles City Hall.

On a cold, rainy day in February 2023, a man sits in front of the Fred Jordan Mission.

(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)

For decades, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, California made the mistake of not creating enough housing to keep up with the flood of people moving here to fill the jobs in the state's burgeoning economy. This is one of many factors behind rising housing prices and homelessness today.

Another reason is that in the 1960s, civil rights activists and others argued that people with mental illnesses were being neglected and mistreated in the state's psychiatric hospitals. Three California state legislators, one Republican and two Democrats, introduced theLanterman-Petris Briefsigned by Republican Governor Ronald Reagan, which placed limits on involuntary psychiatric treatment and led to the closure of hospitals.

But the promised community treatment centers were not established, and for decades untreated mentally ill people ended up in prisons and jails, on the streets and in the morgue. Federal funding for mental health was gutted by Reagan When he became president, local governments were still grappling with the effects of Proposition 13, a property tax relief initiative that emptied municipal coffers.

“We so rarely talk about the homeless crisis of the 1980s under Reagan,” said Regina Freerwho teaches urban politics at Occidental College. “We always want to flatten and simplify really complex challenges. That's why I'm in the classroom – because I don't want my students to fall into the same trap of oversimplification.”

A further simplification is that Democrats alone are responsible for the number of undocumented immigrants in California and elsewhere.

Many of them come here to work in the largely conservative agricultural industry that looks the other way while it writes campaign checks to GOP lawmakers. Many more come to escape drug violence in Mexico, where up to 70% of weapons come from the USA

It is more than a little hypocritical to denigrate crazy, reckless California when it comes to public safety when there is no carnage in the country, including mass shootings in malls and schools (on Wednesday two students and two teachers died in a Georgia High School), can loosen the gun lobby's stranglehold on Republican lawmakers.

“What has changed in our society is that people no longer sit down together and try to solve problems, but it is all about assigning blame,” said Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California. And people blame everything on “the party or political group they don't belong to.”

You may be reading this and saying to yourself, “OK, but Reagan and Nixon and economic change are old stories. The Democrats have been in charge in California for years, and they are soft on crime and the border, full of empty promises, and way too woke.”

Mario Blanco lived in a flood control channel in Downey in July 2022.

(Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times)

Okay, but if that's your view, then whose fault is it that the Democrats are in charge in California?

I have the answer for you.

It's the Republicans.

In a state that proudly celebrates inclusion and leads the resistance to the politics of racist scapegoating, climate change denial, and stripping women of reproductive rights, the out-of-touch GOP is hell-bent on shrinking its tent. Reagan, who signed abortion rights legislation as governor and immigrant amnesty legislation as president, would be thrown out of today's GOP.

The California Republican Party alienated many Latinos in the 1990s with the ban on services for illegal immigrants through Proposition 187 and the television commercial “They Keep Coming Back” by Republican Governor Pete Wilson. GOP Fall Convention Last year, an attempt to remove opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage from the party's manifesto was defeated.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, left Sacramento in 2011, and no Republican candidate has won statewide office since. None of them has offered compelling solutions to deep-rooted problems, and it may be too late to revive the party because while the electorate has become more diverse, the number of registered Republicans has dropped to about 25 percent.

The Democrats cannot be blamed for this.

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