Failure to Govern

We should not, Joel Kotkin suggests, be surprised at the way the authorities in Los Angeles mishandled the recent fires. The portrait of ineptitude extends to all of the nation’s great blue states and cities. It is producing an exodus as people migrate from previously vital cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles… to lead their lives in places like Florida, Texas and Tennessee.

That is, in places where good management is a way of life. It’s a seismic geopolitical shift, one we should not ignore.

Los Angeles authorities’ poor preparation for and lamentable response to the wildfires now devastating the city capture a broader problem – namely, the failure of governance across America’s Democrat-controlled regions. This pattern of incompetence has accelerated the shift of American economic and political power to regions outside the long dominant north-east and West Coast.

Today’s Democratic Party seems radically incapable of governing. In truth, they do not seem to care to govern. Their agenda is more lofty and useless:

The reason for this shift lies in the clear failure of Democrats, writ large in the inferno now consuming large swathes of LA. In states like California, Democratic politicians no longer prioritise such things as public safety and key infrastructure, including roads, ports and, most importantly at the moment, water systems. Indeed, today’s ‘progressives’ generally shy away from things like building dams or maintaining water pressure in the name of protecting the environment. They are far more focussed on climate change and ‘social justice’.

The sign of this failure lies in the effort to blame the fires on climate change, or even on global warming. Kotkin considers this to be so much nonsense:

Of course, California progressives will justify this by blaming the fires on climate change, even though a leading fire expert at the US Geological Survey suggests this claim is unsupported. Fires have been a regular feature of life in southern California for at least 20million years. Moreover, given the recent extremely dry weather conditions, LA should have been prepared for a conflagration. It was not. A councilperson representing the Palisades has noted the ‘chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure’.

As has been noted elsewhere, the policies designed to save the climate have contributed to the destruction:

Indeed, the devastating impact of the fires is largely a result of environmental policies that discouraged such safety practices as controlled burns. California governor Gavin Newsom has cut funding for fighting wildfires by over $100million this past year, while demanding subsidies for electric cars. At the same time, California’s roads are among the worst in the US, and a planned high-speed railway continues to gobble up tens of billions of dollars.

The new political order, as Kotkin calls it, is geographical. It turns away from the coasts and enhances the value of states like Texas and Florida, Georgia, even Tennessee and the Carolinas:

Initially, the East Coast’s supremacy was challenged not so much from the South, but from the West Coast. But the Pacific states have been losing their mojo more recently. Over the past four decades, income and job growth in the southern giants, Texas and Florida, were 50 per cent higher than they were in New York or California. In the past decade, the six fastest-growing southern states – Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee – added more to national GDP than the north-east.

Business service companies are relocating to the South and Southwest:

Even the remaining pillars of the blue economy, such as business services, are under assault from Utah, the Carolinas, Texas and Florida. Austin, Salt Lake, Raleigh and Charlotte have boosted their professional sector far faster than San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Chicago. The Dallas metroplex is now home to 24 Fortune 500 companies’ headquarters, trailing only New York and Chicago. Forty years ago, the Dallas metroplex had fewer than five.

Chicago used to be the second largest financial services locale. Now, that honor belongs to Fort Worth, Texas. And tech companies are moving out of Silicon Valley:

Most alarming of all for California has been the shift in the tech industry. According to one recent analysis, Texas and Florida are now America’s high-growth hotspots and are also attracting the most tech workers. Some tech linchpins have already moved their headquarters from Silicon Valley to Texas, including HP Enterprises, Tesla and Space X.

As might be expected the great blue states are losing population while the Southern and Southwestern states are gaining. 

Young people are moving to these states. Kotkin remarks that these people are most likely to reproduce, thus providing their new home states with an increasing population.

Child-bearing is far more common in the MAGA strongholds of the South, Texas, the Great Plains and parts of the mountain states. These places will continue to add future workers faster in the future than increasingly childless blue states.

We should add that these other states cost far less than do places like New York. One of the reasons people are leaving blue states involves onerous taxation coupled with inferior services. Parents of school age children leave the blue states to escape inferior education.

And Kotkin makes a point I have made several times already:

Comparing California’s pathetic response to the LA fires with Ron DeSantis’s deft handling of hurricanes in Florida reveals a true gap in effective governance.

The blue states are in thrall to labor unions. They are crippled by excessive spending on government services and on pensions. 

So, America is undergoing a sea change. People are abandoning the large blue states and moving to red states. Political power will follow.

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