Will Californians ever wise up?
I fear the answer is “no.” Voting Democratic is a deeply-ingrained habit, plus the mail-in voting system solidifies Democrat control even further.
But news such as this should give people pause and let them know they are being ripped off, big-time:
The City Journal, a public policy magazine published by the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, recently investigated the striking array of entitlements available to illegal alien families in California. What they uncovered was staggering.
Perhaps their most disturbing discovery was that an illegal alien couple with two U.S.-born children and one illegal alien grandparent is eligible to receive benefits worth up to $100,000 in a single calendar year.
The authors, Christopher F. Rufo, Kenneth Schrupp, and Austen Hufford, call this extensive safety net California’s “Shadow Welfare System.” It includes “health care, rental assistance, college grants, tax credits, low-cost car insurance, and even smartphones.” And they’ve estimated the annual cost to California taxpayers to be nearly $11 billion.
I can’t recall when I first heard the term “virtue signaling.” I think it wasn’t long after I began blogging, more than twenty years ago. It has occurred to me more and more over the years that virtue-signaling is at the heart of the appeal to the Democrat voter. The idea is that one is proving oneself to be a good person, a kind person, a generous person, a non-bigoted person – and that those who vote otherwise are neither good, nor kind, nor generous, and that they are bigots.
This is also the source of the hatred many Democrats have for Republican voters. These convictions have broken up family and estranged old friends who should know better.
Plus California has long been driving out its residents who have wised up.
Based on my very recent visit to the far Left Coast, no, Californians will not wise up.
For those in California, here is the reformCalifornia voter guide. Pick the one for your county. Regardless of the top of a ticket, you can still vote in republican members of the assembly and the state Senate to overcome the Dems supermajority. Also, there are many important ballot measures, especially proposition 39 the voter ID initiative.
https://www.reformcalifornia.org/voter-guides-list
— neo
That’s the appeal to the educated progressive class. But while they are the dominant influence in the Demcratic Party, they’re still only one faction.
The appeal to working class whites, minorities, and so forth is much more transactional, their votes are mostly based on economics. There’s a secondary element of ‘tribal loyalty’ driven by the black leadership (such as it still is), but it’s mostly economics.
I can still easily remember, back in the 70s and 80s, working class (everyone I knew was working class) relatives and people I knew in the adult world increasingly hated what the Dems were doing, socially, in terms of national defense, all the usual issues, but they really had to struggle to bring themselves to vote GOP. It wasn’t that they were afraid of being seen as bad people, or racists, or whatever. It was that they were terrified of the GOP.
The GOP were seen as anti-union, anti-worker, on the side of the employers and against the interests of the employees. They were seen as being against Social Security, against Medicare, against ordinary people. The ‘party of the rich’. By ‘party of the rich’ they meant ‘party of the employer’.
This has been the GOP’s largest single problem in all the years since. Gradually, the Dems drove out the white working class, and now they’ve begun to drive out the black and ‘latino’ working class with the same stuff. But the Business Agenda that the upper-level Establishment GOP longs to implement is still desperately unpopular.
The GOP is competitive on social issues, on defense issues, on personal property rights, on gun rights, but the GOPe’s preferred economics are politically toxic.
Neo
I am reminded of what Tom Lehrer wrote 60+ years ago. Tom Lehrer: Folk Song Army
PJ Media quoted Tom Lehrer today for an article headline. Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize! Only Be Sure Always to Call It, Please, “Research.” While Tom Lehrer would be pleased that his songs are not forgotten, he would probably also be upset that an eevull right-wing news source quoted him.
I am reminded of my NYC/SoHo artist cousin, who, in spite of her age, might be called the poster child for virtue-signaling. “We NYC artists are so upset that Trump won.” (She also admitted in a separate conversation that most NYC artists are trust-fund babies. )
Milton said it best:
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Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. (Satan)
–John Milton, “Paradise Lost, Book 1” (1667)
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That’s how I understand what Democrats have done to California, as well as the rest of America.
What should we “know better”?
“The GOP is competitive on social issues, on defense issues, on personal property rights, on gun rights, but the GOPe’s preferred economics are politically toxic.”
If by “preferred economics” you mean open borders and no tariffs on imports, then yes, that’s politically toxic, and it describes the Democrat establishment position, as well as the half of the GOP who are still Bushies e.g. Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, John Thune, et al.
@Gringo : She also admitted in a separate conversation that most NYC artists are trust-fund babies.
I recall Rick Beato or some other YouTuber remarking that most young musicians surviving in today’s economic climate are indeed trust-fund kids.
It wouldn’t surprise me. It does matter.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” H.L. Mencken, A Little Book In C Major
@ Neo > ” The idea is that one is proving oneself to be a good person, a kind person, a generous person, a non-bigoted person – ”
— by giving to illegal aliens and many many many others (including themselves) the money they take from productive people (Republican and Democrat) or borrow from their (or, given some leftist proclivities, mostly our) grandchildren.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HTTLDvDXUAAkvc_?format=jpg&name=medium
The cheaters count on maintaining this perception, virtue signaling etc. What I believe is that vote fraud was tested and perfected here, for example there were news stories of stack of ballots with different names were being dropped off at vacant lots in the early 2000s, also many people go to vote and are told they already voted. Since then they have passed laws preventing showing IDs and other methods of detecting the fraud. See the latest mayors election and Newsom’s recall, they just print the ballots they need to overcome a republican getting elected or a crooked one getting recalled. In the mayors election, all the late ballots were identical for a rotten candidate and a tax increase. There is basically no way to legally prove it did or didn’t happen. Its all statistically impossible though. Voter ID is on the ballot this year, its an 80 percent poll, I predict it will fail due to fraud, in order to protect the fraud. Lots of republicans in California but the fraud cannot be overcome.
Things have to get really bad in places run by leftists before enough voters come to their senses. That can take decades or more. Think Argentina in the 100 years before Milei; El Salvador before Bukele; maybe now Brazil. Closer to home, NYC from the 60s until Giuliani; Detroit for about 40 years until it went bankrupt. I think California has not nearly hit bottom.
I live here and no, they will never rise up.
There’s nothing virtuous about ranking in the top 5 for highest electricity prices, an extra $2 a gallon for gasoline and diesel, high taxes, a serious housing crunch. All of which doesn’t seem to bother Democrat voters. So yes, it does seem virtue signaling is the only reason. They demonize Trump and by extension anyone aligned with him. It’s a convenient deflection. But it works.
“There’s nothing virtuous about ranking in the top 5 for highest electricity prices, an extra $2 a gallon for gasoline and diesel, high taxes, a serious housing crunch. All of which doesn’t seem to bother Democrat voters. So yes, it does seem virtue signaling is the only reason. They demonize Trump and by extension anyone aligned with him. It’s a convenient deflection. But it works.”
And yes, it goes back to what I’ve witnessed the last two days vis North Carolina leftists upset about Florida’s proposed Ad 3 to greatly reduce property taxes. It was all about those evil Republicans trying to help the rich at the expense of the poor. Never mind the amendment would cut property taxes for the lower income to virtually zero. Facts did not matter.
All you need to know about the mindset of democrats may be gleaned from a quick perusal of Gad Saad’s theory of the parasitic mind. His example from neuro-biology: Wood crickets normally hate water. When a hairworm parasitizes a cricket, it alters the host’s brain so the cricket jumps into the water and drowns, completing the parasite’s reproductive cycle. Califonrians’ brains have been parasitized by their education system, political affiliation and popular/corporate media and entertaiment so that they willingly continue to vote to destroy themselves in order to facilitate the continuation of an alien (pun intended) species.
It’s virtue screaming, at 250,000 decibels. And 17 million imbeciles.
huxley
Rick Beato: Why Only Rich Kids Make It In Music Today
Charles Krauthammer is credited with the observation:
“Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think Conservatives are evil.”
California conservatives are powerless. California liberals mean to keep it that way.
— Sgt. Joe Friday
‘Free trade’ and open borders are part of it, yes. The Chamber of Commerce and the other big donors want no borders, ‘any willing worker’ to drive down wages, more globalism generally. That’s horrifically unpopular.
But it also includes union-breaking, which is something a lot of Republicans who support Trump still don’t want to hear. It includes total deregulation of business and no worker protections. The median voter may think unions take things too far, but that doesn’t mean they oppose them in concept. They can recognize the OSHA gets wildly carried away, and want to reform it, but still oppose removing it, because they deeply distrust the investor/employer class.
And yes, the modern-day Dem Establishment believes in exactly the same things as the modern-day GOP Establishment. They just argue over fine details and who is going to drive the bus. They both agree on where they want to take the bus, they just have a few differences about the route and who should drive.
That was not always the case, though. Up until the 1970s, the GOP was the globalist/internationalist party, the Dems the nationalists, at least on economics. The heart and soul of the Democratic Party from 1930 to about 1970 was union labor and working class voters of all races. In the 1970s the professional/managerial class started taking control of the Party and began pushing the working class out (without necessarily intending to).
As the former Dem working class voters moved toward the GOP, it went from being permanent minority party to competitive, but the interests of the investor class and the working class voters were still (and are still) in basic conflict.
One commentator recently opined that a winning message for the GOP in 2026 and 2028 would be: “We won’t allow employers to lay you off and replace you with illegals.”
Which would be true, but the GOP has trouble doing it because their big donors and the ones who pull the strings on the Establishment wing want to lay off their employees and replace them with illegals who’ll work cheaper with fewer demands.
This fundamental economic conflict has kept the GOP barely competitive with the Dems, in spite of all the Democratic insanity, for decades. It’s why Romney was defeated before he started in 2012, why John McCain had already lost before he started in 2008. It’s why the GOP won 3 upset elections in a row (2000, 2002, and 2004), but collapsed and lost control of Congress when Bush II started trying to implement their economic agenda after 2004. It’s why Dole couldn’t make a dent against Clinton and why Ross Perot got 19% of the popular vote in 1992. It’s why Jeb Bush spent hundreds of millions of dollars for 3 delegates in 2016, and why Trump steamrolled the GOP establishment in 2016 and 2024.