In which a political class's trustworthiness goes up in flames
Wincenty Dmochowski: Forest Fire, 1860. Image by Lithuanian National Museum of Art
The Free Press editors suggest that the L.A. fires have revealed a broken governing model in CA: a fecklessness; a lack of professionalism; and a shocking inability to admit mistakes, pivot away from orthodoxies, and actually listen to alternative voices.
LA authorities have failed not only at protecting its residents but at inspiring confidence that they had the situation in hand.
We start with Mayor Karen Bass. As the Palisades fire began to consume wide swaths of America’s second-largest city, she was in Ghana to watch the inauguration of that country’s new president.
Bass left Los Angeles on Saturday—two days after the National Weather Service warned that strong winds and “extreme fire weather conditions” would soon threaten the city. On Sunday, the NWS announced a fire weather watch. By Monday, the warnings had become much more urgent, with the NWS tweeting in all-caps that “A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm” would hit L.A. imminently.
Yet Bass remained halfway around the world, effectively leaving the crisis to her deputies. They, in turn, insisted Bass could run the city from anywhere via phone and tablet.
But this isn’t just about Bass. A great city can survive a bad mayor, or even a series of bad mayors. This is a story about the failure of California to prevent, or capably mitigate, a long-predicted catastrophe, and how a state that was once a model of good governance came to prioritize the boutique concerns of ambitious politicians over the basics of what government must do.
There are always excuses in moments like these, some more valid than others. California is, in a sense, built to burn: Its warm climate and vast woodlands can, and often are, a deadly combination. Any city, regardless of who’s running it, would struggle with winds reaching 100 miles per hour, especially one sitting on a tinderbox of dry vegetation. Climate change exacerbates the issue.
But none of that explains how one of America’s great cities—the biggest in the fifth-largest economy in the world—is burning to the ground. The failure here, at heart, is an entirely human one.
California loves to spend, increasingly moving toward a model of governance where good money constantly chases after bad. Newsom has spent some $22 billion to combat homelessness since he took office and yet, there has been a 3 percent increase in homelessness in the last year. Newsom also made California the first state to have its Medicaid program cover illegal immigrants. This blatant sop to progressive activists is now expected to cost Californians $6.5 billion a year.
Los Angeles has the same problem with nonessential spending, albeit at a smaller scale. The city allocated $1.3 billion to combat homelessness last year, although the city comptroller found that half of that money has gone unspent. The Los Angeles Fire Department got a good deal less than that—$837 million—a budget that has since been cut by $17 million.
Would that $17 million have made a difference? Who knows. Answers are increasingly hard to come by in California. When asked by Anderson Cooper why the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry, Newsom responded that “the local folks are trying to figure that out.” The buck always stops somewhere else in the Golden State.
California seemingly always has money for expensive Band-Aids and pricey, ineffective NGO grants. But they’ve neglected the basics: crime (the murder rate is up more than 15 percent since Newsom took office); public education (per-pupil spending has gone up under Newsom even as test scores have plummeted); and now firefighting.
In 1969, New York mayor John Lindsay—like Newsom, a young and attractive liberal who dreamed of the presidency—saw his political career effectively end when a blizzard dropped 15 inches of snow on the city. Streets went unplowed for days, leaving the city paralyzed. Lindsay’s White House dreams ended then and there, amid heckles from his constituents. He’d lost his focus on the basics.
None of Lindsay’s successors ever let such a weather disaster occur again. Big Apple politicians had learned a lesson. Now it’s the California political class’s turn.
Read the whole thing here.
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