Lopez: They blame Democrats for all of California’s problems. But GOP is MIA

You know what the problem is with California?

Democrats — or so I’m told.

Homelessness, crime on public transit, poverty — in every case, blame the Dems.

Former President Donald Trump loves bashing the Golden State. He is branding Vice President Kamala Harris as a home-grown 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 whole nation into a hellhole like California, as my colleague Mark Barabak recently noted.

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

OK, I’m game. Let’s study history — and current events.

First off, I admit that Democrats deserve to be on the hot seat.

They hold every statewide elective office and dominate the Legislature in a rich state that stands as the fifth largest economy in the world (not bad for a hellhole). And yet California has massive rates of poverty, cuckoo housing costs that are forcing people to flee, and a shameful number of homeless people, many suffering from addiction, mental illness or both.

But none of that happened overnight, nor did it happen exclusively under Democratic leadership.

“Major problems and issues surrounding us locally, statewide and nationally are more complex than simply looking at and blaming those now running the political shows,” said Jaime Regalado, former director of Cal State L.A.’s Pat Brown Institute. “Historical context is important.”

Weaker middle class

I grew up in the San Francisco suburb of Pittsburg so long ago that the state population was 10 million (today 10 million people live in L.A. County alone). Many of the people I went to school with ended up working for the local industrial giants — U.S. Steel, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical and Johns Manville.

Those jobs paid them enough to buy houses, raise families and send their kids to California’s well-funded junior and state colleges. But they also existed in part because much of the world was in ruins after World War II and the United States had little competition. Over the next several decades, due largely to shifting global economics and cheap foreign labor, domestic blue collar jobs in industry, manufacturing and aerospace dried up.

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

“There’s a simply unrealistic expectation about what various levels of government can do — particularly local government,” said Jack Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. “You can have the greatest mayor in the world, and that mayor is not going to be able to solve the problem of poverty.”

For decades, through Democratic and Republican leadership, California made the mistake of not building enough housing to keep up with the flood of people who moved here to fill jobs in the state’s burgeoning economy. It’s one of many factors in rising home prices and homelessness today.

Another reason is that in the 1960s, civil libertarians and others argued that people with mental illness were being neglected and abused in the state’s mental hospitals. Three California state legislators, one Republican and two Democrats, produced the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, signed by Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan, which put limits on involuntary psychiatric treatment and led to the closing of hospitals.

But the promised community treatment centers didn’t materialize, so for decades, untreated mentally ill people have landed in jails and prisons, on the streets and in the morgue. Federal mental health funding was gutted by Reagan when he became president, even as local governments struggled with the impact of Proposition 13, the property tax relief initiative that drained municipal treasuries.

“We so rarely talk about the crisis of homelessness in the ’80s under Reagan,” said Regina Freer, who teaches urban politics at Occidental College. “We always want to flatten and simplify what are really complex challenges. That’s why I’m in the classroom — because I don’t want my students to fall into some of those same traps of over-simplification.”

‘A blame game’

Another over-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 agri-business industry, which looks the other way while writing campaign checks to GOP lawmakers. Many more come to escape narco-violence in Mexico, where as many as 70% of the guns are sourced from the United States.

It’s more than a little bit hypocritical to bash crazy, reckless California on public safety when no amount of carnage in the nation, including mass shootings at shopping malls and schools (on Wednesday it was two students and two teachers dead at a Georgia high school), can loosen the gun lobby’s death grip on GOP lawmakers.

“What’s changed about our society is that instead of people sitting down and trying to solve problems … it’s all about a blame game,” said Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California. And people blame “the party or political group they’re not part of” for everything.

So maybe you’re reading this and saying, “OK, but Reagan and Nixon and economic shifts are old stories. California’s Dems have been in the driver’s seat for years, and they’re soft on crime and the border, full of empty promises and way too woke.”

Fine, but if that’s your perspective, whose fault is it that in California, Democrats are in charge?

I have the answer for you.

It’s Republicans.

In a state that proudly celebrates inclusion and leads the resistance to the politics of race-based scapegoating, climate change denial and the stripping of women’s reproductive rights, the out-of-touch GOP has been hell-bent on shrinking its tent. Reagan, who signed an abortion rights bill as governor and an immigrant amnesty bill as president, would be booted out of today’s GOP.

The California GOP alienated many Latinos in the 1990s with Proposition 187’s ban on services for undocumented immigrants and Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s “they keep coming” TV ad. At the GOP’s fall convention last year, an attempt to remove opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage from the party platform was shot down.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, left Sacramento in 2011 and no GOP candidate has won statewide office since then. None of them has offered winning solutions to deep-seated problems, and it might be too late for a party resurgence because as the electorate has grown more diverse, GOP voter registration has dwindled to roughly 25%.

You can’t blame Democrats for that.

Steve Lopez is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.