California, land of inequality

This trend doesn’t explain the hollowing out of the state’s middle class so much as establish the precondition for it. While the rich and the poor may come together at the ballot box, it is indisputably (and unsurprisingly) the former who end up manning the state’s levers of power. This has given rise to a class of what my Orange County Register colleague (and self-identified “Truman Democrat”) Joel Kotkin refers to as “gentry liberals,” a left-wing governing caste whose public-policy predilections owe more to considerations of taste than of economic necessity.

The unhappy reality of life under the gentry is that the sorts of measures needed to foster economic growth — not to mention affordable middle-class lifestyles — are regarded as gauche in Sacramento. The California of the governing class’s dreams is a place where white-collar workers take public transit through densely packed urban centers, leaving nary a carbon footprint to be found in their wake. That is, a California where rank-and-file citizens have adopted the tastes of the state’s elites — despite the fact that they don’t have the resources to afford them. What it most certainly is not is a California like the one that once beguiled the nation — one with abundant, affordable suburban housing, open roads, middle-class jobs aplenty, and good schools.

It’s harmless enough, of course, for the California cognoscenti to evangelize in behalf of their artisanal lifestyles. It’s another matter entirely to insist that such tastes drive lawmaking. That, however, is precisely what’s happened in the Golden State — and that’s the trend that’s increasingly driving California’s middle class across state lines.