RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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’.

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’.

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.

There’s one word for this: failure. Unsurprisingly, conservative activists, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have all denounced Los Angeles authorities’ bizarrely slow and ineffective response to the fires, and with some justification. Some claims were off-base, such as the suggestion that California’s DEI policies are directly to blame. But the progressive complaint that the right is ‘politicising’ the tragedy also makes little sense. The reasons for the devastating impact of the fires are indeed rooted in conscious decisions taken by Democratic politicians.

The LA fires are likely to accelerate the shift in American politics, demography and economy away from the old centres of wealth – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, Chicago – and towards a new constellation of former laggard states, mostly from the South, the intermountain west and Texas. These provide the base for Trumpism. Indeed, the current ring-kissing at Mar-a-Lago in Florida symbolises this shift in regional power.

There are historical precedents for the shift in power we are now witnessing. At the 1829 inauguration of roughhewn Westerner Andrew Jackson, writes Arthur Schlesinger in The Age of Jackson, ‘people from faraway states came to Washington’. Drawing on the support of southern farmers and the working classes of the cities of the east and north, Jackson’s victory represented a blow against the power of the banks and the New England elites. Now, nearly 200 years later, we are seeing a shift in power just as significant, as the parvenues of the South, Texas, Arizona and Nevada challenge the established power centres.

Like Jackson’s Hermitage estate in Tennessee, Trump’s Florida retreat has become the centre of the new political order. Like Trump, Jackson was, to put it politely, a bullying asshole, even sparking fears of a potential coup d’état. But he was also something of a political genius, delivering the nationalist goods, pushing territorial expansion, opening new land and undermining the East Coast’s grip on the banking system.

After Jackson, this struggle continued, and when the South seceded, the populist urge redirected itself to another Westerner, Abraham Lincoln. He not only defeated the South, but also opened America’s West to settlement and, like Trump, defended a strict tariff regime. For much of the next century, the northern intellectual and financial powers dominated both Republican and Democratic parties. Meanwhile, the South, as political scientist VO Key once noted, was left to provide ‘politics as a comic opera’ filled with bizarre folksy racists and rubes.

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.

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.

This ascendancy even extends to finance, which long remained in its traditional home in the north-east and California. Dallas-Fort Worth recently dethroned Chicago as the second-largest financial centre in the US. It has even started to raise capital to build a new stock exchange.

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.

More damaging still for the old power centres is demographic decline. Since 2000, California, New Jersey, Illinois and New York have lost over 10million net migrants, while Florida has gained almost 3.5million, Texas an additional three million, while the Carolinas gained roughly one million each.

By 2023, demographic growth in five southern states (Texas, Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina), along with Arizona in the west, exceeded the growth in all of the other 44 states and the District of Columbia, according to the US census. Overall, southern states accounted for 87 per cent of all US population growth. Virtually all the 25 fastest-growing cities are in Arizona, Texas, the Carolinas and Florida.

The conventional notion of red states as racist backwaters is now outdated. The Brookings Institution notes that recent streams of immigrants from abroad are choosing to go primarily to Texas and other sunbelt locales. African Americans are returning to the South, a region they once fled en masse. Today, it is among the least-segregated parts of America.

Equally important has been the movement of affluent young professionals to the South. Millennials, notes Brookings, are moving away from places like New York and Los Angeles, with Austin, Houston and Dallas among the leading gainers.

In an age of reduced population growth, the movement of young families could provide certain regions with a critical advantage. 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.

Of more immediate concern may be the movement of affluent citizens, including retirees, injecting billions into the economies of states like Florida, Texas as well as Tennessee and the Carolinas. Last year, these internal migrants took almost $24 billion out of California, $14 billion out of New York and $10 billion out of Illinois.

Just as at the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, we are now seeing the rise of a whole new power alignment. As soon as 2040, Texas should pass California as America’s most-populous state. Failures like the response to the LA fires or the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020 are not great advertisements for blue-state policies. 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.

Rather than counting on Trump’s intemperance to lead to their return to power, Democrats need to rediscover how to govern efficiently and effectively. In California, they need to abandon climate catastrophism and start doing things like building dams, spending on reservoirs, clearing brush and, as the native peoples did in the past, performing controlled burns.

For the blue states and the Democrats, the reckoning is nigh. Most big blue states suffer deep structural budget deficits that may require a massive bailout to cover over-generous pensions and ever-expanding welfare spending. In contrast, competitor states like Texas and Florida have grown their budgets while preserving large surpluses. Under Trump, the federal government’s willingness to bail out cities like Los Angeles or Chicago, already at crisis levels, will simply not be there.

Of course, Democrats and the blue states are not beyond saving. Republicans are celebrating Trump’s presidency as if they’ve won a huge victory for their political agenda. In reality, the Democratic Party is very much alive, even if not very well. The presidential election was actually quite close, with Trump winning the popular vote by just 1.5 percentage points.

Democrats also need to recognise that without appealing to the South, Texas and other deep red states, they will be left in the wilderness. In recent history, it has been Democrats from southern states – think Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton – who managed to appeal both to working people and voters in red states.

The LA fires could provide a wake-up call for the Democrats. They show that government failures can impact their ‘progressive’ wealthy base, and not just poor people, coal miners and truck drivers.

To halt the erosion in their support, the Democrats need to look to figures, such as Kentucky’s Andrew Beshear or Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, who could appeal to the emergent majorities in the South, Texas and suburban and exurban small towns. Republicans are also vulnerable, even in parts of the South, due to repressive laws, such as bans on abortion and book bans in schools, largely promoted by religious zealots.

A Democratic Party that focussed on infrastructure and economic growth could again compete in the now emergent regions of the US. But first Democrats have to confront their failure to govern well. If not, the party may find itself stuck with Trumpism not just for four years, but for many years beyond, too.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.