Will the wildfires finally wake up Los Angeles? Adam Carolla, evacuated from home and ranting into his mic in a Los Angeles hotel room, seems to think so.
When the fast winds that fueled two of L.A. County’s largest wildfires on record die down, wealthy residents of Pacific Palisades rushing to rebuild their homes will crash headlong into a thicket of state, county, and local permitting and building codes. Then, Carolla predicts, and only then will they vote differently, with the neighborhood in ruins and the state’s phalanx of environmental regulation turned against them.
It’s sad that misinformed Angelenos required a conflagration to come to their senses.
It’s a common fantasy. Rich lefties getting their comeuppance and said comeuppance finally beating sense into the next election result is a daydream outnumbered conservatives know too well. In bizarro, chronically mismanaged California, it’s bread and butter.
But such an outcome is a long way off, even as mainstream coverage untangles the lasagna of bad policy, corruption, ill-maintained infrastructure, and outrageous DEI priorities that overshadowed prevention and doomed the fight against the Palisades and Eaton fires. Like Sacramento, one party and one party alone runs Los Angeles. Fairly or not, that’s where the blame will land for empty reservoirs, hydrants that ran dry, and the frenzied evacuations of nearly 200,000 people.
Curtains for Bass and Newsom?
While no one can control 100-mph winds or California’s predictably dry weather, a sense of outrage over preventable measures that could have saved homes is understandable. Like the power lines a co-worker of mine saw banging against trees in Studio City last week, talk of recall is already sparking.
Political careers have been ruined for far less. A search for culprits is rarely fair or thoughtful, and yet Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), who upon rushing back from Ghana appeared dumbstruck, before reading a speech that wasn’t even proofread, and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who has been more vocal about destroying dams along the far-north Klamath River to restore salmon than ramping up reservoir storage, aren’t doing themselves any favors.
In the midst of this, Carolla taps the exasperation that Angelenos, no longer baffled by high taxes, corruption scandals, drug RVs, or the recent looting of evacuated homes, cannot deny. “Will dumb, rich voters finally get it?” he asked. “Now will they understand?”
Such judgments borrow a point Victor Davis Hanson has made for decades about all of California — the Golden State’s disparate geography (affluent coastal plains, separated by mountains from high desert and the Central Valley) shields urban voters from the obvious consequences of green, radical-chic policy choices. Carolla, like Hanson, holds the classical assumption that humans are inherently limited and selfish in scope. Until they have skin in the game, those professing selflessness will neither act nor necessarily know how to act wisely for the good of others.
Fair enough — but will outrage be sufficient to change a leadership given carte blanche by voters and increasingly committed to progressive goals and posturing? Will smoldering ruins along Pacific Coast Highway and landmarks gone forever be enough for a political 180?
Possibly.
But somehow, I doubt it.
Geography blunts politics
Factors that will likely stop fire-scarred residents from changing political allegiance are the same ones that compose Southern California’s vast paradox: size, population, and varied geography. Unlike New York or San Francisco, where the squalor and violence of a permissive approach to crime and drug use can’t help but bottle up and turn ugly for everyone, L.A. may be too spread out to hit rock bottom.
As windswept fires in multiple spots remind us, the Southland’s hills, valleys, and microclimates make for sequestered enclaves. Even with dense, high-profile locations, no single urban cluster towers over the others. As anyone who has spent time in SoCal knows, downtown L.A. is no stone’s throw (in miles or commuting time) from Santa Monica, the port of Long Beach, Disneyland, or anywhere else.
Shared space or a total lack thereof has political dimensions. New Yorkers celebrating Daniel Penny’s acquittal, or the Bay Area voters who ousted Mayors London Breed and Sheng Thao (a few years ago, San Francisco even recalled its openly radical D.A. Chesa Boudin) are much more likely to have ridden the subways or walked downtown recently than people in SoCal.
Pacific Palisades residents may change their tune, but left-leaning voters clustered in Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, Koreatown, Venice, Manhattan Beach, North Hollywood, East L.A., Culver City, Whittier, and even far-off Claremont will have much less reason to. They may be shocked and horrified, but the distance between them and evacuation zones means that few will be harmed or seriously inconvenienced.
Space and geography, with infinite square miles to spread the fruits of poor governance, make widespread change based on outrage alone unlikely.
Tarnished dreams
On the other hand, SoCal’s vastness — Los Angeles, Orange County, Ventura, and the Inland Empire tally some 18 million people spread over 6,000 square miles — is an unlikely blessing. As a Pasadena denizen once told me while we camped out for seats at the Rose Parade: “We’re too spread out for a terrorist attack. A bomb could go off in downtown L.A. and we wouldn’t hear it. We’d still be sitting here watching the parade.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Another parade nut once told us that she moved here from the Midwest after noticing how bright and warm it looked in January. “I was watching this parade on TV and I couldn’t believe the weather!” she recalled. “Then I looked on the map and saw how huge L.A. was. So many cities, neighborhoods, freeways. I knew I’d find space for us down here.”
Her remarks may sound naïve, but how many millions came west and settled here for similar reasons? Urbanists hate L.A.’s sprawling, charmless suburbs, but all those strip malls and tract houses cropped up for the simple reason that someone, often committing to life in a far-off place with opportunity, fair weather, good prospects, and plenty of land, wanted them.
Los Angeles, stretched over 500 square miles, is not so welcoming today. The roads, water, utilities, schools, and public space that made a dry, fire-prone region safe and livable stagger on, less reliable and more expensive than ever. But potholes in L.A. far outpace potholes in El Segundo. Cities like Huntington Beach, which became a rallying point for COVID lockdown resistance, prosecute crime and force itinerants to move along.
For now, and with so many places more competently run than Los Angeles to escape to, a mass movement led by Carolla’s angry one-percenters seems unlikely. Inertia, rather, pushed along by over a million absent Californians who left instead of staying to fight an entrenched, union-fortified leadership, seems more likely.
Sorry, Adam.
Nothing short of a miracle
It’s also likely that fire outrage will add momentum to shifting headwinds. November’s election, which saw the same 6 million Californians vote for Donald Trump who voted for him in 2020, stunned everyone with all 58 counties passing Proposition 36 — a poke in Newsom’s eye that made theft and other offenses felonies again. In a surprise to some, but no surprise to those who remember past successes like the passage of Proposition 8 or the recall of Governor Gray Davis in 2003, Californians everywhere rallied together around a common issue.
Lack of fire prevention, which concerns Northern California residents as much as if not more than their southern counterparts, could be another rallying point. But given space and geography, it would take a lot more for that common issue to become a broad referendum on L.A.’s or, for that matter, California’s hated — and yet beloved — Democratic Party overlords.
If anything, the colossal mismanagement on full display in Pacific Palisades is a potent reminder that as broad and idyllic as it is, nature never intended Los Angeles, or San Francisco for that matter, for humans. Without water and power pumped in from places environmentalists would rather not know about, California’s dry coastline would be uninhabitable. The Spanish sailors who first explored it noted the fires, lack of water, and overall harshness in their journals.
To be populated, let alone the world’s fifth-largest economy, California needed to tame itself. Social justice, identity politics, and reduced livability for the sake of Mother Gaia are nothing short of untaming — regressions to a natural state none of us could imagine.
It’s sad that misinformed Angelenos required a conflagration to come to their senses. L.A. may see a push for legislation or fire-prevention initiatives on the next ballot. Fast-tracking building permits for wealthy residents who lost their homes might be another easy fix, a win that wouldn’t require structural change or voter soul-searching.
We might even see L.A.’s hapless fire chief (the one who said that getting more women and LGBTQ folk on the force was her top priority) hang up her hat. But without renewed humility, a renewed sense of our vulnerability to nature’s power, and a renewed affection for the large, sprawling Southern California that already exists — the one vision and infrastructure made livable in a kind of miracle — we won’t elect the leaders we need.
With any luck, the embers along Sunset Boulevard will be L.A.’s rock bottom — final proof that we Californians ignore place, geography, and common sense at our own peril.
California, California wildfires, Los angeles, Gavin newsom, Karen bass, Recall newsom, Recall bass, Democratic party, Liberals, Palisades fire, Eaton fire, Rebuild, Opinion & analysis
