The Fall of California
... California isn’t just a place, but a dream. In the American mythos, California represented the end of the journey, the land where the dispossessed and forgotten could start again, where “Okies” who fled the Depression searched for relief and veterans of the Second World War discovered a middle-class paradise....
The result is “white flight” on a statewide scale. Half a million white Californians left the state from 2000 to 2008, while the state’s population grew overall. Whites were 48 percent of the population in 2000, but only 40 percent in 2008. Hispanics were 32 percent in 2000 but 37 percent in 2008. On July 1, 2014, Hispanics became the largest racial group in the state. They are projected to be a majority by 2060....
What happened is that 800,000 working-class Californians left for other states between 2005 and 2015....
California’s burgeoning minorities are of course automatically hostile to Republicans....
While it wouldn’t have restored the golden age, Proposition 187, if implemented, could have prevented California from becoming an outright Hispanic state.
The American middle-class paradise is now a society on the Latin American model, with elites enjoying cheap labor, gated communities, and a privileged existence, lording it over the 21st century’s equivalent of landless peasants. The fact that much of this later group is non-white, broke the law to enter this country, and have deep-seated grievances against the European-American population suggests there is almost no possibility of rebuilding the spirit of civic solidarity needed for California to solve its social problems...