Friday, July 14, 2017

Third-World Politics in CA

Politico is reporting California Democrats are battling among themselves, dividing into factions. This is being treated as somehow unusual or newsworthy. It may be newsworthy, but it is exactly what one should expect.

California has become, de facto, a one-party state. Republicans exist and elect a few Reps. to Congress but are such a small minority that Democrat supermajorities exist in both legislative houses in Sacramento. No statewide office is held by a Republican.

We know what happens when one party dominates a polity, we saw it in Mexico with the PRI's dominance for decades, in Japan with similar decades-long one party control, and it persists in China today. Under these circumstances, all decision-making occurs in negotiations among factions of the ruling party.

That is how California will experience politics for the foreseeable future, it has become a quasi-representative government. For the past several decades New York has operated this way. It works, after a fashion, but often becomes corrupt as "rascals" don't much get thrown out of office.

Several state officials in NY have gone to jail for corruption in the last decade. Also, a stream of elected officials in Illinois have left office in handcuffs, headed for the state penitentiary. This "feature" shouldn't take too long to surface in CA, perhaps a decade.