COTTonLINE has often cited with approval the writings of Victor Davis Hanson concerning the decline of California, and he continues to write in that vein, where his latest bemoans CA as "a cruel, medieval state." Mostly, he is correct, but his view of the 'golden' state needs to be put in context.
The DrsC voluntarily spend several months a year in CA, something we would not do if things everywhere in CA were as Hanson describes. They aren't.
To comprehend his view of CA, realize Hanson's family farm is located in the southern part of the great CA central valley known as the San Joaquin Valley. This is "grapes of wrath" country - orchards, vineyards and truck farming. He appears to split his time between there and his current institutional home, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto.
Hanson's Fresno area is a long-time destination for the least skilled immigrants who pick crops, prune vines and trees, and generally do farm labor. Ninety years ago these were Steinbeck's Okies, in the post-war era they are Hispanic illegals.
Time was, most Hispanics would go home to Mexico for the winter and return in spring when farm work revived. That's no longer easy to do, so they stay in el Norte all year and, lacking work, get in trouble.
Hanson commutes between one of the poorest rural parts of CA and one of its richest urban parts, the contrast has to be jarring and the disconnect is reflected in the bitterness of his writings.
We spend time in that northern third he calls "Outer California." Also in the coastal corridor, and seldom encounter the worst excesses of CA which Hanson describes.
He's correct that the state is badly governed, by virtue-signaling snowflakes. On the other hand, institutional inertia continues to allow much of the state to be relatively livable, particularly for non-resident visitors, which we are.
