Demographer Joel Kotkin shares with historian Victor Davis Hanson the seeming ability to generate a thoughtful column daily non-stop, 7 days a week. Both are enviably prolific authors.
Today Kotkin's topic for City Journal is Rick Caruso's attempt to be elected mayor of Los Angeles. Caruso runs on a platform of battling "crime, corruption, and homelessness."
The conditions Kotkin describes in today's LA seem headed toward the future LA imagined in the 2013 Matt Damon sci-fi film Elysium. It portrays conditions like those you'd find today in a Third World barrio or favela.
Elysium depicts an LA with near-universal poverty, unpaved streets, unschooled children and ramshackle buildings. Elysium's story arc is ho-hum, but whoever imagined and depicted its future LA deserved a set-design Oscar.
If Republican-turned-Democrat Caruso wins, he'll have a struggle with the lefty city council. I wish him luck, he'll need it.
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Candidates from Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI won every presidential election (and most other elective offices) during the 1929-2000 period. All political negotiations that mattered took place within the ranks of the PRI, horsetrading between various PRI unions and power blocs over whose agenda would prevail.
Japan has operated in much the same way with the various coalitions within the Liberal Democratic Party controlling the Diet or legislature for most of the post-1945 period. Again, nearly all important decisions have been thrashed out among the members of that party.
California seems to be headed in the same direction. Caruso's choice to become an electable Democrat, in order to pursue a Republican-flavored agenda for LA, appears to be a major step on this path. It marks Caruso as a practical realist and California as a de facto one-party state for urban and statewide elective positions. Some less urban CA regions do send GOP representatives to Congress, including minority leader McCarthy.
