Victor Davis Hanson’s family has lived for generations in the agricultural heartland of California — an area that is now, after decades of ruinously misguided policymaking, in the vanguard of America’s decline into third-world decrepitude. Nobody tells this dismal story better than Dr. Hanson does in his periodic dispatches. His latest is here (with thanks to TBH for the link).
An excerpt:
Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.
Illegal immigration did its share. No society can successfully absorb some 6-7 million illegal aliens, in less than two decades, the vast majority without English, legality, or education from the poorer provinces of Mexico, the arrivals subsidized by state entitlements while sending billions in remittances back to Mexico ”” all in a politicized climate where dissent is demonized as racism. This state of affairs is especially true when the host has given up on assimilation, integration, the melting pot, and basic requirements of lawful citizenship.
Terrible governance was also a culprit, in the sense that the state worked like a lottery: those lucky enough by hook or by crook to get a state job thereby landed a bonanza of high wages, good benefits, no accountability, and rich pensions that eventually almost broke the larger and less well-compensated general society. When I see hordes of Highway Patrolmen writing tickets in a way they did not before 2008, I assume that these are revenue-based, not safety-based, protocols ”” a little added fiscal insurance that pensions and benefits will not be cut.
A coarsening of popular culture ”” a nationwide phenomenon ”” was intensified, as it always is, in California. The internet, video games, and modern pop culture translated into a generation of youth that did not know the value of hard work or a weekend hike in the Sierra. They didn’t learn how to open a good history book or poem, much less acquire even basic skills such as mowing the lawn or hammering a nail. But California’s Generation X did know that they were “somebody’ whom teachers and officials dared not reprimand, punish, prosecute, or otherwise pass judgment on for their anti-social behavior. Add all that up with a whiny, pampered, influential elite on the coast that was more worried about wind power, gay marriage, ending plastic bags in the grocery stores ”” and, well, you get the present-day Road Warrior culture of California.
When you’re done with Dr. Hanson’s piece, read this related item, from Kevin D. Williamson.
39 Comments
I think that this kind of world-coming-to-an-end, we’re-going-to-Hell-in-a-handbasket narrative is conservative porn. The narrative never varies: the halcyon days when we led simple and virtuous lives is compared with a present day dystopia which would make Clockwork Orange or Soylent Green seem like models of decorum. Hanson’s readership wants to believe that not only is there no progress in the world, but things are getting worse by the minute.
However, he has no idea what he is talking about.
The reason there are few family farms or guys with sixty acres of almonds is not due to some sinister force, but to the creative destruction of free market capitalism, where weak hands fold and strong ones prosper. There aren’t a lot of family farms here for the same reason there aren’t a lot of family farms in Iowa or Vermont: the economics of farming disfavor smaller producers.
He omits the rather obvious fact that agriculture here is a fantastically successful money machine, which makes California the fifth largest food producer in the world. I guess that doesn’t fit into the dystopia theme.
A primary reason for this outstanding success is the millions of illegal aliens he deplores.
I have never heard of a CHP issuing a ticket when the driver was not violating the law. Nor – as far as I can tell – do they write more tickets than they did before 2008.
If he thinks that youth are uninterested in a hike in the Sierras, I would ask the last time he has been to a campground or Yosemite. They’re filled with kids and teenagers.
If he thinks that students get off easy, he should plow through the reading list my daughter just finished in sophomore English: Homer, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Dickens, and so forth. Not easy stuff for people of any age.
If he is going to issue ad hominems about “a whiny, pampered, influential elite,” one wonders if Romney, with his house in La Jolla with car elevators, is included in that group.
This is not to say that California is perfect or that its politics is not dysfunctional. However, if there is a better place to live in these United States, I haven’t found it.
Peter, you’re trolling, right?
The man lives in Selma, California, on agricultural land his family has worked for generations. How you find the nerve to sit in your affluent coastal enclave and tell him that he “had no idea what he’s talking about” is really beyond me.
Have you actually read his essays? Have you actually taken in his description of what central California has become? Or do you just go “oh, here goes another conservative asshole”, and put your fingers in your ears singing “lalalalala”, then leave a comment for my readers?
Oh wait, I know you’ve at least seen some of what he’s written, because a while back, when I posted a similarly depressing entry in Dr. Hanson’s ongoing chronicle of collapse, you wrote:
Has that changed? I doubt it. Unlike you, though, Dr. Hanson confronts the reality of the Central Valley every day; day after day his property is vandalized, his wiring stolen, trash and carcasses dumped, etc., by those wonderful, productive enhancements to our population you welcome so blithely.
Unlike you, he teaches in the California university system. Are you saying that the decline in standards he describes simply doesn’t exist, that he’s just making it all up?
Are you aware that city after city in California is now declaring bankruptcy? Do you actually think that the demographic tsunami that has hit California in the past 50 years has nothing to do with this? Perhaps you really do.
Go back and read the essays linked here and here.
Read this:
Do you actually think he’s making this stuff up?
Actually, I do.
When he says that students don’t get challenged in school, Highway Patrolmen write tickets to protect their pensions, and kids don’t go hiking in the Sierras any more: he’s making that up. None of it is true.
When he kvetches that there are no sixty acre farms any more: what exactly does he propose to do? Let the market decide or let the government regulate?
When he writes about the Central Valley and neglects to mention that its economy is extraordinarily healthy and robust: he is being disingenuous.
He provides anecdotal evidence about a crime wave in the Central Valley but no statistics. He may be correct – the data are unclear – but absent hard information it is a questionable assertion.
http://www.centralvalleybusinesstimes.com/stories/001/?ID=10443
I don’t think he is an asshole – for all I know, he is a wonderful human being – but he doesn’t make his case.
Also, the insolvency of Vallejo, Stockton, and San Bernardino is not because of illegal immigration. The primary cause of insolvent municipalities is the effects of Prop 13 in limiting ad valorem taxes and the collapse in real estate prices which decreased tax revenue still further.
Fine, except he didn’t say, for example, that no kids get challenged in school. He says that larger and larger numbers of them are coming out of school with less and less competence in basic skills (particularly in communities away from the affluent coastal belt you live in, and in which your daughter attends school) — and the numbers amply bear him out. California’s national rankings in academic success are low, and sinking fast. Obviously schools in Silicon Valley, where houses cost a fortune and the teeming, ineducable underclass is nowhere to be seen, are going to get better results.
His remarks about law enforcement are clear enough: that there is simply no value, no ROI, in prosecuting quality-of-life crimes committed by indigent aliens who will be released again and again, so the obvious answer, in economic terms, is to go after those who have money to pay their fines and acre conscientious enough to do so.
And so on.
I didn’t say “illegal immigration” was solely responsible; I referred only to “the demographic tsunami that has hit California in the past 50 years”. Do you honestly think that these cities would be declaring bankruptcy today if, ten years ago, their populations had been swapped out and replaced by Danes, or Japanese? It makes obvious sense (or it should): the more Mexicans there are in California, the more California will resemble Mexico — especially as others flee.
VDH wrote:
Do you think this is a recipe for civic success? Do you think it has made California’s pre-existing citizenry happier?
As for your linked item: out of all the cities in the Central Valley, only two were ranked better than the national average for crime. Stockton, for example, was 322nd worst in a field of 338.
Finally, Mr. Hanson isn’t “kvetching” about a decline in the quality-of-life for small farmers brought about by large industrial farms. He is writing about the decline in quality of life brought about by the region’s sinking into lawlessness as a result of its changing population.
Your last word, if you want it. I should realize by now that it’s pointless to argue about this sort of thing with you.
Let me substitute in for Peter. I may have read less of this Dr. Hanson than he, but I know whereof I speak, and the potential for misuse of Dr. Hanson’s perhaps superficially attractive, and to outsiders exotic, mix of Joan Didion’s ancestors, Rush Limbaugh, and Cicero ranges over an astonishingly large territory. No doubt he’s smart enough to reconcile his personal beliefs in his own head, but his outlook leads to internal contradictions and includes traffic in seriously retrograde tropisms.
My assumption is your readers are simultaneously lost and sucked in by his overly detailed and dystopian portrait of the Central Valley. In essence, it was ever thus. In essence, we are at a moment of structural change for which the explanation is far simpler: the housing crisis and the consequent economic collapse.
Regarding cities and bankruptcies, two of these three, Vallejo and San Bernardino, are not even in the Central Valley. Stockton, which is, is the most proximate place there to the Bay Area, and it was Bay Area people selling over-inflated homes to buy bigger, cheaper ones in the Valley that results in towns up and down the Central Valley being in the same housing-collapse league with Las Vegas and Miami; you just haven’t heard of them because they’re too small. I don’t believe San Bernardino has filed BK yet, and when Stockton did so recently, most of us saw stories for the first time about how successfully V’s BK worked out — it wasn’t even news, and as I say it isn’t even a Central Valley town. This is just an inventive new approach for mediumsized municipalities to solve the perennial problem of “a budget crisis”; San Bernardino, which also is not a Central Valley town, sounds bigger, but is actually slightly smaller than Stockton and only twice the size of cozy little Vallejo — and again, the only one of these that even is a Central Valley town is Stockton.
Next, the Central Valley never was a place of wild economic diversity. It always did consist of Big-Ag, an above-average number of government jobs, and less than the full gamut of little people filling in fewer interstices than exist in other places. It must be impossible for your readers to conceive of the Central Valley, perhaps the single largest and most productive agricultural region in the world, yet which in effect did not exist at all 150 years ago, 125 years ago, or even 100 years ago — by which time, critically, Dr. Hanson’s, Joan Didion’s, and a fair number of other folks’ families were already farming it, which allows them to wax nostalgic about something that in essence never existed. That fact fuels a lot of Dr. Hanson’s rant, but he confounds fact and your readers’ perception of reality by talking as if on the one hand some alternative that bears any relationship to the 21st century ever existed and on the other as if Mexicans showed up just 20 years ago and changed everything.
Again, it was ever thus, and Dr. Hanson’s cranky old views misrepresent things on a variety of fronts. It is almost beyond the realm of alternate history to try to imagine a world where seasonal migrant labor did not affect the entire course of development of the entire West Coast of the United States. Read Steinbeck. And there are 3rd and 4th generation Mexicans in small towns and large cities in Oregon and Washington. Your readers may be more familiar with little old Southern villages peopled by ex-slaves than with municipalities built up over many decades by Hispanic immigrants who followed the crops from the Imperial Valley, inches from Baja, to the apple orchards of Washington just shy of Canada, fell out at every point along that route, stayed on permanently, and have been moving into the mainstream for generations now. The aforementioned Stockton is 40% Hispanic, is well over 300 miles north of Los Angeles, and its population is nearly 300,000 — then there’s nearly another 1,000 miles from there to the Canadian border.
And if the Hispanic population thins out north of California, that’s because the Central Valley is a uniquely intense phenomenon — and precisely in the way that people like Dr. Hanson simultaneously lament and benefit from. The Central Valley doesn’t even look like Oregon or Washington from the air, or like anywhere else — and not just because the evergreen rain forest of the Pacific Northwest thins out and ends in the “rain shadow” of Northern California; the Central Valley is a parti-colored patchwork of vibrant and diverse colors because it is an industrial version of agriculture based on an incredibly massive stage-managing of the entire state’s water-system for which there can be no counterpart in the world. We are talking about the world’s most intensive, mechanized, diverse, and gigantic food-production system set in a place with limited rainfall where what water there is would ordinarily result in regular, devastating floods that disappeared before the crops could even be got in the ground, which essentially evolved out of nowhere solely within the context of the American 20th century. Yeah, there were white people on family farms, and Dr. Hanson’s folk must have been among them, but this is not like the rest of the United States; this is the real world on the far side of the 1,000-mile wide desert west of the Rockies, the one behind the stage curtain while Jay Leno or Steve Jobs strut on stage, the one making possible a California population of 37.5 million and significantly feeding the rest of the country and, get this, exporting rice to Japan, etc., much of those 37.5 million located on the southwestern extension of that desert that reaches the Pacific and extends into Mexico.
This is not just reality, but it is a reality that gradually evolved over the entire (short) history of California. To talk about something else involves such radical change that the consequences are unimaginable; the entire nature of the West Coast would be utterly and completely different. The story of Central Valley agriculture is the foundation of this entire end of the country. Forget Hollywood, or WWII aircraft-building in Los Angeles, let alone the Silicon Valley.
And here we have Dr. Hanson, a Central Valley farmer who actually managed to hang onto his family’s land through this entire evolution, almost the only idiot left in California still jabbering (out of one side of his mouth) about prisoner recidivism in a state that locked up so nearly more people than any country in the world that even this conservative Supreme Court said it had to stop also griping about the prevalence of government jobs in the Central Valley, when quadrupling the state’s prison population in 25 years was deliberately done by stashing them all in hinterlands (some quite close to his native Selma) so as to employ vast numbers of people shaken loose from the combine engine of Big Agriculture.
This Central Valley dystopia is not recent, it is absolutely Big Corporate Agriculture conservative-based, and it is so totally simultaneously the source of all Dr. Hanson’s woes and of the very fabric of not just his reality, but the world’s reality, that he is nothing more than a loose cannon sniping at hobby horses from what looks like an idiosyncratic hideaway, but is really the same eye of the storm as any other Yahooville, USA — and incidentally there are lots of 60-acre almond groves, they just happen mostly to be 300 miles north of him in the Sacramento Valley portion of the Central Valley rather than his southern end of the San Joaquin Valley — and a lot of them are owned by… Punjabis who have been here for decades.
Quite a comment!
But you haven’t really addressed his main point: the change in behavior, the degradation of the mode of operation of civilization itself that he’s seen in recent years: the vandalism, the petty theft, the dumping of garbage, and above all the abdication of any effort on the part of law enforcement to do anything about any of it. It is hardly “jabbering about recidivism” to express dismay at a criminal’s being caught and released 36 times, as if he were some sort of grand-daddy tarpon; to expect that in a functioning society such career criminals be sequestered hardly seems, um, unwarranted.
And as you say, this Central valley dystopia, this slow rot, is not recent. Hanson’s been chronicling this for a long time now, so it seems questionable to lay all the blame on the housing collapse — though I have no doubt that that made things worse.
Finally, I’m afraid I must charge you ten minutes in the metaphor-penalty box for “a loose cannon sniping at hobby-horses”.
As an interesting aside: if there is another place to rival California in the art of water-management, it is probably Bali.
Another point that needs to be made here: American conservatism is hardly monolithic, and one of the biggest fault-lines is between traditionalist conservatives and Big Business on the question of mass immigration of unskilled aliens. For business it’s a boon, because it depresses wages and provides a ready source of cheap labor. Businesses can keep employee benefits to a minimum, knowing that they can socialize those costs by letting government (i.e. taxpayers) pick up the slack.
I don’t know. First, you may somewhat misunderstand me: the Central Valley is a dystopia, but point one is it’s all we’ve got and the alternative is utterly unimaginable. We’ll muddle our way to a new reality soon enough, but it won’t particularly be for the reasons Hanson talks of, or rather it will be because of some of them, but not in the proportions his crotchetiness focuses on.
It’s just the same dystopia it always was structurally, but now there are a lot of out-of-work construction workers and prison guards and upside-down houses in an area that always had relatively high unemployment and a simpler and lower standard of living than, e.g., Beverly Hills or Sausalito. Naturally a sinking water table, many decades of accumulated agricultural pesticides, and endless squabbling over how to equitably shunt around enough water to slake the thirsts of several small countries is going to meet a growing interest in local and organic farming and a world capable of outsourcing kumquats and pistachios almost as readily as call centers. No doubt this will be a good thing, and I don’t expect the adaptation to be horrifically bumpy. Only Hanson thinks that. One part of this will be the population growth of these places supporting economic diversification. It’s already been discovered that cheap land supports silicon chip plantations, as well as alfalfa. I mentioned Stockton, which really might almost be likened to a little town on the seasonal migratory path from Mexico to Canada filled with Mexicans who’ve stopped off and stayed for the last 75 years, as having 300,000 people. Fresno, to which Hanson’s Selma is just an outlier, is half a million people; if you threw in his Selma, Sanger, Clovis, Madera, you’re definitely reaching a population size that can support all kinds of things, and there’s a lot more in his little backwater down there near the southern end of the Central Valley — Lemoore, Hanford, Visalia. The only problem with these people is their rather limited history and their relative isolation from places the rest of the country has heard of. Apple, HP, Intech, and a host of others have no trouble establishing a large presence in Sacramento, but it will take a little leap of faith before they do so in the towns made famous by “Petticoat Junction.”
I guess I just don’t even believe in those degradation-of-civilization things you mention. On the one hand, of course copper theft is a faddish new crime; on the other, the quintessential thing one sees fewer of today in any part of America are rusty car carcasses at the bottoms of canyons or creeks, and for practically the same reason as one sees more copper thefts. Cops not following up on crimes is the earmark of a bigger city than Hanson’s used to. I hear in New York they only arrest people like Bernie Madoff; surely if your car isn’t there tomorrow morning you’ll find a more receptive audience for your story in Wellfleet than Park Slope? I more or less already covered recidivism. We already got it wronger than wrong by locking people up at an ever-escalating rate since the late 1970s. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24scotus.html?pagewanted=all What is it Hanson and you want to do? Lock up even more people, at an even higher per capita rate than Russia, one that actually rivals Stalinist Russia? Sorry. Even your Supreme Court says your shot at that one is over, after a 30+ year run. What is Hanson’s solution for 36 dirty drug tests from each of which someone is released back to parole for time served? Do you have a better way? It probably involves not sending that person into this system for crimes like having already been in it, having finished out a prior parole term, and having been caught yet again with drugs.
As for loose cannons sniping at hobby horses, that’s just a new form we call “pure metaphor,” metaphorically consistent, and stripped of tedious claptrap tethers to real-world subjects and predicates. Peter called it “conservative porn.” It’s just conservative porn because fifth-generation family farmers in a state that has neither fifth-generationers nor family farms look like Yodas unless you know the same things in your blood that Hanson ought to know.
Yes, that’s true. A strongly correlated fact is that my car is far more likely to be there in the morning in Wellfleet than Brooklyn.
Here’s what I can’t get to add up: if, as you say, people are incarcerated at a ridiculously high rate in California, then it seems there are two main reasons that could be the case: either A) the crime rate is more or less the same as other states, but California simply has too low a tolerance for it (meaning that it incarcerates people for what shouldn’t really be considered crimes at all); or B) the tolerance of crime is at or above that of other states, but the crime rate itself is higher.
You seem to be arguing for A). But according to Hanson’s testimony, it doesn’t look like A) is the correct explanation — because unpunished crime, where he lives at least, appears to be rampant, and criminals, when caught, are released again and again. (And in the case described above, Mr. Perez wasn’t just arrested 36 times for “dirty drug tests”, or simply for “having already been in the system”, but also for burglary, theft, and weapons charges. The man is almost certainly somebody we’d rather not have at large.)
I agree that the state could do itself and everybody else a favor by loosening up the drug laws. But what about robbery, vandalism, burglary, theft, DUI, rape, and so on? Do you think California punishes these crimes too strictly?
You mention that California incarcerates more people than Russia. But the incarceration rate in Russia is completely irrelevant here; the pertinent questions are how we define the crimes for which we incarcerate people, whether the rate of incarceration is appropriate to the rate at which people are actually committing crimes, and whether people are being falsely convicted.
You seem keen to make the case that the only relevant factor in California’s high incarceration rate is misguided public policy, and an eagerness to imprison, but surely there is another obvious ingredient to consider. The incarceration rate in, say, Vermont is very different from California’s. Can we think of any other way in which Vermont differs sharply from California?
I don’t know, at this point, what can be done, and I doubt very much, in any event, that anything will be done. The decline that Hanson chronicles is almost certainly irreversible, I suspect.
But let me put the same question to you: what do you expect Dr. Hanson to do? Pretty much what Goldfinger expected Bond to do, I guess.
What is more likely is that people like him will just leave, taking their taxable income and their high-falutin’ civilization with them.
I read Hanson’s articles regularly and though his style tends to be a bit wordy, his writing is comprehensible upon first reading.
What I gather from Jesse Kaplan’s comments, above, is that he thinks Hanson is a crotchety old coot who whines about things in the Central Valley, which he (Hanson) should just shut up about, because “it was ever thus”. I am sure Mr. Kaplan means to convey more than that alone, but I don’t have the patience to mine his writing for a clearer idea of his thought processes.
I don’t agree that Hanson is simply a whiner. He strikes me as an intelligent and insightful chronicler of life in the region that he and his ancestors have lived in for generations. And, at least to me, his opinions about the ongoing degradation of the quality of life in the Central Valley is convincing. And I know that you couldn’t pay me enough to put up with the crap he has to put up with on a daily basis.
Of course, I do not have the strong ties to the land of Steinbeck that Hanson has. But I have read Steinbeck, including multiple readings of “East of Eden”, and I have the distinct impression that it was NOT “ever so” in Salinas and environs.
Well, of course I’m just trying to be entertaining and disagreeable, but I do disagree with any perception that the Central Valley is slouching toward Babylon, to borrow from Didion. It’s a silly perspective, just a Central Valley version of grumpiness shared by every person who passes a certain point in life and thinks things are going to hell in a handbasket.
I’m trying to make clear that the Central Valley maxed out on being Big Ag run on the backs of seasonal migrant labor not long after that seasonal migrant labor became wholly brown (and I mean wholly), which was right after Steinbeck and the Dustbowl. None of this is new. If there conceivably is any creeping rot, it is incremental, merely the Central Valley version of it, and perhaps a bit heightened by this recent economic crisis, which hit the Central Valley pretty hard because there was a construction boom fueled by relatively cheap land in the interior resulting in relatively cheaper new homes being bought to some significant extent by relatively richer people who are relatively richer because their homes nearer the Coast are among the more expensive in the nation.
What’s more interesting, as I try to suggest, is that things have been maxed out in this direction for a long, long time in the Central Valley — precisely the point that readers of Hanson elsewhere are likely to get exactly wrong. The Central Valley Project isn’t something new and my point is that in a sense there was no prior regime because this incredibly productive agricultural region couldn’t be anywhere near as productive, and not via the same agricultural technologies, without it. What’s more interesting is that surely it must be poised at the point of change: maxed out for what it is and representing an agricultural approach that must be passing over the horizon, while simultaneously more and more people are piling into the region — enough to push it in new and more diverse directions. Hanson senses this; it’s unmistakable; these two points I’ve just made (changes in the world of agriculture and population density hitting city status up and down the Valley) are obvious; but, perhaps because of his conservative mindset, he’s focused on ruing much the same past that never was that Didion rued (she’s recently engaged in a public self-correction of this), and prefers to fulminate and exaggerate things into personal slights that really have little to do with his particular locale.
1. Salinas isn’t in the Central Valley, either; it’s its own little valley, a quaint little climate blending the Coast and the Valley, ideal for growing lettuce. It’s not wrong to imagine Steinbeck — just blend Steinbeck and East LA street gangs in a setting surrounded by lettuce fields and you’ve got it; certainly don’t look for a lot of white people, but it does happen I’ve been to the synagogue there. And so you’re right, I suppose: Steinbeck in a sense managed to anticipate the place before it became as brown as it is. Please note it is about 150 miles from Salinas to Hanson’s Selma and they are somewhat different worlds, Salinas being an insular microcosm of the massive macrocosm that is the Central Valley. (450 miles long, north-south; that alone may be a little ungraspable in the world of pipsqueak states east of the Rockies.)
Really, though, it was “ever so” in Salinas. White people still grow lettuce and the ambience must be more nearly the same as in the time of Steinbeck’s books than is true of most parts of the country, as long as you can filter out skin color and Nortenos.
2. Malcolm, frankly it astounds me to read your stuff about prisons. I don’t even know what to say, other than we’ve already proved your way of thinking wrong in California since the late 1970s. Yes, we punish every single one of those crimes too strictly in California, at least if you’ve ever been convicted of crimes before. That’s called the Three Strikes Law. And we have lots of laws. I have to realize you are so far from the belly of the beast compared to me that I just assume you realize things, even if your mindset is different. But you must not. What’s happened in California happened all across the United States, but I guess at a certain point quantitative differences become qualitative ones. If you’re implying Vermont locks up fewer people per capita because it’s an “homogenous society,” you’re guilty of massive oversimplification. “[M]isguided public policy, and an eagerness to imprison”? You must have no idea. I have to remind myself that you really may not know, or grasp what it might be like, when a single outsized personality takes over a silly, little union of state prison guards and turns it into literally the single most powerful political organization in a great, big, huge state — and then that organization controls state politics for a 25-year run. Instead of the Mafia taking over and building casinos, you get prisons and laws designed to fill them. Are you beginning to get it? To round this off, can you imagine the possibility that the good little, increasingly maple syrup-colored people of the little valley of Vermont might mysteriously find themselves dividing their time between maple sugar-harvesting and forming up into gang sets for reasons not entirely of their own making if Vermont not-so-mysteriously managed to quadruple its state prison population in, say, only 15 years?
Let me say first of all that I have no doubt that a gigantic public-sector union can wreak unholy havoc when it gets its hands on the levers of power. Believe me. And I can easily believe that the corrections-officers union is the most unholy of the lot. I have no doubt whatsoever that there is plenty of rot there, plenty of misery and real injustice. No question. I know you practice law in Sacramento, and have far more familiarity with what goes on in the California legal system than I do.
But, on the other hand, surely you don’t believe:
A) that Victor Hanson is simply lying about the greatly increased incidence of the sorts of crimes he describes across his span of years in the Central Valley, and the apparent indifference of law enforcement to do anything about it;
B) That the only possible causal difference between crime/incarceration statistics in Vermont and in California is that Vermont’s legal system isn’t in the grip of a nefarious corrections-officer’s union? (And no, my point wasn’t that Vermont is homogeneous, exactly…)
Also, if, as you say, all anyone ever wants to do in California is to lock everyone up, regardless of whether they deserve it (and you seem to be arguing that most of the people that get locked up haven’t in fact committed any crime that merits sequestration from society), then why are actual criminals released again and again (up to 36 times, I hear!), only to commit more crimes?
You wrote:
I’m not quite clear what the “way of thinking” you’re referring to is. Can you tell us what you mean, and how California has proved it wrong?
Jesse (may I address you so?),
Even though I think you rely too much on geographic proximity for validation of your opinions, I have lived almost as long west of the Rockies as I have on the east coast, including New Mexico AND California. And I’ve been to the synagogue there, too. BTW, have you had the courage to attend synagogue in Stockton? How about just driving through Stockton, at night (with car doors securely locked, of course)? I bet not recently.
It really amazes me that people like you and Peter (and I do mean that in a nice way) continue to cling to the policies that are ruining a once-great state. The only explanation I can conjure is that you somehow gain personally from the ruination process itself.
Either you are a member of the Vandals (not likely), or you somehow cater to their needs, via government hand-outs (I think the Liberal euphemism is “redistribution of wealth”) and/or legal representation, which the Vandals need a lot of. Which is it?
450 miles? I think I can grasp that, and stay in the Empire State the whole time…
Let’s see. That’s Montauk to NYC, up the Thruway to Albany, then over to Rochester. Got it.
Ah, but that’s not as the crow flies, Malcolm. Note that Jesse was careful to specify “450 miles long, north-south“, which, of course, implies “as the crow flies”.
I wonder if Jesse is a lawyer?
He is. See above.
Using Google Earth, I make it about 407 miles, agriculturally speaking. NNW to SSE. (Bakersfield to Red Bluff.)
Wait a minute; if you draw a straight line from Montauk to Rochester, can you really avoid going thru parts of Long Island Sound and/or northeastern Pennsylvania?
No, you were right, Henry. It’s a zig-zag.
Graspable, though.
Now you sound like a lawyer …
:)
A straight line from Montauk Point to Ripley (on Lake Erie by the PA border): 415.55 miles.
Stop; I give up …
I take that back: Montauk to Ripley takes you through both L.I. Sound and PA!
That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack (to coin a phrase).
I think you would have to clip the south-western corner of CT, too.
OK, I’ll stop now …
It isn’t quite as if you turn the bug spray on the cockroach and there are two cockroaches, but it definitely is as if when you see a crime committed by a criminal you should never think that increased arrests or increased sentences will solve the problem. It’s the easy, politically attractive solution that has had its run for the last few decades across the country. I trace the inception of the problem in California to the late 1970s because that is when we literally, expressly, and deliberately removed the word and concept of “rehabilitation” from the world of criminal sentencing and resolved to rely solely on the word “punishment.” Now we’ve decided differently. It’s just like the death penalty: gone today, here tomorrow.
Another aspect of my frustration is that you believe anyone can commit and be caught for 36 separate offenses just within the short time-frame of a parole term under California’s still-punitive Penal Code. It’s essentially logistically impossible, but the idea that you see the solution in locking someone like that up longer reveals a naivetÁ© about the subject matter because even if we’re only talking about 36 arrests within some extraordinarily short time period, you ought immediately to grasp that we’re dealing with the intractable problem of crimes so low-level they can’t equitably be punished significantly being committed by someone nearly constitutionally incapable of not committing them. And this is the perfect example of where you’ve tied your hands if 1) you deliberately tie them to the word “punitive” as California did, or 2) you choose to believe punishment is a solution, as you seem to be doing. I suggest that punishment is just a heavy, burdensome chore that society, of necessity, must perform. These are big, tough subjects, but to my way of thinking you’re stumbling at the starting block if you can’t even grasp the nice, simple thought-experiment angle on the bigger problem that this extreme, relatively harmless, and semi-mythical 36-parole violations dude gives us. Here in the real world we conducted a massive, 30-year long experiment on a population now numbering 37.5 million (California), in which we decided to test the hypothesis that fuzzy-headed liberal thinking didn’t work — it’s a big, hopeless subject, but at least “punishment” is a fine, solid straw to grasp. Then our little experiment was helped along by a dangerous megalomaniac seizing control of the prison guards’ union, and in turn of political power from the Governor on down, just when the entire country was going through its current pendulum swing in the opposite direction from the Warren Court’s impact on criminal law. Our little scientific experiment was fueled by what Peter would call a “perfect storm” of logs being thrown on the fire (though I guess we’re entering Metaphor Country here). My buildup is leading to this point: We’re not talking about some unrepresentative little, statistically inadequate population sample like Mr. one-offense-per-month-including-time-behind-bars-after-each-one, or the State of Vermont; we’re talking about California. So even if it happens by a 5-4 margin, if this conservative United States Supreme Court finds the outcome of the experiment to constitute cruel and inhumane punishment, well that’s quite a response. And let me amplify with a reason why it might be an even more startling response: because this case finally hit the Supreme Court after what became a total of three liberal federal district court judges in California, (one of whom I briefly worked for long ago), did their best to intervene into the running of the State’s prison system for a period of time running back as far in my judge’s case as 1990. You have to turn to Scalia’s and Thomas’s dissent before you find any concern expressed about liberal, federal judges telling a state agency how to run its business. And this prison overcrowding happened despite the political power being there to build new prisons as fast as they could be thrown up, at least and especially during the 1980s (including a number at Doc Hanson’s end of the Valley). Incidentally, just so you can be up to speed California-wise, the first thing you’re supposed to think of at this point in the conversation is how the prison guards’ union muscled out the California State Teachers’ Association in Sacramento and miraculously at the end of this 30-year day California’s public school education system ranks nearly at the bottom of the United States on various measures, rubbing elbows with places like Mississippi. Not, of course, that our state taxes aren’t among the highest.
So maybe it is a dystopia. But my only problem with Stockton is that despite its population of nearly 300,000 it isn’t on the GPS system in either my present or my last car. That would be my main concern about driving its streets, which I do, as circumstances dictate. And I know there’s a synagogue there because they have a sign on I-5 on my side of Stockton saying the synagogue takes care of litter there. My take on homogeneity is a little different from others’: having grown up in California, I get nervous in places where everybody looks the same. I don’t know what to say about “Mexifornia.” As with the evolution of the Central Valley, and not unrelated to it, it’s impossible to imagine an alternative California. I can certainly say things aren’t this way because of the lack of a retaining wall. That’s about as dumb as, and similar to, saying you’ll solve crimes by locking up criminals. It’s all part and parcel of a choice that was never presented, the choice to become California versus being some bucolic backwater at a remote end of the country peopled by Dr. Hanson’s ancestors. I don’t think that could have happened. First you had the jump-start of the Gold Rush, then there was the Golden Spike railway link to the rest of the country; from the beginning there were more than the normal number of people, and every time they couldn’t find the expected gold nugget they realized there were tons of acres for farming; then, it isn’t just agriculture but the need to bring water to all the people that were here before there even were anywhere near as many people here as there are now, which got us damming and shunting water all over the place, even without the expanding agricultural incentive. Think John Muir, Hetch Hetchy, and that story of bringing water to San Francisco. How can you expect to ship water from the east side of the state to west without shipping it north and south to irrigate one of the largest arable valleys in the world? Think “Chinatown.” So, if you follow me, maybe you’ll see why I think so many ideas falling from auslander’s minds are just science fiction alternative history. Big Agriculture was inevitable, and an increasing Mexican presence was an inevitable consequence of Big Agriculture. Maybe Peter’s told you this before, but y’all do know that California used to be part of Mexico, perhaps half our place-names, (as well as our legal system at the time of the Gold Rush), come from there? A lot of us just aren’t as surprised or bothered by sharing our state with Hispanics as some might imagine. It’s just part of an inevitable reality.
Perhaps this discussion serves better to show why that is, than it serves as an indictment of Dr. Hanson’s crabbiness. Still, that same inevitability shows the problem with his crabbiness. This yearning for a sun-dappled yesteryear while offering up nothing but simplistic solutions for tomorrow gets one only so far, even if one mantles one’s curmodgeonliness in the cloak of Cicero (there, that was a consistent metaphor, n’est-ce pas?).
Jesse,
I can’t keep track of every single anecdote you invoke to make your case that California is not a leading contender for becoming the first failed state in America. My opinion is that whatever your glorified “public servants” are doing is not working out well.
I have not said that the state’s problems can be attributed to Hispanics, as you seem to imply in your arguments. Yes, Hispanics who have entered the state illegally are a big part of the problem, not because they are Hispanic, but because they are illegal, and they are a significant drain on the state’s resources, which they don’t deserve to have at legal residents’ expense.
You can go on and on about what is or isn’t significant. But the fact remains that California’s finances are in total disarray, and your public servants concern themselves with ridiculous issues, such as the survival of some worm or field mouse.
Don’t you get it? Nancy Pelosi and the rest of your state’s “public servants” are a bunch of f*cking morons. And we both know which political party most of them belong to.
The internet is great. Without remembering his name at all, I was able to find what I wanted in seconds. Here is someone from exactly the same place as Victor Hanson, lengthy family history, academic credentials, more famous for his literature than Hanson, more rhapsodically pastoral, and also more optimistic and forward-looking. And in his case the family held onto their farm despite being thrown into an internment camp. His basic background is not unusual in the Central Valley, though I think it is more common in my neighborhood. He sits in his tractor, contemplates how he’ll cope with climate change, and writes about that instead of griping over stolen copper wire.
http://www.masumoto.com/who/index.htm (I tried two ways to link; I don’t know how.)
Enjoy the ride, Jesse. But if I were you, I would have an escape plan. Hint: when the horseshit hits the fan, it’s not going to be easy to unload a home (much harder than it already is).
Well, that’s what seems to have happened in the case of Adam Joshua Perez, as cited above. You have a tendency simply to deny the factuality of data that you don’t want to hear, as when I pointed out to you a while back that blacks and Hispanics combined committed 98% of all gun assaults in New York in a recent accounting year.
I’m not sure what you think you’ve “disproved” here. You wrote:
Elsewhere:
So: what have you got? Have you solved any problem here? Have you “disproved” anything? No. What you’ve done instead is the classic liberal move: to define the problem out of existence.
Black firefighter applicants not doing well enough on the written test? That’s a problem. Liberal solution? We don’t need no stinkin’ test.
Major U.S. agricultural state swarming with illiterate Mexican peasants committing crime after crime because, as you yourself say, they are “nearly constitutionally incapable of not committing them”? Liberal solution: Come on, those aren’t important crimes! Just get used to it. What’s the big deal about a steady background hum of theft, vandalism, trespassing, burglary, robbery, theft, DUI, unlicensed driving, rape, etc., anyway? Didn’t I already tell you it’s “intractable”?
That isn’t “solving” a problem, or “disproving” an approach to law enforcement, that’s a Gallic shrug. It’s abdication. If the problem is now “intractable”, it’s because California and the Federal government, in cahoots with Big Ag, turned a blind eye to illegal immigration for so long that a tipping point has been reached.
Your focus is on “punishment” versus “rehabilitation”. In all honesty, how many of these illiterate, petty criminals, many of them here illegally to begin with, are being “rehabilitated”, do you think?
Anyway, to cast the issue in these terms shows again the liberal focus, which is on how all of this affects the perpetrator. But when it comes to law enforcement, the main concern of most law-abiding citizens is simply not to have their lives, property, and peace of mind placed at constant risk by hordes of petty criminals. So the issue for them isn’t punishment vs. rehabilitation, but sequestration. And you can say what you like, but a man who is in prison, or who has been deported, is not breaking into your barn, or driving the wrong way down the 5 at two a.m.
So you may never “solve” the problem of “crime” by locking people up, but you can solve the problem of Adam Joshua Perez committing crime after crime by locking him up. (Or far better, kicking him out of the country.)
You also wrote:
No surprise there. It’s always the same refrain: “Spend more money! Gotta FIX the SCHOOLS!!”
Of course, California’s schools used to be very good, for a lot less money. So what has changed? Can we think of anything at all?
Let’s review: the population of California now includes untold millions of recent arrivals who are either ineducable or “constitutionally incapable” of not committing crimes (or both). Vast sums have been siphoned off from the dwindling proportion of productive citizens to try to “solve” this, but in the end it’s just “intractable”, so we might as well get used to it.
Better yet: “it was ever so.”
Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.
You wrote:
Ya think?
Anyway, look: high-speed rail!!
I think you have hit the nail on the head, Malcolm, in identifying why it is impossible to conclude any discussion with a liberal: their modus operandi is re-framing the issue continually.
If anyone’s views are changed by this blog’s comments, surely they are never those of the commenters. Particularly these last responses illustrate the fine line between conservatism and pessimism, and between pessimism and the kind of irritability and generalized anger that can be a symptom of depression. It occurs to me that California might be likened to New York City. To mix more metaphors, it’s the same sort of hothouse melting pot, writ large, everything speeded up, and perhaps driven a little more directly by economics than other states. Why shouldn’t it have nine lives like NYC? The difference, other than the obvious one of size, that I see is actually pretty subtle: NY has even less control over where its immigrants come from; they just show up, driven in perhaps equal part by factors in their own countries; but it’s a distinction without much difference because California can’t be expected to control the contour of its overall economic development, which in its case is the draw.
It also occurs to me that what may have prompted me to write is now coming back at me redoubled in these responses. Were California to collapse — and of course it won’t; it’s too big to fail, not all at once — it would not be in the Central Valley. Los Angeles is both racially and economically Balkanized; that’s why it had riots. The Bay Area is quietly becoming as economically distorted as Manhattan; the resulting Balkanization just happens to be more peaceably distributed. What’s wrongest with Hanson is his myopic extrapolation of Central Valley problems into disaster. I tried to tell a little history and offer the counter-thesis that the Central Valley is simply poised at the point of structural change, or paused, and for the perfectly common reason of the housing collapse and resulting economic slowdown.
What’s ugly and wrongheaded in these responses is the obvious and uncomplicated perception that Big Agriculture sucking in Latinos for 75 years will now lead momentarily to disaster. Because Hanson is on the ground, I don’t think he thinks that, though I haven’t read him. Immediately before that 75+ year run, California sucked in Okies and Arkies to do the same agricultural work. They’ve managed to blend into the landscape, unless you want to look at Aryan prison gangs versus Latino ones, to rope in the prison part of this talk. In the 19th century, California sucked in a lot of Chinese to work on the railroads. Parenthetically, I wish I’d made clearer that quite a few of the farmers up and down the Central Valley, especially the smaller ones, are Japanese and Indians. Circa 1900, Central Valley agricultural opportunity must have seemed an attractive draw to more adventurous rural Japanese, and they were willing to do it the hard way — first working as agricultural laborers, saving money to buy their own land, and bringing over their families to work it. Look at the family history of Hanson’s happier neighbor-farmer, David Masumoto, in my link. Indians, especially Punjabis, have farmed for decades, especially in the Sacramento Valley.
No, what’s happening is that small, sleepy towns up and down the Central Valley, all with well-established, disproportionately large, Latino populations — and some of the smallest and sleepiest being particularly like that, are growing and will continue to grow because farmland is a lot cheaper for homes and commercial buildings than urban land, especially California urban land. This has already been going on. This is the process I tried to explain. The economic base will become more diverse. It’s wrong to think of these places as “Hispanic”; that’s a non-Californian perspective. There just are a lot of Hispanics in California, but as I point out, there are a lot of Hispanics in eastern Washington, too.
It’s fun to extrapolate these bird’s-eye perspectives, and philosophically interesting. Which is more frighteningly dystopian: a Bay Area fueled by white and Indian tech people pushing the cost of living into a grotesque Have/Have-Not divide, or an increasingly economically and racially diverse area with a growing population fueled by the consequent money-and-people spillover from there? What is going to happen agriculturally to a pesticide-poisoned sink where the land is literally sinking considerably from the depletion of the water table, which has already had a long, long, and successful, run on one form of agricultural technology, especially if we’ve already conjured up enough water to handle industrial-scale agriculture?
David Masumoto tries to anticipate a new Central Valley agricultural future. I have offered a vision of its economic future otherwise. Dr. Hanson just offers a pastoral version of pessimism.
It’s tiresome and particularly worthless to point out the subtle errors of argumentation on the criminal justice topic. How many arrests per minute, day, or month does it take before we cross over the line from statistical anomaly to logistical impossibility? What is the point of talking about the person who straddles that line? Isn’t it some kind of “gotcha” that he happens to have an Hispanic name? One might expect maybe Mr. Perez could hide out for a few days under a grape arbor on the farm owned by his grandfather for the last 50 years, while some white, paranoid schizophrenic drug-addict from Beverly Hills would be haplessly without a clue how to evade arrest in downtown LA. But whatever. I didn’t ignore or redefine anything about the California criminal justice system. It does happen I pointed out that an idiotic conservative experiment with deliberately ignoring the rÁ´le of rehabilitation in sentencing and redefining the purpose to be solely punishment failed massively. I wasn’t engaged in either redefining or solving, myself, other than to underscore the magnitude of that mistake. Interesting this topic pushed buttons, interesting that the real reason California ranks at the bottom of the country in public school education is because we’ve historically relied on Latin American seasonal agricultural labor in our rural areas. We know prisons gobbled up the education budget; we know the Hispanic population is increasing. Interesting that the argument gets twisted into student performance from things like per-capita expenditures on students and student-teacher ratios, and then laid at the feet of kids who have morphed into Mr. Perez (now it’s an increasing proportion of California’s public school students who are “constitutionally incapable of not committing crimes” [internal quote omitted] and, apparently because they are the children of “illiterate Mexican peasants,” are “ineducable”). You really shouldn’t wonder why some people think this talk is racist; it isn’t just the language, but the illogical mental leaps and the eagerness to tar children in a discussion that approached no closer to them than reference to the well-recognized trade-off California has suffered between locking up people at an unsustainable velocity and spending money on public school education, instead. Except for Peter, few dissenting voices venture here anymore, and as a result the discourse gets uglier and uglier.
It’s true, “agriculture” shades from farming to timber-harvesting as one moves from Red Bluff to Redding, and here’s a factoid for everyone: Los Angeles is east of Reno. I think a straight line can be drawn from either Grapevine, California or Bakersfield to Redding without grazing the Sierra Nevadas, though. Maybe not quite, but if not, it’s sort of because I’m sitting about 45 feet up in the air above sea level myself in the rise to 10-14,000 feet as I write this.
So, let me see if I have this right: the only underlying cause of California’s low educational rankings is simply that insufficient money is being spent on the schools (more public money would surely fix the problem), and the reason for that is simply that too much money was wasted on the ridiculous notion that locking criminals up prevents them from committing crimes.
Okay, I think we’ve more or less exhausted the topic by now; I think I’ve run out of “illogical mental leaps” at this point, anyway, so I guess I have nothing more to say. Perhaps Dr. Hanson is too pessimistic (though, as in this item, he’s optimistic about some things, too).
I don’t live in California — and ultimately what California does, and what becomes of the state as a result, is up to California. We’ll wait and see how it all goes.
I was exhausted a few comments ago, just from reading them.
In any case, I apologize for any “ugliness” my words may have introduced into the pristine life experiences of our progressive and uber-optimistic colleagues. I sincerely wish you all the best in the future and beyond.
No, the ugliness was on me, I fear.
I certainly don’t mean to suggest that any person, just in virtue of being a member of some particular human subpopulation, is therefore ineducable, or an inveterate criminal, or, for that matter, anything at all. That would be an ugly thing to suggest, and I’m not.
That said, though, on what basis (other than a well-intentioned aversion to a truly uncomfortable topic) can we rule out, a priori, that the statistical distribution of various heritable traits relating to cognition, temperament, social predispositions, etc. may vary among human populations, and that differences in the distribution of these traits may have non-trivial effects on the kinds of societies different groups create, on aggregate statistics regarding life outcomes, etc.?
This was just everyday common sense until World War II; since then, it’s become just about unsayable.
You’re slipping, Malcolm. This is more of the same. I didn’t say the cause of California’s educational problems was just money or wasn’t its demographics; these are more distortions akin to my defining away crime and perhaps not believing in incarceration at all. And I’m not sure what boots it to thumb one’s nose at political correctness, incredibly caveated language or not, when none of us know how these things work, but we’re stuck with them anyway. And thanks for the good wishes, Big Henry. I’ll end this on an agricultural note. It occurs to me that Stockton synagogue must pick up trash along I-5 just where the Asparagus Festival is held each spring and I gather this is a bumper year for peaches, so David Masumoto must be feeling even more optimistic than usual, even as Victor Hanson subsides with the water table under the weight of his own poisons.
Jess, discussing this with you is, as they say, like trying to nail Jell-o to a tree. If I misunderstood your comment about the prison union taking away all the money from the educational system, it wasn’t for lack of trying. And if the decline in California’s educational rankings and other quality-of-life measures is in fact due in large part to rapidly changing demographics, well, that was the pessimistic point, right? So I give up. Your position now seems to be one of absolutely feckless fatalism: we really don’t understand anything about anything, and so however screwed up things are, there was nothing we could or should have done about it anyway, and now we’re just stuck with it, so we’d better get used to it.
There are many urgent reasons not only to “thumb one’s nose” at multi-culti political correctness, but indeed to work every day on tearing it out, root and branch. But this thread has reached the point of utter exhaustion.
Over and out.
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