What's next for California Republicans?

[H. Ross Peron]

California Republicans need to accept the fact they aren't going to win white suburbanites by Reagan-era margins anymore, so its silly to simp excessively for suburban white women wine moms, a large portion of whom have wholeheartedly bought into what Wesley Yang calls the Successor Ideology as of late with the same sense of moral panic that their Eighties predecessors fell for Satanic scares. After all, the California Democrats are very much the party of the suburban wine mom nowadays. Therefore, CA Republicans will have to make up support elsewhere, especially with working-class Asians and Latinos. This means embracing a sort of "radical centrist" ideology rather than either warmed over Reaganism (even in its faux-proletarian "Trumpist" guise) or the "fiskhully conservative, soshully librul" panacea of the pundit midwits.

Such a radical centrist platform would include:

1) Rejecting both wokeness and nativism in favour of an assimilationist civic nationalism. It's worth noting that despite California's recent leftward shift, voters strongly rejecting restoring affirmative action. The University of California system has rejected standardized testing such as SAT while the tendency of the teaching professions towards enthusiastically and uncritically adopting the latest theories has led many public school districts and teachers to embrace extreme forms of wokeness in their curriculum. Witness the infantile demands to cover over murals by a *communist* artist depicting Washington as a slaveholder by would-be neoliberal commissars like Meena Harris, the Vice President's own sister. There is an embarassment of easy targets for a culturally and historically conscious Right here, but only if it is part of a broader constructive effort to teach a positive narrative of National history and continuity and not simply fodder for talk radio or FOX News outrage.

2) Moving to the center on economics. In a state as unequal as California, the Republican Party simply has no path forward by holding onto an extreme anti-tax and anti-social welfare conservatism which has little appeal to working-class Californians of any race. Even within the Bay Area and Los Angeles megapoli, two Californias exist side by side-the metro core and elite suburban California of the professional managerial and creative class and the outer suburban/exurban California of the lower middle and working classes, who often endure hours long commutes. While overclass liberals preen about "individual autonomy" to avoid doing anything constructive about the exploding homeless population of the state, working class Californians must deal with the effects of homelessness on the quality of public facilities like parks, libraries, and mass transit which the elites can avoid by retreating to wealthy enclaves. I suspect some of the lumpenbourgeois (pseudo)intellectuals even see homelessness as part of the "charm" of life in the Big City. Of course, none of this does any favours to homeless people who are with minimal help under atrocious conditions in the Tenderloin and Skid Row. It was the California Ideology of the cultural left and economic right that combined to produce the "deinstitutionalization" approach (under President Reagan no less) that led to exploding homeless populations of the present. Instead of leading the charge to combat homelessness and rising housing costs through liberalization of zoning laws and embracing a more communitarian ethos where sometimes people should be institutionalized for their own good, Republicans only have short-term punitive solutions in mind while tying themselves to the suburban NIMBYs many of whom hate the GOP's guts now! The new legislation removing single-family zoning in California is a start but there's a lot of room where the California Republicans can still pull themselves ahead such as urging more relaxed environmental standards which can be also part of a blue collar jobs strategy in the extractive and manufacturing industries.

3) Related to both of the above, California Republicans can still run on crime issues especially on restoring penalties for certain kinds of theft but must not pretend this is the same central issue it was in the 1980s especially since Democrats are not falling for the trap of police defunding.

Of course, given the decayed state and utter intellectual bankruptcy of the California Republican Party, I suspect that none of my suggestions will be even remotely considered by any of its strategists or politicians.