I’ve lived in CA my entire life (except for my time at Oxford).

I’ve lived in CA my entire life (except for my time at Oxford). Went to Stanford. Trained in law at SD. Wrote a bestselling novel out of LJ.

A lot of what you say here is right.

Diversity is great here. Culture is great. Food is great. Social progressivism is great. The focus on innovation around Stanford in the bay has been phenomenal in the past. (It’s still there, to a degree.) We are a true melting pot—in every sense of the word. The very best of America is here. I know brilliant ”conservatives” and brilliant ”liberals” in California (as to ordinary people, the labels are ridiculous when you drill down). We all add to our conversation. The whole is greater than its parts.

But California has very serious problems. Chiefly, it is farcically expensive. We need to tackle housing costs and homelessness here if we want to hold up California to the world. NIMBY and red tape constraining supply at the local level must stop.

A starter home in SD costs $800k. A ”middle-class” home in my neighborhood is $3m. Rent is $3k/month for a one-bedroom. It’s worse than that in SF (there rent for a one-bedroom can be $4-5k—almost everyone splits). Good luck affording that as a millennial, or gen z, with student loans in a miserable job market.

You can’t sustainably build wealth when your young people can’t build capital & look to the future.

Also, the tech names that have once created so much wealth through innovation are now little more than titans & monopolist billionaires. They are our Carnegies & Rockefellers, ripe for an inevitable antitrust attack or disruptive innovation. These giants are playing the infinite game now, struggling to stay ahead of the next disruption. They openly employ tie-ins & predation, operating search engines & marketplaces to the advantage of their proprietary brands. They check speech—pushing brazen Orwellian concepts like ”Newspeak” (oh sorry, “hate speech”) into our vernacular in defiance of 1A. This is a far cry from the late-90s SV garage tech incubator we once knew.

This article has a tinge of cruelty, narrow-mindedness, & arrogance. You are not nearly sophisticated enough to label half the country “reactionary” and simply stop listening. I don’t know if you’ve spent time a lot of time here, but life in CA isn’t binary. This is a place of brilliant shining glass-and-steel towers, surrounded at their base by homeless camps on all sides. Everything is shades of grey here. Not every so-called “conservative” is a COVID-denying Trump supporter. Not every “progressive” policy will lead us to brilliant prosperity. This is reductive & foolish. We are better than this.

As a society we must reject absolutes. We must re-learn critical thinking, personal responsibility, discipline, & innovation. We must reengage with each other. We must reject groupthink, thought suppression, division, and postmodern nihilism.

We must solve universal healthcare, education costs, housing costs, & climate Δ (solar energy & atmospheric geoengineering + ocean iron fertilization might get this done).

“Liberal”/“progressive” Democrats & “conservative”/“reactionary” Republicans are all valuable. They all have something to add. It would be better if we rejected tribalism altogether and learned to listen. But that’s not likely to happen with human beings. So remember that we all have our share of ugly, and everyone has something of value to add. You’re not special.

Very soon, a new era will begin. Everyone will be a part of that.