California's Hostage Crisis

A cabal of movement conservatives who want to destroy government and install a feudal market libertopia here are holding the entire state of California hostage to their anti-tax anti-government ideology because idiosyncrasies in our state constitution enable this, and because our confused ineffectual Governor is the punchline of a joke that was never funny in the first place.

One hears a lot of cries of "a plague on both their houses" about politicians in Sacramento from the editorial pages and on the subway but even granting the schlerotic incumbency that compromises Democratic Party politics this kind of equivalent condemnation is actually worse than wrong: Not only does it attribute to some generalized incompetence and corruption what is actually mostly the fault of extreme right-wing ideologues hell-bent on destruction (and succeeding), but it actually disseminates an uncritically anti-governmental sentiment that mirrors, endorses, and rewards the very ideological perspective responsible for California's incomparable mess.

California is home to some of the most progressive majorities in the Union and well-informed highly-motivated progressives in California have been instrumental in recent stunningly successful national Democratic politics, and yet here at home we are flabbergastingly ill-informed and apathetic, sleepwalking while the worst exemplars of the "movement conservativsm" we so resolutely repudiated on the national stage are actually managing here the feat that has always driven them; namely, to shrink the government through insolvency, deregulation, and engineered failure to a size that is small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Where government is of the people, by the people, and for the people make no mistake who is drowned by those who would destroy government. The so-called "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" crowd are stealing the sandwiches from our mouths and calling it liberty. It's a problem when you're governed by people who think government is the problem. Lawlessness, corruption, insolvency, failure ensues as a matter of course. Until these ideologues are exposed for what they are, blamed for what they've done, and decisively repudiated in their fully discredited ideas you can be sure that there is no end in sight to our present hostage crisis.