The wildfires ripping through Southern California are an incredibly tragic yet fitting end to the Biden administration.
Joe Biden did not set the blazes that have destroyed more than 10,000 homes and turned one of the most beautiful areas of the country into a smoke-filled hellscape. But it is a struggle to think of any incident that better encapsulates the modus operandi of America in the Biden era than the state and local government failures, which both made the fires more likely to break out and more catastrophic once they did. Perhaps most enraging of all is the self-righteous tone with which all those responsible proclaimed that no one had the right to expect them to have done better.
In California, dysfunction is so systemic that it would be considered satire if presented in a 1990s dystopian novel. It would take a multi-year-long inquiry to even begin to scratch the surface of what went wrong in the time leading up to the start of the fires and the immediate response to them on the part of government officials.
There are still significant questions the public does not know the answer to and perhaps never will. Did the state prioritize the safety of a species of fish over ensuring a steady water supply after years in which the state feuded with Arizona over water shortages? Did the decision to use the Los Angeles Fire Department as a vehicle to offer DEI patronage to racial and LGBTQ+ groups undermine the response, or would any response have been crippled no matter what by the decision to send fire trucks to Ukraine? Was the city’s response to the fires undermined by Mayor Karen Bass’ absence, or did her removal from the scene prevent an even worse disaster?
Getting answers to these questions won’t change the scope of the disaster. Nonetheless, they matter, of course, to the citizens of Los Angeles who have lost their homes and to the California taxpayers who will likely be forced to foot the bill for the destruction to avoid a collapse of the already catatonic state insurance market.
More relevant to the rest of the country is that none of the failures laid bare by the devastation are unique to Los Angeles or even California. They are intrinsic parts of Democratic Party governance in the Obama-Biden era.
Take, for instance, the environmental concerns that led the state government to limit rainwater collection to help an endangered fish or the decision to send fire trucks to Ukraine. Whatever arguments were made during the deliberations leading to those decisions, we can be sure that the risk of an out-of-control fire was not the most compelling.
While it seems inevitable the decision-makers underrated the risk, it is implausible to imagine they didn’t conceive the possibility of an inferno like the one we are now witnessing. Instead, it is more likely they assumed it was not their problem. Their job was to protect a specific species of fish, to ensure increased hiring for DEI quotas, or to produce a photo-op for the party’s foreign policy in Ukraine.
The truly horrifying possibility is that at every level of decision-making – water supplies, recruitment for the fire department, forest management – fighting fires was always someone else’s priority. In the end, it was no one’s priority, with the disastrous consequences we are now witnessing.
The same “too big to fail” dynamic that has gripped corporate America since the 2008 bailouts now extends to the public sector. During the financial crisis, far-sighted critics noted that by bailing out failing financial institutions, the Bush and Obama administrations were socializing risk while privatizing profit. This created a perverse incentive for executives to undertake ventures that, if successful, would lead to personal advancement, safe in the knowledge someone else would take the fall if disaster struck.
This was dangerous, but it at least applied to profit and incentivized innovation. What DEI did was remove the profit motive from the practice. Suddenly, mid-level company executives could be promoted if they hired members of specific minority groups regardless if those employees helped increase profits because their job was to make their department more diverse, not to make it more successful. They could be certain BlackRock would bail them out if the worst happened.
Over the long run, this created a perverse effect whereby those ambitious to move up focused on DEI initiatives, while those who focused on DEI initiatives were the most likely to move up since it was almost impossible to fail. What has now happened is that the same principle has been extended to governance by the Democratic Party.
Once the Democratic Party elevated principles such as “equity” and “social justice” to the same level as “keeping people safe” and “stopping crime,” there was a flight away from responsibility throughout the entire party apparatus. While the job of the police and fire departments as a whole is to reduce crime and fight fires, the ability of any individual within those organizations to do so alone is limited. If they make efficiency their “brand” and disaster occurs, they are finished. Even if they succeed, for instance, by reducing crime through aggressive policing, it can open them up to charges of racism. By creating a situation in which their most effective officials were denounced as sexists and racists, Democrats not only purged every institution they controlled of competence but ensured the ambitious and capable would avoid responsibility like the plague.
Whoever successfully convinced their superiors to starve Los Angeles of water to save a fish or demanded that dams be removed to restore ecosystems was doing precisely what the Democratic Party rewarded. Their job was not preventing Pacific Palisades from burning to the ground, but rather turning progressive talking points into ill-advised policy prescriptions.
What makes California, like Seattle and too many other Democratic-run jurisdictions, a dystopia is that no one capable concerns themselves with the welfare of the public.
Los Angeles liberals seem to be taking comfort in the idea that Gavin Newsom and the state of California will bail them out, and if Newsom gets into trouble, the country as a whole will bail them out. The problem, of course, has been that for the last four years the Biden administration has applied the same toxic incentive structures on the national level.
The Biden administration’s obsession with climate change and sexual, gender, and racial politics comes from the sentiments of Democratic elites. The prioritization by those charged with implementing the CHIPS Act of reducing the number of Asians in tech over actually building semiconductors or pushing Xi Jinping to reduce CO2 emissions rather than fentanyl production is a product of the same bureaucratic rot that is allowing LA to burn.
The most remarkable thing about this rot is how unaware its perpetrators are of cause and effect. A sensible person might reflect in the face of the LA fires that prioritizing wildlife preservation over keeping reservoirs full may have been a mistake. For Newsom and Democratic voices in the media, Republican criticism is demagogic because the officials who cut off the water to LA were doing their jobs. The officials who failed to stop the fire without trucks, water, or competent leadership are at fault, and Democrats are willing to hold them accountable – if only they can identify who those individuals are.
The song and dance of Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass should be familiar. It was one that Americans heard repeatedly over the last few years when they were assured that no one was responsible for the border, inflation, Afghanistan, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Those attacking hardworking officials who only did their jobs were the real villains, they told us.
The irony is that this dystopian structure, built for no purpose other than to pander to certain groups, has alienated almost everyone, including those it was intended to buy off. There have been comparisons of the corruption of modern Democratic governance with that of New York’s Tammany Hall in the 19th century. Tammany never forgot that the support of Irish, Italian, and Jewish voters depended not on providing government jobs to the few but on ensuring the rest that their houses would not burn down. Democrats may have delivered a diverse, LGBTQ+ inclusive fire department, but the gays and lesbians of Santa Monica would much prefer a fire department that could save their homes.
In November, the American electorate rendered its verdict on the California model. It went down in flames politically, including in LA, where Soros-backed DA George Gascon lost reelection to Republican 2022 Attorney General nominee Nathan Hochman. It is a tragedy that it came too late to prevent nature from rendering its own verdict and two weeks too early for help to arrive from a new regime in Washington.
The people of Los Angeles deserved better than to become the lasting image of the Biden years.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
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