7thriv

George Will is talking California and the talk ain't good: California As Liberalism's Laboratory

California's increasingly severe and largely self-inflicted economic crisis will deepen on May 19 if, as is probable and desirable, voters reject most of the ballot measures that were drafted as part of a "solution" to the state's budget deficit. They would make matters worse. National economic revival is being impeded because one-eighth of the nation's population lives in a state that is driving itself into permanent stagnation. California's perennial boast -- that it is the incubator of America's future -- now has an increasingly dark urgency

Along the way, Will makes a point rarely made either here in CA or anywhere else in American politics: our problem is often the political "moderates" who are held up in the media and popular culture as the beau ideal of American politics.

Flinching from serious budget cutting, and from confronting public employees unions, some Californians focus on process questions. They devise candidate-selection rules designed to diminish the role of parties, thereby supposedly making more likely the election of "moderates" amenable to even more tax increases.

But what actually ails California is centrist evasions. The state's crisis has been caused by "moderation," understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a "reasonableness" that merely moderates the speed at which the ever-expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.

Political moderates like CA's Arnold Schwarzenegger or GOP state senator "Arlen" Maldonado exist in the shatter belt of modern politics; the place where the demand for increased services and a low tax burden meet. You need nerves of steel and a philosophy of stone to balance the electorate's twin demands and most "moderates" lack both. They are, instead, weak-willed and untrustworthy. You never know when they are going to betray their party for the sake of a deal, or betray their allies in the other party for the sake of a party-line vote.

The one thing you can count on: they will always support the expansion of government. In that sense, political moderates are better understood as representing the party of spending and appropriations. Yet moderates are often portayed in the media (and in their own Walter Mitty inner lives) as standing on "principle." As if. Sherrod Brown and Russ Feingold stand on principle. Tom Coburn and Mark Sanford stand on principle. But the rheamy-eyes likes of Arlen Specter and "Arlen" Maldonado stand on little more than self-preservation and kicking the can down the road.