After her election as mayor of Los Angeles in 2022, Karen Bass was a heroine of California’s Left. A former backer of Fidel Castro, she decisively defeated billionaire businessman Rick Caruso, who spent more than $100 million to try and defeat her. With a struggling economy, rising crime, and a high cost of living, Bass’s election seemed to confirm LA’s final transition from a place of political diversity to a single-party city dominated by a well-organised Left and funders from the public unions.
Now, though, Bass “is a dead woman walking”, as a union organiser friend told me this week. The revelations of incompetence, poor planning, and awful communication, combined with the fact that the LA mayor was partying in Ghana when wildfires started in her city, have worked against her, and yesterday angry protestors gathered outside her home. Some charges made by Donald Trump and Elon Musk tying the disaster to DEI and climate policies are exaggerated. But Bass’s lack of interest in public safety mirrors the new progressive script which prioritises “social justice” over actual justice, racial quotas over merit, and climate alarmism over common sense.
Naturally, Bass, Governor Gavin Newsom and their media supporters reject conservatives’ accusations of incompetence. They say opponents are using the fires as a political “piñata”, and blame the damage on climate change. Yet Steven Koonin, a respected physicist and advisor in the Obama administration, has argued that the real responsibility lies with a slew of bad policies which left the city unprepared for the scale of the disaster. Fires have been a regular feature of life here in Southern California for at least 20 million years. Given recent weather conditions, the city should have known what was coming.
Rather than help save our piece of the planet, proponents of the green movement have been consistent barriers to effective fire management. As far back as 2018, the Little Hoover Commission found that controlled burns and brush clearance were necessary to avoid catastrophic wildfires, yet not enough was done. Even as the state reacted to major fires in 2020, attempts at controlled fires have been hampered by environmental lawsuits that delay implementation, as well as fire management budget cuts. Bass also cut the fire budget.
California has been running huge deficits in recent years, but not enough of those funds have gone towards fire preparedness. Those in charge never made sure that fire engines were in place beforehand, that there was sufficient water pressure in hydrants, and that reservoirs were filled. To her credit, the LA council member who represents the Palisades, Traci Park, has consistently made these arguments.
Unsurprisingly, there has been a groundswell against Bass and the city’s bureaucrats. Some Hollywood stars — a group which has historically been the bulwark of the progressive movement — have even joined in. Celebrities including Maria Shriver, Justine Bateman and Dennis Quaid have now called on Bass to resign, as have the 150,000 signatories of a petition launched last week. As the journalist Michael Shellenberger notes: “They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.”
Read the rest of this piece at Unherd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Los Angeles Fire Department via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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