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IN MY VIEW - California’s downward spiral is staged by the very people who pride themselves on being the smartest in the room. The state’s most educated voters continue to support policies that have produced unmistakable, measurable failure: exploding homelessness, rising crime, rampant drug addiction, astronomical housing costs, declining schools, self-inflicted environmental and energy crises, and corruption embedded in every layer of California’s government.
Yet the same governing class responsible for these outcomes congratulates itself for its supposed moral and intellectual superiority. They insist they are guided by compassion, reason, and “evidence-based” policy, even as every metric screams failure. We refuse to examine a taboo too big and too uncomfortable to confront: California’s cultural elite is not simply mal-informed; they are psychologically and economically committed to the very policies that are destroying the state and blind to their disastrous policy outcomes.
The results are clear to those who choose to see, and the data backs up the casual observations anyone can make. Over the past decade, homelessness has increased significantly. Everyone, except those wealthy enough to afford bodyguards, fears becoming a crime victim, whether it is having your house ransacked by a criminal gang or being assaulted for being in a place merely at the wrong time. It is so bad that even in so-called safe neighborhoods, one cannot walk safely without fear of becoming a victim.
Yet, at every election, the same tired, devoid of new ideas war horse incumbents of the left are reelected with overwhelming support from the same college-educated coastal voters who say they value data, evidence, and rational governance.
Observers dismiss this as political insanity, repeating the same choices and expecting different outcomes. But that cliché masks something deeper and far more disturbing. California’s dysfunction isn’t due to insanity, ignorance, mere partisanship, or unfair elections. Traditional prisons have walls, guards, and locked doors. You know you're captive. California's educated elite live in a panopticon of their own psychology and monetary advancement.
California’s educated class lives inside a prison without bars: a system in which acceptable political views are tightly constrained, dissent is met with reputational destruction rather than argument and reason. Ideological conformity is enforced not by the state but by peers, employers, institutions, and the status hierarchy. It is a system in which people defend the very beliefs that undermine their communities, because rejecting them would threaten their identity, social standing, and professional credentials.
The bear state’s elites fear being perceived as privileged oppressors. Their acts of misguided empathy serve as a purification ritual broadcast perpetually lest one forget their holier-than-thou virtuousness. Every policy that harms the working class, like sky-high energy prices, becomes a symbolic act of repentance and a way to prove they are “the good ones”. In this moral economy, empathy is currency, and public suffering becomes the stage on which they perform their public sacrifices.
Suicidal empathy provides ready-made emotional shortcuts: Don’t enforce laws? “We’re being compassionate.” Best articulated by Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has stated that "we cannot incarcerate our way out of violence" and described the "addiction" to jails and incarceration in the U.S. as "racist, immoral, and unholy". Therefore, through the lens of suicidal empathy, anarchy and victimhood are sacramental lambs of the great reset. In other words, if incarceration is racist, immoral, and unholy, then the refusal to incarcerate, no matter how much harm, chaos, and human suffering it produces, becomes a pillar of saintly virtue; it transforms anarchy into righteousness.
The mechanism is subtle. In elite institutions like universities, law firms, tech companies, media organizations, and nonprofits, the boundaries of acceptable thought are well understood, even if they are never officially stated. People quickly learn which views gain social approval and which lead to suspicion or moral judgment. As a result, they accept that certain issues are ignored or considered unimportant, such as failing schools. Lack of quality education becomes acceptable because equity is more important, either because it somehow supports social justice or because illegal immigration is viewed as diversity being our strength™. Despite evidence that assimilation is impossible and their culture is diametrically opposed to ours.
Conforming to beliefs, even when they involve elements of magical thinking, creates a sense of belonging, while deviation results in social exclusion, professional penalties, and moral rebuke. Over time, external expectations become internal beliefs. Individuals begin to police their own thoughts first, then others’, allowing the ideological bondage to sustain itself without force.
The most insidious feature of this arrangement is that it does not feel like propaganda. Visible propaganda can be resisted. But propaganda that arrives through peer affirmation, institutional consensus, and moral vocabulary becomes indistinguishable from personal belief. It becomes the adhesive of the social order. In such a system, failure is often rewarded as long as right-think was used.
This leads to two complementary psychological effects. The first is moral narcissism, the tendency to treat political preferences as markers of personal virtue rather than as instruments for producing real-world outcomes. The second is cognitive euthanasia, the deliberate numbing of critical faculties to avoid confronting facts that undermine one’s worldview. Together, they create a cycle in which California’s educated voters cling to policies that harm the very communities they claim to champion, because abandoning those policies would require admitting error, risking social exclusion, and challenging the institutions that confer their status.
This psychological structure did not emerge randomly. It is the expression of a broader ideological project often referred to as “The Great Reset.” While the term is frequently caricatured as a conspiracy theory, its core meaning is straightforward: the belief that society should be re-engineered from above by technocratic elites using the language of sustainability, equity, and compassion. It is an ideology rooted in the conviction that experts, not citizens, should shape the economic, cultural, and moral contours of society. It replaces democratic participation with managerial administration and recasts dissent as moral deviance and racism rather than legitimate disagreement. It doesn't require coordination; it only needs consensus. California has embraced this ideology with an intensity unmatched anywhere else in the United States.
The Reset’s core idea that society should be “reimagined” based on elite moral visions is evident across California policies. The state has “reimagined” public safety by downplaying crime concerns and weakening law enforcement. It has “reimagined” homelessness by emphasizing costly, unconditional housing without requiring treatment for mental illness or addiction. It has “reimagined” education by dismantling merit-based standards. It has “reimagined” environmental policy by creating a complex regulatory system that restricts housing supply (while bemoaning the lack of affordable housing) and energy production. In each case, the aim is utopian, the language is moralized, and the results are disastrous.
But the ideology persists because it is shielded from the consequences of its own failure. Its staunchest supporters are those least affected by its harms. College-educated professionals in wealthier neighborhoods do not live near encampments. Their children do not attend deteriorating schools. They are not concerned about understaffed police departments that do not patrol their communities because they have private security. They possess the money, mobility, and political influence to protect themselves from the outcomes of the policies they endorse. They live in a bubble.
Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than among California’s liberal, educated women, who form the state’s most loyal progressive constituency. Their social networks are more personal and emotionally connected. Their professional environments, like education, nonprofits, healthcare, and philanthropy, are the most ideologically scrutinized by themselves.
Liberal women’s political preferences are tied more closely to moral identity and group belonging. Criticizing progressive crime policies, expressing concern about addiction, or questioning housing regulations is not treated as a policy disagreement but as evidence of insufficient compassion and tax dollars. For many of these women, dissent does not simply risk disagreement; it risks social exile, reputational damage, and violation of group norms. Their suicidal empathy becomes a vulnerability that the political system exploits.
This explanation also accounts for the rise of female political leadership in California. The state’s mayors, county supervisors, and legislators increasingly emerge from activist networks, nonprofit bureaucracies, and ideologically aligned institutions where dissenting views are filtered out long before candidates reach office. To succeed, they must fully adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy. Once elected, they face continuous pressure from the same groups that supported their rise. Policy failures are not seen as signs of flawed ideas but as proof that the ideological struggle has not gone far enough. Homelessness worsens, and they demand more affordable housing, never looking at the underlying causes. Crime increases, and they dismiss it as “misinformation.” Schools fail, and they blame systemic racism.
Education complicates the problem instead of solving it. Higher education fosters ideological conformity rather than independence. It deepens the psychological confinement by embedding individuals in institutions that reward orthodoxy and punish deviation. Professional networks increase pressure to conform, and if you don’t, you risk losing licenses (think COVID shots). As a result, identity becomes closely tied to ideology, making change both psychologically and economically undesirable.
California is therefore not simply misgoverned. It is ideologically imprisoned. Its dysfunction is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a worldview that prioritizes broadcasting your high-minded intentions to the world over competence, moral posture over public safety. It is continually foisted and sold on the low-information voter as progress. The tragedy is that the people who believe they are acting from compassion, people who want to alleviate suffering, have become the most effective praetorian guards of a system that perpetuates suffering and eschews human flourishing.
California’s decline will persist, but it is a logical outcome of a philosophy that has forgotten how to deal with cause and effect and failure. California’s political system is caught in a catastrophic doom loop of its own high-minded stinking thinking.
(Eliot Cohen has served on the Neighborhood Council for 12 years, served on the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, is on the Board of Homeowners of Encino, and was the president of HOME for over seven years. Eliot retired after a 35-year career on Wall Street. Eliot is a critic of the stinking thinking of the bureaucrats and politicians that run the County, the State, and the City. Eliot and his wife divide their time between L.A. and Baja Norte, Mexico. Eliot is a featured writer for CityWatchLA.com.)
