How "A Perfect Storm of Smugness" Has Destroyed California

As They Often Do, the South Park Guys Got It Right

In 2006, I got a healthy contract to write a book to be titled What’s the Matter with California?. The book was to something of a rejoinder to the liberal best seller, What’s the Matter with Kansas?. It was a great project. I always loved San Francisco and liked Los Angeles, and the advance allowed me to roam at will throughout the nation’s most physically blessed state.

Even in 2006, however, it was clear the inhabitants had f***ed it all up. When I told old-time Californians the title of my book, the most common response I got was, “How many volumes?” They knew. We all knew. We just could not be sure of what form the self-destruction would take.

A classic episode of the contrarian adult cartoon TV show, South Park, cut to the heart of the state’s ultimate vulnerability. As the plot unfolds, young Kyle’s father, Gerald Broflovski, buys a new hybrid car, the “Pious.” Of course, he drives it endlessly around town so people can see how wonderfully green he is.

“I just couldn't sit back and be a part of destroying the earth anymore,” he tells one bystander. When Mr. Broflovski starts handing out “awareness citations” to SUV drivers, the town of South Park, Colorado, decides it has had piety enough.

“We need to be where everyone is motivated and progressive like us!” Mr. Broflovski tells his stunned family. “Start getting your things packed, boys! The Broflovksi family is moving to San Francisco!”

Young Stan pleads with Mr. Broflovski not to leave town with his best friend Kyle in tow, but Mr. Broflovski proves to be as non-judgmental as your average Oscar-winning harpy. “I'm sorry, Stan, but unfortunately you live in a small-minded town filled with ignorant boobs.”

The show unwinds in pure South Park fashion. In the way of a PG summary, a “smug cloud” rising from San Francisco threatens to merge with a smug cloud rising over Los Angeles, a direct emission from the Oscar ceremony where George Clooney has just given Hollywood “credit for the Civil Rights movement.”

These clouds threaten to form “a perfect storm of self-satisfaction” until the unlikely young Cartman saves the day. For the full scatological effect, the reader can check out episode 141.

Where there was smugness, there is now fire. The perfect storm of self-satisfaction has devolved into a perfect form of self-destruction. While TV commentators busy themselves listing—or avoiding—the obvious causes of the hellfire now consuming Los Angeles, they lack the perspective to talk root causes, and no cause is more deeply rooted than the smugness of the woke.

In no state have so many people of influence grown so thoroughly blind to the obvious. The fact is that California could solve its problems in a generation if only its creative classes could see what those problems are. This, they refuse to do.

In his dazzling and much cited book, City of Quartz, for instance, Mike Davis shows an impressive mastery of the details of what he calls “Fortress LA.” His description of “the most menacing library ever built,” the Frank Gehry-designed Goldwyn Library in Hollywood, is alone worth a trip to your local bookstore.

For all his gifts of observation, however, Davis refuses to grasp the larger picture. As a case in point, where lesser mortals see the bellwether Watts Riot of 1965, he sees the “Watts Rebellion.” Calling a riot a “rebellion.” however, does not make it “an organized attempt to overthrow a government or other authority by use of violence.”

It was nothing of the kind. He knows that. No, it remains a riot, exactly as the dictionary defines “riot” namely “a public disturbance during which a group of angry people becomes noisy and out of control, often damaging property and acting violently.”

Davis represents something of a hip norm. By denying the obvious, observers like him, talented and otherwise, fail to get a handle on root causes. Depending on their skills and their biases, they fixate on the less true, the less relevant, the half true, the irrelevant, and sometimes the downright false. So prevalent is this phenomenon that I have assigned it an acronym, ABETTO—as in, a blind eye to the obvious.

Aggravating the blindness is the progressive attachment to singular causes—antiracism, antisexism, reproductive rights, radical environmentalism, LGBT rights, illegal immigration. In theory, “intersectionality” meant that these marginalized groups shared common oppressors and thus have common political interests.

Schooled in street-level Critical Theory, activists from various fronts have been forging alliances with those in other fronts who also see themselves as oppressed. These activists are expected to subordinate their own interests to the larger progressive cause—seizing and sustaining power.

In November 2024, at the national level, that dream died. Rather than address the ways in which the absurdity of their various causes had alienated the majority of Americans—or even review how these causes were eroding the quality of life in California—these groups found common cause in a common enemy. In this effort, they were not even subtle. As fire raged through Los Angeles, the Democrat dominated legislature began a special legislative session to”Trump-proof” California.

Smug apparently gets in your eyes. Unable to save themselves, the California woke will learn soon enough that if the state is to have a savior, his name is Donald Trump. They had better play nice. They are in for some tough love.