I love California.

I’m not just saying that because I’m about to be rude about its government; I really, truly love California. A few years ago, when Scotland was considering leaving the U.K., I made the case to anyone who would listen that, while it was certainly true that the move would have made it easier for the English Right to win, I was against it anyway — for the same reason I would not want to lose a part of my body. Fairly often, Americans met this argument with a cynical remark. “Nah,” they would say. “Let ’em go. Perhaps it’ll inspire California.” This horrified me. I wouldn’t want to see any Part of the United States leave. But that one? California is beautiful. It has sublime weather. Its people are inventive and unusual. It’s full of roller coasters. The food is good. It produces wine. It’s the center of the worlds technological innovation. And, above all, there’s something ineffable about the way the light hits the trees that you just don’t get anywhere else. I have all manner of great memories of the place – from childhood up to now. When I’m invited to go there, I do so without much thought. As Ronald Reagan used to joke, ” If the Pilgrims had landed in California instead of back East, nobody would have bothered to discover the rest of the country.”

but, look, it really IS badly run, and there’s absolutely nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise. Heck, if California had the geography of Kansas and the climate of Minnesota, there’d be nobody left in it. About a decade ago, I spoke to some conservative students at UCLA who were tearing their hair out over the state’s misgovernance. I listened patiently as they complained and bellyached and griped and emoted, and, eventually, I asked the group whether anyone was planning to leave. “Leave?” they all said, as if I’d asked them when they expected to commit their first ritual sacrifice. “Look outside. are you crazy?“

But that was then, and this is now, and I suspect that some of those people have, in face, left. Sunshine and mountains and dry heat will cover a multitude of sins, but they will not cover all of them. Perhaps California has not yet reached the point at which the dysfunction becomes too much to bear, but it is closer now than it haas been for a while. There are, after all, a lot of other attractive states in our Union.

Lest I be misunderstood, when I propose that California is “really badly run,” I do not mean that it is run by people with whose politics I disagree – although that is undoubtedly true. I mean that it is run by people who are incompetent at the tasks of taxing ans spending, passing and enforcing laws, representing their constituents, and dealing with emergencies. Massachusetts is full of people with whose politics I disagree, but, on the whole, it’s pretty solidly governed. Sure, I don’t want to live there, but, by the same token, a lot of Bay Staters don’t want to live where I live in Florida. One of the great things about the United States is that it offers a bunch of opeions. If you favor the “red-state model,” you can opt for Massachusetts or Washington. And if you favor the utterly infuriating mocel, you can follow California.

The proximate cause of California’s woes is that it politicians havae forgotten how to do the basics. One can get away with a great deal of ideology, wastefulness, and self-indulgence if the schools are good, the roads are smooth, the police are allowed to do their jobs, the housing is affordable, and the natural disasters are addressed swiftly and sanely. But the moment those things are forgotten? Forget about it.

In essence, California’s progressive political establishment – an establishement that has dominated its Republican governors, as well as its Democratic governors – has coasted along atop and entirely negative promise: “Vote for us, and we’ll make sure that the other guys don’t win.” As a strategy for gaining and retaining power, this has worked rather well. As the bedrock for sensible governance, it has failed disastrously. California has extremely high taxes and a prohibitive cost of living, and in return, its residents get . . . well, what? Their government is in debt, and their schools are failing, their planning system is broken, their business environment is toxic, and, above all, nothing – whether it be power stations or reservoirs or high-speed rail or housing estates – ever seems to get vuilt. At the same time, the state spends a good deal of its energy trying to force people to take their carrs off the road, to make their homes less useful and more expensive, and to interrupt their work lives by demanding that they join a labor union. It is telling that, if asked why they put up with it, the Californians that stay tend to point to the features of the state that existed before mankind walked the earth.

Or, if they are feeling less charitable, they tend to balame someone – or something – else. The fires that haave terrorized Los Angeles over the past week have many causes, but reasonable observers ought to be able to agree that none of those causes is Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Christian nationalism, or any of the other bogeymen that are typically trotted out to explain why figures such as Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass should remain in their jobs. Even “climate change” – that dastardly protean villian – represents a weak excuse for the state’s poor preparation for wildfires, given that, if one truly believed that the circumstances were as dire as California’s officials repetedly insist that they are, one would presumably end up being more prepared for the consequenses of climate change, not less.

Politics is too complicates a subject to make simplisic predictions profitable, but one must wonder nevertheless whether this month’s split screen between the raging inferno in Pacific Palisates and the most useless politicians in the world will at least contribute to a sense of that, at long last, California has descended into farce. Strip away the posturing and the feflection and the indignation, discount the many virtues over which they have no control, ignore the slick presentations and the cutting-edge vocabularies, and one is left only with a famous question for those politicians: “What would you say you do here?”