VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: California and conservatism:

Conservatives know that the problem with California is not skin color, ethnic affinity, or race, but rather a juxtaposition of historically unprecedented great wealth on the coast and the culture it spawns — especially in high technology, government, finance, entertainment, and academia — with dire poverty in the state’s north and interior, some the result of years of open borders and illegal immigration. The result is a state in which the pernicious consequences of elite policymaking are never quite experienced by their insulated architects.

Open borders are fine, but then so are their proponents’ gated communities and the growth in coastal private academies and prep schools, as the public schools score near bottom in the nation’s test scores. Water transfers are the obsolete projects of a bygone age, but not those such as Hetch Hetchy, vital to Bay Area survival. Expensive gas and electricity are good green policies, but their deleterious consequences fall most heavily on the distant inland poor of the much hotter and colder interior. The nation’s highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes can be either avoided or easily paid by those who are most in favor of them.

And, yes, there are enormous demographic changes in the state going on. One in four residents was not born in the U.S. Somewhere near 4 million Californians have left in recent years. The Democratic party has largely bifurcated into a pyramidal, medieval organization of the few very wealthy and the many very poor, the former pursuing iconic green and identity politics and gender issues, the later increasingly dependent on social services.

California is a state with the nation’s most billionaires and some of the highest per capita income communities in the country, while home to one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, with a fifth of the population living below the poverty line. My own rural community is now part of a tri-county region that is more impoverished than Appalachia; most of my former neighbors’ farmhouses now have ad hoc trailers and shacks behind them, often resulting in ten or 15 residents per home. Sheriff raids to break up drug production, prostitution rings, and gang violence are not trumped-up conservative angst, but common in our rural neighborhood.

Is there any hope?