There is a Facebook group called “Conservatives Take Back California,” which I find rather amusing. Here are a few reasons why they won’t come anywhere close to achieving their goal, at least within lifetimes of anyone living here today.
Sheer Volume of Quality Higher Education. California has over 750 higher education institutions, including public universities, private colleges, community colleges, and vocational schools.
The nine campuses of the University of California alone have over 300K students, 26K faculty, 194K staff members, and 2.5 million alumni.
How many UC professors support Trump? Four? There is a huge correlation between voters’ education level and repudiation of Trump and his values of hate, corruption, authoritarianism, anti-education, etc.
Environmentalism. California ranks #1 in the nation in terms of things like college graduates with environmental science degrees, pro-environment policies, and the development of clean technology. California (along with Texas with its immense wind resources) leads the country in terms of MWs of renewable energy installed.
Conservatives, at least those of today, are doing everything they can to inflict damage to solar and wind energy, most notably via Trump’s cancelling tax credits for both these technologies. The GOP views environmentalism generally and climate change mitigation in particular as something for woke socialists. The also believe (without evidence) that the scientists in these fields are corrupt.
Precious few Californians vote for the party that supports fossil fuels and accepts enormous campaign contributions from Big Oil.
Prosperity. California has the largest GDP in the Unites States. If it were a country, it would be the fourth largest economy on Earth.
Of the 3400 venture capital firms in the United States, 2400 of them are in California.
A great deal of this economic success is cutting-edge technology. This legacy goes back to the establishment of Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild, and several others in the late 1930s.
We need to compare this triumph to Trump’s tariffs, an instrument which uniformly causes retaliation and has historically hurt both American workers and consumers. In addition, we have a variety of other economic policies that experts regard as erratic and misguided.
Entertainment. California is known as the entertainment capital of world, by virtue in its stature in film, television, and music. Of course, not everyone in the industry is a progressive; you will find an occasional Clint Eastwood or Kid Rock. But most people in entertainment attained their positions via their emotional sensitivity, and therefore tend to reject Donald Trump’s indifference to human suffering, not to mention his overt criminality.
Conservatives have a solid grasp on states like West Virginia and Alabama, which are known for their racism, poverty, and ignorance. They could get a grip on Mars or Venus before they could make a serious dent in California.
I wish I had $100 for every time I heard some uneducated Trump supporter tell me this.
A democracy is a system where governmental power is derived directly from the will of the majority. A constitutional republic is a specific type of representative democracy where the people elect officials to govern, but those officials are strictly limited by a supreme, written constitution designed to protect minority rights from majority rule.
I remember a conservative friend who lived in Hawaii who complained that the native people objected to a project directed from Washington to build something at the top of one of their volcanoes, on the basis that this was their holy land. My friend asked, “Doesn’t the majority rule?”
“Not necessarily.” Trying to make my point in the simplest way possible, I explained, “People have rights. My neighbors like me, but imagine that they didn’t, and 20 of them, a 20:1 majority, wanted to come in here and beat me to death. I have a right not to murdered. When you think about it, we’re lucky not to live in a country where ‘the majority rules.’”
“Oh. I guess you’re right,” my friend said.
My biggest beef with Trump isn’t the many individual points of failure, but the fact that they are all the product of the mind of a criminal sociopath whose only way of thinking is self-enrichment, normally at the expense of anyone who cannot serve to make him richer and more powerful.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson says that our problem isn’t that our children don’t understand science, but that our adults don’t.
Three comments:
1) Wind is not a finite resource as long as the sun comes up every morning and disproportionately heats the Earth’s surface. 8th grade Earth science.
2) Wind doesn’t cool anything except the skins of certain animals that perspire. 9th grade biology.
3) Putting one’s ignorance of public display is not a strong idea, even in rural Texas.
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