California at a Crossroads

T he upcoming gubernatorial-recall election in California provides an amusing contrast between Larry Elder, a black conservative from inner-city Los Angeles who made it from Crenshaw High School to Brown to a position at one of the nation’s most prestigious law firms before embarking on his radio and television career, and Gavin Newsom, the son of a rich white guy in San Francisco who made his money sucking on the Getty Oil teat who grew up to be a rich white guy in San Francisco who made his money sucking on the Getty Oil teat.

As I put it in the New York Post, it’s the Sage from South Central vs. the Schmuck from the French Laundry.

Larry Elder is a conservative talk-radio host in 2021, with all the bumptious, Trumpish baggage that goes with that. And yet the polls have him within plausible reach of the governorship. Elder is a formidable communicator and a man of genuine intelligence, but the fact that an AM-radio chatterbox has managed, in the breaks between the doggie-vitamin commercials, to get within striking distance of supplanting the sitting Democratic governor is less a recognition of his considerable gifts than it is an indictment of Gavin Newsom’s sundry grotesqueries — and the sorry state of California as a whole.

Because there is much more to what ails California than the depths of mediocrity plumbed by the feckless, po-faced hypocrite who currently sits at the top of state government or the temperament of the irascible broadcaster who aims to be the third man (by my count) to make his way from the Hollywood Walk of Fame to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.

Think of California as Detroit writ large.

In the 1950s, Detroit was an economic powerhouse, full of dynamism and innovation. In 1960, it had the highest per-capita income of any city in these United States. Like Silicon Valley, it was home to many of the world’s most famous companies, but its most important asset was its people. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 100 automobile startups were founded in the United States, mostly in the industrial centers of New England and Ohio. But it was Detroit that succeeded, thanks largely to a highly skilled work force that was able to easily make the transition from manufacturing marine engines, one of Detroit’s pre-automotive specialties, to manufacturing automobiles. And Detroit built success on success: The best workers could be found there, because that’s where the best jobs were, and the best jobs came there, because that’s where the best workers were.

Those union jobs on automotive assembly lines made Detroit a mecca for blue-collar and middle-class workers, but, like Silicon Valley, it grew culturally sophisticated as it grew rich: In the Ford Auditorium on the waterfront, a string of European conductors led the city’s popular and well-regarded orchestra, while culinary magazines printed recipes from the city’s restaurants, its schools educated the likes of Elmore Leonard, and its factory workers labored in buildings designed by Albert Kahn.

But even with all that going for it, Detroit was already showing signs of trouble in 1960, when the U.S. Census found its population in a decline that would soon turn into a stampede for the exits — once the nation’s fifth-largest city, it would eventually slide down to 27th place, losing two-thirds of its people. Its famous hotels — the Wolverine, the Park Avenue — were converted into flophouses and homeless shelters, or knocked down to build parking lots. Americans still make cars — a great many of them — but only one of the ten-biggest U.S. automobile factories operating today is in Michigan. The largest car factory in the United States today belongs to Nissan, whose U.S. operations are based in Tennessee.

Detroit’s hubris should be a lesson for California, especially for Silicon Valley. In 1950, the Age of the Automobile was upon us, and Detroit believed that its factories were an eternal golden goose, a source of high-paying jobs and oodles of tax revenue that would always be there. Both the Big Three automotive companies and the local authorities in Detroit were unprepared for the changes that already were under way in the 1950s, from increased competition from Japan to broader shifts in the U.S. economy. Detroit was enormously disadvantaged by the riots that helped to scare most of the white middle class and much of the black middle class out of the city and into the suburbs, and then beyond to sunnier climes in the south and southwest.

Detroit thought it could count on Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors forever. Silicon Valley thinks it can count on Apple, Amazon, and Facebook forever. The complacent leaders in Michigan were dead wrong. So are the ones in California.

Not everybody in Detroit was surprised to learn in the late 1950s that the city was losing population. Not everybody in Silicon Valley today will be surprised to learn that 90 percent of the high-tech industry’s workers are earning less in real wages now than their counterparts were 20 years ago. The biggest digital publisher in the United States is in South Carolina, not California, and Tesla’s future is in Texas, as are Hewlett-Packard’s and Oracle’s. It’s not just Elon Musk and the other bold-face names, either: It is venture-capital investors and services firms and, above all, the most in-demand workers, many of whom have discovered that they are far better-off making $200,000 a year in Austin or Charleston than $300,000 a year in San Francisco.

Detroit did not really appreciate how serious its problems were until it was too late to reverse the decline. And instead of putting forward serious and responsible leaders, Detroit leaned hard into identity politics with such figures as Mayor Coleman Young, the Gavin Newsom of Michigan, who had his own French Laundry moment, greeting municipal leaders in gray and hurting Detroit from the beaches of sunny Hawaii with the immortal salutation: “Aloha, motherfu**ers!”

Larry Elder may not be precisely to the taste of his fellow Californians. But Sacramento needs a wakeup call a lot more urgently than it needs another prix-fixe dinner at the French Laundry.