Karen Bass, the World’s Least Sympathetic Scapegoat

I can think of few healthy, un-incarcerated people in this world I would less prefer to be right now than Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass. Admittedly the reasons for this are overdetermined — I would never want to live in L.A., for one thing. (Also, I would no doubt regret suddenly becoming stupid.) But mostly it’s because I am not a zombie, whereas Bass has joined Joe Biden amongst the legions of the walking dead: Deceased politically, even if she doesn’t know it yet. I wouldn’t trade a bucket of warm sputum for her future prospects — why take lesser value on the exchange?

Bass is in huge trouble, and even if it’s only partially her fault, she certainly made her own portion of the bed she’s about to lie in. As you may or may not have heard, the city and its environs are currently on fire. It may get worse before it gets better. The amount of damage already caused — to Pacific Palisades, to Malibu, to some of the oldest and most beautiful communities on the West Coast — properly rates as apocalyptic. (In terms of property loss, it is already the costliest fire in American history, and it’s not over yet.)

Meanwhile, Karen Bass was halfway across the world in Ghana when all of this began, having flown there for the Ghanaian president’s inauguration — days after she received warnings about elevated fire risk because of heightened Santa Ana winds, and months after cutting the fire department’s budget by $17.6 million and denying its request for more firefighters. (The Free Beacon caught Bass’s administration yanking a disastrously embarrassing public memorandum about this from the city’s website this week.)

As an incompetent failure, Bass is in the unsympathetic position of holding genuine responsibility for her city’s unpreparedness (and inability) to respond to the fires, while nevertheless quite obviously being turned into the universal scapegoat for the disaster by others running from their own accountability. Her own fire chief, Kristin Crowley — a woman who made “diversity” the LAFD’s major priority, mind you — tossed Bass under the bus at the end of last week, saying that the city had failed Crowley’s department. (She retains her position simply because Bass doesn’t have the option of firing her in the middle of a crisis.) Angry residents are exploring recall options for the mayor. Meanwhile, California governor Gavin Newsom is using everything short of semaphore flags (up to and including body language that eerily simulates it) to signal that she’s the one to blame for all of this.

And the worst part of it all? They’re not really wrong. It’s transparently obvious that Bass failed to consider fire prevention and risk management to be a serious concern — you don’t slash the fire department’s budget in that case. It’s also transparently obvious that Bass considered her mayoralty to be the functional equivalent of a glorified international ambassadorship, entitling her to continue a schedule of world travel she had come to consider her due during her time in Congress. (Koreans have an apt term for this sort of attitude: gong ju byeong, which translates roughly as “princess disease.”)

But what would her presence on the ground really have changed? Bass, while hopeless, is also a clear scapegoat for failures that transcend her own inadequate leadership and run all the way to the top, particularly to Gavin Newsom. As Jim Geraghty asked this morning, Why exactly is this man governor, again? Who was responsible for checking to make sure that local reservoirs throughout the region actually had water in them? Who was responsible for statewide policies governing controlled burns and brush-clearing? Who has final responsibility for California’s water-management policies?

Karen Bass isn’t the real answer to any of these questions, and Newsom is well aware of it. That’s why he would prefer, more than anyone else, that we focus our attentions on her rather than him. If you don’t think that Newsom is terrified of what the Los Angeles fires portend for his national hopes as a presidential candidate, then just watch his body language in every interview he’s given since the fires began burning. He’s running scared. Last week, he sought to dodge an interview with an angry resident by pretending to be on the phone with President Biden. His voice has gotten both thin and ragged. Witness this amazing interview where Newsom promises a “Marshall Plan” to rebuild Los Angeles and, when asked for details, nervously launches into wildly expressive arm gestures like an amateur mime. (I next expect him to try yelling “Look out behind you!” and skedaddling in a Looney Tunes–like puff of smoke when you turn around to check.)

Still, I have no love lost for Bass. Not only is she terrible at her job — and authentically weird and alienating in her public affect — she doesn’t even seem to particularly care for it. When people talk about the top-to-bottom incompetence of California’s elected Democrats all across the state, they are thinking of people like San Francisco’s incompetently self-loathing government or Gavin Newsom’s misrule from Sacramento, but they are also thinking about what Karen Bass represents, the radical activist turned spoiled and indifferent government functionary, the politician promoted through the ranks of a one-party state for her ability to check demographic boxes rather than because of any talent. Bass’s original qualification for office was as a radical Communist — an organizer for the pro-Castro “Venceremos Brigade.” (Bass journeyed to Cuba to meet with Castro eight separate times during the 1970s.) From radical organizing in the ’70s to “community organizing” in the ’80s and ’90s, she naturally transitioned from attacking the government to ensconcing herself in it.

She climbed the ladder in the California legislature — where she became speaker of the state house until being term-limited out of office — to the U.S. House of Representatives, for twelve years representing a safe seat, before finally returning to Los Angeles in 2022 to claim her reward: the mayorship of Los Angeles. As a perpetual careerist, she has always been less interested in whatever job she holds than its proximity to power or promotion. (Vice President Kamala Harris recognizes this personality well; it is no surprise that the two, so similar in their vapid ambition and lack of qualifications, loathe one another. They each succeeded in California for the same superficial box-checking reasons, playing the same game, and thus are thinly veiled sworn enemies.)

The perpetual refrain I hear when I discuss my own town’s hopeless mayor — and I can guarantee you that as bad as Bass is, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson is still memorably worse — is that “people get what they voted for.” And it is true that when Los Angeles was offered a choice between Bass and moderate Democrat Rick Caruso in 2022, they chose her far more enthusiastically than Chicagoans did Johnson, giving her 55 percent of the vote. I suspect that will not happen again, and one can at least hope there will be a course correction in 2026.

But when I read well-meaning people argue that what Los Angeles really needs is a nice moderate like Caruso or Richard Riordan to restore it to working order, as all blue cities need so that progressives can enjoy them once again (“not forever — just until the place functions well”), I cannot help but sigh in despair. Indeed, it is precisely for those reasons — the prevalence of the “fix it until we can take it back and break it again” mindset so common to the political cycle of New York City, for one — that explain why these sorts of politicians neither run for office anymore nor win. We live in a world of Karen Basses now.