Commentary California once was run by conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats. True paleo-liberal governors like Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state. But they also believed in pushing integration and building freeways, dams, aqueducts, and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring that the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil and gas, nuclear and agricultural industries. So, why would anyone deliberately destroy that heritage? Why allow California to have the highest aggregate basket of income, sales, property, and capital gains taxes in the nation, the highest gas and power prices in the continental United States, and nearly the worst schools and infrastructure? California also has the country’s largest populations of homeless, welfare recipients, and undocumented immigrants. Remember that the left wing of the Democratic Party became hyper-wealthy through globalization and the tech revolution. Coastal universities such as Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC, …