Fans of outlaw country music will recall an old song called “Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues,” which appeared on Waylon Jennings’s 1973 album Lonesome, On’ry, and Mean. Grok tells me that the original version of the song—a folk-pop version, written and performed by Danny O’Keefe and released the year before—was the “hit” version, but I’d be willing to bet that Waylon’s take is better remembered today.
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In any case, the song, which is about loneliness, regret, fading youth, and feeling left behind, starts with the lyrics. “Everybody’s gone away / Said they’re movin’ to L.A. / Ain’t a soul I know around/everybody’s leaving town.”
That’s what people did back then—53 years ago—when things were going poorly in their hometown or their home state or wherever. They moved to L.A. “Find the sunshine/Leave the rain.” In America—“the land of opportunity”—California was the pinnacle of that maxim. It was “opportunity” beyond compare.
And it wasn’t just in 1973. The American move to California is the demographic story of the 20th century. California’s population rose from under two million in 1900 to 10 million by 1950. It then more than tripled in the second half of the century, reaching 34 million by 2000. The most explosive growth came in the 1940s: the state grew from roughly 6.9 million in 1940 to 10.6 million in 1950, an increase of about 75 percent. In every census from 1930 to 2000, California added more residents than any other state, and by 1970 it had secured the top position in total population.
All of this was reflected in the popular culture. When Jed Clampett struck “black gold” on his property in 1962, his “kinfolk said, ‘Jed, move away from there.’ They said, ‘Californee is the place you oughtta be.’ So they loaded up the truck, and they moved to Beverley—Hills that is.” Of course, Jed, Grannie, Jethro, and Ellie Mae were nearly a quarter century behind Tom Joad, who loaded up his own Ma and Pa (and the rest of his family) and headed West on Route 66, along with “thousands” of other Okies, all migrating to California and “the promised land.” In truth, of course, the Joads and the Okies made up a very small percentage of those who moved to California in and after the Great Depression. More than half a million people left the southern plains states—Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri—in the 1930s, mostly heading for California. Few of them, however, were farmers like the Joads.
Data from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) shows migrants from the Dust Bowl region were actually no more likely to move to California than migrants from other parts of the U.S., and farmers were the least likely to move. Farmers tended to remain at home and retain their assets, while others fled. The depopulation of the southern plains was driven less by a mass exodus than by a collapse of new people moving in.
While most other states struggled, California reaped the benefits. By the late 1950s, all ten of the largest migration flows involving California were inflows, generally from Midwest and Northeast states. Continuing prosperity and migration from other states roughly doubled California’s population again to nearly 20 million by 1970.
This was the Golden Era for the Golden State.
And why shouldn’t it have been? California was, in many ways, heaven on earth. The weather, the geographical beauty, the bounty of the land were largely unmatched—not just in the United States, but anywhere in the world.
Additionally, California was uniquely and assertively governed. For most of its Golden Era, California was a “builder state.” Jobs were plentiful, in part because the federal government was expanding its footprint by adding billions of dollars to defense and technology contracts, an overwhelming percentage of which went to California-based companies.
The state itself bought into the Hooverian version of Progressivism, based on the belief that nature can be “harnessed” rather than “subdued” and can, therefore, be put in service to its human “masters.” From the 1930s through the mid-1960s, Sacramento radiated a specific energy: governance as a construction project. The federal Central Valley Project (1937), Shasta Dam, the freeway network, and above all, Pat Brown’s State Water Project (authorized 1960)—an undertaking Brown himself compared to the pyramids—expressed a bipartisan consensus that the government’s job was to move water, pour concrete, and make room for more people. The University of California Master Plan of 1960, drafted under Clark Kerr, extended this logic to human capital. Under his vision, every Californian was entitled to a place in a top-quality public higher education system, tuition-free. The Master Plan—and California’s vision more generally—constituted one of the most ambitious social contracts any American state had ever proposed.
Because of the state’s largely unmatched natural resources, including its ability to attract people from other states, it all worked beautifully. Until it didn’t.
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Cracks began to form in the mid-1960s, when the state’s more traditional progressivism began to give way to a more radical, culture-based leftism, starting especially in the Bay area—San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, and so on. But even then, California was lucky. In November 1966, the state’s enormous but often ignored middle class revolted against its progressive ruling class. Two-term Democratic Governor Pat Brown lost his second reelection bid in a landslide to Ronald Reagan. Although Reagan’s two terms as the state’s chief executive may appear tame or “moderate” by the standards of his two terms as the nation’s chief executive, they were nevertheless exactly what California needed at the moment. Reagan’s zero-tolerance approach to the unrest on state college campuses, his budget discipline, and his aggressive reform of the state’s welfare system all helped to squelch the impression that California was flailing. The state’s population and economy continued to grow, as the Golden Era got its second wind.
Unfortunately, however, all good things must end, as they say, and when Reagan left office in January 1976, he was replaced by his predecessor’s son, Jerry Brown—that is, “Governor Moonbeam.” While the younger Brown was far more fiscally conservative than either his father or any of his successors, he was also far more socially leftist. Whereas his father represented an era of positive, growth-oriented progressivism, Jerry Brown was an environmentalist, a cultural radical, a skeptic of “unchecked” growth. Jerry Brown’s tenure in Sacramento represented a radical shift in California’s governance philosophy—and it also represented a radical shift in California’s fortunes.
In his 1971 hit “I Am I Said,” Neil Diamond starts by saying (singing, I guess), “L.A.’s fine/the sun shines most the time/And the feeling is lay back/Palm trees grow and rents are low . . .” At the time, rents were low. But that didn’t last. Once Brown refocused the state away from growth and toward environmentalism and other culture-centric issues, the “builder-state” collapsed, the construction of middle-class homes collapsed, and rents soared. Indeed, California’s Golden Era itself collapsed. That change, coupled with the unforeseen consequences of the state’s famous/infamous Proposition 13, crushed the state’s development.
By the end of Brown’s first term, California was very clearly losing its appeal for many Americans. The cost of living rose due to the new “limits of growth” ideology, local policy choices, and the anti-growth incentives of Prop. 13, and wages stagnated. The result was migratory inertia in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s. It is hardly fair to blame all of this on one person, especially since that one person is probably the most competent and fiscally conservative governor in the state’s recent history, but it’s also hard not to notice that the vibe shift that accompanied Jerry Brown’s rise to power also coincided with the state’s faltering appeal. To be clear, California has had as many Republican governors since Reagan as it has had Democratic governors. But none of that changes the fact that the state largely shifted to a cultural and environmental progressivism in the late 1970s and has been falling apart dramatically ever since.
The true turning point came around 1989. California has had a net loss of domestic migrants every year since then. The period from 1995 to 2000 marked the first time since such data had been measured that California saw net domestic outmigration over a five-year period. During that span, 1.4 million people moved to California from other states, but 2.2 million left. By the late 1990s, nine of the 10 largest migration flows involving California represented people leaving rather than arriving. Since 1990, the state has lost nearly 3.4 million residents through net domestic outmigration, with the flow running mainly to Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and the Pacific Northwest.
It is worth noting that during most of this period, from 1983 to 1999, California had Republican governors—George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. They were largely ineffective at undoing the damage done, however. The state’s ethos had shifted so profoundly that neither they nor Arnold Schwarzenegger, another Republican, dared to challenge the environmental limits-to-growth consensus.
Today, California is anything but a Golden State. It is profoundly broken. It has the highest out-migration in the country. It has the greatest income inequality in the country. It has the highest income tax rate in the country, the second-highest cost of housing, the sixth-highest homelessness rate, the second-highest cost of living, and, by far, the largest state budget deficit. The state’s feeble and repeated attempts to build a high-speed rail system are archetypal. Corruption and cronyism hinder important projects and undermine much of the state’s massive private economy.
The point here is that no state has ever had more natural advantages than California. And no state has ever squandered them so quickly. The state’s early progressive governance was successful for a while, largely because of the state’s enormous resources, but that success couldn’t last forever. “Heaven on earth” is a utopian fantasy, after all, no matter how beautiful the state. Even so, it is amazing—and frankly shocking—how quickly demographic and cultural collapse has followed the state’s meteoric rise. Right now, the nation watches to see if Californians still have the wherewithal to change their circumstances and elect new leadership, but are dumbfounded by the venality and intransigence of the state’s ruling class.
California had everything—and still does. Nothing about the state’s natural advantages has changed. It’s all still there. To quote the late, great Charles Krauthammer, “Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.”
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