California Is Hopeless

Los Angeles is often jokingly referred to as “La La Land,” an obvious play on its nickname “L.A.”

It is also a reference to the fact that it is a dream factory, built on the creation of reassuring or exciting illusions. The city is built on a war with reality. Plunked down in what any sane person would consider a harsh environment, utterly incapable of sustaining 13 million people in the metropolitan region. It has no water to speak of, for instance, and its economy is no longer based on what natural advantages it does have. 

That’s not a knock on the people of the city, who have built a thriving city despite these disadvantages. But it does suggest that there is a Wiley E. Coyote quality to how it stays suspended in the air at times despite the laws of reality. As long as it doesn’t look down, it’s been fine. 

When people think of Hollywood, they think of massively wealthy movie stars and directors, usually ignoring that this class of people is infinitesimally small compared to all those starving artists waiting tables, hoping for a break that never comes. People think of surfing on the beach or living in the hills looking down on the glorious lights of the city, when almost nobody lives anywhere near a beach, and only the most wealthy get such a view. 

For most people, the most common view is a traffic jam on the highway. That’s not to say it’s a bad city; just that it is not the paradise that people expect. Anybody who actually goes to Hollywood, for instance, learns that it is actually pretty dirty and unpleasant compared to where they live. 

Still, Los Angeles remains a city of dreams, just as Californians are unusually prone to a desire to create a utopia rather than a more realistic, better life. Californians, for some reason, still believe it when politicians promise to eradicate homelessness, build futuristic high-speed rail, or create a society where diversity is our strength. 

It is the dream, not the reality, that they see. And, in typical California fashion, they believe that the dream isn’t made reality by hard work and making necessary trade-offs, but by uttering the correct magical incantations. 

For everyone keeping track ✍️
The race for LA Mayor is now between:
1. The woman who let the Palisades burn down.
2. The man who was the Superintendent to shut LAUSD schools down for over a year in COVID
3. And a card carrying member of the DSA, and advocate for more control. pic.twitter.com/vn9nPuJcm3

— Lisa Cusack (@lisa_4_la) November 17, 2025

California wasn’t always this way. Back when it was a harsher land and the deserts were untamed, people who moved to California hoped to strike it rich, but they knew it would require more than a little good luck and a lot of ridiculously hard work and risk. People died on the way there in wagons, and the gold rush that fueled a lot of hope entailed backbreaking work and terrible risks. 

In other words, striking it rich has always been California’s promise—people didn’t go there to claim a farm and scratch out a living as they did in the Heartland—but they didn’t expect it to be easy. 

No longer. Dreams and illusions still form the core identity of the coastal regions, but the state and its politics are Hollywoodized. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento—which, while not coastal itself, is dominated by the power of the coastal elites—are built on pretty promises that Californians want to believe despite the gritty reality that they actually have to endure. 

We all know about San Francisco’s crappy underbelly, but it wasn’t really until the Palisades fires that we saw how far from reality Los Angeles has drifted. It elected an actual socialist whose political hero was Fidel Castro to be mayor, and saw its most valuable real estate immolated as a result. Nearly zero progress has been made to rebuild what was destroyed, and that is entirely due to the fecklessness of the political leadership, who again are making grand promises and delivering utter failure. 

So now an election looms on the horizon, and due to the stubborn unwillingness of the dreamers to face the reality that screenwriters and wordsmiths don’t actually create reality out of thin air, they will be asked to choose between a Marxist and an even more radical Marxist, with an incompetent technocrat with a record of destruction that is perhaps worse than Mayor Bass’ as the major alternative. 

Who wants to bet against the most radical alternative winning? She is promising that she can create a socialist paradise by driving out the most productive Angelinos by stealing their wealth. 

Huang, a Sawtelle resident, has never run for elected office. She faces an extremely uphill battle against Mayor Karen Bass, a veteran politician with close ties to the Democratic Party who has spent much of the year denouncing President Trump’s immigration crackdown in L.A.

Still, Huang could complicate Bass’ reelection bid by playing a spoiler role, pulling away left-of-center voters in a year when the incumbent is facing criticism over her handling of the Palisades fire, a struggling city budget and less-than-optimal public services.

Bass already has a challenger in former Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner, who has assailed her record in each of those areas. And it’s still not clear whether billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who lost to Bass in 2022, will jump in the race.

The larger the pool of candidates, the more work Bass will have to do in the June primary to secure an outright victory. If she falls below 50% of the vote, she would need to wage an expensive runoff campaign in the November 2026 election.

Doug Herman, a spokesperson for Bass’ campaign, said that under her leadership, “there has been unprecedented progress on the issues that matter most to Angelenos.”

“Homelessness has declined for the first time in two consecutive years, neighborhoods are safer with significant drops in crime, and the Palisades fire recovery continues far ahead of pace with the fastest recovery and rebuilding in California history,” Herman said in a statement. “In addition, there was no better defender of Los Angeles than Mayor Karen Bass when Trump’s ICE raids started and we won a court ruling to help stop the illegal raids and unconstitutional arrests.”

Sara Sadhwani, a politics professor at Pomona College, said the upcoming mayoral election differs from recent L.A. contests that were won by DSA-aligned candidates. In many of those races, DSA-backed challengers ousted incumbents who were already struggling politically, she said.

Perhaps she is a long shot, but perhaps not. After all, who expected a mousy socialist to become the next mayor of Seattle, or a Muslim immigrant who quotes Karl Marx to become the mayor in the center of world capitalism? 

Rick Caruso would be the obvious alternative to all these insane people, and he almost won last time. But, instead, Los Angeles chose the Castroite. And it’s hard to recall a recent example of liberals learning from their mistakes. When forced to choose between reality and fantasy, Tinkerbell is the more attractive option. 

Perhaps Angelinos will prove me wrong. After all, even in Deep Blue California, there are lots of working people who actually live normal lives, and even the tech bros will only tolerate so much chaos before they rouse themselves from their own fantasies of great wealth to preserve their businesses. 

But Los Angeles is a city that celebrated Harvey Weinstein while knowing exactly who he was. It is the place where Harrison Ford will fly for a couple of hours in his private plane to get his favorite hamburger, only to give us lectures about our carbon footprint. 

It is a place that values stories over reality, and fancy words are a currency worth more than gold. 

I hope that Angelinos prove my cynicism wrong, but I doubt it. 

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