How Californias self-sabotage by the left made it a national disgrace

By any measure, California is a failed state — and a national embarrassment.What happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed, and once best-governed, state?The left took total control — after millions of the embattled middle class fled.Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place.Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.The result was a neo-feudal society that’s hardly democratic.As upper-bracket taxpayers fled, taxes rose on those who remained to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents.In turn, even more of the middle class left.The remaining pyramidal economic structure ensured a Democratic monopoly — further entrenched by changing balloting laws, gerrymandering voting districts, vote harvesting and ignoring or undermining popular referenda.For example, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit.Included was $2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs: The last major reservoir had been built in 1980, when California had roughly half its current population.But bureaucracies, elected officials and green activists blocked all new reservoir construction.Adding insult to injury, Gov.Gavin Newsom used $250 million from the Proposition 1 fund to blow up four Klamath River dams that had once provided storage, electrical generation, recreation and flood control.Californians have twice voted in referenda (for Proposition 209 and against Proposition 16) to bar the use of racial preferences for contracting, admissions and promotion in public institutions.Most public universities simply ignored the law and continued their “diversity” quotas under new names, against the will of the people.California voters in 2008 passed Proposition 11 to stop political gerrymandering via a supposedly nonpartisan state redistricting commission.But Democratic...