So, What's Going On In California?

As I've said, I'm surprised and a little disappointed at the very muted response to California Gov Newsom's rollback of "reopening". The only detailed analysis of the political situation I've seen is at Politico, which is establishment corporate media aligned with the Washington Post. As a result, it's important to allow for the lens through which the piece sees things -- what's not said is as important as what's said.

The article doesn't say enough about the background of COVID lockdowns in California. Both Gov Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti are members of long-established Democrat political families aligned with the Pelosi and Brown families. They are instinctively center-left, though that particular center itself has moved steadily left over decades. Both Speaker Pelosi and Gov Newsom have been under pressure from the now-dominant Democrat alliance of \bourgeois-hippie Stalinists and the Lumpenproletariat, which is apparent in the current situation.

Over the spring, both Newsom and Garcetti faced pressure to reopen, for instance from Elon Musk, who in early May forced Newsom to take his side in a conflict with the Fremont health authorities, who opposed looser state rules on opening his Tesla plant. Newsom was also pressured by Evangelical and Pentecostal parishes who announced that they would reopen on Pentecost May 31, whether Newsom agreed or not.

County sheriffs increasingly annouced they would not enforce lockdown orders. At the same time, Newsom was forced to relax restrictions on church services as the lawsuit from South Bay United Pentecostal Church reached the US Supreme Court. In order to avoid a potential injunction that would tie his hands, Newsom relaxed the restrictions on May 29, effectively mooting the case.

It's worth noting that South Bay United Pentecostal wanted to continue the suit based on their assertion that Newsom could reinstate the restriction at any time, which of course, six weeks later, is precisely what he did.

Without mentioning this background, the Politico story begins,

It’s taken four months and 7,000 deaths for Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti — high-profile California Democrats with even higher political aspirations — to go from vanguards to nearly vanquished in the fight against Covid-19.

Newsom’s early success in the Covid-19 crisis turned into a sobering reversal Monday after the state flared into a deadly hot spot, prompting the governor to impose the nation's most sweeping reclosure to contain the alarming outbreak.

Politico's position is clearly that Newsom's been forced to see the light, that he'd reopened too early. But it does recognize that both he and Garcetti had been responding to pressure:

The two leaders have been buffeted throughout the crisis by countervailing demands: businesses and local politicians clamoring to reopen and health officials warning that overly hasty moves would reverse months of painfully earned progress. But now, with numbers exploding, a chorus of critics are second-guessing how the California governor and LA mayor reopened businesses.

The biggest pressure on Garcetti, who has often spoken for the county board of supervisors as well as the city, came from remarks by Dr (a PhD in social justice) Barbara Ferrer, the county health director, who on May 12 told the board that the lockdown would “with all certainty” be extended for another three months. Little was said about this in public, but it appears that this caused a furor behind the scenes, and Ferrer quickly walked back the comment as misunderstood.

A second factor was the California House District 25 (distant Los Angeles suburbs) special election on May 12, which had been held by a Democrat, but it was rated a tossup. Instead, the Republican won well outside the predicted margin. Voter frustration with the lockdown was cited as a key factor.

Clearly in response to conditions, Garcetti quickly began reopening parks and businesses, with restricted church services and haircuts available by early June.

What changed over the next six weeks? The Politico article doesn't mention it at all, but it's fairly plain that the main cause was the BLM protests and riots. I think that from both Newsom's and Garcetti's perspectives, they showed the power of the extreme left alliance of the bourgeois-hippie Stalinists and the Lumpenroletariat in the Democrat party. This group had kept the counties in the San Francisco Bay area under more severe lockdown than even Southern California, and they hadn't relaxed it. Politico cites as an authority one of the San Francisco hard liners:

“The desire for popularity gets in the way of making good choices in a pandemic,’’ said state Sen. Steve Glazer, a Bay Area Democrat who has repeatedly urged the governor to take “command and control’’ of the situation and not rely on a patchwork of local officials to sort it out.

But Politico tiptoes around the political reality, which I have an impression continues unabated since the District 25 election. People have been fed up with the lockdown, had become impatient with the slow pace of further reopening after early June, and are enraged at Newsom's rollback.

Over the past few days, Garcetti has been threatening that he's "on the verge" of ordering a return to full stay-at-home lockdown in Los Angeles (probably coordinating with the county as well), but any such rollback would be met with massive disobedience, as the widespread illegal fireworks displays over the July 4 weekend suggest.

Add to that the fact that Garcetti won his first mayoral election with the support of the police union, whose endorsement and financial contribution are key to that election. His recent proposal to divert $150 million from the police budget has likely put a limit on the cooperation he can expect from LAPD in enforcing any new lockdown. For now, I think the threats to reimpose a full lockdown are empty, as he needs to stay far away from controversy for a while if he wants to rebuild a political career.

The Politico piece says,

Garcetti, said Michael Trujillo, a political strategist in Los Angeles who advised one of Garcetti’s opponents in the 2013 mayoral race, is caught in “this perfect sandwich with right-wing conservatives on one slice of bread and hardened progressives being the other slice of bread.”

As to whether those forces are reflected in the broader electorate, he said, “That’s the question we don’t know the answer to.”

My guess is that the California bishops are going to sit this one out, as the November election isn't that far away. Analysts credit the possibility of a vaccine for the record recovery of the stock market, but I think that's unlikely -- the Stalinists won't drop their agenda just because there's a vaccine. They'll insist nothing can reopen until everyone's had a shot and a chip implant as well. The market knows that. What it's anticipating is a Trump landslide in November that will reestablish a more centrist political reality.

I think the Democrats behind the scenes recognize that Biden is, if anything, a worse candidate, in poorer health, than Secretary Clinton was in 2016. The Pelosi-Newsom establishment may use a 2020 debacle, with the Stalinist left as the likely scapegoats, as a way to retake power. But I strongly think they've written off the election and the potential for a Stalinist agenda.

I think the bishops are leaning that way, too.