...Brown’s vision is backward looking and preservationist rather than futuristic. The high speed rail project aims to preserve Blue California rather than to lay the foundations of a 21st century, cutting-edge state. The interests behind it are protecting existing turf rather than pioneering something new. The unions and the big city mayors want to preserve or even revive the political economy and urban geography of the mid 20th century. They want a California of strong urban cores rather than exurban sprawl, and they want to return to a large unionized labor force guaranteed lifetime employment, and they want the state government to supply long term funding to make it all work. They want new canals in the age of rail.
But the stuff that used to work doesn’t work anymore. Between the unions, the legal system and the various regulations and requirements that have built up over the years, the big projects cost much more than they used to. Because California’s economy is so heavily bogged down by excessive regulation, litigiousness and a culture of benefits and entitlements, growth is too sluggish to support huge new expenditures. And high speed rail is of all forms of mass transit the one most poorly suited to the decentralized, exurban, car-based society Californians continue to build.
The blue social model can’t produce great results anymore. If you want to think big, you can no longer think blue. This is Governor Brown’s problem in a nutshell. The political coalition that backs him cannot produce coherent and workable plans anymore. The greens, the unions, the planning bureaucrats, the mayors and so forth each bring so many requirements to the table that the only designs that make them all happy are so cumbersome and expensive that they cannot be built. The political imagination of the blue coalition can no longer visualize the future: it can only project its nostalgia ahead.
California, like the country as a whole, is desperate for new ideas and a new vision. Governor Brown is completely correct that the state cannot passively drift into the new century but neither he nor the coalition behind him has any idea how to get California moving again.
