California is making liberals squirm
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States)
which has a mismatch in supply and demand much like Libertarianism.
The New York Times would like to be Whiggish (e.g. "how am I going to afford to send my kids to college if cancel culture stops me from getting paid $50,000 to give a college commencement address?") and so would the people in California.
For various reasons the "left" in America can't quite throw the poor, blacks, and brown people under the bus, but the political establishment would love to do so if it could: but a bird with two right wings can't really fly.
History treats the whigs so badly because the whigs tried to "split the difference" between the north and the south in the civil war so you wind up with characters like Daniel Webster, the US secretary of state from New Hampshire, who was imploring activists to stop resisting efforts to repatriate escaped slaves from New York to the the south.
Today "split the difference" comes in the form of symbolic activities like the ones mentioned here in the context of California where saying that a certain population is "15% white" could well mean that it is "70% asian", not "70% black". (e.g. even in the American South today it seems that white people are taking their kids out of the public schools to get them away from asians, not to get them away from blacks) Asians break the "race theory" enshrined in American law by being both successful (higher than average income) and discriminated against (whites and blacks who graduate Harvard get a ticket to the the elite, asians get a ticket to apply to med school)
As for development in California the most interesting line of thought is this:
What if the insanely high costs of construction that we see are real? If San Francisco grows up vertically like Hong Kong, where does the water come from? Can new development pay for the infrastructure that supports it?
Do you have any references for this? I'm aware of the Harvard lawsuit but I haven't really seen any research about widespread discrimination against Asians. I'm not saying it isn't there, just that I don't know anything about it or its scope.
It's my perception that the conservatives have done this more effectively. That may be my own bias, though it's true that the checks and balances favor the status quo and therefore the conservatives will always have an advantage. (They have, notably, been unable to undo the Affordable Care Act, because it's status quo.)
Liberals display their internal qualms quite openly. There is substantial dissent between the "whig" (centrist) version of the party that would be called conservative in any other country, and the part that comes close to actually being left wing. The former holds all of the high offices, and the latter is very angry about that -- and when the two split publicly, the party fails utterly.
I, among others, would be very happy to have the centrist wing of the Republicans talk to the centrist wing of the Democrats and make compromises between them, but that's not the way it happens. Obviously I have opinions on who's more responsible, but that's not my point. The point is that, given that as a fait accompli, Democrats -- when they win -- have to have open discussions like this one, where the genuine conflicts within liberalism come out. That's uncomfortable, but sincere, and the discussions are important.