California has a democrat governor, a democrat Lieutenant governor, a state senate that's 80% democrat and a state house that's 75% democrat, and democrat mayors in all major cities.
Conservatives are not the problem.
Conservatives are not the problem.
I'm in Los Angeles and it's mostly by business and real estate interests.
Republicans, like Rick Caruso, run as Democrats because that's how you get elected here. It's a meaningless label.
They'll do culture war signaling like support for pride month to their Twitter feed but when it comes to actual policy, for instance, the "defunding" of the LAPD which just last month included 780 more police, a new helicopter ... https://knock-la.com/lapd-budget-2023-increase/ an increase of $118,000,000, it's a different story.
On homelessness, actual leftists advocate for strong regulation on housing costs, bans on speculation, criminalization of landlords who do illegal evictions, seizing of idle real estate for redistributive housing, things like that.
You may disagree, but that's what the actual left position is. It's not buying new helicopters for the cops or giving them 100 million to do encampment sweeps where they throw away medication and wheelchairs and then classify it as "homeless abatement".
The policy, in practice, is increased money for police, shelters without storage or mail services, encampment sweeps, and a blind eye to landlord and market forces. In a Venn diagram with most conservative approaches, it's a pretty significant crossover.
Morality, fiscal responsibility, small government, local control, you can paint policies like a city chartering its own bank, community banking, cooperative retail, housing trusts etc with the same brush. You can even package say, free college in terms of competition, industry, and nationalism. Call it something like "America winning" or "Competitive Edge" instead of "free college". Instead of being a student, you're "serving your county". It's an easy parlay. I'm surprised I don't see it more.
I'm guessing the people attempting that gambit don't get the millions needed to run the campaigns.
They need their own journals and publications because the sponsored content they call research can't stand up to academic scrutiny. They'll flip flop on their "conclusions" all the time because different people pay their bills.
They start from an ideological position, which is based on who is paying them, and then work backwards using reactionary arguments, misrepresenting statistics and sometimes just straight up fraud
I can't emphasize this enough. Think tanks are private propaganda factories and that's literally it. They're peddlers of agenda and ideology who are not concerned with reality.
Calling it "the other side" is a false dichotomy. There's certainly advocacy groups like Sea Shepherd but they don't wear cloaks of subterfuge to try to distance themselves from their structure and purpose like say, the heartland institute which among other things, was, at the time secretly, funded by Philip Morris to deny that smoking had health impacts.
That's a different class of spin. But sure, the Brookings institution is mostly neoliberal radical centrist, fine.
They are however, vast majority, on the right side of the spectrum and all the various flavors of right https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_think_tanks_in_the_U...
You have been tricked about what leftism is by people who have been sued millions and gone to prison for their lies, defamation and crimes.
There's nothing to defend in your arguments - they're simply manufactured bullshit.
On the other than, CA has the most government rules for housing and "leftist" policies in that regard and it has been nothing but an unmitigated disaster.
They also passed anti-firearm legislation to allow private citizens to sue gunmakers.[0] It passed with 52 ayes/21 nays in the assembly and 26 ayes/9 nays in the senate.
So California democrats toe the party line and vote with progressives on wedge issues. In what sense are they conservative?
[0] https://apnews.com/article/california-gavin-newsom-climate-a... [1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xht... [2] https://www.capradio.org/articles/2022/07/22/newsom-signs-fi... [3] https://openstates.org/ca/bills/20212022/SB1327/