Orange County once was a Republican bastion. It is the place the birthed Richard Nixon's rise to power and fueled Ronald Reagan's political ambitions. By now, however, the conservative fortress has fallen. In 2016, Orange County turned blue, as it has remained, for the first time since the Great Depression.
The academic I meet embodies this dramatic shift, at least by partisan labels. Joel Kotkin calls former president Donald J. Trump “a buffoon,” and self identifies as a member of “the old social democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”
This time around, though, the 71-year-old researcher will not vote Democrat. He has seen too much damage wrought by Democratic Party governance -- change that he pins directly on Kamala Harris and her progressive elite coterie. “She is the latest avatar created by the San Francisco cabal," Kotkin tells me. “I don't think she has any feel for the economy at all.”
Kotkin deals in hard facts and figures. He is an authority on global, economic, political, and social trends and his reputation extends beyond the US borders. The New York Times columnist David Brooks calls Kotkin America's “über-geographer.” But first and foremost, the Chapman University professor is a public intellectual able to communicate complex social phenomena to a general audience.
Sitting over a coffee in downtown Orange, Kotkin delineates how California's climate policies have driven legions of companies out of the state. “It has nothing to do with reality,” he says of the “opportunity economy” Harris promises. “Everything that she says has been confected.”
Kotkin is convinced that if the vice president wins on November 5th, her agenda will wreck the country, and Harris-led foreign policy would be “a complete disaster.”
Weltwoche: There's a clear chance that Kamala Harris will become president.
Joel Kotkin: I would say 60-40. But she is working hard to help Trump win, despite his negatives.
Weltwoche: What will happen, if she is elected?
Kotkin: It's pretty clear, it's going to be Biden on steroids. I tell my Republican friends is the best thing that can happen to the Republican Party is have Trump lose and Harris as president for two years and then they'll gain 90 seats in the House because she will be a horrific person. Biden at least could pretend that he was part of the rest of the country. He's from Pennsylvania, representative of a broader state, was always known as sort of a middle-of-the-road Democrat. Harris was never that.
Weltwoche: Based on her record as Attorney General, as US-Senator and Vice-President, what kind of policy would we see under Harris?
Kotikin: We're going to see Electric Vehicles mandates and all that, with implications that would be devastating to Michigan and the existing industrial base.You're going to get crazy “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) on everything. What's interesting, she's going to push this agenda even when every poll and every indication says that it's falling apart. Companies are dropping “Environmental, social, and governance” (ESG, is an investing principle that prioritizes environmental issues, social issues, and corporate governance), the green industry is falling apart, basically. Where's the money going to come to keep it going? I think that Harris is out of touch with the country. I think she's even out of touch with California. The only Republican she could beat is Donald Trump. She's lucky to have him as an opponent.
Weltwoche: From the 19th century gold rush to the Hollywood dream factory California has long been a place of opportunity. But now the dream has turned into a nightmare. Kamala Harris’ home state suffers from rampant unemployment and the nation’s highest poverty rate. Adjusting for the state’s sky-high cost of living, nearly 1 in 5 Californians lives in poverty.
Kotkin: Right.
Weltwoche: Another fifth lives in near poverty according to the Public Policy Institute of California. That’s roughly 15 million people in total as you point out.
Kotkin: Mainly because of the rents and the electricity costs.The lack of high end job growth also means that people are less able to keep up.
Weltwoche: What has happened to this Californian dream?
Kotkin: The California dream was a product of a creative conflict in a two-party system. Each party had to deliver the goods, whether it was Reagan or Pat Brown before him. Only in the last 10 to 15 years, it's become a one-party state.
Weltwoche: After Schwarzenegger left the Governor’s office.
Kotkin: Yes. Arnold was the last one. He screwed it up.
Weltwoche: How did he screw up?
Kotkin: He tried to take on the unions and lost. Then he became a muscle bound pussycat who pushed the climate agenda and essentially let the Democrats govern. What happened in California is, we end up with a one-party system which is increasingly dominated by a very small group of people who have very different interests than most of the people. These people are either related to each other or have had relations with each other. Obviously, Kamala got her job on her knees, initially. That's just the way it is. I'm sorry.
Weltwoche: You are referring to Willie Brown, the godfather of San Francisco politics, who opened the doors to power for Kamala Harris.
Kotkin: Willie was one of the smartest politicians. I'd rather have Willie than Kamala because Willie knows how to make a deal. So, what happened is you end up with a one-party system. You have is a small group of people we call the San Francisco machine. It was started by John Burton. What you had was a confluence of the tech guys, the inherited wealth, and the nonprofits and the public employees. That's what makes the state go. I'm from, what you might call, the old social democratic wing of the Democratic Party, which has now been completely obliterated. Whenever they talk about Harris as being a socialist, a communist, I say she's not that old. She's a woke Keynesian, super Keynesian.
Weltwoche: California has become hostile to enterprise. Over the past decade, companies from banking to aerospace (and tech) have decamped from the Golden State, taking large numbers of middle-class jobs with them. What are the core reasons for this exodus?
Kotkin: Here's the basic thing. There is a calculus that former Governor Jerry Brown to some extent, Gavin Newsom even more supported, which is: we're going to have the super green state, we're going to have super social welfare state, and we are going to be able to afford it because the tech guys. They are going to make so much money, that just the capital gains will get us through. We don't really have to worry about these companies leaving. But what happened was, after the pandemic, many of those wealthy people no longer pay taxes in California. That's one of the reasons for the deficit. The leading politicians have put all the eggs in one basket. The beauty of the California economy that I covered for many years, was, it had oil, it had ag (agriculture), it had manufacturing, it had aerospace, it had tech, it had lots of different things. Now it's basically down to tech. Pretty much everything else is either stagnant or declining. By doing that, you've destroyed the opportunities for much of the middle and working class. There just aren't the jobs anymore.
Weltwoche: Where does this idea come from, that you can afford to put all eggs in one basket?
Kotkin: I don't think it's necessarily conscious. It's just that you live in a bubble in San Francisco, where you have people who have so much money, people like Reid Hoffman (an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, co-founder of Linked-In) or Marc Benioff (internet entrepreneur, co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce and the owner of Time magazine) spend their money on people who support policies injurious to smaller business, but when you are an oligarch these people barely exist.
Weltwoche: How much does this reflect Harris's thinking?
Kotkin: Somehow the two words “Harris” and “thinking” probably should be disassociated. I think Harris is influenced by that environment. My sense of it is, if she has any original ideas, I've yet to hear. I think she's a product of this San Francisco Silicon Valley culture, and down here in Los Angeles, the entertainment industry culture. I don't think she has any feel for the rest of the economy at all.
Weltwoche: She must feel, though, that this state and this country is hurting. You can see the misery. She cannot escape from that.
Kotkin: Well, you can escape from everything if the media has decided to become Pravda. How many stories do you read in The New York Times about poverty in California? How many stories in The New York Times do you have about business leaving California? There's no serious coverage of what's happening here because it interferes with their narrative.It’s not the idiot Trump notion of “fake news” but as I tell the students, it's the sins of omission, what you don't write about. They'll say, "Oh, the problem of California's high housing prices is because suburban NIMBYs don't want to let go." Yes, people in suburbia don't want a bunch of high-rise buildings in their neighborhoods. But there are suburban NIMBYs in every state.
Weltwoche: Just as Gavin Newsom, the current Governor, Kamala Harris has been promoting a “social justice model”. But the reality doesn’t look anything like “social” or “just”.
Kotkin: No. We've done a report for Chapman University where we can show that the average real income of Hispanics and Blacks is much higher in other states. We found that African American’s and Latino Californians’ real earnings ranked between 48th and 50th among the states. The adjusted income of African-Americans in California is about the same as Mississippi. Now, this was a town that people of Willie Brown's ilk went to leaving Texas coming to California. Tom Bradley, who was our mayor was also from Texas. It's completely reversed now. Yes, there were people who moved from Texas to California, but a lot more go the other way.
Weltwoche: You have argued that California's climate policies drive up the cost of housing, food, and electricity, while destroying thousands of energy sector jobs held primarily by black and Latino workers. Can you explain what happened there?
Kotkin: Basically. There was idea that we would do all of the above (work different industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, aerospace, high tech and oil. As we have oil, we might as well use it. Now we get rid of oil drilling here and bring oil from Saudi Arabia. I don't see what the environmental win there is. (The government of) California has this insanely stupid idea, that we’re going to fight global warming by reducing emissions in California. California is insignificant. One month of China wipes out California. It's insane. It's this virtue signaling that we see in Europe as well. The problem with Europe is they don't have the fossil fuels to make up for it either.
Weltwoche: Let's turn to the likely scenario that Harris will be president. What would we expect in terms of foreign policy?
Kotkin: A complete disaster. She's surrounded by Iranian apologists. What Obama and those people think is so attractive about Iran has always escaped me. My assistant is Iranian. She was whipped by the morality police.
Weltwoche: Islamic religious police force and vicesquad.
Kotkin: Yes that’s what happened.Why are gay groups supporting Hamas? As a gay you would last about 15 seconds in Gaza. Hamas would kill you before the Israelis even got a chance. Anyway, so I think that what you have is you're going to have very much standard brand progressive policies. Because Biden had served in the Senate and had roots in the American, if not working class, but lower middle class, he had some understanding. Even Obama, to his credit, understood that you could only go so far so fast. Obama was a brilliant politician. Harris is not. No one's ever accused her of being a brilliant politician.
Weltwoche: Harris vows a “opportunity economy”. What is that, does it make sense to you?
Kotkin: Everything that she says has been confected. Her confectionaries , those who create her as a candidate, said, "Okay, people feel this way, so you need to say this." That's nothing to do with reality. Look at small business. California is ranked 50th in small business climate. Talk to anybody who tries to run a business here. If you're not one of the tech oligarchs, it's not so pretty. Even for some of them, it's not so pretty. I don't see where she would be different than Biden, except worse.
Weltwoche: You have argued that key points of her “opportunity economy” are plans for a massive expansion of federal power, paying mortgages for homebuyers, raising corporate taxes and fixing grocery prices. Where would that lead us?
Kotkin: Well, first of all, we know that price controls and rent control don't work very well, but we are going to get it anyway. The only problem is she's got to control both houses of Congress against some of it. I think that this whole opportunity economy, it's just a confection. It's something made up.
Weltwoche: She says, "I actually have a plan."
Kotkin: "By the way, you've been vice president for four years. How come this hasn't come up once?" It's weird. It's like she's trying to run as a new vision person after having been the vice president for three years. I don't understand what exactly are you proposing? Are you saying that you're going to do something different than what Biden did, or are you going to follow up on it?
The other thing is that so many of her decisions like increased corporate taxes or increased capital gains rates, you think that's going to create more jobs? I just think the problem is the whole sort of mythology of Bidenomics, which now they don't use anymore is it was all artificially stimulated employment. In California, it's even worse. We've actually lost private sector jobs, and the only gain is public sector.
If you look at who has benefited under Biden, unless there is a massive downturn, there'll be the same people that will benefit under Harris, people who own stock and property. It will benefit the public employees and those people who feed off the government. That has become a bigger and bigger group. If you look at who votes, democratic teachers, lawyers, obviously anyone who works for the government, environmental consultants, big law firms, those same people will benefit. Look, her husband's law background is representing the oligarchs and the sovereign wealth funds. Only an imbecile like Trump would call her a socialist.
Weltwoche: Who is she really?
Kotkin: She's the latest avatar created by the San Francisco cabal. If it wasn't her, it would have been Newsom, and in many ways, Newsom is a more skilled politician than she is, but she was the one who got the nod. Newsom has a terrible crime that he's committed, which is being White and male.
Weltwoche: You recently called Harris “a creature of the oligarchy”. Who exactly is this oligarchy?
Kotkin: The oligarchy is really at the center of the tech companies, particularly Google. It was interesting that she was coached for a debate by a Google attorney who was arguing against her own government. The oligarchs are the big tech guys, the venture capitalists on the Wall Street people. That's the oligarchy.
Weltwoche: Among the oligarchs there are also donors. You have donors from the Silicon Valley who support Harris massively. Who else?
Kotkin: Reid Hoffman, Marc Benioff, Steve Jobs widow, Lauren Jobs, among many others.
Weltwoche: Cisco, Apple.
Kotkin: The big source of money for her and for the left is the former or discarded wives of the oligarchs. Melinda Gates is worth what? $ 30 billion. Laurene Jobs is worth at least $15 billion. They don't even have to worry about business. They just have the money.
Weltwoche: Harris frequently talks about her roots in the middle class. Indeed, she grew up in a modest house, but now she is living in Brentwood, Los Angeles, a very upscale neighborhood. Who does she represent today?
Kotkin: She represents the political machines, the nonprofits, the tech oligarchs, and most of Wall Street. The interesting divide in the selection among the oligarchs is those involved in media, in social media, in AI, on the information side, are overwhelmingly for Harris. The people who actually build things tend to be for Trump. Musk. Musk, I think, is somewhat out there in some other universe
Weltwoche: Literally.
Kotkin: He builds cars, he builds spaceships, he builds solar panels. He has to deal with the same problem that somebody in the oil industry has to deal with, somebody building homes has to deal with. He has to deal with regulations, they are a killer. If you're Mark Zuckerberg, it doesn't matter. You put your data centers in some state that burns coal, but you don't have to do anything much here.
The division is really between those who build, like the guys who do defense, they're all for Trump, like Palantir and Anduril, and the people who are involved in the digits side, they're all for Harris.
Urs Gehriger