Will apocalyptic wildfire finally wake L.A. voters up?

Adam Carolla, evacuated from home and ranting to the mic in a Los Angeles hotel room, seems to think so.

When the winds that fueled two of L.A. County’s largest wildfires on record die down, Pacific Palisades residents eager to rebuild their homes will crash headlong into L.A.’s thicket of permitting and building codes. Then, and only then, Carolla predicts, with the neighborhood in ruins and a phalanx of environmental regulation set against them, will they vote differently.

It’s a common fantasy. Rich lefties getting their comeuppance, and said comeuppance finally beating sense into the next election result is a daydream outnumbered conservatives know too well. In bizarro, chronically mismanaged California, it’s bread and butter.

But such an outcome is a long way off, even as mainstream coverage untangles the lasagna of bad policy, lack of prevention, ill-maintained infrastructure and DEI priorities that doomed the fight against the Palisades Fire. Like Sacramento, one party and one party alone runs Los Angeles. Fairly or not, that’s where the blame for empty reservoirs, hydrants that ran dry, and the frenzied evacuations of some 180,000 people (some on foot after abandoning their cars), must land.

While no one can control 100-mile-per-hour winds or California’s predictably dry weather, the ruling clique’s missed opportunities to mitigate disaster warrant outrage. Like the power lines a co-worker of mine saw banging against trees in Studio City a few nights ago, talk of recall is already sparking. Political careers have been ruined for far less. An angry search for culprits is rarely even-handed, and yet Mayor Karen Bass, rushed back from Ghana only to appear dumbstruck and read a speech transcript that wasn’t even proofread, and Gavin Newsome, who has been more vocal about destroying dams along the far-north Klamath river than ramping up water storage, aren’t doing themselves any favors.

In the midst of this, Carolla taps the exasperation that Angelenos no longer baffled by high taxes, corruption scandals, drug RV’s, or the recent looting of evacuated homes, can’t deny. ‘Will dumb, rich voters finally get it?’ he asks.

‘Now will they understand?’

Such judgments borrow a point Victor Davis Hanson has made for decades about all of California—the Golden state’s disparate geography (affluent coastal plains, separated by mountains from high desert and the Central Valley) shields urban voters from the obvious consequences of green, radical-chic policy choices. Carolla, like Hanson, holds the classical assumption that humans are inherently limited and selfish in scope. Until they have skin in the game, those professing selflessness will neither act, nor necessarily know how to act wisely for the good of others.

To the extent that it’s a real problem (I think we should dub affluent voters who don’t pay their price for what they vote for the ‘Hanson’ effect), fair enough. With those consequences now seared in everyone’s minds in what Victor Davis Hanson called ‘a DEI-green new deal-hydrogen bomb’ it is time to point out that Angelenos have voted routinely for the mayors, governors, city councilmen, and judges who year, after year, laid the groundwork for collapse.

But will said outrage be enough to change a leadership given carte blanche by voters to chase progressive ends? Will a crippled home insurance market, or smoldering ruins along Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway be enough for a political one-eighty?

Possibly.

But somehow, I doubt it.

Factors that will likely stop fire-scarred residents from changing political allegiance are the same ones that make Southern California a vast paradox: size, population, and varied geography. Unlike New York or San Francisco, where the squalor and violence of a permissive approach to crime and drug use can’t help but bottle up for everyone, L.A. may be too spread out to hit rock bottom.

As wind-swept fires devouring multiple locations remind us, the Southland’s hills and valleys make for sequestered enclaves. There’s plenty of busy, high-profile locations, but no single urban cluster towers over the others. Downtown L.A. is no stone’s throw (in miles or commuting time) from Santa Monica, the port of Long Beach, Disneyland, or anywhere else.

Leave a comment

Shared space or a lack thereof has political dimensions. New Yorkers celebrating Daniel Penny’s acquittal, or the Bay Area voters who ousted mayors London Breed and Sheng Thao (a few years ago, San Francisco even recalled their openly-Marxist D.A. Chesa Boudin) are much more likely to have ridden the subways or walked downtown recently than people in SoCal. Pacific Palisades residents may change their tune, but left-leaning voters in Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, Venice, Manhattan Beach, Culver City, and even far-off Claremont will have far less reason to. They may be shocked and horrified, but the distance between them and evacuation zones means that few will be harmed, or beyond poor air quality, seriously inconvenienced.

For the record, that’s only a handful of the neighborhoods that routinely vote democrat in Los Angeles.

On the other hand, SoCal’s enormity—Greater L.A., Orange County, Ventura, and the Inland Empire tally some eighteen million people and six thousand square miles—is an unlikely blessing.

As a Pasadena denizen once told me while we camped out to watch the annual Rose Parade: “We’re too spread out for a terrorist attack. A bomb could go off in downtown L.A. and we wouldn’t hear it. We’d still be sitting here watching the parade.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Another parade-nut once told us that she up and moved here from the Midwest after noticing how bright and warm it looked in January. The sun, the welcoming vibe, and the enormous slate of neighborhoods and suburbs to choose from were her veritable siren song.

That rings naive in 2025, but how many hundreds of thousands came west and settled out here for similar reasons? Urbanists hate L.A.'s sprawling, charmless suburbs, but all those strip malls and tract houses cropped up for the simple reason that someone, usually committing to life in a far-off place with fair weather, good prospects, and plenty of land, wanted them.

Los Angeles, stretched over five hundred square miles, is not so welcoming today. The roads, utilities, schools, and public spaces that made a fire-prone region safe and livable, stagger on, less reliable and more expensive than ever. But potholes in L.A. beat potholes in El Segundo, or Thousand Oaks. Tent cities and dilapidated RV’s that line Los Angeles streets are sparse or absent in more aggressively policed Orange County.

With more than a handful of places more competently run than Los Angeles for voters to live or relocate to, a mass movement led by Carolla’s angry one percenters seems like a stretch. Furthermore, and as author Charles Murray points out, most of the region’s affluent blue voters actually live traditional, often suburban lives. Strong ties to family, neighbors, and local places root people to their lifestyle—and can buttress them against the consequences of radical policies.

Inertia, rather, pushed along by over a million Californians who voted with their feet instead of staying to fight an entrenched leadership, seems more likely.

Sorry, Adam.

Fire outrage will hopefully add momentum to shifting headwinds. November’s election saw all fifty-eight counties agree to make theft and other offenses felonies again with the passage of Proposition 36—another poke in Newsome’s eye. In a surprise to some, but no surprise to those who remember past successes like the passage of Prop 8, or the recall of Gray Davis in 2003, Californians north and south rallied around a common issue.

Lack of fire prevention, which concerns Northern California residents as much, if not even more than their southern counterparts, could be another rallying point. But given size and sheer numbers, it would take more for that common issue to become a broad referendum on California’s hated—and yet beloved—ruling party.

If anything, the colossal mismanagement on full display is a strong reminder. As broad and idyllic as the L.A. basin is, nature never intended humans to live here, or for that matter, the environment-loving Bay Area. Strip away the concrete and Los Angeles is dry grassland (not all desert, as it turns out). Drought, wildfire, and even flooding come with the ecology. Without infrastructure to prevent those things, and without water and power imported from places environmentalists would rather not talk about, California’s dry coastline is uninhabitable. The Spanish sailors who first explored it noted the seasonal fires and lack of water sources in their journals.

To be populated, let alone the world’s fifth largest economy, California needed to tame itself. Social justice, identity politics, and reduced livability for the sake of Mother Gaia are nothing short of a sadistic, if unintentional untaming—large-scale regression to natural state none of us could imagine.

Share Shelf of Crocodiles

Share

It’s sad that misinformed voters need a conflagration to come to their senses. All the same, the sheer extent of damage and dysfunction means they might see fire-prevention initiatives on the next ballot. Fast-tracking building permits for those who lost their homes would is also looking to be an easy fix—one with no soul-searching, or skin off of Nass or Newsome’s nose. We might eventually see L.A. fire chief Kristin Crowley, (the one who said that getting more women and LGBTQ folks on the force was her top priority) hang up her hat.

But it will take nothing short of renewed humility, and perhaps a sense of their tragic vulnerability to nature’s raw power for Angelenos to elect the leaders they need. Competent ones, committed to preventing the recurring dangers of a large, developed, and yes, miraculous place, would be a start.