A lot of Hacker News analysis of California reads to me like people who moved there 10 years ago and lack any context. The shocking liberalism of California's

A lot of Hacker News analysis of California reads to me like people who moved there 10 years ago and lack any context. The shocking liberalism of California's approach to street-visible crime, homelessness, immigration, and drug use is a backlash against prior failed policies. The 80s and 90s saw brutally high crime rates. Gang activity terrified people. It felt like every single nightly news included some 8 year-old girl caught in the crossfire waiting to buy ice cream from an ice cream truck. Combine that with Satanism scares, the Polly Klaas case, and we got some tough laws. As kids in LA County, we were not allowed to wear red, blue, or Raider's jerseys to school. A classmate of mine was expelled for having a switchblade comb because of zero-tolerance rules against lookalike weapons. Three-strikes laws and enhanced sentencing for gang-related crime led to extreme prison overcrowding and the general hardening of the prisons themselves led to runaway recidivism. It was pretty obvious those approaches were not working. So what happens? A backlash in the opposite direction. Addiction rates only got higher when we arrested people for drug use, so try something else. If you're not going to build housing and you're not going to have public toilets, exactly where are people who live on the street supposed to shit? Let them shit in the street. This is neither progressive nor conservative. It's the same back and forth oscillating between two extremes and hoping you eventually discover moderation that all of American politics experiences because of the two-party, first past the post voting system. California isn't even really that progressive. It's public-facing culture is dominated by the hippies of the Bay Area and libertines of Hollywood, but those are hardly the only people. Mexican Catholics, all of the refugees and immigrants from Asia post the wars in Vietnam and Korea, and the huge flood of Orthodox fleeing former Soviet republics after 1989 make up far more of the population than any descendants of the English. These are hardly super progressive populations. It's only been dominated by Democrats since the mid-90s due to backlash from Prop 187 poisoning Latino voters against the Republican party, plus whatever residual strength remains in public-sector and trade unions. Throw in the relatively high proportion of success in performing arts rather than business ownership in making people wealthy and you get a pretty good atmosphere against the American GOP. It doesn't mean the average person there is radically different from the average person anywhere else.