Bringing Back Normality

And striking fear into Democrats

Everyman L.A. Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt is “controversial” according to the press. “Controversial” is a press code word for “Democrats don’t like him, but can’t give actual reasons why because they would sound stupid.”

Why don’t Democrats like Spencer Pratt? Because he’s standing up for normal things, and the political system in L.A., as dominated by Democrats and their satraps for decades, has made a point of not delivering those normal things.

Not all that long ago, really, every local politician would talk about potholes, garbage collection, crime control, clean sidewalks, and the like. Now it’s “controversial” — which means a threat to the power of the ruling machine — to even talk about those things.

That’s because those are things that voters want, that the machine doesn’t want to give them.

Why doesn’t the machine want to give voters these very basic, normal things?

There are a lot of reasons. The first is that they’re spending the money on other stuff, which basically means themselves and their cronies. There’s a Nigerian joke that’s on point here, though sadly obsolete nowadays. A Nigerian visits his rich cousin in the United States and is gobsmacked by his wealth. The rich American cousin says, “See that bridge over there, that stadium, that school building?” The Nigerian cousin nods. The American cousin points at himself and says “Ten percent!”

Some years later the American cousin goes back to Nigeria and visits his Nigerian cousin, who has become fabulously wealthy, much richer than the American. “How did you do that"? he asks. The Nigerian says, “do you see that bridge over there, that stadium, that school building?”

“Er, no,” says the American. The Nigerian proudly points at himself and says “One hundred percent!”

The joke is obsolete because Los Angeles has moved close to the one hundred percent level. When you’re spending upwards of $800,000 to house a single “homeless” person you’re nearly there. (And Gavin Newsom’s high speed rail, which has gobbled up billions but produced no trains, is basically in one hundred percent territory already.) So the current rulers of L.A. couldn’t easily fix the potholes if they wanted, because too many constituencies are living off the taxpayer’s teat, leaving not enough money to do it without nasty political fights. As Vaclav Havel says, ossified. (See also Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations.)

But another, possibly bigger, reason that the machine doesn’t want to give the voters basic, normal things is because they are normal.

If you value clean streets and sidewalks, it’s not that hard to get them. (Look what Gavin Newsom did to pretty up San Francisco before Chairman Xi’s visit). If you want crime rates down, as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — and Donald Trump in places like Memphis and Washington, DC — have demonstrated, it’s not that hard.

The purpose of a system is what it does, and what the political system in Los Angeles, as in most big, blue cities, does is generate crime, homelessness, rampant drug use, and decayed common spaces.

It doesn’t do normal things because it doesn’t want to do normal things, and it doesn’t want to do normal things because, at core, leftism doesn’t want things to be normal. Why that is is open to interpretation (personally, I think it’s because leftists want the outer world to be as disgusting and disordered as their inner selves) but the pattern is there. And you can get away with it, so long as people think the decline in their world stems from some sort of organic causes, rather than being a choice.

But decline is a choice.

This is also one of the reasons why leftist architecture and public art are are so awful, and why Donald Trump’s efforts to pretty things up are getting so much pushback:

Will Spencer Pratt win? I don’t know. Some right-leaning commentators look at the polls and say that he doesn’t have a chance. But local polls aren’t super reliable — and, for that matter, neither are national polls sometimes. I’m reminded of election day 2016 when my colleague Penny White asked me how I thought it would turn out and I said that according to the polls Hillary had it won, but that I felt a vast current of fuck-you in the electorate that I didn’t think the polls had captured.

I was right, of course, and that might be the case here.

But even if Pratt loses, he’s opened up these issues that no one was supposed to talk about, and gotten people talking about them. That’s a brutal blow to a machine that has for years relied on making sure people weren’t able to talk about the things that might be dangerous to it. That will raise pressure, and likely lead to change in time anyway.

Stay tuned.