The Golden State is staring down a Detroit-like decline — and the upcoming gubernatorial-recall election

may offer a rare chance to avert that disaster.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he upcoming gubernatorial-recall election in California provides an amusing

contrast between Larry Elder, a black conservative from inner-city Los Angeles who made it from
Crenshaw High School to Brown to a position at one of the nation’s most prestigious law firms before
embarking on his radio and television career, and Gavin Newsom, the son of a rich white guy in San
Francisco who made his money sucking on the Getty Oil teat who grew up to be a rich white guy in San
Francisco who made his money sucking on the Getty Oil teat.

As I put it in the New York Post, it’s the Sage from South Central vs. the Schmuck from the French
Laundry.

Larry Elder is a conservative talk-radio host in 2021, with all the bumptious, Trumpish baggage that goes
with that. And yet the polls have him within plausible reach of the governorship. Elder is a formidable
communicator and a man of genuine intelligence, but the fact that an AM-radio chatterbox has
managed, in the breaks between the doggie-vitamin commercials, to get within striking distance of
supplanting the sitting Democratic governor is less a recognition of his considerable gifts than it is an
indictment of Gavin Newsom’s sundry grotesqueries — and the sorry state of California as a whole.

Because there is much more to what ails California than the depths of mediocrity plumbed by the
feckless, po-faced hypocrite who currently sits at the top of state government or the temperament of the
irascible broadcaster who aims to be the third man (by my count) to make his way from the Hollywood
Walk of Fame to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.

Think of California as Detroit writ large.

In the 1950s, Detroit was an economic powerhouse, full of dynamism and innovation. In 1960, it had the
highest per-capita income of any city in these United States. Like Silicon Valley, it was home to many of
the world’s most famous companies, but its most important asset was its people. In the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, more than 100 automobile startups were founded in the United States, mostly in
the industrial centers of New England and Ohio. But it was Detroit that succeeded, thanks largely to a
highly skilled work force that was able to easily make the transition from manufacturing marine engines,
one of Detroit’s pre-automotive specialties, to manufacturing automobiles. And Detroit built success on
success: The best workers could be found there, because that’s where the best jobs were, and the best
jobs came there, because that’s where the best workers were.

Those union jobs on automotive assembly lines made Detroit a mecca for blue-collar and middle-class
workers, but, like Silicon Valley, it grew culturally sophisticated as it grew rich: In the Ford Auditorium on
the waterfront, a string of European conductors led the city’s popular and well-regarded orchestra, while
culinary magazines printed recipes from the city’s restaurants, its schools educated the likes of Elmore
Leonard, and its factory workers labored in buildings designed by Albert Kahn.

But even with all that going for it, Detroit was already showing signs of trouble in 1960, when the U.S.
Census found its population in a decline that would soon turn into a stampede for the exits — once the
nation’s fifth-largest city, it would eventually slide down to 27th place, losing two-thirds of its people. Its
famous hotels — the Wolverine, the Park Avenue — were converted into flophouses and homeless
shelters, or knocked down to build parking lots. Americans still make cars — a great many of them — but
only one of the ten-biggest U.S. automobile factories operating today is in Michigan. The largest car
factory in the United States today belongs to Nissan, whose U.S. operations are based in Tennessee.

Detroit’s hubris should be a lesson for California, especially for Silicon Valley. In 1950, the Age of the
Automobile was upon us, and Detroit believed that its factories were an eternal golden goose, a source
of high-paying jobs and oodles of tax revenue that would always be there. Both the Big Three
automotive companies and the local authorities in Detroit were unprepared for the changes that already
were under way in the 1950s, from increased competition from Japan to broader shifts in the U.S.
economy. Detroit was enormously disadvantaged by the riots that helped to scare most of the white
middle class and much of the black middle class out of the city and into the suburbs, and then beyond to
sunnier climes in the south and southwest.

Detroit thought it could count on Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors forever. Silicon Valley thinks it can
count on Apple, Amazon, and Facebook forever. The complacent leaders in Michigan were dead wrong.
So are the ones in California.

Not everybody in Detroit was surprised to learn in the late 1950s that the city was losing population. Not
everybody in Silicon Valley today will be surprised to learn that 90 percent of the high-tech industry’s
workers are earning less in real wages now than their counterparts were 20 years ago. The biggest digital
publisher in the United States is in South Carolina, not California, and Tesla’s future is in Texas, as are
Hewlett-Packard’s and Oracle’s. It’s not just Elon Musk and the other bold-face names, either: It is
venture-capital investors and services firms and, above all, the most in-demand workers, many of whom
have discovered that they are far better-off making $200,000 a year in Austin or Charleston than
$300,000 a year in San Francisco.

Detroit did not really appreciate how serious its problems were until it was too late to reverse the
decline. And instead of putting forward serious and responsible leaders, Detroit leaned hard into identity
politics with such figures as Mayor Coleman Young, the Gavin Newsom of Michigan, who had his own
French Laundry moment, greeting municipal leaders in gray and hurting Detroit from the beaches of
sunny Hawaii with the immortal salutation: “Aloha, motherfu**ers!”

Larry Elder may not be precisely to the taste of his fellow Californians. But Sacramento needs a wakeup
call a lot more urgently than it needs another prix-fixe dinner at the French Laundry.