'For all its issues and faults, California is the closest thing that the U.S. has to European-style social democracy...'

A mind-boggling blog post and comment thread at the communist academic blog, Crooked Timber, "Open up your Golden Gate":

I think it’s important to situate “California is ungovernable”–which has *never* been true in any recognizable sense–in the broader political discussion about American political life. For all its issues and faults, California is the closest thing that the U.S. has to European-style social democracy. It has strong state-provided social services, such as a very robust state OSHA program, relatively pro-worker wage-and-hour laws, and a massively successful (if declining) public university system–which provides far more to state public life than in other states with premier universities, such as Massachusetts, where such are privatized. It has politically active unions like the CTA and CNA on the winning side. It has strong environmental protections and lots of public lands and public trusts. It has a broadly politically empowered populus in its major cities; and so forth.

This isn’t to say that California is perfect, by any means. But it is to say that reiterating the discourses without situating them in those broader conversations often tends to legitimize a discourse that implies that social democracy is “ungovernable” and neoliberalism is a neutral, invisibile, natural state of affairs.

This state's bankrupt, but for these idiot commies, it's like heaven on earth.

Meanwhile, "Prop. 30 Won't Quench California's Big Government Thirst."

The Democrats own it now, as if they hadn't already. The state's going down. Ten percent unemployment still after almost four years, and listen to these shitbag progressives sing the praises of the bankrupt blue state morass. We're about as close as you'll get to a European social democracy, alright. Take your pick: Greece, Spain. Shoot, Italy, the San Bernardino of Europe, came close to dragging down the entire European project all by itself. No matter, let's raise taxes. Yeah, that'll work. Forward! To growth and prosperity!

Wake me up from this nightmare. This country is populated with chest-thumping pinhead progressives who haven't got a freakin' clue.