grognardish

As someone who lived there, Conservatives hate it for very specific reasons, and other people dislike it for other ones.

The political biases were really well expressed above, and I won’t rehash them. But, suffice it to say, it’s seen as a standards-bearer for a way of living and a perspective on life that they fundamentally hate, so they have to tear it down.

For more practical reasons to dislike it, the cost of living is insane - I was priced out of a livable home in two cities and I made six-figure money. By ‘livable’, I mean ‘less than a 1-hour commute to work by car each way’ and ‘pay for my home, a car, and be putting money away each month’. Renting a tiny place beneath my means and socking away money felt good, but was never able to catch up and purchase something that didn’t make me house-poor or kill my soul in traffic. Other people made that sacrifice, I couldn’t. So, I left.

Those real estate prices had many factors contributing - Prop 13 taxes, NIMBY types that kept new home construction well beneath the population growth, typical crap American zoning that prevents mixed-use mid-sized buildings that makes parts of Europe so livable and walkable, corrupt as hell politics that made the few new developments built into car-centric hells, massive influx of Chinese and Russian money investing in real estate pricing normal people out of single-family homes, AirBNB properties undermining and taking away rental properties, etcetera. It’s a wide variety of factors.

The knock-on effects of this are huge - people living house-poor, or having horrible commutes that make them miserable, and at worst, an increasing number of people being bankrupted into homelessness. Combine that with the excellent coastal climate making homelessness survivable, libertarian communities that siphon away public funds while using slimy legal tactics to stop contributing their own, and every conservative government of bordering states buying their own homeless one-way tickets to California, and that’s snowballed out of control. San Francisco, LA, and San Diego are the hardest hit.

It’s kind of a microcosm of the entire country, so it’s not like it has unique problems. But it has a bunch of them coming to fruition right now.

Yeah, this is the answer right here. There was always a latent effect on politics - i.e. since American is so heavily Protestant, Kennedy getting elected as a Catholic was kind of a big deal, but that was more of a passive preference and not so blatantly driven by party strategy. And that effects all countries, whether you want to believe it or not - America’s not alone here by any means.

But, I remember when Reagan and the ‘Moral Majority’ (which was neither moral, nor the majority) kicked off and turbocharged the whole thing, and that’s when fundamentalists started pushing congregations on their voting patterns in an organized way. It was like someone flipped a switch and the message was coordinated across the country.