The Victims of the L.A. Fires Have Nowhere to Turn

It seems impossible now, or, at the very least, quaint, but there was a time when the country looked to our elected officials in times of chaos and disaster. Less than five years ago, Andrew Cuomo’s daily press conferences comforted and informed New Yorkers during the worst days of the pandemic. The same could be said for Rudy Giuliani, who transformed himself into America’s Mayor in the wake of 9/11. Such spotlight is usually reserved for big-city officials, but even small-town tragedies once featured cameos from the mayor speaking to the unique character of their community and how the town will rebuild stronger.

The devastating fires in Los Angeles have no steadying political voices. The two figures who are nominally in charge—Karen Bass, the city’s mayor, and Gavin Newsom, California’s governor—have spent much of the past week responding (or not responding) to criticism about everything from D.E.I. policies to illegal immigration to the Delta smelt. Even the city’s fire chief, Kristin Crowley, has come under scrutiny, breaking one of the cardinal rules in this country—that firefighters can never be criticized during a disaster.

These attacks should not be surprising to anyone, but I wonder whether we have reached a place where no political leader in any crisis, regardless of the magnitude, can act as a calming and edifying presence for the public. (It’s arguable whether they should have ever had that privilege, especially given what has happened to both Cuomo and Giuliani since.) Social media, where most of these arguments live, can really only replicate one form of discourse and crudely force it on every story that comes down the assembly line. It is, more than anything, a stubborn, inelegant, and predatory machine.

On the right, the social-media refrain on the fires, much of which has been whipped up by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, has gone something like this: The gay woman fire chief has the words “D.E.I.” in her online biography and clearly did not hire qualified people. She, herself, is likely a liberal diversity hire. Liberal fealty to environmentalists who wanted to protect a tiny fish called the Delta smelt led to a water shortage in Los Angeles. Also, why does Ukraine have fully prepared fire stations on the United States’ dime and our firefighters are understaffed? And why are we spending money to protect illegal immigrants when that money could be used to prevent these fires? The relative truth of any of these claims is not all that important to the people posting the memes and tweet threads. The point, as is true in all politics, is to flood the zone with damaging stories about your opponents.

In the past, liberals might have comforted ourselves with the mantra that online life is not real. But, although that might still be true in our daily lives, it is no longer the case in politics, especially with the owner of the most toxic of these platforms now seated next to the throne (or arguably on it) at Mar-a-Lago. Newsom, one of the purported favorites to be the Democratic Presidential nominee in 2028, seems to have spent more time fighting with Trump and Musk and pushing back on their posts on Twitter and Truth Social than actually talking about the fires. This is just how things are now. The stubborn machine has won, and politicians are, for the most part, just fodder, which means that every politician who has to stand in front of a camera after a tragedy turns into another battle site in an endless culture war.

Social media is Trump’s territory, and its norms—insults without consequence, braggadocio, and flame wars—line up neatly with his way of doing politics. Twitter is not toxic because of Donald Trump, but Donald Trump almost single-handedly pulled politics and the media onto Twitter, which meant that, during the years he compulsively posted on the site, he was setting the terms of every debate. But the sameness of any political conversation involving Trump and the hyperbolized outrage he often inspires can also cover up real shifts in the electorate. Americans still do change their minds about things, often in large numbers, but changes tend to hide in plain sight. The swing among Latino and Asian voters to the right, for example, had been relatively obvious to people paying attention between the end of the Obama Administration and last November. Some combination of cultural conservatism in many immigrant families; changes away from merit-based systems in schools; and concerns about the border, inflation, and inevitable attrition from too many years of being reliably blue led to what now feels like a certain and robust electoral shift.

Is California going through the early stages of a political realignment that has not quite yet shown up in electoral results? One can cherry-pick certain bits of data to argue that this has already happened—something like Kamala Harris, despite being from California and serving as its senator, winning significantly fewer votes in the state in her bid to become President than Joe Biden did in 2020—but I’m talking here about something much more under the surface. The question isn’t whether California will flip red—it won’t—but whether its residents are becoming increasingly disillusioned with liberal governance at the local and state level. Nor do I think most Californians blame wokeness or D.E.I. or even climate change for the fires. I imagine they, like normal human beings, feel a great deal of sympathy for the people who lost their homes and their lives, whether they’re celebrities in the Pacific Palisades, multigenerational Black families in Altadena, or disabled and elderly people who could not evacuate in time.

But I do wonder whether Californians, especially those in cities with crime rates that spiked during the pandemic, poorly maintained infrastructure, and large homeless populations might be questioning the priorities of the liberals who govern them. In the Bay Area, voters in both Oakland and San Francisco effectively deposed their mayors in last November’s election—Sheng Thao, of Oakland, was recalled in the midst of a bizarre corruption scandal; London Breed, the incumbent mayor of San Francisco, who once seemed primed for a run up the ladder of the Democratic Party, was defeated by Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi’s jeans fortune who has no real political experience. Even in Berkeley, where I live, two long-standing city-council members running for mayor were defeated by an unknown challenger who, as far as I could tell, was a complete unknown to many voters.

It’s difficult to classify or quantify these changes because they will likely not persuade voters in deep-blue districts to leave the Democratic Party. But what seems to be settling in is a general unease about the competence of local and state governance. I live in what Kamala Harris dubbed the East Bay Hills, where the most salient political issue is fire prevention. Most families I know have a go bag packed and can recite their evacuation plan. My house, along with hundreds of others in the neighborhood, was dropped from its fire-insurance policy last year. Most of my neighbors, like many of the people in the Pacific Palisades whose houses burned to the ground, received little to no warning. Nor were there any alternatives to just signing up for the state’s FAIR plan, which, as Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out this week, will come under incredible strain and scrutiny once the claims from Los Angeles start flooding in. It’s reasonable for residents to be skeptical that FAIR will actually pay out, or, at the very least, to expect that the claims process will be so broken, bureaucratic, and ultimately bankrupt that it would almost be easier to skip it entirely. We all pay because we have to pay, but if the East Bay Hills burn down again—they last burned in 1991, leading to the loss of twenty-five lives and more than three thousand homes—nobody is expecting much help from their local or state officials. It is notable how many of the most heartbreaking stories coming out of the fires in Los Angeles have been accompanied by a GoFundMe link, which is both an inspiring reflection of communities coming together and an expression of uncertainty about the help that’s going to come from the government and insurance companies. On Monday, Newsom proposed $2.5 billion in funding for a Marshall Plan to rebuild California, but we have heard similar grand proclamations from Newsom—and even bigger dollar amounts—attached to solving the homelessness crisis and, in the end, much of what’s discussed is where, exactly, all that money went.

There is a significant portion of the California electorate who will never vote Republican in a Presidential election, who hold socially progressive cultural beliefs when it comes to racial and gender issues, and who can’t figure out why a place of such wealth and high taxes can’t seem to run anything well on a local level. They carry around their own bag of annoyances about how the state is run. Some grievances, such as homeless encampments in cities, can trigger more strong reactions, while others, such as overzealous equity pushes in public schools, bad roads, high taxes, or property crime, are mostly just accepted as part of the deal if you want to live in the state.

Catastrophic events like the fires in Los Angeles have a way of turning these annoyances into disillusionment. As Trump, Musk, and their army of right-wing online warriors have stepped up the attacks on Bass and Newsom, I’ve been struck by how little resistance they’ve encountered, whether from elected Democrats, media figures, or even liberal posters. There are some obvious reasons why this has happened—Musk owns a social-media company and many of the state’s more politically inclined residents seem to have entered a state of hibernation when it comes to the news—but I also imagine there’s a feeling of exhaustion with the state’s leadership. Many of the people in California I’ve spoken to in the past week have expressed a total lack of surprise that local water infrastructure in L.A. had not been updated to deal with the threat of a catastrophic wildfire.

When the fires come for us—and it is a question of when and how much, not if—how many of us will feel the narrative pull to turn all our separate grievances about potholes or schools or petty corruption into one grand story of failing liberal leadership? ♦