A popular meme making the rounds on social media shows an anguished citizen, outraged at California’s incompetent ruling Democrats Gov. Gavin Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Attorney General Rob Bonta and the rest of the state’s Democratic politburo, saying, “Next time I’ll vote for a different Democrat!”
It’s a mordant recognition California is a hopeless one-party state. For someone like me who grew up in California when it was considered “Reagan Country” and the bulwark of Republican strength in the Electoral College, this is a shocking and depressing state of affairs.
The California Republican Party is so feeble that it’s becoming more frequent that the state’s top-two “jungle” primary system adopted 20 years ago, in which all candidates are listed and voted on together with the top two finishers going on the November ballot, produces general-election contests for statewide office between two Democrats.
Kamala Harris was first elected to the US Senate in 2016 out of the jungle-primary process, beating another Democrat who finished second in the spring.
Sen. Adam Schiff last year ran TV ads successfully boosting Republican Steve Garvey’s candidacy in the primary so he wouldn’t have to contest another Democrat in November — and won.
In an open field for governor next year, it’s possible two strong Democrats could keep a Republican from making the general-election ballot. One of them is likely to be Kamala Harris, who’s leading in the early polls.
Part of the problem for anyone, especially a Republican, seeking statewide office in California is that the state’s sheer size and expensive media markets make it difficult to break through to the public and establish basic name identification.
Succeeding statewide requires that a candidate be part of a well-organized and well-funded political machine — which is how Newsom and Harris ascended in the Bay Area — or have celebrity status, like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan back in 1966.
(Lost in the mists of time is the Democratic effort in 1974 to get Warren Beatty to run for governor, mimicking Reagan’s celebrity success.)
Long gone are the days when a Republican could slowly climb the greasy pole of statewide politics with a solid record in lower offices, like George Deukmejian or Pete Wilson.
While Republican strength has atrophied, California Democrats have built a powerful and flush political machine, anchored in progressive San Francisco, that skillfully grooms and promotes statewide candidates, such as Newsom and Harris.
If next year’s election offers Harris and some other far-left Democrat such as AG Bonta, we few remaining California Republicans might well pack up our moving vans or consider assisted suicide.
The despair over today’s one-party rule has led to the faint hope that perhaps a moderate Democrat might come along some Republicans could swallow.
But amazingly Jerry Brown was about as moderate as you could expect from California Democrats, and that’s saying something.
Maybe the time has come for Republicans to explore some exotic options besides exile. Are there any different Democrats out there with the possible appeal and ability to disrupt the Democratic Party’s far-left political machine?
There might be one: comedian Bill Maher.
It may sound crazy at first, but he seems to have finally made the turn toward across-the-board political sense.
Perhaps Maher’s progress is a simple case of maturity that comes with advancing years, but one sees no such progress with other left-leaning comedians such as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, who increasingly offer up unfunny partisan hackery.
Maher appears to be a “liberal who was mugged by reality” — the Christopher Hitchens of lefty comedians.
Going back to his ABC show “Politically Incorrect” 25 years ago, Maher has always displayed an independent streak. He never sugarcoated radical Islam and chided fellow liberals who did.
“Liberals need to stand up for liberal principles,” he insisted. “Liberal principles like freedom of speech, freedom to practice any religion you want without fear of violence, freedom to leave a religion, equality for women, equality for minorities including homosexuals — these are liberal principles that liberals applaud for, but then when you say in the Muslim world this is what’s lacking, then they get upset.”
That prompted guest Ben Affleck to call him a bigot.
In more recent years Maher has repeatedly attacked identity politics in his rants on his weekly HBO show, “Real Time.”
In one monologue several months ago, Maher said: “We need to stop talking about the things that make Americans different from each other and start honoring the things that make us the same. . . . Outdated racial pandering is one reason Democrats keep losing elections. Today’s Democrats should move on from identity politics.”
This has now become the conventional wisdom among many leading Democrats, though they haven’t figured out how to get out of it without infuriating their identity interest groups that hold so much sway over the party.
In the wake of the Los Angeles fires Maher suddenly sounds like a fiscal conservative, pointing out that people in California pay high taxes and rightly expect competent government — but aren’t getting it.
It’s pretty clear he has contempt for Newsom and Bass. He even dishes on high-speed rail, the greatest boondoggle in California history. One recent monologue on HBO he asked, “Can anyone really say our government is not broken?”
He followed up by saying President Trump might be right about getting rid of the Department of Education. Rare for a liberal, he looks at results rather than the good intentions and money spent, and he sees that the Department of Education has abjectly failed in its mission.
And he’s called for getting tough on crime.
These are all heresies among the ideological minders of the Democratic Party but probably in step with a lot of rank-and-file Democrats. He is a callback to an older, hardheaded, commonsense social democrat.
Would he make a good candidate?
He checks the well-known-celebrity box and would generate lots of free media. To be sure, Maher is a Trump-hater, a professed socialist and a celebrant of the drug culture. He’s made it clear he’ll never become a Republican or vote for a Republican.
But given that California Democrats now are incompetent socialists, Maher might still be attractive to many Republicans, while peeling off some of the growing number of Democrats in California, especially in Silicon Valley, who are quietly disgusted with the state of things.
In the absence of a credible Republican candidate (a good bet as of the moment), Maher presents Republicans with the opportunity at least to disrupt the Democrats’ machine. If nothing else, it would be amusing to watch other Democrats attack Maher from the left in a campaign, which would push the party’s public image even further left than it already is. There’s a chance that if he won, he’d include several Republicans in his cabinet because he’d know they’re more competent than the ideologues Democrats install now.
It will be objected that as a comedian, he has no government experience. That was the main objection to Reagan, of course, and we know how that turned out.
And Maher wouldn’t be the first comedian propelled into high office at a stroke. There’s another TV comedian people have heard of who ascended into high office recently named Volodymyr Zelensky.
Don’t knock the comic temperament. “A joke is a serious thing,” Winston Churchill remarked.
We’ll know wokeism is truly over when “Blazing Saddles” can be shown on a college campus.
Besides, if Republicans can embrace Robert F. Kennedy Jr., they ought to be able to accept Bill Maher or at least enjoy the disruptive possibilities he might offer.
Who knows how far his journey might yet take him? After all, coming around begrudgingly to the former host of “The Apprentice” has worked out fairly well for RFK Jr. Maher should follow his lead.
Steven F. Hayward is the Edward Gaylord Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
