5 Feet of Fury

Steve Sailer: Liberalism is Expensive, Conservatism is Cheap

Steve Sailer writes:

As a native Californian, I’ve always been struck by how much of the cultural revolution of the 1960s transpired in California even though many of what we hear ret-conned today as the causes of the 1960s – slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, civil rights, and so forth – were not particularly relevant in California. There were enough blacks to stage a major riot in Watts in 1965, but it was hard to say that blacks were terribly central to California in the 1960s.

Instead, the California that fostered Berkeley in 1964 was largely a creation of the once seemingly triumphant liberal consensus of the middle of the 20th Century, with the population almost tripling from under seven million in 1940 to 20 million in 1970.

My impression is that the social revolution that began in California in the 1960s was actually more about the transition from affordability to expensiveness, from inclusivity to exclusivity.