This shift away from liberal orthodoxy has shocked Newsom’s long-time progressive allies, who see it as an act of treachery. Yet if they had been paying attention to Newsom’s career — above all, his willingness to morph into whatever identity best serves his quest for power — this wouldn’t be so surprising.

Conservatives, too, will discover that Newsom isn’t a tool of the progressive Left, or a typical California progressive with “communistic” policies, as one conservative outlet described them. On the contrary, Newsom, unlike his predecessor, Jerry Brown, has been a committed, shameless sniffer of political winds throughout his career.

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That’s not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a lodestar. He does: namely, the monied elite of the Bay Area, particularly the Getty family. It explains his ease in discarding Left-of-center dogmas on law and order, and likewise why he has emerged as an unofficial political spokesman for the “abundance” agenda, which is how neoliberal Democrats are rebranding themselves these days. (In a display of virtuoso flexibility, however, Newsom in his conversation with Bannon called out Trump for his closeness with the tech oligarchs — talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

His oligarchic allegiance has funded, and shaped, Newsom’s career. He projected himself as a relative moderate as mayor of San Francisco. Later in 2011, as lieutenant governor, he challenged the rigid Brown, suggesting pro-business reforms. That year, amid a weakening Golden State economy, he traveled to arch-rival Texas to discover the secrets of the Lone Star State’s boom — much to the consternation of progressives.

Then, as the winds shifted to the Left, Newsom decided to re-center his appeal to progressives in California and nationwide. He became a fervent advocate of such things as early transgender treatments and banning schools from informing parents about their own kids’ sexual identity issues. His heiress wife, Jennifer Siebel, made a documentary film embracing the transgender cause.

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As governor, he could dispense the blessings of full-spectrum progressivism thanks to a massive accumulation of capital-gains revenue during the tech boom. The economy, about which he repeatedly bragged, may have hurt the middle and working classes, but it allowed Newsom and his legislative allies to build a vote-catching “blue welfare state”, as The Nation magazine enthused.

During the tech boom, Newsom ladled out subsidies to poorer Californians; indeed, the Golden State spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any state, twice as much as Texas, while it generally neglects basic infrastructure like roads and water supply. This sort of liberal welfarism recalls what Marx recognised in the Communist Manifesto as “the proletarian alms bag”.

Today, California’s economy is struggling, and progressive ideology increasingly clashes with reality and voter preferences. Newsom is clever enough to see the writing on the wall — in contrast to Kamala Harris, his possible gubernatorial successor and potential 2028 rival.

Bottom line: rather than frame Newsom as an ideologue, it is better to see him as a representative of the Bay Area tech oligarchy. To the titans of Silicon Valley, issues matter less than power and influence, as evinced in their recent genuflecting to Trump. If tactics need to be changed, if it’s necessary (for now) to learn the lessons of the 2024 MAGA triumph, so be it.

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This shift began to emerge even before the 2024 election. As it became clear that wind and solar couldn’t easily replace fossil fuels or nuclear power, particularly in light of the state’s draconian electric-vehicle mandate, Newsom signaled a growing flexibility. He reversed the proposed decommissioning of the state’s last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, as a means to prevent embarrassing blackouts.

This, along with natural-gas plants that account for close to half the state’s electricity, prevented politically damaging blackouts. He has even considered amending the state’s landmark environmental law. The green lobby’s ever harsher energy policies were recently dissed by a Newsom spokesperson as akin to “fantasy and fairy dust”.

Similar fault lines have pitted him against progressives when it comes to race. Newsom was an ostentatious promulgator of Leftist racial cant and racial policies, like reparations and quotas. Yet when reparations legislation suggested cash payments upwards of $640 billion dollars for the descendants of slaves, Newsom recoiled, upsetting the state’s hyperactive race hustlers. He now also expresses concerns about the injustice of transgender men competing in female sports programs, perhaps aware of the damage done to Harris by this issue.

Newsom has even backed away from his welfarist inclinations, recasting himself as a fiscally conscious moderate. He fended off proposals from Sacramento progressives, including their calls for a 32-hour workweek; raising the state’s income tax (already the nation’s highest); and adding new payroll taxes to cover universal health care.

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After the 2024 election, Newsom’s centrist shift has accelerated. This may still not be necessary in a state that went nearly 60% for Kamala Harris. But state politics are beside the point for the termed-out governor. For him, the prize is no longer in Sacramento — but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Newsom senses, correctly, that the best chance lies with embracing moderates reacting against the inevitable Trumpian excess. But the Democrats can only win the national vote if they shift away from progressive stances on climate, diversity, and gender — all widely unpopular east of the Sierra.

Ultimately Newsom’s biggest problem, particularly in a general election campaign, will be his miserable record. In a national campaign, he will be made to defend the state’s lousy education system: California’s students perform at among the lowest rates in the country, with nearly three of five Golden State high-schoolers unprepared for either college or a career; in most categories, the state scores below lower-spending places like Texas and Florida.

Nor can he boast of the state’s still massive economy. Once deemed to be the world’s fourth largest, the California economy is now among the weakest in the country and seems destined to fall to sixth place in the near future. His frequent pro-worker pronouncements don’t hold water in a state where unimaginable wealth coexists with the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

Then there’s crime. In a recent referendum, Californians overwhelmingly ditched liberalized sentencing laws enacted by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Newsom. Sensing danger, he has moderated on some law-and-order issues. Newsom last year vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” — so-called safe drug-injection sites — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Many of his progressive allies, who favor such programs, denounced his veto. But a GOP presidential nominee could slam him for his Johnny-come-lately rethink on social order and cohesion.

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Newsom also is vulnerable for the utter failure of the state’s climate-focused housing policies. By curtailing new suburban construction, state policies have hiked housing costs to the highest levels in the country, sparking a powerful out-migration trend. And that’s not to mention the state’s dismal performance in response to the horrific LA fires this year, a result of progressives ditching basic infrastructure in favor of boutique climate and “justice” causes.

Overall, whatever his media savvy, Newsom will have to run as former chief executive of a state repeatedly rated by Wallet Hub as among the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. Newsom might be tempted to curtail regulations so he can appeal to business-oriented Democrats and independents. As a white male, Newsom seems ill-suited to compete for the diversity vote, particularly if Harris or some other “person of color” decides to run.

Whether this lurch to the center works or not, it is now the most viable path to the nomination. Of course, things may change in response to Trumpian overreach. The 45th and 47th president might just make progressivism great again. If that comes to pass, the Governor’s moderate rhetoric will no doubt change. In being willing to bend to any prevailing trend, at least, Newsom is almost perfectly consistent.

There is not a single disaster the country has faced in recent years that has not, sometimes within hours of it happening, resulted in driving Americans apart rather than bringing them together. Mere weeks after the 9/11 attacks, people were accusing each other of war-mongering, or appeasement, or anti-Muslim prejudice, or complacency about “fifth columns”, or an unforgivable lack of preparedness before the attacks. Hurricane Katrina was followed by bitter debates over the rapidity, fairness and the adequacy of the federal response.

As for the country’s response to Covid, it hardly seems an overstatement to say that the 19th-century debate over slavery was no less vitriolic than the strife, often vicious, incited by masks, lockdowns and vaccines. The proverbial visitor from another planet would have thought that this argument over a health crisis — it killed over a million Americans, after all — was in fact an argument over an election. Maybe the contestations around Covid created the atmosphere for the contestation of an election.

In one perspective, of course, even the most heated differences signify a democracy’s health. Authoritarian regimes don’t tolerate altercations in the name of freedom. But disaster is different. There was hot debate in Britain over the Munich Agreement, but there was no debate over how to respond to Germany’s invasion of Poland one year later. In a crisis, healthy civilizations respond to the crisis. They don’t turn on themselves.

It took no time at all for the recriminations to start flying after the worst wildfires in the history of California broke out in Los Angeles. Within hours of the flames taking hold, the New York Times ran, in short order, articles accusing the LA mayor, Karen Bass, of not having had dry brush near houses cleared away, and of not having sufficient water to fight the fires. The newly minted firefighting experts at the newspaper even accused the LA fire department of not having updated its tactics for fighting fires. This was followed shortly afterward, with a sort of mechanical cluelessness, by an article titled “When Disaster Hits, Trump is the Blamer in Chief”.

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The problem here was twofold. First, these articles appeared while people were being burned alive, while people were watching their houses, their possessions and their memories being destroyed, while LA firefighters were working 24-hour shifts in horrific conditions to save people’s lives and property. The “gotcha” style of American journalism — it wasn’t just the Times — that has prevailed since Watergate surely could have been restrained until the catastrophe had come to an end.

The second problem with the predictable banquet of accusation was that it wasn’t strictly accurate. What the media was covering was not the result of any kind of impartial investigation. It was the result of the usual infighting among a municipality’s politicians and their surrogates. The media were reporting on a political quarrel over who was to blame, not on who was actually to blame. Apparently, the fire chief, Kristin Crowley, had protested Bass cutting the fire department’s budget in some areas (in fact the 2025 budget ended up rising by over 7%). But city officials fighting with a mayor over how much money they will get for their agencies and departments is hardly a scandal. It’s never anything but murky, either.

It’s a time-honored convention for newspapers, in America anyway, to end their news articles with a quote from an expert, or some figure of authority, with which to delicately insinuate a moral judgment. The New York Times does this to a fare-thee-well. Its article critical of Bass’s response ended with the customary authority figure, who delivered his, and the article’s, stern judgment of Bass’s performance. “’This is a massive failure of epic proportions,’ he said.”

It was an impressive way to finish, firm with reassuring finality. There was one problem, though. The authority figure was Rick Caruso, whom Bass had defeated in the 2022 mayoral election. To say that he had an axe to grind with regard to Bass would be an understatement.

To make matters worse, the Times had already quoted Caruso, a billionaire real-estate developer, dramatically lamenting the shortage of water, the Times adding, with nary a sliver of critical distance — the Times’ news articles have always been artfully choreographed — that Caruso himself had hired his very own team of private firefighters. The Times writes: “All night, [Caruso] said, [the private firefighters] were telling him that water was in short supply.” In other words, the great liberal newspaper, almost singlehandedly responsible for the woke divisions that have helped rip American society apart, relied on the testimony of a politically embittered billionaire to discredit the efforts of a publicly elected official. The paper didn’t even inform its readers whether Caruso’s private team had enough water in the end or not.

That was the “gotcha” response to the catastrophe. The political response was even more irresponsible. What was the true cause of the LA apocalypse, according to a chorus of ideologically motivated voices? An unusually heavy season of rain, which created an abundance of foliage, which then dried into an enormous tinderbox during a long drought? The powerful gusts of high wind known as the Santa Ana winds? Gusts reaching 100mph capable of driving embers in countless wild directions at once? The historically unprecedented event of six wildfires raging in California at the same time, which would have exhausted the water supply no matter how full it was? Winds fanning fires into a conflagration that no firefighter could enter, and that no planes or helicopters bearing water and retardant could fly through?

Nope. According to experts, such as the conservative commentator Scott Jennings on CNN (where reporters like Nick Watt and Natasha Chen were risking their lives to report on the fires), it was all the fault of “woke”: “We have DEI… and… I’m wondering now, if your house was burning down, how much do you care what color the firefighters are?”

Jennings, and others like him, including an increasingly deranged Elon Musk, were responding to a sentence on the LA Fire Department’s website that described a commitment to hiring more black firefighters. Even David Mamet, stunning screenwriter and America’s greatest living playwright, whose moral imagination is the product of some sort of divine spark, was swept up in these pages into the anti-DEI groupthink that is now the default response to DEI groupthink.

Like many people, I think DEI has been a poisonous and divisive plague on true fairness and opportunity. But it is hard to see how a conscientious commitment to diversifying LA’s Fire Department, which would require more, not less money, in the budget, could have caused the LA fires, or made them worse once they had begun. Unless Bass had been moving large sums of money away from basic firefighting needs into creating and enforcing DEI policies, which no one has said she did, it is hard to see how her declared commitment to DEI — often boilerplate without meaning anyway — could have affected the city’s response to the wildfires one bit.

So much for how America — or, rather, the people Americans permit to represent reality to them — responded to the fires in LA. We are left with the wildfires themselves. As I write, they are threatening to grow and spread again in a resurgence of high wind. Now is not the time for a literary interpretation of an event that has torn lives apart, and taken lives. But one fact, and one image, beg to be understood in a different key.

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The stark fact is that — and I gratefully get this information from the Times — so far as one can see, most, if not all the people who have been killed in the fires, have been poor, or of modest means, and most have been black. The stark image is of gorgeous mansions burning in isolation, on cliffs overlooking the ocean. They are images of the zenith of American success, which is the consummation of the American Dream, which is to rise above your fellow Americans, your fellow humans, your community; to ascend beyond all those less fortunate, or not fortunate at all, who are the first to suffer and die, down below, and to live in magnificent isolation. I don’t begrudge the magnificence to anyone. I wish it for my children. And my heart breaks for all that the people in those beautiful houses, the fruit (often) of beautiful achievements, have lost.

But the media does their customary thing, breaking the tragedy down to individual stories, stories that you can identify yourself with and thus use to control the inexplicable and incomprehensible by fitting them into the safe confines of your life. You are left with individual stories, cut off from each other, and from a shared reality with each other. You are left thinking what you would do in that situation, how you would feel.

And you wonder if, amid all the unspeakable destruction, an illusion is also being destroyed, and a reality revealed. The illusion is of American happiness as an invincible solitude. The reality is wholly different. Blame comes easily to Americans because we are all alone. Because there is no “we”. Because our isolation from each other is allowing ghouls to waltz into our midst. And this isolation is allowing us to burn, and to watch each other burn. It is allowing some to relish the conflagration. It is compelling the rest of us — but there is no “us”, only “me”, and “them” — to point fingers instead of, as moist as it may sound, linking arms.