Will Californians at last ask themselves the hard question?

A structure is burned by the Palisades Fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Coastal California is one of the nicest places on Earth. It has a 1,000-mile coastline, magnificent natural geography and a Mediterranean climate, all set against the vista of the beautiful Pacific Ocean.

But no place is perfect, and nothing is free and the price attendant to enjoying the picturesque natural landscape, and the year-round moderate climate of Coastal California, is to live with the risk of natural disasters, one of which is wildfires – such as those now devastating Los Angeles.

If you choose to live in an area prone to natural disaster, you have an affirmative duty to fully acknowledge that risk, which includes holding your government to account for being properly prepared.

The residents, homeowners and business owners of Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Altadena and other Greater Los Angeles communities are finding out the hard way that their government is woefully unprepared.

As the tragedy of the Los Angeles wildfires unfolds, it is becoming clear in an acutely painful way that government in California – at both the state and local levels – is breathtakingly incompetent.

Protecting the lives and property of citizens is the first job of government. It is why governments were ever formed in the first place. If the job of protecting lives and property isn’t done, nothing else that government does matters.

Yet even though an astonishing percentage of California citizens have seemed blissfully unaware of it – up until now at least – government in California hasn’t operated in their interest in quite some time.

Government in California has greatly curtailed – sometimes to the point of outright abandonment – the performance of its core functions in favor of far-left initiatives that include DEI-dominated hiring practices, extreme environmental policy, race-fixated law enforcement and a near theological (fetishistic?) belief in man-made climate change. Taken together, radical leftism has crowded out governmental attendance to the day-to-day interests of the California citizens that government is nominally there to serve.

You and I take for granted that water will come out of the fire hydrant at the end of our block. We simply assume that our local government would take steps to mitigate an obvious extreme fire risk.

The citizens of LA have learned the hard way that they can’t make such assumptions.

From allowing environmental extremism to stand in the way of clearing dry, fire-prone underbrush (as happens in other places with similar geography), to allowing concern for an obscure fish species to stand in the way of providing adequate water supplies, to prioritizing race-based hiring in the fire department, to cutting fire department budgets, leaving them undermanned and underequipped so as to fund the costs of homelessness (driven in large measure by illegal immigration), California – a one-party Democratic state – has abjectly failed in its basic duty to protect its citizens.

Tens of thousands of Angelenos have lost literally everything. It seems cruel to ask this question now.

But it will have to be asked sometime.

As they begin the long, hard slog of rebuilding their lives, will these beleaguered, over-taxed citizens at last reexamine how they vote?