Sacramento, CA -- The election returns are streaming in, but this will not be another rehash of windy campaigns that likely lowered California’s collective IQ by 10 points. Capital Ideas will not review fervent Democrats suffering from foot-in-mouth disease, nor recalcitrant Republicans who either can’t or won’t hit targets the size of the Gobi desert.

Rather, this comes as a reminder that, no matter which Party occupies the governor’s office, the Assembly, and the Senate, certain realities not subject to the vote continue to prevail. Take bureaucracy, for example.

Sacramento is bulked with bureaucracies covering everything from education to aging. The state deploys an unelected Coastal Commission to override elected county governments along the Pacific and make sure housing in those areas remains expensive. The Board of Equalization exists to promote special taxes on such items as editorial cartoons and snack foods. Dozens of other boards and commissions cover everything from water to avocados. These bureaucracies are expensive, unelected, and often empowered to make major policy and regulatory decisions.

They are also stocked by a professional political class, highly unionized, with a vested interest in the continued expansion of government and the taxes necessary to pay for it. Unlike the private sector, where managers are rewarded for saving money, bureaucrats strive to spend it, so they can make the case for yet more money to spend next year. And as a visit to the DMV will confirm, government bureaucrats get promoted to their highest level of incompetence. Firing an incompetent one, like firing a teacher, is practically impossible.

Politicians of both major parties talk a good game when it comes to bureaucracy, but once in power both wind up caving. Private companies come and go but when was the last time any California government eliminated an entire agency? Bureaucracies thrive by working in tandem with special interests.

The key to political leverage is to become part of an accredited victim class, championed by high-profile activists and, as the theory goes, unable to survive without assistance from the nanny state. State workers are happy to oblige, thereby expanding their own power and influence. And the media have their role to play.

While doing a good job at covering election races, the media remain largely uncritical of bureaucracy and special interests. In areas such as health, welfare, and environmental policy, supposedly skeptical journalists do little more than paraphrase government press releases. This comes in addition to their inherent bias.

Most reporters are big-government liberals, as every survey on the subject has confirmed. The liberal bias emerges in code language. We read of "right wing" and "far-right" politicians, but never of "left-wing" or "far-left" politicians, though plenty of them exist. We read of "ultra-conservatives," but never of "ultra-liberals," though many exist. The religious left is alive and well, but one only hears about the "religious right" in the press. (The code for left-wing is "moderates.") We read of Chilean "dictator" Augusto Pinochet, but Cuban "leader" Fidel Castro.

California’s capital is a one-newspaper town, and that paper, the thin but politically correct Sacramento Bee, is the voice of the state’s government establishment. The Bee often reads like a Democrat Party newsletter.

Together the bureaucracies, special interests, and media constitute a kind of unelected one-party state. As politicians and voters alike have learned, a three-stranded cord is not easily broken, not even by the power of the ballot box.

--By K. Lloyd Billingsley