CARLSBAD, Calif. — While the world watches thousands of acres of some of Los Angeles County’s most beautiful landscapes incinerate, a shocked nation asks how this third-world catastrophe could take place in one of the most affluent areas of the country.

Fueled by Santa Ana winds that reached 90 miles per hour in a drought-afflicted region, five separate wildfires raged down from the mountains in populous towns and neighborhoods, destroying thousands of homes and other buildings, taking at least five lives, injuring many more, and leaving a pall of toxic smoke over the Los Angeles basin.

While California citizens experiencing the loss of their homes and loved ones are traumatized by the devastation, many aren’t shocked after years of watching blaze after blaze destroy communities across the state while the governing class fails to take meaningful preventive actions.

Instead, politicians and their followers retreat to ideological corners.

For Democrats, climate change was the go-to talking point. “Eight months since the area has seen rain,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tweeted. “The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is.”

Republicans, starting with the president-elect, instantly identified another culprit: the Democratic Party leaders in this heavily blue state, especially Gov. Gavin Newsom.

But behind these predictable rhetorical excesses and tactical finger-pointing are long-smoldering questions about public policy, ranging from land-use decisions to competent governance. The fires raging across California this week are a perfect storm of years of inept preparation, combined with overzealous environmental and water policies, a failure to rein in monopolistic utilities spreading special-interest money across the state, and a political insurance crisis.

Unusual high-wind conditions and an ultra-arid environment certainly created the conditions for these infernos to spark and rapidly spread. But California has been down this road before, watching whole communities wiped out by these blazes that rip through thousands of acres, leaving charred remains in their path.

In 2018, it was the bucolic town of Paradise in Northern California, when a poorly maintained PG&E utility transmission line failed during strong winds. The entire town was wiped out – 85 people died, and the blaze destroyed 153,000 acres and 18,000 structures.

This week, it was the upscale swath of beachside neighborhoods, stretching from Pacific Palisades to Malibu, where the flames jumped the Pacific Coast Highway to immolate a stretch of some of the most iconic and expensive homes in the state just steps away from the ocean.

Even though California’s emergency services have decades of experience predicting wildfire conditions and issued dire warnings for this week’s high winds, Democratic politicians appeared woefully unprepared for the onslaught.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass was caught flat-footed when the fires began to rage late morning Tuesday. Despite explicit warnings that higher-than-normal Santa Ana winds and the dry conditions made the change of dangerous fires likely, Bass flew off to Africa to witness the inauguration of the president of Ghana.

A video that went viral Wednesday night shows a Sky News reporter asking the mayor if it was appropriate for her visit to fly overseas after the National Weather Service issued its warnings. Bass simply refused to respond to a question, although at a press conference hours later, she boasted about returning to Los Angeles quickly – she said one leg was a military plane – and said she was in constant communications with state and community officials during her return trip.

Gov. Newsom, however, was on the scene Tuesday night just hours after the fires broke out. After meeting with President Biden, who was in the area to visit family members, the governor praised him for immediately approving his text request for federal disaster relief funds without playing politics.

That provision is particularly important, Newsom said, considering where we are in “the history of our nation,” an apparent reference to Trump’s election and his history of questioning the provision of federal disaster relief to California to help compensate for the most........

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