Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton attends a town hall meeting in San Francisco on July 10. Hilton blames California’s liberal policies for many of the state’s problems.

In recent decades, the Golden State of California has often been depicted by conservative writers as a stunning siren song of nature that has, in stark contrast, yielded a morass of dysfunctional public institutions and socioeconomic malaise. William Voegeli’s “Failed State: How the California Dream became a nightmare” and David L. Bahnsen’s “The Great California Exodus” are just two examples of essays that blame the state’s liberal government for all that ails California.  

A recent addition to that literary lineage is gubernatorial candidate and former Fox News host Steve Hilton’s 2025 book, “Califailure: Reversing the Ruin of America’s Worst-Run State.”

Based on this book, Hilton’s views on public policy in California vacillate between an embrace of the state in the latter half of the 20th century when “California actually worked” compared to the almost “Blade Runner”-like “dystopian chaos” of this century. The dystopian turn, Hilton maintains, came about due to particularly twisted Democratic “isms,” including elitism, cronyism and narcissism. But “climatism,” which has consumed the “commonsense” environmentalism that began in the 1970s, is the worst. Indeed, “this is how California became Califailure.”

Article continues below this ad

Hilton laments the climatists’........

© San Francisco Chronicle