How long have you lived in California?

I'm sick of hearing these sweeping generalizations from people who have never lived here. We have amazing social welfare programs when compared with the rest of the US. We have state grants for college, tuition waivers, scholarships and programs for different populations including the most disdvantaged. We have Medi-Cal, which improved so much since the Obama admin that it covers ten times more than my parents' private insurance did when I was a kid. This includes addiction treatment and mental health. (This is actually a federal requirement so not sure why CA should be any different). Methadone, suboxone (again, federal, as Biden just increased access to suboxone doctors), rehab, ER, ambulance, derm, psychiatry, inpatient psych, birth control, reproductive care, etc. However, the city/county you live in needs to have that healthcare infrastructure before Medi-Cal can pay for it, and geographically, much of this state is pretty conservative. To your "point" about progressivism being "lip service," our metro areas have large enough populations to counter that. I mean, idk if you ever paid attention in high school civics, but geography and population density are two different things. The San Juaquin valley is pretty red, but it consists of...Fresno. The advantages we have here are astronomical compared to Medicaid in other states, especially red states. Not to mention housing, food programs, K-12 and pre-K education, reproductive rights. The way we handled covid was far better than most of the country, but Pelosi got her hair done when she shouldn't have so I guess it doesn't count. Oh, and homeless people exist, so I guess all the rest of it is invalid too. Which is exactly why education is so important. Decent higher education teaches you to think for yourself and identify what's true and what's not, instead of buying into rhetoric. They call it "media literacy" and it's taught in our state subsidized colleges. Good luck with all those book bans though.

But no one can convince someone of reality when they'd rather believe clickbait. This is America - no state is going to have social welfare that is anywhere near as extensive as it should be, and no state in the union is "progressive." California is only doing the absolute bare minimum of what a decent direct democracy should be doing for it's people, and even that is just so fucking radical that the rest of the country seems to think we're Sodom and Gomorrah (while simultaneously arguing about how we're not liberal enough. Hmmm.) So it's just disingenuous to argue that it's "not progressive enough" when that's just...not even a thing in the US. But if whining about someplace they've never been, that has such a high GDP that it probably subsidizes their own state, is so much fun for people then who am I to try to stop their bitching. If you want to have perfection be the enemy of progress, then I guess that's on you.

Republicans will give you all the social conservatism capital will tolerate, while Democrats will give you all the social progress that capital will tolerate. It's a very fuckin' narrow window.

Your problem is that the parties have shifted so far right, most of the democratic support in California would actually be centrist republicans.

California is overwhelmingly not super liberal, though there are notable exceptions.

There is no easy fix for poverty and homelessness in CA. It should legitimately be a national level issue given that the homeless populations here are near to small size city.

CA has grown all it could in the last 6 decades and now is contracting. I moved here 20 years ago and the grown is absolutely staggering.