L.A. City Council’s Scandal of the Ascendant

Mostly heard is the voice of one of the city’s most powerful officials, Council President

Nury Martinez,

whose act might as well have been pulled from that of “Veep” lead

Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

The second thing to notice is that, for once, a “racist” scandal isn’t a hoax and doesn’t feature a cartoonish white malefactor exhibiting attitudes and language from the 1940s.

The third thing to point out is the obvious question: What do you expect in a ruthlessly competitive business like politics in a Democratic Party that increasingly defines the basic unit of competition to be racial and other identity groups in a zero-sum spoils contest?

The 80-minute conversation, which reportedly took place almost exactly a year ago, ranges widely but consists of griping about the decisions of the city’s 21-member redistricting commission. The dramatis personae include Ms. Martinez, the star of the show, two other Latino council members and

Ron Herrera,

powerful head of Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Choice moments of gratuitous offense include referring to a white city councilman’s adopted black son as “an accessory” that he displays on

Martin Luther King Jr.

day like a “Louis Vuitton bag.” Ms. Martinez refers to city residents of Oaxacan ancestry as “a lot of little short dark people.” She describes an Armenian political consultant as the “guy with one eyebrow.”

The final member of the dramatis personae is the media chorus deploring the slurs on display. A National Public Radio host said Latino bigotry is a subject that doesn’t come up often enough—as if subjects are responsible for raising themselves on the radio.

Like the HBO show or an average Tuesday in the life of

Donald Trump,

really on display is the cynicism of politics shorn of its ritualized hypocrisy. The genius of the HBO show was to communicate a sense in which the outrageous, comically brutal off-the-record banter of its characters was the antidote to the unctuous sensitivity they were obliged to practice before the public.

Their extreme tastelessness in private was offered by the show’s writers almost as a reaction to the exhausting compulsions of today’s political correctness and identity politics. Whether the same extenuation should be granted Ms. Martinez and colleagues is beyond my expertise. The real-life episode, though, features one dynamic missing from the show, and that’s the growing Latino ascendancy in L.A. Half the Los Angeles County population now identifies as Hispanic or Latino. Between the 1990 and 2020 censuses, the number who described themselves as African-American but not Hispanic dropped in absolute terms, losing 175,000 people, falling from 10.5% to 7.6%.

Today’s scandal is being rightly typecast by the media as symbolic of the decline in cross-ethnic coalition building that once ruled Los Angeles. There’s a good reason for that—the emergence of a genuine ethnic majority bidding for all the levers in America’s second-largest city. The labor leader Mr. Herrera is heard describing his fellow kibitzers as “a little Latino caucus” and says: “I’m here to get you three elected.”

At the same time, such a large and diverse bloc will breed its own internal divisions, one reason Republicans nationally are upbeat about the Hispanic vote. Take the least-heard participant in the recorded conversation. This was 68-year-old council member

Gil Cedillo,

a long-time state legislator whose career was upended by term limits, author of a landmark driver’s license bill for illegal immigrants, pro-development, pro-business. In a June primary, he effectively lost his City Council seat in an upset win by a young activist in the AOC mold, anti-gentrification, anticorporate, in favor of abolishing police and prisons, touting her card-carrying membership in the Democratic Socialists of America.

To bring up a final point, norms don’t fall because one person (Mr. Trump) violates them. They fall when institutions lose their credibility to enforce compliance. A problem of late has been a national media that, in key instances, has preferred to protect the lies and sins of its favorites while exaggerating and even inventing those of politicians it opposes. But there is no longer a GOP member on the L.A. City Council, the last one having reregistered as “unaffiliated” two years ago. Whether the scandal would be getting the same unstinting national coverage if the beneficiaries were likely to be Republicans instead of other, more “progressive” Democrats is a question we might wonder about.