Only One Man Can Save California | The American Spectator

He sits in retirement: a man of granite-like visage, grim with age and experience. Grey-bearded, he reflects on past glories. He remains active and strong, but the aches and pains and weariness of age are inescapable. Like many a hero, he would need to be coaxed, convinced that his people need him, that only he can slay the monsters that beset them. Like many a hero, the desire to serve still likely burns as an ember in his heart and mind. A call to duty might not go unheeded.

Indeed, already he roars in anger and plans a campaign against a usurper who now plans to redistrict — or rather, gerrymander — his supporters into oblivion. But why merely fight the gerrymander? Why not fight the enemy all the way? (RELATED: Will Newsom Rig His Redistricting Referendum?)

He once led a great state, after all, a state that in its size and wealth and diversity of peoples was a veritable empire. Now it is a land from which people flee; a plague-land of poverty and crime; a pestilential land of poisonous rulers and self-serving bureaucrats who enrich themselves and corrupt the people through maximized envy and punitive taxation, directed hate and tyrannical regulation. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom’s California Is a Crashing Caliphate of Chaos)

Families cannot safely raise their children in this former empire, nor (often) can they even afford to live there. Companies that once formed there, and created jobs and middle-class prosperity there, can do so no longer, moving instead to faraway lands, lands that the state’s nomenklatura regard as barbaric “Red States” that formerly flew a rebel flag and might do so again. But the flag of the former empire itself began as a rebel flag, the bear flag of a self-styled California Republic.

Someone, some hero, must restore glory to that flag and save this once great state — a state that boasted, at one time, that it was “Reagan Country,” an optimistic land of dreamers and doers, farmers and ranchers, aerospace and defense engineers, film stars, and a much better version of Disney.

There are worthy candidates who would lift a banner of reform and restoration and lead this land. They include a brave man, Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, and a clever man, Steve Hilton, the well-meaning, egg-headed refugee from another decayed empire, that of formerly Great Britain.

But neither they nor any other declared candidate for governor is likely to be recognized by the electorate as having the necessary heroic virtue (in this case, name recognition and popular appeal) to win an election and smite the Scylla of Wokeness and the Charybdis of the state employees unions; to put policemen back on the streets and criminals and dangerous crazies back beyond bars; and to wield a vengeful sword against suffocating government regulation and burdensome taxation.

Who could possibly achieve this? What heroic man could possibly be elected in a state where reason is largely forfeit, decadent self-destruction appears a goal of the regime, and truth and honor and realism and foresight appear relegated to only a small cadre of the faithful, like Christians in the catacombs of Nero’s Rome?

There is, of course, an answer. There always is. There is always the essential man — the great man of history who heeds the call and knows his moment — whether that man be George Washington at our nation’s founding or Donald Trump at our nation’s rescue. Only one man can save the Golden State, only one man has the strength to bring down the tyranny of the California Democrat Party.

That man is Arnold Schwarzenegger. The task of cleaning out the state’s Augean Stables will require a Hercules — a part Schwarzenegger has played before, both on-screen and in Sacramento as a two-term governor of California, elected during a previous state crisis.

There is, however, a problem with this obvious solution. In 1990, the people of California passed Proposition 140, which prohibits candidates from serving more than two terms as governor. So, just as it was a gubernatorial recall election in 2003 that propelled Schwarzenegger into office, it seems that it would require another proposition undoing the failed reform of term limits to return him to the governorship.

Or would it?

What if Schwarzenegger ran for lieutenant governor and acted as the éminence grise of a Bianco or Hilton administration, campaigning on the slogan, “If you want me, vote for him!” Perhaps the brave Bianco or the clever Hilton could suggest this winning idea. No Republican has served as California’s governor since Schwarzenegger’s departure. But perhaps Schwarzenegger himself could change that.

If Californians are fortunate — if America is fortunate — Schwarzenegger will return to Sacramento, ably advising a conservative ally; and all who wish the Golden State well will rejoice to see him crush his Democrat enemies, drive them before him, and hear the lamentations of the Democrat women and their girly men. For the sake of all that is good, let it be so.

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W. Crocker III is a native Californian, former speechwriter for Governor Pete Wilson of California, and a popular novelist and bestselling historian, including of the recently reissued classic Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, a 2,000-Year History.