You can think of the current political struggle in Oakland, and across the country, as a Chess game with three pieces in contention: the radical progressive left, the moderate centrist-left, and a rightwing bloc. As the left and right struggle for power, pressure on the moderate-centrists increases; both left and right are anxious to poach off as many moderates as they can.
Up to approximately two years ago, the radical progressives were winning. They had seized complete control here in Oakland, and in San Francisco they elected Chesa Boudin and several “socialists” to the Board of Supervisors. But then something happened to stop the socialist surge. It’s hard to say exactly what it was. No single thing or event made it happen: it was a combination of things, like violence in BLM protests that resulted in widespread civic damage; increasingly bizarre and hysterical demands by progressives for a vast transfer of wealth to poor communities; and the spiraling epidemic of crime, which many reasonable people attributed to progressive politicians who were trying to (and in many cases did) defund the police. In short, ordinary citizens looked around at their neighborhoods and cities and, witnessing the destruction, began to realize that the far left—for all its idealism—was actually creating far more problems than it was solving.
Hence we’re now seeing what I would describe as an historic turn away from progressivism back to moderation. Moderate-centrists are peeling away from the far left toward the kind of political centrism exemplified by Mayor London Breed in San Francisco. The denizens of the far left see this happening, and they’re scared. They know that they’re losing the battle for hearts and minds; here in Oakland, they’re watching the Recall of Pamela Price with mounting fear, and they see also a burgeoning resentment of Sheng Thao, who is widely perceived as being in over her head and may be the target of her own recall sooner or later.
There isn’t much the far left can do to fight these trends. Beyond their standard rhetoric of “equity” and other platitudes, all they can do is complain, and try to get as much sympathetic public media as they can, in a last-ditch effort to prevent further deterioration. If there’s a poster child for the left’s final, fruitless fight against moderate-centrism, it’s the S.F. Chronicle’s Justin Phillips, who yesterday published the latest in his endless screeds to tamp down the hemorrhaging. His thesis is weak: he claims that “liberals” are allying with Republicans to offer a “distorted narrative” of reality. “Moderate Democrats are helping Republicans spread lies about progressive values,” he alleges. For example, Phillips charges that Breed is “poisoning the political atmosphere” in San Francisco by her heavy focus on fighting crime and reinforcing the police department. Phillips also recognizes that—as he writes—the word “woke” is now “a derogatory term.” He laments the failure of the “defund the police” movement, charging that “conservatives [are] skillfully spinning it as an attack on law and order.”
Phillips is correct that his fellow progressives are crumbling, but he’s incorrect in arguing that the way to fight back is to double down on the “true meaning” of “defund and police,” “woke” and “equity.” What Phillips can’t, or won’t, understand is that the public already understands the “true meaning” of those terms, having watched events of the last several years and concluded that the “true meaning” of progressivism is societal instability and unchecked criminality.
Phillips and his fellow progressives need to understand that “Republican” is not in itself a dirty word. Some Republican ideas are loathsome, but others are common sense (e.g. funding the police, obeying the law). If moderate-centrists are finding common cause with some Republicans, it’s because we share the same goals: peace and safety in our neighborhoods and an end to racial politics. Instead of going to war against that alliance, Justin Phillips should join us but, of course, he won’t, because he’s lost in the wilderness of his blinkered ideology.
Steve Heimoff