My friend and colleague Jack Saunders gave me a book, “Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption.” The author, Mitchell Schwarzer, is professor of Architectural and Urban History at California College of the Arts (where coincidentally I used to work).
Although I’m only about halfway through the book, I’ve learned more about Oakland’s 19th century and 20th century histories than I ever knew before, and one key takeaway is how close Oakland came to being a great American city. Oakland has been a national leader in everything from urban planning to transit systems, port development to airports, ship building to high-rise skyscrapers, department stores and movie palaces to conservation and park development. The city came close to dominating the West’s rail system, as well as U.S. auto production (“The Detroit of the West”), and even the American electronics industry. Oakland was this close to joining the ranks of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in terms of size, economic clout and importance.
And then, poof! It all went away. The promise, the grandeur, the dream vanished almost overnight. Historians will long debate why, so I’ll offer my own explanation, which as a 37-year resident I believe is the correct one. Between the end of World War II, when the city was booming, and the 1970s-1980s, when it began its precipitous decline, Oakland turned ever more “progressive” in its politics. This was both because the entire Bay Area was doing the same thing (especially San Francisco and Berkeley) but also because of the large number of younger students attending the many colleges in the region, as well as a high proportion of African-Americans among the population—Blacks had poured into Oakland in droves during the war because jobs were plentiful. As a result, Oakland tended to have extremely left-leaning mayors and city council members, a trend that only grew more exaggerated from the 1990s to today.
As these elected officials became more radically left, they adopted a social policy of “equity” that became their mantra, and was practically required in order to be elected to anything in Oakland. Whereas before the 1990s, economic growth had always been the goal of elected leaders, as the new century loomed our leaders abandoned growth as a primary objective and instead decided to make racial issues their priority. Racialized politics became the sine qua non of getting elected, and gradually crowded out all other issues. By the 2000s not even steadily increasing crime in the city managed to grab the politicians’ attention; by the time Libby Schaaf became mayor, equity and its twins, diversity and inclusion, had become the lodestars by which the politicians governed, or hoped to. Politicians couldn’t be bothered with burgeoning crime and tent encampments; achieving racial equity became everything. An anti-police hysteria also prevailed in City Hall that was unusual for a city in which police had been for so long valued members of the Oakland family. We witnessed a streak of anti-cop bias so violent that Schaaf’s predecessor, Jean Quan, actually led a “defund the police” march downtown!
Progressivism had, of course, initially been a healthy stimulant to America. From Teddy Roosevelt and FDR through Truman, JFK and LBJ, progressive Democrats made America fairer and wealthier. But progressivism ran out of steam and finally could offer nothing more than grotesque caricatures of itself; making everything race-based represented the final death agony of progressive politics. Progressivism aroused unrealistic hopes among people of color and was offensive to many others. Today’s progressives believe neither in the American Dream nor in equality of opportunity, as did the Founders. Instead, they demand equality of outcomes (which they call “equity”), even for the most incompetent among us. This is why progressivism in America is dying, as it is around the world. Most of us got the message; diehard deadenders like Carroll Fife, Nikki Bas and Sheng Thao didn’t. That they retain power in Oakland just shows how twisted things are and how embarrassed we should be.
And so we have the Oakland we know today: a dying American city whose tragedy is all the worse because its promise once was go great. Oakland is in many respects the worst-governed city in America, and yet the very politicians who make it that way continue to be rewarded with re-election. Think about the death of an American city. It takes a lot to kill something as vital and complex and wonderful and inspiring and huge and creative and living as Oakland used to be; but the virulence of progressive woke politics always proves fatal to the host organism. (Just ask the old Soviet Union.) Wokeism is at epidemic levels in Oakland and, as with all epidemics, we have to take strong, firm steps to crush the pestilence, restore Oakland to health, and—if we’re lucky—recapture the dream.
Steve Heimoff