The November elections are less than a month away, and I’m already thinking about how I’ll celebrate when we recall Pamela Price and Sheng Thao. It will certainly include Champagne. And if we also succeed in defeating both Nikki Bas and Carroll Fife in their re-election bids, I might even add a few tokes of weed! (Well, I probably will, however the election turns out.) Collectively, these four are the Evil Quartet, and they have nearly succeeded in killing Oakland.
History is funny. We tend to remember politicians like Hitler and Mussolini as the epitome of evil, but they had their fans, and still do. Many Republicans of the MAGA ilk like and admire both, although they don’t admit it in public. So I’m sure that, even when the Evil Quartet is consigned to the dustbin of history, they’ll have their fans, among what is left of wokeism. After all, Cat Brooks will still be out there howling at the moon, even as her cult is dealt a death blow by the voters.
Confession time: I actually voted Republican once, the only time in my life I did. It was in the 1988 presidential election, and I checked the box for George H.W. Bush over the hapless Michael Dukakis. I remember clearly why I did: I’d moved to Oakland just the year before, from San Francisco, and was really shocked by what I found here. While I loved most things about Oakland—the beauty, the weather, the cultural diversity, the restaurants and cafes, the affordability compared to San Francisco—I was taken aback by the cavalier attitude so many Oaklanders had towards crime and anti-social behavior, which was fueled by a weird reverse racism. I constantly saw people doing stuff that was wrong, saying things that were stupid (like insulting the police), and acting as though they had no responsibility to be good citizens. I got my own sense of being a good citizen from my parents and my culture—Jewish-American immigrants. It was the ancient Jews who invented the concept of “law” and took it very seriously. When I was young, the Holocaust was fresh in the memory of New York City Jews; that torment made us respect the law even more, for where the law had broken down, as it had in Nazi Germany, the result was the worse crime wave in history: the murder of six million.
So the crime I saw when I moved to Oakland in 1987 shocked me. The liberal politicians of that time didn’t seem particularly bothered by it, or by the anti-police feeling of so many Oaklanders. And I think that’s why I voted for George H.W. Bush. It was a symbolic repudiation of the Democratic Party.
I might have become a Republican, as so many other Democrats did, had I not also been so aware of the danger the religious right, which had morphed with the Republican Party, posed to our American liberties. This was at the height of the “Moral Majority,” that insane cult of hate led by Jerry Falwell that had declared war on gay people. As a gay man, I took their attack personally. As a Jew, I felt personally threatened and intellectually offended by the rise of a so-called “Christian” movement that clearly wanted to establish a religious dictatorship—a theocracy—in America. I’ve been acutely aware of that danger for more than 40 years now, and it’s only gotten worse.
It’s not that I have anything against true Christianity, and I do admire Jesus, who was a Jew all his life. But I have something against these evangelical, conservative “Christians” who, in Jesus’s name, are trying to stage a coup d’etat in America. I think it’s worth fighting to preserve our hard-fought freedoms, which include the freedom to believe in any religion you want, or none at all. And I certainly don’t want a bunch of sexually-repressed Republicans in my bedroom, or yours. For those reasons, I have remained a Democrat.
At the same time, I’m fully aware of the difficulty some of my friends have with the Democratic Party. My friend Jim Thompson, a Coalition member, always lets me know about his (very low) opinion of Kamala Harris (whom I support) and his disdain for the progressive direction Democrats have taken. Progressivism—which includes belief in reproductive and gay rights—is great, but when it turns woke, it displays as much intolerance as the worst of the evangelical Bible thumpers. The difference between Jim and me is that he thinks the Democratic Party is beyond repair. I think it can be saved from its extremes. And I know we can’t let a fringe cult of Republican religious lunatics, led by a monomaniacal sociopath, take over.
Meanwhile, I’m proud of the role that I and the Coalition have played for the last four years in educating voters about the damage caused by woke politicians. I’m wary of declaring tipping points—I’ve been wrong so many times—but now I really sense change in the air. I believe we’re going to have a fantastic Nov. 5. Break out the champagne and have a toke with me!
COMING MONDAY: My endorsements for the election
Steve Heimoff