I agree with Bret Stephens’ op-ed piece in the New York Times, which vividly illustrates how California’s progressive policies are wrecking our cities. Entitled “Can Liberals Survive Progressivism?”, it asks a pertinent question, one that readers of this blog will relate to: “Can anyone seriously say that Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Philadelphia, Portland, Oregon, or New York has been improved in recent years under progressive leadership?” (Stephens might have included Oakland in that list of infamy.)
In all these cities, homelessness and violent crime are soaring. Shoplifting has become endemic, without consequences. Murder is rampant. In all these cities, and many others, Stephens writes, “Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement.” While some of these things are happening in red cities too, “nowhere are dysfunctions more concentrated than in the very places that were supposed to have become beacons of progressive sunshine.”
The journalist Michael Schellenberger, who lives in San Francisco, recently published a book that gets to the heart of why and how progressives are failing so massively. “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities” examines a question that has been dealt with extensively on this blog. “How [did] the conversation around how to use law and order to advance civil rights give way to a debate over whether law and order is an obstacle to social justice”? (Defunding the police is one dysfunctional result of this progressive notion.) Schellenberger’s conclusion is as frightening as it will be familiar to us here in Oakland: “The governing majority in some of America’s cities seems to believe that the only real public policy problem is how to pay for letting people do whatever they want, from turning public parks into open-air drug encampments, to using sidewalks as toilets, to handing over whole neighborhoods to people who are heavily armed and purposefully unaccountable.”
We need only to look at our current City Council, or at least the majority of it, to understand how true this statement is and how recklessly and wantonly progressives have cast us into this catastrophe. In the face of all our city’s crises, we are still lectured by the likes of Carroll Fife, Nikki Fortunato Bas and Rebecca Kaplan that Oakland’s real problem is a lack of social justice. If white people would only open their hearts and wallets to people of color, they tell us, all would be well. Homelessness would disappear poof, like the morning dew. Crime would evaporate overnight. The criminality we see will be replaced by wonderful, polite behavior. Progressive politics, these politicians claim, will usher in a new era of love, peace and prosperity. End mass incarceration! Decriminalize almost everything! Open the jails! Let all the criminals, who are basically good people but have been victims of white supremacy, go free!
Fortunately, the American people aren’t buying this baloney. As Schellenberger writes, “The good news is that the backlash against the excesses of progressivism is already underway.” New Yorkers just elected a pro-cop mayor. The Seattle City Council just voted to kill a proposal to defund the police department. San Francisco is about to recall its woke District Attorney and School Board. In Oakland, we’ve forced progressives onto the defensive, after their defunding treachery contributed to our summer of violence. Council members like Sheng Thao are pulling U-turns, desperately trying to convince voters they didn’t really vote to defund the police department last June. (Liar liar pants on fire!) In progressive city after city, normal, law-abiding citizens are discovering the truth of Brett Stephens’ contention that progressives are destroying the moderate-liberal wing of the Democratic Party that gave us Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
The historically malign result of this progressive failure is the likelihood of massive Republican gains in coming elections. “[W]ho has been helped the most by all this, politically speaking” Stephens asks, and then answers: “Donald Trump and his mini-mes. The country won’t be safe from them until a more serious Democratic Party can set itself free from ideas that embarrass it and endanger us all.”
Do you see evidence that “a more serious Democratic Party” is setting itself free from the scorpion’s sting of progressivism? I do not. Maybe this is what Fife et al. really want: for Democrats to get wiped out in next year’s elections. That will hammer home the point: Progressivism is a cancer on the Democratic Party. Excise it, or die.
NUMBER OF DAYS SINCE I INVITED CARROLL FIFE TO HAVE TEA WITH ME, WITH NO REPLY: 15
Steve Heimoff