As a student of history, I try to imagine about what historians who look back at this period in Oakland will say about Mayor Libby Schaaf and the City Council. I think I know, and it won’t be kind.
There have been other instances in modern history in which societies have been plunged into crisis due to the negligence and ineptitude of their leaders. For example, British governments of the 1930s, up until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, are rightfully castigated for appeasement. They saw, or should have seen, what was happening in Nazi Germany, and instead of acting, they saw no evil, heard no evil, spoke no evil—and lost hundreds of thousands of lives, as well as their empire.
Now, in Oakland, we have a city that is collapsing all around us, as is obvious to anyone following the news. So what will the historian of 2050 say about our times? I believe it will be along the following lines:
“Following Schaaf’s accession to power as Mayor of Oakland, in 2015, the city was confronted with major problems that Schaaf proved unable to resolve. First, Schaaf permitted the spread of encampments throughout the city during her first term. She could have resisted the proliferation but chose not to; the result was that, by her second term, the problem was insoluble, and the city was overrun. After 2019, she gave up even pretending to address the crisis, and handed it over to her City Council, which proved as incapable as she of resolving it.”
This would be a fair recording of history. It will stand as Indictment 1 of Schaaf’s presiding over the disintegration of a once-great city. But that is not all.
The second great failure of the Schaaf administration that historians will record—a failure that has been so devastating to Oakland--has been her unwillingness to strongly support her own police department. One must grant to Schaaf that she is a self-professed progressive running a city dominated by progressives whose attitudes toward the police are not exactly favorable. However, great leaders do not crater to public sentiment when they know better, especially when they understand that cratering to public opinion endangers the lives and safety of the citizens they purport to represent. As Schaaf entered her 2018 re-election campaign, she played it safe. It was a time when anyone in Oakland could have foreseen the dangers of the incipient “defund the police” movement. But Schaaf, attempting to placate the Left, failed to alert her public to the extent she could and should have. She could have given speeches decrying the “defund” movement as the lie it was, and calling out the likes of Cat Brooks as dangerous. She could have reminded citizens that the police were the “thin blue line” protecting them from nihilistic criminality. When she saw Carroll Fife’s star rising, she could have rung the alarm bell. She did none of these things, and nihilistic criminality won out.
Thus Schaaf fiddled while Oakland burned. I have no doubt that Libby Schaaf is a good person. Her heart is good; her instincts are moral; her hopes are blessedly spiritual. But her judgment was fatally flawed, and it is a politician’s judgment that History brings its verdict upon. History also will judge the City Council. I am convinced History will look back upon the “progressives”—Fife and Bas in particular, but also Kaplan and the “soft” progressives, Kalb, Gallo, Thao—and determine that they were the Neville Chamberlains of our time: weak appeasers, whose woolly philosophies, never really thought through, compromised Oakland’s safety. History will record this period 2015-2021 as the most disastrous in Oakland’s history.
I think Libby Schaaf knows these things. I don’t know if Bas or Fife do: the black boxes of their minds are closed to me, and I can only judge them by their words and actions, which are deplorable. But I think the final verdict of History will condemn them. A once-great city, dignified and liberal, one of the most diverse in the world, happy and creative, poised to assume leadership in the arts, sciences and technology, driven to decrepitude by the almost criminal failure of its politicians: this is the Schaaf-Bas-Fife legacy. Here will be the final take of the historians of 2050: “How awful was the failure of those wayward politicians, that they allowed their city to die, when there was so much they could have done to avert the catastrophe.”
Steve Heimoff