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NY Magazine: San Francisco is a disaster area because Republicans have kept it from reaching its true progressive potential

Sarah D
Sarah D  |  10:26 AM on June 06, 2022

So apparently San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin isn’t winning any popularity contests in his beloved city.

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Go figure, right? He’s the quintessential progressive, San Francisco is the quintessential progressive city … or is it?

According to New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, San Francisco is not a progressive paradise. In fact, it’s a product of decades of Republican-led efforts to keep it from reaching its true progressive potential. Who knew?

Wow!

So much truth. So much power.

Ross Barkan writes:

Modern San Francisco, unlike New York, does not rest on the legacy of a social-democratic state forged with New Deal largesse. There are no Fiorello
La Guardias or Robert Wagners lurking in the city’s history. From 1912 to 1963, only Republicans governed San Francisco, and they were largely backers of big business who could occasionally draw support from organized labor. The first nonwhite person to win an election in 20th-century San Francisco, Willie Brown, did not enter office until 1965. Despite San Francisco’s reputation as a liberal nirvana, proud progressive governance came and went quickly. George Moscone was assassinated along with Harvey Milk in 1978. Art Agnos, another liberal Democrat, lost his reelection bid to Frank Jordan, a Republican former police chief, in 1991.

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Quick thing:

But other than that, Barkan’s on a quality tear:

A right-leaning, if conventional, business Establishment held great sway over San Francisco politics until tech, with its billions, subsumed much of it in the 21st century. Tech money is more formidable than anything a local developer or bank could deploy. Silicon Valley employees, drawn from across America and now fully settled into San Francisco, are an influential slice of the electorate, directly replacing working-class votes. To them, homelessness is more an aesthetic annoyance than a humanitarian catastrophe. Among wealthy San Franciscans, the indignity is tangible — if an extraordinary price is going to be paid to live in Presidio Heights or the Marina District, how can visible poverty be imposed on such a supposedly idyllic lifestyle?

Damn those damn Republicans …

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Yeah, well, 1964 is more than halfway into the 20th century, so there!

Republicans are just playing the long game. The loooooongest game.

It really is top-quality stuff:

If Boudin loses, the criminal-justice-reform movement in San Francisco and across America could be dealt a grievous blow, at least in the short term. Wealthy conservatives, emboldened in California, may hunt for ways to make recall elections legal in other states, hoping to execute an end-run around higher-turnout contests that elected progressive prosecutors in the first place. “Republicans and their police-union allies have tried and failed in traditional elections,” Boudin says. “They’re desperate to go backwards.” If he is recalled, San Francisco, inevitably, will have a more conservative replacement.

A more conservative replacement! Boy, what a shame that would be, considering how badly Republicans and conservatives managed to muck up San Francisco almost 60 years ago. How will progressivism turn San Francisco around if progressivism never gets a chance to take hold?

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