For generations, the ultra-rich in big American cities have been willing to go along with progressives and their policies. But now, as urban areas across the country depopulate and lose jobs, some of those oligarchs – from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Boston – appear to be increasingly willing to take on the Left. And in some places, they have already had considerable and surprising success.
These efforts contradict the prevailing Democratic trend, as evidenced by the recent choices for the leadership of the party. The Democratic National Committee’s obsessions with race and gender seemed to one party veteran “like outtakes from a humanities seminar at a small liberal arts college”. While moderates still represent a larger group, a growing proportion of Democrats identify as being on the Left, as the party shrinks.
Progressive stances taken within the party, and parroted by clueless Biden operatives, have much to do with Democrats’ high disapproval ratings. But the party’s heart still belongs to the favourites of the Left – Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren.
Yet when it comes to running cities, it’s clear to many in the commanding heights of the party – particularly donors – that the passions of the heart have led to a less effective brain. Once strong backers of progressives, taking the knee during the George Floyd era, the Democratic bourgeoisie – aghast at urban decay – have decided to try to save their cities.
Nowhere is this clearer than in San Francisco, the epicentre of progressive insanity. There, tech entrepreneurs worked to get rid of Left-wing prosecutor Chesa Boudin, and last year helped to elect as mayor Daniel Lurie, scion of the Levi Strauss fortune, as well as some more moderate members of the Board of Supervisors. Lurie’s candidacy reflected growing concern even among the city’s famously progressive business elites with the almost Dickensian lunacy on the streets.
Lurie, of course, faces major challenges in his efforts to restore San Francisco’s lustre and risks being labelled by progressives as promoting interests that are fundamentally selfish. But one has to be blind, or perhaps a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to not see the ruination of a great city that, in recent years, has lost branches of national businesses like Safeway, Old Navy, Anthropologie, Whole Foods, Nordstrom and H&M. San Francisco’s office vacancy rate has reached record highs – and this in a city that not long ago seemed to be among the best positioned for the digital age.
Critically, Lurie, who spent almost $9 million of his own funds on his campaign, will run an administration less connected to progressive non-profits and the powerful public employee unions. In a place like San Francisco, it greatly helps to fund your own campaigns.
Yet “Baghdad-by-the-Bay” is not the only city suffering from progressive-generated decline and its consequences, such as wealthy individuals bailing to low-cost places such as Florida. Traditional big blue cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are also those whose workers are most likely to have embraced hybrid or totally remote working, while more jobs of all kinds are headed to much faster growing suburbs and exurbs. Over the past five years, finance, business services, business management and even tech have shifted from New York, LA, Chicago, Boston and San Francisco to places such as Austin, Dallas, Salt Lake and Raleigh-Durham.
Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Lead photo: Thomas Hawk, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
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