From San Fransicko - Why Progressives Ruin Cities. Michael Shellenberger. 2021. Kindle online sample. Section 1.
From introduction:
Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime.
But IN CITIES THEY CONTROL, PROGRESSIVES MADE THOSE PROBLEMS WORSE.
Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years.
During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison.
But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed,
…
Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem.
What he discovered shocked him.
THE HOMELESSNESS, INEQUALITY, AND CRIME PROBLEMS HAD GROWN WORSE NOT DESPITE BUT BECAUSE OF PROGRESSIVE POLICIES.
San Francisco and other West Coast cities — Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland — had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing, and crime to actively enabling them.
…
San Fransicko reveals the underlying problem isn’t a lack of housing or money for social programs.
THE REAL PROBLEM IS AN IDEOLOGY THAT DESIGNATES SOME PEOPLE, BY IDENTITY OR EXPERIENCE, AS VICTIMS entitled to destructive behaviors.
The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.
….
From book sample:
When I first heard last June A GROUP OF PEOPLE HAD TAKEN OVER A NEIGHBORHOOD IN DOWNTOWN SEATTLE, OSTENSIBLY IN RESPONSE TO THE KILLING OF AN UNARMED BLACK MAN, GEORGE FLOYD, by a police officer in Minneapolis, I couldn’t understand what had happened.
It wasn’t like a bunch of heavily armed anarchists had erected traffic barricades and kicked the police out of their precinct building, I thought.
It was only after I had learned of the killing of two black teenagers in the occupied area that I came to understand the anarchists had, in fact, done exactly that.
But why? And why did the Seattle police and mayor let them?
…
I am not unfamiliar with radical politics.
As a socialist youth in the late 1980s I had read books by America’s most famous anarchist, Noam Chomsky, excoriating US imperialism in Latin America.
From 1996 to 1999, I worked with eco-anarchists seeking to save old-growth forests in California and the Pacific Northwest.
In 1999, I PROTESTED ALONGSIDE SO-CALLED BLACK BLOC ANARCHISTS AGAINST ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION IN THE STREETS OF SEATTLE.
While I knew anarchists wanted to abolish government, it never dawned on me a major city government would actually participate in its own abolition.
…
None of these problems started with the COVID-19 pandemic.
BETWEEN 2008 AND 2019, EIGHTEEN THOUSAND COMPANIES, INCLUDING TOYOTA, CHARLES SCHWAB, AND HEWLETT-PACKARD, FLED CALIFORNIA due to a constellation of problems sometimes summarized as “poor business climate.”
California has the highest income tax, highest gasoline tax, and highest sales tax in the United States, spends significantly more than other states on homelessness, and yet has worse outcomes.
…
“I came out here in 1983,” said HBO’s Bill Maher to Representative Adam Schiff in the fall of 2020.
“I found paradise. I love California. I do. I don’t want to leave.
But I feel like I’m living in Italy in the ’70s or something, I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GETTING FOR MY SUPER HIGH TAXES.”
…
I was as confused as Maher.
Though I have been a progressive and Democrat all of my adult life, I found myself asking a question that sounded rather conservative.
What were we getting for our high taxes?
WHY, AFTER TWENTY YEARS OF VOTING FOR BALLOT INITIATIVES PROMISING TO ADDRESS DRUG ADDICTION, MENTAL ILLNESS, AND HOMELESSNESS, HAD ALL THREE GOTTEN WORSE?
And why had progressive Democratic elected officials stopped enforcing many laws against certain groups of people, from unhoused people suffering mental illness and drug addiction in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, to heavily armed and mostly white anarchists in Seattle, Portland, and Minneapolis?
…
I wrote San Fransicko because I didn’t have the answers to those questions and felt I needed them.
What I discovered in the process was MUCH OF WHAT I AND OTHER PROGRESSIVES HAD BELIEVED ABOUT CITIES, CRIME, AND HOMELESSNESS WAS ALL WRONG, and we needed to get it right.
Just as no police officer believes it’s good for neighborhood safety to abandon a precinct building, no sane psychiatrist believes enabling and subsidizing people with schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorders to use fentanyl and meth is good medicine.
…
Yet that is what San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles are, in effect, doing.
What California does with its 100,000 unsheltered residents, most suffering mental illness or drug addiction while living in violent, dangerous, and degrading encampments, is MISTREATMENT OF THE FOULEST SORT AND IN MANY INSTANCES FAR WORSE THAN THE MISTREATMENT OF MENTALLY ILL PEOPLE IN THE FIRST THREE QUARTERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
…
How did we go from the nightmare of mental institutions to the nightmare of homeless encampments?
In San Fransicko I explore how the conversation around how to use law and order to advance civil rights gave way to A DEBATE OVER WHETHER LAW AND ORDER IS AN OBSTACLE TO SOCIAL JUSTICE.
The question used to be carrots versus sticks.
Do you reward people for not committing crimes, or do you punish them when they do?
But that’s been superseded by a question from progressives: what if it’s a form of victimization to try to influence people’s behavior at all?
…
THE GOVERNING MAJORITY IN SOME OF AMERICA’S CITIES SEEMS TO BELIEVE 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.
…
Some will take offense at this book’s subtitle, but I am not suggesting progressives only ruin cities, nor they never save them.
Nor am I suggesting conservatives never ruin them.
But I am saying when progressives do ruin cities, they do so in similar ways, and for similar reasons.
And WHILE THE CRISIS OF DISORDER I AM DESCRIBING IS STRONGEST IN PROGRESSIVE WEST COAST CITIES, IT IS SPREADING EAST, like many trends in America do. Progressives have been in charge of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, as well as California and Washington, during most of the decades in which the problems I describe here have grown worse.
…
On the fundamental policies relating to mental illness, addiction, and housing for the homeless, moderate Democrats, conservatives, and Republicans have either gone along with the liberal and progressive agenda or been powerless to prevent it since the 1960s.
It was Democrats, not Republicans, who played the primary role in creating the dominant neoliberal model of government contracting to fragmented and often UNACCOUNTABLE NONPROFIT SERVICE PROVIDERS THAT HAVE PROVEN FINANCIALLY, STRUCTURALLY, AND LEGALLY INCAPABLE OF ADDRESSING THE CRISIS.
…
Not long after I began my research, I read what I felt then, and still feel now, were the three best books on homelessness, all published in the early 1990s, and all authored by liberals or progressives.
At first the books inspired me.
I felt as though three wise elders had reached forward through time to pass along essential truths.
But then it dawned on me, despite those three books having been widely reviewed and well received, including by America’s most influential newspapers, THE CRISIS OF UNTREATED MENTAL ILLNESS AND ADDICTION, AS WELL AS WHAT WE CALL HOMELESSNESS, HAD GROWN WORSE, NOT BETTER.
…
What would prevent San Fransicko from suffering a similar fate?
That night, I confessed to my wife, Helen, all I might be able to do was write a book that warned other places what not to do.
She said, “We live here.”
I needed to be as constructive as I was critical, she felt.
So AT THE HEART OF SAN FRANSICKO IS A POSITIVE PROPOSAL FOR HOW TO RESTORE HUMAN DIGNITY, NOT JUST LAW AND ORDER, TO PROGRESSIVE WEST COAST CITIES.
At both philosophical and policy levels the proposal will, I hope and believe, resonate with the heads, hearts, and guts of reasonable conservatives and reasonable progressives.
(end of section 1)
… …
(own comments)
“At the heart of San Fransicko is a positive proposal for how to restore human dignity, not just law and order, to progressive West Coast cities.”
Shellenberger is socialist at heart so am sure this book is oll a ruse, he actually wants things to get worse faster.
He’s worried Dems’ malfeasance is becoming too obvious so know his proposal is negative cover-up Rubik’s Cube twisting, “must find ways to improve Progressives’ look-good do-bad tools so we can better fool All and our misery can spread east more easily.”
The actual solution is the actually positive Republican proposal: more happy-love tough-love do-good.
But unfortunately about half of us, Democrats, actually don’t want solutions, rather Dems want more problems and misery.
…
“The homelessness, inequality, and crime problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies.”
(always some edits…)
We have to keep in mind:
More problems is the actual goal of dem progressives.
How can one enjoy feeling sorry for the downtrodden if there are no downtrodden.
How can one fight for socialism if there are no downtrodden.
How can socialism reach its final goal of total (Kim-North Korea style) misery if we All aren’t downtrodden.
Oll the Dems’ nonsense makes sense if We understand and accept tHAT positive-negative-quark atomic philosophy including about half of us be negative misery-wuvvers, the more poverty and misery and enjoying complaining about zat the better.
Dem negative misery-wuvvers know positive Republican happy-lovers’ fatal weakness be We predictably keep thinking “everybody fundamentally wants happy, everything will be okay, go along to get along.”
…
Dem misery wuvver (we’re united victims and victimizers) negatives mostly act, appear and profess to want happy but actually prefer misery, often only subconsciously.
Misery-want evidenced by zeir enjoyment of:
-feeling sorry for self
-others feeling sorry for self
-self feeling sorry for others
-duping and forcing misery-wuv on the other side, on We living believing positive happy-lovers, hoping zeir brainwashing game will induce us to stand around, stoop down, give in, and join dem
So, the more misery and less happy the better for Dem.
…
Dem negatives’ duty be to deride, doff and scoff at positive Republicans’ Rubric Cube HAT (actual not fictional answers to social problems) and fire-up our side, zei need not, must not, accept tHAT.
We want inspire-fire-can not dire-mire-can’t.
Once We accept the reality dem socialists actually consciously and/or subconsciously want misery not happy oll zeir nonsense makes sense and We can go on offense.
…
We and They see and know in dem negative socialists’ minds zeir major failure has been zei have failed to cement zeir dead old world socialism/misery government-punishment somewhere then finally spread everywhere around Earth.
But, there now actually be a somewhere: Kim-North Korea.
Dem demi-commies know zei don’t need to try to force full socialism here, only need to distract, soften, weaken, corrupt, and hollow out America.
This will allow Xi-China to catch and pass us and then suppress U.S.
Down-looking king Xi-China then can easily take U.S. and All down with dem to the final goal: to zeir adored, protected, and coddled model of Kim-North Korea.
In Kim-North Korea zeir own misery-wuvver 47.5% negatives + 5% quark shapeless-form mafias have overpowered, subsumed and doomed zeir 47.5% happy-lover positives and achieved total control of full-misery socialism.
Now, zei want zat here and everywhere.
… …
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