In a post on X, Reichstadter explained: “I am calling on Anthropic’s management, directors and employees to immediately stop their reckless actions which are harming our society and to work to remediate the harm that has already been done.” Days later, filmmaker and former AI researcher Michaël Trazzi launched his own campaign, inspired by Reichstadter’s, outside Google DeepMind’s London headquarters.

The cross-continental demonstration took hold, earning press coverage in Business Insider, Futurism, and The Verge, among others, even if Anthropic and DeepMind themselves did not respond. After 30 days of consuming only vitamins and electrolytes, Reichstadter ended his participation in the protest. “We who have everything at stake,” he wrote, “cannot stand by while this malignant conspiracy against the safety and security of the human race flourishes under the aid and protection of the corrupt and inept governments of this world.”

***

In the months after the hunger strike, I connected with Reichstadter through some mutual acquaintances on X. I was told that he was part of a larger anti-AI social movement cropping up in San Francisco, and that he had helped found an organization called Stop AI. The city is at the center of the AI boom — and corresponding safety movement — but it’s also the beating heart of American counterculture. I wondered what this burgeoning social resistance might look like, so ask Reichstadter to meet.

He agrees, and we make plans to go hiking in the Berkeley Hills. Given Reichstadter’s past, the natural setting feels appropriate. With a background in climate and other issue-driven activism, in April 2022 he went on a two-week hunger strike outside the offices of Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava to bring attention to climate change. In June that same year, the father of two spent 28 hours atop the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in Washington, D.C. to protest the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. “Civil resistance works,” he said in an Instagram video facing out over the Anacostia River. “Learn about it… That’s how we’re going to get the radical change we need in the shortest time necessary.”

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Out on the trail, Reichstadter walks me through his journey into anti-AI activism. He says he was still in college when it first occurred to him that super-powerful AI could cause serious human harm. With the launch of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT in 2022, his fears became more concrete. Now, as the technology continues to advance at breakneck speed, Reichstadter’s efforts have become increasingly urgent. “These systems,” he tells me, “have the potential to become powerful enough, even without consciousness, to control the world.”

Reichstadter first came to San Francisco in 2024, after meeting a guy named Sam Kirchner through a group called Pause AI. The pair apparently bonded over the idea of using civil resistance and direct action, which Pause AI does not allow, to bring attention to the risks surrounding the development of super-intelligent AI. That led to a new group: Stop AI. Reichstadter is no longer connected with it — he left last August amid internal disputes — but still maintains ties: including legal ones. He’s awaiting trial with another Stop AI member for charges related to non-violent protests last February at Open AI’s headquarters. Lately, Reichstadter has been acting independently and recruiting more people for the cause. “This is not necessarily about reaching everybody,” he says. “It’s about finding a viable coalition of individuals who are willing to push back.”

***

The idea that superintelligent AI might lead to catastrophic harm or human extinction, once the domain of theorists and philosophers, has gained momentum among some experts. The discourse surrounding the extinction threat — or “x-risk” as it’s known in some corners of the internet — became especially intense following the release of ChatGPT. More than 1,000 tech leaders and experts, including Elon Musk, signed a March 2023 letter calling for tech companies to pause further AI development. In May the same year, Nobel laureate and pioneering “AI godfather” Geoffrey Hinton dramatically left his job at Google to warn about the dangers associated with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Weeks later, CEOs from leading AI labs, including Anthropic, DeepMind, and OpenAI, acknowledged that the extinction risk from AI is on par with that of pandemics or nuclear war.

Experts disagree about what the actual risk might look like, and how likely any given scenario might be. One argument suggests that superintelligent AI systems pose a risk to human beings if their goals are not precisely aligned with human values. The idea is demonstrated by Nick Bostrom’s “paperclip maximizer” thought experiment, in which a powerful AGI is given the directive to maximize the number of paperclips in existence: even if that means eliminating human beings in the process. Others worry that bad actors could misuse AI to cause more conventional harms, from global war and disease to economic and ecological collapse.

Even so, big tech firms have continued full speed ahead toward increasingly powerful AI systems, with critics ever-more worried in turn. Stuart Russell, a professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, has likened the situation to an “arms race”. “For governments to allow private entities to essentially play Russian roulette with every human being on earth is, in my view, a total dereliction of duty,” he told AFP during last week’s India AI Impact Summit. The warning comes as researchers at some of the world’s biggest AI firms have also tendered their resignations. As Mrinank Sharma, who led Anthropic’s safeguards research team, wrote in an open letter to his colleagues: “The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”

***

In some ways, Stop AI is an effort to harness those anxieties into collective action. It’s an approach that’s been used by radical environmentalist groups in the UK, notably Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, to bring about systemic change. Traditionally, those within the AI safety movement have taken the insider approach, working with labs and research centers and think tanks to influence safety procedures and government policy. That, along with concerns about being taken seriously, have encouraged caution when it comes to practical campaigning. Stop AI, however, explicitly favors civil disobedience. “History has shown us that non-violent movements can meet their goals quickly when a large enough group of people cooperate towards a common goal,” reads the group’s website. “Non-violent resistance is the only answer.”

As its name would suggest, Stop AI’s end goal is a permanent and binding international ban on the development of both Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI): respectively AI as capable as human beings at most cognitive tasks, and AI that surpasses the abilities of human beings. In its pursuit, the group has never shied away from controversy, adopting tactics like blocking entrances to office buildings or chaining their doors shut.

Last November, they made national headlines when a public investigator hopped on stage to serve a subpoena on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during an event with Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr. On social media, Stop AI claimed responsibility for the stunt. “Our public defender successfully subpoenaed Sam Altman to appear at our trial where we will be tried for non-violently blocking the front door of OpenAI on multiple occasions,” the group said in an X post. “This trial will be the first time in human history where a jury of normal people are asked about the extinction threat that AI poses to humanity.”

In the past, the group’s messaging has been direct, if not apocalyptic. There was a banner, for instance, that read “AI Will Kill Us All.” Then there was the accompanying chant: “Stop AI or We’re All Gonna Die.” In recent months, though, as Stop AI’s organizers have wrestled with how to more effectively raise awareness and grow their ranks, that message has evolved. With the election last fall of new leader Matthew Hall, who goes by the name Yakko, Stop AI began moving from focusing solely on the risk of human extinction. “I feel a moral obligation to warn people,” Yakko told The Daily Californian. “I just think when people get too scared they just kind of shut down. They still have to go about their daily business.”

What happened next hints at the broader tensions within the anti-AI movement. Kirchner, apparently frustrated by what he saw as a departure from Stop AI’s more radical message, stormed out of a November planning meeting. Later, he came back and asked for access to the organization’s funds. Agitated that his request was denied, he struck Yakko several times in the head. According to Yakko, Kirchner told him that “the non-violence ship has sailed for me”. He later apologized, but the incident led to his expulsion from Stop AI. Since then, though, Kirchner has vanished, not turning up for a scheduled court date. His bike and camping gear have disappeared from his house too. Out of an abundance of caution, a member of Stop AI called the police to say that Kirchner could potentially pose a threat to people working at AI labs. That led to lockdowns at OpenAI, though members of Stop AI maintain they are not aware of any specific threats.

Either way, StopAI was quick to post a message on X detailing the situation, reaffirming its commitment to non-violence. Pause AI equally condemned Kirchner’s actions, explicitly stressing that it “has no affiliation with him or his organization”. For its part, Pause AI’s Code of Conduct explicitly prohibits violence, while also requiring compliance with any applicable laws. Pause AI CEO Maxime Fournes adds that the movement has always been “extremely peaceful”. That’s echoed by a broader debate about the perils of a certain kind of apocalyptic anti-AI messaging. “An early activist at Stop AI had a mental health crisis and went missing,” Remmelt Ellen, an advisor to Stop AI, warned in an X post. “Act with care. Find Sam. Stop with the ‘AGI may kill us all by 2027’ shit please.”

It’s impossible now to know what Kirchner might have been thinking, what pressures he may have been under. Yet three months after his initial disappearance, the 27-year-old activist is still missing. According to Kirchner’s friends and allies, he had been under a lot of stress, and the thought that AI might cause harm to his sister was consuming him. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” one of the group’s members told reporters.

Lately, Stop AI has been engaged in the delicate task of sorting out how to continue its work in spite of everything that’s happened — and despite the fact that Kirchner has still not been found. For its last public event of 2025, Stop AI hosted what it called “A Vigil for Humanity”. Tellingly, perhaps, it wasn’t held at OpenAI or Anthropic, but rather at San Francisco City Hall.

The tone was decidedly somber. A video posted online shows members holding lanterns in the waning daylight. Someone in the group explains who Stop AI is and what they’re doing there. There are warnings about the extinction risk. But then the conversation turns toward the broader value of human life. “We are going to take a moment to meditate and pray that every human life is protected, including the lives of the people who work at these companies… even though we deeply disagree with what they’re choosing to dedicate their lives to… even though they’re pursuing something that is dangerous. We think their lives are sacred and important too.”

***

While in San Francisco, I planned to go to a Stop AI protest at OpenAI’s headquarters, but then learned that the event had been canceled. I considered going by the offices anyway, just to get a sense of the place. Instead, I connect with Wynd Kaufmyn, who is one of the group’s organizers. We meet at a restaurant near the Fruitvale BART station; she’s planning to attend a nearby protest against the Trump’s administration’s immigration policy.

Now in her sixties, Kaufmyn came to the Bay Area as a Berkeley graduate student — drawn in by its radical politics and the lingering energy of the Free Speech Movement — and never left. She met Reichstadter and Kirchner at a protest in support of Palestine at Andrews Airforce Base. The pair shared some information about Stop AI, and Kaufmyn started going to meetings. Now, more than a year later, she’s a member of the group’s leadership council. “The reason that we’re having this AI problem right now is that we have corporations running the world,” she tells me. “And they don’t care what happens to people. So, for me, this is really about being anti-establishment, being anti-fascist.”

Stop AI, Kaufmyn explains, has been talking a lot more lately about AI skepticism as a big-tent issue, encompassing concerns about more immediate risks — like autonomous weaponry, surveillance, mass resource use, and job loss — alongside existential risk. “We want to be honest about what’s at stake here,” she says. “But we don’t want the message to be all doom.”

Certainly, Kaufmyn worries that anxiety about impending catastrophe is what led to Kirchner’s disappearance. “I could tell he was really depressed,” she says. “And I wanted to help him, but he was always very guarded.” She echoes the observation that he had become increasingly frantic that AI might hurt or kill his sister. “There was an article in the San Francisco Standard that I thought put it well,” Kaufmyn continues. “Is it possible to protest the end of the world without losing your mind?”

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In recent months, Stop AI has been in a regrouping phase — trying to understand what happened and how to keep it from ever happening again. Kaufmyn explains they’ve been working on strengthening the organization from the inside out, building a strong internal culture so that they can reach more people outside of the movement. They’re being mentored, she tells me, by some members of Extinction Rebellion. The group is known for practicing what it calls “regenerative culture”, which tries to create healthy relationships through mutual care. But Extinction Rebellion is also among those in the environmental space most willing to aggressively engage on the AI issue.

Last summer, two Extinction Rebellion activists protested Meta’s AI expansion by chalk-spraying the windows at its New York offices with messages like “Meta Makes Kings” and “Zuck Loves Trump”. Earlier this month, Reichstadter shared an X post from Extinction Rebellion Founder Roger Hallam, announcing the Zoom launch of a group called “Pull the Plug” in the UK. “Give ordinary people a say in how AI is used in our lives,” its website says. Later this month, the group is hosting what’s been billed as the UK’s “first-ever anti-AI march” at OpenAI’s London offices. It’s called the “March Against the Machines”.

Before I leave San Francisco, I tag along with Kaufmyn for part of the immigration policy protest. It’s crowded in Fruitvale Commons. Some of the activists shout over a megaphone. Others hold a huge white sign with red lettering that says: “People Over Billionaires.” Kaufmyn surveys the banner and reads the words out loud. “People over billionaires… I like that.” For a moment, we stand in silence. “I have one last question,” I tell her. “What do you think your goal is for Stop AI?” She shifts her weight a little. “I would like everybody from every walk of life to stand up to these billionaires — through civil disobedience, a hunger strike, however — and demand that they aren’t building harmful technologies that could destroy our lives when we are telling them not to.” A different battle in the same fight within the AI-skeptic movement, and one Kaufmyn and others have fought many times before.

Despite these abominable conditions — or perhaps because of them — a nine-story apartment building called “La Maravilla” has been approved for construction next door to the school. It will contain 135 units to house formerly homeless people. Neighbors, school staff and parents of Marshall students fear it will make conditions around the school even worse. Yet in response to their concerns, supporters of La Maravilla have called them “Nimbys” (“Not In My Back Yard”) and accused them of bigotry.

In a meeting before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors last July, Sam Moss, the executive director of the Mission Housing Development Corporation, the non-profit affordable housing development firm leading the project, lit into critics of La Maravilla. A group of neighbors opposed to the new construction, which is slated to begin in December, had appealed its approval, and that appeal was before the board to consider.

“This appeal isn’t about protecting the neighborhood,” Moss said, his voice tense with anger and brimming with contempt. “It’s about protecting privilege. It’s about using bureaucracy to block equity. It sends a clear message to low-income and housing insecure folks in San Francisco: you don’t belong here.”

His acerbic language reflected the rhetorical tenor of the Yimby (“Yes In My Back Yard”) movement. It’s a moniker proudly claimed by the pro-housing activists who oppose Nimbys — the pejorative used for neighbors who criticize and hold up new housing construction projects. Moss’ wife, Laura Foote, who also testified on behalf of La Maravilla that day, is one of the founders of the Yimby movement. (Moss declined to speak to me for this story and Foote did not respond to an interview request.)

Nimbys, in the minds of Yimbys, are affluent homeowners so pampered by their comfortable neighborhoods that they become feverish reactionaries in the face of any proposed change to the status quo. The caricature of a Nimby is encapsulated in a video from a 2017 Berkeley City Council meeting in which a neighbor held a zucchini aloft and declared that it could never have grown in the shade that would be cast over her vegetable garden by a couple of two-story buildings slated for construction next door. Yimbys often claim that concerns invoked by opponents of new development projects over traffic, parking, shadows and neighborhood character are not merely frivolous; they’re smokescreens for the real objective of keeping poor people out of the area. “I am ashamed at this classist and hostile behavior from some of my neighbors,” said one supporter of La Maravilla at the Board of Supervisors meeting.

But the stereotype is an odd fit for those who oppose Moss’ project, especially those affiliated with Marshall. The school’s students are overwhelmingly low-income. Many of them are the children of immigrants. The complaints of their parents and educators are not about zucchini gardens; they’re about surrounding a school with an open-air drug market. Neighbors have seen open prostitution in the area during school hours. One school employee told me about a man masturbating on the sidewalk in front of the playground in view of the kids. A teacher had seen shirtless young men walking out of a nearby station carrying machetes. “It’s unsafe at a hygiene level,” the Marshall employee, who asked not to be named, told me. “People are defecating on the street daily.”

Yet their grievances have been described as those of Nimbys even by Jackie Fielder, the supervisor who represents the neighborhood, on her Instagram page. (Fielder did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s a trope that plays well in San Francisco,” said Ali Gilmore, who lives across the street from the school.

Neighbors and parents fear that the new project will bring even more chaos and disorder to the vicinity. Plans for La Maravilla include three buildings. All of them will be affordable housing, but only one of them — the nine-story structure that will break ground in December — has been funded. That building will be permanent supportive housing. “Supportive housing” means housing with services for formerly homeless people who are mentally ill or drug-addicted.

San Francisco incentivizes the development of this type of housing. Thanks to a ballot measure passed in 2018 that raised taxes on huge companies in San Francisco to fund homeless services, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in city funding available for the construction of permanent supportive housing. And thanks to recent Yimby-supported legislation, residential development projects that include supportive housing are streamlined for approval in California, especially when they’re near transit corridors, as La Maravilla is. Instead of going through the tedious process of gaining the approval of public officials, developers whose projects meet a list of prerequisites can dispense with public hearings and costly environmental reviews and cut the permitting process down to months instead of years. The rules are meant to prevent Nimbys from blocking the construction of housing desperately needed to address the state’s affordability crisis. It was this streamlined process that allowed the Mission Housing Development Corporation and its partner on the project, the Mission Economic Development Agency, to push La Maravilla through.

Moss has described his opponents’ appeal against La Maravilla as “a greatest hits of Nimbyism” and “chock full of bigotry and segregation”. For people in wealthy Pacific Heights or on the low-slung west side of  San Francisco who for decades have stubbornly resisted affordable housing construction and upzoning — changing construction codes to allow for denser development — that’s a charge that might stick. Those were the kinds of homeowners the Yimby movement was built to confront, not moderate-income and working-class families whose neighborhoods are already inundated by blight. “I follow what’s happening in the Sunset,” Naomi Fox, who heads the Marshall Parent Teacher Association, said of the west side neighborhood. “I see Mayor Lurie begging them to allow an upzoning plan. We would have no problem with that.”

The Inner Mission is, in fact, already upzoned, and no one I spoke to in the neighborhood had a problem with affordable housing being constructed next to Marshall. Marc Solomon, another neighbor, told me they’d be fine with a building for homeless families, who tend to be higher-functioning than homeless individuals. The issue he and other neighbors have is with what La Maravilla is offering: permanent supportive housing for formerly incarcerated and chronically homeless single adults, which in San Francisco means drug addicts.

The part of the Mission that surrounds Marshall is already clogged with services for this population. About a block and a half south of the school is a free medical clinic for the indigent. A couple of blocks west lies a charity that distributes socks, blankets and hygiene kits to the homeless, and provides them with foot care and back massages. About a block southwest is another affordable housing complex called La Fénix, also built by the Mission Housing Development Corporation, with a quarter of the units set aside for the homeless. The site that La Maravilla will be built upon was, until recently, a homeless shelter.

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Neighbors believe that the dense concentration of housing and services for the homeless, mentally ill and drug-addicted has turned the Inner Mission into a containment zone for highly unstable and sometimes dangerous people. On the first day of the school year, around pick-up time, there was a shooting at La Fénix. A Marshall employee told me the police never informed the school’s staff, who may have decided to go into lockdown. Another time, someone being pursued by a gunman ran onto school grounds while kids were being dropped off. “The people that live in this neighborhood are dealing with the most difficult conditions in the entire city, alongside the Tenderloin and SoMa,” said Aaron Wojack, who lives across the street from Marshall. “The burden on this neighborhood is already tremendous.”

Yet at meetings with the community, numerous people who attended them told me, the non-profit developers treated neighbors as if they were bigots. “Whenever there was any talk of the community not wanting this, we were told, ‘you don’t care about unhoused people,’” a neighbor with a son at Marshall told me. “It was their cause, their cause, their cause. Everyone who opposes it is bad and doesn’t care about poor people.”

“They were just telling us the bare minimum to say we met with community,” said Todd Eng, who lives a few blocks away and whose daughter graduated from Marshall. “It’s, we’re going to proceed forward with this, we don’t care what the community thinks.”

Development in the Inner Mission fits a pattern in San Francisco, in which just three neighborhoods shoulder the brunt of the city’s addiction crisis. Even more than the Mission, the Tenderloin District and parts of SoMa are crammed with single-room occupancy hotels for the homeless, as well as food pantries, free medical clinics, drug courts and distribution sites for free, city-funded drug paraphernalia. Sidewalks are often clogged with drug users and dealers. As in the Mission, the poor immigrant families who live in the walk-up apartment buildings of the Tenderloin routinely have to dodge feces and meth smoke on the street. A child of one family, who immigrated from Yemen, was attacked.

To many residents, it seems by design. Earlier this year, a group of Tenderloin residents and businesses sued the city for turning their neighborhood into a drug containment zone. Among the plaintiffs is an immigrant mother who says drug users have threatened her with knives and hammers. Like the parents and teachers and neighbors of Marshall, these San Franciscans don’t want an open-air drug market in their proverbial back yard, which is already overflowing with the city’s worst problems. Does this make them Nimbys, too?

There’s no question there’s a housing crisis in San Francisco and throughout the entire state of California. Nobody questions the need for more housing construction of every sort, including permanent supportive housing. But the burden is not evenly spread. A few neighborhoods are expected to absorb the fallout of concentrating hundreds of drug-addicted and mentally ill people in buildings next to their kids’ schools, while the rest of the city enjoys clean sidewalks and safe playgrounds. It’s not a coincidence that these neighborhoods are also where the most powerless families reside.

The fight over the fate of the neighborhood around the proposed La Maravilla development belies the simplistic picture of Yimbys versus Nimbys painted in the national media. Sometimes there are real issues at stake in projects such as these, and the compromises made to address them are messy and divisive. The Nimby caricature papers over these complexities, dismissing anyone who objects to any new housing construction as selfish and entitled, whether their worries are about blocked views or about the risk of their kids being shot. This is what passes for “equity” in San Francisco.

But just because urban crime is a real problem doesn’t mean that Trump can fix it by decree. Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in attempting to circumvent the frustratingly iterative process of federalist democracy, which rarely offers political or practical shortcuts.

As with many things Trump, we are here because of abject Democratic failures. During the pandemic, much of America endured a rupture in personal safety and order. Reported homicides rose by a third between 2019 and 2022. Cities that seemed to have vanquished the bad old decades disintegrated in full national view: New York City’s murder level spiked 53 percent from near-record lows between 2019 and 2021, the sharpest increase in recorded history.

The summer 2020 riots, too, heightened voter fears. People who remember plywood Manhattan (stores boarded up against another night of window smashing), or who saw Minneapolis burn, can hold two perfectly compatible thoughts in their heads: just because there were peaceful protests in 2020 doesn’t mean there weren’t violent disturbances.

In much of the country, if not New York, rising violence in 2020 and 2021 was a sharp acceleration of existing trends; killings had been rising for a half decade. Moreover, even people who didn’t acutely fear being murdered had already noticed the gradual increase in pettier transgressions, with stores locking the toothpaste behind Plexiglass and drivers with fake plates blowing more red lights.

Crime and disorder, not coincidentally, exploded as high-profile cities, including San Francisco and New York, embraced new state and local policies to soften or altogether eliminate the consequences of committing many crimes — including, yes, reducing the use of cash bail to incarcerate suspects.

Democrats and their media allies and social-media surrogates for years ignored or minimized these failures and gaslighted the growing public anxiety. “Crime is much lower than it was in 1990,” we heard repeatedly, as if a 30-year-old, out-of-context benchmark could be a substitute for continued steady progress (never mind that no Democrat would ever argue that 1990 should serve as the singular barometer to track other ills).

“Crime is higher in red states,” we heard (and still hear). Democrats ignored a big reason for this disparity. People living in areas with higher population density have long demanded, and gotten, a lower crime rate, partly because they are more aware of crime’s impact. A person screaming threats on the subway can unnerve dozens of witnesses; scream on a rural road, and nobody will hear you.

 “Crime happens for a lot of reasons,” we heard, “you can’t just blame bail reform.” Sure, but those other factors were unwitting arguments for far more careful reform of criminal-justice laws, not for throwing out decades of practice and hoping for the best. For example, serious mental illness is proliferating, perhaps because of growing pot use. So it isn’t a good idea to discard one imperfect tool of incapacitating the violently mentally ill — keeping them in jail before a trial — without creating another, better tool: boosting the capacity for long-term, in-patient mental-health treatment. Likewise, organized retail theft, abetted by Facebook, has spread, which means that it isn’t a good idea to diminish the consequences for stealing stuff from stores to feed this new market. 

 The latest Democratic argument is that crime is now falling, not rising. Good news, yes, but this line of reasoning ignores the impact of years of preventable trauma. This “mission-accomplished” take also ignores the fact that crime isn’t falling uniformly. Overall felonies in New York City, for example, as of mid-August, remain 29 percent higher than in 2019. 

Into this void of Democratic leadership slides Trump. As on immigration, tariffs, and federal budget efficiencies, the president wants quick results. One of his twin executive orders on Monday decreed that “federal policies and resources should not be used to support jurisdictions with cashless bail policies,” and directed the attorney general to compile a list of states and cities with such policies governing crimes that “pose a clear threat to public safety and order,” so that federal agencies can “suspend or terminate” their grants. The other order directed the Pentagon to “designate an appropriate number of each state’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization” for “quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order.”  

 But there’s a major difference between the president’s actions on immigration and trade and his actions on state and local disorder. Whether you agree or disagree with Trump’s tariffs and immigration measures, there’s no question that the federal government has substantial authority, under both the Constitution and statutory law, to govern these areas.

 By contrast, state and local governments, not Washington, govern most crime and disorder. (The main exceptions are crimes that cross state or international borders.) The constitutional basis is clear. Article IV requires that states respect the “judicial proceedings of every other state,” thus implying that such proceedings will differ from state to state. A person who flees one state to escape prosecution for a serious crime is to be extradited “to the state having jurisdiction of the crime,” further solidifying state, not national, control. Moreover, Trump has no authority to revoke existing federal grants or restrict future federal funding based on a state’s criminal-justice laws. Congress, not the White House, sets conditions on federal grants. 

 The Founding Fathers had a practical basis for reserving most criminal-justice powers at the state and local level. States differ from one another, in everything from culture to geography to population density. The circumstances in which a person charged with homicide can make a self-defense claim, for example, can and should differ between a predominantly rural state, in which citizens know they are largely on their own, and an urban state, in which citizens know the police are stationed on the next block. Voters in a state with a well-funded public-health system may feel more comfortable releasing a chronic thief provided he attend rehab, and voters in a state with a sophisticated mental-health system may think someone arrested for punching a stranger may be better rehabilitated in a hospital rather than in a jail.  

 Enforcement, too, is better left to state and local officials. National Guard troops have a role in protecting people and property during real emergencies — after a hurricane, say, when a neighborhood is entirely depopulated and needs protection from looting. But Guardsmen and women can’t make the subtle daily distinctions that police officers must make.

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A police officer regularly stationed at a Bronx subway stop may develop a knack for knowing which fare-beater to let off with a warning — a day laborer he knows, who has just forgotten his wallet — and which fare-beater to serve with a fine. A police officer patrolling a gang-plagued Brooklyn street may arrest one person for swigging from an open bottle of vodka, because he knows that that person was just released from prison for a violent crime. He may walk by another individual engaged in the same behavior, because he knows that that person is walking home from his father’s funeral.  

 That’s not to say that governors and state legislators always, or usually, get it right on creating and maintaining criminal-justice systems, or that city police get it right on enforcement. But the past few years have shown that state and local democracy is working, albeit slowly and imperfectly. In New York, for example, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature have tightened the criminal-justice laws several times, in part because the governor was threatened by a close Republican challenger in 2022 and will likely face a similarly close opponent next year. San Francisco voters threw out their progressive district attorney. 

 The democratic process at the state and local level is annoying, difficult, takes too long, and isn’t guaranteed to have a perfect or even a good result, but this doesn’t mean that the process is irrevocably broken. As with all issues of democratic governance, the question is: compared to what? 

Trump isn’t powerless in nudging states in the right direction. The president could ask Congress to enact a bill similar to the Clinton-era “Cops on the Beat” program, which offered $8.8 billion in grants ($19.4 billion in today’s inflated dollars) to hire police officers. Congress could attach certain conditions to these grants, including requirements to report better data. The federal government could require state and local jurisdictions, for example, to report on what percentage of suspects arrested for nonviolent crimes and released on no or low bail go on to face re-arrest for similar and more serious crimes. New funding for in-patient and intensive outpatient mental-health treatment could require states and cities to report on the share of patients who are arrested for criminal behavior after release.

Trump has tapped into a problem, which is more than national Democrats have done. But acknowledging a problem, though critical, isn’t the same as fixing it.

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognizability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

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The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matt Gasda

Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimized overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimized?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighborhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimize my body. You start to like rationalist civilization. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasized self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techno-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labor — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimizing, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilization they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

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The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimize? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat—not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also hard to imagine that those bodyguards won’t, at some point, be necessary.

This shift away from liberal orthodoxy has shocked Newsom’s long-time progressive allies, who see it as an act of treachery. Yet if they had been paying attention to Newsom’s career — above all, his willingness to morph into whatever identity best serves his quest for power — this wouldn’t be so surprising.

Conservatives, too, will discover that Newsom isn’t a tool of the progressive Left, or a typical California progressive with “communistic” policies, as one conservative outlet described them. On the contrary, Newsom, unlike his predecessor, Jerry Brown, has been a committed, shameless sniffer of political winds throughout his career.

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That’s not to say that Newsom doesn’t have a lodestar. He does: namely, the monied elite of the Bay Area, particularly the Getty family. It explains his ease in discarding Left-of-center dogmas on law and order, and likewise why he has emerged as an unofficial political spokesman for the “abundance” agenda, which is how neoliberal Democrats are rebranding themselves these days. (In a display of virtuoso flexibility, however, Newsom in his conversation with Bannon called out Trump for his closeness with the tech oligarchs — talk about the pot calling the kettle black.)

His oligarchic allegiance has funded, and shaped, Newsom’s career. He projected himself as a relative moderate as mayor of San Francisco. Later in 2011, as lieutenant governor, he challenged the rigid Brown, suggesting pro-business reforms. That year, amid a weakening Golden State economy, he traveled to arch-rival Texas to discover the secrets of the Lone Star State’s boom — much to the consternation of progressives.

Then, as the winds shifted to the Left, Newsom decided to re-center his appeal to progressives in California and nationwide. He became a fervent advocate of such things as early transgender treatments and banning schools from informing parents about their own kids’ sexual identity issues. His heiress wife, Jennifer Siebel, made a documentary film embracing the transgender cause.

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As governor, he could dispense the blessings of full-spectrum progressivism thanks to a massive accumulation of capital-gains revenue during the tech boom. The economy, about which he repeatedly bragged, may have hurt the middle and working classes, but it allowed Newsom and his legislative allies to build a vote-catching “blue welfare state”, as The Nation magazine enthused.

During the tech boom, Newsom ladled out subsidies to poorer Californians; indeed, the Golden State spends more of its budget on welfare than virtually any state, twice as much as Texas, while it generally neglects basic infrastructure like roads and water supply. This sort of liberal welfarism recalls what Marx recognised in the Communist Manifesto as “the proletarian alms bag”.

Today, California’s economy is struggling, and progressive ideology increasingly clashes with reality and voter preferences. Newsom is clever enough to see the writing on the wall — in contrast to Kamala Harris, his possible gubernatorial successor and potential 2028 rival.

Bottom line: rather than frame Newsom as an ideologue, it is better to see him as a representative of the Bay Area tech oligarchy. To the titans of Silicon Valley, issues matter less than power and influence, as evinced in their recent genuflecting to Trump. If tactics need to be changed, if it’s necessary (for now) to learn the lessons of the 2024 MAGA triumph, so be it.

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This shift began to emerge even before the 2024 election. As it became clear that wind and solar couldn’t easily replace fossil fuels or nuclear power, particularly in light of the state’s draconian electric-vehicle mandate, Newsom signaled a growing flexibility. He reversed the proposed decommissioning of the state’s last nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, as a means to prevent embarrassing blackouts.

This, along with natural-gas plants that account for close to half the state’s electricity, prevented politically damaging blackouts. He has even considered amending the state’s landmark environmental law. The green lobby’s ever harsher energy policies were recently dissed by a Newsom spokesperson as akin to “fantasy and fairy dust”.

Similar fault lines have pitted him against progressives when it comes to race. Newsom was an ostentatious promulgator of Leftist racial cant and racial policies, like reparations and quotas. Yet when reparations legislation suggested cash payments upwards of $640 billion dollars for the descendants of slaves, Newsom recoiled, upsetting the state’s hyperactive race hustlers. He now also expresses concerns about the injustice of transgender men competing in female sports programs, perhaps aware of the damage done to Harris by this issue.

Newsom has even backed away from his welfarist inclinations, recasting himself as a fiscally conscious moderate. He fended off proposals from Sacramento progressives, including their calls for a 32-hour workweek; raising the state’s income tax (already the nation’s highest); and adding new payroll taxes to cover universal health care.

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After the 2024 election, Newsom’s centrist shift has accelerated. This may still not be necessary in a state that went nearly 60% for Kamala Harris. But state politics are beside the point for the termed-out governor. For him, the prize is no longer in Sacramento — but at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Newsom senses, correctly, that the best chance lies with embracing moderates reacting against the inevitable Trumpian excess. But the Democrats can only win the national vote if they shift away from progressive stances on climate, diversity, and gender — all widely unpopular east of the Sierra.

Ultimately Newsom’s biggest problem, particularly in a general election campaign, will be his miserable record. In a national campaign, he will be made to defend the state’s lousy education system: California’s students perform at among the lowest rates in the country, with nearly three of five Golden State high-schoolers unprepared for either college or a career; in most categories, the state scores below lower-spending places like Texas and Florida.

Nor can he boast of the state’s still massive economy. Once deemed to be the world’s fourth largest, the California economy is now among the weakest in the country and seems destined to fall to sixth place in the near future. His frequent pro-worker pronouncements don’t hold water in a state where unimaginable wealth coexists with the nation’s highest cost-of-living-adjusted poverty rate. Nearly one in five Californians — many working — lives in poverty (using a cost-of-living adjusted poverty rate); the Public Policy Institute of California estimates another fifth live in near-poverty — roughly 15 million people in total.

Then there’s crime. In a recent referendum, Californians overwhelmingly ditched liberalized sentencing laws enacted by Democratic lawmakers and defended by Newsom. Sensing danger, he has moderated on some law-and-order issues. Newsom last year vetoed a bill that would have legalized “shooting alleys” — so-called safe drug-injection sites — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Many of his progressive allies, who favor such programs, denounced his veto. But a GOP presidential nominee could slam him for his Johnny-come-lately rethink on social order and cohesion.

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Newsom also is vulnerable for the utter failure of the state’s climate-focused housing policies. By curtailing new suburban construction, state policies have hiked housing costs to the highest levels in the country, sparking a powerful out-migration trend. And that’s not to mention the state’s dismal performance in response to the horrific LA fires this year, a result of progressives ditching basic infrastructure in favor of boutique climate and “justice” causes.

Overall, whatever his media savvy, Newsom will have to run as former chief executive of a state repeatedly rated by Wallet Hub as among the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. Newsom might be tempted to curtail regulations so he can appeal to business-oriented Democrats and independents. As a white male, Newsom seems ill-suited to compete for the diversity vote, particularly if Harris or some other “person of color” decides to run.

Whether this lurch to the center works or not, it is now the most viable path to the nomination. Of course, things may change in response to Trumpian overreach. The 45th and 47th president might just make progressivism great again. If that comes to pass, the Governor’s moderate rhetoric will no doubt change. In being willing to bend to any prevailing trend, at least, Newsom is almost perfectly consistent.

Treasure Trove opened a year ago in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as a satellite store of their toy and second-hand goods shop in nearby Newberrytown. But this second location, within spitting distance of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, has evolved into something like a mission for the chronically homeless that also sells Funko Pops figurines. The owners, a pleasantly nerdy couple named Jason Crocenzi and Jennifer Draisey-Crocenzi, say it was impossible to operate a standard retail business in a downtown where hundreds of deprived homeless people wander the streets and often outnumber regular pedestrians.

In July, the Crocenzis were featured in a feel-good story for the local newspaper about turning their business into “a hub for helping the homeless”. One of Treasure Trove’s employees is Daniel, a gravel-voiced 75-year-old veteran who had been sleeping in a tent since 2011 until the Crocenzis were kind enough to let him live in the store building.

The problem is that the homeless don’t always love them back. Less than a month after the article appeared in The Burg, someone named Toby walked into the store and angrily demanded $3,000 for a new e-bike. He’s a bespectacled 26-year-old homeless person already infamous among some local merchants and residents because, for years, he’s been aggressively demanding no-strings-attached financial assistance. The Crocenzis offered Toby free clothes, beverages and leads on affordable housing, but wouldn’t hand over thousands in cash to him.

Jennifer’s account of what happened next is harrowing: “He then threatened to sue me, then kill himself, and then charged at my huge husband, ripping part of his beard off, hitting him with a mop, throwing his phone, and breaking inventory. He ripped Jason’s shirt, kicked and hit him, and refused to let him go for several minutes as we kept yelling: ‘Let him go, stop this!’

“Jason was on the ground, unable to breathe, until the police arrived and immediately pulled him off. It’s not many who would even try to attack a 600-pound store owner who does nothing but give free items to the homeless all day long.”

The Crocenzis pressed charges, and Toby eventually pleaded guilty to assault but was not in police custody for long. Meanwhile, Toby told a completely different story about the encounter. According to an account on a neighborhood Facebook group, he was the blameless one being discriminated against. “They started yelling, cussing, and harassing me,” he wrote. “If anyone supports this business, they are not human.” The moderators sided with Toby and banned the Crocenzis from the group. When Jason Crocenzi protested, he said he was told they didn’t want to infringe on a homeless person’s First Amendment rights.

Today, Toby continues to use the group to beg for PayPal or Venmo donations and bullies people individually through direct messages. Everyone in this liberal-leaning city seems too uncomfortable to put an end to it; anyway, what can truly be done?

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It’s not an uncommon story: nearly every American city now has a version of Toby. Often, it’s a handful of individuals — mentally ill or drug-addled chronically homeless people — who terrorize entire blocks, neighborhoods, or public transit for weeks, sometimes years.

In San Francisco, one such repeat offender is Lacey, a woman who, since 2020, has chased people and their children around city parks while screaming bloody murder. In Austin, Texas, a homeless man named Rami Zawaideh smashes city property with a sledgehammer and cuts down trees with a chainsaw and machete while shrieking all through the night. Due to a confrontation with Daniel Penny in a New York subway car, the entire nation is aware of the sad story of Jordan Neely, a homeless person with 42 prior arrests — including three subway assaults. Neely remained on New York City’s “Top 50 List” of homeless people in need of assistance and treatment from 2019 until he was killed in 2023.

In Harrisburg, a small city in south-central Pennsylvania, the problem isn’t just Toby. There’s another unhoused man who — for seven years — has created havoc wherever he goes in a stretch of downtown. “He just comes in, and he’s ranting and raving, torturing customers, yelling in their face for money, doing drugs,” said Angel Fox, the owner of a local laundromat. “It was so sad to see that he’s not just tortured the other small businesses on the street but the community. In a four-block radius, one person is terrorizing the community, and nothing is being done.

“Why is he still on the streets? Is law enforcement… waiting for him to hurt someone or someone’s kid, or do we have to be traumatized because we have to self-defend ourselves?” Fox continued.

The local police say they’re doing what they can under the system as it exists — they’ve arrested this particular perpetrator nine times in 2024 and 45 times since 2017, but the charges aren’t violent enough to warrant longer-term jail. There’s little in the way of other recourse. The Harrisburg State Hospital, which once took care of thousands of mentally ill patients for a century and a half, was shut down in the early 2000s and sat decrepit and abandoned until it finally burned to the ground late last year.

The fiery destruction of the state hospital is an appropriate metaphor of America’s under-institutionalization problem. Since John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act of 1963, most of the country’s mental hospitals were closed over the second half of the 20th century. And it was a bipartisan project: liberal reformers catalyzed by exposes of abuses found common ground with fiscal conservatives who opposed the costliness of the asylum system. Without these institutions, the tens of thousands once housed in them are instead cycled in and out of jail, emergency rooms, and living on the streets. The shelters that offer to put a temporary roof over them run on government funding, grants, and donations and are all voluntary. No one is forced to get treatment or stay in a shelter, and so many of the homeless inevitably pick up where they left off after they leave jail, for better or worse.

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What we get instead, in a time of ever-increasing economic inequality and hyper-individualism, is the rise of the anti-institution — large informal homeless encampments that have become a standard feature of the American city. Harrisburg’s own ragged tent city grows in a forested acre on the south edge of town, a no-man’s-land patch of wilderness between the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation building, a trainyard, and the Susquehanna River. It’s a series of tents, lean-tos, and makeshift camps walled in with found objects, surrounded by litter and discarded items.

This isn’t the first iteration of Tent City. The previous version, under the Mulberry Street Bridge, was cleared out in 2023 after police said the area was full of trash, rats leaping out of garbage, and “a spike in violent crime, drug usage, overdoses, sex workers, rapes, stabbings, and shootings”. Without institutionalization and a short-term housing plan beyond the shelters, the homeless simply recreated the bridge encampment in a new location.

It isn’t safe to live there. Two men were stabbed in the camp in 2024, and dangerous blazes break out as people try to stay warm by building haphazard campfires. On 16 January, after a man named Alfred Colon burned to death in a tent there, his family said they hadn’t had contact with him in four years, and didn’t even know he was homeless. Drug overdoses are also common, hence the emergency doses of Narcan at Treasure Trove. According to Daniel, the former homeless employee at Treasure Trove, a portion of tent city’s residents are addicted to $5 fentanyl pills, often called “blues”.

The dysfunction of the tent cities inevitably spills out into the downtown area which, like many cities, is already suffering from a post-Covid malaise. A lack of foot traffic in a struggling local economy reliant on state government jobs that have stayed remote, boarded-up businesses, and the chronically homeless population have given much of downtown Harrisburg a tragic post-apocalyptic quality.

The political vacuum creates a doom-loop effect: businesses are often wary of investing in neighborhoods like these, and when they don’t, residents lack access to essential services, including groceries and healthy food options. Commercial and property values drop, reducing funding for public schools and other municipal services. Middle-class people in these neighborhoods tend to move out, exacerbating the concentration and clustering of disadvantage. Without policy changes, cities like these threaten to produce more homeless people and quietly slide into oblivion.

The lack of a legitimate response to this issue, or liberals’ defense of the status quo, may help explain some of the urban working class’s revolt in November’s election of Donald Trump. The media scratched their heads and tried to puzzle out why working-class people, especially those of color in cities, turned towards MAGA.

At least some of that anger was directed at the Democrats for prioritizing the chronically homeless and illegal immigrants for free housing and services. Liberal cities continue a delusional Housing First policy that’s next to impossible to succeed over the next decade when there’s hardly any affordable housing for the non-college-educated working class, much less the destitute. In 2024, the Biden-Harris administration awarded $3.16 billion to over 7,000 homeless-related projects, including $2 million to Harrisburg. That amounts to about $7,500 per homeless person included in the city’s Continuum of Care. Meanwhile, those who hide their homelessness or who scrape by working multiple jobs receive little help.

Those who object to these priorities or the anarchic state of encampments are considered bigots. Thanks to progressives’ culture of weaponized “empathy”, there’s little expectation of accountability or pro-social behavior from the homeless because it’s considered inherently cruel to a class of people to be pitied as symbolic victims of capitalism and contemporary society. But treating the homeless like they’re Peter Pan’s Lost Boys helps no one, especially not the mentally ill or drug-addicted people themselves, who are often victims of crimes at the hands of each other in tent cities.

Thankfully, the tide may be slowly turning towards involuntary treatments. California and New York have recently adopted and expanded involuntary treatment policies and so have Canadian provinces such as British Columbia and Alberta. Trump has said that he will work with states to ban urban camping and push people into treatment for drug addiction and mental health, but it’s unclear whether his administration will invest in the kind of resources needed. Thus far in his second term, he’s appeared to be much more interested in wrecking existing institutions than creating new ones.

But without serious reform, we will just see more tragedies such as Daniel Penny’s vigilante confrontation with Jordan Neely in a New York subway or the attack on Jason Crocenzi in Harrisburg. More tragedies by inertia.

Where I live, across San Francisco Bay in Oakland, the homelessness has also become a favorite subject for YouTube video sleuths. But instead of capturing it at ground level, from the juddering view of a camera held by a pedestrian, or through the window of a car moving along a curb in voyeuristic slowness, these videographers often do their thing while moving at the speed of traffic, panning hungrily along a blighted street, or they send up a drone to gather a vast scene in an aerial sweep. San Francisco homelessness is defined by depressing human detail. Oakland homelessness is captured in aggregate terms, by visual reference to its physical scale.

Until the city dismantled it in 2023, the vast Wood Street encampment in West Oakland was our most notorious emblem of homelessness, and a favorite subject of videos shot from the sky. When the Mosswood encampment in North Oakland reaches its maximum population — which it does periodically before it’s cleared again — one makes sense of it while driving past at 30 miles an hour. This perspective shows you something that Google Maps identifies as a park but what looks to you like, well, tents, just a wide field covered by tents.

The most familiar and ominous form of homelessness in Oakland, however, has become the vehicle encampment. A few small clusters of vehicles have gathered in my North Oakland neighborhood, lines of dirty campers and battered cars seeking shade under an elevated freeway, but poor East Oakland has it the worst. There, such encampments have taken over long stretches of busy street, visiting already-distressed neighborhoods with huge living sculptures of ugliness and disorder — cars filled with clothes and junk; hulking RVs parked for months at a time, drug and sex deals conducted streetside; trash gathering around and between the vehicles, and lots of new crime. Recently, the city had to replace traffic lights at an East Oakland intersection with stop signs, because people, presumably from the vehicle encampment close by, were constantly stealing the cables to sell the copper wire inside.

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These urban nightmares provoke understandable calls for the city to show some leadership and clear the bigger, more dangerous, more embarrassing encampments, but Wood Street offers a cautionary lesson that, in turn, places the larger problem of homelessness in an unhappy, if clarifying, light. When the city cleared Wood Street, it hoped to move many residents into shelters but many of the homeless, and many of the vehicles that could be started and driven off before the tow trucks and bulldozers and forklifts arrived, just moved themselves to other parts of West Oakland. When officials clear the encampments in East Oakland, we can expect the same thing to happen. This highlights a troubling problem with homeless people that no one has managed to solve — their insistence on being somewhere rather than nowhere.

The attempt to solve this problem of where the homeless are is what brought the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, before the United States Supreme Court in Grants Pass v. Johnson. Two local ordinances in Grants Pass prohibit “camping” on public property — one applying to living and sleeping outside, the other to living and sleeping in a motor vehicle. A lower court has ruled that the Grants Pass ordinances, and other laws that make it illegal for homeless people to camp and sleep in certain places, amount to “cruel and unusual punishment” — as proscribed by the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. The underlying legal notion the lower court fixed upon is the distinction between “status” and “conduct”. Court precedent holds that it’s reasonable to enjoin people from doing something, but it is unreasonable to punish them for being something, for their status, a condition they can’t control that to some extent defines them. The court argued that if shelter is available for the homeless, then the “camping” in question is conduct, something chosen, which it’s reasonable for a city to prohibit. If no shelter is available, then this sort of camping is not conduct but simply a necessary entailment — necessary because everyone needs to sleep — of the status of being homeless, which it’s unreasonable to punish.

The court will be making these careful distinctions between status and conduct, what civic measures are and aren’t reasonable. But in 2013, Grants Pass city council president Lily Morgan made clear that the underlying concern of the ordinances is the one I mention above, not so much the existence and metaphysical nature of homeless people but their location. “The point,” Morgan said, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.” It’s better for the homeless to be there than here. Most people agree.

But not all people. In San Francisco, for example, non-profit executives, public health academics, and government bureaucrats who serve the homeless don’t want to send the homeless on down the road. These influential figures work to portray the homeless as genuine residents of the city, to defend their rights to be where they are, wherever that is. This approach may sound humane, but over the long run it may be as ineffective, and indeed as inhumane, as the other approach of sending the homeless down the road.

This matter of where the homeless are from has become very salient in San Francisco, especially in the city’s notorious Tenderloin District, where the open, obvious, unashamed daylight commerce in and consumption of drugs provokes understandable questions. Might it be that – sort of like the hippies in the Sixties who flocked to the city for its freewheeling atmosphere — a good number of these drug-addicted homeless people aren’t actually from San Francisco?

For the city’s influential homeless advocates, to raise this suspicion is — in the words of Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness — to engage in the “othering of unhoused people”. And she’s right. Many people really do make an “othering” sort of distinction between those who met misfortune in their city and became homeless there and those — those others, if you will — who came to their city and live on its streets because they wanted to use drugs there. These people would like to move some of San Francisco’s homeless on down the road.

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In any case, official data roughly, apparently, support the idea of which Friedenbach is so protective — that San Francisco’s homeless are mostly San Franciscans. For example, a 2022 survey shows that 71% of San Francisco homeless became homeless while they were San Francisco residents, and only 17% had been in the city for a year or less. Homeless advocates cite these numbers in a peremptory spirit, as if they simply settle the matter, but they actually invite a fair amount of questioning and skepticism. For example, homeless people are viewed as being from the city if they were living there “at the time they most recently became homeless” but this phrasing pretty much forces you to wonder how much prior homelessness in other cities is hiding in this 71% number.

But the numbers aren’t great even if you believe them. Even if fully 71% of the city’s homeless are “from San Francisco”, 29% of the city’s 8,323 homeless people is still a lot of people. At the lowest estimate, 2,413 of San Francisco’s homeless people came to the city already homeless. And 17% means that 1,414 of the city’s homeless people are newly arrived. That’s a lot of newly arrived homeless people in a fairly small city.

From there it’s a reasonable assumption — given the current drug epidemic and the city’s vigorous “harm reduction” infrastructure, which dispenses free drug paraphernalia and exerts serious political and legal pressure to minimize enforcement of crimes associated with drugs and homelessness — that drug addicts are overrepresented among these thousands of recent arrivals. That is, it’s likely that at least hundreds of drug addicts from other places are coming to the city every year, and especially to the drug-ridden and drug-tolerant Tenderloin. Anecdotes from the neighborhood support this modest assumption — such as San Francisco’s police chief noting that, in a recent drug crackdown in the Tenderloin, only three of 46 people arrested were from San Francisco, and the series of very affecting YouTube interviews called “Soft White Underbelly” whose Tenderloin subjects very much paint a picture of the district as a drug destination for outsiders.

These drug migrants to the Tenderloin may account for a small or even marginal portion of the city’s overall homeless population, but from the standpoint of its lawfulness and civic order, and of the survival of its small businesses and its tourism industry, and of the security and pride and happiness of its citizens, it’s not marginal at all. It’s central. The Tenderloin is in the center of the city.

Activists and academic commentators often portray any concern with this aspect of homelessness as morally shallow and politically nefarious, a desire to render the homeless “invisible”. But the wishes of shopkeepers trying to keep their little businesses alive, and parents whose children have to pass those appalling scenes on the way to school, are not abstract or hypothetical. These people aren’t shills of international capital. It’s not to erase the needs and suffering of the homeless to consider the humble interests of these everyday citizens when we decide where to encourage the law-breaking homeless to pitch their tents and sell and use their drugs.

We’ve traveled to an interesting place, culturally and politically, when not wanting to step in human feces on city sidewalks is considered morally frivolous. To put it another way, it’s possible that harm reduction is good for the drug-addicted homeless in the Tenderloin and bad for the city of San Francisco, and what we have is a political conflict, in which open contestation and compromise are necessary, rather than the dogmatism and language policing of the city’s homelessness functionaries. Then again, people seem to get a lot worse once they’ve been in the Tenderloin for any length of time. Encouraging more people to join them doesn’t seem like harm reduction. If bureaucrats and non-profit executives can be deceptive about homeless in-migration and blithe about its bad effects, their opponents can generate a tunnel-visioned portrait of homelessness that also hinders a clear understanding of the problem and its possible remedies — which threatens to leave us choosing between maintaining the homeless where they are and merely moving them from place to place, rather than reducing their number.

California contrarian Michael Shellenberger, recent candidate for governor and author of San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, has built something of a movement from pointing out the folly of Left-wing approaches to homelessness, and of progressive governance more generally. Shellenberger argues that homelessness is not, as progressives will tell you, a problem of poverty. It is, he says both in his book and in a growing number of online videos, a problem of drug addiction and mental illness. This latter claim is substantially true, but only within his very narrow framework. That is, his implicit comparison (I say “implicit” because his work contains little if any systematic demographic comparison) is between the homeless and non-homeless in cities — especially Los Angeles and San Francisco — already characterized by high rates of homelessness, as well as by nice weather and progressive governance. Within this framework, individual pathologies such as addiction and psychosis account for a lot of variation between who is and isn’t homeless, and thus seem to explain homelessness per se. And progressives, occupying safe seats of influence in these places, are easily blamed for their undeniable failures of vision and policy, the squalor and madness they seem happy to tolerate, if not actively curate. But the framework itself is conceived in a way that isolates individual variables like addiction and psychosis, and leaves broader economic ones to the side, barely considered.

When, instead of comparing individuals within high-homelessness cities with progressive power structures and Mediterranean climates, we compare rates of homelessness across different cities or regions in the United States, a very different set of variables rises to the surface, or a very different variable: housing costs. Yes, being psychotic or addicted to a powerful drug, along with being recently incarcerated and newly unemployed and disabled and a victim of domestic violence, increases your chances of becoming homeless wherever you live in America. But it increases these chances a lot more in some places than in others.

That is, when we compare rates of homelessness across different cities and regions, the differences do not correlate with levels of drug addiction and mental illness in these places. West Virginia, for example, has very high rates of drug addiction and very low rates of homelessness. These differences do, however, strongly correlate with housing costs. Drug addiction and psychosis are far more likely to cause homelessness in and around expensive San Francisco or Los Angeles than they are around more affordable, and progressive-led, Chicago and Detroit, or warmer-weather cities like Houston or Charlotte, North Carolina. Boston has one of the highest rates of homelessness in America because, though quite cold and snowy in winter, it’s a very expensive place to live.

This claim might seem counterintuitive to people who’ve zeroed in on mental illness and drug addiction as the obvious causes of homelessness. How can psychotics and drug addicts make rent? But New York housing analyst Stephen Smith, who posts as @MarketUrbanism on X, gives an illuminating gloss on how it applies at the individual level. “Fun fact,” Smith tweeted in 2021, “homeless people with mental illnesses and drug addictions are humans who can interact with the housing market. They often have families who can take them in (if they have room), and are eligible for housing subsidies (if housing is available).”

These and related expedients for housing the hardest cases are much more accessible where there’s more, and thus more affordable, housing. They’re not ideal, but the gulf between even these marginal housing arrangements and living on the streets — especially if you want to keep the addiction and mental illness from getting much, much worse — is huge. As Smith puts it: “Sometimes you see somebody talking to themselves on the street (normal life thing), and sometimes you see somebody who smells terrible and has what looks like rotting flesh talking to themselves on the street (scary city thing). The difference is housing.”

Somewhat depressingly, this is not a story of poverty or weak economies. It’s a story of affluence and economic vigor. American cities and regions with the highest rates of homelessness — such as New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their environs — are all, or recently have been, “superstar cities”. They’re employment destinations, coastal cities that many people move to over short timescales. Many of these new people are highly educated and high-earning, and, when they arrive, they bid up rents and home prices. The superstar performance of these local economies may boost wages for their poorest citizens, but they drive up housing costs a lot more.

The other part of the story is familiar to anyone who follows these issues: failure to build additional housing to meet the new demand. This, in turn, is largely a story of incumbent homeowners and their elected representatives using zoning, environmental, architectural and other pretexts and regulatory means to block new housing, especially multi-family housing, and thereby protect the inflated values of existing homes (like mine). Sometimes, as Shellenberger points out in San Fransicko, this reflects the hypocrisy of land-rich progressives in desirable cities, who put out social-justice yard signs and then make sure new homes for poor people don’t get built anywhere near them. But it’s also the work of conservatives, who invoke “local control” to defy state laws that oblige their roomy suburbs to approve a few apartment buildings. It’s fun to mock the limousine liberals of San Francisco and Santa Monica, but many of the most anti-housing members of the California legislature are Republicans.

For those who still want a solid reason to mock Leftists, a crucial anti-housing force at the city level is the teamwork of urban socialists and anti-gentrification activists, for whom landlords and real-estate developers have a sort of demonic status. These are people who’ve made being deeply confused about housing markets into a guiding principle. Given a choice between “no new housing” and “new housing someone might make a profit on” they consistently choose “no new housing”. Then, when rents go up and gentrification intensifies and more people end up homeless, they wave their hands and say capitalism did it.

One clear signal that housing costs drive much of the homelessness where I live comes from the vehicle encampments blighting my city’s streets, specifically the growing number of those trailers and vans and RVs that were built for people to camp in. For as long as those things have been a presence and a problem in Oakland, they’ve also been a mystery. People see them and wonder, “Why are they here?” “Where did they come from?” After all, owners of recreational vehicles are an unlikely class of people to be so conspicuously represented among the homeless.

But the people in those RVs don’t own them. They rent them, from people who’ve come to be called “vanlords”. These energetic businesspeople buy up old trailers and RVs and either drive or tow them to unfortunate neighborhoods in cities like Oakland. There they enter into informal rental agreements with homeless people. These campers, and the people who own and rent them out, occupy a tier of the official housing market that should exist but, thanks to the efforts of high-minded urban fanatics and small-minded suburban Nimbys, does not.

Their growing presence should also be a warning. If you think landlords are a bad influence on your city, just wait and see what vanlords have in store for it..

***

This article was first published on 13 June, 2024.

In San Francisco, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as “progressive”.

What California does, the rest of the country tends to follow. In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?

We can start by tracing its roots to medieval England. In his 1989 book, Albion’s Seed, the historian David Hackett Fischer describes four distinct American political traditions that originated in four waves of migration to the New World, each from different regions of England. The most famous of these groups were the Puritans from East Anglia, who believed in community and the power of the state. Then there were the “Scots-Irish” from the Scottish-English borderlands, who shunned any form of authority whatsoever. Together, these two groups would come to shape the politics of contemporary California.

The Puritans who sailed into Massachusetts Bay in the early 17th century were pious middle-class artisans and yeoman farmers fleeing religious persecution in England. Their leaders dreamed of establishing a Christian utopia in America. The Puritans had a bleak view of humanity. They believed in Original Sin, and in mankind’s infinite capacity for evil. But this cynicism was offset by their reverence for community, through which people could be steered toward godliness. Their faith in the common good manifested itself in the town hall, a centuries-old institution that the Puritans brought from the Old Country. Every adult male could participate in a town meeting, where the goal was to achieve consensus, rather than a mere majority. New England townships voted for high taxation, and their level of public spending was two-to-four times that of other North American colonies.

All this meant that the modern American understanding of “liberty” was alien in Puritan New England, where individual rights were not really rights at all, but privileges bestowed by the commonwealth. Puritans spoke not of liberty, but of liberties: discrete permissions granted by the government, such as the liberty to fish in a particular river. Fischer describes these liberties as “specific exemptions from a condition of prior restraint”, suggesting that the natural state was one of state discipline, not personal freedom. In other words, it was the role of the government to regulate the behaviour of its citizens, not vice versa.

In the centuries that followed, the Puritan social ideal would spread from New England across the continent and become one of the foundational elements of American politics. This was no accident: the Puritans believed it was their God-ordained duty to expand Christian civilisation and save lost souls. Their evangelical spirit became part of the secular worldview of the Yankees.

This worldview would eventually come to embed itself in California. The Yankees were the first Americans to explore the Pacific Coast by ship, as fur traders. They feared that, without their spiritual example, California would be lost to the Catholicism of French rival fur trappers and Spanish-speaking “Californios”. That threat only grew with the discovery of gold in 1848, as Americans flocked West seeking anything but Christian enlightenment. Yankee ministers began preaching against the Gold Rush in New England, discouraging their kinfolk from making the trek; then, they took to the road themselves, spreading the Word in the saloons and brothels of California. By 1849, almost half of the vessels docked in San Francisco’s port had arrived from New England.

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The Yankee elite dreamed of turning California into a Massachusetts on the Pacific, and New Englanders into “the founding race of California”, in the words of the historian Kevin Starr. They went about founding civilising institutions, through which they could assert their influence. New Englanders poured money into new Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches all over San Francisco. They founded the city’s public school system. Across the Bay, they established the College of California, which would later become the University of California at Berkeley. But while the Yankees dominated the state’s emerging cultural establishment, they did not make up a majority of California’s population. This meant they were denied the political hegemony they had achieved in the Northern states, from Boston to Minneapolis.

According to the US Census, less than 30% of Californians in 1860 were born in Yankee-dominated states. A third were born in California, and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”. And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures: the Yankees and the Scots-Irish emigrants of Greater Appalachia.

Unlike the community-minded Puritans, the Scots-Irish were fierce defenders of personal liberty. Their love of freedom was born in the rugged borderlands between England and Scotland, a contested region of unremitting warfare throughout the Middle Ages. Vicious military raids on behalf of a stream of duelling Scottish and English monarchs were a routine part of life. The poor grew used to watching their homes razed to the ground, their family members tortured or killed. Without a government to lean on, families aligned themselves into warrior clans and waged blood feuds to settle disputes. So despised were the inhabitants of this border region that in the 16th century the parliaments of both Scotland and England passed a law declaring that “All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock.”

In the 17th century, with the two kingdoms unified under James VI, the borderlands were finally pacified through a campaign of state-sanctioned mass murder. Many of the borderland’s ruffians headed to Ireland, from where they were banished once again to the colonies. Many more fled voluntarily, seeking freedom in America.

These fugitives arrived primarily through the port of Philadelphia, but quickly fled to the backcountry. In the mountains and hollows of the Appalachian wilderness, they could at last enjoy their independence — and continue in their violent folkways. Fischer describes one traditional Scots-Irish “rough and tumble” match between a Kentuckian and a West Virginian. Even after the Virginian gouged out the eyes of the Kentuckian, Fischer narrates, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the “Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears and nose, gave in”.

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, as America drove relentlessly West, the Scots-Irish acted as the new nation’s advance guard. Instead of waiting for the US military to defeat the Indians before moving onto their land, as the Yankees did, the backcountry settlers waged war upon the natives by themselves. They were driven, however, less by a desire to expand American civilisation than to escape it. Fleeing the government’s encroachment upon the frontier, they pushed West — and eventually wound up in California, Oregon, and Washington.

They brought their belligerent folkways with them. California in the 19th century was one of the most violent places on the continent. As the historian Elliott West has noted, this was a period of racial re-ordering in the state, during which Anglo-Americans asserted their place at the top of the hierarchy. In the middle decades of that century, lynchings in California — of Hispanic Californios, principally — were at least as common as lynchings of black people in the Jim Crow South. In 1854, the murder rate in Los Angeles was 56 times that of New York City.

As on the Atlantic seaboard, the Scots-Irish settled in the mountains and valleys rather than in the coastal port cities. To this day, their individualistic worldview continues to shape the politics of rural California, with its populist agrarian politics, its small-government conservatism, and its distrust of the coast-dwelling liberal elite. But their influence wasn’t limited to the inland regions. The Scots-Irish pioneers infused California’s hegemonic brand of progressivism — which one might describe as fundamentally Yankee — with a touch of backcountry libertarianism, and in doing so, transformed the politics of the state.

Perhaps the clearest example of this ideological fusion was the apotheosis of California progressivism: the Sixties. The closest the Yankees ever got to uncontested national political power was the New Deal era, which brought the entire country into alignment with the Yankee vision of liberty. Yet the Sixties saw a generation of young people seek to dismantle the social and political machinery that the New Deal had built — and that spark was lit on the campus of that hallowed Yankee institution, the University of California, Berkeley.

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The Berkeley student revolutionaries were inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, but after facing resistance to their civil rights activism from university administrators, their cause transformed into something more personal. The University of California system was the pinnacle of Yankee social engineering: a massive, egalitarian government institution that transformed the individual into the ideal citizen. Against the backdrop of Jim Crow and then the Vietnam War, however, that system became odious to the post-materialist, middle-class agitators of the New Left. Mario Savio’s plea in Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in 1964 was an explicit rejection of Yankee social conformity:

“Well I ask you to consider — if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the Board of Directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I tell you something — the faculty are a bunch of employees and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be […] made into any product! Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organised labour, be they anyone! We’re human beings!”

Over the next decade, Berkeley’s libertarian strain became ever more central to the evolving counterculture. Activists resisted not just the politics and the mass industrial economic structures of the era, but mainstream American culture altogether. They grew their hair, renounced all forms of authority, and eventually fled the cities to establish self-sufficient agricultural cooperatives in the countryside. In this, they followed the well-worn path of the Scots-Irish settlers of the Appalachian backcountry. The conservative, rural Californian communities that those settlers had established a century before may have had little affection for their new hippy neighbours, but they were, in fact, animated by the same American spirit and the same animosity for Yankee authoritarianism.

As the New Left faded in the Seventies, its anti-establishment zeal was absorbed into Silicon Valley’s startup culture, and into a distinctly West Coast style of progressivism. This is reflected in liberal California’s instinctive contempt for the police, its high tolerance for visible social disorder, its celebration of cultural non-conformity, and its theatrical embrace of hedonism, all of which are antithetical to the Puritan ideal. At the same time, Californian progressivism has retained its Yankee predilection for top-down social regulation, government activism, moral surveillance, and cultural evangelism.

From time to time, as in the Sixties, this ideological hybrid yields a politics that is vital and new. But more often, it manifests as a distinctively dysfunctional kind of progressive politics that sets the state apart from its Yankee cousins. There is no better example of this than the way that the state manages its mental health crisis. California once ran a vast Department of Mental Hygiene, but in 1967, shocked by conditions in its 14 asylums, state legislators all but banned involuntary commitment of the insane in a law they characterised as a “Magna Carta” for California’s mentally ill. In doing so, the state swung from an excess of Yankee-style social control to the opposite extreme: a hardcore civil libertarian regime that has left the mentally ill languishing on city sidewalks. This right to suffer from drug addiction and psychosis on the street without intervention from the government may constitute “freedom” in the Scots-Irish backcountry, but a traditional Yankee would not recognise it as such.

Drug policy is another case-in-point. California’s libertarian attitude toward recreational drug use began in the Sixties. Today, its ramifications can be seen in San Francisco’s Tenderloin and South of Market districts and Skid Row in Los Angeles, where not only drug use but open drug dealing is decriminalised, in part as a result of Proposition 47, a progressive ballot initiative that California voters passed in 2014. In San Francisco’s influential activist circles, drug-dealing is hardly considered a crime at all, and drug enforcement is deemed an act of state repression against the poor. The assumption, which would be right at home in the Appalachian backcountry, is that the government is nothing more than a malign apparatus of coercion. Those same activists, however, also believe in the government’s responsibility to provide expansive services and treatment to those who want it — reflecting the political philosophy of colonial New England.

California’s convoluted policies toward drugs and mental illness have combined to exacerbate its colossal homelessness problem, setting it apart, once again, from progressive Yankee states. California has the highest rate of unsheltered homelessness, followed by Oregon, whose settlement history and politics are very similar to those of Northern California. By contrast, New York City, whose upstate region was settled by Yankees, has the third lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness in America. Its success in bringing its homeless population indoors is thanks to its “right to shelter” law — a classic top-down Yankee solution to an urgent social problem. Neither California nor Oregon has such a law. What’s more, homeless advocates on the West Coast fight to prevent city governments from infringing on homeless people’s freedom to sleep in tents on the street, a liberty that would be easily understood by the Scots-Irish of Appalachia but would perplex the Puritans of New England.

The result of this inscrutable ideology is a state that fails to fulfil the most elementary obligation of government: the provision of basic social order. You see it everywhere in California, in the tent encampments that line the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica and the dusty sidewalks of Fresno and Bakersfield. California is where two fundamentally incompatible Anglo traditions merged, yielding a unique kind of social dysfunction that’s as indelible a part of the state as the coastal cliffs and the redwood forests.

The progressive Mission District in San Francisco has become ground zero for a form of Lefty nativism that scorns newcomers and most forms of economic growth. In a city renowned for its inclusive diversity and technological innovation, it is here that a bitter racialised activism has taken root.

Roberto Hernandez, self-styled “mayor of the Mission” and candidate on the ballot in local elections this year, is one of those activists. He has been waging a decade-long war to keep the neighbourhood, in his words, “a Latino barrio”. He has campaigned furiously against shuttles for tech workers, new restaurants and bars, and even a low-cost bike-sharing programme — all in the name of battling gentrification and those developments that might alter the demographics of the predominantly Latino area.

Plans for hundreds of new housing units at vacant lots or blighted areas were defeated by a Hernandez-led coalition. Developers pitched nearly 400 below-market rate homes as part of their proposals, but Hernandez has said that he opposes anything that is not built at “100% affordable” rates. He demands vouchers for any black or Latino resident priced out of the city to first return before new residents are allowed to arrive.

“Delay, delay, delay,” said Hernandez of his strategy for stopping a proposed mixed housing development on South Van Ness Avenue by 26th Street. “Until we kill it,” another activist added.

In a barn-burning speech in 2015, Hernandez decried the influx of thousands of privileged “white techies” who he said gallivant around Dolores Park with the audacity to openly drink wine and smoke marijuana in full view of cops.

The hostility towards those perceived as racial outsiders is palpable. Several non-Latino small business owners, have cited ethnic intimidation from neighbourhood groups in the Mission. In one instance, an organisation tied to Hernandez helped block a Russian immigrant-owned bakery from leasing a vacant storefront previously occupied by a Mexican panaderia over the baker’s lack of Latino heritage. The pressure worked — over the last four years, the location has remained boarded up and bereft of any tenants.

Meanwhile, the Hernandez faction has placed onerous restrictions on various forms of policing and ploughed hundreds of millions of dollars into failed homeless assistance programmes — the results of which are now world famous, as images of the city’s urban decay and untreated addiction-mental health crisis routinely go viral.

The Mission is now hardly gentrified. Rather than a hotbed of investment, 56 storefronts are empty and lots once viewed as prime real estate sit abandoned, accumulating trash and graffiti. Car break-ins and burglaries abound and drive-by shootings by gang members, once a relic of the distant past, have returned over the past year. The mass transit BART station is now a daily market for stolen goods, with young men hawking electronics and shampoo bottles still featuring their tags from the Best Buy and Walgreens stores.

New elections, then, represent an opportunity to shift this status quo. With the mayor’s office and several pivotal supervisor seats up for grabs, Hernandez and other far-Left candidates are vying to represent the Mission. Jackie Fielder, who has called to defund the police and restrict building projects, similarly never skips an opportunity to tout her candidacy on identitarian grounds as “a queer, Indigenous-Latina”. Fielder or Hernandez are favoured to win, but unlike previous years, these types of candidates might not be a shoo-in.

Because for the first time in recent memory, moderate liberals seeking pro-growth policies, less bureaucratic obstacles, and commonsense policing have organised and are pushing back. They have been on the march over the past two years, winning elections to remove the city’s anti-law enforcement District Attorney and several education commissioners who prioritised renaming schools over the basics of teaching children. Despite the doom loop narrative, change may be on the horizon.

The far-Left campaigns, however, offer the tempting allure of scapegoat politics. They blame nebulous landlords and tech workers and “gentrifiers” for every affliction facing the city, claiming that only they alone can finally prioritise the Mission’s true “natives”, as Hernandez has argued.

Such storylines not only sidestep scrutiny of the failed policies of the past decade, but obscure a more vibrant history than these one-dimensional identity politics might suggest. The Mission’s past is rich with cycles of migration and economic growth.

Once home to indigenous communities, the land next saw the arrival of Spanish missionary explorers who gave the neighbourhood its name with the first Catholic church. The gold rush brought waves of Scottish, German, Italian, English and Scandinavian arrivals, migrants who built the ornately decorated Victorians that line the main boulevards. Successful merchants and traders constructed stately homes, while the business corridors of Mission were self-sufficient centres of commerce. Following the 1906 fire, the neighbourhood swelled with those displaced by the disaster.

The Irish arrived in large numbers by the turn of the century, filling its eastern factories and warehouses with working-class labour. St. Peter’s Church in the Mission — now one of the largest Spanish-speaking congregations in the Bay Area — was once a bastion of the strong Irish majority.

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It was not until after the Second World War that many residents of European descent began moving out to be replaced by immigrants from Latin American countries. The Latino migration has its own storied and fascinating history, one that is vital to the Mission’s identity. It is a community that has welcomed asylum seekers and those displaced by foreign conflict, and produced wonderful Mission-centric food and music inspired by far-flung cultures. The Chipotle burrito is said to have been inspired by local taquerias.

Hernandez, to his credit, has helped organise the widely attended Carnival, a daylong parade displaying the many cultures that make up Latin America, an event that has become a signature festival of the community. And he has pushed for vital job training and arts programmes for Mission youth, efforts that should be applauded. Yet he myopically views the neighbourhood as a territory claimed by one racial group, to the exclusion of all else. The post-dot-com arrival of Asian and young entrepreneurs as well as artists of every ethnic background should be welcomed equally. The stubborn rejection of new housing and business is a race to the bottom, ignoring credible economic research which shows that depressing the housing supply actually raises housing costs.

Many fear that any new influx of residents might threaten the neighbourhood’s character. But such anxiety is fuelled by the same concerns over any ethnic change. For an ultra-progressive sector of San Francisco, the mindset is downright reactionary.

The mix and blend of cultures and backgrounds is what makes the neighbourhood unique. The grand Lutheran church on 22nd Street and the breweries on Potrero Hill were built by 19th-century German immigrants. Now, the church is a Buddhist temple and nunnery, and the largest local brewery was recently purchased by a yoghurt billionaire of Kurdish ancestry. The most popular Mission burritos now include a Filipino fusion variety. Among the most generous donors to philanthropy in the neighbourhood are software developers born to Taiwanese and Indian immigrants, as well as white Americans born in New Jersey and Illinois who now call San Francisco home.

The anger at the arrival of white neighbours is misplaced. Decades ago, the inverse arguments were made to denounce “white flight”. Such double-standards only serve to create a nasty racial barrier, where superficial differences take precedence over behaviour.

At a forum earlier this month, taking place at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, the progressive candidates jostled for racial authenticity points, repeatedly reminding the audience of their Latino heritage and competing to fight the influence of outsiders, especially housing speculators and landlords. Hernandez opened his remarks with a nod to the venue, noting that he helped open this institution, a testament to his ethnic appeal.

Left unmentioned, though, were the venue’s humble roots. A century ago, it was Shaff’s Furniture Company, a small business run by German-Jewish immigrants who were known in the community for their relief efforts directed towards refugees fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. And here is the irony at the heart of the Mission’s politics. For a community so transfixed on identity, its representatives fail to appreciate the actual history and diversity of the neighbourhood. Focusing on ethnic scapegoats and powered by racial chauvinism, it is fiddling while the Mission burns.

Where I live, across San Francisco Bay in Oakland, the homelessness has also become a favourite subject for YouTube video sleuths. But instead of capturing it at ground level, from the juddering view of a camera held by a pedestrian, or through the window of a car moving along a curb in voyeuristic slowness, these videographers often do their thing while moving at the speed of traffic, panning hungrily along a blighted street, or they send up a drone to gather a vast scene in an aerial sweep. San Francisco homelessness is defined by depressing human detail. Oakland homelessness is captured in aggregate terms, by visual reference to its physical scale.

Until the city dismantled it in 2023, the vast Wood Street encampment in West Oakland was our most notorious emblem of homelessness, and a favourite subject of videos shot from the sky. When the Mosswood encampment in North Oakland reaches its maximum population — which it does periodically before it’s cleared again — one makes sense of it while driving past at 30 miles an hour. This perspective shows you something that Google Maps identifies as a park but what looks to you like, well, tents, just a wide field covered by tents. 

The most familiar and ominous form of homelessness in Oakland, however, has become the vehicle encampment. A few small clusters of vehicles have gathered in my North Oakland neighbourhood, lines of dirty campers and battered cars seeking shade under an elevated freeway, but poor East Oakland has it the worst. There, such encampments have taken over long stretches of busy street, visiting already-distressed neighbourhoods with huge living sculptures of ugliness and disorder — cars filled with clothes and junk; hulking RVs parked for months at a time, drug and sex deals conducted streetside; trash gathering around and between the vehicles, and lots of new crime. Recently, the city had to replace traffic lights at an East Oakland intersection with stop signs, because people, presumably from the vehicle encampment close by, were constantly stealing the cables to sell the copper wire inside. 

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These urban nightmares provoke understandable calls for the city to show some leadership and clear the bigger, more dangerous, more embarrassing encampments, but Wood Street offers a cautionary lesson that, in turn, places the larger problem of homelessness in an unhappy, if clarifying, light. When the city cleared Wood Street, it hoped to move many residents into shelters but many of the homeless, and many of the vehicles that could be started and driven off before the tow trucks and bulldozers and forklifts arrived, just moved themselves to other parts of West Oakland. When officials clear the encampments in East Oakland, we can expect the same thing to happen. This highlights a troubling problem with homeless people that no one has managed to solve — their insistence on being somewhere rather than nowhere.

The attempt to solve this problem of where the homeless are is what brought the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, before the United States Supreme Court in Grants Pass v. Johnson. Two local ordinances in Grants Pass prohibit “camping” on public property — one applying to living and sleeping outside, the other to living and sleeping in a motor vehicle. A lower court has ruled that the Grants Pass ordinances, and other laws that make it illegal for homeless people to camp and sleep in certain places, amount to “cruel and unusual punishment” — as proscribed by the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. The underlying legal notion the lower court fixed upon is the distinction between “status” and “conduct”. Court precedent holds that it’s reasonable to enjoin people from doing something, but it is unreasonable to punish them for being something, for their status, a condition they can’t control that to some extent defines them. The court argued that if shelter is available for the homeless, then the “camping” in question is conduct, something chosen, which it’s reasonable for a city to prohibit. If no shelter is available, then this sort of camping is not conduct but simply a necessary entailment — necessary because everyone needs to sleep — of the status of being homeless, which it’s unreasonable to punish.  

The court will be making these careful distinctions between status and conduct, what civic measures are and aren’t reasonable. But in 2013, Grants Pass city council president Lily Morgan made clear that the underlying concern of the ordinances is the one I mention above, not so much the existence and metaphysical nature of homeless people but their location. “The point,” Morgan said, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.” It’s better for the homeless to be there than here. Most people agree.

But not all people. In San Francisco, for example, non-profit executives, public health academics, and government bureaucrats who serve the homeless don’t want to send the homeless on down the road. These influential figures work to portray the homeless as genuine residents of the city, to defend their rights to be where they are, wherever that is. This approach may sound humane, but over the long run it may be as ineffective, and indeed as inhumane, as the other approach of sending the homeless down the road.  

This matter of where the homeless are from has become very salient in San Francisco, especially in the city’s notorious Tenderloin District, where the open, obvious, unashamed daylight commerce in and consumption of drugs provokes understandable questions. Might it be that – sort of like the hippies in the Sixties who flocked to the city for its freewheeling atmosphere — a good number of these drug-addicted homeless people aren’t actually from San Francisco? 

For the city’s influential homeless advocates, to raise this suspicion is — in the words of Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness — to engage in the “othering of unhoused people”. And she’s right. Many people really do make an “othering” sort of distinction between those who met misfortune in their city and became homeless there and those — those others, if you will — who came to their city and live on its streets because they wanted to use drugs there. These people would like to move some of San Francisco’s homeless on down the road.

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In any case, official data roughly, apparently, support the idea of which Friedenbach is so protective — that San Francisco’s homeless are mostly San Franciscans. For example, a 2022 survey shows that 71% of San Francisco homeless became homeless while they were San Francisco residents, and only 17% had been in the city for a year or less. Homeless advocates cite these numbers in a peremptory spirit, as if they simply settle the matter, but they actually invite a fair amount of questioning and scepticism. For example, homeless people are viewed as being from the city if they were living there “at the time they most recently became homeless” but this phrasing pretty much forces you to wonder how much prior homelessness in other cities is hiding in this 71% number. 

But the numbers aren’t great even if you believe them. Even if fully 71% of the city’s homeless are “from San Francisco”, 29% of the city’s 8,323 homeless people is still a lot of people. At the lowest estimate, 2,413 of San Francisco’s homeless people came to the city already homeless. And 17% means that 1,414 of the city’s homeless people are newly arrived. That’s a lot of newly arrived homeless people in a fairly small city. 

From there it’s a reasonable assumption — given the current drug epidemic and the city’s vigorous “harm reduction” infrastructure, which dispenses free drug paraphernalia and exerts serious political and legal pressure to minimise enforcement of crimes associated with drugs and homelessness — that drug addicts are overrepresented among these thousands of recent arrivals. That is, it’s likely that at least hundreds of drug addicts from other places are coming to the city every year, and especially to the drug-ridden and drug-tolerant Tenderloin. Anecdotes from the neighbourhood support this modest assumption — such as San Francisco’s police chief noting that, in a recent drug crackdown in the Tenderloin, only three of 46 people arrested were from San Francisco, and the series of very affecting YouTube interviews called “Soft White Underbelly” whose Tenderloin subjects very much paint a picture of the district as a drug destination for outsiders.  

These drug migrants to the Tenderloin may account for a small or even marginal portion of the city’s overall homeless population, but from the standpoint of its lawfulness and civic order, and of the survival of its small businesses and its tourism industry, and of the security and pride and happiness of its citizens, it’s not marginal at all. It’s central. The Tenderloin is in the centre of the city. 

Activists and academic commentators often portray any concern with this aspect of homelessness as morally shallow and politically nefarious, a desire to render the homeless “invisible”. But the wishes of shopkeepers trying to keep their little businesses alive, and parents whose children have to pass those appalling scenes on the way to school, are not abstract or hypothetical. These people aren’t shills of international capital. It’s not to erase the needs and suffering of the homeless to consider the humble interests of these everyday citizens when we decide where to encourage the law-breaking homeless to pitch their tents and sell and use their drugs.

We’ve travelled to an interesting place, culturally and politically, when not wanting to step in human faeces on city sidewalks is considered morally frivolous. To put it another way, it’s possible that harm reduction is good for the drug-addicted homeless in the Tenderloin and bad for the city of San Francisco, and what we have is a political conflict, in which open contestation and compromise are necessary, rather than the dogmatism and language policing of the city’s homelessness functionaries. Then again, people seem to get a lot worse once they’ve been in the Tenderloin for any length of time. Encouraging more people to join them doesn’t seem like harm reduction. If bureaucrats and non-profit executives can be deceptive about homeless in-migration and blithe about its bad effects, their opponents can generate a tunnel-visioned portrait of homelessness that also hinders a clear understanding of the problem and its possible remedies — which threatens to leave us choosing between maintaining the homeless where they are and merely moving them from place to place, rather than reducing their number. 

California contrarian Michael Shellenberger, recent candidate for governor and author of San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, has built something of a movement from pointing out the folly of Left-wing approaches to homelessness, and of progressive governance more generally. Shellenberger argues that homelessness is not, as progressives will tell you, a problem of poverty. It is, he says both in his book and in a growing number of online videos, a problem of drug addiction and mental illness. This latter claim is substantially true, but only within his very narrow framework. That is, his implicit comparison (I say “implicit” because his work contains little if any systematic demographic comparison) is between the homeless and non-homeless in cities — especially Los Angeles and San Francisco — already characterised by high rates of homelessness, as well as by nice weather and progressive governance. Within this framework, individual pathologies such as addiction and psychosis account for a lot of variation between who is and isn’t homeless, and thus seem to explain homelessness per se. And progressives, occupying safe seats of influence in these places, are easily blamed for their undeniable failures of vision and policy, the squalor and madness they seem happy to tolerate, if not actively curate. But the framework itself is conceived in a way that isolates individual variables like addiction and psychosis, and leaves broader economic ones to the side, barely considered.

When, instead of comparing individuals within high-homelessness cities with progressive power structures and Mediterranean climates, we compare rates of homelessness across different cities or regions in the United States, a very different set of variables rises to the surface, or a very different variable: housing costs. Yes, being psychotic or addicted to a powerful drug, along with being recently incarcerated and newly unemployed and disabled and a victim of domestic violence, increases your chances of becoming homeless wherever you live in America. But it increases these chances a lot more in some places than in others.

That is, when we compare rates of homelessness across different cities and regions, the differences do not correlate with levels of drug addiction and mental illness in these places. West Virginia, for example, has very high rates of drug addiction and very low rates of homelessness. These differences do, however, strongly correlate with housing costs. Drug addiction and psychosis are far more likely to cause homelessness in and around expensive San Francisco or Los Angeles than they are around more affordable, and progressive-led, Chicago and Detroit, or warmer-weather cities like Houston or Charlotte, North Carolina. Boston has one of the highest rates of homelessness in America because, though quite cold and snowy in winter, it’s a very expensive place to live.

This claim might seem counterintuitive to people who’ve zeroed in on mental illness and drug addiction as the obvious causes of homelessness. How can psychotics and drug addicts make rent? But New York housing analyst Stephen Smith, who posts as @MarketUrbanism on X, gives an illuminating gloss on how it applies at the individual level. “Fun fact,” Smith tweeted in 2021, “homeless people with mental illnesses and drug addictions are humans who can interact with the housing market. They often have families who can take them in (if they have room), and are eligible for housing subsidies (if housing is available).” 

These and related expedients for housing the hardest cases are much more accessible where there’s more, and thus more affordable, housing. They’re not ideal, but the gulf between even these marginal housing arrangements and living on the streets — especially if you want to keep the addiction and mental illness from getting much, much worse — is huge. As Smith puts it: “Sometimes you see somebody talking to themselves on the street (normal life thing), and sometimes you see somebody who smells terrible and has what looks like rotting flesh talking to themselves on the street (scary city thing). The difference is housing.” 

Somewhat depressingly, this is not a story of poverty or weak economies. It’s a story of affluence and economic vigour. American cities and regions with the highest rates of homelessness — such as New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and their environs — are all, or recently have been, “superstar cities”. They’re employment destinations, coastal cities that many people move to over short timescales. Many of these new people are highly educated and high-earning, and, when they arrive, they bid up rents and home prices. The superstar performance of these local economies may boost wages for their poorest citizens, but they drive up housing costs a lot more. 

The other part of the story is familiar to anyone who follows these issues: failure to build additional housing to meet the new demand. This, in turn, is largely a story of incumbent homeowners and their elected representatives using zoning, environmental, architectural and other pretexts and regulatory means to block new housing, especially multi-family housing, and thereby protect the inflated values of existing homes (like mine). Sometimes, as Shellenberger points out in San Fransicko, this reflects the hypocrisy of land-rich progressives in desirable cities, who put out social-justice yard signs and then make sure new homes for poor people don’t get built anywhere near them. But it’s also the work of conservatives, who invoke “local control” to defy state laws that oblige their roomy suburbs to approve a few apartment buildings. It’s fun to mock the limousine liberals of San Francisco and Santa Monica, but many of the most anti-housing members of the California legislature are Republicans.

For those who still want a solid reason to mock Leftists, a crucial anti-housing force at the city level is the teamwork of urban socialists and anti-gentrification activists, for whom landlords and real-estate developers have a sort of demonic status. These are people who’ve made being deeply confused about housing markets into a guiding principle. Given a choice between “no new housing” and “new housing someone might make a profit on” they consistently choose “no new housing”. Then, when rents go up and gentrification intensifies and more people end up homeless, they wave their hands and say capitalism did it.

One clear signal that housing costs drive much of the homelessness where I live comes from the vehicle encampments blighting my city’s streets, specifically the growing number of those trailers and vans and RVs that were built for people to camp in. For as long as those things have been a presence and a problem in Oakland, they’ve also been a mystery. People see them and wonder, “Why are they here?” “Where did they come from?” After all, owners of recreational vehicles are an unlikely class of people to be so conspicuously represented among the homeless.

But the people in those RVs don’t own them. They rent them, from people who’ve come to be called “vanlords”. These energetic businesspeople buy up old trailers and RVs and either drive or tow them to unfortunate neighbourhoods in cities like Oakland. There they enter into informal rental agreements with homeless people. These campers, and the people who own and rent them out, occupy a tier of the official housing market that should exist but, thanks to the efforts of high-minded urban fanatics and small-minded suburban Nimbys, does not. 

Their growing presence should also be a warning. If you think landlords are a bad influence on your city, just wait and see what vanlords have in store for it.

Unlike the high-rise “transactional” cities of New York, Chicago and San Francisco, all groaning under record levels of vacancy and massive investor losses, London never had an official “downtown”, with all major business clustered in dense formations. Rather, as one observer noted in 1843, London’s development occurred organically, surrounding “itself suburb by suburb like onions 50 to rope”. Of course, parts of central London have suffered significant losses — see Canary Wharf and Spitalfields — but the capital’s archipelago of villages have mostly survived. Far more than its great American rivals, London is actually increasing its population.

This, let’s not forget, comes in the wake of Brexit, which many feared would turn the City into a tertiary player. Yet even here, despite the loss of listings from some prominent firms such as ARM, London is thriving: it has since welcomed the financial powerhouses of Bloomberg, Citadel and Alantra into its embrace.

Crucial to London’s success is its prospering technology and media industries, which, notes Tony Travers, a visiting professor at LSE, increasingly drive the capital’s economy. Its creative sector, for instance, now accounts for almost 15% of jobs in London, up from 11% in 2010. In the realm of tech, one recent study suggested that London beats New York and San Francisco. Indeed, Microsoft plans to open an AI hub in the city, part of a $2.5-billion investment strategy, following other firms such as OpenAI. According to the Harvard Business Review, this makes London both first in the world for talent attraction and the top destination for foreign investment in financial and professional services.

None of this is to say that London’s streets are paved with gold. Flick through the capital’s Evening Standard and you’ll find report after report about surges in crime. Even so, notes Munira Mirza, who served as policy director for former prime minister and London mayor Boris Johnson: “London is doing better in many ways than a lot of US cities… But for Londoners, the perception is that crime, street cleanliness, housing costs, road congestion, etc, have been getting worse because public services and infrastructure have not expanded to match the growing population.”

And yet, she observes, overall crime rates have fallen under London’s last three mayors and, in terms of crime and anti-social behaviour, levels are well below the national average. Travers partly credits this to the fact that the UK has not experienced an American-style “opioid crisis” or “defund-the-police moment”. As a result, London saw 104 homicides last year, equivalent to 12 per million people, compared to 45.4 per million in New York, one of America’s safer cities.

A similar story is playing out in London’s classrooms, particularly when it comes to ethnic-minority performance. In one diverse district in Chicago, not one student can do grade-level math. According to data from the Illinois State Board of Education, 30 schools last year, 22 of which are in the Chicago area, failed to lift even one student to grade-level reading.

In London, by contrast, state schools are consistently improving, particularly in recently developed free schools. Moreover, immigrants are actually lifting the performance of London’s state schools above their counterparts in the rest of the country. “London’s schools are better now because of the immigrants,” suggests Mirza. The proximity of world-class universities — in London, Cambridge and Oxford — not only helps jumpstart elite industries such as tech and media, but has also attracted generations of ambitious foreigners who then choose to stay in London.

It is difficult to imagine how any rival city-states — including Singapore — could operate so successfully without the interference of a powerful central bureaucracy. In Dubai, there is no real recourse from the wrath of Sheikh Mohammed. In India, corruption, pollution and lower life expectancy make Mumbai or Delhi less than likely locales for rich investors and skilled professionals. Beirut was once promising, but is now largely a sectarian ruin. As for Latin America, even business-friendly Sao Paolo is now in poor repute.

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Similarly, none of the other huge Asian cities — Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei — are likely to become sufficiently cosmopolitan to compete with London or New York. All remain essentially insular, with few migrants and a culture that is less than welcoming to outsiders. During the Eighties, it was possible to imagine Tokyo, driven by the rapid expansion of the Japanese economy, to claim a top spot — but today, despite its wealth and size, few would consider it a dominant international capital. Worse yet are the prospects for China’s cities, as well as CCP-strangled Hong Kong, arguably the most likely hotspot for Asian capital and once among the most valued office markets in the world.

Perhaps the least appreciated advantage of London lies in its historical inertia. “London,” wrote Ford Madox Ford in 1905, “is the world town, not because of its immense size but its assimilative powers.” In just one generation, the French Huguenot, the eastern European Jew, the Hindu brahmin, Muslim merchant, the Sikh soldier, the Caribbean or African can all become Londoners, all attracted, as Ford put it, “a glamour like that of a great and green gaming table”.

This stems from two foundational factors: the legacy of Empire and, more importantly, the notions of due process, privacy and property. It is here that London particularly diverges from its offspring in the developing world, and even, to some extent, in North America. London, whose origins lie in Roman Britain, simply projects the old Latin concept of civitas better than any of its rivals.

In the past, the capital, like many other older cities, pushed its version of modernity, with high-rise towers and the promotion of “swinging London” deployed as a rebuke to its stiffer imperial past. Yet it also fostered a web of relations and open attitudes, making London a natural home for migrants, rich and poor. Although some ethnic communities still cluster, largely in Britain’s north, London’s newcomers are now part of the municipal fabric. There are few of the banlieues one sees in Paris. “You don’t get a lot of the ghetto vibe here,” observes Mirza.

Mayor Sadiq Khan, himself the son of an immigrant bus driver, may be less than competent, but he is no Bill de Blasio, who worked overtime to destroy New York, or Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, America’s leading urban arsonist. The capital has its problems, but it continues to prosper: a city whose past paradoxically guarantees its future. London, as the saying goes, is a bad habit to lose.

The strange saga began a week ago, when the board of the nonprofit decided to fire its AI guru and cultish leader, Sam Altman. But when the 700+ staffers of OpenAI wrote an open letter saying that they too would go with the ousted CEO, he was swiftly reinstated.

The hairpin plot twists of this power struggle have been breathtakingly hard to follow. Reports are now surfacing that Altman had announced that he was on the brink of achieving a significant AI breakthrough only the day before he was fired. A letter was sent to the Board advising them that this tech discovery — an algorithm known as Q* (pronounced Q-Star) — could “threaten humanity”. The algorithm was deemed to be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), a system smarter than humans.

Altman’s dream was to then marry AGI with an integrated supply chain of AI chips, AI phones, AI robotics, and the world’s largest collections of data and LLMs (large language models). Its working name is Tigris.

To achieve this, Altman would need vast computing resources and funding. Perhaps that is why reports suggest he has been talking to Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, Softbank, and Cerebras — which now makes the fastest AI chips in the world. Cerebras chips are big. The size of a dinner plate and more powerful than any traditional chips.They also have Swarm X software, which allows them to knit together into clusters that create a computational fabric that can handle the massive volume of data needed to build better AI.

Cerebras represents a great threat to the manufacturer of the world’s fastest supercomputers and AI chips, Nvidia. The most powerful of these supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, are central to the defence of the American nation and are kept at the highly protected nuclear facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But almost every big organisation depends on Nvidia chips or computers. A year ago, Nvidia was worth $300 billion; now it is worth $1.35 trillion — the most dramatic increase in the value of a Nasdaq firm since 1971. Yet Cerebras has designed a chip 20-times faster than Nvidia’s. This is why some say the Cerebras IPO will kill Nvidia. Now we begin to see a national-security component to this story.

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While the West has been focused on generative AI that has no cognitive ability, China has taken a different path. It has built the world’s only Quantum optical computer, which can solve in 47 seconds a problem that would take a traditional supercomputer 240 years.

Similarly, Altman wants to build a new generation of computers for the AI era. In July, he partnered with Cerebras and the Emirati incubator G42 to unveil the Condor Galaxy, the “World’s Largest Supercomputer for AI Training”. G42 is behind the world’s largest Arabic LLM (Large Language model), which, like ChatGPT, generates new linguistic content, and is also working with Amazon to gather and process DNA information to develop massive new global genomics, proteomics and biobanking services.

To an AI data scientist, the data collected for these innovations — the languages, nationalities and DNA involved — are honeypots brimming with opportunity. The West doesn’t have the mechanisms or the mores to gather such a quantity of meaningful data or the money to finance what Altman wants. But international investors do, including the Emiratis, the Chinese — who are already very interested in Altman — and all the others backing G42.

Moreover, if the world wants AI designed for true diversity, if it wants medical and financial products created to suit the broadest range of humans, then this will only happen where that diverse data can be found. It’s not going to be created in the US, where young, white male tech bros all design AI, and the FDA-approved testing of medicines pretty much excludes anyone but white males.

When AI people say they worry about Altman’s lack of “guardrails”, they mean he is willing to take the risk that he builds something that, like a Djinni, cannot be put back in a bottle. He is prepared to build something that might not be controllable. He is like Oppenheimer who was willing to smash atoms to win the Second World War, even though he might have ignited the atmosphere and incinerated Earth to do it.

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By this measure, Altman is a mad scientist who will put us all at risk to achieve a historic breakthrough. Hence the letter to the board of OpenAI by some staff, along with others keen for the world to take note that the huge staff attrition rate at OpenAI was not due to “bad culture fits” — rather, this was due to “a disturbing pattern of deceit and manipulation”, “self deception” and the “insatiable pursuit of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)”. For Altman, this “pursuit” entailed incorporating superintelligence inside a robot’s body. Which, presumably, is why OpenAI started investing in humanoid robotics made by IX in Norway back in March.

You can understand why the OpenAI Board might have become uneasy when they realised that Altman was racing around the Middle East and Asia trying to raise billions for this vision. But, as Bloomberg wrote, “these are not “side ventures”, they are “core ventures”. This is about redefining the cutting-edge of chip design, data collection and storage, computational power, and the interface between AI and physical robotics.

This new supply chain would not only challenge America’s IT infrastructure; it could be facilitating the diminishment of US power. It implies innovation is shifting outside of the US and acquiring data that is beyond the reach of regulators. No doubt the US authorities looked at all this and saw Altman collaborating with G42 as equivalent to fraternising with the enemy because it is seen to be backed by the folks who own ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok (G42 has a significant stake in them). They saw that G42 owns Pax AI, which some say is Pegasus (the notorious spyware) reconfigured. Was Altman under surveillance as he pursued this grand vision? How could he not be?

The truth is Altman does not believe in borders. He has one goal: to build the best AI possible. He has a vision that probably worried his board and unnerved Washington. Given that the US is trying to slow down technological innovation in other parts of the world by restricting the sale of the best chips and computers, it is hugely challenging when he says: “We’ll build our own stuff — in fact we’ll build our own supply chain and ecosystem.” So much for ITAR, the US system for banning the export of critical tech.

There was a time when an American would have been arrested for selling such protected high-tech innovations abroad. Today, can you stop a smart American from innovating outside the US? Can you tell entrepreneurs not to take foreign money and not to partner with foreign firms? Can you demand that they stop challenging existing firms like Nvidia? No. Not when others are offering so much money.

What took place over the past week at OpenAI confirms that none of the young leaders of this new AI space see borders. As Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems said: AI “isn’t a Silicon Valley thing, it isn’t even a US thing, it’s now all over the world — it’s a global phenomenon”. Yet, the US authorities and its allies will have known the significant challenge to Western notions of security and control that Altman’s vision presents.

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Two days after Xi and Biden met on November 15 and agreed to play nice, Altman was fired. The Daily Dot suggests that Altman was terminated because Xi hinted to Biden that Altman’s OpenAI was surreptitiously involved in a data-gathering deal with a firm called D2 (Double Dragon), which some thought to be a Chinese Cyber Army Group. David Covucci reported, “This D2 group has the largest and biggest crawling/indexing/ scanning capacity in the world 10 times more than Alphabet Inc (Google), hence the deal so Open AI could get their hands on vast quantities of data for training after exhausting their other options.”

There is something deeper happening here. China has already forged an AGI path of its own. They are avoiding generative AI in favour of cognitive AI. They want it to think independently of prompts. China is already giving AI control over satellites and weaponised drones. No doubt, Altman would love to work with that capability and the Chinese would love to work with him.

Could that be why Larry Summers, the Former Secretary of the Treasury with connections to US politics and business, also ended up on the new OpenAI Board? Perhaps the US Government realised they could not stop Altman but might claim a seat at his table?

What does all this mean for us? Experts like Altman say they are designing AI to do good. But AI designers disagree about what constitutes “good”. It is clear this arms race could have civilisational consequences.

Yayoi Kusama creates demons too, although they don’t look like the fictional Pickman’s. Her pet horrors are all the more frightening for their ordinariness. She is afraid of sex, and men, and war, and food. Most of all, she’s afraid of disappearing into the endless white noise of the universe — or, in her parlance, of “Obliteration”. The polka dots she’s been famous for since the Sixties obscure the physical boundaries of whatever form they’re applied to, human or otherwise. Walk through one of her mirror rooms and the singular you disappears. In her autobiography, Infinity Net, Kusama describes watching helplessly as a net-shaped pattern spills off one of her canvases and begins to cover the table, the walls, the contours of her body; it’s difficult to say where the hallucination ends and the art — or the artist — begins.

While her work flirts with the concept of suicide — the ultimate obliteration of the self, by the self — Kusama’s career has been astonishingly long-lived: today, she is a 94-year-old grande dame of the art world. This year saw the publication of a retrospective essay collection, Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now, as well as the opening of yet another solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the first two months of tickets for which have already sold out. Kusama has not yet been obliterated.

She might, however, be cancelled.

“Yayoi Kusama Apologizes for Past Racist Remarks”, reads a recent headline from the New York Times, while the San Francisco Chronicle laments Kusama’s upcoming show at the city’s modern art museum: “Japan’s Yayoi Kusama, one of the world’s most prominent creators, has produced work that objectified and demeaned Black people. Does the art community care?”

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The allegations of racism centre largely on the autobiography, which came out in 2002, and details Kusama’s fraught relationship with her family, her struggle to be taken seriously as an artist in her native Japan, and the mental health issues that eventually resulted in her voluntary residence at the Tokyo hospital where she has lived since the Seventies. The most damning line from the book, though it does not actually appear in the English version of Infinity Net, is one in which Kusama describes the real estate values of her NYC neighbourhood tanking due to “black people shooting each other out front, and homeless people sleeping there”.

Although the New York Times describes Kusama’s problematic commentary being “surfaced” by the website Hyperallergic in June this year, it would be more accurate to identify this cancellation attempt as the particular obsession of just one man, a writer named Dexter Thomas.

Thomas is the author of the Hyperallergic essay in which he accuses the artist of a “troubling record of anti-Black statements”, and to which as far as I can tell, every story about Kusama’s supposed racism can be traced. His interest in Kusama in turn traces to an earlier essay he wrote for Vice News, in which he describes being banned from the artist’s studio for reasons unclear, though Thomas coyly suggests that his being black might have had something to do with it. And while multiple outlets, including the New York Times, have reproduced the claim that Kusama describes black people in her autobiography as “primitive, hyper-sexualized beings”, the implicit attribution appears to be in error. This is not a quote from Infinity Net; it is Thomas’s subjective interpretation of Kusama’s words.

In fact, reading the autobiography, it struck me that most of Thomas’s claims rely on a subjective (and in some cases, motivated) reading of Kusama’s work or behaviour, rather than her own explicitly stated views. And his main criticism — that “black people make several appearances… as exotic or primitive beings” — I found to be in astonishingly bad faith.

In one case, Kusama recalls that she became fascinated by the idea of travelling to the US after seeing “the exotic face of a little black girl with braided hair” in a picture book — a description that may be off-colour by 2023 standards, but also captures something essential about how strange and inaccessible America seemed to a Japanese child living on the other side of the world in the Forties. In another case, Thomas complains that Kusama describes the lips and genitals of a black participant in one of her naked performance art pieces, the obvious implication being that white characters do not receive similar treatment; he apparently missed the scene just 35 pages later in which Kusama’s boyfriend, a white man, begs the disgusted artist to touch his penis: “It was like a big, desiccated calzone.”

And then there are Kusama’s actual and explicit observations of the way that the sexual liberation of the Sixties became intertwined with issues of race and class, which suggest a far more conscious and critical perspective than Thomas gives her credit for. In one passage contextualising her naked performance artworks against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, she archly notes the phenomenon of privileged white women coming to New York in explicit pursuit of black lovers, “drawn by the legendary sexual prowess of dark, muscular men”.

“Blacks were still discriminated against in mainstream society, but the tendency to prize them as sexual playthings was taking root,” she writes. Perhaps Kusama could have done more to condemn this tendency — that is, if you believe that the job of an artist is to not just observe the world as it is but bloviate about how it ought to be. It’s hard to square the woman who wrote the above lines with the bogeyman conjured by her critics: an unapologetic racist who “seems to luxuriate” in stereotypical depictions of blacks as “hyper-sexual and primitive”.

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And it’s hard to see what, exactly, is to be gained from analysing her work through the framework of contemporary American racial politics in the first place. Soleil Ho, the writer at the San Francisco Chronicle who denounced Kusama’s upcoming museum show, suggests that the Yayoi Kusama: 1945 to Now book should have analysed her career in racial terms, lamenting that “the many esteemed curators and critics in the volume also opted to look away”. What Ho and others seem not to realise is that there’s a difference between looking away from a thing, and looking at it from a more productive angle. Despite the myopic convictions of certain American culture critics, not everything is best evaluated through the lens of race; not every story, person, or artwork is best understood as a parable for power, privilege and oppression. And in Kusama’s case, trying to reframe her life and legacy via a reckoning with her alleged racism is like trying to interpret her work by standing blindfolded inside one of her installations and licking the wall. Whatever information you might glean, it will not help you understand the art.

Often, the defence of this or that elderly or deceased artist is a plea for context: people must be understood as a product of their time, their culture, their unique and often immense personal struggles. Yayoi Kusama, who grew up in a famously insular and non-diverse country, who has spent most of her life institutionalised, and who is literally older than Scotch tape, has arguably earned a pass for being less than perfectly enlightened on the issues of 2023 — and anyway, she’s already made the standard-issue apology for her “hurtful and offensive language”. Her critics can hardly ask for more.

But the more important point here isn’t about how woke a 94-year-old mentally ill Japanese woman should be; it’s about what an artist does, and must do, which is to express the truth of the world as he or she sees it. Kusama’s perspective is bleak and terrifying, but it also makes no pretence of moral authority. The woman is terrified of macaroni; she’s not telling anyone else how to live. All she does, and all she has ever done — in paint, in words, in naked choreography — is to describe what she sees. To paint from life, as Lovecraft’s Pickman put it.

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Sometimes that means capturing beauty; sometimes it means terror, or something worse. There’s a famous, and famously controversial, painting by Gustav Courbet called “L’origine du monde”. It’s an image of an anonymous woman, naked from the waist down, her thighs spread to show her vulva. The painting has often been criticised as misogynistic, and perhaps it is, but it also articulates something true: Look, it says. This is where we come from. This is how we are made.

Yayoi Kusama, with her dots, her obliteration, is saying something true, too: this is how we unravel. And her autobiography, insensitive though it may be, is a truthful articulation of reality as she experienced it. Rather than punishing her for this, or demanding a reckoning and an apology, perhaps we might reckon with that reality ourselves, as we do with her art, and leave the artist out of it.

Kusama has always showed us the same thing; what changes is who else is looking, and how. The dot paintings that once challenged and infuriated her critics are now considered pop art masterpieces; a naked performance art piece that once resulted in scandalised calls to the police by MoMA officials is now lauded on the museum’s website for its daring irreverence. But Kusama’s view of the world — her obsessions, her fears, her fixations — remains the same. She is still seeking obliteration. She will probably chase it until she’s dead.

And what does she owe to the rest of us? Only the truth of the world as she sees it. Nothing less, nothing more.

At the end of “Pickman’s Model”, the narrator, Pickman’s friend, views a ghastly portrait of a monstrous creature in Pickman’s studio: “The monster was there—it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared—and I knew that only a suspension of Nature’s laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model”. It’s only after he unrolls a small scrap of paper that was pinned to the canvas that he understands the source of his friend’s demons. The secret of those horrible, haunting paintings. Because there it is: the same glaring, gnawing monster.

“By God,” he says. “It was a photograph from life.”

Meanwhile, house prices are so high in San Francisco that even software engineers at mega companies struggle to afford accommodation, tech companies are downsizing, and homelessness is on the rise. Confronted with these problems, the city recently recommended a payment of $5 million each in “reparations” to eligible black residents. The figure was arrived at without actually doing any maths and, it is estimated, would cost everybody else $600,000 each.

As always, Silicon Valley is at the vanguard of a wider Californian trend. Here is a place where things were too good for too long; where the ruling class became unmoored from reality, hastening their state’s decline. Residents are voting with their feet: in 2020, California’s population declined for the first time in its history, a trend which continued through July 2022. Where, people are asking, are all those who came to California seeking success now going?

For many, the answer appears to be Texas. Austin in particular has received some high-profile defections. In 2020, Joe Rogan left LA for the city because, as he put it, “I want fucking freedom.” Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, the data mining firm  that helped locate Osama Bin Laden, declared that Texas beats California “in almost every method you can name, whether it’s education, pollution, homeless[ness].” Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison relocated the HQ of database giant Oracle from Redwood City to Austin following a bitter struggle with regulators. And, most famously, Elon Musk shifted Tesla’s headquarters to Austin in 2021, after claiming that California regulators had started behaving like a “monopoly that cannot go bankrupt”.

Musk’s announcement marked the moment when the rise of Austin as a tech hub reached critical mass in the public consciousness, but the process had been underway for over a decade. Long before Tesla arrived, Google, Amazon and Meta (as well as older firms such as Apple, IBM and Dell) had established significant presences in the city. They had been attracted by a concentration of engineering talent and Texas’s business-friendly government. The result is that the Austin metro’s population has exploded, while rents and house prices have soared. Since I moved here, during the second Bush administration, the downtown skyline has completely transformed. A second centre, “The Domain”, has sprouted in the city’s north, where many tech firms have offices.

The cultural changes have also been profound. The laid-back city of old prided itself on the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird”. But there is a sense among locals that, in the new Austin, idiosyncrasies are ironed out. Formerly hip neighbourhoods that might once have boasted the odd wax museum or vintage thrift store are now lined with luxury boutiques and frou-frou eateries, while quirky institutions have either fled to the remote reaches of the city to survive or closed for good.

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Although Austin was a second-tier provincial city until very recently, it always punched above its weight when it came to the counterculture. Cheap rents, low house prices and Left-wing politics made it attractive to creative people and misfits: “slackers” unafflicted by the ambition and status anxiety that bedevils all those chasing careers in NYC or LA. Psychedelic music was born here, in the shape of The 13th Floor Elevator’s debut LP — released a year before Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. And in my almost two decades here, I have met many interesting characters without trying, including a Scottish BMX champion who was once name-dropped on an episode of Neighbours, Morrissey’s guitar technician, and a man who turned his PhD on crustaceans in Victorian literature into a career in AI. The poster boy for the Keep Austin Weird era was Leslie Cochran, a homeless man in a thong bikini who ran for mayor three times and had his own line of fridge magnets that allowed you to dress him in an array of outfits. Leslie’s death in 2012 (he was only 60) coincides almost too precisely with the last gasp of weird Austin.

As depressing as this metamorphosis might feel to many Austinites, it is simply the next logical stage in a process that began years ago, as middle-class hipsters displaced the black and Hispanic residents of the working-class neighbourhoods they moved into. What follows now is not gentrification but rather wholesale destruction, as entire blocks are razed to the ground and replaced with luxury apartment buildings, while the truly wealthy erect ostentatious ziggurats on lots where modest kit houses once stood.

Tech bros are often cast as the villains here, but they are too easy to scapegoat. A more interesting example of how social dynamics have shifted in the new Austin can be found in the furore that erupted when the residents of a brand new luxury development attempted to shut down a weekly car club that had been taking place since the Nineties. The sight of customised low riders and the roar of engines was too much for the exquisite sensibilities of the residents of “The Weaver”, one of whom denounced the club as “a display of toxic masculinity”.

The invocation of Left-wing pieties in the service of naked class war captured perfectly the way similar language would be used to justify policies during the pandemic that had a disproportionately harmful effect on the poor. Austin’s leadership embraced school closures and mask psychosis. After the murder of George Floyd, it also voted to defund the police — promptly experienced record murder rates. This was not the first time radically progressive policy had backfired in Austin. In 2019, the city had decriminalised public camping, allowing tent cities doubling as drug markets to spring up along freeways and in underpasses. San Francisco had already demonstrated how a policy that sounds compassionate can quickly become indistinguishable from the worst kind of laissez-faire cruelty, yet Austin seemed determined to pursue the policy to its destruction.

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But while Silicon Valley operates in uber-progressive California, Austin has an openly hostile Republican state legislature to contend with. Texas puts a limit on just how far the city can go with its more avant-garde policies, while occasional uprisings from the electorate thwart others. The ban on public camping was reinstated by popular vote. It is also misleading to assume that everybody moving to Austin is a doctrinaire progressive: when three-time Democrat failure Robert “Beto” O’Rourke was defeated for the first time, he had actually polled higher among native-born Texans than among those who have moved to the state from elsewhere. Indeed, Musk himself has argued that Austin should not slavishly copy San Francisco, while Lonsdale said that bad policies made the state “unlivable”. Indeed, so appalled is Lonsdale by the “far Left” thinking he saw in San Francisco that he co-founded the new University of Austin to challenge the “new ideologies of intolerance that order subservience and quash those who think differently.”

It would be preferable, of course, if we did not live in a world where entire cities could be so radically transformed by the desires of the super-rich. But in this, Austin is becoming not weirder, but more normal. All the great cities — Moscow, London, Paris, New York, LA, Istanbul — are full of buildings, monuments and institutions that exist only because rich and powerful people wanted them: indeed, there are entire cities, such as Saint Petersburg and Astana that exist because of this principle. If not exactly progress, it is a sign of Austin leaving childish things behind.

Meanwhile, even as the old “Keep Austin Weird” spirit teeters on the verge of extinction, the new city is weird in its own ways. Sometimes this is in the style of nouveau riche grotesque: $150 cups of coffee are weird. But I also recall my confusion the first time I drove past the shell of Musk’s immense Tesla Gigafactory just outside the city. At first, I assumed it was just another Amazon warehouse, but the scale was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was weirdly radical to see so ambitious a manufacturing plant in a Western country when we have spent decades getting the rest of the world to make our stuff for us.

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And people here still dream of creating their own worlds: I recently met a man who was considering building a commune south of the city, while Musk himself is rumoured to be contemplating the construction of a “utopia” in the Austin metro area, close to where facilities for The Boring Company and SpaceX are being assembled. On the one hand, Musk’s plans have a practical aim: he wants his employees to have access to affordable housing. But on the other, they are extremely secretive, although Kanye West was reportedly involved in discussions about what the town might look like.

But whether Musk builds his City of the Sun or not, there is a more certain sign of the old Austin’s extinction. The city has approved a 12-foot tall monument, to be erected downtown, that will read: “Keep Austin Weird.” In doing so, a cold, heavy slab has been dropped on the still warm corpse of the town that was once was, to guarantee it never escapes from its resting place.

From this moment emerged a potent modern revolution in evangelical Christianity, led by one of the Summer of Love’s most compelling refugees. Lonnie Frisbee was a gay, Rasputin-like mystic who believed in the transformative power of LSD; he would “party on Saturday night and preach on Sunday morning”. His story is counter to the Hollywood narrative of that summer in San Francisco — but, in its darkness, it is far more in line with reality.

The streets of Haight-Ashbury were certainly filled by girls with daisies in their hair and guys with outsized flares seeking to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” in the words of Timothy Leary, godfather of the hippy movement. But soon enough, the district’s new residents realised that “turning on” to free love gave rise to a widespread culture of rape; “tuning in” saw a spontaneous movement transform into a commercialised spectacle; and “dropping out” found free-spirited flower children sleeping on park benches. As one pamphlet put it, at the time: “Minds & bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.”

Now, a new film has arrived to both illuminate and further obscure the cultural effect of that summer. Jesus Revolution, starring Kelsey Grammer, portrays one of the most important evolutions in modern Christian history: the “Jesus People” movement (also known as the Jesus Movement or Jesus Freaks). Grammer plays Chuck Smith, the buttoned-up pastor of Calvary Chapel, a struggling Pentecostal church in California’s Orange County, who had a chance meeting with the teenage Lonnie Frisbee. A disaffected hippy, Frisbee was hitchhiking down the California coast after spending the Summer of Love tripping on acid and reading the Bible, having converted to Christianity in a San Francisco commune.

Based on the memoir of Greg Laurie — who worshipped under both Frisbee and Smith in the Seventies, and in turn became a prominent evangelical preacher — Jesus Revolution offers Frisbee a far more prominent role in contemporary Christian history than he is usually given. Yet as with other representations of Frisbee’s life, the film also writes him out at a convenient moment, long before his gruesome, lonely death from AIDS in 1993. His sexuality is ignored.

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Frisbee’s legacy is profound, but constantly overlooked — as is the wider movement. Jesus People probably couldn’t have happened at any other time or place than the beaches of Orange County, south of Los Angeles. It was a hotbed of internal migration in the post-war years, as families from the Midwest escaped the farms and factories hollowed out by the Depression. The region’s burgeoning defence industry offered entry into the middle class. Carrying little more than their hopes, faith and conservative values, these new arrivals helped transform the region into the seat of the modern evangelical movement.

These hard-working Americans seem to be at odds with the 19-year-old Frisbee, who attracted young people to Calvary Chapel with devotional music that could have been played on the stages of the future Woodstock. But Smith, according to the film, saw something in him that could bring young people like his daughter back into the fold. They found a new way of doing church, but their union was building on ideas that had started in Pentecostal churches in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, where renegades insisted — in something that was hotly resisted by church leaders of the day — that instead of waiting for the blessings of the Holy Spirit to work their miracles, believers could experience these wonders “on demand”.

Here was a Christianity that could find not only historical justification, but a home in the spirit of the Sixties and its growing consumer culture. Calvary Chapel was a place to feel good as well as feel God — an evangelical version of the Summer of Love. Frisbee’s magnetic appeal was the spark able to bring the masses to the movement. Described by some as a figure akin to the biblical Samson, Frisbee was uniquely blessed with the ability to speak to the moment, but ultimately brought low by temptation. He was, after all, still preaching to a congregation who were evangelical Christians, in both temperament and values; most of them weren’t hippies. His renegade style and personal life were only going to cut it for so long, and he was eventually cast out — of the movement, and the film.

Jesus Revolution moves onto Greg Laurie’s story here, but in real life a far more interesting character stepped up to fill Frisbee’s shoes. John Wimber, a fellow hippy who was in a Sixties rock’n’roll band called the Paramours — which went on to become the Righteous Brothers, of whom he was the manager — was at that time described as a “beer-guzzling, drug-abusing pop musician, who was converted at the age of 29 while chain-smoking his way through a Quaker-led Bible study”.

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Wimber became a central figure at Vineyard, a church affiliated with Calvary Chapel, where he helped mould the energy of Frisbee and the sensibility of Smith into a more far-reaching and coherent Christian revival movement. Today, they’re known as the Charismatic and Neocharismatic movements, or the second and third waves of Pentecostal Christianity, but labels aren’t that important. What matters is the way in which they spread like wildfire through churches in California, and eventually the world.

Wimber’s “power evangelism” — a term first associated with Frisbee, but now largely credited to his heir — is best described by the former rock’n’roll pioneer’s own formulation of doin’ the stuff. “When I worked for the devil, he let me do his stuff,” Wimber said. “But when I came to work for Jesus, they didn’t want to let me do His stuff. To tell you the truth, I joined up to do the stuff!” The stuff is the direct experience of the signs, wonders and miracles of the Holy Spirit promised in the Bible, such as faith healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues. In the old days, you had to go to your preacher for that. The genius of the former hippies was to change that, satisfying the cultural desire to have direct experience with the stuff. As anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann put it: “If God is present in a literal sense, you no longer need to turn to intermediaries to learn what his wishes are. You can ask him yourself.”

This kind of Christianity spoke to cultural icons of the hippy era, up to and including Bob Dylan, who went to Wimber’s Vineyard bible school in 1978, after the singer felt Jesus as a “physical thing” and began to tremble in his hotel room. “The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up,” he later said. But Dylan was a late adopter to what was by then Wimber’s movement, which was drifting a long way from Frisbee’s ideals. The Jesus People movement, which was now Charismatic Christianity, was beginning to look more McDonald’s than McCartney. The direct descendants of this movement can be found in churches such as Hillsong, the Australian megachurch that has recently seen an almighty fall from grace. Earlier this month, it was accused of failing to report $80 million in profit, while its founder, Brian Houston, was alleged to have spent $150,000 on a luxury family holiday in Cancun, as well as many more thousands on “the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian”. This fully corporatised church would be unrecognisable to even the most disillusioned Haight-Ashbury refugees.

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Frisbee has been written out of not only the Jesus Revolution film, but Wimber’s six published books. A gay party animal, even in 2023, is an unappealing saint for the average believer. In Wimber’s version of the revolution, the person who transformed evangelical Christianity with his New Age power evangelism is only briefly mentioned as “the young man”.

Nevertheless, Frisbee and his Jesus People’s profound effect continues to be felt today. At a time when church attendance is in decline in the United States, those more broadly described as Charismatic attend the most. Theologian Dale M. Coulter recently wrote that the two major features of the Charismatic spiritual tradition are “narrative and journey” — hinting at the way evangelical Christianity has found new relevance since the Sixties. They modernised salvation, created personal relationships (He died for me) and turned the Lord into a mate (Jesus, minus the Christ). Waiting around to be saved by God was no longer a thing, because hippy Jesus became a consumer choice — a massive festival, where you can enter the tent for a guy who looks and sounds just like you. Today, the heirs to Frisbee, Smith and Wimber’s movement are largely doin’ the stuff through a one-click checkout; to survive the capitalist age, evangelism has commercialised.

But there are hints of a spiritual revival. The recent Asbury Revival, which attracted tens of thousands of GenZs to a mass pray-in at Kentucky university, proved that there’s a new generation who are still attracted to this Christian message. Young people are regularly attending services, from Lagos to London and New York City, and they’re joined by modern cultural icons, including Premier League players, rappers, and various Kardashian-Jenners. They hold church in commercial theatres, and attract devoted followers, among them TikTok influencers and hardcore conservatives. All are looking for something they can believe in, and a relationship with God that they can control. Most of these believers won’t even know Lonnie Frisbee’s name, but they certainly feel his legacy. And that is, quite simply, that you can be a Christian in a secular world. You can do the stuff and not have to go without. And as Jesus Revolution shows, a lot of the stuff involves telling a good story that doesn’t entirely reflect historical reality.

I was moved. By the end, I teared up, though I couldn’t discern whether my sorrow was solely a tribute to the artistry of the film. My older brother also staggered around with the help of canes and a walker. My brother also suffered from congestive heart failure. In 2009, my brother also died from the medical complications of morbid obesity. To say that I likewise approach this subject matter with intense sympathy is an understatement.

Still, I could have warned Aronofsky that he’d get stick. I channelled the loss of a sibling I loved and admired into my novel Big Brother, which similarly riled the “fat acceptance movement”. (Predictably, none of my aggrieved correspondents read the book.) No amount of sympathy cuts it with these people. I did not have the qualifications to address this topic. I wasn’t fat.

For what it’s worth, my own minor criticism of the film is stylistic. It’s adapted from the eponymous play by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the screenplay. Occasionally, stilted dialogue and stagey acting keep one foot in the theatre. Otherwise, scenes where Charlie jerks off to gay porn while having a heart attack, or joylessly crams his mouth with doubled slices of pizza topped with ranch dressing, do entail an element of spectacle and voyeurism. But all film viewers are voyeurs, and these scenes are supposed to be painful. Charlie is sad, and his confined, shame-drenched life is meant to make us sad, too. That is the naysayers’ real primary objection: Charlie’s weight is tragic. Charlie’s weight is bad.

Stigma has been on the way out for a while. In the early 20th century, divorce was at last a legal option. But as novels such as Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence demonstrate, that didn’t make the dissolution of a marriage acceptable in the drawing room. Divorce was a scandal. Even as breaking one’s solemn vows at the altar grew more common, into the mid-Sixties the iconic female “divorcee” was a wanton loose cannon often preying on the happy marriage. Come to think of it, we seldom use the word “divorcee” anymore, since an identifier is pretty useless when it applies to nearly everyone you know. Nowadays, having been divorced multiple times barely raises an eyebrow.

But this is not the most momentous eradication of stigma during my lifetime. Facilitated by the Pill, that would be the abruptly permissive attitude towards sex outside marriage — although (lucky me) I had morally conservative parents who exposed me to the scathing repudiation and hysterical disgust to which earlier “fallen women” were subject. When I announced that I planned to live with my boyfriend at 18, my mother screeched that I was a “harlot” and a “kept woman” whose “shacking up” would ruin me for the purity of Christian marriage. (Both my parents claimed to be virgins before they wed, and I don’t even think they were lying.)

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Spitting parental disavowal didn’t stop me from having a good time in my young adulthood, but it did give me a taste of stigma at its most effective; in my mother, my transgression triggered a visceral revulsion that she couldn’t control. Yet these days the only debate is whether to have sex on a first date, if we bother with dates.

Once unmarried sex became no big deal, the “out-of-wedlock pregnancy” followed suit. Presently, single parenthood can prove an economic challenge, and that’s about it. Yet not that long ago unmarried pregnancy was such a social horror that young women rushed to marry men they didn’t love or sometimes committed suicide. One of my mother’s college classmates starved herself for nine months to conceal her disgrace.

Homosexuality was next, and to be fair the exoneration of same-sex attraction (which, though she later pretended otherwise, my mother also found revolting) was a long slog. But now the stigma attached to same-sex relationships has so evaporated that being gay or lesbian isn’t even interesting anymore. As for cross-dressing, once a deep dark secret hidden literally in the closet, it is now so reputable that drag queens are reading stories to children in public libraries, and the furtive, old-school habit of struggling into your wife’s frock while she was out shopping seems to have been swallowed by the transgender movement. All that time you weren’t excited by dressing as a woman. You were a woman.

The rehabilitation of masturbation may still have a way to go, though, especially for older generations, since post-hoc mortification and an urge to concealment are instilled so early and run so deep. Yet masturbation must be the most ridiculous of no-nos. This free, universally available entertainment has no dire social consequences. The killjoy demonisation of harmless self-stimulation springs from a puritanical discomfort with sexual pleasure.

On balance, all these historically recent permissions probably make life better. Men and women aren’t stuck married to spouses they detest until death, mercifully, parts them. Having been around the sexual block meant that when I hooked up with my husband, I knew we were a good fit. I’m glad homosexuality is boring now, so gay friends and I can talk about something else. If I still feel a residual sheepishness after getting off in private, at least I know, abstractly, that I shouldn’t feel sheepish.

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But even the hunky-dory-ness of divorce and casual sex is a mixed bag. Marriage is not as meaningful; both parties know they can always get out of it. If I’m relieved divorce is possible, I’m also relieved my own parents didn’t get one; the cost of divorce for children is well known. And thanks to what we used to call promiscuity, sex is less meaningful as well. The much-lauded sexual revolution has produced more kids with only one parent to turn to, more children in care, and more venereal disease.

My point being that stigma isn’t always bad. It can attach to particular conduct for good reason. Collective disapproval is a powerful tool for encouraging behaviour that’s in the collective interest. More recent campaigns to remove the stigma clinging to overtly destructive conduct are therefore questionable. That includes the crusade to embrace “fat pride”, which wages a two-pronged war on conventional assumptions about both aesthetics and health.

On the aesthetic front, alas, what qualifies as attractive cannot be imposed by cultural fiat. No number of Dove models spilling from their underwear in Tube adverts can make riders on the Circle Line yearn to take them to bed. Standards of beauty are stubborn; we don’t find certain bodies beautiful because we ought to. On the health front, advocates for “people living with obesity” — an expression that suggests they’re not overweight but have simply taken in a flat mate — like to claim that one can be “healthy at any size”. Yet the NHS estimates that obesity costs the service £6bn every year, a figure projected to rise to over £9.7bn by 2050. Matthew Crawford, who at 55 stone once earned the title of “the UK’s fattest man”, requiring four adjacent hospital beds to lie down, died last year from sepsis and organ failure. Purportedly quite nice fellow, he was only 37.

Far too many people make themselves miserable over their weight, sometimes anguishing disproportionately over a few extra pounds. Nevertheless, is it in our communal interest for obesity to become broadly condoned? Already, especially in the US, television presenters and commentators are growing ever portlier. What qualifies as a standard build has risen several sizes. That’s good news for bigger people, who may feel more socially at ease, but bad news for any nation’s medical bills.

The drive for alleviation of stigma doesn’t stop at fat. We are henceforth to spurn the word “prostitute” and substitute the less loaded “sex worker”. This linguistic tweak is intended to convey that selling sexual services is no more degrading than attorneys selling legal services. “Sex work” is merely a career path, as deserving of respect as accounting or interior design. If specialists in desire wish to perform certain physical acts for a price, that is literally their business.

The world’s oldest profession is never going away. Personally, I support decriminalisation of prostitution. Yet most of the prosperous progressives who advocate this new open-mindedness would never themselves trade intimate access to their bodies for money in a million years. These are the same people who, if their daughter announced that instead of studying Economics at UCL she aspired to become a “sex worker”, would be horrified and would probably send the kid to a therapist. These are the same people who, should their daughter indeed end up walking the streets at 2am in fishnets, would regard her as in some ways lost and themselves as having failed as parents.

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Expunging stigma is not so simple a matter as wiping down a sticky marble counter with Cillit Bang, job done. Stigma is more like the black mould on the wall of the loo, which has an exasperating tendency to grow right back. Moreover, any society that pushed its young to pursue “careers” in prostitution would either be very desperate or deeply disturbed. I know of nowhere in the world where selling one’s body for sex is a neutral option. It’s reliably a last resort, and no new terminology can make the experience of turning tricks any more agreeable or raise the status of the sex trade a jot.

Drug addiction and alcoholism are now subject to the same brisk Left-wing housecleaning. Enlightened social services have rechristened an addict or drunk, “person struggling with substance use” — we no longer say “abuse” — or “person with substance use disorder”. The most extreme manifestations of this new moral detachment are in San Francisco and LA, whose downtowns are now covered with tented encampments of homeless people — whom we’re now meant to call “the unhoused”, the grammatical inference being that their circumstances are wholly the responsibility of some delinquent outside party. These denizens of faeces-strewn pavements are almost all drug addicts or alcoholics who may also be mentally ill. The city provides food, pocket money, drug paraphernalia, and safe, sanitary venues for getting high, because consuming meth, fentanyl, or a bottle of vodka every day is merely a defensible life choice. Behold, no stigma. What’s an addict not to like? Big surprise, the population of substance users in these cities continues to soar.

California has also effectively destigmatised theft, by demoting shoplifting of goods worth less than $950 to a misdemeanour, which police ignore as inconsequential. Ravaged by losses, businesses are closing retail outlets. If everybody does it — if stealing is normal and never punished — California’s shoplifters have no reason to feel contrite. Likewise, in the riots following the death of George Floyd, the wholesale ransacking of shops was justified as a “mass protest against our dominant conceptions of property”, as the sociologist Russell Dynes put it. Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, commended widespread commercial theft because it “gets people what they need for free immediately”. Looting also, she says, “attacks the history of whiteness and white supremacy”.

Yet this takes the biscuit: the serious campaign to make paedophilia respectable. Apparently, the stigmatisation of “Minor Attracted Persons” is unfair, because Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs) are just doing what anyone sexually drawn to children would naturally do. This MAPs business so crosses a line that it makes the prospective rehabilitation of a range of other once-villainous behaviours short of fanciful. Rapists could soon become “people with a coercion disorder”.  Burglars might be reclassified as “people living with other people’s things”. Perhaps we’ll simply see “Murder Attracted Persons” as “being themselves” — and who are we to interfere with their sanguinary self-expression?

For the consistent pattern here is an accelerating, positively demented refusal to make judgments. The stigma that once attached to socially unacceptable conduct has shifted from the transgressor to the adjudicator. If you use the word “addict” and ever suggest that maybe getting clean would make this person happier and more productive, you’re the problem.

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Furthermore, the language of mindless moral neutrality — “people living with obesity”, “people with substance use disorder” — distances people from their own decisions and deprives them of agency. The plight of alcoholics, drug addicts, and the life-threateningly overweight is medicalised, ascribed to having innocently contracted a disease. For erstwhile outcasts, the price of acceptance is helplessness, if not hopelessness. If your behaviour played no role in determining your current circumstances, then presumably behaving otherwise won’t improve those circumstances, either. You’re stuck.

Stigma has its place. We’re not obliged to celebrate everything our neighbours get up to. For the sake of a liveable country, we should fiercely discourage addiction to substances that turn people into stupefied dependents on the rest of us. Stealing, looting, prostitution, medically burdensome obesity, and sexual predation on children don’t make the world a better place. We should want thugs who break into our homes to feel shunned. For shame, guilt, and remorse also have their place. AA’s classic “hitting bottom” often involves self-disgust, which can finally motivate folks to pick themselves up.

If not all stigma is bad, some stigma is still both poisonous and unjustified, and it remains the case that pariah status can be whipped up with a vengeance almost overnight. Not long ago, one group was singled out as homicidal, delusional, and stupid. Pundits and politicians alike urged us to spurn their company; complex bureaucracies sprang up to keep the scum from restaurants, cinemas, and planes. Social media’s pitchfork brigade demanded this subhuman dross be denied access to healthcare or brazenly hoped they’d all die. That’s right, the unvaccinated. Stigma at its most ferocious. (For the record: I am triple jabbed.)

Clearly, stigma is a powerful force — for ill or good — which, having been firmly planted in a collective psyche, is not necessarily subject to top-down control. Stigma is sticky. Once a population is stigmatised, it’s hard to take the stigma back. When most of us watch Charlie showering his infeasible naked bulk in The Whale, no number of lectures from fat activists or censorious comment pieces in the New York Times can mitigate an unsettling sense of revulsion — which, even if tinged with a vertiginous sympathy and sorrow, still rivals my mother’s disgust at her daughter’s “shacking up”.

Voters in what is perhaps America’s most liberal city will today vote on whether or not to recall Boudin. The polls suggest he will lose. Boudin’s 2019 victory was heralded as part of a national moment: a major milestone for a movement of progressive prosecutors promising a radical new approach to law and order. Now, his possible downfall is also part of a bigger story: the Left-wing poster boy who boasted about emptying jails, not prosecuting “quality-of-life” crimes, and “reimagining” criminal justice has become the face of the backlash against a lax approach in the midst of a crime wave.

It’s not hard to understand why the recall race has attracted outsized attention. Whether it’s the open air drug markets of the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood or the brazen shoplifting that has caused many retail chains to simply shut up shop in the city, anarchic scenes from San Francisco have captured the popular imagination of a public increasingly concerned about crime. From the mass resignations in his DA office to the tragic cases of former offenders committing violent, sometimes lethal, crimes after being released on his watch, there’s no shortage of evidence for the case against Boudin.

If the recall race has been an opportunity for the radical prosecutor to restate his progressive principles, he hasn’t exactly seized it. Instead, he has attempted a half-hearted and unconvincing pivot to a tougher (or at least slightly less lawless) approach and resorted to partisan name-calling, attempting to smear the recall campaign as a Republican plot. Not something that you want to be in a city where just 7% of voters are registered Republican. “It’s really problematic that we are having a very Trumpian conversation in San Francisco,” Boudin said recently.

But this is a blue-on-blue fight, with liberal San Franciscans exasperated with the incompetence and extremism of a prosecutor for whom their safety doesn’t always seem like the top priority. As recall campaigner Andrea Shorter told me last year: “The inconvenient truth for Boudin is that it’s not just a small group of conservatives that are out to recall Democratic politicians… We are interested in and support criminal justice reform. We understand its implications in terms of racial justice. I myself am African-American and also LGBTQ. I have supported criminal justice reform for nearly three decades, but not at the expense of public safety.”

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Boudin would certainly be a major scalp for those worried about safety in American cities — and his ousting would send a powerful national message about the politics of crime in an election year. But if it is possible to underplay the significance of the recall race, it’s also possible to let the parable of San Francisco obscure the bigger picture.

Other high-profile progressive prosecutors are in office across America’s major cities: George Gascon in Los Angeles, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia are all prosecutors who, until recently, were happy to be described as part of the same movement as Boudin. At a city, state and federal level, a self-defeating, permissive approach to the interconnected problems of crime, homelessness and addiction dominates.

In the story many Democrats tell themselves, the party’s soft-on-crime mistakes are in the past. The U-turn from defund to refund the police has long since been completed. We get it now, they say to the voters and themselves, albeit a little later than we should have done. New York, for instance, has a tough-on-crime former cop running the show. Joe Biden has increased police funding. But in reality, the malpractice continues.

Take New York as an example: even as Eric Adams won the mayoralty with a promise to get a grip on the city’s burgeoning crime problem, the same election also saw the ascent of Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney who takes a very different approach. On his first day in office, Bragg issued a memo asking colleagues to avoid jail time for perpetrators of all but the most serious crimes. He later backtracked, but the instincts and priorities of the man in charge of prosecuting crimes in Manhattan were plain to see. Also in Eric Adams’s supposedly tough-on-crime New York, subway advertisements normalise the use of some of the deadliest and most addictive substances you can put in your body and empower their users. The city’s “Let’s Talk Fentanyl” campaign tells addicts: “Don’t be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely.”

Meanwhile, there is no sign of New York’s violent crime surge slowing. Shootings and homicides surged during the pandemic and, five months into the Eric Adams era, are still rising. Shootings in the city in the first quarter of 2022 were up on the same period last year. Nationwide, 2020 saw the largest year-on-year increase in homicides ever recorded. And the numbers are still going up.

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In Philadelphia, the story is especially grim. Homicide and shootings are at the highest rates on record, surpassing even the numbers from bad old days in the City of Brotherly Love. In a city of just 1.5 million, 559 people were murdered last year. And yet the city’s progressive prosecutor, Krasner, won re-election with two-thirds of the vote in both the Democratic primary and the general election. Even as public anxiety about crime rises, Krasner is sticking to his progressive guns: he recently established a unit dedicated to de-prosecuting crimes for offenders aged 18 to 25. By prioritising “rehabilitative programming”, the scheme effectively treats a violent criminal in his mid-twenties like a juvenile offender.

Elsewhere, the predictable damage of reckless post-George Floyd experiments is plain to see. In 2020, Oregon voted to decriminalise all drugs. The next year, overdose rates rose by 700%. To take a more prosaic example from neighbouring Washington: after the state passed a law dramatically limiting the ability of police from pursuing a car, drivers have taken to simply driving away from routine traffic stops.

More recently, after the Uvalde and Buffalo shootings, the Democrats have been understandably eager to talk about gun control. But they are more defensive when it comes to other, more everyday instances of gun violence. Krasner, for example, has called prosecutions for illegal gun possession “not only ineffective but unjust and racially discriminatory” while pointing the finger at the NRA and calling for tougher gun laws after another lethal in Philadelphia at the weekend. The cognitive dissonance is staggering. A more effective public safety agenda might bridge this absurd gap and unite the Democrats’ convictions on gun laws with the violence in America’s cities.

In the meantime, defeat for Boudin would be yet another chastening moment for progressive prosecutors and the Democrats more generally. But how many wake-up calls does the party need? In an America where violent crime is on the rise and fentanyl overdoses are now the leading cause of death among 18 to 45-year-olds, the Democrats are still a long way from completing the law-and-order U-turn that is required if they are to start making the streets of America’s cities any safer. Whether or not Boudin loses, liberal America is still firmly wedded to a mindset on crime, policing, criminal justice, drug addiction and homelessness that is failing — and for which may more Americans will pay for with their lives.

It’s easy to see why the images of the debris, a very pandemic-era combination of online shopping and urban lawlessness, received heavy play on local news and spread far and wide across the web. So bad was the litter problem — caused by systematic robbery, with criminal groups pilfering packages, ripping them open and running off with the most valuable goods — that a cargo train had derailed just a few days before Newsom’s late-January visit. And so here was the state governor, in jeans and a t-shirt (and a cloth mask outdoors) in a litter-picking photo-op: an irresistible visual to add to the thick dossier on Democratic misrule in California.

But the bluntness of Newsom’s reaction — as well as comparing his own state to a third-world country, he explicitly blamed organised criminals — was a revealing sign of this safely Democratic state’s changed political landscape.

Put simply, such statements might have been a political headache for a California Democrat only 18 months earlier. With the country in the throes of its post-George Floyd “reckoning” — dominated by a mood of hypersensitivity around anything relating to crime, policing, race and any combination of the three — references to the third world, as well as daring to be seen to be tough on crime, might not have gone down well. But Newsom received only fringe pushback.

In California’s two biggest cities, the signs of progressive retreat are everywhere. The extent of that retreat, and the question of exactly what comes after years of Leftwards shift, will define the political future of America’s most populous state.

In the past two years, London Breed, the Mayor of San Francisco, has performed a dramatic about-turn on crime and policing. In 2020, the city chief cut $120 million from the budget of the San Francisco police department. Yet a year later, she asked for emergency extra funding for the police and announced a crackdown on crime in the Tenderloin, the city’s most lawless neighborhood which operates as an open-air drug market. It was time, said Breed, to end the “bullshit”. Now she is doing battle with the city’s progressive forces to deliver on what, anywhere other than San Francisco, would be considered a reasonably common-sense clampdown given the scale of the city’s drug overdose and crime problems.

And she is far from alone. The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, the city’s progressive prosecutor whose short time in office has been a disaster, was started by a group of local activists and quickly developed serious momentum. Campaigners secured enough signatures to force a citywide vote, which is scheduled for June, and look increasingly likely to triumph. A mid-February survey found that 68% of San Francisco voters planned to vote Boudin out of office. (That in a city where just 6.7% are registered Republicans.)

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Campaigners in another recall push in the city found success last month when voters ousted three members of San Francisco’s school board. 70% of voters opted to ditch officials who seemed more interested in what to rename the city’s schools than figuring out how to reopen safely during the pandemic. (Among the names they hoped to erase from the San Francisco schools: George Washington, sitting Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and author Robert Louis Stevenson.) As part of her tack towards the center, Breed has supported the recall campaign.

A few hundred miles to the south, a group of Angelenos have taken inspiration from the anti-Boudin campaign and hope to oust LA’s head prosecutor. The move to recall George Gascón is in its early stages, with campaigners recently given the all-clear to start collecting signatures. But things don’t look good for Gascón, who is cut from a similar, hyperprogessive cloth to Boudin. Like Boudin, he has overseen a lethal slide towards lawlessness. And, like Boudin, he faces a furious internal revolt from his prosecutors. In a recently published internal survey by Los Angeles Association for Deputy District Attorneys, nine in ten prosecutors supported the recall effort. “Over a year ago, Gascón began a massive social experiment by redirecting prosecutorial resources away from enforcing the law while simultaneously ignoring large portions of the legal code,” said its vice-president Eric Siddall. “The result is an emboldened criminal element that knows the DA will not hold criminals accountable. This experiment needs to end.”

Even before a single vote has been counted, the anti-Gascón campaign has already changed policy in the city. In an effort to fend off the backlash, he has reversed two of his landmark policies: a ban on trying juveniles as adults and on seeking life without parole.

Meanwhile, in the crowded race to replace Eric Garcetti as the mayor of Los Angeles — Joe Biden has appointed him as the US ambassador to India — the mood is unmistakably moderate. Homelessness, crime and the cost of living dominate the debate. Karen Bass, a former congresswoman and the pick of the city’s Democratic machine, has swerved Rightwards, with a policy platform that features clearing homeless encampments as a prominent promise. This has dismayed the city’s progressives, who complain that she is “pandering to affluent Westside and Valley voters at the expense of black, Latinx and working-class ones”, as two Black Lives Matter activists put it in a recent column. (Needless to say, LA’s working-class voters, whatever their race, are by no means as on board with a far-Left approach to criminal justice as the authors claim.)

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Meanwhile, Rick Caruso, a billionaire former Republican, has thrown his hat into the ring. Caruso, a shopping mall developer, is a big beast in LA civic life: he is a trustee at the University of Southern California and has been a member of the city’s Police Commission. In a statement confirming his switch from Independent to Democrat, he said that he “won’t be a typical Democrat… I’ll be a pro-centrist, pro-jobs, pro-public safety Democrat.” Caruso has backed the Gascón recall campaign. (Bass has not.)

The counterrevolution in California’s cities may seem fairly mild by national standards: a shift in tone among the same class of Democratic politicians. But the backlash on America’s left coast demonstrates the outer limits of tolerance for radical progressivism in American politics. As the novelist Wallace Stegner noted, California is like “America, only more so”.

When it comes to experiments in far-Left urban politics in recent years, that has undoubtedly been the case. Now the question is whether Californian Democrats have learned anything but the most shallow lessons from the last few years. It is one thing to acknowledge that “Defund the Police” is political kryptonite and nudge public safety spending back up. It is another to face up to the grave problems facing your city.

Voters are watching closely as the likes of Breed, or whoever is chosen to replace Garcetti, try to clean things up. A nod to the centre might be enough to spare short-term political disaster. But it will likely take more than that to actually solve the problems that have voters so frustrated.

The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, wondered whether “people with guns” should even be responding to mental health calls. Pilot projects were launched all over the country to replace police with civilian response teams for 911 calls involving mental health, drugs and homelessness. Congresswoman Katie Porter introduced a bill to pay states and cities to set up more such units, while her colleague Cori Bush introduced a bill that does much the same. In many cities, “decriminalisation”, long a rallying cry for progressive critics of policing, became standard operating procedure.

The activists are right that police cannot be the “solution” to mental illness and drug abuse, which overlap in about 50% of cases. But the programmes developed to replace law enforcement have had mixed results. That’s because in many of America’s progressive enclaves, the problem isn’t that it’s the police who are responding to these emergencies. It’s that there is little the police can legally do once they get there.

Lejon Butler is a tall, lean, black man who lives in Rodeo, a bedroom community in the North Bay Area. As a kid in the East Bay in the Eighties, he recalls going to school and being taught to “Just Say No” to drugs, then coming home and smelling the familiar chemical odour of freebased cocaine wafting through the air.

Lejon’s mother, Martin, who is now deceased, and his stepfather, Craig, were drug addicts. But Craig was such a high-functioning addict that he was able to conceal his use from his family for years. He ran a successful landscaping business while getting high every day, even trading services with one of his clients for Oxycontin. But a few years ago, he overdosed. After that, dementia set in.

By now Craig was living in Richmond, a working-class residential city in the East Bay. A few months before Lejon’s mother passed away, Craig had started to become violent towards her. When she died, in April 2021, he fell into a deep depression. He became aggressive and unpredictable. He threatened to kill his grandson with a samurai sword. He put a dagger to his own stomach and threatened to gut himself. On January 5 this year, he started a fire in his kitchen and then refused to leave the house, acting like nothing had happened. His family called 911.

The responding officer was Brian Lande, who, as part of the county’s Mental Health Evaluation Team, specialises in handling these sorts of calls. Officer Lande had spoken to Craig only a few days earlier. He makes a point of checking in on people with mental illness and addiction issues when they’re not in crisis. That way he’s able to get to know them as they really are, and not just when they’re sick.

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When Lande arrived at Craig’s house, Lejon, his wife, and his niece Dnaya were already outside. Lande intended to put a psychiatric hold on Craig, which would allow a hospital to keep him for up to 72 hours. He also recommended that Dnaya fill out an application for a restraining order, which might help persuade the hospital to keep him there instead of just releasing him within a few hours.

The family had been through this drill many times before. Craig fell neatly through a gap in the system. He had dementia, but that didn’t count as a “mental illness” for the purposes of institutionalisation. He threatened his relatives’ lives, but he rarely actually attacked them, so the criminal justice system wasn’t inclined to take him seriously. “Someone’s going to have to get killed for them to do anything,” Lejon told me.

An ambulance pulled up, and the EMTs walked over to get a rundown from the cops. Then they went inside with two of the officers and came out with Craig on a gurney. Craig is in his seventies, and looks, if anything, older. He’s a small, stout Japanese-American man with sheet-white hair and an unkempt beard and moustache. His belligerence with the family stopped as soon as the first responders arrived. Suddenly he was compliant and reasonable.

This, according to Lejon, was a tactic of his stepfather’s. “He’s a very intelligent man,” Lejon said. His antics cease the moment he’s interacting with the authorities. Craig was deemed stable and released back to the family that evening, at which point the chaos flared right back up again.

It’s a pattern Officer Lande has seen time and again. “People have crises, they go to the hospital, they get stabilised,” he said. “They agree to a treatment plan. Then there’s no follow-up.” He continued: “Having a system of coercive mental healthcare that’s limited to emergency psychiatric crises that’s wedded strictly to voluntary participation — you’re condemning people to not getting the level of care they need. You’re condemning them to never get better.”

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Craig is drug-addicted and psychologically debilitated, but he at least has a house to sleep in and a family to keep tabs on him. Hundreds of thousands of Americans suffering mental illness and substance addiction lack even that basic structure to their lives. In recent months, we’ve seen what happens when the most violent among them are left to their demons: America’s cities have been struck by a series of grisly, unprovoked murders of women committed by homeless men.

The deceased in these homicides were not the only victims. The acutely mentally ill and drug-addicted are prisoners of their sicknesses, and despite all the money we’ve thrown at homelessness, our policies have amounted to a wholesale abandonment of these broken people to their grim fates.

In San Francisco, that chronic failure has become the city’s official policy. An entire downtown neighbourhood, right in the heart of the city, has been effectively ceded to drug dealers, addicts and the mentally ill, all in the name of compassion. Users in the Tenderloin smoke fentanyl and shoot heroin on the sidewalks in broad daylight. When it rains, the train station there becomes a huge underground shooting gallery.

Following the spectacular failure of the War on Drugs, the prevailing ideology in the addiction treatment world became “harm reduction”. Harm reduction aims to respect the rights and dignity of drug addicts by destigmatising their drug use; to minimise the social harms that accompany drug addiction such as crime, incarceration and discrimination; to save lives by providing safeguards against overdoses; and to offer detoxification but not to require it as a condition for social services and subsidies. The motto of harm reduction is “meeting people where they’re at”, rather than compelling abstinence as a one-size-fits-all-solution.

But the approach has its critics, who view it as well-intentioned but ineffective. “There are aspects of harm reduction that I support, and there are aspects that blur the lines between harm reduction and enabling,” said Tom Wolf, a former addict in San Francisco. “The most important thing is to have a full continuum of care that focuses on recovery, not an indefinite maintenance of one’s addiction.”

“Out of thousands of people I saw maybe two get clean,” said Ginny Burton, a former addict in Seattle, describing her work as a case manager employing the harm reduction model. “What I’ve seen actually work, and experienced myself, is separation. Separate the person from the destructive environment. Maintain that separation long enough for the person to get clarity. Then implement services based on priority of need.”

This is how she got clean. “Thank God I was arrested,” she said. But in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, the enforcement policies that resulted in her arrest don’t exist anymore. “If I was loaded today, I wouldn’t be able to pull myself out,” she said. “I wouldn’t be arrested.”

Tom Ostly, who was a prosecutor under the former San Francisco District Attorney, agrees that the state’s coercive powers are what are needed to jolt drug-addicted people into making the commitment to go clean. He once prosecuted a man who had walked up to a random man on the street, punched him in the face and broke his nose. The whole assault was caught on video. With his priors, the defendant was facing 12-15 years in prison.

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It turned out the man’s son had died, and the grief had turned the father into a drug addict. The day of the assault was the anniversary of his son’s death. He had been on a self-destructive spiral. Facing 15 years in prison, he agreed to go to intensive drug rehab instead, where he received counselling for PTSD. He’s now taking classes to be a drug counsellor and will soon graduate from college.

Those kinds of prosecutions just don’t happen anymore in San Francisco, where it’s considered more humane to allow people to continue killing themselves with drugs than to force them to stop. “The current administration lets everyone out and gives them no services,” said Ostly. “It’s bullshit.”

Jail is a lousy place to get clean, and drug use in and of itself should not be treated as a crime. Those lessons have come across loud and clear from the failed War on Drugs. But in rejecting the politics of mass incarceration, we’ve also thrown out the very idea of coercion. And without that, we’re empty-handed in the struggle against addiction and the rampant crime that it engenders.

Drug addiction itself is coercive. Giving an addict the “choice” to continue to use or to voluntarily get clean is as illusory as pushing someone off a roof and giving them the choice to either fall or fly. The current approach in cities such as San Francisco, Officer Lande said, “assumes people exercise full voluntary volition over their behaviour, and they don’t”. The decision to get clean has to be as non-optional as an addict’s “choice” to continue using. It has to be forced.

That doesn’t have to mean jail — in fact, it shouldn’t. Ginny was incarcerated repeatedly, but she finally got clean not through the criminal justice system but through her diversion to drug court and mandated rehabilitation. Nevertheless, coercion was an indispensable element in that successful intervention. The certainty of consequences is what finally broke through the fog of addiction.

“You don’t want to overly criminalise people,” said Officer Lande. “But you have to have some non-carceral way. Some judicial process beyond what the current system has.”

“Right now it’s very black or white,” he continued. “You’re either a psychotic or you’re not. You’re either a grave danger to others or you’re not. We don’t have anything in that grey area. We just have to wait until people are hitting rock bottom before we can do something.”

At my son’s school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ), Asian children account for about 70% of the student body. Many have worked incredibly hard to get into the prestigious institute, supported by first generation immigrant parents who, like me, see education as the best route to security and success. But in the months when America was rocked by race riots, self-described “equity warriors” described the Asian, mostly immigrant families of TJ as “white-adjacent” and “resource hoarders”. The white principal, Ann Bonitatibus, told us to check our “privileges”, while one teacher called on her to push through a “Diversity Initiative” while “The Iron is hot!”

In the months that followed, the local school board — all 12 members endorsed by the Democratic Party — voted to remove the school’s merit-based, race-blind admissions process, and replace it with one that was race-based. Along with other parents I was horrified by the school’s readiness to use identity, rather than achievement, as the basis of admissions. But when we objected, the Virginia education secretary, a Democrat, told our families that preparing for tests was like using illegal “performance enhancement drugs”. A black father, Harry Jackson, who spoke up for our cause was called a “motherfucker” selling “segregationist bullshit” — by a white activist who uses the Twitter handle @Antiracist14. These “anti-racists” have worked day and night to try to silence us, using pressure and insults, instead of debating us.

And our story is far from unusual: racist admissions processes are being reintroduced across America. Take the case of San Francisco’s elite Lowell High School, which garnered national attention last week: the overwhelmingly progressive city — Republicans account for less than 7% of the electorate — voted to recall three Democratic members of the school board in a landslide. One of those fired was Alison Collins who, in a now infamous tweet, had called Asian Americans “house n****rs”, insinuating that Asian parents who disagreed with her plan to turn an outstanding school into an experiment in racialism are captive to white supremacist forces.

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Like at TJ, activists waged a war on merit at Lowell, in the name of “equity”. Asian Americans, through diligence and ambition, had earned an impressive number of slots — so they were disparaged as “privileged” by anti-racist activists, who called on the school to replace merit-based testing with a lottery. The result was striking. Asian freshmen admitted to Lowell in 2021 fell to 42% from 50% the year before. White enrolment also decreased, to 16% from 21%. Black students increased to 5% from 2% and Hispanic students rose to 25% from 14%.

This process doesn’t just harm Asian American students. Despite increasing the enrolment of black and Hispanic students, schools like TJ put little effort into preparing them for their advanced academic classes. In school district enrolment figures made public for the first time, eight freshmen students, admitted through the new race-based admissions process, dropped out of TJ over just five months, between September 2021 and January 2022 (in the entire school year before, just one student dropped out). Changing admissions processes of outstanding schools does nothing to address the systemic failure of the education system to ensure these students are ready for rigorous training in Maths and Science. It also insults and demeans the achievements of black and Hispanic students who get into schools like Lowell and TJ through sacrifice and achievement. The message is clear: stop trying so hard. (The school district claims its new admissions process is “race neutral.”)

The United States Constitution — and common sense — tell us that a just society requires equality of opportunity, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or social status. “Equity” is a divisive, illiberal system fundamentally at odds with this ideal, because it preaches that there is a quota of opportunities for every group; individuals now find that their skin colour ends up being more important than their hard work.

One year ago, I waited in a virtual waiting room to express those views to the San Francisco school board. I wanted to explain that it had made me sick to my stomach to witness the disdain endured by parents who look like me, for immigrants from Asia with dreams like my family’s. I’ve written here before about how I moved to New Jersey from India, as a child who spoke no English. What I didn’t write was that we lived in poverty. While I was learning the alphabet, I received free breakfast, part of America’s social welfare program for the poor. Now, families like mine are being called “privileged” and “white adjacent” just because our children have achieved academic success, like I did.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The board members never called on me in that meeting. Instead of sharing my story, I listened to Collins — whose tweet calling Asian families “house n****r” had just emerged — discussing her efforts to change admissions to Lowell High School.

Other parents watched in shock, too. Siva Raj, an immigrant from India and father to two sons, wanted something very simple, he told me in an interview: for his sons to be able to return to school. For almost a year, the board had been on a virtue-signalling crusade — scrubbing American icons such as Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln out of school names — while utterly failing to address the elephant in the room. In cahoots with the powerful union, the California Teachers Association, and a far-Left wing of the Democratic Party, the Berniecrats, the board showed little concern as parents pleaded with them to come up with a plan to reopen schools closed during lockdown.

All children, but especially the most disadvantaged, were suffering terribly under remote learning. Even the uber-liberal mayor of San Francisco wanted schools reopened. But “the school board had a wall of indifference,” Raj told me. And so on Valentine’s Day 2021, he sat in his kitchen with his partner, Autumn Looijen, and cooked up a plan: a recall election.

Looijen readied the papers and that Friday, Raj posted a Priority Mail Express envelope, his hands trembling. At the time, he was only in the US on a work visa (now he is on the pathway to citizenship). Growing up in an apartment above a carton factory in Chennai, where his parents worked, Raj learned to never challenge authority. “This is what gets your throat slit”, he said. But he could see his sons withering under online learning.

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Last week, Raj stepped onto a small stage at Manny’s, a community space in San Francisco’s Mission District, and read the results of the recall election. Looking on were leaders of the Chinese American and Indian American communities, as well as other parents. “We had a cross-fertilisation of energy”, Raj told me later: parents of all races, backgrounds and political beliefs had united to oppose the corruption of our educational system.

Even the progressive New York Times declared, “The recall, which galvanized Asian-Americans, was a victory for parents angered by the district’s priorities during the pandemic”. This felt like a turning point: the mainstream media has been all too eager to perpetuate the idea that parents who object to the prioritisation of “anti-racism” over effective education are “Republican strategists”, “right wing activists”, “suburban white moms”, “conservative white parents whipped into a frenzy” and “white supremacists” engaged in “domestic terrorism”. And yet these parents prevailed in San Francisco, arguably America’s bluest city.

And the implications of this victory ricochet across the nation. Prior to the recall election, Allison Collins posted a video of me speaking to my school board, asking why someone in Northern Virginia would care about a school’s dust-up on the West Coast. What was I thinking, “penning” articles about the story in which she was embroiled?

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After the results were in, I answered Collins. I am “penning” articles about Lowell High School because it is one battleground of many where Asians have become the illiberal regressives’ scapegoat, punching bag, doormat — pick your metaphor. In the new hierarchy of human value put forward by “anti-racism,” Asians don’t count.

Indeed, Hannah Nikole Jones, the author of the controversial “1619 Project”, once posted a tweet arguing that it was “disingenuous” to say that New York’s specialised high schools have “majority people of color”, because the majority are Asian. In November 2020, North Thurston Public Schools in Washington state — which includes 22 schools and some 16,000 students — lumped Asian and white students together, excluding “Asians” as “Students of Color.”

And, in discriminating against Asians, Lowell mirrors not only my son’s school, but schools across the country. In August 2020, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the mostly-Democratic school board ignored the pleas of Asian families from India by suddenly eliminating the merit-based admissions test to its advanced academic science and technology high school programmes. The same year, Boston’s all-Democratic school board dismissed the protests of Asian parents, who said their children were being targeted in a plan to change admissions to the city’s most advanced schools, imposing postcode quotas and a lottery system. In both cases, just as in San Francisco and northern Virginia, new freshmen classes saw a decrease in the number of Asian students.

For a long while, the parents fighting against these measures were outliers. Many are understandably afraid of cancel culture; some are already marginalised in their communities, because of their race, their fear of challenging authority, immigrant status and the fact they speak English as a second language. But the case of Lowell High School shows what they can do when they find the moral courage to organise. This courage, for many, comes from the high stakes. For many immigrant families, education is a way out of poverty; for others, it is the path to becoming more settled: secure jobs, rewarding careers, a deciding role in America’s future. As one father said online, as parents celebrated at Manny’s, “They touched the third rail for Asians. Never mess with Asians and their education.”

But now, rising crime is rapidly undermining the progressive consensus. Homicides rose 30% in 2020, and over two-thirds of America’s largest cities will have had even more homicides in 2021 than in 2020. At least 13 big cities will set all-time records for homicides, including Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland. Meanwhile property crimes in California’s four largest cities rose 7% between 2020 and 2021. Car break-ins in San Francisco declined temporarily in 2020, because Covid emptied the city of tourists, but they have since skyrocketed, reaching 3,000 in November. Many residents have stopped bothering to report crime.

Of course, many crime rates are still below what they were in the Eighties. And progressives are right to say that we shouldn’t panic about rising crime, since past panics contributed to cruel and crude responses, including overly long prison sentences with little in the way of real rehabilitation programmes. That’s why, in the late Nineties, I worked for George Soros’s foundation, among others, advocating for drug decriminalisation, reduced sentences for nonviolent crimes, and alternatives to incarceration.

But today it’s clear that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. In 2000, when I stopped working on criminal justice policy, progressives were advocating mandatory rehabilitation as an alternative to incarceration. Now, progressive prosecutors are simply releasing criminal suspects from custody without requiring rehab or extended probation. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for instance, a man who had run over the mother of his child with his SUV was released on $1,000 bail. Neither he nor his SUV were put under electronic surveillance. Soon after, he killed six people and injured another three dozen — by running them over with his SUV.

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Meanwhile incarceration rates in the United States are at a 30-year low. In 2019, there were 17% fewer prisoners in the US than in 2009. And while progressives are right to point out that nearly half of the people in federal prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences, it’s worth noting that there are eight times more people in state prisons than federal prisons. And just 14% of people in state prisons are there for nonviolent drug offences. Half are there for murder, rape, robbery and other violent offences.

While homicides and other violent crimes merit special attention, crimes driven by drug addiction, such as shoplifting, public camping, and public defecation, undermine the fabric of city life. Progressives sold their criminal justice reforms on the idea that nonviolent offenders would be released into some kind of supervisory care, focused on treatment and rehabilitation. But often that did not happen.

Consider San Francisco. Its jail population plummeted to 766 in 2021 from 2,850 in 2019. If progressives had done what they’d promised, there would be 2,000 extra people on probation being supported to stay sober and out of trouble. That hasn’t happened. And that’s troubling because many who are released re-offend. Half of all offenders — and three-quarters of the most violent ones ­— who were released from San Francisco jails before trial, between 2016 and 2019, went on to commit new crimes. Instead of benevolent paternalism, progressives delivered libertarian anarchism. And yet all that would have been required would have been weekly drug testing, check-ins with probation officers, and electronic monitoring.

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Still, if we are to reduce crime without returning to an era of mass incarceration, we need a new consensus around criminal justice — one that prioritises prevention and rehabilitation, rejects calls to defund the police, and views probation as critical to making alternatives to incarceration work. And all of that starts with understanding why people commit crimes in the first place.

Progressives attribute crime to “root causes” like poverty, inequality, and structural racism. San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin, for example, recently claimed that, “Affordable housing, quality education, access to health care and addiction services can provide the stability that empirical evidence has shown actually deters criminal activity.” Of course these things are important, but there is no evidence that they prevent crime. Indeed, the study Boudin cited simply found that, in 12 cities where over 10% of population received welfare benefits, “more crime occurs when more time has passed since welfare payments occurred.” It did not look at the role of any of the factors he referenced.

Indeed, there is little evidence for the claim that poverty and structural racism have any impact on crime. African American crime rates were lower during the Forties and Fifties, when segregation was legal, poverty more widespread, and discrimination more overt, than between 1965 and 1990. Indeed, homicides among African Americans shot up after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And though it’s true that homicides rose during the first few years of the Great Depression, they then declined in most major cities afterward. And rates of crime, including homicide, kept declining after the 2007 financial crash and resulting recession, the worst since the Depression.

Homicide is irrational and emotional, experts agree, not a natural and predictable response to personal setbacks. Social conditions like poverty, oppression, and unemployment do not drive violent acts; people suffering from these conditions have varied rates of violence throughout history. Rather, one of the most important factors, when it comes to homicide, is the public’s belief in the legitimacy of the criminal justice system, as well as things like patriotism and “fellow feeling”. Homicide rates among unrelated adults in the United States closely follow the proportion of the public who trust their government to do the right thing, and believe that most public officials are honest. As trust in government fell in the late Sixties and early Seventies, homicides increased. When trust in government rose in the Fifties and mid-Nineties, homicides decreased.

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So anti-police protests take a toll. In 2014, a white police officer in Ferguson killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager, causing demonstrations across the US. Afterwards, the police chief in nearby St Louis noted that, “the criminal element is feeling empowered by the environment.” In 2015, the US Department of Justice asked one of the country’s leading criminologists, Richard Rosenfeld, to investigate whether homicides had risen after the incident. At first, Rosenfeld was sceptical, noting that homicides in St. Louis had started to rise before then. But after looking at the evidence, he changed his mind. “The homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and nearly unprecedented,” he wrote in his 2016 report. Rosenfeld had found a 17% rise in homicide in the nation’s largest cities, between 2014 and 2015.

Rosenfeld told me, when I interviewed him, that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had contributed to the homicide increase. “When people believe the procedures of formal social control are unjust,” noted Rosenfeld, “they are less likely to obey the law.” And BLM protestors fail to recognise that the people who suffer most, when the police can’t do their jobs, are black Americans, who are more likely to be victims of violent crime. They are seven to eight times more likely to be homicide victims than white Americans.

But progressives have gone one step further, by undermining the idea that police actually have any power to reduce crime. “Law enforcement is not going to prevent the violence,” claimed Philip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, a few weeks ago. In 2020, then–vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris tweeted, “America has confused having safe communities with having more cops on the street. It’s time to change that.”

Researchers find that negative publicity about the police has a powerful impact on police officers. Little wonder, then, that in 2020, at least two dozen police chiefs or senior officers resigned, retired, or took disability leave in America’s 50 biggest cities. 3,700 beat officers left. Today there are fewer police officers per capita in America than at any time since 1992.

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What liberals ignore is that there is good quantitative evidence that more policing can reduce crime. They argue that the police don’t actually prevent crime, they just punish people after the fact. But in 2009, President Obama’s stimulus package offered a billion dollars in grants to struggling American cities, to fund the police; cities qualifying for the grant increased policing by 3.2% and experienced a 3.5% decline in crime.

And there’s another inconvenient truth that liberals ignore: the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Working a 13-hour, rather than 10-hour, shift means cops are far more likely to experience public complaints against them, while back-to-back shifts quadruple the likelihood.

Still, progressives are busy gaslighting the public about their efforts to defund the police. A progressive columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote, “while there is continuing debate about what is driving the violent crime increases … we know for a fact that defund had nothing to do with it. Because defund never actually happened.” This is patently untrue. After the Black Lives Matter protests, more than 20 big cities reduced police budgets by at least $870 million. The LAPD’s budget was slashed by $150 million in July, for instance. It’s just that homicides rose so quickly that most cities reversed their defunding budgets. “From New York City to Los Angeles,” noted the Associated Press at the end of last month, “in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests … police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus, and political pressures.”

San Francisco is a classic example. After Black Lives Matter protesters last year demanded that cities “Defund the Police,” Mayor London Breed held a press conference to announce that her city would be one of the first to do exactly that. Breed announced $120 million in cuts to the budgets of both San Francisco’s police and sheriff’s departments. Last week, Breed u-turned dramatically, announcing that she was making an emergency request to the city’s Board of Supervisors for more money to fund the police and support a crackdown on crime, including open-air drug-dealing, car break-ins, and retail theft.

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Progressives denounced her plan. They oppose enforcing laws, when addicts and mentally ill people break them, because they believe “the system” is fundamentally racist, wrong and the cause of social injustice. This explains why progressives are narrowly focused on black people killed by the police, even though 30 times more black people are killed by civilians. And it explains why Boudin and other progressive prosecutors are obsessed with emptying prisons. (“The challenge going forward,” said Boudin in 2019, “is how do we close a jail?”)

Still, there’s reason to be hopeful. When Breed announced a sweeping crackdown on open air drug dealing and crime, she said, “I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances.”

“Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law … Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference … I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”

My time working in justice reform taught me that tough love works. The Netherlands and Portugal are often held up as progressive utopias, and while it’s true that both have reduced criminal penalties, both nations still ban drug dealing, arrest drug users, and sentence dealers and users to prison or rehabilitation. “If somebody in Portugal started injecting heroin in public,” I asked the head of drug policy in that country, “what would happen to them?” He said, without hesitation, “They would be arrested.”

And being arrested is sometimes what addicts need. “I am a big fan of mandated stuff,” says former felon Victoria Westbrook. “I don’t recommend it as a way to get your life together, but getting indicted by the Feds worked for me.” Today Victoria is working for the San Francisco city government to integrate ex-convicts back into society.

It’s hard work, but it pays off. Over the last 20 years, Miami has reduced its “homeless” population by 57%, despite skyrocketing rents, by closing open drug scenes and providing free psychiatric care, drug treatment and basic shelter. In High Point, North Carolina, police targeted three neighbourhoods with persistent crack cocaine dealing. There, police officers, accompanied by local community workers, met with dealers in person, asked them to stop, and offered them job training, tattoo removal and help restarting their lives. The officers gave the dealers unsigned arrest warrants, ring binders of the evidence against them, and video proof of their crimes. It proved to be good motivation for the dealers to clean up their acts.

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People in progressive cities are often shouted down for even suggesting a role for law enforcement. “Anytime a person says, ‘Maybe the police and the health care system could work together?’ or, ‘Maybe we could try some probation or low-level arrests,’ there’s an enormous outcry,” said Stanford addiction specialist Keith Humphreys. “‘No! That’s the war on drugs! The police have no role in this! Let’s open up some more services and people will come in and use them voluntarily!’”

But there is strong quantitative evidence that probationary programs that are “swift, certain, and fair” reduce arrests, recidivism, and drug use. The most famous of these programmes is Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE). It incentivised offenders to follow probation rules by applying guaranteed, immediate, and short jail time for parole violations like failing a drug test. One study found that HOPE reduced drug use by 72%, future arrests by 55%, and incarceration by 48%.

A researcher summarised the benefits of the program, saying, “HOPE actually gets people to change their behaviour by setting up a circumstance where their natural behaviour moves in the right direction. They don’t want to be arrested and go to jail, so they stop using. That’s a profoundly rehabilitative thing to do.” In other words, HOPE rewards addicts and criminals for behaving well, instead of simply expecting them to.

It’s time for a new consensus on crime. Enforcing laws will reduce violence. Pushing offenders to take responsibility for themselves, when they leave prison, will lead them to independent lives, rather lives of crime. Progressives have done their best to undermine justice, as well as common sense, for two decades. As well as refunding the police, we should apologise to them.

One owns a popular restaurant; the front door was destroyed, and the cash register robbed. The other was renting a car, the entire rear window of which was smashed to bits and the contents swiped. So common is this sort of looting and thievery that when he returned the rental car, he noticed that the car company’s lot was full of vehicles with broken windows.

Since November, throughout California, thousands of dollars have been stolen from stores including Apple, CVS, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry. In San Jose, over $40,000-worth of inventory was stolen from a Lululemon before the robbers escaped in getaway car. In Carmel-by-the-Sea last week, thieves wielding sledgehammers broke into a high-end jewellery store, smashing, grabbing and then fleeing. Right before Thanksgiving, 80 individuals rushed a Nordstrom in the Bay Area to participate in what authorities called “organised theft”.

Cannabis dispensaries are another favourite target. In Oakland, the Police Chief LeRonne L. Armstrong explained that most of these attacks turn violent: “more than 175 shots were fired” during cannabis robberies in Oakland last month alone. Even a physical therapy office in Beverly Hills was robbed this month by armed, masked burglars who entered the office and stole the doctor’s Rolex. The list of robberies is not limited to stores or businesses.

Many of the victims are ordinary individuals, walking down the street in broad daylight. As Jamie McBride, the head of the union representing LAPD officers, told tourists last week: “We can’t guarantee your safety. It is really, really out of control. I said it to people before. It’s like that movie Purge, but instead of 24 hours to commit your crime, these people have 365 days to commit whatever they want.”

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Once upon a time, we would have been shocked by this level of crime. Today, citizens fatalistically adapt their behaviours. I know countless women who no longer walk alone after dark in California’s cities. Everyone knows to hide anything they leave in their cars. Those who can afford it are installing gates and building tall fences around their homes. The wealthy are hiring personal security and no longer relying on police for protection. I’ve seen this all before — in Nairobi as well as other places in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and India.

Stores are boarding up their windows and closing earlier. They are hiring security staff and implementing new safety processes. A Safeway in San Francisco has installed gates that “let customers easily enter the store but swing quickly shut behind them, preventing would-be thieves from dashing out with shopping carts full of stolen items”. Rental car companies, like the one my friend used, are hiring glass repairmen to work full-time fixing the overwhelming number of broken windows.

As for those who cannot or will not adapt, they are faced with one option: to leave their city and often the state. High taxes are not the only reason so many big companies have pulled out of California over the past two years.

But how did we arrive at a point where people either have to adapt to the crime surrounding them or to flee; where the police union’s spokesperson has to warn the public that they are no longer in control?

The answer lies in an abundance of affluence. Affluence has allowed us to overcome many constraints in a way past generations could never have imagined. For long periods, a majority of people in the West have not had to worry about what tomorrow might bring. Questions over where future food, water and shelter will come from are no longer bother the majority of Americans. We’ve got apps on our phone that tell us what the weather will be not only tomorrow, but ten days hence; apps that allow us to buy meals, drinks, cars and even apartments with only a click or two; apps that even think for us.

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But with that increased quality of life, we’ve become lazy. We’ve stopped paying attention. We’ve come to take for granted the institutions that hold up our affluent society. We have assumed that they would continue functioning without our personal involvement and investment. It seems that when a society is as wealthy as ours and as insulated from day-to-day threats, the vigilance to maintain its institutions wilts.

What makes this affluence particularly damaging is the fact that the rich are the furthest removed from the consequences of their negligence. In California, those with enormous wealth are often also the loudest advocates for leniency towards criminals. Those individuals, who have the least contact with crime, are frequently the most enthusiastic proponents of reforms that reduce the safety of the average American. Democratic donors give their money to candidates who support defunding the police. They campaign against stop-and-search, three strikes, and “broken window” policies. They argue for lighter sentences or even the decriminalisation of certain crimes — shoplifting, for example, has been all but legalised in San Francisco.

Wealthy liberals for some reason feel more compassion for those committing crimes than for their victims. They believe in a form of “progress” that ignores human nature and social reality. As Mary Harrington recently wrote: “Team Empathy… tends to skew wealthy: it’s easier to believe people are naturally good if you’ve led a sheltered life.”

Meanwhile, some of the politicians they support, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even deny problems such as smash-and-grab exist. Others urge the public not to be distracted by rising crime, but to follow the “arc of history” towards the utopia of social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism. Melina Andullah, founder of Black Lives Matter LA, recently said of those concerned about the rising tide of crime: “They’re trying to move us backward. We don’t want to move backward; we want to move forward.”

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On December 1, Jacqueline Avant, the wife of Clarence Avant and mother-in-law of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, was shot and killed in her home in Beverly Hills. The suspect, Aariel Maynor, was attempting to rob her home when he shot her. He also attempted to kill her security guard.

On hearing the news, Abdullah’s response was to condemn it as “appalling”, yet also called on officials not to use it as an excuse to introduce tougher measures on crime. Elsewhere, Oprah Winfrey mourned the loss of her friend with a social media post that ended with the comment: “The world is upside down. And deeply in need of some love today.”

Love, as Oprah imagines it, is an ideal. Who knows? Perhaps, one day, we will achieve universal love. But, in the absence of any meaningful proposals, to hold it up as the solution to criminal activity is pure decadence.

Far more important is the need to keep in place the infrastructure of policing, investigating, trying and punishing that has evolved in the Western world — a system that seeks to strike a judicious balance between the safety of society and the rights of any accused individual. Tweak that system by all means. No one claims it is perfect, and much has been achieved in recent years by the movement for criminal justice reform.

But don’t delude yourself with talk of “love” or proposals to defund the police. For the perpetrators, the best kind of love is tough love. For the victims, whether they’re affluent or not, the best kind of love is being protected. We don’t need “social justice”, just plain justice.

But until recently, it seemed like we were all meant to aspire to the own-nothing-and-be-happy life. It’s a vision in which travel is easy, possessions are minimal (and delivered by drone), work happens remotely on a laptop, and different geographies aren’t homes so much as flavours to sample on a tasting menu.

Perhaps no voice expresses this more elegantly than the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, who this week wrote a plaintive defence of the frictionless life: “The myth of the man-child”.

The childless bachelor male, Ganesh claims, isn’t a perpetual adolescent. Far from it: this figure is cultivated, high-minded, “austere” and well-travelled, with “a decorum, almost a formality, born of aversion to the smells, stains and general boisterousness of a kid-filled home”. The most adult conversations, Ganesh reports, “are with the childless”.

This isn’t the first defence of the frictionless life he’s written. Shortly before the pandemic hit in earnest, he made “The climate case for childlessness”, in which he acknowledged that it’s not really about climate at all, but a desire to stay unencumbered. It’s about “a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony”. He and others like him did not, he says, “hate to ‘bring a child into this world’ […] so much as into our diaries”.

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And this is driven, he claims, by a desire for “maximum control” over life: “I know with some precision the list of cities in which I want to pass the rest of this decade, and in what sequence” — a plan that, he acknowledges, wouldn’t be workable with a spouse and children in tow. Ganesh realises this makes him selfish. But he sees this as “a bid for a more, not a less serious life”.

There was a time I would have nodded energetically along with this idea. I wanted, I would say, joy rather than contentment. (I’m pretty sure I recall claiming that the latter emotion merely ‘bovine’.) I spent my twenties living light, travelling lots, and resisting the accumulation of permanent possessions or obligations.

I could have bought a flat in London back when it was affordable; but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want a long-term relationship. I didn’t feel stable or coherent enough to tolerate the sheer consistency of commitment to just one other person.

As for the most serious such commitment there is — children — the prospect gave me recurring nightmares. In this I was an early adopter of a now-mainstream Western trend: to remain “child-free”. Many frame this in ecological terms, as in the recent COP26 protest by Population Matters aimed at encouraging people to breed less to save the earth. But a recent Pew poll reported the most common reason given by childless Americans for their decision is simply “I just don’t want to”.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Ganesh, who is thoughtful and clearly aware of the inverse correlation between freedom and intimacy. “Our horizons widen as our commitments narrow,” he observes in his defence of the ‘man-child’. Or, as he puts it differently in a column mourning the decline of expat city-states: “shallowness can be emancipating”.

Even as he defends the atomised hyper-liberal lifestyle, Ganesh is not insensible to what can be lost. He comments, for example, on the way pets “fill a hole” for many millennials in a way allotments, or religion, or volunteering might once have done: “Their dog or cat is the only endothermic mammal that some outwardly successful peers can count on for affection, or don’t have to walk on eggshells around.”

And in any case, even he is uncomfortably aware that his preferred way of life as a “middle class world citizen” may be on borrowed time. Climate anxiety, political instability, middle-class wage stagnation and, more recently, pandemic restrictions all militate against the democratic opening-up of the world to mass frictionlessness.

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But here’s the rub: swapping emancipation for shallowness is less enjoyable when you can’t afford the consumerist upside of minimal ties. One of the first columns I ever wrote here discussed the growing demographic who have embraced liberal atomisation, only to find changing economic conditions have denied them the disposable income that makes being unencumbered fun.

It’s all very well rejecting loyalties and obligations, if your earnings open the full range of upscale world-citizenship for your delectation. But Ganesh has little to offer those who lose this abundance. His best suggestion is that if you own nothing, having spent your twenties acquiring memories, you can always be happy by marrying into money in your thirties. It scarcely needs saying that while this might at a pinch be plausible advice for the kind of 20-something who reads the Financial Times, it’s unlikely to be of use more generally.

For the bottom tier of the new knowledge class is materially increasingly difficult to distinguish from gig-economy proles: both groups own nothing, and neither seems especially happy. Political unrest is rising and, as I’ve argued, the principal distinction between the Left-wing version of this discontent — antifa — and its alt-Right counterpart is cultural.

Some have belatedly realised they traded deep commitments for horizons that aren’t wide at all but shrinking rapidly. Happily not all of these disappointed would-be world citizens have responded by setting cities on fire. And it’s far from a foregone conclusion that the unlucky also-rans who got the atomisation but not the spending-money are all doomed to a future eating mealworm slurry in tiny one-person ‘pod’ homes.

Many are responding in far more constructive ways. For every doomer meme or creepy WEF video, subcultures are emerging in which people raised to be maximally individualist are trying to work out how to live together. In its most mundane form, this looks like a backlash against waiting till your thirties to have kids, or young parents writing about how to rebuild local community. In its more Bay Area-esque form, the social organiser Richard Bartlett is working on strategies for making ‘decentralised’ communities more capable of long-term interpersonal commitment, and thus less vulnerable to the well-documented tendency utopias have of imploding.

Or further out on the apocalyptic spectrum lie green land-based projects such as the Rizoma Field School, which is one of a growing network of families and groups attempting what adherents call ‘Doomer Optimism’: an approach to life based on the idea that things will probably get a lot worse, but that all is not lost if we can find ‘regenerative paths forward’. It seeks to develop sustainable forms of farming and community life, and also teach them to others. Many of these are a long way from the egalitarian ideals of the hippie commune era, and often explicitly opposed to the progressive and hyper-individualist ideas that drove such utopian ventures.

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Will any of this work? ‘Doomer optimist’, smallholder and sustainability academic Jason Snyder is acutely aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by the first generations after Peak Frictionlessness. “An uprooted generation will suffer all sorts of embarrassing contradictions as they try to relocalise,” he observed earlier this year. “They should do it anyway”.

I won’t bore you with how I came to reconsider my commitment to the frictionless life, beyond saying I’m glad I did so just about young enough to form a family before I got too old for that option to be open. But Snyder is right: adjusting to a life organised around the commitments I always feared hasn’t always been easy. It’s not uncommon for family members to get exasperated with me when I do something that implies I still think of myself as a solitary atom-self rather than a member of the team.

I don’t think I’m the only voluntary adopter of a more encumbered life to wrestle with this. The Bay Area technologist Venkatesh Rao captured something of the resulting ambivalence recently. In an increasingly politically unstable world, Rao acknowledged, the frictionless life may be less prudent than stockpiling supplies and working for a durable, secure home. Even so, he doesn’t seem wholly thrilled, tweeting nostalgically: “Remember when the ideal was a backpack, phone, passport, credit card?”. In contrast: “Owning lots of shit and supplies is a PITA [pain in the arse]”.

But what else can we do? Ganesh is right that narrower commitments mean wider horizons. But that’s assuming you can afford to enjoy those wider horizons. And for the rest, when emancipation is unaffordable, all you get is the shallowness.

In response, growing numbers are struggling, however clumsily, to rebuild all those commitments we were raised to discard. It might not work, but I refuse to be cynical towards anyone who’s trying. After all, some loves are worth sacrificing a measure of freedom for. And as the world grows stranger and more unstable, perhaps these are all we’ll be able to rely on.

Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.

I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.

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That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.

And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.

The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.

In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.

I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.

There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”

“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.

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Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.

In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.

To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.

They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.

The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18^th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.

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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?

As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.

I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.

The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.

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For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.

This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.

But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?

When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.

The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.

I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.

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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?

I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.

But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20^th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.

This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.

But America’s lethal addiction crisis is far from over. In fact, it’s worse than ever. According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control published this week, more than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in the 12 months between April 2020 an April 2021. It is the first time the figure has reached six figures over a year-long period and represents a 28% jump on the previous 12 months.

As I have reported before for UnHerd, the pandemic quickly undid what limited progress had been made in the fight against opioids before 2020. Lockdowns left recovering addicts alone and starved of the human contact that is so central to staying sober. Relapses spiked, and with them deaths. “Isolation is the opposite of what you need for recovery,” one pastor in West Virginia told me.

But the pandemic is only one dimension of what amounts to a serious public health emergency. And the prescription pills peddled by Big Pharma that most people think of when they hear the words “opioid crisis” aren’t the biggest problem. Today’s battle is against two synthetic drugs: one that kills with terrifying ease, another that creates zombified and desperate addicts almost overnight. These have transformed America’s drug landscape, and rendered obsolete a lot of conventional wisdom about drug use, addiction and the proper policy responses. They are not the drugs fondly remembered by ex-hippie Boomers.

“I don’t know any longtime fentanyl users,” one addict-turned-counselor tells the journalist Sam Quinones in The Least Of Us, his new book on America’s metastasising addiction crisis and the two drugs at its heart. “They all die.”

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Today, fentanyl is responsible for the majority of drug deaths in America. In tiny doses it gives users a high that resembles the blissed-out pain relief delivered by heroin or prescription pills. But it is far stronger and more deadly. In anything other than those microscopic quantities, it will kill you. The other drug central to the latest phase of the addiction crisis is methamphetamine, in particular a kind cooked up using a method known as P2P, which uses phenyl-2-propanone.

This new meth isn’t like the old meth. “I wouldn’t even call it meth anymore,” an addict-turned-councillor tells Quinones. Some gangs refer to it as “weirdo dope”. One user, Kirsten, explains that it was not the party drug that used to cause her to chat endlessly and crave companionship. After using the new meth, she “had trouble talking, unless it was to herself. She heard voices.” She struggled to eat and rarely left her home: “Her once-pretty smile faded along with the enamel on her teeth, which turned black and abscessed. Her head jerked uncontrollably. She gave her son to her family to keep him safe. By 2016, she was seeing angels and demons… She began barking like a dog in public.”

Users across America were all experiencing the same thing: paranoia, hallucinations, isolation, uncontrollable limbs, memory loss and garbled speech. Together, fentanyl and meth, Quinones writes, now form “an unmercifully addictive, mind-twisting, and deadly concoction that no one demanded”. That point is crucial. No one asked for this. These designer drugs were not devised with a particular set of consumer tastes in mind.

As The Least Of Us makes clear, they are first and foremost, supply-side innovations. The supply chain found a way of making drugs that were easier to produce than their naturally occurring equivalents; far more addictive, far cheaper. The results have been immensely lucrative — and devastating.

Fentanyl was initially imported with the click of a button from unregulated Chinese producers. After a government clampdown, that then switched to Mexico and domestic production, where the raw ingredients for the rudimentary production process were imported instead of the finished product.

The story with P2P meth is a little more complicated. For years, producers had preferred the method of production that extracted ephedrine, an ingredient used in over-the-counter drugs. Meth was churned out on an industrial scale in Mexico this way, and on a smaller scale in the US, where ephedrine could be found in drugs such as Sudafed. But a clampdown on that substance on both sides of the border led to a different, messier technique. The advantage of the so-called P2P method is that the ingredients are easier to come by: a list of legal and widely available chemicals. The disadvantage is that the methamphetamine it produced is — to simplify a little — a lot dirtier, filled with all sorts of noxious stuff. But the producers didn’t care: it was cheap and easy and meant they could deliver addicts a highly addictive fix with minimal fuss. Again, supply-side issues, not consumer tastes, explained the change.

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These are drugs for the age of the gig economy. You don’t need capital, you don’t land, you don’t need armed guards. You just need an internet connection and, for fentanyl, a magic bullet blender (the brand of choice, apparently). As Quinones writes, the gadget “fit snugly with fentanyl’s disruptive allure, which was this: that with minuscule investment of learning and money, anyone — even someone in boxers in his mother’s basement, without education nor connection to mafia or trackers — could now making a killing. And beginning in about 2015, they did.”

In spite of this brave new world of synthetic drugs, we are stuck in the shadow of the Sixties and Seventies and the idea that drug use is “a form of adventure, particularly for a young man who had intellect and a thrill-seeking soul”. But that culture was formed in an era when the drugs were a far cry from the “highly potent marijuana, corrosive methamphetamine, and powerful narcotic pain pills in unprecedented supply”.

The big argument in The Least Of Us is that drugs explain the drugs crisis. That may sound fatuous, but it’s important. Yes, demand matters, but pontificating about the root causes of American unhappiness — post-industrial decline, family breakdown, listlessness and so on — misses the point. The lethal addiction crisis is, first and foremost, about receptors in our brain and the horrifying availability of chemicals that attack them with overwhelming force.

We are dealing with a chemical assault: a woeful mismatch between 21st-century compounds and our stone-age brains. In other words, it’s the drugs, stupid. Put simply, this is a fight for what it means to be human. As Quinones puts it: “Our brains are wondrous, mystifying, complex organs. From them have sprung awesome creations, innovations, inventions. Drugs dim those gorgeous lights to gray obedience. Our brain on drugs resembles the regime that imprisons its great writers, artists, and scientists.”

By messing with the pleasure circuits we have evolved in order to eat, have sex, socialise in a group and pass on our genes to the next generation — things that have kept us alive and helped us thrive for millennia — drugs diminish what makes us human, and kill all sense of community. (Understand this and you understand how the pandemic has made the problem so much worse.)

Our blindness to the potency of modern drugs also means we have ignored the spillover effects of addiction. The proliferation of homeless encampments in American communities of all sizes, Quinones argues, is first and foremost a consequence of the new meth: “Homelessness is different now — more prolific, more stationary, less transient,” he writes. “Much of it now is rooted in the voluminous supplies of meth that Mexican traffickers’ switch to the P2P method made possible.” In light of this insight, the focus on “housing-first” approaches to homelessness miss the point.

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Ultimately, the twin meth and fentanyl assault on America scrambles conventional debates about drug legalisation and decriminalisation in unpredictable ways. An addiction crisis largely started by over-prescribing addictive pain pills before has become a story of deadly illegal synthetic drugs made with ever-changing combinations of widely available substances. The question of what the law proscribes feels besides the point. On the one hand, Oxycontin and the other addictive painkillers pushed by pharmaceutical companies starting in the Nineties undercuts the legalisers’ claim that a regulated market saves people from abuse. On the other, the restrictionists will never be able to keep up with the labs, who will always be one step ahead in the hunt for cheap, easy-to-manufacture addictive chemical compounds.

First and foremost, the problem is one of supply: the challenge is to find ways to prevent the aggressive marketing, and dramatic increase in supply, of highly addictive, very dangerous drugs — legal or illegal. Here, the emergence of Big Weed and its campaign to sell high doses of THC as part of a healthy lifestyle is surely an ominous development.

For his part, Quinones says his instincts are with the liberals, but is cautious about the consequences. In particular, he believes in the need for continued criminalisation “not as a reason to send someone to prison” but as “leverage we can use to pry users from the dope that will consume them otherwise”. It is not good enough, he argues persuasively, to wait for someone to “hit rock bottom” and seek help. Today, people “are living in tents, screaming at unseen demons, raped, pimped, beaten, unshowered and unfed”.surely  If that’s not rock bottom, what is? When it comes to fentanyl, the answer is death. Coercion must be part of the solution.

The Least Of Us is a bleak wake-up call, but Quinones ends on an upbeat note. Perhaps, he argues, the misery of the drug wave sweeping America will do what other crises haven’t done and bring about much needed community reconstruction.

I’m less optimistic. Not because America’s communities, from small Appalachian towns to big coastal cities, lack resilience. But because of the mismatch between our stone-age brains and terrifyingly addictive drugs. Even as the latest overdose numbers make headlines, America is yet to properly come to terms with the seriousness of what it is up against. However, despite all the bleak headlines and grim statistics, I’m left with the horrible feeling that the country hasn’t quite hit rock bottom.

And then, in 1906, an earthquake destroyed the fragile city. Buildings toppled. Broken gas pipes and fallen powerlines started fires. The authorities tried in vain to create firebreaks, resorting to dynamiting whole blocks of houses, but there was no stopping the fires that burned for another four days. More than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. At least 3,000 people were killed, and the majority of survivors were displaced from their homes.

It is what followed the disaster, though, that is truly fascinating. San Francisco transformed. It went from a city renowned for cut-throat competition, race riots and brothels to the site of an extraordinary upsurge of public-spiritedness. Residents who survived built impromptu health clinics and makeshift shelters.

A beautician, Anna Amelia Holshouser, recalled how she and others stitched blankets and sheets together to make a tent for children, and then set up a soup kitchen, feeding as many strangers as they could out of a few unbroken plates and tin cans. All across the wrecked landscape, groups of survivors banded together to create places of safety and mutual aid. Rebecca Solnit describes the small-scale initiatives on each rubble-strewn street of San Francisco as “little utopias” — that is, idealistic micro-societies where people lived as much for others as for themselves, spontaneously rejecting the dominant narrative of individualism.

What occurred in San Francisco was a rare thing, but it had happened before and it would happen again. Over and over throughout history, idealistic, cooperative communities have sprouted up in the wake of disasters.

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There are few examples as clear as the communities that followed the First World War, less than a decade after the earthquake in San Francisco. On a single day in the war — 22 August 1914 — the French army lost 27,000 men: half as many soldiers dead as the United States would later lose in the entire Vietnam War. In addition to ten million lives lost over the course of the conflict there was the wider damage: the uncounted millions scarred in body and mind; the disorienting sense of an entire social order destroyed.

People reeled under the compound effect of war and an influenza pandemic — robbed of their young, their hopes destroyed, uncertain of what the future held. But amid the destruction arose an impulse that was optimistic, energetic and humanitarian.

As in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, small groups of men and women began to rebuild, starting experimental settlements, renouncing old ways of living and trying to create new ones. Many people around the world believed the old social order was to blame for the Great War: the preoccupation with capitalist gain and nationalistic competition. Their response was to lead lives built around philosophies of non-materialistic mutual aid. In Germany, coteries of students and intellectuals took to the country to live collectively and farm cooperatively. In Japan, so many idealistic settlements were started that the conservative press reported anxiously on a “new village craze”. These post-war groups, though drastically different in style and structure, all had shades of the resilient, compassionate and communally-minded action that defined the days after the earthquake in San Francisco.

What can we learn from these reactions to disaster? Perhaps simply that adversity itself can prompt what is good in mankind — the urge to redraft the lines along which our societies are built for the better; a turn to co-operative social striving that would otherwise never have manifested.

And yet few utopias last long. In San Francisco, it was just a matter of days before thousands of soldiers were “restoring order” in the city — which included shooting those who were trying to collect food for the needy. New modes of living rarely spark large-scale social transformations, and all too often the status quo resumes.

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But short-lived though most utopian communities are, they are connected in a beneficial way to the existing social order. They are in what German sociologist Karl Mannheim called “dialectical tension” with it: offering a reconfigured version of the outside world, expanding people’s sense of social possibilities, while at the same time being shaped by the mainstream’s needs. Even the communities that disintegrate quickly leave traces behind them, some of which are absorbed into the dominant social structures. And their examples gesture towards the fundamental idealism and resiliency in the human spirit, and the easily forgotten truth that it is always possible to recast the way we live.

We’re passing through another disaster now. And though the defining nature of this pandemic has been that people have been forced to live apart, it has nonetheless sparked impressive examples of idealistic activity, of cooperation and social action. Drivers in Wuhan created a volunteer car fleet to transport medical workers to hospitals when public transport shut down; young people in India mobilised to provide aid packages for those without savings; experts created the open-source library “Coronavirus Tech Handbook”, pooling knowledge on technologies and organisational methods for fighting the pandemic.

Climate change is a slower-moving crisis. Like the First World War, it has sparked in many a sense of the failure of the underlying systems of society and governance, which seem to be unable or unwilling to cope and change. Collectives experimenting with low-impact modes of communal living — ecotopias, as some of them call themselves — are proliferating.

At Old Hall Community in Suffolk, a group of 50 share a manor house, farming, cooking communally and keeping their carbon footprint as near as possible to net zero. In the mountains of Asturias in northern Spain, sixty Spanish, French, Danish and German women and men live in the remote commune of Matavenero, where they grow their own food, build their own houses and consume as little as they can. There are larger initiatives, including the community of Toyosato in Japan, where several hundred participants aim to demonstrate a fulfilling life built on sustainable farming, cooperation and minimal possessions. This settlement is one of more than 70 low-impact communities that form the Yamagishi movement, which stretches to Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the United States.

These contemporary utopias are not a replacement for long-sighted national and international legislation, or for the much-needed regulation of corporate actors. In many ways they may be less effective than change-oriented activists such as Extinction Rebellion. But ecotopians put their money where their mouths are. They live in the way they think we all ought to live.

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There seems to be a time limit on utopian communities. When the disasters that inspired them are forgotten, they generally collapse, or are absorbed back into the old order with its attendant oppressions and injustices. Sometimes, they mitigate that old order, demonstrating practices that can help make society a little better, a little more just. But climate change falls outside of this pattern. We are not likely to live to see the end of this global disaster. And if we insist on holding fast to the old order, to the dominant ideologies of hyper-individualism and materialism, the crisis will only deepen.

Utopian living, at its best, creates an opening in the fabric of society, allowing us to see how fragile the habits and structures which seem immutable in day-to-day life really are. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” wrote the young reformer Dorothy Day of the San Francisco earthquake, having watched her mother give away her clothes to survivors. We haven’t quite reached the moment of imaginative, communal rebuilding that people are capable of when faced with disaster. We must hope that this moment will arrive soon.

In each of these cases, the perpetrator had been recently released by police, either on parole or because of a failure to bring charges. Police had already detained the man suspected of murdering Williams twice this year after domestic violence incidents. The man who killed Abe and Platt had been arrested for 73 felonies and 32 misdemeanours in San Francisco alone.

Such avoidable tragedies keep happening in San Francisco, a city where petty crime rates have exploded, where an already chronic homelessness problem has become even worse, where there were twice as many drug overdose deaths as Covid-19 fatalities last year and where America’s largest and oldest Chinese-American community is battling a spike in violent hate crimes. Anger is growing, and its target is the chief prosecutor notionally responsible for putting criminals away, but who a growing number of San Franciscans say cannot be trusted to keep their city safe. 

Chesa Boudin was elected District Attorney in November 2019 to much fanfare. Never mind that he had never prosecuted a case before; his unabashedly progressive platform — which promised to end cash bail, reduce the size of the city’s prison population, “reimagine” criminal justice and stop enforcing so-called “quality-of-life” crimes such as prostitution — garnered international praise. According to the Guardian, his victory was a “welcome shift from the ‘tough on crime’ norms to bold positions that veer radically to the left”. The Nation described Boudin’s election as confirmation that “political revolutions are possible”. In a video message at his swearing in ceremony last January, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Boudin that “the hope you reflect is a great beacon to many”.

Not even 18 months into the job, Boudin has inspired more despair than hope — so much so that he now faces a recall petition from San Franciscans unhappy with his radical approach to criminal justice. And if he has become a “beacon”, it is as a cautionary tale of what happens when voguish ideas of radical reform are put into action.

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Boudin, to his credit, has only done what he promised to do. Two days into the job, he fired seven top prosecutors, replacing them with lawyers who had previously worked as public defenders. Within a few months, he had released almost 40% of the city’s prison population. The pandemic further provided Boudin with a public health rationale for his programme of decarceration. The consequences speak for themselves: homicides are up, as are burglaries and carjackings. Arson attacks have also increased by almost 50%.

And yet prosecutions are down. Between January 2020, when he took office, and March this year, Boudin has tried just 23 cases. During an equivalent time period, his (already quite liberal) predecessor brought more than ten times as many cases to trial. In 2020, prosecutors in neighbouring Alameda county dismissed only 11% of felonies brought to them by the police. In San Francisco, that figure stood at 40%.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that San Franciscans have started to turn on Boudin. Of the 131 arrests made for domestic violence felonies in the last three months of 2020, Boudin dismissed 113, prompting anger from campaigners and volunteers at the city’s women’s shelters. Meanwhile, police in the Tenderloin district, ground zero for the city’s homelessness and drug abuse crises, are outspoken in their frustration at Boudin’s refusal to prosecute the dealers behind the surge in fentanyl overdose deaths in the city.

The growing sense of disorder in San Francisco has forced some to take matters into their own hands. Leanna Louie is a lifelong San Franciscan and, like most people in the city, a lifelong Democrat. Disturbed by a rise in anti-Asian attacks, which she attributes to the racially charged language deployed by Donald Trump during the pandemic, she has spent nearly every evening of the past year patrolling San Francisco’s Chinatown with a group of other volunteers. Exasperated with Boudin’s apparent inability to put away the kind of violent criminals she spends her evenings protecting shop-owners and elderly Chinese-American residents from, she is also now campaigning for his recall.

Boudin’s social media is full of concern over the rise in crime targeted at Asians, but Louie says it is very hard for her or the victims to take him seriously. “These attacks are happening over and over again because he releases criminals,” she says. “It’s so insulting to hear him claim he cares about us. If you care about us, why don’t you join us on patrol?”

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Andrea Shorter, also part of the recall campaign, says that “the inconvenient truth for Boudin is that it’s not just a small group of conservatives that are out to recall Democratic politicians… We are interested in and support criminal justice reform. We understand its implications in terms of racial justice. I myself am African-American and also LGBTQ. I have supported criminal justice reform for nearly three decades, but not at the expense of public safety.”

Yet San Francisco’s lax attitude to crime does not start and end with Chesa Boudin. Proposition 47, a 2014 ballot measure that reclassified a range of felonies — including theft of anything worth less than $950 and most drug possession and drug use offences — as “misdemeanours”, is also part of the problem; shoplifting is now so rife in the city that Walgreens, a national pharmacy chain, has closed 17 locations in San Francisco. Meanwhile, like other liberal city leaders, San Francisco’s mayor London Breed has pulled $120 million from the city’s law enforcement budget to reinvest elsewhere.

But even if Boudin is only one in a cast of characters responsible for the decay of San Francisco, the 40-year-old perfectly personifies the hypocrisies of American progressivism behind that decline. Read any of the fawning profiles in America’s liberal press and the first thing you’ll learn is his first-hand experience of America’s judicial system. He is often described as “the son of jailed radicals” or the son of “imprisoned leftists” and frequently touts his parents as the inspiration for his decarceration agenda.

This is a heavily spun version of the truth. Boudin’s mother and father were members of the Weather Underground, a far-left terrorist organisation that spent the 1970s bombing banks and government buildings (including the US Capitol). They went on to form a splinter group called the May 19th Communist Organisation and, in 1981, took part in the armed robbery of a bank truck in Nyack, New York.

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They botched the heist and the Boudins’ accomplices shot and killed a security guard and two policemen. Chesa’s parents were convicted of felony murder. In their trial, the defendents said the stolen $1.5m was “expropriation” needed to fund the creation of a black nation-state in the American south. For the progressive goals of the Boudins (both of whom are white), Officer Waverly Brown, the first African-American police officer in Nyack, paid with his life.

It would, of course, be unfair to tar Boudin with his parents’ extremism. But he shows no embarrassment over his lineage. “My parents were all dedicated to fighting US imperialism around the world,” the radical princeling told the New York Times in 2002. “I’m dedicated to the same thing.” In his cringeworthy memoir about his travels in Latin America — during which he worked as a translator in the Hugo Chavez’s Presidential Palace as a translator author of  pro-regime pamphlets aimed at a gullible US audience — he condescends the poor and shows a painful lack of self-awareness. “Why weren’t they as eager as I to criticise imperialism,” he asks of working-class South Americans.

Boudin has never renounced any part of his past: his parents, in his eyes, are brave radicals and blameless victims of America’s industrial-prison complex. His radicalism is of a piece with theirs. And just as he appears impervious to the consequences of his parents’ actions, he seems blind to the results of the experiment he is running in San Francisco.

The failure of that radical experiment — and the desperation of the San Franciscans who want to put a stop to it — is, in many ways, a parable of the American Left: the ultra-liberal metropolis being mugged by reality. The Boudin recall effort is a test of the limits of San Francisco’s commitment to radical ideas. Campaigners must gather more than 51,000 signatures to trigger a recall election. Indeed, if its residents do manage to do so, it would be a chastening moment for progressives across the country who have spent the last year calling for more of the sort of radicalism embodied in San Francisco’s DA. 

And if they don’t, it will suggest liberal America is oblivious to the consequences of “reimagining” policing and criminal justice: a spike in violence and disorder that ultimately hits the country’s most vulnerable the hardest. 

Perhaps channelling such hyperbole, President Biden recently suggested that he wants to “make America California again”. Yet before leaping on this particular train, he should consider whether the California model may be better seen as a cautionary tale than a roadmap to a better future in the digital age.

The on-the-ground reality — as opposed to that portrayed in the media or popular culture — is more Dickensian than utopian. Rather than the state where dreams are made, in reality California increasingly presents the prototype of a new feudalism fused oddly with a supposedly progressive model in which inequality is growing, not falling.

California now suffers the highest cost-adjusted poverty rate in the country, and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners. It also has one of the nation’s highest Gini ratios, which measures the inequality of wealth distribution from the richest to poorest residents — and the disparity is growing. Incredibly, California’s level of inequality is greater than that of neighbouring Mexico, and closer to Central American countries like Guatemala and Honduras than developed nations like Canada and Norway.

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It is true that California’s GDP per capita is far higher than these Central American countries, but the state has slowly morphed into a low wage economy. Over the past decade, 80% of the state’s jobs have paid under the median wage — half of which are paid less than $40,000 — and most are in poorly paid personal services or hospitality jobs. Even at some of the state’s most prestigious companies like Google, many lower (and even mid-level) workers live in mobile home parks. Others sleep in their cars.   

The state’s dependence on low-wage service workers has been critical in the pandemic, but it now suffers among the highest unemployment rates in the nation, outdone only by tourism-dominated states like Hawaii, Nevada and New Jersey. Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood, now has the highest unemployment rate of the nation’s top ten metropolitan areas, higher even than New York.

But that hasn’t stopped California from portraying itself as a progressive’s paradise, publicly advocating racial and social justice. The state just passed a Racial Justice Act to monitor law enforcement, endorsing reparations (although California was never a slave state) and is working to address “systemic” racism in its classrooms. This “woke” agenda was taken to a new extreme this week when the San Francisco School Board decided to rename 44 schools because they were named after people connected to racism or slavery. The district’s Arts Department, originally known as “VAPA”, also decided to re-brand because “acronyms are a symptom of white supremacy culture”.

Unsurprisingly, changing school names has little effect on the daily lives of minorities. In fact, minorities do better today outside of California, enjoying far higher adjusted incomes and rates of homeownership in places like Atlanta and Dallas than in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Almost one-third of Hispanics, the state’s largest ethnic group, subsist below the poverty line, compared with 21% outside the state. Meanwhile, one fifth of African Americans and over two-thirds of noncitizen Latinos, including the undocumented, are the edge of poverty.

The reality today is certainly a stark change from the 1980s, when the technology industry created lots of middle class jobs. Hewlett Packard was an exemplar of enlightened management and employee benefits; it was long noted for its informal way of running its business and worked particularly hard to involve its line workers in helping define and reach the company’s goals. Yet in recent years, Valley companies have become ever more abstract and digital, with fewer jobs requiring working and even middle-class employees.

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By 2015, nearly 30% of Silicon Valley’s residents relied on public or private financial assistance. Once a beacon of middle-class aspiration, it has become “fragmented and divided,” note two Leftist researchers, Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor, “with the high-tech community largely isolated from the broader region and particularly those parts of the region that are less fortunate”. Rather than “a capitalism we can believe in”, the Bay Area has become “a region of segregated innovation,” where the upper class waxes, the middle class wanes, and the poor live in poverty that is becoming impossible to break out of. Silicon Valley, as we know it today, has essentially collapsed into “feudalism with better marketing”.

Yet for most of its 170-year history as a state, California was a magnet both for ambitious Americans and foreigners. The newcomers helped create the farms, drill oil wells, engendered Hollywood, the aerospace, and technology industries. The California dream was, in a sense, America on steroids. Even when high costs and the rise of other areas — Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Washington State — slowed and eventually reversed domestic migration, people from abroad continued to pour in to pick up the slack.

This is increasingly no longer the case. California’s population is — for the first time in its modern history — falling. Millennials, particularly when they start having families, are heading to other states, a process that has been accelerated by the pandemic. Once the ultimate land of youth, the Golden State is now ageing 50% faster than the rest of the country. In time, the wheelchair could replace the surfboard as the symbol of the state. And as millennials flee the state and other expensive coastal regions, immigrants are no longer coming in large numbers. Instead, as demographer Wendell Cox explains, they are increasingly moving inland to cities like Houston, Nashville, and Orlando.

Californian officials try to cover up these shortcomings by pointing to the huge capital gains tax receipts they receive from large tech companies, and those derived from IPOs. Together these have created an enormous tax windfall estimated at $26 billion that allows the state to enjoy an annual surplus even in hard times. That’s partly why, when Governor Newsom recently defended his economic track record, he predictably pointed to the new round of IPOs to assure us that the state’s growing billionaire class is “doing pretty damn well”.

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Yet Newsom currently faces a determined recall campaign, which could trigger an election if it attracts enough signatures. For in spite of his optimism, opportunities and avenues for growth, the Governor’s preening and inconsistent lockdown activities — such as closing outdoor dining despite no evidence of its dangers, and being caught eating un-socially distanced at the hyper-expensive French Laundry restaurant — have angered large swathes of the state’s population. Not only have these incidents exposed his cluelessness, but also the political class’ imperviousness to the needs of non-elite business and ordinary citizens of the state.

And this is all at a time when we are starting to see the unravelling of the precise policies on social justice, climate and taxes that are widely viewed among progressives as role models for the future. These policies have not brought about greater racial harmony, enhanced upward mobility and widely based economic growth. They are not even exemplars in reducing climate change, but, at best, shift the burden of saving Gaia onto the working class while their jobs and resources generate wealth elsewhere.

Clearly California is not the avatar of brighter future, particularly in an age of heightened competition from hungrier, more motivated and less carbon-obsessed places like India and China; indeed, California increasingly cannot compete, even for most high-end jobs, with American upstarts like Texas or Arizona. So before the state — and the President — entertains any notion of sensibly “exporting” its model, California’s leaders need to embrace the biblical notion of “physician cure thyself” and demonstrate that our state is the harbinger of a better future, rather than a feudalistic past.