“Has San Francisco lost its liberal soul?” So asked a New York Times headline earlier this month, after voters there approved ballot measures aimed at tackling crime and drug addiction. As Republicans campaign against urban dysfunction and Democrats stare down the possibility of a second Trump presidency, there has never been a better time to reconsider what it means to have a liberal soul.
To begin: What do the ballot measures in San Francisco actually do?
One measure gives more flexibility to the police department to fight crime, allowing it to install street cameras and use drones. It also aims to reduce the paperwork burden on officers, in part by making use of body camera footage, and it eliminates a ban on chasing violent-crime suspects fleeing in vehicles.
The other requires drug screening and treatment for single adults who are suspected of drug use and who receive cash assistance and other local benefits — to avoid subsidizing addiction and contributing to fatal overdoses.
Stunning? Not to people who live there
The Los Angeles Times called their passage “a stunning rightward shift” for the city. But it wasn’t stunning to Mayor London Breed, who championed the measures, or to voters, who are fed up with crime and heartbroken by drug addiction. Overdose deaths have soared to an average of more than two per day.
The referendum was of a piece with San Franciscans’ 2022 decisions to recall both a district attorney who scaled back prosecutions and school board members who seemed more concerned with removing the names of historical figures from schools than educating students.
So, the result wasn’t all that stunning. But was it a soul-losing moment and a “rightward shift?” It was, if the essence of liberalism is the old Cole Porter line, “anything goes,” where tolerance for transgressions and hostility to authority are its defining qualities. That has been the dominant perception of liberalism for decades, with devastating consequences for the Democratic Party.
New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan memorably summarized this problem more than 30 years ago, when he bemoaned the trend of excusing street disorder and rejecting social norms as “defining deviancy down.” Liberalism became such a damaged brand that many Democrats began calling themselves progressives, without wrestling with the fact that progress is often at odds with permissiveness.
In the Progressive, New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society eras, the soul of liberalism — what breathed life into it as a political force — lay not in permissiveness toward individual lawbreaking, but in the advancement of collective freedom and equality through government action. Liberalism meant empowering public officials, not handcuffing them. And it meant holding high expectations of government, not low expectations of neighbors.
San Francisco voters, wanting their government to be more active and effective, are embracing what was long the essence of liberalism. What happened to those roots?
Tyranny of rules, fear of lawsuits
Much of the answer lies in “Everyday Freedom,” a powerful and succinct new book by Philip Howard. As liberals ushered in a wave of fundamental changes to individual freedom and equality beginning in the 1960s — one of the great achievements in human history — they rightly sought to constrain the power of government to impinge on individual rights.
But to do so, as Howard explains, rather than adopting guiding principles that would allow for governmental flexibility and public accountability, lawmakers and regulators began writing millions of pages of prescriptive rules for every imaginable facet of life. That red tape, along with a corresponding expansion in litigation, greatly curtailed government’s freedom to address problems. Collective action was subjugated to an ever-expanding array of individual legal rights, and the idea of freedom, Howard writes, was reduced to “a solitary activity — ‘the right to be left alone.’”
It is not just technology that has turned alienation, loneliness, and isolation into social epidemics. Liberalism, instead of delivering the Great Society, has helped trap us at Walden Pond.
“Americans have lost the authority to do what they think is sensible,” Howard writes, owing to fear of lawsuits and a tyranny of rules. That loss of authority — which is also a loss of freedom — has paralyzed government, demoralized the public, eroded public trust in institutions and fueled the anger and division promoted by Donald Trump and his most extreme supporters.
Rebelling against the loss of freedom
The good news: some Democratic leaders are beginning to rebel against this loss of freedom, and not just Mayor Breed. A state senator from San Francisco has proposed rolling back environmental regulations that have long blocked the creation of new housing, part of a new movement of YIMBYs (“Yes In My Backyard”). The city is starved for housing, and its density and mass transit mean that new development would yield major environmental benefits. The inability to build it is among the countless examples of regulations stymieing their own goals.
The problem of lost freedom is so endemic that we often fail to notice it, which is why Howard’s book is invaluable. At only 84 pages, it can be read in one sitting. I did, and I’d recommend it to anyone who has ever felt frustrated by government– and anyone who believes, as it seems most San Franciscans do, that the true soul of liberalism is worth saving.
Frank Barry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy.”
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