Do Leftists Now Believe Leftism Doesn’t Work?

It
is hard to destroy a naturally beautiful city like San
Francisco, with ideal weather and stunning infrastructure
inherited from far better earlier generations.

Yet
San Francisco continues its much-publicized and self-inflicted
doom loop. The productive classes still flee the increasingly
crime-ridden city and its self-induced pathologies. The city
is eroding not because of the doomsayers and not because of
what people say about San Francisco, but because of what San
Franciscans have done to San Francisco.

In
2023, more than 40,000 crimes were reportedly committed in
San Francisco. The great majority of the perpetrators
were either not arrested or never jailed, indicted, or
convicted.

Downtown
office vacancy rates exceed 35 percent—and are climbing.
Tourists have ostracized the city, given the thousands of
homeless that occupy sidewalks and downtown. San Francisco
claimed to be on the cutting-edge of the woke green movement,
proud that it had enacted the most stringent environmental
laws and regulations in the world—except when it came to
defecation, injection, and urination on the sidewalks,
doorways, and parks and during storms, when the toxic,
effluviant human waste escapes sewage treatment and flows into
the once-cherished bay.

In
a mere five years, the city went from being one of the most
envied and wealthy in the world with a vibrant nightlife and
new high-tech start-ups to a West-Cost Detroit.

Now
billionaires are trying to heal San Francisco by returning it
to the old normality in the era before the progressive city
councils, the boards of supervisors, and mayors defunded the
police, allowed the homeless to absorb the downtown, and
promoted prosecutors who refused to enforce the laws.

The
rich are rallying to undo the damage wrought by the very
officials whom they and the majority of the city voted into
office. Their principles seem simple—start doing the very
opposite of the progressive agenda: enforce laws; arrest,
convict, and incarcerate criminals; balance city budgets; and
insist that the homeless leave the streets, follow the laws of
the city, and relocate to shelters.

Across
the bay, Oakland is in even worse shape. The city is on
life support as a predictable result of progressive nihilism:
do not enforce the law; do not arrest or jail criminals; raise
taxes and overregulate businesses; pay exorbitant salaries to
unionize public workers and bloated city staff; create toxic
racial animosity. And the result is Oakland 2024, a mix
between 19th-century
Tombstone and contemporary Port-au-Prince.

The
city is becoming a veritable ghost town as more overtaxed
employers leave and more taxes rise on those who cannot leave.
Cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York follow
the same trajectory. They suffer the symptoms of a collective
madness triggered by a combination of the destructive national
COVID quarantine that birthed the zoom culture, the systematic
attack on police after the George Floyd death, and a nihilist
woke epidemic that postulated a binary of stereotyped
oppressors and oppressed that saw the so-called punching bag
victimizers shrug and move far away from blue states and
cities.

In
all these doom-loop cities, progressive reformers in the
eleventh hour are now trying to undo the very policies of
those they elected, as if they are slowly waking up from a
collective madness—in an election year.

A
similar confessional and re-examination among the left is
occurring over the border catastrophe. Upon ascension, the
Biden administration discarded, and ridiculed as illiberal,
the security measures it had inherited from the prior
administration—the end of catch-and-release, the demand that
would-be refugees apply for entry in their home countries, the
continuation of the wall, and Mexico’s responsibility to stop
the transit of millions northward through its country.

Much
of the sudden left-wing panic over the border is, of course,
opportunistic because it is an election year and the left
fears losing power for what it has done to the middle class.
The optics of 8 million people swarming the border with
impunity over the last few years have alienated the public.
And the infusion of illegal migrants into inner-city and
border communities threatens to hemorrhage the Democratic
base.

So
suddenly, no one takes credit for the once wonderful, porous
Biden border. Abruptly, the crossings are blamed on Trump—as
if no one remembers Joe Biden’s 2019 performance-art boast for
illegal aliens to “surge” the border and how he facilitated
that advice over the next three years. Abruptly, the Democrats
insist that after three years and 8 million illegal aliens
into the Biden administration, something must be done—perhaps
even a rebranding of what worked in 2020 as their own.

The
same rethinking of energy is occurring as well among the
left—in an election year. The more they talk of banning
natural gas, mandating electric vehicles, and ending internal
combustion engines, the more they quietly reverse course,
draining the strategic petroleum reserve, quietly allowing
more federal oil leases, and encouraging national production
to return to pre-COVID levels present during the Trump
administration.

Frackers
and drillers are working at near-full production. Production
in 2023 ended up at 13.5 million barrels a day. In short,
halfway through the Biden administration, as it desperately
drained the strategic petroleum reserve on the eve of the
midterms to lower the high gasoline prices it had spawned, the
left kept up the green rhetoric as it greenlighted oil
production.

In
early 2024, the U.S. is once again the largest oil producer in
the world. Monthly production now matches or exceeds the high
record months during the pre-COVID Trump administration.

Why
the turnabout? Once again, reality strikes. In an election
year, the return to reasonable energy prices is helping to
moderate the inflation that the Biden administration fueled.

Energy
self-sufficiency is a valuable foreign exchange earner. It
allows the U.S. to be independent abroad, free from foreign
leverage, whether from the Middle East, Russia, or Iran.
American petroleum autarchy keeps the world price low and
reduces the income of belligerent states. Again, the green
rhetoric continues as the oil flows more than ever. Understood
is that the left quietly agrees that oil and gas are necessary
for the now slow transition to alternate fuels—in an election
year.

Are
any of our major cities, the vast majority blue and
progressively run, still hammering away at the police, eager
to cut more from the police? Are they rallying around another
Soros-funded critical legal theory wannabe district attorney?

Or
are they more likely desperately trying to offer bonuses to
recruit officers whom, in just two or three years, they
libeled and drove out?

Why
the shift? Perhaps because they got their utopian wish that
asserted that blameless criminals break the law only because
of society’s biases and unfairness, not because they calculate
perceived benefits of criminality offset by its dangers. And
now they rue the result—in an election year. In other words,
leftists don’t like getting mugged, car-jacked, assaulted, and
beaten and fear their own policies are endangering their own
safety.

Why
are corporations no longer lavishing money on Black Lives
Matter? Why are donations to Ivy League schools down? Is
Professor Kendi still a hot ticket on the lecture circuit? Is
the reparations movement picking up steam?

Or
does the left now fear that its promotion of tribalism and
guilt-ridden racial essentialism is leading to a
race-obsessed, fractious society, headlong on its way to a
Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, or Iraq—in an election year?

The
Biden administration, staffed by Obama-era foreign policy
apparatchiks and functionaries, sought to remake what National
Security Advisor Jake Sullivan once bragged was a quiet
inherited Middle East.

The
progressive therapeutic approach was supposed to lead to an
ecumenical Middle East. A tolerant, passive, turn-the-other
cheek enlightened foreign policy for the 21st century
would lead to a new, better Iran without nukes, a two-state
solution of Hamas living peacefully with Israelis, while the
occasionally raucous Houthis calmed down, Hezbollah would
become more a partner than mere terrorists, Israel would be
lectured and sermonized to as an overdog punching too much
above its weight, and the childish Abrams Accords nonsense
would end the work of Trump’s conniving son-in-law, and the
pariah Saudi Arabia.

Or
so they thought.

So
everything was rebooted to kinder and gentler premises—and
thus the Biden administration blew up the once calm Middle
East.

And
now? Two carriers were dispatched to the Mediterranean. The
U.S. is belatedly bombing and launching missiles to respond to
some 170 attacks on American installations. In an election
year, Biden seems baffled that distancing himself from Israel
still earns him the moniker of “Genocide Joe” from once
loyalist Democratic Arab-American communities.

The
woke, Jacobin revolution was promoted by progressives, mostly
out of guilt and insecurity, as an overdue remake of America
based on therapeutic principles. For three years, it found a
rare pathway to power, enacted much of what it had long
wished, and discovered the result was not just a catastrophe
but dangerous to the very architects themselves.

So
now in 2024—an election year—the left is trying to undo what
it created without explaining why and what they did to us and
themselves as well.