Blue Waves Don’t Surge on Ocean Beach

Neither FOMO nor irony describes the feeling of watching Tuesday’s Blue Wave from my rent-controlled SOMA apartment. Both despite and because it is a perennial specter of progressivism, San Francisco is often thought of as a city of contrasts. Gilded neighborhoods atop 30% grade hills less than a mile from gentrifying, deindustrialized warehouse districts barely built above sea level. Fights to preserve historic charm — some may say even at the cost of building more affordable housing — amid an embrace of Silicon Valley’s technological innovations, even those that merely re-invent the bus. Astronomical levels of nouveau riche wealth alongside abject human misery. But the reason the politics of San Francisco suck, especially if you are a socialist, is that the contradictions are surprisingly difficult to heighten in the 7X7. 

Though this wasn’t a mayoral election year, Daniel Lurie and the moderate political class won almost every candidate and ballot initiative they supported. Lurie’s mix of San Francisco old money, front-facing camera-ready Instagram-influencer videos at local businesses, and self-styled outsider pragmatism embodies the narrow gifted-child technocratic political horizons of contemporary San Francisco. Billionaire-backed groups like Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and Garry Tan’s former political pet project, Grow SF, have spent millions to tarnish left candidates and ideas — starting with the 2022 recall of members of the school board and Chesa Boudin. Key to their success has been their campaign to posit the city’s seeming disorder — homelessness, public drug use, property crime, and cleanliness — as the consequence of too much progressive power, and Lurie’s subsequent administration (the moderates have disavowed London Breed, though she was no friend to the left) as mere ideologically-free policy unencumbered by bureaucracy. They’ve also mastered the art of using seemingly grassroots efforts like recalls and ballot initiatives for their class warfare — though they are now poised to make those democratic tools less available to the working class.

Unmarred by the previous progressive-moderate debates, Lurie presents as a savvy Bloomberg-esque businessman who just wants to get things done. This may also explain why his power-grab parlay of ballot initiatives, touted as the “Clean Up City Hall” slate, all resoundingly passed where previous, recent moneyed attempts to change the city’s charter failed. Prop E will consolidate the city’s contracting power under the City Administrator, a position appointed by the mayor that would now have a ten-year rather than five-year term; and Prop F will enable the mayor to unilaterally hire and fire department heads and change, merge, and dismantle entire city departments. While Props E and F give the executive more power over the Board of Supervisors, Prop D is most concerning for the working class: it raised the signature threshold for introducing ballot measures from 2 to 8% of registered voters (from approximately 10,600 signatures to 42,500 signatures). Essentially, Lurie’s committee spent $14 million to make it four times more costly for grassroots and working-class campaigns to get propositions on the ballot, which is a boon for billionaires. 

Given Lurie’s popularity and the unmatched amount of money he is able to pour into campaigns, it also stands to reason that his mischaracterizations of SF DSA-endorsed Prop I, which would have established a dedicated fund for affordable housing from a portion of taxes on sales of real estate over $10 million, led to its defeat. 

Thirteen of the fourteen candidates Lurie endorsed for positions on the Board of Supervisors and Board of Education won. The notable exception was disgraced District 8 Board of Supervisors candidate Manny Yekutiel, a major player in Lurie’s Zionist backed Civic Joy Fund, who Lurie continued to endorse even after the first allegation of sexual harassment. And while Lurie never endorsed Scott Wiener over Connie Chan for the congressional seat that Nancy Pelosi has held for nearly 40 years, they are ideologically aligned on developer solutions to housing and avoiding inconveniencing the billionaire class through taxes like Prop 40. Lurie even attended Wiener’s election night watch party at Swedish American Hall. 

Here in San Francisco, the fiscally “responsible,” socially liberal abundance-style wonk can still reign supreme. While SF has served as the right’s cautionary tale of when woke goes too far since the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech oligarchy needs to be able to say “we are so back” in order to project their AI utopian-permanent underclass political project onto the rest of the country. This in part helps explain why Lurie was able to convince Trump last October not to send federal agents to the Bay Area. The lack of card-carrying Republicans in the city and state’s politics for the last 20 years makes it hard to negatively polarize the electorate the way Trump’s wars and raids have in other places. San Francisco was unaffordable before the war in Iran sent gas prices climbing. For SF moderates, that means that ICE agents at SFO, an overpaid do-nothing police department, drones, Waymos, Flock cameras, crypto and prediction markets, and data centers remain technologies to be embraced — and maybe regulated — rather than instruments of class warfare. 

But while San Francisco’s voters are nowhere near as left-wing as the media likes to make us seem, we did back some left-adjacent causes. The Regional Transit Measure to fund BART and AC Transit had the strongest support in San Francisco County, as did California Proposition 3 to support public K-12 and community college education. Though it likely won’t pass, Prop B to found a public bank is still too close to call. And it seems like SF will be one of only 9 California counties — together with Alameda, Santa Cruz, and Los Angeles — to have backed Prop 40, the one-time billionaire tax. True to brand, the San Francisco Democratic Party, including Lurie and Wiener, broke with the state party by opposing Prop 40.

Maybe the issue isn’t that San Francisco is uniquely captured by regressive tax advocates, homeowners associations, and the billionaire class, but that California is. The blue wave didn’t come crashing down on California’s shores just because we are still living in the wake of Prop 13 and Ronald Reagan, but because the moderate Democrats who have controlled the state for years prefer to keep Silicon Valley afloat over working-class families. The Democrats have had near-total control of the state assembly since 1975, and there hasn’t been a Republican governor since the fairly moderate Arnold Schwarzenegger. While it’s no surprise that the Governator vetoed bills to pass single-payer healthcare in California, Newsom flipped on his promise to enact a public option and now governor-elect Xavier Becerra, who advocated for single-payer as a young congressman, seems likely to do the same. And in a state whose democratic political machine elevated its number-one cop to the Vice Presidency, voters declined two years ago to eliminate forced prison labor from the constitution — though San Francisco County supported the measure and came out the strongest in favor of Prop 6. 

But San Francisco’s left should not succumb to the doomerism of money in politics — Musk’s millions amounted to the skid marks of a burning Tesla for the right nationally — nor to the moderate takeover of California — Nithya Raman just ousted Karen Bass in Los Angeles. We also have to say more than just “Don’t vote for that, it’s billionaire-backed!” In part because many, and yes, not just tech bros, do look up to billionaires like Lurie as emblems of success, but more importantly because mere opposition is not a vision for the future. Instead, we should look to the successful United Educators of San Francisco’s strike, who caught Lurie and the complaining moderates off guard, especially since they spent years making SF schools the center of their meritocracy-pilled culture wars rather than a central feature of working-class families’ lives. The city’s residents, themselves burdened by the cost of living, supported the city’s teachers’ fight for wage increases and to include dependents on their health insurance plans. A historic union city supported a public union in a historic strike. San Francisco, where 30% of students are enrolled in private schools, supported public education — and not just at perennial reactionary battleground Lowell High School. Socialists need to continually remind San Franciscans that public services work — we have to make the Overton window wider than the storefront of a small business supported by one of Lurie’s public-private partnerships.