Modern Progressivism in One Embarrassing Nutshell

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 02, 2026

 

Thank goodness for San Francisco. Without the city and its officials’ determined commitment to maladministration, conservatives might sound hyperbolic when they warn of the consequences that flow from the left’s policies and priorities.

 

On the last day of 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie demonstrated the bankruptcy of the progressive project when he signed into law a measure that he regards as unworkable and that he will not enforce. He signed it only because he dared not invite the wrath of the activist left.

 

“The bill, which was passed unanimously by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors earlier this month,” the New York Post reported, “creates a fund to accept private or public money for a controversial reparations plan that calls for cash payouts of $5 million each to eligible black residents, debt forgiveness, 250 years of tax abatements, and income subsidies.”

 

In writing, San Francisco has fulfilled the activist left’s desire to provide America’s black population with monetary reparations to make amends for the legacy of slavery. In practice, San Francisco has no intention of honoring the obligations to which the city has committed itself.

 

“We are not allocating money to this fund,” Lurie told reporters. Indeed, “with a historic $1 billion budget deficit,” he added, “we are going to spend our money on making the city safer and cleaner.”

 

What a perfect illustration of progressive governance. City officials seek credit only for their noble intentions. Those intentions are measured in astronomical dollar figures by a constituency that regards spending alone as a metric by which individuals and institutions can be judged. But because San Francisco’s administrators know their constituents don’t care nearly as much about results, they have not even made a pretense of their intention to follow through with their self-set obligations.

 

This episode would contribute to a narrative that Republican lawmakers should spend every waking moment between today and the November midterm elections promulgating. It is in keeping with the Covid fraud scandal engulfing Minnesota, which is only part of a much larger campaign of Covid-era fraud that Democratic lawmakers have seemed to care little about, despite the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars lost to it.

 

In the age of tribal politics, progressive politicians cannot be trusted to properly administer the expansive welfare state they want. Those lawmakers care only for the dollar figure they can shovel out the door — the higher, the better, they seem to think. It matters little to those officials whether those funds find their way into the right pockets or stand up the public services those funds are supposed to finance. The spending is the point. Indeed, the left increasingly regards profligacy as its own virtue.

 

As Joe Biden used to say, with monotonous frequency, “Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” Spending patterns are a terrible way to gauge moral values. One can budget for pathologies and addictions, too. One can be extorted as well as persuaded to part with one’s wealth.

 

That’s what happened to San Francisco, and nobody seems to care — not the targets of the activist class’s coercion nor those who are supposed to be mollified by the city’s capitulation. It’s all theater, the foremost purpose of which is to indemnify San Francisco officials against the charge of anti-black racism.

 

Between this story and the ongoing exposure of the Covid-era graft over which Democratic officials presided, it should not be hard for Republicans to argue what conservatives have long maintained: big government is an elaborate patronage system for the connected, not a service provider. Given the public’s growing distrust of America’s governing institutions, there might be more appetite for the kind of “frigidity of rugged individualism” than populists on both ends of the American political spectrum believe.

 

Getting government out of your way may not cosset you in a comfy taxpayer-funded blanket. But allowing you to succeed on your own or encounter the important lessons that accompany failure has some advantages. Foremost among them, it’s fair.