2024: The Year ‘San Francisco Values’ Finally Failed

By Wesley J. Smith

Saturday, November 30, 2024

 

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

 

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

 

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.

 

Today, the city is a wreck. The commercial hub of San Francisco, a huge shopping mall at Fifth and Market, anchored by a beautiful multistory Nordstrom, imploded after the department store closed last year. Union Square, once the pride of San Francisco, with high-end retail stores, now sees many empty storefronts. Drug bazaars operate openly, enabled by city employees who hand out free drug paraphernalia. Homelessness abounds. Old men ride bicycles around the city naked. There is so much human excrement in the streets that maps have been created to warn people where not to walk. What was once a world-class city has become a lifestyle calamity.

 

But none of that steadily increasing misery deterred San Francisco progressives from proselytizing their politics. Over time, San Francisco values — sexual libertinism, maximum abortion rights, sanctuary-city protections, gender ideology, DEI impositions in employment and schools, soft-on-crime law enforcement, massive social spending, climate radicalism, and coercive Covid policies — came to dominate the state that had twice elected Ronald Reagan and had been administered by Republican governors for 16 straight years between 1983 and 1999.

 

Remarkably, only ten years later, Bay Area liberals and progressives, including Governor Jerry Brown — once denigrated as “Governor Moonbeam” — claimed the most important statewide offices. Former San Francisco mayor and future governor Gavin Newsom was then lieutenant governor, and former San Francisco district attorney and future senator and vice president Kamala Harris was elected attorney general. Both of California’s U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, hailed from the Bay Area (Feinstein having once been San Francisco’s mayor). Not only that, San Franciscan Nancy Pelosi became one of the country’s most powerful leaders, serving as speaker of the House of Representatives between 2007 and 2011. Pelosi would resume that high office between 2019 and 2023. It was a remarkable takeover of an entire state by a small area’s politics. Alas, progressive policies did to California what they had done to San Francisco. California is in debt, it has lost population, and profitable companies are leaving in droves.

 

San Francisco values went national after the 2020 elections, when the supposedly centrist President Joe Biden governed from the hard left. Under Biden, the southern border was thrown wide open, and millions of illegal immigrants flooded the country, accommodated by lax enforcement and loose refugee policies. Gender ideology was promulgated by regulations of the Health and Human Services Department. The military featured soldier drag queens in recruitment advertisements, perhaps a contributing factor to the precipitous drop in enlistment. Massive spending programs were enacted to fight climate change, unleashing wild inflation, and the energy sector was throttled with canceled pipelines and suspended liquefied natural gas export licenses.

 

San Franciscans and Californians might have been unwilling to change political course in the face of calamities, but nationally, voters were unhappy. As the 2024 election approached, it looked bad for the aging president. But after panicked Democrats forced Biden to yield the presidential nomination to Harris and she soared in the polls, it seemed as if San Francisco values — once the brunt of so many denigrating jokes — would complete their national triumph when a daughter of the city’s progressive establishment took the oath of office as president of the United States.

 

But San Francisco values hit a wall of MAGA populism that was willing to push back against cultural progressivism. The unthinkable happened. A once disgraced and often indicted former president, Donald Trump, was elected for a second time, scoring a rare Republican victory in the popular presidential vote and a landslide in the Electoral College. Republicans retook the Senate majority, gaining four formerly Democratic seats in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Montana. The GOP also maintained control of the House of Representatives. Even California and San Francisco were affected by the conservative shift in the public’s mood. The almost pro-criminal Los Angeles district attorney, George Gascón — who had formerly been San Francisco’s DA — was wiped out electorally, and San Francisco’s progressive mayor London Breed lost to a more moderate Democrat.

 

After decades of steady political advances, San Francisco values are finally in retreat. But was this progressivism’s Waterloo? If only. For someone who made it this far, Harris is an unusually bad politician. She was simply outworked and out-campaigned by Trump, whose remarkable courage after being shot by a would-be assassin, willingness to be interviewed anytime anywhere (except on 60 Minutes), and fun stunts such as working a shift at McDonald’s made Harris’s campaign of “joy” seem both dour and substantively empty.

 

And yet. Harris received the third-most votes of any presidential candidate in U.S. history, losing the popular count by less than two percentage points. Moreover, the rightward shift was hardly a sea change. Democrats won Senate seats in Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan — even as all these states voted for Trump — that would surely have gone Republican in a true red wave.

 

But the GOP’s decisive overall victory has at least presented the new administration with a real opportunity to put the progressive beast back in its cage. If after four years Trump’s conservative populism produces greater prosperity and personal liberty, if woke goes the way of the dodo, if America is seen as both strong at home and abroad, if the world is at greater peace when the next national election rolls around, then perhaps San Francisco progressivism will be contained once again in its tiny original enclave — and jokes about the city’s loco values can resume.

 

But if Trump fails, expect San Francisco values to roar back, this time with sharper teeth fronted by politicians of far greater talent than Harris. If that happens, it could be curtains for traditional Americanism.