I don’t know if this is an organic period of self-reflection for liberals or if they’re just trying to pull a long con on voters, showing they’re aware of their movement’s problems, but if we elect them, things will be different. Nicholas Kristof was never someone I’d thought who’d pen a lengthy column about the failures of liberalism. Alas, he did, blaming West Coast liberalism for turning that part of the country into a hellhole. Republicans can’t be blamed; there aren’t enough of them in the cities that dot the Left Coast. Even Democrats have called out progressives for their ridiculous levels of anemia when it comes to governing.
Kristof doesn’t shy away from the West’s issues, noting the deplorable decay that’s taking hold in the region where he grew up as a native Oregonian. He blames progressives who are more concerned about maintaining ideological purity.
The results are everything falling apart. Regarding the progressive agenda, the list of accomplishments is non-existent. ‘Housing for everyone’ is a legislative action item Kristof points to as emblematic of the Left’s abject failure to govern properly (via NYT):
Centrist voters can reasonably ask: Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places where they have greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?
I’ll try to answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me do need to face the painful fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge, from San Diego to Seattle. I’m an Oregonian who bores people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West, but the truth is that too often we offer a version of progressivism that doesn’t result in progress.
We are more likely to believe that “housing is a human right” than conservatives in Florida or Texas, but less likely to actually get people housed. We accept a yawning gulf between our values and our outcomes.
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…the problem isn’t with liberalism. It’s with West Coast liberalism.
The two states with the highest rates of unsheltered homelessness are California and Oregon. The three states with the lowest rates of unsheltered homelessness are all blue ones in the Northeast: Vermont, New York and Maine. Liberal Massachusetts has some of the finest public schools in the country, while liberal Washington and Oregon have below-average high school graduation rates.
Oregon ranks dead last for youth mental health services, according to Mental Health America, while Washington, D.C., and Delaware rank best.
[…]
…my take is that the West Coast’s central problem is not so much that it’s unserious as that it’s infected with an ideological purity that is focused more on intentions than on oversight and outcomes.
I ran for governor in Oregon two years ago (I was ousted from the ballot by Oregon’s then-secretary of state, who said I didn’t meet the residency requirement). While running, I’d meet groups of liberal donors in Portland, as the city’s problems cast a shadow over all of us; we’d all be wondering nervously if our catalytic converters were in the process of being stolen. The undercurrent in such a liberal gathering would be the failures of Republicans — but Portland was one mess we couldn’t blame on Republicans, because there simply aren’t many Republicans in Portland. This was our liberal mess.
Politics always is part theater, but out West too often we settle for being performative rather than substantive.
For example, as a gesture to support trans kids, Oregon took money from the tight education budget to put tampons in boys’ restrooms in elementary schools — including boys’ restrooms in kindergartens.
These are all valid points, but this West Coast/East Coast thing is odd. The results may be differing, but both coasts have liberal snobs who believe in no bail for violent offenders, go insane over transgender issues, hate law enforcement, scoff at working Americans, and all shop at Whole Foods. East Coast liberals might be slightly more reasonable in the sense that no one set a federal courthouse on fire to the best of my memory as raging leftists did in Portland in 2020. Then again, during that summer, all of New York City devolved into total anarchy, where leftist attorneys got busted for throwing a Molotov cocktail on police cars.
And while this column is not the usual stroking of egos and re-affirmation of liberal self-righteousness, as we’ve seen often in other articles, Kristof does have to engage in a little cosmopolitan bias:
Democratic states enjoy a life expectancy two years longer than Republican states. Per capita G.D.P. in Democratic states is 29 percent higher than in G.O.P. states, and child poverty is lower. Education is generally better in blue states, with more kids graduating from high school and college. The gulf in well-being between blue states and red states is growing wider, not narrower.
So my rejoinder to Republican critiques is: Yes, governance is flawed in some blue parts of America, but overall, liberal places have enjoyed faster economic growth and higher living standards than conservative places. That doesn’t look like failure.
Despite acknowledging that the Left has destroyed the West Coast, Kristof believes in a renaissance. He remembers the 1970s when the situation was similar—new ideas and innovations saved the area. He feels that advancements in artificial intelligence could bring the region back.
“We need to get our act together. Less purity and more pragmatism would go a long way. But perhaps the first step must be the humility to acknowledge our failures,” he wrote.
The problem is liberals think they’re always right. There is no humility, and any actual failures are due to the ignorance of people who are less than, either because of income or education, who don’t know any better. That’s gospel in liberal America, which is why people like Trump get a lot of attention.
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