Almost Everyone Has a Strong Opinion About San Francisco. But the Most Accurate One is Mine.
In America, the City by the Bay fuses cerebellums on both the right *and* the left.
For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here.
In the past week, the subject of San Francisco came up twice in conversations with friends. Both folks had recently visited the city, but I heard two radically different takes.
“It’s finally coming back after COVID!” the first person told me. “The city feels more vibrant than ever.”
But the second person said, “There are homeless people everywhere. And drugs — right out in the open! I truly think the city might be gone for good.”
Very few cities are as iconic as San Francisco, which displayed its trademark tolerance right from the start.
In the mid-19th century, the Chinese, who came to the area to work in the mines during the Gold Rush (and who also built the Transcontinental Railroad), were scorned in much of America, but they were welcomed with open arms in the City by the Bay.
Even Chinatown’s popular “opium dens” were accepted by local residents.
Now, of course, San Francisco is known for its unabashedly left-wing politics. The city is shorthand for a certain kind of highly educated, ultra-liberal progressivism and, perhaps, starry-eyed idealism.
This is why Americans themselves perceive the same city so differently. San Francisco has become a kind of national Rorschach test.
If you lean left — or if you’re generally supportive of the cultural changes of the last eighty years — it’s in your interest to see the city through sympathetic eyes.
San Francisco has its problems, these folks say, and maybe it went a little too far with the “woke” nuttiness. But things are already looking up!
But if you lean right — or you’re more of a traditionalist in your point of view — you might look at the city with a more critical eye, because this confirms your priors: namely, that the endless permissiveness of the left can’t help but end in total disaster.
Of course, the most accurate take on San Francisco is, er, mine:
I think there’s some truth to both perspectives.
San Francisco is a great city, but it also has massive problems — namely, an insane cost of living, out-of-control homelessness, and general social disorder.
Alas, I also think that the thing that makes San Francisco so unique — its defiant tolerance and permissiveness — is the thing that may make its current problems very difficult to solve.
