When I first saw this story, I did a double-take. Was this some sort of “Onion” story that made it past the army of fact-checkers and landed on Politico’s front page?
“‘There’s a reckoning to be had’: San Francisco Dems move to push the national party to the center.”
Yes, San Francisco Democrats. They’re the party that elected Chesa Boudin, the son of Weather Underground terrorists who went to prison for killing two police officers and a security guard in the infamous Brinks robbery in New York. He was later adopted by Obama buddy and Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and another terrorist, Bernadine Dohrn.
When crime rates skyrocketed, even San Francisco Democrats voted to recall him.
Democrats in that city also made retail theft kind of a party, and crooks celebrated by ransacking stores from one end of the town to another.
Now, San Francisco Democrats are out to save the National Democratic Party. They’re calling it “The New Pragmatism,” instead of the “old pragmatism” that was singularly unpopular at the polls. But you know the old saying about putting lipstick on a pig.
I guess the San Francicsco radicals think that as long as every other Tom, Dick, and Harry (gender fluid) is giving their two cents on how to save the Democratic Party, why not us?
Local Democrats are horrified to see that many of the policies that they adopted, like no-bail for almost everything except mass murder and putting law enforcement in a straitjacket, were actually adopted across the country. San Francisco Democrats are chagrined at the damage they’ve caused. So, naturally, they want to make up for it by claiming that they weren’t really serious about all that radical stuff.
Politico:
Leaders of the local party argue the famously liberal city has, in recent years, exported one bad political idea after another, leading Democrats astray and ceding power in Washington to Donald Trump and the GOP. They cite “defund the police,” symbolic resolutions about foreign conflicts like the war in Gaza and removing the names of U.S. presidents from school buildings, among other causes they cast as damaging to the party’s brand.
It’s an astonishing pivot for the party in a longtime bastion of progressivism, after moderate Democratic activists made deep inroads in the city last year. Now they are attempting to lead a national conversation around what it takes for Democrats to win — by rejecting what they deride as performative politics and virtue signaling and embracing pragmatism and quality-of-life issues.
Most of the country rejected “performative politics” in the 1970s, and virtue signaling has become the stuff of late-night monologues (for the most part). But one has to ask: How much influence do “moderate Democrats” have nationwide? In San Francisco, a coalition of Democratic survivalists helped boot Boudin out. They also elected Daniel Lurie mayor, a founder of a non-profit organization and a political insider. In San Francisco, he passes for a “moderate.”
Related: The City of Oakland, CA, Is in the Very Best of Hands
What does this “New Pragmatism” stand for besides taking policy positions that might get a Democrat elected?
Their previously unreported plans, shared first in conversations with POLITICO, call for fully staffing police departments, erasing local regulations that drive up the cost of building new housing and focusing public schools on closing learning gaps for Black and Hispanic students in math and reading. They are also calling for imposing potential age limits on elected officials, a cause of some activists in both the center and left wings of the party.
“There’s a reckoning to be had — we need to stop pretending like everything is OK,” said San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Nancy Tung, who is leading the effort. “Part of it is that we see a lack of leadership on the national level.”
Their proposed solution is an ideology they call “new pragmatism”: a focus on issues they say dominate the daily lives of ordinary people, such as crime and housing costs, and that they argue deep-blue cities must address to shake the pervasive perception that progressive cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York aren’t governed efficiently.
By definition, “pragmatism” is non-ideological. How those wonderful-sounding policies are implemented will depend on the Democratic Party of San Francisco being able to slough off ideology, drop racial nose counting as public policy, and embrace true diversity of thought. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” It means that old-fashioned democratic (small “D”) values like tolerance and compromise will have to be implemented.
Until then, San Francisco Democrats should be like little children and be seen but not heard.
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