The American writer Michael Shellenberger is a relatively recent recruit to the rapidly expanding club of “liberals mugged by reality” — the phrase coined in the 1990s by the grandaddy of this sad-eyed and much maligned tribe, the political analyst Irving Kristol.
Shellenberger has published a book tearing into the way in which the Democratic Party that he has always supported is destroying his home city of San Francisco, renamed San Fransicko in the book’s title. The case he makes is devastating. Yet although his target is the left, his epiphany carries a no less crucial message for conservatives and for politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
San Fransicko is a forensic deconstruction of the harm being done in a city where homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness have gone through the roof as a result of so-called liberal policies.
California’s Democratic governing class blames the city’s social problems on racism and poverty. Through remorseless use of the statistics, Shellenberger shreds all such alibis. Public spending has soared, yet unprecedented levels of public squalor and crime have been the result. San Francisco gives proportionally more in cash and other benefits to the homeless than do other cities. Yet while, nationally, homelessness declined from 2005 to 2020, in San Francisco it rose from 5,404 to 8,124 — far more per capita than in other comparable places.
As a result of the dogma that homeless people can choose not to be housed and can take up residence wherever they want, the numbers sleeping on the streets increased in that period from 2,655 to 5,180.
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The authorities have largely stopped enforcing the law against public defecation. Complaints about human waste on the streets rose from 10,692 in 2014 to 20,933 in 2018. Between 2010 and 2020, complaints about hypodermic needles on the streets, in parks and other public places rose from 224 to 6,275. Whole neighbourhoods are run with a total absence of law and order, because trying to influence behaviour is seen as a form of victimisation.
Virtually all the social pathologies Shellenberger dissects — including the dismissal of mental illness as a label of social control invented by an oppressive state, and the catastrophic liberalisation of drug use, which has created skyrocketing rates of those who are addicted, psychotic, violent, criminal, unemployable, homeless or dead — read like a reprise of my own journalistic observations over the past three decades.
For he has discovered what we reality-mugged liberals all previously discovered. We still stand for the values we always upheld — improving society, being compassionate to the vulnerable, encouraging good behaviour and discouraging the bad — but so-called progressives have betrayed every liberal virtue they so aggressively signal. They actually cause acute harm to the very people they purport to care about: people of colour, the poor and the mentally ill.
He has also understood the reason. These liberals believe that everyone must be free to do their own thing. Want to live on the street, use it as a toilet and shoot up heroin? Please be our guest, say California’s Democrats, and let us spend lots of money helping you do so.
Shellenberger has now realised that freedom is a paradox. Without the moral rules that constrain liberty through a sense of communal responsibility and attachment, the outcome isn’t freedom but selfishness, anarchy and harm. “We need a new, pro-human, pro-civilisation and pro-cities morality. Freedom is essential, but without order it can’t exist in cities. If we are not safe, if our cities are not walkable, then we don’t have a civilisation,” he writes.
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This is a message that is not limited to the left. Conservatism has also lost its way through a similar fetish with liberty that has been wrenched out of its moorings in moral responsibility.
Since the time of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, many conservatives have forgotten that their purpose is to conserve what’s most valuable in their cultural tradition: the inherited links of duty and responsibility that create a civilised society. Instead, they have chosen to raise the standard of unconstrained liberty and the free market.
That’s why so many libertarian “conservatives” have supported mass immigration, tobacco advertising and drug liberalisation — and now oppose all Covid restrictions.
Fascinatingly, a number of young, mostly Catholic intellectuals in America’s conservative ranks have realised that this dominant libertarian strand spells cultural suicide. So they’re doing something that’s ostensibly very un-conservative. They’re turning themselves into cultural counter-revolutionaries to bring down the consensus that they understand very clearly is on course to destroy western civilisation.
As Sam Adler-Bell writes in The New Republic, they want to see Republicans “abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps”.
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Commenting on this in a piece for the website UnHerd, Aris Roussinos excoriates British conservatives for sticking to their bankrupt libertarian pieties while doing diddly-squat to reverse the decadent left-wing consensus. As he writes: “A ruthlessly efficient machine for winning and holding power, the Conservative Party simply has no idea what to do with power once it has it, and thrusts it at its enemies like a hot brick.”
There’s a hole at the heart of western culture — and in America and Britain, politicians from all sides have fallen in and are blindly thrashing around.
