Learning while doing during the primaries

Is San Francisco's recall of their progressive district attorney revealing something important about the state of liberalism?

As the midterm primaries continue to unfold toward November, much is being made today about the recall of San Francisco DA, Chesa Boudin. First reactions are often justifications or rationalizations for what people already thought or expected. I give Democrats a lot of grief for misinterpreting election cycles, but let’s be honest: it’s tough to learn mid-experience. What I do think we are seeing unequivocally (dangerous that word choice) is an emotional gap between politicians (and the activists that drive a lot of their attention and positioning) and the people they represent.

Turns out, popularism (not just populism) is popular. Reactionary disaffection and populist cultural responses to dysfunction speak to the pain and frustration people are experiencing under the weight of systems meant to control them, not serve them. But those reactions are not necessarily guides to solutions — populism is not a governing philosophy. And popular is a feature of solutions but not always a guide to effectiveness. Listening to the lived experiences of all the people in our communities should guide our attention, where we focus our energy, and the promises we are willing to commit to. But how we then move from pain to principles to practice (and ultimately new policy) demands a different process.

Noah Smith has a deep, smart take on how to look into what is going on with people’s experience of safety (crime) and prices (inflation) mean for how we think about both politics and policy especially with regard to the San Francisco recall:

Crime and inflation are very real, substantive problems that large parts of the progressive movement seem dismissive of, and which their preferred policies would exacerbate. If this dismissal becomes the movement’s consensus, it will mean that progressives have essentially forfeited the high ground of social effectiveness.

The year we all became reactionaries

The whole piece is very much worth your time. We desperately need to disentangle and engage with questions of both substance and style. How we talk about what we want for each other, who we are, and who we want to be matters. Framing our entire worldview in the theory and the negative shadow of the present on issues that people are wrestling with everyday is not likely to build broad support for the major shifts needed to reshape our social contract. What motivates us may be the gross unfairness of cruel systems making people less safe and less free. Anachronistic, unfair, inequitable, and dangerous, these systems and policies and their results may drive us to being reformers and revolutionaries. And the articulation of that may drive and inspire entire movements. But while it is the pain people feel that drives our attention, it is the different outcomes we are desperate to deliver for people that must animate the story we tell and how we frame the solutions we are striving for. The articulation of the pain — the rallying cry — might not be the policy.

This differentiation is not a failure. It simply represents the necessary, complex differentiation between all the dimensions of public leadership and civic life from activism to organizing to narrative and persuasion to policy development to policy making, legislation, and regulation. Leveraging the rally cry as the policy or assuming they are the same is potentially deeply problematic. Across a whole host of complex and painful questions, we need to ask basic questions: what do we need? what are we promising? what are we committed to? We need a clear path toward a future we all want to be part, that we all have a role in, that gives us all faith and confidence in where we are going. If the underlying principles or cultural norms necessary for a new policy to be a real solution are not alive and active broadly enough in culture and community, new policies may not only feel out of step but actually make us feel unheard and feel less safe (regardless of whether we are, in fact, less safe). We may need to establish strong, healthy new habits before we can stop doing things that are not working without unintended consequences that undermine our good intentions and best efforts. Ultimately, the lesson from Boudin’s recall may not be one about policy failure, but the failure to do the cultural and community work necessary to transform society while transforming institutions, systems, and policies.