On Tuesday, a Democratic Socialist who believes in state-run grocery stores and says there’s nothing offensive about pro-Hamas demonstrators shouting “globalize the intifada” became New York City’s mayor-in-waiting.
San Francisco, which has seen this Shakespearean tragicomedy many times, is watching and wondering.
If ever there were a great American city that had experimented with radical chic—open-air drugs sites? Check; defund the police? Hell yes—it’s fog town, which has long imagined itself at the progressive vanguard.
That experiment, which started decades ago and reached a roaring, cataclysmic nadir over the past five years, has had some unhappy, unambiguous results: more homelessness and drugs and drug dealers, fewer retailers, the exodus of the working and middle classes.
Now, New York has apparently decided it wants some of that—and San Francisco, which recently elected a mayor whose job is basically to undo the past decade, is smirking.
That would be Daniel Lurie.