The Opinions - Nicholas Kristof on the Failure of West Coast Liberalism

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Nicholas Kristof is an Oregonian and, he is quick to point out, a liberal. But in this audio essay, Kristof takes liberals to task for their governing of cities on the West Coast. It’s an election year, and so he asks the question he believes many Americans are thinking: “Why put liberals in charge nationally when the places around the country where liberals have the greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime and dysfunction?”Thoughts? Questions? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. Democrats are going to be going to voters this fall and asking for their votes. But one challenge is that the parts of the country that are the bluest, the cities on the West Coast, are a complete mess. And I think centrist voters can plausibly ask, why put liberals in charge nationally when the places around the country where liberals have the greatest control, are plagued by homelessness, crime, and dysfunction. I'm Nick Christoph. I'm a columnist for the New York Times, and I should rush to say a liberal. But I do think that liberals, like me, need to face the awkward fact that something has gone badly wrong where we're in charge, up and down the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle.

Conservatives look at the West and they say, hey, the problem is simply the left. But overall, it seems to me, the Democratic states have outperformed Republican ones. Liberalism has done a better job raising people's well-being than conservatism has done. For example, Democratic states have a life expectancy that is two years longer than Republican states. Per capita GDP is higher in Democratic states. Child poverty is lower. Overall, liberal places have enjoyed facts. macroeconomic growth in higher living standards than conservative places. So I would argue that the

problem we're seeing, it's not liberalism as such. It's with a thread of West Coast liberalism. And, you know, I'm an Oregonian. I bore people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West Coast. But the truth is that we too often have a version of progressivism that just does not result in progress and the metric of progressivism should be progress. I think on the West Coast, we tend to be full of good intentions. We have some great slogans. We're more likely to repeat the slogan that housing is a human right than conservatives are in Florida or Texas, but they're the ones who are actually more likely to get people

house. We're too often infected with ideological purity that is very much focused on good intentions and not so much on oversight and on outcomes. And that's where we have this gulf between our values and our outcomes. So, for example, there was a volunteer group here in Oregon called the Portland Freedom Fund, and it was set up to pay bail for people of color. It was raising money from well-intentioned liberal donors, and it was addressing a, you know, a genuine problem. Portland did have a history of racist policing and bail requirements hit poor people, particularly hard. So in 2022, the Portland Freedom Fund bailed out a black man who was named Mohamed Adon. He had been arrested for allegedly attacking his former girlfriend, holding a gun to her

head and then violating a restraining order by going to her building. She felt that her life was in danger, but the Freedom Fund paid Adon's bail, and he walked out of jail. We're going to begin tonight with a sort of a sickening story about a murder in Portland that should have never happened. Now, of course, you can say... A week later, he allegedly removed his GPS monitor again and went to that former girlfriend's house.

The case involves the murder of a woman named Rachel Abraham. She was 36 years old. Police found her body drenched in blood with a large knife nearby. Adon was charged with murder. This time there was no bail. And that incident did prompt real soul searching in Portland. But maybe not enough. This was a well-meaning effort to help people of color,

but it may have cost the life of a woman of color. Also, for example, some blue states have these, very well-meant laws meant to protect people from involuntary commitment to mental institutions. But these laws can crush the people. They're supposed to help. And I speak from experience there. One of my school friends from my hometown of Yam Hill, Oregon, Stacey, struggled for many years with alcoholism and mental illness. She was homeless. She lived in a tent in a park in a near by town, but it's almost impossible in these kind of cases to move somebody involuntarily into an institution to get help. And so Stacey froze to death one winter night. And I think of

Stacy suffering and dying unnecessarily on that winter night. And I fear that our liberalism just failed her. I wonder if one reason why we have some of ideological purity out West is that there isn't much political competition. Republicans are pretty much irrelevant in much of the Far West, and so that they can't hold Democrats' feet to the fire, which just pushes Democrats farther and farther to the left. Out West, when we don't have Republicans looking over our shoulders, we sometimes end up with well-intentioned laws that hurt the people they're supposed to protect. I'm still a believer in the West Coast.

I love this region. It's the physical beauty, the outdoor opportunities, and the West has this history of reinventing itself. I remember Seattle back in the 1970s when there was a billboard near the airport that said, well, the last person leaving Seattle, turn out the lights. The West Coast has rescued itself

by seizing new ideas and building on them from personal computers to the internet. Maybe the new idea we need is this. Less purity and more pragmatism. That would go a long way. But maybe the very first step to cultivate that pragmatism is the humility to acknowledge our failures.