NO. NEXT QUESTION? Would You Believe San Francisco’s Too Right-Wing?

“In some sense, there are two San Franciscos,” New York Magazine’s Ross Barkan stipulates. There is the city you know and have known for decades, which has incubated a political culture well to the left of nearly any other major American metropolitan area. But there is another San Francisco, he adds; a city that is profoundly conventional and even a little right-wing.

“Modern San Francisco, unlike New York, does not rest on the legacy of a social-democratic state forged with New Deal largesse,” Barkan continues. “From 1912 to 1963, only Republicans governed San Francisco, and they were largely backers of big business who could occasionally draw support from organized labor.” The city, therefore, lacks a deeply rooted working-class population that could ballast progressive politicians at the polls. Likewise, San Francisco’s “black population is declining,” robbing the city of an African-American political establishment. And while Silicon Valley casts a progressive gloss over the city, the members of this wealthy caste resent the “visible poverty” and squalor that has become a feature of their daily life.

You might not expect a city that hasn’t elected a Republican to the mayoralty for a half-century—a city that leans Democratic to the tune of 38 points and has sent Nancy Pelosi to Congress every two years since Ronald Reagan was in the White House—to be a hotbed of conservative thought. And yet, the city’s current mayor, London Breed, “exists somewhere on an ideological spectrum to the right of Bill de Blasio,” and even she has left Boudin for dead. It’s hardly a feat to position yourself to the right of a one-time socialist who raised money for the Sandinistas and honeymooned in Communist Cuba, but you have to take your Bay Area right-wingers as they come. In fact, Breed backed the movement to defund police departments and went so far as to cut $120 million from her city’s law-enforcement budget when that was the faddish thing to do. She only saw the light when crime rates in her city exploded, and the law-abiding public went on a recall frenzy.

Barkan notes that Boudin is cut from the same cloth as other progressive prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner and St. Louis’s Wesley Bell. Indeed, that is the problem.

As New York Times owner Tom Cotton wrote in December: Recall, Remove & Replace Every Last Soros Prosecutor.