Kulturkampf

[benji]

Former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin on the city’s ‘hard turn to the right’

The right wing has been extremely effective at doing long-term investment in infrastructure building, and I think it’s something that folks who are committed, frankly, to democracy and to progress need to do a better job of. It’s true in the criminal justice space and really across the spectrum. And absolutely the work that I’m doing here, while nonpartisan, is designed to be part of elevating the integrity and nuance in the conversation we’re having in the public square about public safety.

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To the extent though, to your point, that conservatives had a decades-long project of creating this sort of legal, intellectual scaffolding for some of the decisions we’re now seeing out of the Supreme Court. Do you see the need for a similar type of long-term project to create legal space on a different part of the spectrum? And if so, why hasn’t that happened?

Yes, I think there’s a few reasons why it hasn’t happened.

One is probably just a resource imbalance. The right wing traditionally represents business and corporate interests, the interests of billionaires, and they have more money. So it’s easier to invest in and build the kind of organizations and projects that will do the long-term work. It’s hard to do long-term work if you have short-term funding.

San Francisco is not nearly as progressive as its reputation, and my recall was only one small piece of evidence in support of that claim. Look at the recall of the school board. Look at the fact that the city has never had a progressive mayor other than perhaps Art Agnos.

Look at the fact that the city is home to more billionaires per capita than probably any other jurisdiction in the world. Look at the fact that the city’s made a hard turn to the right in the last couple of years. Look at the fact that the politicians that have come out of San Francisco on the national stage are anything but progressive

I don’t think there is really a backlash in the traditional sense because you don’t see voters rejecting the progressive policies or candidates that they’ve endorsed except in very, very, very few cases. You can count on one hand the number of so-called progressive prosecutors who have been elected who have then been voted out in favor of someone else.

The reality is the attacks on so-called progressive prosecutors are coming overwhelmingly from places where there’s more concentrated power rather than from voters.

A politicization, if you will, of the role, which can be helpful or harmful, but it’s not something that happens linearly or with equal application. The level of attention that the press paid to crime in San Francisco when I was D.A. is exponentially higher than the level of attention that’s paid now, that Jenkins is the D.A.

I don’t know how to explain that. But crime is up under her, it was down under me. And you wouldn’t know that if you were following local or national news about San Francisco.

Well, like I said earlier, I don’t think it’s a backlash in the traditional sense. It’s not primarily coming from voters. It’s primarily coming from other areas of government and from very, very wealthy, narrow financial interests.

In San Francisco, for example, I won 3% more votes and about 15,000 more individual votes in the recall than I did to get elected. That’s not part of the national narrative. It’s not a convenient part of the story that people like to tell about what happened in San Francisco, but the reality is, the pro-recall forces spent $10 million and they created a dynamic where I was running against myself, not against any other candidate, any other ideas, any other platforms. And despite that, we got more votes and a higher percentage of the votes.

All things that researchers, academics, policy experts, predicted and were shouting from the rooftops and the Twitterverse would happen with these policies that they implemented. It is ironic and tragic that the people who justified my recall in the name of victims of fatal overdoses are themselves responsible for more fatal overdoses in a year than had ever been imaginable in San Francisco until 2023.

This guy.