Do progressives ruin cities? Michael Shellenberger makes the case - The Hub
"MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: San Francisco has about 10,000 so-called “homeless people”, of which about 5,000 people live on the street. These are folks who are suffering from untreated mental illnesses, many of them are self-medicating with heroin, fentanyl, and meth. About 700 people died last year and another 700 people have died this year from easily preventable overdoses and drug poisonings. There are many neighbourhoods in which it’s unsafe to walk, people are regularly assaulted, and we’ve seen a rise in crimes such as theft to support people’s addictions.
The progressive movement, out of which I come, has been dishonest about what the causes of this are. They’ve suggested that somehow this is a problem of poverty or lack of housing. That’s just incorrect and unconscionable to, out of a kind of exaggerated compassion, be describing people that are suffering from a medical disorder—namely, addiction but also untreated mental illness—as simply being poor. Ostensibly, they are letting people die on the streets because there’s this idea that if you suffer from addiction, if you’re classified as a victim, then everything should be given and nothing asked...
many of the policies that are contributing to these terrible outcomes in San Francisco are predicated on the idea that you can classify real people as either victims or oppressors. Victims should be given whatever they want, without any conditions. The consequences are tragically plain...
SEAN SPEER: In San Fransicko, you essentially argue that a big problem of progressive policymaking on drugs and homelessness is that it doesn’t attribute any agency to individuals...
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: I recently wrote an essay called “Why I Am Not a Progressive,” where I describe why that’s not a label I choose to use anymore. When I was a teenager and part of the radical Left, or at least a progressive, that meant embracing a story of heroism, whether from Martin Luther King or Gandhi or Nelson Mandela. But today to be a progressive means to celebrate victimhood. And part of that is to insist on people’s victimhood.
The Bangladeshis, for example, could never possibly adjust to a world of rising sea levels. If they did, that would mean that they wouldn’t be victims anymore and progressives want to insist that Bangladeshis are helpless victims doomed to stay in place as the water laps over them. It can express itself in an infantilization of people of colour, of women, of children, of the mentally ill, and of people who suffer addiction. I find it offensive. I think it’s racist.
The same reasoning often applies to people that are street addicts. The idea seems to be that these people are addicted to hard drugs and are helpless to quit their drugs, so we should literally give them drugs.
Take the Netherlands, as well as other liberal cities around the world: there is a strong effort for people to get the treatment they need. But for progressives in San Francisco and other major U.S. cities, the idea is just to give victims whatever they want. If they say they want to shoot heroin and meth all day, that’s what we should do for them. Well, that’s just pathetic and wrong. It is, to some extent, a power move. That, us, white males, are powerful and oppressive, but, you poor people are victims. We’re going to help you.
One of my best friends in Europe wrote a book called The Tears of the White Man, which was about how at a moment when Africa is starting to emerge and its countries are starting to develop at fast rates, Europe says, “Oh well, Africa, really, they’re doomed because of Europe, because of our whiteness and our colonialism.” So, narcissistically, Europe puts itself back in the centre of Africa’s development. It’s a reversal, on the one hand, in the sense that rather than saying white men have a burden to develop Africa, now we say, “Well, Africa just can’t develop because Europeans colonized it”, but on the other hand it’s the same impulse...
I consider whether this is Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is like when a mother makes her child sick so that she can take care of her child and be narcissistically recognized as a good mother. “Witness me, caregiver hero.” That’s the idea. That’s a pretty extreme way of saying it. I ultimately don’t conclude that that’s what’s going on, but I do say it’s pathological altruism.
There’s a small minority of people, again, a very small minority, but nonetheless, a real minority of leaders, that are sociopathic. They use language like “Our unhoused population” as though there’s this little group of people that are ours. “These are my civic people; they belong to me” is the idea. It’s creepy and weird. It freaked me out while I was working on the book.
We have this lovely tradition of self-help in America. Sometimes it’s corny and cheesy. But, nonetheless, the basic message of self-help is “You can do it! You have the power.” It’s not saying that you can do it alone; it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get help or that everybody is going to be president. That’s a caricature. Self-help is about taking on challenges in your life and becoming the person that you’re meant to be by taking individual responsibility and exercising your own agency and power.
Liberal parents in the Berkeley Hills, where I live, make sure their kids develop that kind of resilience. They make them go to soccer practice; they make them do their homework. There is a kind of class put down here. It’s very postmodern in the sense that it’s an apparent reversal of where it used to be. But, still, the message is that if you’re classified as a victim, you can’t do it...
I’m not necessarily against decriminalization. In fact, I argue for a modified or very similar proposal to what they do in the Netherlands and other parts of Europe where it’s still against the law, but it’s not a felony offence necessarily. I don’t think that most addicts need to go to prison. I think it needs to be a threat to get some people to ultimately accept rehabilitation.
But I also think we should distinguish between drug use in private places and public places. If people want to be idiotic and smoke fentanyl in their own apartments at no harm to others, I think that’s terrible, but I don’t think that taxpayers should spend money arresting them. By contrast, if you’re doing drugs in public, defecating in public, camping in public, you should be arrested because you’re breaking the law. Then, you should be given the choice of drug treatment or incarceration...
My conclusion is that San Fran-sickness comes from within us and that it’s emerging from our own coddling sense, which itself emerges from our prosperity.
These developments are a symptom of our prosperity and success. The coddling culture, which ultimately is behind the devastation of San Francisco and other cities in the form of overprescribing opioids and the addiction it fuels, comes from a rising entitlement and coddling in Western cultures. I don’t think it’s inevitable, but I do think it emerges from that."
