As Democrats appeal to voters across the country this fall, one challenge is that some of the most Democratic parts of the country – West Coast cities – are in disarray.
Centrist voters naturally ask: why put a liberal in charge of a country when homelessness, crime and dysfunction are rampant in the places where they have the most influence?
I'll answer that question in a moment, but liberals like me need to face the painful truth that something is terribly wrong in the places we hold responsible, from San Diego to Seattle. I'm from Oregon, and while I bore people at cocktail parties with my eulogizing of the West, the truth is that too often we present a progressivism that doesn't deliver progress.
We are more likely than conservatives in Florida or Texas to believe that “housing is a human right,” but less likely to actually give people housing. We accept a wide gap between our values and the outcomes.
Conservatives argue that the problem is simply with the left. Michael Shellenberger wrote a scathing book condemning so-called “San Francisco” subtitled “Why Progressives Are Destroying the City.” But I don't think that's true.
Democratic states have a two year higher life expectancy than Republican states. Democratic states have a 29% higher GDP per capita than Republican states and lower child poverty rates. Democratic states generally have better education, with more children graduating from high school and college. The happiness gap between Democratic and Republican states is widening, not narrowing.
So my counterargument to the Republican criticism is this: Yes, there are flaws in governance in some Democratic parts of America, but overall, liberal parts of the country have enjoyed faster economic growth and higher standards of living than conservative parts of the country. This doesn't look like a failure.
So the problem isn't liberalism, it's West Coast liberalism.
The two states with the highest rates of unhoused homelessness are California and Oregon. The three states with the lowest rates of unhoused homelessness are all blue Northeastern states: Vermont, New York, and Maine. Liberal Massachusetts has some of the best public schools in the country, while liberal Washington and Oregon have below-average high school graduation rates.
According to Mental Health America, Oregon ranks last when it comes to youth mental health services, while Washington, D.C., and Delaware rank highest.
Drug overdoses appear to have increased in Democratic West Coast states last year but decreased in Democratic Northeastern states last year. Portland's murder rate last year was more than twice that of New York City.
Why does Democratic governance seem less effective on the West Coast than on the East Coast?
Sometimes I wonder if the West is not as serious about policy as the East, and less focused on relying on the most rigorous evidence. There is some evidence of that. But it is also true that West Coast states have been exceptionally innovators in some areas, so I am not so sure. Oregon pioneered “death with dignity” through physician-assisted suicide and paved the way for mail-in voting, a crucial step for democracy. California has the most sensible gun safety laws in America, driven by Governor Gavin Newsom. As a result, California's gun death rate is 40% lower than the national average.
So, in my view, the central problem with West Coast is not that it isn't serious, but that it's tainted by an ideological purity that focuses on intent over oversight and results.
I ran for Governor of Oregon two years ago (the Oregon Secretary of State at the time rejected my candidacy because I didn't meet the residency requirement). During my candidacy, I met with a group of liberal donors in Portland because the city's problems were hanging over all of us. We were all worried that our catalytic converters were being stolen. There is an undercurrent of Republican failure in these liberal gatherings, but Portland was one of those messes that the Republicans couldn't blame, because there are so few Republicans in Portland. This was our liberal mess.
Politics has always been a part of theatre, but in the West it has too often been content with being performative rather than substantive.
For example, Oregon has used money from its tight education budget to provide tampons in boys' bathrooms in elementary schools, including kindergarten, to support transgender children.
“It's just astonishing that progressives, especially in the Portland metropolitan area, can't deal with the details of governing and get anything done,” Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat who has represented and defended Portland for more than half a century, told me. “People are much more interested in ideology than they are in actual results.”
Consider the Portland Freedom Fund, a volunteer organization formed to pay bail for people of color. The organization raised money from well-meaning liberal donors, but the underlying problem was real: bail requirements hit poor people hard.
In 2022, the Portland Freedom Fund supported a Black man named Mohamed Adan who was arrested for allegedly strangling his ex-girlfriend and holding a gun to her head, then violating a restraining order, cutting off her GPS monitor, and breaking into her building. “He said he was going to kill me,” his ex-girlfriend, Rachel Abraham, warned.
The Freedom Fund paid Adan's bail and he was released from jail. A week later, Adan again removed his GPS monitor and allegedly broke into Abraham's home. Police found Abraham's bloodied body with a large knife nearby. Three children were also inside the home.
Adán was charged with murder but this time was not released on bail, and the case prompted reflection in Portland, but it may not be enough: A well-intentioned effort to help people of color may have ended the life of a woman of color.
One passion on the left, based in part on Ibram X. Kendi’s book “How to Be an Antiracist,” is that if a policy leads to racial inequality, it’s racist even if unintended. But by that standard, West Coast progressivism is rife with racism.
We in the West have stymied housing construction, making our cities less livable, especially for people of color. We have allowed the number of people experiencing homelessness, especially Black and brown people, to rise. Black people in Portland are murdered at a higher rate than in cities notorious for violence, and Seattle and Portland have some of the widest racial disparities in arrests in the country.
I actually don't agree with Kendi. I think intentions and frameworks are important, but it's absolutely true that good intentions aren't enough. What matters is improving opportunity and quality of life, and the best way to achieve that is through ruthless empiricism. This clashes with West Coast indifference to economic law.
The root cause of homelessness on the West Coast is a massive housing shortage that leads to high rents: California is short about 3 million housing units, in part because building permits are difficult to obtain.
As long as there is such a shortage, housing is like a game of musical chairs: some families get housing while others don't.
The private sector is key because public sector housing efforts are often ruinously expensive — “affordable housing” can cost more than $1 million a unit — but one element of progressivism's purity is a suspicion of the private sector, which hampers efforts to make corporations part of the solution: Business owners who receive their income from corporations are effectively barred from serving on Portland's City Council.
Perhaps the lack of political competition on the West Coast preserves ideological purity. Republicans are irrelevant in much of the Far West, so they can't go after Democrats as hard, which allows the Democrats to wander unchecked further to the left. Not so in the Northeast. Republican Charlie Baker was governor of Massachusetts until recently, and Republicans are competitive throughout Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey.
Presumably, if the Republican Party is healthy, the Democrats are healthy, and vice versa.
Without opposition oversight, the problem won't necessarily be resolved anytime soon. For example, some Democratic-leaning states have well-intentioned laws to keep citizens from being forcibly committed to psychiatric hospitals, but in an age when drugs and untreated mental illnesses interact to cause psychosis, such laws can harm the very people they are meant to help.
One of my friends from school in my hometown of Yamhill, Oregon, Stacey, struggled with alcoholism and mental illness. She became homeless and was living in a tent in the park — it's almost impossible to force someone into an institution in a situation like that — and she froze to death one winter night.
As I think about Stacey suffering and dying needlessly, I believe that rather than protecting her, our liberalism has failed her.
There is one encouraging sign that the West Coast may be correcting itself. I've been on book tour for the past few weeks, and in talks in California, Oregon and Washington, I was struck by how nearly everyone was willing to frankly acknowledge the disconnect between our values and our outcomes, and welcome a more pragmatic approach. California and Oregon have taken steps to increase housing supply, and Oregon ended its experiment with decriminalizing drugs. Homelessness seems to be improving somewhat in cities like San Francisco, and murders are down.
I remain a West Coast believer because of the region's natural beauty, opportunities for outdoor activities, and the West's history of reinventing itself. I remember Seattle's struggles in the 1970s, when a sign near the airport said, “Last person leaving Seattle, please turn off the lights.” The West Coast has always saved itself by grabbing new ideas and building on them, from the personal computer to the Internet. The Bay Area may be doing it again today with artificial intelligence.
During a visit to San Francisco in May, I rode in a Waymo self-driving taxi that eerily stopped right in front of me, unlocked itself automatically, and drove me smoothly to my destination. It truly felt like a futuristic journey in the city of the future.
We need to come together. Less purism and more pragmatism would go a long way. But perhaps the first step is to be humble enough to admit failure.
