*this blog contains language and images that readers may find disturbing*
It is Sunday night in San Francisco, a full week since I posted in the afterglow of our Nevada victory.
That very night I got on a FlixBus from Las Vegas to SF, a 12 hour drive, which, if not in luxury, passed smoothly enough. Watching through the window as a woman confronted one of the (large, middle-aged) drivers at Fresno was about as bad as it got:
“The worst customer service I’ve ever seen! You can sass all you want…”
I have been put up in a very very nice apartment in a posh district of San Francisco. I feel intensely guilty about this. I was fully ready to be on a sofa in the back of backwater, but this is where they put me. My accent must have come across via email.
I have mostly been working out of the San Francisco office in the Mission. Mission and 18th. It is a very nice office, the largest I’ve come across yet. It even has an upstairs.
I have also been to the Oakland Bernie Sanders office, and spent an afternoon at the East Bay DSA. This was nice as I’d followed them on Facebook for a long time (not quite sure why, possibly because it’s Meagan Day’s chapter), so it was pleasing to actually be present at their operation. There I did data entry, but I’ve also been doing phonebanking (both California and Massachusetts) and of course canvassing.
The first of my canvassing partners was on his first ever shift. He told me he had been inspired to get involved after Nevada.
I have got to know the San Francisco DSA and the San Francisco Berniecrats, largely through my new friend Hae Min. There was a debate watch party at El Rio and Shahid Buttar gave a speech during the ads. Shahid is running to unseat current House Speaker and neoliberal hawk Nancy Pelosi. He probably won’t quite do it, but his campaign (along with the recent election of Chesa Boudin) shows just how powerful the radical movement in Democratic politics is becoming. Shahid performed a little liberation rap at the end of his speech, which was great.
The next day I went out for dinner with Hae Min and a California Democratic official I will leave unnamed. We were discussing ways of ensuring that the Superdelegates did not steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders in the event of him only winning a plurality. The idea was to organise the Superdelegates if they were sympathetic – and to make sure they knew that they would find hell at home if they weren’t. It’s too late to just organise and agitate at the convention in Milwaukee. They need to feel it now, at their workplaces, in the streets. Their way of life needs to be under threat. And if California can show the way today, Bernie supporters in other states can begin the project of organising the Superdelegates, the same way we organise everything else.
The result in South Carolina, while not disastrous, has unfortunately increased the likelihood that we are heading for a contested convention. That means trouble, to put it mildly.
Hae Min gave me a guided car tour of golden gate park, ocean beach and the marina. I have now seen the golden gate bridge, although what they don’t tell you is that it’s actually red.
In the day time, San Francisco certainly has some of the qualities of a nice place. You can get beautiful views of the bay. It’s sunny. There are some hip people and some good food. There are lots of pretty exterior fire escapes on the buildings, as if merely being caught in a fire is not enough, you also have to suffer crippling vertigo.
But my overall impression of San Francisco is not that it’s nice. It’s that it’s an anticipatory dystopia.
The inequality in this town is absolutely staggering. You can be in a completely fancy, Mayfair-style part of town and a 5 minute walk later you’re in a desperately poor, filthy neighbourhood, with maybe 10 homeless people on a street corner and the street then lined with massive tents. San Francisco has an acute housing crisis, resulting in thousands and thousands homeless. It has seen massive gentrification as the tech industry of the Bay expands and swamps the city’s housing. In San Francisco now, a minimum wage worker would have to work approximately 4.7 full-time jobs to be able to rent a two-bedroom apartment. The affordable housing is allocated by lottery – but get this: you have to be over an income threshold to qualify. There just isn’t enough money for anything different, apparently.
These facts in no way significantly distinguish it from e.g. London, of course, but homelessness does appear worse on the street here, partly I think because of the lack of services provision.
The crisis is also intersecting very visibly with opioid, drug, alcohol and mental health crises. Some of the behaviour is extremely disturbing to be around. I saw a man lying in the street just with his pubes out. This is at like 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Not in a back alley – on Mission Street. Others with needles in their arms. Another I saw living amongst his own shit. Loud, incoherent ranting is just a standard soundtrack to the street.
What’s more, the inequality is utterly racialised. I have not seen a single homeless white person. I have seen almost zero non-white people walking around the fancier parts of town.
And it has all become completely matter-of-fact. People just don’t even bat an eyelid. Well, the Bernie canvassers do. But life in the richer parts of town goes on, with this conspicuous upper-class lifestyle tucked under their arms.
The homeless people need compassionate support, shelter, addiction treatment, mental health provision. Instead, my friend reported when out canvassing that he watched two cops in a police car bopping to music and laughing as they ploughed straight into a group of homeless people, literally driving them off a public street. One woman in a wheelchair couldn’t move so they got out the car and booked her. They are being criminalised just for existing.
And of course, these people don’t even have a free health service. There is no free A&E. There is nothing.
And so to walk around this city, particularly at night but really all the time, becomes like being in a science fiction movie. You have this extraordinary wealth, conspicuously displayed – and this desperate poverty, lit up in neon – and then the violence necessary for such outcomes being visibly enforced, not just in the form of police brutality, but in the psychological punishment and trauma from which these people are vocally suffering – which produces a kind of frenzied, apocalyptic atmosphere of a failed society.
Part of the horror of it is that this is all occurring in a city famed around the world for its liberalism. It has always been run by liberals, and the tech bros who move in are liberals. The rich people in the wealthy neighbourhoods almost all vote Democrat, they probably know how to deploy some ‘woke’ language, and I’m sure they all say they love living in such a liberal city. There is a kind of smugness, a self-aggrandisement which feels preparatory for totalitarian rule under dystopia. What’s more, the social life of the city remains rent-starved young people who probably do get it – but they have no political mechanism by which to produce anything but liberalism in power. My point is not that it’s ironic because the outcomes are not liberal. They are liberal. This is liberalism. This is a feature not a bug. This is liberalism’s internal direction.
Meanwhile, some estimates say 40% of young homeless people in the United States identify as LGBT+.
I have never been to a city with so many, and such pronounced, slopes. That in turn makes it feel like you’re in Parasite, which obviously used this visual metaphor very prominently. It’s as if the city is satirising its inhabitants.
San Francisco also has a lot of wires overhead its streets. For trams, probably. This again reminded me of Parasite, as well as Blade Runner. I was trying to work out what makes overhead wires feel dystopian beyond the association with films. My working hypothesis is it’s the precarity of technological connection – the technological is made solid, brought out of the ether and into the world, and it suddenly seems vulnerable, as if what we rely on for communication may be cut at any time and force us to return to the old and the dirt. The rich meanwhile keep their wires hidden.
And speaking of technology, it is the arrival of Big Tech which characterises the Bay Area’s last 20 years. Google, Facebook, Twitter. What has this technology really done for San Francisco? What has it really done for America? The city feels like a microcosm for the failure of the theology of technological advancement; representing in fact the tendency of technology to prove corrupting and violent under runaway capitalism, to the point where its main beneficiary is fascism.
On Wednesday, the mayor of SF declared a state of emergency over Coronavirus. There haven’t been any cases here yet, it’s just in preparation.
Chinatown, one of the most famous Chinatowns in the world, has become empty – no one is visiting. The Chinese people here have had to stage a march to encourage people to come back. This is only one case of what Chinese communities have faced in the past few weeks across the Western World.
Obviously the spread of a global epidemic forged in a smoggy mega-city is somewhat dystopian. But I think equally so is how quick we have been to racialise it. How ready we are to racialise global emergencies. To take an event which affects us as a species and divide us into Us and Them, even as They die.
Because more global emergencies are on their way. All under the umbrella of the single greatest existential threat to the species. And you’d better believe that the Right (and the liberals) will find ways of maintaining power by Othering those at the sharp end of the crises. That is what fascism in the 21st century will look like. Of course, this has already started. Dystopia now.
I enjoyed my Hong Kong Moo Shu at 3am on Thursday, and I’m feeling just fine.
It is, unsurprisingly, the poorer neighbourhoods that we have been canvassing in, rather than the one I am staying in. And in these neighbourhoods, Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly popular.
My second canvassing buddy told me about his brother, who is a recovering alcoholic. 6 years ago, his family dropped everything to help him turn his life around. But he voted for Trump, and says of the homeless and addicted on the streets: ‘it’s their fault, they should know better.’ My buddy is really upset by it. It’s tragic.
Together we watch a Latinx woman push an Aryan toddler around in a buggy, singing to him in Spanish. Staff.
Yesterday, in my favourite canvassing moment of the entire trip, me and my friend Sophie knocked on the door of a flat in a tenement building in Tenderloin, one of the poorest bits of central San Francisco. In fact the door was open, as several young boys dashed in and out.
The father of a muslim family came to the threshold, and after hearing who we were, immediately invited us in and sat us down on his sofa. This had never happened before.
His English was actually very good, but he invited his daughter (20s) over so that we could talk to her. She was running things, when it came to English documentation. She was, very understandably, a little nervous.
More little children seemed to pop out of every doorway, until eventually what felt like a whole extended family was sat opposite us with our clipboards and Bernie badges.
The daughter said she was completely undecided. Not sure. It was their first time voting. I asked her what the issues important to her were. Housing, and corruption.
The flat was very run-down, almost unfurnished. I don’t believe there could have been more than one bedroom for every three people sat opposite us. It smelt delicious, they’d just been cooking.
I got to explain Bernie’s strength on both housing and corruption, and she nodded at his 40 year record of not taking corporate money and standing up for the little guy. The only candidate still not taking corporate money. Free college for all these lovely kids as well. It was difficult for her to trust me – as she said, that’s what all the politicians say. A fair point. She wasn’t going to be played. But I think she recognised something that, if it were true, would be more than worth her time to vote for.
She said she would do more research, and we gave her some resources for this. We made sure they had a plan to vote. Her dad says there were 5 of them eligible. The daughter was sorting out the ballots. The father seemed very keen on us.
We shook hands with all, and made our way out, after about 10 minutes. I think that they are going to vote for Bernie Sanders.
I’ve been thinking about that young woman a lot – new to a country, carrying the burden of speaking English for her whole family, razor sharp – about my sister’s age I reckon. She’d make an excellent politician I think. She deserves some fucking power.
For what it’s worth, Bernie has by far the most radical housing plan in the race, proposing building 10 million affordable units for 2.5 trillion dollars and enforcing a national rent control standard.
But we need to talk about housing as a human right, not a market good – provided free to all. We have to recognise Dystopia San Francisco as augural of the alternative.
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I should be able to do some kind of post-Super Tuesday update, not in the same level of depth as Nevada but just some initial takes. I hope you’ll be able to pay attention to Super Tuesday as it’s going to go a very long way to deciding the Democratic nominee. Look out for Texas and North Carolina – if we win Texas and North Carolina, I think we might just do it.
mini moralia 