Oh mb, wasn't sure.

I don't like Singapore's solution; I think it's too authoritarian. Most people agree that there are benefits to a police state in terms of public order but we consciously forsake those in exchange for liberty.

What does nothing for liberty, and also nothing for public order, is allowing open-air drug use. Is failing to prosecute property crime. Is catch-and-release policing because the DA won't do squat. I don't think the common man cares about this due to dehumanization of the poor, it's due to the fact that we are the ones actually victimized by this. Joe average is much less affected by John Wallstreet trading on insider information. His car getting busted into and robbed? Packages getting stolen from his front porch? His wife getting harassed and terrified by drugged-out schizos, while unable to so much as carry a handgun for her own defense? Those victimize the common man and so the common man cares about them.

Saying this is a right-wing impulse is, I think, precisely what put Trump in office. Twice. The democrats were largely subverted by progressives and ceded this monopoly on the idea of public order to the republicans. Why is it such a stretch to say that yes, we believe that the common man should be protected from wage theft or pollution, and also we believe that he should be protected from violent or criminal impulses?

The reality of the situation is that while yes, insider trading or other white-collar crime has an impact on the average American, it's much less tangible. And ultimately, it's less emotionally harmful and poses no risk of violence. Please don't mistake me; we should strongly punish both. But it's responses like this to ordinary people showing up to city hall meetings or political fora and saying, "What about all this crime that's happening to me?" It's these responses, in the vein of, "Why would we care when there are Madoffs to catch?" that turn people away from the left.

> Saying this is a right-wing impulse is, I think, precisely what put Trump in office. Twice. The democrats were largely subverted by progressives and ceded this monopoly on the idea of public order to the republicans. Why is it such a stretch to say that yes, we believe that the common man should be protected from wage theft or pollution, and also we believe that he should be protected from violent or criminal impulses?

You may be right about this.

But if you zoom out, how is it that we are at a moment in civilization with unprecedented wealth, unprecedented technology, unprecedented nutrition, unprecedented medical care, unprecedented education and access to information, and yet politicians gain power at the federal level by railing against petty street crime?

Right-wing impulse thinking is generally what is most desirable to people who have already fully "made it" financially want -- things like a country club atmosphere (no visible poverty or crime), a suburban style layout (private over public transit, low density housing, private security, etc.)

For most people, such an arrangement is suboptimal. Higher density housing is much less expensive and safer, public transit is much more efficient, economic heterogeneity an opportunity for economic interaction and small business creation, etc.

In the US people have been told they need to live in the suburbs and have a big mortgage on a massive property (often 1000+ square feet and one bathroom per person) to escape the dangers of urban crime. They often purchase expensive cars and spend 2-3 hours per day commuting to an office, tying up most of their leisure time.

This of course reduces government revenue in urban, higher density areas, which does lead to increased crime. But you can see how it's a cycle perpetuated by right-wing impulse style thinking. Many Americans are already very bought into this mentality with respect to housing, but they do not realize the extent to which it shapes other aspects of their worldview.

To a significant extent, the financial allocations of people across the US for many decades is invested in perpetuating suburban property values and social values (fear of urban density, fear of economic diversity, fear of crime, etc.).

People like Garry Tan with $100M net worth should be the ones focusing on bringing the fruits of our modern civilization to more people, not calling for them to be punished. It's a bad look and it has the same effect as Trump's rallying cry against the weakest -- it promotes the narrative that suburban, country club isolation from economic diversity is humane and desirable, and it pretends that rather than living in times of unprecedented abundance, we face such scarcity that we should abandon our empathy for the weakest among us. I'm not sure how things could get more ugly.

Politicians gain power at the federal level by railing against petty street crime because people feel the local level has been so totally captured by people divorced from their priorities. So, they turn to the feds hoping they can fix things instead.

I don't think wanting a safe neighborhood clean of debris and crime is necessarily "right-wing", and this is precisely my point. A few years ago I co-founded a non-profit working mostly with inner-city youth, got to know them and their parents well. One of the primary complaints their parents had was the fact that "justice" initiatives and policing changes had increased the level of crime in bad neighborhoods which victimized them. They weren't any less hurt than the suburbanites who wanted to avoid their cars getting burgled. They weren't less-affected because they didn't live in 1000+sqft houses commuting an hour each way.

I don't think crime exists because of low revenues in inner cities. Everything I know about American history shows it flowed the opposite way: people expanded because they didn't want to be around crime and other inconveniences of living close into cities; that crime didn't show up because people expanded.

I don't think Tan wants to punish people intrinsically, I think he wants to focus on the 99% of people who are victimized by crime rather than the 1% who commit it. This isn't really about country-club isolation, it's just as much, maybe more, about people living in cities being able to live in peace. Without feces on the streets, without fear of property or violent crime.

Social spending on poor people predisposed to these types of crime has only gone up over the past decades. Crime hasn't magically fallen in proportion with that spending. This suggests that it's not the silver bullet for solving this problem. Additionally, SF has spent huge amounts of money on "housing-first" policies which have broadly failed because they don't recognize that a large number of the homeless aren't really that willing to seek treatment or to go to inpatient psych care where they belong.

And lastly, the middle class is still the bulk of America. Telling them that they must sacrifice their dreams of raising a family in peace, consign themselves and their families to petty crime so Fred Junkie can buy fent, accept their wives and daughters won't feel safe being out past dark, is just a non-starter. I consider it deeply immoral, but politically, it's simply not expedient. No party that holds up this as its moral paradigm can be expected to win.

> A few years ago I co-founded a non-profit working mostly with inner-city youth

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of your reply and give major credit to you for being personally and directly involved. Much respect.

People wanting to be able to live in a safe environment free from violence and coercion is the essence of the social contract. We create institutional structures like a judicial system and penal system in an attempt to create fair systems that create the desired incentives for all.

There are certainly a small number of people who suffer from mental illness and substance abuse challenges that render them incapable of participating in the social contract in the same way as other people. Society has replaced private charity with state welfare which also includes care for the elderly, for orphans, etc.

I think the defining characteristic of a properly functioning social contract is that it provides an incentive for everyone to cooperate and to preserve the status quo. SF is at a disadvantage because of how badly other cities treat the underserved. I've heard stories even about private hospitals in SF putting very ill homeless patients in a taxi and sending them to the public hospital (in violation of a multitude of laws and ethical standards), and a similar scenario exists with other cities that are less hospitable to the have nots.

Thus SF has become a sanctuary city. Much like a bird sanctuary that offers habitat to beings that would otherwise starve or die off, SF provides habitat for humans who simply would not have anywhere to go.

In the past we've had laws that criminalize drugs and prevent many modes of treatment, creating a drug epidemic in the US far worse than exists in places that provide care without moral judgment. But in the US moral judgment is insatiable and sells politically.

That's why I am trying to help identify what I call the "right-wing impulse", the idea of the downtrodden as the political "other" that must be feared and stopped. While any kind of dehumanization rhetoric is harmful and cuts of empathy and critical thought, dehumanization targeting the weakest in society has been strongly on the rise in the US in recent years.

In my view, the post-911 response of "see something, say something" and widespread, state sponsored suspicion of brown people fueled what would eventually become Trump's anti-immigrant (fundamentally anti-brown) movement. The US Government spent billions on advertising telling us to fear or neighbors.

The right wing impulse is what the public is trained to have by that kind of advertising. The idea that we should be suspicious, fearful, and that policing and surveillance is the solution.

Much like an abundant apple orchard will attract all kinds of species with the smell of blossoms and fruit, an abundant society will attract people from all walks of life. It will give hope to those who are too damaged to be contributors to society and whose role it is to receive charity. I think we need to change our impulse response from the right-wing one to the realization that it is our good fortune that makes our cities places where those with no hope go to find hope.

This is pretty-well considered; you're right that the SF's policies and climate go a long way to contributing to the problem. And yes, if other cities treated them better, SF's problem would be smaller. Sometimes this is due to a lack of services, to be sure, but SF's services are so unsustainably expensive that even were we to radically increase taxation and scale this federally, it wouldn't work. The "NGO-industrial complex" through which this is washed is the big culprit here, I think. But so is the fact that we do a bad job of caring for those who cannot participate. They cannot really live on their own, cannot keep their housing clean or well-maintained. At some level, the only thing to be done here is to move them to in-patient care, at least until they are psychologically stabilized.

This is really hard to do nowadays, legally speaking. The changes that made it so are entirely understandable: after reports of the incredible institutional abuse of the mentally ill, after the age of lobotomies being the craze, it's no wonder everyone agreed we were due for a change. But the pendulum swung too far, and this is helpful neither for the homeless nor for those who live near them. Psych hospitals are objectively not great and we should improve them. But living out on the street, hopelessly addicted or mentally ill with no treatment, isn't really better. I'm afraid we've let the perfect become the enemy of the good, let the valid conclusion that state psych wards are not nice places blind us to the streets being worse for at least some people.

This doesn't apply to those who are legitimately just down on their luck, obviously; for them, housing-first policies can work much better.

No arguments with you that state-sponsored suspicion is bad. That said, Trump just won all four counties in the Rio Grande Valley, an extremely Latino-dominant area that was a democratic stronghold. He's consistently performing better than any other republican in my lifetime amongst many minority groups (though with a heavy bias towards men), so he must be tapping into something more than anti-brown.

I see what you're saying about this being at some level a right-wing impulse, and distrust of the other is much more right-wing versus the classical left-wing openness. I just don't know that you will ever get people to be substantially open to those whom they see as victimizing them: this moves past the right-leaning "I don't like this other" to the fairly neutral "I don't like this person who is harming me." If I am mugged, my empathy for that person is zero. Maybe it should be different, and that may soften with time, but it's extremely hard to give people sermons on why they should really feel for the guy who just took their wallets at knifepoint.

All that said I agree with most of the issues you've identified. I'm a big fan of localism, moving things to smaller governance areas, because that does seem to resolve many of the scaling issues of democracy. My hope is that helps us apply empathy more consistently where it's deserved: it's much easier for me to look at folks in my city whom I know and figure out how to help them out than it is to do this for folks up in Washington, or over in South Carolina, or wherever.

The other side of this is crime committed by people besides the homeless. I think for that, you'll seldom get much sympathy, and that's incredibly unlikely to change. This is because most of us who are still sympathetic to the homeless are creating an exception to our dislike of people who wrong us, not defaulting to empathy as our first response. I'm not sure how realistically this is fixable. As much as government rhetoric doesn't help, most people get pissed when someone cuts them off in traffic. They don't think, "Wow, I bet that person is having a bad day, or has somewhere to be." And there's no government rhetoric telling them to flip that guy the bird.