Faux Liberal vs Actually Liberal (better, place, populations, Los Angeles)
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There's a difference between being liberal and being a Democrat.
While many people in the Rust Belt will vote blue, few seem themselves as liberal. Many of these Democrats are against abortion, gay marriage, immigration and marijuana. They're not "faux liberal," they're just working-class populists who vote Democratic.
Also, most people in Orange County are moderate conservatives. Orange County will never be the epicenter of liberalism.
I think Vermont is the only truly left wing state in the Union. Maybe Massachusetts to a lesser extent as well. The West Coast is libertarian (socially liberal/fiscally conservative) and the Upper Midwest is third-positionist (socialist but socially conservative).
So do you have to be liberal in every way to be considered liberal? I think for myself and don't always fall in line with every liberal cause, but I would definitely be considered liberal by most people. Who makes this decision about what constitutes liberal and what constitutes "faux" liberal? Is liberal considered far left or can someone be moderately liberal? I really hate some of the causes out there today, but am on the side of things like marriage equality, abortion rights, path to citizenship, and many others.
I'm just wondering who is making this determination and why.
What liberal causes are you opposed to? I can't really think of any liberal cause that has wide support in America that's all that radical. Our left is pretty much just the center these days.
The Pacific Northwest is very liberal, mostly because the region is the most homogenous place in the country. They support diversity without diversity really existing in the region. It's quite peculiar for someone from a truly diverse region to observe.
If the Pacific Northwest means "Southeast Portland", this is accurate. Most of the PNW is very conservative IMO, the only reason it seems liberal to many is because religion is of reduced importance there compared to most other places in the US.
I get what you're trying to say, but I think you're not aware of some of the cities you speak of.
You definitely nailed the clear most liberal cities on the head, but then flopped when you replayed a sound bite that SF is a monoculture and potentially no longer liberal?
San Francisco has more income, racial, ethnic, sexuality, and age diversity than most of the cities on that list. SF is still one of the only cities in the world with a sizable population of real hippies (hint, it ain't Boston). SF is also one of the only cities in your list with a political system that engages citizens through a 1-2x a year local ballot initiative process, which encourages extreme activism. The Ninth Circuit is based in San Francisco. Rent control and Prop 13 also mean that most people who want to stay in the city even through extreme price increases can, so SF's diverse base of constituents (literally only getting more diverse, not less) remains.
I don't know if SF is technically the most "liberal" city if you go by votes for Democrats in the last elections as a percentage of voters. SF has been 83-84% Democrat for the past 3 elections, and while only in the 70s% in the 80s and 90s, SF has also tended to vote heavily Green Party and Libertarian Party when given a solid chance (96/2000). Philly has been between 80-85% for the past 4 elections. DC has been 85-92% Democrat since 1992 election! Boston has been between 71-78% since 2000. New York has been 75-81% since 1996.
But four things are true:
1) The Bay Area as a whole is by far the most liberal metro area in the country (whereas every city on your list drops off to pretty much 50-50 or even red in suburban counties, the Bay Area principal counties are Democrat voting via 2012 election as follows:
San Francisco 83%
Alameda 79%
Marin 74%
San Mateo 72%
Santa Clara 70%
Contra Costa 66%
2) SF has 852K people and the Bay Area (at least the counties listed above) contains 6.5 million people. Even if every one moving to the city/area were white, worked in tech, was under the age of 40, made $150K+, and voted Republican, it would take many many many years to legitimately change the whole culture of the city/area, and to create a monoculture it would take decades. Fortunately, not everyone that moves to the area fits this description as the only two demographic groups not represented pro rata in the group moving to the area are women and blacks.
3) SF continues to be and will continue to be at the forefront of social issues as the city is a testing ground for the meeting of policy, technology, and a diverse, activist population. I don't know if this qualifies city as "most liberal" or "most progressive", but if I hear one more soundbite that SF has been culturally destroyed and it's some monoculture from some typewriter commentator in the Midwest...!
4) Of 67,000 jobs added to the city between 2010-2014, 21,000 were tech/info related. As a percentage of jobs in the city, tech/info represented 13% of jobs and 22% of wages. Even today, measured by either jobs or wages, the financial/accounting/legal sector is still the largest component of the economy. At its peak, it was 20% of jobs and 40% of wages in 2000, exceeded only by NYC, though it's a lot closer to tech employment/wages today than it is on its own island.
Moreover, "tech/info" in SF ranges from internally employed PR person for Uber to user experience web design for Yelp to hardware engineer at Dolby Laboratories to internally employed financial analyst or project manager at Google to account manager at Salesforce. That's a lot more diversity attracting a broader range of people/interests than the financial sector as a whole. Basically, the same kinds of people that want to a derivatives desk or sell fixed income securities are the same kinds of people who want to underwrite acquisitions for an equity arm or do equity research or work on a banking team. Perhaps even more male dominated than "tech", and probably the most homogeneous group of people working today (but yet "tech" is in the spotlight and facing scrutiny, and progressive Bay Area is ok with that and looking for ways to change).
Long story short, it's basically BS that people say such stereotypical stuff without doing any research or without any facts to back them up.
It is hard to find a *less* monoculturally inclined city than SF, or one that is *more* progressive (and one that comes to mind as maybe being even *more* progressive is Berkeley, just a few subway stops away!).
Well we can agree to disagree then. Sure there is rent control which grandfathers in old hippies and old gays and some token poor people. but those people will eventually leave or die. And who is moving in? I don't really know the demographics to be honest which is why I said I don't really know about SF. But I venture to guess it's no longer the starving artists and creative types and social activists that it used to attract because it is prohibitively expensive. So that pretty much leaves rich people. And all I know is that rich people don't often don't like the government taking their money (see Orange County). And even if SF isn't itself bringing in as many tech jobs, it's still a bedroom community to other tech centers. If you don't think San Francisco has become a sterilized caricature of its former self, I think you may be misinformed.
And what evidence do you have that SF is at the forefront of social issues? Not Berkeley, not Oakland, but San Francisco. I really don't think that's the case. That being said, I never said the Bay Area isn't liberal, in fact I expressly acknowledged that in my OP. But SF is heading in a markedly different direction than where it's been. I don't necessarily know if it will be less liberal but it's absolutely a different place than even 20 years ago.
Yeah guys, it's so different now, you don't even know. It is unrecognizable from 20 years ago!
I'm talking in terms of demographics. It's a completely different city and will probably be different again in another 20 years. Why is it that the black and Hispanic populations have shrunk so low? (And Hispanic is extremely low for California) Could it be that they were priced out? Now it's basically white and Asian, like any uppity suburb in Anywhere, USA. Also: why is there so much inequality in that city?
I don't think liberals are a monolithic group. "Faux liberal" implies an air of arrogance toward anyone who doesn't agree with your cause.
Not being arrogant. I just think if you are say against gay marriage for example you shouldn't call yourself liberal. Or if you think the wealthy 1% should get tax cuts, you should not call yourself liberal. You are, at the very best, moderate.
Yeah guys, it's so different now, you don't even know. It is unrecognizable from 20 years ago!
Yeah all of this talk of SF completely changing does seem a bit premature. It's mostly that it's just an impossible market for middle-income (or less) newcomers to enter into.
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I don't think liberals are a monolithic group. "Faux liberal" implies an air of arrogance toward anyone who doesn't agree with your cause.
