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Seems like a lot of cities claim to be liberal but only in the sense that there are young people who are "liberal" who live in the city for a few years only to get married, move to the suburbs, reproduce, and become conservative (justifying it as "for fiscal reasons" or what not). I am 29 and have several friends who have done this. Just saw a pretty awful Facebook post from a friend who lived in liberal Chicago and now lives in Naperville posting about how marriage should be between a man and a woman. Bleh. Anyway, I honestly think there are only a few truly liberal cities in the country: NYC, Boston, Philly, Seattle, LA, DC, Minneapolis, Portland, and a handful of smaller less important cities.
SF used to be the poster child of liberal America but it is so monocultural these days, I don't even know what to think about it. Seems like the next OC to me, or will be in terms of demographics. The Bay Area overall is liberal though. Chicago is another weird case. I think it's sort of half and half between faux liberals and actual liberals.
Most other Midwestern cities including KC, Indy, etc are pretty fake liberal IMO.
Do you agree? Disagree? Any other cities to add to the list?
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.
Facebook seems to bring out the worst and most banal in people so I wouldn't look to that as a yardstick.
There are a few different flavors of liberal from what I've seen, which are:
Far-Left Militant: Usually those places with group think, where if you aren't just like them they show you the door. So tolerant they tolerate the intolerant. All for diversity (so long as you keep the diversity out of their backyard). Typically you'll find this in the PacNW.
Old School Blue: Basically you can see this most in the NE, rust belt, and a few places in the Midwest (Detroit, Cleveland, etc.). Anywhere that unions were a big deal. Tend to be more conservative democrats.
Nanny Liberal: NYC, California, etc. Places where they feel they need a lot of rules to micromanage people's lives to "act properly", but overall are truly liberal.
Live-and-Let-Live Liberals: More Libertarian in their outlook with an almost anything goes approach. Denver, Vegas, etc. Basically the idea is if I'm not hurting anyone then leave me be. They can be pro-capitalist and lean red in a lot of their outlooks too so at times don't exactly seem all that liberal.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.
Anyway the deal with the Midwest in general is most areas are split pretty close to 50-50 when it comes to liberals and conservatives. Not to mention once you give people a little money, kids, a house (i.e. something to lose) their ideals often go out the window.
Anyway, I honestly think there are only a few truly liberal cities in the country: NYC, Boston, Philly, Seattle, LA, DC, Minneapolis, Portland, and a handful of smaller less important cities.
SF used to be the poster child of liberal America but it is so monocultural these days, I don't even know what to think about it. Seems like the next OC to me, or will be in terms of demographics. The Bay Area overall is liberal though. Chicago is another weird case. I think it's sort of half and half between faux liberals and actual liberals.
Most other Midwestern cities including KC, Indy, etc are pretty fake liberal IMO.
Do you agree? Disagree? Any other cities to add to the list?
I disagree with almost everything you say.
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!).
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.
I think NYC is far less liberal in reality than it is in the popular imagination. All of our last few mayors IMO, with the possible exception of Guiliani, governed as centrist Democrats. No matter what planks they campaigned on, when the rubber hits the road at budget time, it's damn near impossible for a NYC mayor to effectively govern by moving way left or way right. Every mayor here has learned that there's a big gap between campaign rhetoric and city hall reality. So we're liberal only maybe compared to most of the rest of the country. I think we're mildly left-of-center at best.
NYC is also full of all variety of social conservatives, including many white ethnic Catholics, all the Hasidim, and a good number of black and Latino evangelicals. So while the socially liberal thing may be a big feature of Manhattan, its not nearly as strong in the rest of the city where these people tend to live.
So I don't know if you call it faux liberal or real liberal or what. But it is what New York City is.
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.
The West Coast is "faux liberal" in the sense that it's socially liberal but also libertarian. Ultimately its materialistic values trump its social justice values.
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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.
