As someone who talks a lot \u2014 unfortunately about other people \u2014 I found myself sitting on a fire escape in the wee hours of the night as a friend told me about a girl we knew, a girl I had heard a lot about.<\/p>\n
My friend spoke about this girl\u2019s kindness, perseverance and much higher GPA. But my gears were turning. Is she talking about \u2026 ? She can\u2019t be. As a woman of many informants, I had heard a thing or two about this individual, and I knew something they didn\u2019t. Something nasty.<\/p>\n
\u201cWait, no guys, she\u2019s super f—ing MAGA,\u201d I interrupted.<\/p>\n
The praise stopped in its tracks: \u201cWho said that?\u201d \u201cIs that true?\u201d \u201cI didn\u2019t know she was such a \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
What followed was both irrelevant and unflattering, so I won\u2019t go on. However, I believe that most UC Berkeley students can infer what route we took, analytically.<\/p>\n
As a more-than-left citizen of the U.S., I have a natural, gut-wrenching reaction to hearing that a peer of mine is MAGA \u2014 or whatever you want to call it. With the global rise of right-wing extremism, this reaction echoes the thought process of many of my peers on campus.<\/p>\n
But, much like my \u201cmoderate\u201d dad, I have always been an open-minded person. So, what the hell was I doing?<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t matter why, but I recently became, or, was rather forced to be, engaged with local Berkeley politics, understanding something my peers may not know: The city of Berkeley is not working well.<\/p>\n
Homelessness, an unaffordable cost of living and public safety issues run rampant all across the city of Berkeley, everywhere you turn. And after becoming acquainted with the campaign platforms of many local politicians, I came to the disheartening truth that their left-wing campaigns were likely going to do little about these problems.<\/p>\n
Without the national common enemy of the right, the only thing Berkeley is running against is other left-wing legislators who are also not doing what our city so desperately needs.<\/p>\n
Take Berkeley District 7 for example. The race for the city\u2019s Southside council member has become a heated debate from the same side. Candidate Syrak Micael advocates for the unionization of campus dorm resident assistants, while candidate Aidan Hill wants to reclaim the now-developed-upon People\u2019s Park. But against the city\u2019s pressing issues, most notably housing insecurity and affordability in District 7, one can only wonder if these policies actually improve our city.<\/p>\n
The race appears not to be about who can bring the most feasible change but rather who can appear more progressive. Has this become the goal of our political efforts?<\/p>\n
The fatal gap between blue values and actual legislative outcomes has become too wide to warrant a superiority complex. Our eagerness to openly condemn someone for their political standing without critical examination of whom we support is part of what keeps our attention off of what the left can do better.<\/p>\n
And do better blue states can.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look at California more broadly. California\u2019s median home price hit about $894,630, about two times the U.S. median. On top of this, only about half of Californians own their homes, the second-lowest rate in the country, because no one can afford to buy a goddamn house.<\/p>\n
Democrats have held the California governorship since 2011 and have had supermajorities in both state Legislature houses since 2016. They have had the votes and the time, yet the issue of affordability that their campaigns run on still goes unresolved.<\/p>\n
It is not just the prevalence of these issues that blue legislators struggle with; it is how they manage them that illustrates true weakness. About 25% of the country\u2019s homeless population resides in California. However, the effectiveness of California\u2019s efforts to mitigate homelessness hardly exists.<\/p>\n
A 2024 state audit revealed that California had spent $24 billion to tackle homelessness over a five-year period but failed to consistently track the outcomes or effectiveness of its programs. The council that was created to oversee these programs hadn\u2019t tracked spending or whether they were working since June 2021. In turn, auditors were unable to assess the cost-effectiveness of other programs because the state hadn\u2019t collected enough outcome data \u2014 neither San Jose nor San Diego was able to effectively track its own homelessness spending either.<\/p>\n
This note is not a story of villainy or lack of values within these cities \u2014 it\u2019s a story of inefficiency within blue governance.<\/p>\n
None of these issues we face can be blamed on the right; these are California problems that go widely ignored while we continue to feed a culture war that further divides our country, preventing any possible change.<\/p>\n
Acknowledging President Donald Trump\u2019s administration\u2019s deeply humiliating flaws has become such intellectual comfort food for myself and others on the left that it has become all the more convenient to ignore left-wing legislative shortcomings. Since the most interesting thing to hear about is what the people we hate are doing wrong, it has become muscle memory for us to ignore the least interesting one \u2014 what we are doing wrong.<\/p>\n
With the surge of AI and adjacent algorithms, it is only becoming easier, especially for young people, to become engulfed in a sea of information that only illustrates what one side of the political spectrum is doing wrong. This shadow is a scary place to live in, yet here we all are, poking around in the dark together.<\/p>\n
I still think about that fire escape a lot now. I wasn\u2019t sorry because I had politics; I was sorry because I was being lazy. Every opinion I held about the right had appeared freely, while every opinion I should\u2019ve held about my own ideological values I had avoided forming altogether.<\/p>\n
During that conversation, the only thing I knew was whom she voted for; however, that is a dangerously thin line of knowledge. The city I actually live in had tents on its sidewalks and rents I couldn\u2019t even begin to picture paying, and yet I had never once talked about it.<\/p>\n
Maybe I should start. It might be the only talk that does anyone good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As someone who talks a lot \u2014 unfortunately about other people \u2014 I found myself sitting on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":517275,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[380,110271,195478,17980,38812,1493,198514,24359,143,145,144,198515,6214,110273,17981],"class_list":["post-517274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-affordable-housing","tag-aidan-hill","tag-berkeley-politics","tag-democrat","tag-district-7","tag-homelessness","tag-left-wing-politics","tag-maga","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-political-polarization","tag-republican","tag-syrak-micael","tag-u-s-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/517275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}