San Francisco's anti-populism
Originally published on my Substack: San Francisco's anti-populism
Over the past few months, I've been going on an ideological tour of San Francisco, spending time in spaces from the far left to the far right to the far "weird," speaking to people and reading their associated writing.
I've come to the conclusion that one dominant theme is shared across many of these groups with wildly different beliefs, and that is anti-populism.
Many people will express this openly. The far-right Palladium Magazine articulates an openly aristocratic theory of change. The centrist Bay Area New Liberals have a technocratic vision of politics: free markets and limited government, that has little room for the desires of the people. Some members of the far-left support an ideologically disciplined vanguard to lead revolutionary change. Those worried about "AI safety" get jobs at large AI labs under the belief that that they alone are responsible enough to steward this powerful technology. Even critics of AI consider the populist anti-datacenter movement as naive or pointless in the face of their more "serious" apocalyptic concerns. Effective Altruists view themselves as uniquely capable of (undemocratically) distributing wealth towards "good" causes. Rationalists view themselves as an intellectual vanguard insulated from the "irrational" thinking of the common man. And so on.
In a revealing conversation at a party with a centrist-aligned neoliberal, I asked whether he would ever change any of his policy perspectives in response to backlash from the people. His answer was no: that, essentially, it is the responsibility of experts to determine the best "evidence-based" policies and the purpose of politics is to sell those policies to the people, even using deception if necessary. In other conversations, many people have openly described themselves as "anti-populist."
In the anti-populist vision of the world, the problems of the world stem from the stupid, uneducated masses and their fickle, poorly thought out and contradictory desires. The responsible people, those who should have power, fortunately also happen to be the class of people that these people find themselves among: wealthy, educated, located in one of the most powerful cities in the world among some of the most powerful institutions in the world, in San Francisco.
For the San Francisco anti-populists, the rest of America, outside a small handful of coastal cities, is worthy of contempt and distrust. San Francisco anti-populists rarely spend time in Oakland or SF's Western Neighborhoods, much less the rest of the country: cultural backwaters, "flyover country" with no "cultural output."
The majority of America is written off often in the language of memes. This is the America of Breezewood, PA, a suburban, car-based hellscape full of ugly, unfashionable, uncultured people. When I suggest to people in SF that Iowa, a state I lived near for a long time, is quite beautiful, people look at me like I am insane. This is "America B," where unconscious "normies" live—their tastes and values inscrutable, seduced by "slopulism."
In particular among anti-populists, New York Times interviews with "median voters" are widely mocked for their bizarre, contradictory worldviews. Voters distrust big government, but love big social welfare programs like social security and Medicare and also want lower taxes. They want society to be tough on crime, but reject mass police surveillance. They support expanded rights for women, but describe themselves as holding "traditional" attitudes towards gender and family, and so on. For Christopher Lasch, these contradictions, rather than expressing a kind of idiocy or schizophrenia, arise from the fact that
The parties no longer represent the opinions and interests of ordinary people. The political process is dominated by rival elites committed to irreconcilable ideologies. If [E. J.] Dionne is to be believed, the politics of ideology has distorted view of the world and confronted us with a series of false choices: between feminism and the family, social reform and traditional values, racial justice and individual responsibility. Ideological rigidity has the effect of obscuring the view Americans have in common, replacing substantive issues with purely symbolic issues, and of creating a false impression of polarization.1
If this sort of language sounds familiar, you may have heard it from Michigan Senator Abdul El-Sayed, who last night won a senate seat in Michigan by seven points. El-Sayed's campaign articulated a "bread and butter" left-populist vision similar to, for example, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who appealed primarily, not to ideological camps, but a shared vision of the common good. In the left-populist worldview, more ideologically flexible than an orthodox left-wing socialist one, class categories, while important, are only one component of "the people" vs those who are screwing over "the people," the elites: billionaires, powerful corporations, unresponsive and corrupt government officials, and so on.
El-Sayed demonstrated that this populist message resonates not just in ultra-blue New York City, but an upper-Midwest swing state. Similarly, Talarico's victory in Texas or Angie Nixon's narrow loss in Florida shatter the narrative that "technocratic centrists" are the key to Democratic electoral success in swing states. Rather, a winning message is a populist one, one that tries to reconcile the apparently contradictory values of the "median voter" into a coherent policy vision of the common good.
While the populists performed well in red and swing states, it was California where a centrist, technocratic vision of politics performed best. In San Francisco, the more populist Connie Chan (beloved by the Western neighborhoods, reviled by liberal tech workers) lost to billionaire-funded centrist technocrat Scott Wiener. Voters rejected the economically left-wing propositions B and I, voted to centralize power in the hands of the mayor, and in a rebuke of their own citizen power, voted for proposition D, making it more difficult to get future propositions on the ballot. Statewide, anti-populist Democrats performed well, and the billionaire wealth tax proposition 40 failed.
But should this be surprising? California is the wealthiest state in the country, and San Francisco has the highest concentration of billionaires and highest median income anywhere in the country. Historically a working class city, it has become a city politically dominated by wealthy tech workers and tech companies, whose anti-populist politics should probably surprise no one.
If there is a lesson for tonight, it is that I place far less faith in the left-wing populist potential of my city and my state. Last night clarified the political landscape of this country: that the center of left-wing populism is less in California than the Midwest and the South. Bernie Sanders expressed this attitude in e.g. the 2016 primary: he did far better in rural America, places like West Virginia, Michigan, Kansas, and so on, that resemble Vermont, than in major cities like SF and New York. Despite Bernie's tremendous support among urban leftists, they often overlook how his populist politics differs from theirs: how he favors rural and small-town populists outside of major cities like Montana's Sam Forstag. How he, unlike big-city leftists, is far less likely to write off "red America" as hopelessly reactionary and even is (controversially) willing to tolerate some cultural conservatism among candidates like Dan Osborn with an economically populist message. The 2026 midterms were the year where some version of Bernie's populist message, certainly watered down a bit from his far-left radicalism, was tremendously successful.
It is clear that almost all of this motion is happening outside of California and San Francisco, and its anti-populist politics. The good news is: California Democrats are almost totally irrelevant to the national events of last night: the victories in Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, South Carolina, maybe even Mississippi, and the success of populist candidates across the board. The future belongs to "America B," the "slopulists" of flyover country.
1 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995), p. 112. ↩