What Progressives Did to Cities

I've spent my entire life in or in near-orbit of what I think it’s safe to call America’s four most important cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. Whether by coincidence or providence, my time in and around these metropolises overlapped with their worst of times, their best, and now—it appears—back to their worst.

I was born just after the beginning of what left-wing San Franciscophile David Talbot has described as that city’s “Season of the Witch”: the decade-and-a-half of insanity that began (more or less) with the Summer of Love and carried through the early days of the AIDS epidemic. In between saw the Zodiac murders, the Zebra murders, the Moscone-Milk murders, Jonestown, the Hearst kidnapping, innumerable other acts of New Left violence, plus several attempts at revolution, some serious, most LARPy, but all disruptive—and meant to be—of ordinary civic life.

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