Post-Brown billionaires: The state of the city and nation

by Bay View Editorial Board

If you were paying any attention to demographic and economic forecasts in the 1990s, you would have noticed that by the 2020s the U.S. was projected to be majority non-white and the economy of China was projected to match or surpass that of the United States. You might have thought these forecasts presaged some significant shifts in domestic and international politics. Welcome to 2024, when the U.S. presidency is dominated by a demagogic billionaire replacement theorist promoting tariffs on Chinese goods. Make no mistake, fascism at the intersection of casino capitalism and white nationalism has arrived in the American republic, and it’s going to be a lot worse than many have dared to imagine.

But we haven’t arrived here because most Americans are plutocracy craving nativists. While that is a very powerful element that now occupies the top of the political ladder, we arrived here because of the indifference of traditional elites in both major parties to the deeply festering socio-economic inequality that defines contemporary reality. As Giambattista Vico, an Italian philosopher of the Enlightenment period, observed, there comes a time in the life of a democratic republic when unbridled oligarchy sets in and “there are as many tyrants as there are bold and dissolute men in the cities.” More prophetic words could not be imagined to describe the Trump-Musk bromance. Moreover, “at this juncture,” he writes, the people, “warned by the ills they suffer, and casting about for a remedy, seek shelter under monarchies.”

Predictably, mainstream pundits will draw all the wrong lessons from the disastrous rise of monarchic fascism in America. They’ll say the Democratic Party needs to recalibrate, move to the center and attract more Republican voters, instead of energizing a base of disaffected working poor casting about for the tragically ironic remedy they’ve currently landed on because the party has already moved so far to the center it’s hard to get enough people excited. 

Here are three things that do not excite the base, three things that have nothing to do with a “New Way Forward” or the idea that “we are not going back”: the Cheneys, Wall Street and deafening silence on genocide. Democratic politicians in recent years, from Nancy Pelosi to Elizabeth Warren, have told us that they are “capitalist to the bone.” Unfortunately for them, and the rest of us, their opponents are capitalist to the marrow. It remains to be seen if the Democratic Party can regain national relevance in this context.

So, from the Oval Office to the Governor’s Office, Mayor’s Office and Fillmore District Supervisor’s Office, it is the era of ultra wealthy politicians. Why are they getting elected? Because, in the post-Citizens United corporatocracy in which we live, while billionaires are your enemies – your enemies’ enemies are billionaires too. General disaffection with the status quo has fueled a rejection of standard-issue wealth-backed politicians for ultra-wealthy candidates who can afford to buy their own election.

The mayor’s race was case in point and it’s an experiment the results of which are as yet unknown. One thing seems relatively certain however: The unseating of incumbent Mayor London Breed by Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie signals the end of the Willie Brown machine that has ruled San Francisco City Hall for the past 30 years. It’s been a machine well oiled by sleazy real estate developers and, with Breed, reached a well-documented apex of cronyism and corruption. 

Not every mayor in the Brown line of succession was Black, but whether Black, Chinese American or white, Blacks lost out: Black contractors were locked out of construction jobs building the city of the future, Black outmigration continued unabated, and tech corporations got tax breaks while the children and grandchildren of Black homeowners displaced during redevelopment wander hungry and homeless through the Tenderloin’s “streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” of fentanyl (see the opening lines of Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl”).

For many, Breed’s demise is tinged with political schadenfreude. Ask anyone who bore the brunt of the dirty style of politics she embodied. Whether orchestrating a character assassination of Julian Davis in 2012, having supporters sling slurs at Jane Kim and Mark Leno in 2018, or her brash badgering of union leaders in 2024, the Machiavelli of the ‘Mo will not be missed. 

Lurie will enter office as a political novice but one who, for that fact, turns a fresh page and closes out a long and wearisome chapter of San Francisco politics. He has many in the City feeling unusually hopeful during a dark time for the nation. He recently visited the Bayview during a post-election victory lap and called the neighborhood “one of the beating hearts of San Francisco.” We couldn’t agree more, and it’s going to take real leadership to keep it beating.

Home to Candlestick, Hunters Point and the Naval Shipyard, the City’s southeast sector is the epicenter of major planned developments in the coming years. The hard-fought community benefits agreements repeatedly breached by Lennar/FivePoint and unceremoniously scrapped by Mayor Breed’s Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure (OCII) represented a microcosm of all the major issues affecting the wellbeing of San Francisco’s Black community — affordable housing, jobs, workforce development, education, school to jobs pipelines, environmental health, health care, public safety and quality of life. 

If the new mayor is serious about keeping Bayview a beating heart of the City, future development here must be reimagined, renegotiated and linked to reparations for prior racist redevelopment — most importantly it must completely replace and transcend the failed policies and politics of the last 30 years.

To contact the SF Bay View Editorial Board, email Kevin Epps at kevin@sfbayview.com. 

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