Advertisement

transcript

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

Democrats are going to be going to voters this fall and asking for their votes. But one challenge is that the parts of the country that are the bluest, the cities on the West Coast, are a complete mess. And I think centrist voters can plausibly ask why put liberals in charge nationally, when the places around the country where liberals have the greatest control are plagued by homelessness, crime, and dysfunction?

I’m Nick Kristof. I’m a columnist for “The New York Times,” and I should rush to say a liberal, but I do think that liberals like me need to face the awkward fact that something has gone badly wrong where we’re in charge up and down the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle.

Conservatives look at the West, and they say, hey, the problem is simply the left. But overall, it seems to me the Democratic states have outperformed Republican ones. Liberalism has done a better job raising people’s well-being than conservatism has done.

For example, Democratic states have a life expectancy that is two years longer than Republican states. Per capita GDP is higher in Democratic states. Child poverty is lower. Overall, liberal places have enjoyed faster economic growth and higher living standards than conservative places. So I would argue that the problem we’re seeing, it’s not liberalism as such. It’s with a thread of West Coast liberalism.

And I’m an Oregonian.

I bore people at cocktail parties by singing the praises of the West Coast. But the truth is that we too often have a version of progressivism that just does not result in progress, and the metric of progressivism should be progress.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I think on the West Coast, we tend to be full of good intentions. We have some great slogans. We’re more likely to repeat the slogan that housing is a human right than conservatives are in Florida or Texas, but they’re the ones who are actually more likely to get people housed. We’re too often infected with ideological purity that is very much focused on good intentions, and not so much on oversight and on outcomes. And that’s where we have this gulf between our values and our outcomes.

So, for example, there was a volunteer group here in Oregon called the Portland Freedom Fund, and it was set up to pay bail for people of color. It was raising money from well-intentioned, liberal donors, and it was addressing a genuine problem. Portland did have a history of racist policing, and bail requirements hit poor people particularly hard.

So in 2022, the Portland Freedom Fund bailed out a Black man who was named Mohamed Adan. He had been arrested for allegedly attacking his former girlfriend, holding a gun to her head, and then violating a restraining order by going to her building. She felt that her life was in danger, but the Freedom Fund paid Adan’s bail, and he walked out of jail.

We’re going to begin tonight with a sort of a sickening story about a murder in Portland that should have never happened. Now, of course, you can see —

A week........

© The New York Times