This is the classic approach of conservatives: throw wrenches in every part of a welfare system, then point to its failures to justify its dissolution. See: Medicare, public education, etc.
This is just about the worst example you could have used for your theory. In this case there are thousands of people that could have just done a 1:1 copy of what they do in Switzerland, Portugal, Netherlands, Scandinavia etc. Instead they copied only the carrot (treatment and harm reduction). Then they didn't just not copy the stick (prison, consequences for missing treatment) they threw away all their sticks.
With this in mind I can understand why many people are now against harm reduction of any kind, when the same people that fucked it all up in the first place now want to try again.
I'm curious why you think there are much fewer homeless in conservative cities (like Provo, Jacksonville, even Orange County)? Is it because everything is backwards? The progressive cities are actually conservative, and the conservative cities are actually progressive?
Because if you're homeless, you totally want to stay somewhere with no social programs. Here in California, our Medicaid insurance is infinitely better than any private insurance. Why would you stay somewhere where you get zero help? I. E. Zero Medicaid expansion in conservative states
They're pushed out, either through police violence or a complete lack of viable social support systems. There's many ways to discourage folks from sticking around through ad hoc policies without putting it explicitly into law, or else to simply not mandate the kind of support that other cities have.
Right, but I'm asking if Portland is secretly run by conservatives, why does it have a different outcome? i.e., why doesn't Portland discourage folks from sticking around?
Conservatives don't "secretly run" anything and to insinuate that that's what I'm saying is to misinterpret my comments. So the premise of the question is false from the outset.
Conservatives (and the threat of conservative backlash) can nonetheless meaningfully influence the shape of institutional policies that hinder the stated goals of the organization, municipal government or otherwise. It's not at "tyranny of the minority" levels in many cases but that doesn't mean they're completely shut out.
Intention matters little when it comes to outcomes -- this is the credo of the consequentialist. It's about the material facts as regards what specific elements of specific policies promote or discourage this or that outcome. Deft policymakers can find sneaky leverage points that are only obvious in retrospect as having been a significant influence on the outcome vis a vis the stated goals of the policy in the first place, and it would be naive to assume that large political organizations (parties, PACs, etc.) on both sides don't develop and hire talent to provide exactly this kind of service. It's a battle of shadow consultancies just as much as it is a battle between ideologically-motivated parties, even though you are only exposed to the dramas of the latter in news media.
If Portland is secretly run by conservatives that want to prove that high minded liberal ideas for dealing with the unhoused and drug addicts, they're doing a very good job!
I live in Portland. Conservatives do not have anything to do with our city or the county of Multnomah. We haven't elected a conservative since the 80s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_McCready. We're the second highest taxed city in the nation.
If you ask me most of our problems come down to fraud/waste/abuse, mismanagement, and dysfunction.
I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.
In regards to Portland, you almost certainly have a problem with the key points you identified, but you also have a problem with the fact that public drug use is intrinsically tied with homelessness. You can't fix one without the other. This involves (in the short term) more public housing, but for a better solution (the long term) it involves better education, welfare, health-care and social equality.
You can't try to fix one of these problems while ignoring the others. It won't work.
> “ compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative.”
As someone from the “rest of the world” I don’t know what people mean when they say that. I think this claim is based on a broad misunderstanding of, let’s be honest, Western European politics by people who’ve never voted in elections here.
I live in Switzerland, have lived or worked in the Netherlands, UK and Czechia. The liberal parts of the US are far to the left of any of those countries.
(Yes, healthcare is cheaper, except in Switzerland. It’s not a 1:1 mapping, but on questions related to drug use in the public square, I think you’d find it’s a lot less lenient here than you think.)
I think if you look at actual class issues such as labor organization, healthcare, housing, public transportation, the adage of all US politicians being consevative stays (mostly) true
Hm, maybe? Public transport, for example, I very nice, I agree, but in fact it’s less affordable in most places than, say in New York. I’d much rather be poor in NYC than in Paris, London or Prague. At least in NYC, you don’t get charged more for commuting from a cheaper area, the city provides heat, there are community programs, etc.
Look up some actual political programs from major parties in Western Europe. You’ll be surprised.
I think most Americans have seen a sanitized version of Europe, just like most Europeans have seen the evening news version of America. Both of those ideas are caricatures.
The way I see it, current European conservatism manifests as nationalism, anti immigration, anti Islam, and anti green policy. I looked at French and Dutch conservativd parties and that seems like a fair description. They’re still in support of government funded education, healthcare, labor organization, vast public transportation etc… those are all hot topics to American conservatives. American conservatives also have their own colors of nationalism and anti immigration stances, but I’m talking class issues, as opposed to social and culture issues. I don’t live in Europe and not a politics expert, so correct me if I’m wrong
> I think if you look at actual class issues such as labor organization, healthcare, housing, public transportation, the adage of all US politicians being consevative stays (mostly) true
Australia is way ahead of the US at privatising public transport. Selling off public assets into private hands is a much bigger thing in the UK and Australia than the US. Some Australian states are now even privatising government services such as motor vehicle registration, driver licensing and land title registration. The UK and Australia also have a much bigger culture of commercialising government IP as opposed to the US culture of putting it in the public domain. People always think of the US as more capitalist, but I think these are examples of ways in which the US is less capitalist. Some of these Australian initiatives are almost bordering on anarcho-capitalism (sans the competition part). And they aren’t necessarily the work of “conservatives” - the decision to partially privatise the motor vehicle registry in the State of Victoria was undertaken by the Andrews government, [0] which is arguably the most left-leaning of Australian state governments, in charge of Australia’s most left-leaning state
The OP was talking about politicians and at least for politicians on a national level that is certainly true. Look up any of the many political compass/categorisation sites and you will find the Democrats economic, defence, education... policies typically to the right of the major conservative party in European countries (CDU, French republicans, moderaterna in Sweden...).
Now with social/drug policies it's typically more complicated, and there are vast differences between European countries as well (e.g. Sweden is extremely restrictive for drugs and even the major left parties don't push for changes).
The overall point still stands though. Now among the population there is much greater variety, but this is one of the issues with the US two party system, significant portions of views in the electorate are not represented.
A very American definition of "conservative" is being used when people say that. The converse statement, "other countries' politicians are in general much more liberal", probably makes more intuitive sense, again using a strictly Western definition of "liberal" (Enlightenment, post-revolutionary France, etc.).
What is conservative about Portland politicians and whom are you actually comparing them to?
IMO Portland already does every single one of the solutions that you recommend. It’s not working out for them well, in the same way it isn’t working out for Portugal or Amsterdam.
Maybe some drugs should be restricted and usage controlled. I’m pro legalization, but I would not support opium dens being as common as Starbucks.
Why do you say it's not working out in Portugal or Amsterdam? I frequently hear those two places cited as an example of where drug liberalisation has been a big success. Is that not true? I ask from ignorance.
The programme in Portugal requires people to check in with the authorities, seek treatment and move off the street corner. It by most accounts worked ok for a while, but downtown Lisbon started to look pretty bad recently, and I think they’ve been backpedaling a bit.
In Amsterdam, the drug tourism made the city hard to live in, and the authorities have largely cleaned it up now. Weed is a special case, but using anything else on the street will warrant a check-in from the cops.
I live in Lisbon and I don't see how "downtown Lisbon started to look pretty badly recently". Street drug users, seemingly mostly/wholly homeless, seem to be concentrated in an area I wouldn't call downtown. I don't really know what they do to keep it that way though. Also Porto seems to be an entirely different story from what I've seen there.
In any case, Portugal's strategy was supposed to be diverting funds from the narcotics police to rehabilitation efforts. But those funds have steadily eroded over the years with cost-cutting measures such as the merger of the autonomous drug agency into the main healthcare service. It's not too surprising if it is falling short of its initial success.
Another thing to consider is the inseparability of homelessness and drug abuse issues. It doesn't seem to be possible address one without the other, rising homelessness will inevitably bring more drug abuse. (Still I see fewer homeless people in downtown Lisbon than in Barcelona that won't even let you have a beer in the park).
I don’t know about Portugal. But Amsterdam’s drug toleration (it’s still illegal mind you) happens against a background of pretty intense anti-drug culture. As that culture has become more permissive, drug policy has become more punitive: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/681551
You got this wrong: drug use generates homelessness. Most homeless in the US are drug addicts - many of them with serious health conditions partly induced by drug use - and that’s why they can’t hold a job or get a home.
In San Francisco when we give homes to drug addicts, the first thing they do is ripping the sink out to sell it and buy more drugs.
There is a serious drug epidemic that needs to be addressed simultaneously as we try to help the super-minority of legitimate homeless that are bad on their luck and need 2-3 months to find a new job and get back on their feet.
I always felt like I heard this was the opposite. That the drug addicts were the minority population, but the majority of the news stories. I feel like we both would benefit from statistics that prove either way. My feelings are generated from anecdotes I've heard over the years, and I would love to be proved wrong and change my mind. Do you know? I feel like so much of this discussion is fueled by strong feelings without data.
Have you ever personally known someone addicted to hard drugs? I've known several. They can't continue living in a house or apartment with other non addicted people. They would steal literally everything to sell for drugs. Losing their housing is something that happens to every drug addict. Of course their use escalates from there, but it's an early milestone common to all.
Have you ever known someone addicted to hard drugs? What gets them started on it before the transition into homelessness? Safe bet is on the scenario that they're in a stressful, economically insecure situation (including insecurely housed), but still housed, when they begin diving deeper into the drug habit.
> In 2022, there are approximately 582,462 people affected by long-term homelessness in the United States. The US homeless population is increasing yearly, particularly in younger age ranges. Tragically, homelessness and substance abuse go hand in hand. The National Coalition for the Homeless has found that 55% of homeless people are alcohol dependent, and 25% reported being dependent on other harmful substances.[0]
More than half suffer substance abuse. Accounting for the fact that many of them would deny admitting to drug use when asked, this is probably a conservative number and the percentage is much higher. Also this is an US average, and it doesn't take into consideration "drug tourism" in cities like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle where drug use is literally the main goal thanks to easy drug access, therefore the drug-related homelessness ratio in some places is much higher.
They also probably take into account both housed an unhoused homeless, with the nuance that unhoused homeless are more likely to be druggies and to refuse shelter. Therefore the percentage of homeless population we see every day in our streets (which is the subset of homeless more likely to affect our day-to-day lives) have very likely an higher percentage of drug use.
Finally, the US actually has another problem: we can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.
The elephant is the room is that drug addicts are present in large number, they cannot hold onto housing and they cause incredible damage in the cities where they congregate, to themselves and to the community.
For as long as we keep ignoring this, we are stuck in nuances.
These people don't want to get better, so we need to mandate treatment (and give them one of the many available supportive housing units after accepting treatment) or - if they refuse treatment - relocate them where they cause no harm other than themselves. Might as well call it a "government-assisted suicide" campus, because this is what it already is in every major American city nowadays. Today, we are literally letting them die on our streets.
Nobody in modern public discourse is complaining about homeless in the context of a regular Joe bad on his luck, who after a while - with dignity and hard work - goes back to a stable life. We should give our all to him and homeless like him.
The Democratic party would be considered right of center to many Western European nations, but certainly not compared to "the rest of the world", and there's a growing chunk of U.S. politicians that are proper left of center as well.
In Seattle, local elections are a contest between Socialists and Democrats. The former may not have much presence on the state or federal levels, but to say they don't exist in city politics is incorrect.
Also, the reason they can't succeed much beyond a few lefty cities is because they can't stop saying insanely stupid shit, like the suggestion that Boeing workers should seize Boeing factories and use them to make city buses instead of airplanes. Most of America doesn't go in for this kind of nonsense. This is a real example btw: https://www.kiro7.com/news/seattle-city-councilmember-elect-...
What American cities need more then public housing, is housing. Actual policies that increase housing stock and make it possible to live in these places without a car.
That is how you actually decrease total cost of living.
The US has been trending up, between housing and transportation, a huge amount of people spend well above 50% of their income on that, and poorer people even more.
Public housing can be part of this, but by itself it wont fix anything.
We can't fill up the supportive housing units fast enough! New York has empty supportive housing units [1]. This suggests that the total number of vacancies might be even higher, as more units are added to the system regularly.
This is only true economically in arenas like taxes and government programs. Socially what country are you thinking of that is to the left of the American left?
Please stop voting to steal my money for more social program waste.
I already have to pay a 1% tax on all household earnings above $200k. Before haters hate, please realize I'm already paying 10% to the state on all earned income. Plus the federal rates.
Oregon has consistently mismanaged funds. Giving them more money won't fix anything. They don't know how to spend it.
I'm tired of keeping zero income until the end of April. Especially when all I have to show for it is constant homeless drug addicts. Lwt the private sector handle it or enforce no camping laws and sober folks up in a cell or ship them away, or just give them all fet lined drugs to permasolve the issue.
>I know this is difficult to digest, but compared to a lot of the rest of the world, almost every US politician is conservative
In what way? Compared to almost everywhere on earth, American politicians are extremely xenophilic, extremely tolerant of sexual minorities, extremely feminist, more inclined towards individual freedoms in general and perhaps slightly more capitalist.
All of these things are different axes of politics that are correlated differently in different regions of the world.
Conservatism isn't the point, it's the specific tactics being used that they're highlighting. IIRC the same tactics were recommended in that WWII "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" that still makes the rounds on the internet.
The gist of it is: to kill any initiative, form a committee or task force around it and then drag your feet at every opportunity.
I disagree, falsely labeling things conservative is unproductive for the conversation of "what is going right or wrong in Portland, OR, USA". That's to say, context and the goals of discussion are important. We do a lot of committees out here, but most of them are with the aim of including a vast number of viewpoints. If your point is that we fancy ourselves the type of liberals that do everything but nothing well even to a dysfunctional degree then you and I might agree. If your point is to say there's some conservative operator out here speaking to struggles, empowerment, etc then I'd say you're off your rocker.
It's not a false label. Conservatives do in fact do this. It's kinda their thing. Look what Obamacare became once they got involved.
Nobody is saying conservatives have infiltrated the Portland political scene, only that we see similar failures in other contexts when initiatives are half-assed (on purpose). Similar circumstances-- not identical.
It is a false label when there are no conservatives in Portland's government. That yields to two things:
- This is just a common American tactic
- There are other, less nefarious, reasons this happens
Including conservatives in a context where they don't exist and shifting the goal posts outside of American politics on a whim is both entirely inappropriate and distracting if your goal is to discuss how Portland can be better. Nobody in Portland is sabotaging our committees is my point; at the very least they're not doing so intentionally.
What you do get here is what some people call "everything bagel style liberalism" where we do everything, but nothing particularly well, and there is really no North Star when it comes to ethos.
Small-c conservative is a label that is not necessarily aligned with any political party. If I wanted to say (big-R) Republican I would have. Does that help you understand the argument better?
You will note of course that the rules and regulations around how to implement these things are always 'bipartisan' and meant to stir up as little backlash as possible. There's many opportunities to install bottlenecks and roadblocks in systems that end up shaping the entire way they function. To some extent it is progressives anticipating conservative backlash but there's plenty of lines in plenty of laws written into and insisted on by conservatives that have wide-ranging consequences.
Reductionist perspectives on how politics works always end up at this "one side is dominating the other" kind of narrative but it's never actually that way, both sides still have a lot of influence on the various specifics of the outcome.
Are you seriously attributing public sector bureaucratic dysfunction to some sort of subversive public sector conservative operatives, or vague regulatory poison pills that you cannot actually point to here?
It seems a lot more intuitive to believe that you cannot just legislate that all government employees act selflessly towards the Greater Good, and the Homeless Industrial complex is a real thing that is not necessarily working in the interests of the public. Observing waste, fraud, and abuse and reflexively saying "this must be the fault of conservatives somehow" is just sorta sad.
Taking that as an axiom; then what exactly would the plan be to make the welfare system work? Conservatives are frequently going to be in power, they represent about half the votes.
If half the voters think something is not an option, then it isn't an option. That is the joy of democracy. There needs to be a consensus to implement policies long term. Assuming you are correct (big assumption, but still) then the only real choice is to abandon the welfare system. Otherwise, the alternative is to abandon the welfare system spitefully in a way that doesn't achieve anything for anyone.
Technically, Republicans are not necessarily "half the votes", more like "a third of the votes" which are then joined by another 10-15% of "unfaithful" swing voters - whose opinions don't necessarily overlap 100% with core conservative principles.
Participation rates can also be very low, particularly at local/state level, making that core of strongly-conservative votes actually pretty small in absolute terms.
You can quickly judge the actual opinion of the overwhelming majority of voters on completely abolishing welfare provisions, when you mention a few magic words that happen to extend those provisions to "normies" (medicare etc).
BTW: Indie voters typically strongly align on one or other side of the partisan divide despite their self-assigned labels. The nature of the two-party system is it binarizes the entire discourse and ends up reproducing the bipartisan dynamics by restricting and chopping up the Overton window according to the two major lines of thought. For more true independence you'll need proportional representation and multiple parties. The problem would (does) still exist but across a wider spectrum of opinion.
I used to hold that view, but the fact is the vast majority of those voters ask this question and declare themselves independents while asking:
Vote for what?
They want to know what politicians will do to earn those votes.
What you call unfaithful is actually a direct failure to garner votes.
And that means speaking with people, not at or to them.
It means actually asking for those votes too. Go and watch some politicians and in particular the one who lost to Trump. There is almost no ask and a whole lot of speaking at or to people not with them.
The unfaithful ignore voter shaming, again something I used to do:
A no vote is a yes vote for the enemy
Unfaithful voters cannot be counted on. Think it through: a politician who knows they have votes no matter what has very little incentive to work for those votes...
Today I do not judge others for their votes.
Our future is in the votes to be cast and why we might think about casting those votes.
And I do not blame or shame anyone either.
It is on those of us running for office to get out there, talk with the people, garner those votes and then act on them.
Calm down, it's just a technical term when talking about voter behaviour - the "faithfuls" being voters extremely unlikely to ever change their preference (regardless of what it is). It's a fact of life that many voters have "for life" preferences.
I was calm. Just doing a bit of framing in the hope of improving an otherwise solid discussion.
The optics on that term warrant the framing for reasons already given.
Sidenote: one of the most difficult aspects of threaded text dialog is a very high degree of intent ambiguity is ever present. Same goes for overall emotional perception.
Because of this, I avoid personal judgment and very frequently avoid the top responses to "things one may feel compelled to respond to", which are righteous indignation and subject change.
Much better to assume a friendly dialog, give benefit of the doubt and see where it all may lead.
If nothing else, flat out asking about other people state is often better than declaring it out of hand.
Conservatives? In Portland? How exactly did they manage to throw wrenches there? And also in San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and other deep blue cities? Maybe we need to give some tin foil hats to the managers of those, to shield them from the evil conservative influence?
With this in mind I can understand why many people are now against harm reduction of any kind, when the same people that fucked it all up in the first place now want to try again.