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by achierius 922 days ago
The conservatives who run Portland and Oregon?
2 comments

They mean not leftists enough, its a way to absolve themselves of any responsibility of the situation at hand, if only they were even more leftist.
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.

Subversive public sector partisanship is a lot more believable than a homeless industrial complex, I'm glad you brought the two up together.