Where the Left Meets the Right

The city of San Francisco, progressive capital of a continent, a city that championed gay rights and democratic reform (instant runoff voting), and perhaps the only metropolis in America that allows meaningful independent and third party participation, recently passed legislation that reveals one of the critical flaws of progressive politics.

San Francisco will ban smoking in public parks and publicly owned open spaces. While it is not immediately known whether the ban will apply to medicinal marijuana or be restricted to tobacco smokers, it is known to exempt public golf courses.

With a wink and a nod more familiar to rightwing politicians disguising themselves as moderates, Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier declared, "Secondhand smoke outdoors is just as dangerous." Oh, really? That’s not what the politicos told smokers when they were pushed to the sidewalks in 1993.

Let’s face it: Like Bill Clinton’s laughable explanation for his failings in the Monica Lewinski affair, the San Francisco liberal community is doing it because they can. They’re doing it because nobody likes big tobacco and smokers don’t vote – or do they? More to the point: The outdoor smoking ban is fully intended to further stigmatize and punish individuals whose behavior, though not illegal, does not meet the approved standards of the liberal-social elite.

Here is where the left meets the right and the liberal liberators become the oppressors they have traditionally thought to oppose. Taken to logical extreme, it is the serpent devouring itself.

Progressives were once famous for opposing legislated morality aimed at what is appropriately termed Victimless Crimes. Included under this heading are attempts by law to restrict gambling, prostitution, recreational drug usage, panhandling and vagrancy. The rationale of the social libertarian has always been: If you have to look too hard for social harm, it does not belong in the jurisdiction of law or government.

There was a time when former Mayor Willie Brown, representing the citizens of San Francisco as Speaker of the Assembly, rose to the podium every year to rail on the wasteful and Puritanical obsession with legislated morality. There was a time when not a single progressive voice would dare rise to challenge that enlightened theme.

Where have all the libertarians gone? If the progressive community has banished the libertarian ideal, they have severed themselves from the better half of their ideological roots. If the progressive community is allowed to punish individuals for behaviors that essentially harm only themselves and the sensibilities of the social elite, what distinguishes their newfound ideology from the despotic ideologies of the far right, who may well wish to punish supporters of Roe v. Wade, medicinal marijuana or, indeed, the perceived decadence of San Francisco, itself?

Like the Catholic Church at the Wounded Knee Memorial, experiments in social engineering and legislated morality do not belong in the city of light on San Francisco bay. As the song implores: Return to yourself. Hypocrisy is no more appealing when it comes from the liberal left as it is when it comes from the self-righteous right.

This is a particularly disturbing development at a time when both libertarians and progressives are at risk of being evicted from the political mainstream. While it is common to view these political philosophies as opposing extremes, there is in fact a natural alliance that occurs not only when confronting a common enemy (as in the Ohio recount effort); it occurs where the left meets the right, where the moralizing of an overbearing majority ends and social justice begins.

Let us find that point of unity once again.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS).

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