Leftist Cities: Be Careful What You Wish For Because You’re Going To Get It

A young friend of mine moved to Portland, Oregon, because, as a nascent hipster, he thought Portland would be a cool yet affordable place to live. After less than a year there, he can’t wait to leave. The coup de grace to his dreams of a life in the hipster capital of the Pacific Northwest was the mini tent city that sprang up immediately outside the door of his apartment building. Apparently, stepping through human feces, needles, and used condoms just isn’t hip. Indeed, Portland is so bad that even the drug dealers don’t want to live there anymore, proving the truth of Prof. Peter St. Onge’s thesis about the problems flowing to the winner in gamed elections.

I was first in Portland in 1966 and last in Portland in 2013. Both times, Portland presented the same face: It was a clean, charming little city that I found enchanting as a little girl and a grown woman. Since then, while it’s been amusing to watch the hipster takeover, it’s been much less amusing to watch the decay as hard leftists took over the city’s governance, doing away with the police and opening the door to an unlimited influx of drug addicts people.

In 2020, Oregon voters decided to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs. Technically, selling them is still a crime, but the police in Portland don’t police that crime. With a dramatically reduced force, why bother? When your city has gone in a few years from one of the safest cities in America to one of its murder capitals, policing drug sales is a low priority. The city has been adding police to its roster again, but it’s a case of too little, too late.

With legalized hard drugs, the homeless situation in Portland…which is a problem, not of poverty, but of substance abuse and mental illness…is so bad that even the drug dealers are desperate for more stringent laws:

Three years on, the policy, known as Measure 110, has proved to be disastrous. Even Utah, a 33-year-old former forklift truck driver who prefers to give the Mail only his ‘street’ name, freely admits he cannot understand what possessed his fellow Oregonians to support the move.

Speaking of the policy’s effect on drug use in the city, he says: ‘It’s made it worse. Don’t get me wrong, it makes it better for me, but getting the police off our backs and giving us free pipes and foil to do our drugs is not going to get us off the streets.’

He estimates that 20 per cent of the city’s more than 5,000 homeless people want to tackle their addiction. But it’s hard when they live in a city that Measure 110 has turned into what even the Left-wing New York Times recently called a ‘drug-user’s paradise’.

And it appears that after nearly three years in which Portland’s once attractive and vibrant downtown area has been turned into a tent-covered hellscape of soaring crime, endemic drug abuse and maniacal behaviour, the rest of the city has finally accepted that the decriminalisation experiment has spectacularly failed.

Locals complain of having to step over used needles, shattered glass pipes and human faeces on the way to work, and say they’ve become inured even to blood- curdling screaming fits from disturbed addicts.

This viral video gives some sense of what’s happening on Portland’s streets:

Man riding his bike erratically in traffic crashes into a naked guy in front of a store called “Killer Burger” with a giant LGBTQ flag in the window. Then they fight.

This is Portland. This is the culture Democrats create when given power. pic.twitter.com/Xpv2fPN6yT

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) September 13, 2023

I saw this report on the woes of legalized drugs and limited policing yesterday. Then, today, I saw a video by Prof. St. Onge explaining that, when you game elections, you become obligated only to those who work the system with you to keep you in power. (E.g., the LGBTQ+ lobby, which is politically powerful but numerically small.) The actual voters are no longer important. Inevitably, their lives degrade in very painful ways. Eventually, the party’s voters abandon it:

After yet another election with widespread “glitches,” it’s worth asking what’s the end-game to election fraud.

In short, cheating works in the short run, but it backfires spectacularly in the long run.

Costing the cheater not just power, but their entire electoral base.… pic.twitter.com/Hmabh7qUMm

— Peter St Onge, Ph.D. (@profstonge) November 9, 2023

We are, of course, seeing this problem play out in Democrat-run cities across America, not to mention in the whole of America. Not a single Democrat policy benefits the majority of people. Instead, each caters to a numerically small demographic willing to go to the wall for Democrats.

However, because that demographic is small, ultimately, it cannot maintain weight at the ballot box. There’s not enough cheating in the world to give it the margin it needs to win. (Of course, all that is off the table once the party in power resorts to force of arms, but we must hope it doesn’t come to that.)

Democrat policies are losers. The sooner the American voters wise up and turn their backs on the Democrats, the better and safer we’ll be.