Whether you like leftism or not (I don’t), one of the most admirable things about leftists is that they are long-term planners. Conservatives dream of quick fixes, but leftists put systems in place and then patiently wait for them to come to fruition. San Francisco perfectly illustrates how this works...and it goes back to the 1960s.

At the end of June, a San Francisco convenience store was robbed and vandalized. This happened in a city that no longer polices minor crimes (allowing it to boast that its crime statistics have improved), thereby paving the way for major crimes.

The city, rather than vowing to do better to protect its law-abiding taxpayer citizens, served the storeowner with a notice warning him that he’d better fix the damage the city’s policies caused...or else. And do note that this is a minority-owned business in what I happen to know is (or at least was) a working-class neighborhood.

The above report is hardly unique. Indeed, it’s typical for San Francisco and for nearby and equally Democrat-controlled Oakland, too:

What’s important to take away here isn’t how disastrous progressive Democrats’ left-wing policies are for ordinary people. Instead, what’s important to understand is that these things didn’t happen overnight. Leftists planted the seeds a long time ago.

Riffing off the travails of that poor San Francisco shop owner, Omri Ceren was kind enough to bring to his X followers’ attention a post that I wrote at Bookworm Room all the way back in 2009, at the dawn of the Obama era:

I wrote that post before the hard left had a chance to nationalize the policies that it had been implementing for decades at city and state levels. Everything I described in San Francisco as of 2009—from the hippies to the hostility to capitalism to the soft-on-crime policies to the fascistic control over every aspect of life through the medium of climate change to the collapse of public decency—is now official Democrat policy emanating from the White House and Congress.

The result in San Francisco has been disastrous, especially because the city took advantage of COVID to strengthen these economic and cultural Marxist policies. Crime has exploded, public debauchery is the norm, and the city’s economy is in freefall (including in its once-thriving tech sector), with a coming commercial real property collapse that will make 1929 look like a party year.

The leftists’ horrific policies have even managed to destroy one of America’s most popular and profitable tourist attractions: Fisherman’s Wharf.

When I was in high school, my friends and I would go to the wharf all the time just to hang around. It was a fun, crazy place. Now, it’s a broken-down ghost town.

This is what leftism does: It destroys things. And since 2009, with only the briefest of intermissions during Trump’s presidency, the left has been bringing to America what the Democrats have brought to San Francisco (and Oakland).

We have a very small window of time, not just to stop what’s happening but also to destroy it, root and branch. If we just prune the policies, the Marxist plants will still be there, growing and growing, and they will take over America, reducing us to leftist rubble. The true believers think that a socialist paradise will grow from that rubble. Wise people know, though, that all that will be left is a Mad Max hellscape.

Image: YouTube screen grab.