It is kind of ironic, isn't it? These days Tucker Carlson talks about pardoning Assange, the deep state and that house prices in SF are too high for the middle class. Literally Noam Chomsky could be saying the same things.

But people still believe that Republicans will take away your freedoms and Democrats will solve everything (I don't believe either will solve much).

The Republicans are actively eroding voting rights around the country (see Texas) and actually tried to annul the last election. Gee, I wonder why people believe that.

"Erode" compared to what? Texas's voting laws are still vastly more loosey goosey compared to voting in France. The Netherlands didn't even have mail in voting for the elderly last year. Most European countries have very limited early voting compared to even the "restrictive" new Texas rules.

Voting rules should instill confidence in elections among people who are low information and don't trust the other side. You can't build an election system on telling the other side "trust us" and "you can't prove bad things happened." And elections should be decided quickly and decisively, again to foster faith in the system. The NYC Democratic Primary was a shit show in this regard.

Look at how they do voting in Taiwain--we should do it that way too: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3855762

Democrats tried to "annul" the 2004 and 2016 elections too. They had Congressional hearings over "voter fraud" in Ohio, based on the supposed mismatch between exit polls and the final results. (And that was with a 2 point margin for Bush, vastly bigger than the ones at issue in 2020.)

America is the only first world democracy that doesn't require stringent identity verification to vote or acquire your ballot for mail-in, etc.

I read the article last night. I lived there from '98-'01, during a somewhat different cultural moment, in the Willie Brown era. It was if anything more corrupt and dysfunctional. The music writer Bill Wyman wrote a good article on this back in 1999, which probably still holds up:

https://www.salon.com/1999/11/03/sf/

I don't think there's that much ideology to it. The place is corrupt and dysfunctional because it's conditioned itself to be corrupt and dysfunctional. Brownback's Kansas government had similar problems; same in Ohio.

Well, it could be true, but not necessarily in a right wing vs left wing sense. People with stupid amounts of money playing stupid political games, propping up people who have no business being in political leadership but are funded to be “our person in office” with some specific agenda but no real attention to the actual roles (buying authority but not desiring or able to actually manage). I don’t know, sounds a lot like USA in the Middle East.

The word you're looking for is progressivism, not liberalism. American liberalism is just progressivism wearing liberalism as a skinsuit.

Fair enough. I’m a liberal if by that you mean “ACA is a good idea.” “Let’s have massive tent camps of homeless people” is where you lose me.

Many social problems in west coast cities are self-inflicted but there's also the 9th circuit's Martin v. Boise decision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_v._Boise); it prevents criminalizing public camping unless there's shelter space for everyone. This is effectively impossible given the number of homeless people so we're stuck with the encampments.