J Gulick said (paraphrased):
> > It seems to me that 2 of the Dem Party's main blocs in Cali are on some
> > kind of collision course. In the Bay Area (which of course you know
> > intimately) you have, on the one hand, the socially liberal
> > dot.com types ... on the other hand, you have the largely people of
> > color working class ...
N Newman replied (small excerpts):
> The Tom Amminano revolt in San Francisco was as far as I can tell largely a
> "fuck you" to the dot.com influence driving up rents while letting the
> infrastructure of the city rot.
> Silicon Valley lost population for the first
> time this year and it is largely due to the increasing unlivability of the
> area.
J Gulick retorts:
Nathan, thanks for responding to my speculative assertions. There's a line of analysis I've been wanting to test-drive for a while, and who better to run it past than you.
The recent mayoral contest in SF in certain respects encapsulates the precise contradictions I'm talking about. While I haven't comprehensively sifted the exit poll data, I have fairly sound reasons to believe that one of Ammiano's important voting blocs was socially/culturally liberal 25-to-40 year-olds, many of whom are former boho artists/musicians/scribes etc. and have become multimedia/e-journalism etc. tech-profs (in many cases grudgingly, in order to earn the big bucks now required to rent/buy housing in SF and Bay Area at large -- the ever-looming temptation to "sell out" and reproduce the collective outcome that you individually despise).
Because Willie Brown has had the accidental good fortune to be in office during SF's dot-comization, and Tom Ammiano has visibly denounced the consequences of dot-comization for low-to-medium-end renters, the bonehead mass media (and so-called "alternative" media) assumes that Brown culls donations/endorsements/votes from high-tech moguls and carpetbaggers, and Ammiano represents the obverse of this. This is a massive over-simplification (it doesn't help matters any that b/c of distorted pay-scales in the Bay Area the Chron-Ex can't attract writers/analysts w/a shred of intelligence, or that the "alternative" Bay Guardian is virtually Ammiano's house organ, and refuses to see the social landscape in any complex way that would violate its incoherent populist multi-culti hipster p.c. worldview -- i.e. it sees the world as it wishes it would be, as opposed to how it is).
In short, Willie did better w/working class people of color (especially African-American and Asian-American) than did the more "progressive" Tom; Tom probably did as well if not better than Willie with the young, culturally experimental multimedia/dot.com set (especially those aesthetes of long- and medium-term residence, who, in order to defend themsevles against the increasingly high cost of living, have made a reluctant career switch into the "creative" dimensions of high-tech, namely Web Page design, Internet publishing, multimedia, etc.).
Despite the mass and "alternative" media's flawed charcterizations of Willie as the grand presider over SF's dot-comization, if one hung around South Park or visited high-techie chat rooms prior to the final election, one would discover that the young and hip (to the extent that they follow/care about electoral politics at all, instead of their rumored IPO's) were leaning more strongly toward Tom than Willie. Willie was denigrated as a tool of downtown FIRE/committee on JOBS (Bank of America, the Gap, Levi's, Shorensteins, etc.); Tom as more tuned into the liberatory possibilities of the New Economy/"network society." Willie was (half-accurately, half-racistly) painted as a crooked black machine politician and master of graftocracy; Tom as a "goo-goo" (revered by some dot.commers as an independent reformer a la Jesse Ventura not stained by clientelism). Even the more cash- and stock-option flush dot.commers rent apartments/lofts instead of owning their own places (and hence are attentive to rent control enforcement appeals in a NIMBY vein); a large share of the non-Anglo working class/middle class own their own place/are paying off mortgages and like rising land values (Bayview blacks, Oceanview & Portola Chinese, and many if not most Mission Latinos). Obviously I am exaggerating for effect -- a sizable share of dot.commers are ruthless liberatarians who saw Tom as a dated bleeding heart. But, as you know, an important (and rather nauseating) dimension of the "creative" end of the high-tech spectrum is a distorted self-image of being "cutting-edge" and "anti-hierarchical" (translating into the cultural politics of being against Willie's cronyism and for Tom's "eccentricities"). Plenty of pro-Tom fundraisers amongst the "socially responsible" dot.com set were held.
Much to the chagrin of SF's labor activists and its progressive rank-and-filers, the SF CLC endorsed Willie way early before Tom entered the race way late; even so, growth machine-oriented organized labor provided the foot soldiers to walk the precincts for Willie on election day (and reportedly to rip down Tom's campaign posters). I don't have on tap the exit polling data on union households, but I'm quite sure a solid majority went for Willie, especially construction trade and public sector workers who make relatively good livings and own their own homes). Obviously, Willie also did well because he captured the votes of politically conservative/moderate middle-class/upper middle-class homeowners (Pac Heights/Twin Peaks whites and westside Chinese) who saw him as the lesser of two evils (better than the confiscatory super-liberal Ammiano), a point which neither adds or detracts from my overall line of analysis, which is this:
Even though on paper Tom's platform was more progressive than Willie's (and were I registered to vote in SF I would have pulled the lever for Tom), this does not mean that Tom did better w/the people of color working class, nor worse w/the dot.com crowd. Obviously there are limitations to this "pluralist" style of poli sci inquiry, since it focuses on electoral blocs and not on which segments of capital and which large orgs fund, endorse, and hit the pavement for which candidates. And there's no intrinsic reason why stronger progressive alliances can't be built. But the outcomes of the SF mayoral race do point to some structural tensions in the non-DLC wing of the Dem Party's voting base, important rifts between the relatively young, liberal-arts educated, culturally hip, on-line crowd, and the unionized (and less so the non-unionized) largely p. of c. working class. In some ways it represents a re-working of stresses and strains in the older New Deal coalition (dot.commers as limousene liberals, working class p. of. c. as white ethnic hard hats), w/some obvious key differences (especially ethno-racially).
On a somewhat related note, although Silicon Valley had more outmigrants than inmigrants for the first time since the early 90's slumber, this figure (I believe) was for Santa Clara County only, which can be explained by more and more high-tech industrial parks/super-inflated residential property values pushing renters/homeowners into adjacent counties, where population totals continue to swell. Near the end of every boom of microelectronix expansion, pundits of right/center/left talk about Silicon Valley unsustainability, then a slowdown/restructuring hits, and eventually the cycle starts anew. Over the long haul SV will still grow absolutely if not relatively (as Seattle, Penang, Austin, Colorado, Baden, M5 corrdior, etc. grab more market share), and more working class and non-affluent middle class will commute like hell or put up w/shitty mass transit links (as even downtown San Jose is slogging toward gentrification) ...
Sometimes, my wild opinions are way off-base, sometimes on-target, usually in a grey zone. Let me know what you think.
John Gulick