Matthew Lefkowitz
6.5K posts

Matthew Lefkowitz
@LefkowitzSyS
Standard-issue, middle-class, suburban-California psuedo-intellectual who loves to hyphenate. Sire/Sovereign.




.@spencerpratt: "We’re going to build so much housing, the entire city will be cranes. We’re going to look like Dubai in eight years."


From a political perspective, calling existing programs “communism” is a tactical error. The reaction to the Mayor’s housing plan is the textbook case. The city already had the power to take buildings from bad landlords. In rem foreclosure. Eminent domain. 7A administrators. None of it is new. And all of it requires court judgments, waiting periods, and Council sign-off. There is no instant seizure button, no matter how the rhetoric sounds. COPA is the same story. It is a right of first offer, not a seizure. San Francisco has run it since 2019 with no legal challenges and a market that never slowed. The heavy-handed version New York tried two decades ago, Local Law 79 of 2006, is the one the courts struck down. The careful version survives. The seizure version loses. Of course they shouldn’t be passing bills of questionable legality in the first place but that’s not the point I’m debating. The idea of the policies themselves must become toxic to touch. The Mayor’s rhetoric is built to gin up his base and inflame his opposition. It does not match the legal reality of what he can actually do. And right now the public believes things are going well. Voters went from 66% wrong track last fall to a right track majority today. Every hard input says the same thing. The anecdotal conversations people claim to have with their neighbors do not change that. So when you label all of it communist or socialist, you tie his current popularity to policies I would argue are bad ones. You do his work for him. Labels do not move voters. Impacts do. Look at the numbers. Voters give socialism the cold shoulder and pick capitalism head to head, but two thirds back the millionaire’s tax anyway. Majorities back free childcare but also support limited government power. The policy outruns the label every time. Attack the label and you lose. Attack the impact and you have a chance. Those who oppose bad policy should be proving it is bad to the people who do not already agree. Just calling it bad desensitizes everyone. Every time you say communism without tying it to something real, you make the word easier to embrace. Tie the proposals to the reality, or stop using the labels.





















