For too long, journalists, and many political insiders, have sought to explain San Francisco politics as an internecine struggle between progressives and moderates all of whom are left of center. This approach is extremely unhelpful. It does not so much shed more heat than light on the issue, as it casts an impenetrable fog over any real understanding of San Francisco politics. It also gives a feel-good “we’re all liberals here” vibe to San Francisco that is deeply inaccurate.

One reason this framework is so pointless is that the term moderate is used to describe a very broad swath of the political community, For example, a San Francisco voter, or politician, who is strong on LGBT rights, believes in changing some laws to make it easier to build housing and understands the need to prioritize affordable housing, wants to address homelessness through a holistic approach and understands that policing alone is not the answer to reducing crime, could truthfully be described as a moderate. However, in San Francisco politicians and voters who fit that description are generally called progressives.

On the other hand, a politician, voter or donor who wants to give virtually unlimited power to police and developers, roll back regulations that protect workers and the environment, and shrugs off death threats to progressive elected officials, but is liberal on some social issues is, incongruously, referred to as moderate in the city’s political vernacular. The question this raises is how to describe the San Franciscans who espouse those kinds of positions, because continuing to call them moderates, as most of the media does, is increasingly absurd.

People with those views on regulations, development and workers’ rights are generally considered conservative in the United States, but many of these same people also have a vision of transforming a San Francisco that is distinctly not conservative. If, as William F. Buckley said, “(A) conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling stop,” then these forces are something other than conservative.

The goal of the right in San Francisco is not to slow down change, but in many respects to accelerate it. This movement seeks to substantially increase the city’s population, replace older institutions, whether physical, social or cultural, with newer ones, and bring about a more powerful security and surveillance state.

These ideas can be described as right wing, but not quite conservative. However, even right wing is an insufficiently precise term. The dominant faction of the right in the U.S. is the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement led by the fascistic grifter, and Republican nominee for President, Donald Trump. While right-wing actors in San Francisco share some MAGA views and tactics, and in some cases support MAGA candidates and causes outside the city, they are still not exactly MAGA. For example, two defining aspects of the MAGA movement are extreme social conservatism and Christian nationalism. Mercifully, those sentiments are not strong in San Francisco.

The right-wing forces in San Francisco are not full MAGA , but they share some important similarities with the MAGA movement, and with populism more generally. For example, an article of MAGA faith is that the country is being destroyed by dangerous left-wing forces including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and most of the Democratic Party. This kind of scapegoating, often linked to threats of violence, is common in far-right movements.

In San Francisco, the scapegoat is not the Democratic Party, but progressives. Progressives make a convenient target for the right in San Francisco because they are difficult to define. Thus, any politician or policy that the right does not like can be described as progressive. The most glaring example of this is the ultraUr right-wing view that the progressives have turned San Francisco into a hellish urban dystopia. 

When confronted with the basic truth that San Francisco has long been governed by powerful mayors who are not progressive and that progressives have not even had a consistent majority on the Board of Supervisors, the right’s response is dismissive because a good populist knows never to let facts get in the way of an angry theory.

Like most populist movements, the right-wing in San Francisco blames elites, specifically the progressive elites supposedly running the city, for all problems while obscuring their own elite status. Similarly the right-wing drumbeat about crime being out of control in San Francisco, despite ample evidence to the contrary, dovetails with a populist strategy of making their supporters afraid of an out-group. 

Right-wing San Franciscans have, to their credit, not embraced the ugly anti-gay and anti-trans rhetoric that is deeply embedded in the MAGA movement, but many donors to right-wing causes in San Francisco have also contributed to politicians who promote those ugly bigotries. 

Moreover, the anti-woke rhetoric of the MAGA movement was also evident in the pushback against diversity initiatives and COVID-19 protocols that has characterized much of the right-wing movement in San Francisco during recent years.

In addition to these populist sentiments, there is a strong element of disturbing tech-libertarianism in right-wing San Francisco. Many of these wealthy right-wing libertarians envision a San Francisco where automated vehicles replace Muni, developers are given free rein to build whatever they want with no concern for affordability, social programs are defunded, rent protections are abolished and business is completely deregulated. However, the tech libertarian belief in individual freedom is not unbound because these same people also want to give the police essentially unlimited power and access to sophisticated surveillance tools.

It is at this odd intersection of populism and libertarianism, a sort of Howard Roark meets Tucker Carlson, where the moneyed right-wing forces in San Francisco can be found. Libertarian populism may seem like an oxymoron, but in San Francisco it is a very real threat.