Value-signaling is all fun and games — until the vagrant sets up a tent on your sidewalk. Then it becomes real. And this kind of reality-delivered slap in the face is apparently what recently caused residents of Austin, Texas — a notoriously liberal city — to reject measures pushed by progressives.
The first case concerns how, in 2019, the left-wing Austin City Council allowed vagrant encampments on all city-owned land, except City Hall. (Just as with laws, apparently, social decay is only for the little people.) This led to all the usual problems and an attempt to gag police who warned of the policy’s perils.
The result was a rebellion by residents who sought to reinstate the camping ban via an initiative known as Proposition B. As the group responsible for the proposition tweeted, demonstrating the ban’s necessity (hat tip: American Thinker):
And the proposition passed, on Saturday, by a margin striking “in a city often compared to Berkeley and Madison,” writes American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson. KVUE TV provides the details, reporting that “Austin voters have approved Proposition B, which aims to reinstate the public-camping ban that was reversed in July 2019. The results were 57% to 43%, with the majority voting to approve the proposition.”
“The camping ban makes it illegal to camp in any public area not designated by the Parks and Recreation Department; to sit or lie on a public sidewalk or sleep outdoors in and near the downtown area and the area around the University of Texas campus; and to panhandle at specific hours and locations,” the news site continues.
In reality, “Even progs don’t like strangers setting up tents in front of their houses and urinating and defecating on the sidewalks (and much worse) there,” Lifson notes.
A second leftist measure was also defeated Saturday, one that would’ve moved Austin somewhat closer to dictatorship with what’s known as a “strong mayor” form of city government.
As the Austin American-Statesman reports, “Final but unofficial results on Saturday showed Proposition F, which would have delivered far more power into the mayor’s hands, lost by a margin wider than any in recent memory.… The unofficial result was 14% for and 86% against with 147,657 ballots cast.”
Proposition F amounted to a leftist scheme, as the “Austin City Council placed Prop F on the ballot after the political action committee Austinites for Progressive Reform successfully circulated a petition for it and a slate of other items to come up for election,” to again quote the Austin American-Statesman.
Yet bipartisan opposition to the proposition soon developed. As the Statesman also tells us, it “became clear soon after Austinites for Progressive Reform announced they had the signatures to place strong-mayor on the ballot that many initial supporters had softened on the idea after learning about the mayor’s veto power.”
“Had it passed, the mayor would have the ability to veto any ordinance passed by the City Council. A two-thirds majority could overturn the veto.”
Lifson takes this as a “healthy sign” that even liberals prefer local control to a central authority figure. But, well, Lifson (a man of whom I’m very fond), you never did tell me where I could get a pair of those rose-colored glasses.
(Note that the Statesman also writes that opponents of the proposition “said giving that much power to a single official would water down the district system that has pushed the Austin City Council to the left.”)
At the end of the day, the most logical conclusion is that Austin’s leftist measures were defeated by the NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) phenomenon. In fact, it’s all reminiscent of a liberal New York City parent who said in response to a 2015 diversity/integration plan involving his neighborhood’s schools, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.”
This is par for the course with leftists. They’re all for gun control but want to have armed security details or live in gated communities; they just love immigration and refugee programs, as long as the unassimilable newcomers are put in blue-collar towns, and their liberal neighborhoods can continue looking like it’s 1954; they’re all in on diversity, as long as they can only see it on TV.
As someone close to me once put it, “It’s easy being idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals.” It’s selfish, too, reflecting the moral dysfunction characterizing leftists. Ironically, it’s the same phenomenon as when the Austin City Council allowed vagrants to camp out everywhere but City Hall. The message is, “Dump your garbage, but…” (said in a whisper) “just do it on the other guy’s lawn.”
If only these leftist believed in the Golden Rule. Instead, it’s “Do unto others and make sure they can’t do it to you.”
