The American writer Michael Shellenberger is a relatively recent recruit to the rapidly expanding club of “liberals mugged by reality” — the phrase coined in the 1990s by the grandaddy of this sad-eyed and much maligned tribe, the political analyst Irving Kristol.
Shellenberger has published a book tearing into the way in which the Democratic Party that he has always supported is destroying his home city of San Francisco, renamed San Fransicko in the book’s title. The case he makes is devastating. Yet although his target is the left, his epiphany carries a no less crucial message for conservatives and for politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
San Fransicko is a forensic deconstruction of the harm being done in a city where homelessness, drug