Sequoia Capital Exec Admits “Even Democrats Like Me Are Fed Up With San Francisco”

Authored by Olivia Murray via AmericanThinker.com,

I guess all that “culture” (human feces and heroin needles) and “excitement” (rampant crime) of life in a big city is getting a little old for Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital.

But, don’t you smug conservatives get any ideas, these blights aren’t a byproduct of Democrat ideas — San Francisco is merely “held hostage” by “political classes.”

In an essay published by The New York Times today, Moritz acknowledged the city was indeed “crippled” by “homeless encampments” and “drug addicts” before he blamed conservatives for rubbing Democrat noses in the mess. Moritz opened his piece with this:

Few subjects please Tucker Carlson more than sticking a shiv into the city of his birth – San Francisco. Sadly, Mr. Carlson has plenty of reasons for portraying San Francisco as a crippled city, hence his fondness for broadcasting clips of homeless encampments and drug addicts. But Mr. Carlson and his ilk have less interest in understanding why these problems exist.

Let me stop Mr. Moritz right there: conservatives lack neither interest in nor understanding about the sorry state of San Francisco. In fact, we care immensely about human suffering, undignified existences, and burdensome realities, but we don’t allow reason and logic to fall by the wayside in pursuit of a utopia that we know exists only in fiction. This balance is what makes us believe a limited government and conservative principles yield the most prosperous results for the greatest number of people. If we were to elevate our feelings over the facts, and in doing so, jettison logic and reason… we’d be Democrats like Mr. Moritz.

Moritz notes:

Like it or not, San Francisco has become a prize example of how we Democrats have become our own worst enemy. Causes that we have long espoused… have all been crippled by a small coterie who knows how to bend government to its will.

He describes this phenomenon as “tyranny of the minority.” Is this a prelude to reinvigorated efforts to abolish the Electoral College? His verbiage leaves room for theorizing…. Funny enough though, in the same essay, Moritz asserts that negative changes have been brought about by “referendums that are a staple of the city’s elections” — is it just me or isn’t that the exact definition of “tyranny of the majority”? Referendums bypass a representative government, usurping lawmaking authority from elected lawmakers. The voters themselves head to the ballot box, and the impulses of the majority decide.

Perhaps this San Francisco Democrat ought to read the words of James Madison, as the Founder expounded on “the mischiefs of faction” in Federalist 10:

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction.

…

Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

Moritz also states this:

The core of the issue, in San Francisco and other cities, is that government is more malleable at the city level than at higher levels of government.

…

If the U.S. Constitution requires decades and a chisel and hammer to change, San Francisco’s City Charter is like a live Google doc controlled by manipulative copy editors.

Again, that seems like a Democrat policy problem to me…. Remind me again which political faction consistently asserts the “need” to “rewrite the Constitution”? Can Moritz’s observation noting that perpetual revisions of foundational documents is a recipe for disaster please be the nail in the coffin for any more leftist cries to scrap our national Constitution? A girl can dream.

Moritz is right, San Francisco is held hostage by political classes, but what “classes” those could possibly be other than leftist ones, I can’t say — and apparently neither can Moritz.