Bernie’s Revolution Funded by Techies, Hipsters, and Champagne Socialists

Bernie’s Revolution Funded by Techies, Hipsters, and Champagne Socialists

The staunchest supporters of Bernie Sanders are young, wealthy, and incapable of governing themselves.

After Sanders boasted of the high number of individual donations, Daniel Greenfield researched the geographic distribution of the Senator’s donor base, and came up with the answer both sad and unsurprising. The socialist from Vermont who never held a job in his life does not collect money from miners in Pennsylvania or hardworking immigrants in Arizona, the working class he purports to champion. His most devoted followers are the techies, hipsters, and champagne socialist trustafarians from gentrified neighborhoods: 

Geographically, Bernie’s top dollar zip code is 94110 in San Francisco. The average household income in this part of the Mission District, specifically the Inner Mission, the Bernal Heights area, is $166,302. The median home value is around $1.5 million and the median rent is almost $5,000 a month.

There are no poor socialists in what was dubbed as “the hottest neighborhood in San Francisco.”

Not incidentally, the Facebook overlord Mark Zuckerberg has a 10 million dollar mansion in The Mission, though I’m not sure it’s in 94110.

Continues Greenfield: 

This was the area that Salon founder David Talbot blasted as the “hottest zip code in the country” overrun by “Silicon Valley movers and shakers” in “new-model Teslas, BMWs and Uber limousines”. It’s only fitting that it should also be the spigot through which so much of Bernie’s tech bros dollars flow. 

The second top dollar Bernie zip code in San Francisco, 94117 or Haight-Ashbury, seems like a better fit for Bernie. But the Summer of Love has long since given way to the Winter of Trust Fund Hipsters in the Haight where the average income is $201,503 and average home values top $1.6 million.

. . . . The Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles is a hipster haven which boasts the most expensive pizza in the city where the median price for housing is $813,000, and rents can hit $6,700 a month. Like Park Slope and Haight-Ashbury, Echo Park is full of wealthy hipsters.

That’s Bernie’s core demographic.

San Franciscans living in these areas tend to be under 50, childless, and unmarried. White. Slightly more likely to be male than female.  

In recent years, San Francisco became notorious for its dystopian facade — open air drug use, homeless encampments blocking sidewalks, human waste, and the like. In the metro that prides itself on its protest culture, visible political activity remains limited to children marching for the environment, and the local Charter of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, agitating for their candidates. Corruption of local Democrat officials is just not the kind of sexy issue that causes the local opinion makers to come out on naked bicycle demonstrations. 

The hipster Marxists most fond of Bernie don’t live in the Tenderloin containment area where the worst of the city’s human wasteland lies, nor do they have to worry about their families being negatively affected. 

Last November that demographic doubled down on the lawlessness and ineptitude, electing the son of Weather Underground bombers Chesa Boudin to District Attorney’s office.  The Mission and Haight Ashbury were two out of three best neighborhoods turning out for Boudin, with about 2/3 of the vote going to the offspring of convicted domestic terrorists. 

Boudin ran on the platform of replacing the criminal law with restorative justice and of going after cops, landlords, and corporations. 

As expected from a hereditary zealot, Boudin has stuck to his campaign promises. In January, he dismissed 18 charges against a human trafficker who kidnapped and raped a 13-year-old girl. Again, no visible outrage in San Francisco, certainly not among The Handmaid’s Tale red robe brigade. 

It’s also worth noting that Americans believe that race relations have improved nationwide in recent years. Yet, ostensibly to combat racism, Boudin introduced sweeping changes in prosecution, promising to stop charging defendants for contraband discovered during “pretextual” traffic stops and to no longer bring up “aggravating factors” such as gang membership and past criminal history.   

Two black suspects of an assault against an Asian victim that took place on February 22 assault were apprehended because the 20-year-old Dwayne Grayson videotaped, and posted on social media, his own hate crime. The video shows another suspect, Jonathan Anderson, 56, swinging a metal bar against the victim: ““I hate Asians n—” one person is heard saying in the video. The victim appears to be crying as bystanders mock him and put their cell phones in his face.” 

Boudin dropped the charges against Grayson in favor of restorative justice model.

Both Boudin and Sanders are products of the same political culture. They endorse each other, and are backed by the DSA.  DSA faithful have their own hopes, anxieties, and identity issues. A lot has been said about the unrepayable student loans turning millennials into socialists. I’m sure some of the San Franciscans who are the driving agents of the Bernie movement are indebted, but 94110 and 94117 are not the neighborhoods of mom’s basement dwellers.

People who live there have the means to support themselves, be it well-paid jobs, family fortunes, or working “living wage” jobs while occupying rent-controlled apartments they moved into when Bernie was honeymooning in Yaroslavl. They are not socialists because they are poor; they are socialists because they have ambitions. 

San Francisco has long suffered from an inferiority complex coupled with delusions of grandeur. On one hand, it envies LA, seeing the Southern California city as plastic and undeservingly influential. On the other, San Franciscans believe that, as the tagline of a popular local NPR show has it, San Francisco changes America and the world.  

What hipsters and techies are developing here is their own brand of wealth and power to rival Hollywood’s.  They can take this brand anywhere.

Well-healed techies will be with us long after Bernie is gone, and next time they may nominate a more charismatic socialist without his baggage.  Unfortunately for us, their vision for private property, sex, and race relations is not going to scale well.  San Francisco’s squalor is not the absolute rock bottom of the kind of policies the Marxist hipsters advocate.

The worst of San Francisco is merely some former graphic designers languishing in the encampments, and middle aged tough guys tormenting vulnerable immigrants.  That’s because San Francisco is small (under a million residents), fantastically wealthy, and surrounded by water. Even the Greater Bay Area is relatively calm. Oakland has been notorious in the past, but nowhere near New York, Chicago, or Detroit.

If San Francisco-style political culture is introduced elsewhere in this country, the physical environment will get much worse. If the going gets tough, they can pick up tomorrow, and take their companies to Austin or Salt Lake City — in fact, they are already encroaching in these areas. That’s something to think about long after this election is over.  

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.