A San Francisco elegy in Trump’s America

The morning after this calamitous election, as the sun rose over my jewel box of a city, I wondered how one nation could contain such multitudes.

In my hillside San Francisco neighborhood, dominated by mixed-race and same-sex households, not one home displayed a Trump sign. The ratio of Harris to Trump placards in the city was more or less infinite. But even Harris signs were rare. What was the point? San Francisco would turn out overwhelmingly for the vice president, who made her name in our city, and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference. In our deep-blue bubble on a deep-blue bay in a state never in contention, those choosing our next president seemed very far away.

Driving through my multiethnic city toward work, the streets had the same eerie quiet as on the day last winter when Patrick Mahomes walked off with Brock Purdy’s Superbowl championship. South along Route 101, past the sun-speckled bay, I wondered at the image of carnage right-wing pundits and podcasters project onto this glorious landscape.

And as I arrived at my workplace, an elite university scorned by so many Trump supporters, not one student or faculty member openly cheered the election results. Nor did anyone jeer. Instead, the prevailing mood was quiet sadness — and embarrassment at finding ourselves once again so out of step with a nation whose laws and traditions we revere.

For most of us in the Bay Area, the prospect of the return to power of a president who threatened to deport our friends and neighbors, to abandon Ukraine and our European allies, to reject (again) the voters’ mandate if he lost and to "drill, baby, drill" us into climate-change oblivion fills us with dread.

And yet, truth be told, we mostly get it. Both Ukraine’s fall and global warming seem distant threats when grocery bills consume rent payments and corner stores lock their shelves or shutter their doors to fight runaway theft. Even here in the Bay Area, the electorate rejected some of the last decade’s liberalized drug and theft laws. We dumped a ballot measure to end forced labor in prisons and recalled progressive officials deemed responsible for urban crime and blight. Even San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who deftly steered us through the pandemic, lost to Daniel Lurie, a self-styled reformer to her right.

We understand, also, that the same tech boom that crowds our freeways with Teslas threatens the livelihoods of Appalachian coal miners, Midwestern autoworkers and so many others in traditional industries. And when my Bay Area friends and I are being truly honest with ourselves, we see how smug we seem when we speak of “those experiencing homelessness” and “justice-involved persons,” when others call them homeless or criminals. That Harris wisely avoided such badges of “wokeism” could not erase her Bay Area heritage.

So even as we look longingly down the road to the next election and the chance for a change of course, we know our first challenge is mutual understanding. For every nonstop flight we book to New York or D.C., we should book one to Tulsa or Birmingham.

I hope, too, that folks in communities that broke for Trump will visit us here in the Bay. The weather is mostly lovely, the food is great — and we’d love to get better acquainted.

George Fisher is a professor at Stanford Law School.