San Francisco and the Limits of Full-Tilt Liberalism and Capitalism

Homelessness in the richest city on earth - and the crisis of liberal self-correction

I went to San Francisco for the first time last month. The city was dotted with homeless people, visible mental illness and open drug use. Signs were everywhere warning not to leave valuables in cars. Downtown felt lifeless, half the stores had shut shop. As I walked around, I thought to myself that this was the logical culmination of full tilt liberalism and capitalism, with nothing to moderate either.

When I made this observation in conversation, the response was steeped in policy minutiae - governance dysfunction, anti-housing zoning, closed shelters, a tech economy inflating housing costs. All true. But I looked at the numbers: just about 8,000 homeless people¹ in San Francisco, one of the richest cities in the richest country in the world. In India, the scale itself can confound solutions. But the inability to fix a problem of this limited size, in a place this rich, and instead retreat into abstract “systemic” explanations felt like escapism.

Instead of saying, “Here’s the plan, here’s the enforcement, here’s the housing,” solutions dissolve into abstractions about root causes and arguments over whether addiction is a public health issue or a public order one, the hierarchy of rights of those addicted and residents of affected neighborhoods. It is both. Treatment and rehabilitation are essential, but so is legitimate enforcement to protect the commons. When homelessness is framed as inseparable from ending capitalism or abolishing inequality, the problem becomes too big to tackle. It produces political stalemates, because the “real” solution is cast as lying in some distant transformation.

I am not denying systemic roots - but there is a tendency among well‑meaning liberals to let ideologically pure solutions shade into performance instead of governance. If a wealthy, well-intentioned city cannot address a problem of this limited scale, it calls into question the liberal claim of self‑correction: that discussion and deliberation yield solutions instead of paralysis. The refusal to act decisively is not liberal tolerance; it is a governing culture that gives primacy to performance over governance.

This is what I mean by full tilt liberalism and capitalism. Liberalism, in the sense of refusing to set and enforce standards of behaviour even when consequences of individual choice spill into public space. Capitalism, as the production of extraordinary wealth that prices out the majority. Together, they produce civic collapse. Liberal democracy needs guardrails - normative, institutional, and distributive - to stay credible.

Walking through this beautiful city, I saw signs everywhere: “Abolish ICE”, “Resist”, “F*ck Trump”. I found this strand of lifestyle liberalism exasperating. It seemed too self-indulgent and non-serious in the face of obvious practical and normative deficits.

Over and over, I find that the loudest exponents of liberalism are also often the most non‑serious. On one side, there is the old establishment which has lost credibility; on the other, rebels who can only shout “f*ck the establishment”. Often their critique is correct - there's a lot that's self-dealing and unjust and plain unimaginative and boring in the old order - but a critique is not an alternative. Without a viable and coherent path from point A (bad) to point B (good), all we can have is performance. Both sides of liberalism appear to be failing the same democratic test: the ability to mobilise people around a vision that is both desirable and feasible.

In Berkeley and later in Aspen, the buildings and programmes built on philanthropy showcased a liberalism more invested in the commons. There was a time when the rich had to earn legitimacy by investing in nationbuilding. Of course there were issues - whitewashing of legacies, gatekeeping etc - but the broader point stays - a commitment to the commons and greater good was the path to public legitimacy.

This ethic is almost absent in India: here the rich are rich and they seem to think their richness alone is a gift to the country, and one which gives them a licence to pontificate without contributing to public good. This smugness is increasingly visible in America’s new hyper-rich elite. Elites everywhere are often self‑serving. But where legitimacy is tied to contribution to the common good and a defense of public values, there is at least a basis for democratic negotiation.

It would be a mistake though to mistake endless discussions alone as democratic negotiation. My one deepening conviction over the past few years - and reinforced in the last couple of weeks - is that liberals - and the liberalism we espouse - needs new big picture articulation that can connect the personal to the political and cut through paralysing complexity. We have a tendency to get lost in policy detail, niche causes, or moral abstraction - losing the mass of people in the center where majorities are built.

We have relied too long on the procedural aspects of democracy - free speech, fair elections, checks and balances - and forgotten that people also need direction, belonging, and a shared purpose. That cannot come from tolerance or outrage alone. It requires a serious normative core that can anchor a new social contract, facilitate collaboration instead of paralysing it..

And this is where the democratic negotiation truly begins - not in endless discussion, but in articulating principles that can build majorities across differences. A new social contract must speak not just to the poor or the marginalised, but to the anxious middle, the aspirational youth, and even the elite - so that legitimacy is earned not through virtue-signalling, but through contribution to a shared civic project.

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1. Yes, these numbers conceal churn: many people cycle in and out of homelessness. However the point stands - the numbers are tiny compared to SF’s wealth and resources