Editorials

A letter writer this week took umbrage at a flippant remark which we quoted in a story on the failure of a councilmember’s aide to collect the signatures his boss needed to file for re-election. The speaker suggested that the incident might be a “gentrified left-wing conspiracy,” parodying Hillary Clinton’s often ridiculed suggestion that accusations against her Bill were part of a right-wing conspiracy.  

There’s no real way at this point to know if there was a conspiracy involved, as the quoted person suggested, or just one man’s mistake. But the question of whether there’s a gentrified left in Berkeley isn’t hard to answer. Of course there is. There always has been. 

The letter writer equated “gentry” in Berkeley with “homeowners,” and opined that a m ore proper term would be “left-wing gentry.” But “gentry” usually describes a class of property owners who own more than their own houses, as in the term “landed gentry.” “Gentrification” is most often a critical term, used in the urban context to refer t o the displacement of poor residents by well-off buyers. It doesn’t take much imagination to extend these usages to people as well as places, to describe the way the political left is changed by the socio-cultural influence of the better-fixed left partis ans. There’s a long list of similar terms which have been used historically to describe this class: limousine liberals (now updated to latte liberals), parlor pinks, radical chic….. 

New residents—and a lot of you are arriving this week—should be aware th at Berkeley is the mother church of the gentrified left. Berkeleyans are fervent about political abstractions, but often fuzzy on the local consequences of their beliefs. For example, we’ve recently experienced labor strife at a previously non-union groce ry store. Nevertheless, it’s easy to encounter devout leftists who say proudly that they always shop at that store because it combines exotic merchandise with being much cheaper than the competition. Since they’re gentrified, they miss the connection between low wages and low prices. And godforbid they should shop at the unionized but pedestrian supermarket, where the coffee is pre-ground, the lettuce is iceberg and the fizzy water is generic seltzer.  

The gentrified leftist loves the poor in principle (he calls them “low-income”) but he quails when accosted on Shattuck or Telegraph by a homeless person asking for a handout. He supports the First Amendment, but confiscates newspapers which back his opponent. He believes in public education, but sends his kids to a “progressive” private school. (Or, of course, she does all of the above, since praise and blame in Berkeley must always be meted out in equal shares to all genders.) 

The errant aide is a case in point. Councilmember Shirek, his boss, has been the fire-breathing dragon of the left for 20 years, and a strong voice for rent control. Her staffer also has impeccable Old Left lineage. But he owns many rental units around town, and he was recently hit by the Rent Board with a substantial violation of Berkeley’s rent control law, to the tune of a $100,000 fine. How does he reconcile the two roles of landlord and leftist? Is there a connection between his real estate holdings and his “mistake,” conscious or subconscious? Because of his income propertie s, he might actually be considered “left-wing gentry,” as contrasted with the “gentrified left,” who are more likely to be wanna-bes with pretensions than people who profit from capital investment in land.  

What you won’t find in Berkeley politics is Rep ublicans in any numbers. Some of you probably came here from Orange County on purpose to escape Republicans, but for those who are used to having a few Republicans around there might be some culture shock. A quick check of contributors to Republican natio nal campaigns at www.fundrace.org turns up only a couple of them in the whole “9470x” Berkeley zip code area. One might own your building, however: UC Business School Professor David Teece, a lead investor in “Moldy Manor,” the Gaia Building in downtown B erkeley, who gave at least $1,000 to the Republican National Committee. (His behind-the-scenes financing of the Berkeley building boom was recently documented in these pages.)  

But Teece is the exception, not the rule. The Piedmont developer who has pro vided a public face for Teece’s Berkeley holdings, Patrick Kennedy, was spotted at a John Kerry fundraiser this summer which was well attended by the gentrified left.  

Or were the guests at that party, held in the lovely garden of a gracious Berkeley home, the left-wing gentry? Are they members of the left with ruling class pretensions, or members of the ruling class with leftist affectations? Hair-splitting like this is what makes Berkeley politics fun for our humongous chattering class to chat about. 

—Becky O’Malley ?