Hundreds of unsheltered people living in tent encampments in the blocks surrounding the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco have been forced to leave by city outreach workers and police as part of an attempted “clean up the house” ahead of this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual free trade conference.
The action, which housing advocates allege violated a court injunction, was celebrated by right-wing figures and the tech crowd, who have long been convinced that the city is in terminal decline because of an increase in encampments in the downtown area.
The X account End Wokness wrote that the displacement was proof the “government can easily fix our cities overnight. It just doesn’t want to” (the post received 77,000 likes). “Queer Eye but it’s just Xi visiting troubled US cities then they get a makeover,” joked Packy McCormick, the founder of Not Boring Capital and advisor to Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto VC team. The New York Post celebrated the action, saying that residents had “miraculously disappeared.”
Right there is where the disagreement is. My argument is that laws are ultimately a moral code of a people, because a people are ultimately responsible for their state. It’s a false dichotomy that misrepresents where states and laws ultimately come from. It ‘others’ the state as some kind of inaccessible agent that our actions don’t contribute to. It removes the moral responsibility of state actions from a people, which is not ok. My argument is that individuals are and need to take responsibility for the state and the codification of its moral because they are us. The state is not a separate entity from its people, when it is a state of the people. This thinking of the state as separate from the people is deeply problematic.