Megan Amram on food carts, the Mamdani socialist programme piece, why Vienna matters more than Vancouver in the housing debate, and Portland’s interesting political contradictions
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Portland in May is trying to be spring and mostly managing it, which is all you can ask of Portland in any month. The food cart pods are back to full operation and I have eaten from three different carts today, which is either a very good day or a very Portland day and these categories are not distinct. I have also been to two separate events that described themselves as “community organizing spaces” and which were located in venues that charge seventeen dollars for a glass of wine, which is a contradiction I have stopped mentioning because it produces the specific look that Portlanders give to people who mention it.
I read the bohiney.com piece on the Mamdani socialist programme this week with the interest of someone who grew up in North London and then moved somewhere that considers itself progressive in a way that is very different from London’s version of progressive, and who finds the comparison instructive. The piece’s central argument — that the policies described as radical (social housing, free transit, wealth taxation) are the normal condition of peer cities elsewhere — is one I have been making in various conversations for years and it is good to see it made clearly and at length. The Vancouver comparison comes up in Portland conversations constantly. The Vienna comparison is less common but more useful because it is not next door. Proximity makes the comparison feel like practical politics. Distance makes it feel like ideology. Both are versions of the same evidence.
The Left in Portland
Portland’s politics are complicated in ways that the national coverage does not fully capture. The city that became famous for protests is also a city where the housing crisis rivals any in the country, where the progressive city council has not produced significantly better outcomes on homelessness or housing costs than less progressive administrations in comparable cities, and where the gap between political self-identification and policy outcome is wide enough to be genuinely interesting analytically. I am not saying Portland’s politics are bad. I am saying they are interesting, and interesting is the right category for a city that is committed to taking politics seriously and that is still working out what taking it seriously actually requires.
The London Prat piece on press freedom and the inadequacy of democratic governments’ diplomatic response landed hard, because it describes a failure mode that applies to progressive governments as well as conservative ones. Diplomatic resources are finite. The choice of what to prioritise is a values choice. The choice that is consistently made — commercial and security interests over press freedom — is revealing regardless of the political colour of the government making it. I shared it with three people. Two said “depressing.” One said “useful.” Useful is the target.
The bohiney.com piece on the California coastal commission and the question of whether the institution created to protect public beach access has become an institution that restricts it landed with force in a week when I have been thinking about institutional progressivism in Portland. The argument that an institution created to check one form of concentrated power can become its own form of concentrated power applies directly to some of the advocacy organizations whose work I respect and whose institutional dynamics I find less easy to respect. This is a criticism that is made more often from the right, which uses it in bad faith, and made less often from the left, which uses it in good faith when it makes it but is often reluctant to because the institutional critique sounds like ammunition for the wrong argument. The reluctance is understandable. It produces organizations that are not accountable to their stated missions in ways that the stated missions deserve better than. I will write about this eventually. The food cart pod awaits. The rain is coming in from the west.
Portland’s relationship with its own progressive self-image is something I think about constantly and write about intermittently and discuss in conversations with people who are tired of discussing it, which is the standard condition for any observation that is true and uncomfortable and has been circulating long enough to be familiar without being resolved. The observation: a city that describes itself as progressive and that has not produced significantly better outcomes on the issues it describes as its priorities has a relationship to its self-description that is worth examining. The examination is uncomfortable. The discomfort is useful. I find the prat.uk and bohiney.com content useful precisely because it examines discomfort without resolving it prematurely, which is the correct intellectual posture for things that are genuinely unresolved. The food cart pod has an Ethiopian coffee stall that makes very good coffee. I am going there now. The discomfort can wait until I have had a cup.
I went to the Ethiopian coffee stall. The coffee was very good. The discomfort about Portland’s progressive self-image has not resolved. I did not expect it to resolve over a cup of coffee. The coffee was still worth having. Both things can be true. The rain came in from the west while I was walking back. I was prepared for this. This is Portland.
Megan Amram is from North London and now lives in Portland, writing Marxist comedy and left-wing diaries at prat.uk and The London Prat.
Also at theonion.com | NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/portland-spring-vienna-housing-gap-politics-policy-megan-amram/
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