For more than half a century, San Francisco has been mythologized: For Democrats, a shining city on 48 hills; for Republicans, a parable of decay. This aesthetic quarrel in interpretation over the pre-supposed notion of San Francisco’s true nature functions however to mask almost perfectly what should ashamedly be considered our city’s most influential political export: That of a steady lurch towards what can only be described as fascistic tendencies, both inside City Hall directly, and from those who would seek to pave over violent revanchist policy as pragmatism. 

As the historian Robert Paxton argues in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism is less a fixed ideology than a process that adapts to local traditions, forging coalitions with elites when conditions ripen; the forms change, the choreography repeats. Scholar Umberto Eco called it a “family resemblance”: habits that survive by wearing whatever costume a society will accept. In San Francisco, those habits are stitched from our civic self-image — competence, moderation, order — until efficiency becomes a polemic alibi.

The use of the word fascism to describe tendencies within our local government is a heavy one, and skepticism toward it is healthy. But Eco reminds us that one may name tendencies before uniforms appear. Once you know what to look for, the impulses are legible: Nostalgia for a purified past, obsession with crisis, vilification of dissent, contempt for weakness, and a manipulative moral vocabulary that renders complexity unspeakable. These are not abstractions; they describe how policy is narrated in San Francisco, where designed panic becomes emergency control and that control then becomes law.

Consider the coalition Gregory Woolston and Katharyne Mitchell describe in their study Revanchist populism in San Francisco and the United States: Donors, operatives, and message machines that transmute fear into civic virtue and private capital into public punishment. Organizations such as Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, GrowSF, TogetherSF, and its rebrand, Blueprint, present as grassroots while local reporting has documented the coordinated, big-donor architecture behind them. What matters is not conjecture but infrastructure: How committees, vendors, and narratives interlock to naturalize a single “common sense” as a mask for authority.

Jason Stanley clarifies the script: Narrate decline, sanctify “order,” and recast pluralism as weakness. In San Francisco, that story is sold as civic pride — saving the city, restoring what “real San Franciscans” deserve. It is an old trick repackaged for a liberal metropolis: The promise of a prelapsarian neighborhood cleansed of the unhoused, the addicted, the migrant. What performs as tough-minded pragmatism functions as boundary-drawing. The aesthetic of order becomes the ethics of exclusion, and the excluded become the evidence that order is needed.

Under the Lurie administration, crisis has matured into method. The 2021 Tenderloin emergency authorization explicitly empowered the city to “waive certain laws” to act quickly; the logic of exception, once extraordinary, was repackaged as efficiency. Last month, City Hall touted new ordinances to expedite contracting and hiring by cutting regulatory steps “to unlock funding” and “move faster.” Whether one applauds or rejects these initiatives, the structure is plain: Emergency as pretext, exception as practice. The more emergency becomes the story we tell about ourselves, the easier it becomes to make temporary shortcuts feel like permanent consolidations of power.

Paxton maps the process: Incubation, rooting in local culture, alliance with elites, then radicalization. San Francisco is not at the terminus of that arc; it is in the coalition phase where billionaire-funded nonprofits perform popular uprisings and accountability is rebranded as red tape. The grammar shifts subtly — from participation to performance, from deliberation to stage-managed consent. You do not need uniforms when you have task forces, emergency memos, and dashboards that convert worrying executive power into neutral-sounding metrics.

The receipts are visible in the political media ecosystem: Glossy mailers, targeted digital buys, and town halls that function as message discipline rather than deliberation. Reporting by outlets like Mission Local and 48 Hills has traced how a handful of ultra-wealthy donors underwrite multiple committees, cross-pollinate vendors, and repeat frames across cycles — “process is the problem,” “order is the solution,” “compassion is why the city is dying.” Intention is not the argument; infrastructure is. When the same networks bankroll recalls, redefine “safety,” and bless executive shortcuts as courage, the Overton window no longer shifts through reasoned debate — it moves in line with the metastasizing system.

The local choreography rhymes with a national score now marketed as technocratic reform. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes a presidency unbound by an independent civil service and muscular purges dressed as efficiency; legal scholars warn that such a program would centralize power and hollow institutional checks. You do not need to agree with every reading to recognize the family resemblance: Concentrate authority, weaken internal resistances, and narrate it all as restoration. The laboratory work is done locally; the scaling protocol begins to reach to the federal level.

Eco’s checklist here becomes almost comically literal the scale of our city government and nonprofit network. The cult of tradition appears as nostalgia for “the real San Francisco,” a city purified of needles, tents, and inconvenient grief. The fear of difference surfaces as categorical suspicion of the unhoused neighbor. Popular elitism is reinvented as “community coalitions” whose boards overlap with the donor class. Newspeak arrives as a moral vocabulary of “safety” and “order” so total that no other value can speak. None of this requires banners or salutes; it needs only a procedural tone and a steady insistence that democracy’s slowness is the true emergency.

What distinguishes the present from the authoritarianism of the past is not mimicry but sequencing. San Francisco has piloted techniques — emergency governance, donor-driven mass organizations, visibility management — that national actors can now scale. The braid runs both ways: Local experiments legitimate federal ambitions, and federal ambitions backfill local authority. Each becomes the other’s proof. That is why arguments over labels miss the inherent structure. The question is not whether the costume fits perfectly; it is whether we recognize the choreography it enables, and whether we are willing to keep dancing without thought.

A city can love itself into complacency. We tell ourselves that moderation is a civic virtue, that “pragmatism” is what grown-ups do. But when “pragmatism” means suspending the very procedures that make democracy slow, we are not solving a crisis — we are capitulating towards the authoritarian capture of our local democratic system. 

To name this plainly is not to declare that consolidation of more authoritarian politics is complete; it is to chart a direction, and then demand that we turn away. In San Francisco, the disguise is moderation, civic pride, and the language of order. If we fail to strip away that disguise, if we fail to name it here, then what we are rehearsing in this city will become the “common sense” of the nation. If we do not name it here, we will not stop it anywhere.