Chesa Boudin has been recalled. In my opinion, he deserved to be recalled. I voted for the recall.

Opponents for the recall offered two narratives; one which was reasonable and irrelevant, and the other just false.

Reasonable and irrelevant: Chesa is unfairly being unfairly singled out as the cause of a number of ailments facing San Francisco, for which blame should be shared widely.

False: The recall campaign was a right wing operation.

I'm not going to waste any time on the False narrative. Just read what Heather Knight has to say.

I say the first narrative is reasonable because it is fundamentally true. Chesa isn't the cause of everything bad in SF. A lot of it predated him. It's irrelevant because that's not the point. Sentiments like Jay Caspian Kang's below make what I believe is a simplistic and false assumption about the way liberal democracy works.

Here's what I mean by irrelevant.

Of course San Francisco's problems are complex and Chesa is not solely to blame. We would have worse problems if he was. It's a sign of a healthy liberal democracy that culpability is widely distributed among multiple actors. It is both true that democratic procedures generally do not allow widescale repudiation of the system and that the most pressing problems are systemic. What's a voter to do? Pick off the problem people and address the problem policies whenever they can. Chesa is the tip of the spear. He's not solely responsible, but voters correctly perceived that he was a neutral to negative force - an avatar of soft-on-crime progressivism that sees a certain level of background death and destruction as the price of entry for "respecting" the dignity of the downtrodden and desperate.

If you believe the world to be as static as Jay's tweet suggests, then you might be very bearish regarding democracy's ability to get anything done. Social systems are much more dynamic though, which is the other reason for the irrelevance of the unfair blame charge.

In physics, there's an observer effect that takes place, when examining a system changes the very nature of the system itself. To ground this more: when you shine a light on something, what you are seeing is an object interacting with light. It's not really the same as the object before it was lit. With the school board recall and now Chesa's recall, light is being shed. A system is being observed and scrutinized and acted upon, and it is already different. Our mayor went from wanting to cut the police budget to surging it in a year. Progressive leaders like Matt Haney re-aligned themselves with pro-development policy. There's a whif of change in the air. Let's not forget that voters also soundly defeated an attempt by the Board of Supervisors to make it harder for recalls to be effective. Jay might be right that ultimately it will prove futile and the problems will persist. But it's far from certain and the conditions for renewal are starting to coalesce. 

What happened last night gives momentum and valence to the forces which are already leading to a shift in the political orientation of the city. Chesa had the misfortune of being both wrong and expendable. That's the flip side of being only partly to blame. So to that I say, "good riddance, and who's next?"