Unfortunately, it's not online. (For a free mag, you'd think they'd do better about free online content, but...)

The article posits that, due to Portland's wingnut left, the city will become an ephermal city where only "trust-fund babies" will be welcome. He doesn't, Limbaugh-like, blast the "feminazis" or anything so obvious. It's the entire article that's an indictment of liberalism and the values of the Portlanders who hold it.

For example, he cites as an example the city's squirrelly values the rejection of the JTTF, which 51% of the people supported. "It's a decision no other city has made, including Portland's West Coast political soulmates, San Francisco and Seattle."

He facilely shifts from the politicians to the people as targets, so it's not always clear who's the agent and who's the victim. The result of this liberalism is clear, however:

For those who value a genuine diversity of business, culture, and political discourse, let's hope the slogan for Portland in the near future is not, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here."

The slogan, apparently, we liberals wish to send to nonbelievers.

This latté leftist thing pisses me off. I used to drive every morning to teach an 8 am class for Clark College on the WSUV campus. I would stop at a coffee place in a mall off of I-205 that also had a Kinko's. Most of the other patrons at that hour were women office workers, often buying a group order to bring in for co-workers. There was the occasional guy in a suit, maybe a businessman or professional, maybe a sales guy. This January I was teaching at Linfield's Portland campus, which teaches mainly nursing classes affiliated with Good Samaritan Hospital. A few blocks away Coffee People sits across the street from Starbucks, two NW entrepreneurial success stories who I guess count as class traitors so that trashing their industry isn't anti-corporate or anti-business. Who patronizes them? Maybe a few relatively rich shoppers spending on NW 23rd, and a few more upper middle class ones -- there really aren't that many rich people in Portland/MultCo, just like anywhere else -- but mostly students and people talking about business decisions and retail workers on a break and policemen on a break. Is anyone seriously going to try to tell me that the folks who put out Brainstorm NW and their doyens like Molly Bordonaro drink any less espresso or wine or eat out less at restaurants than liberals? Is it really more elitist to drink espresso and support public spending on education and social services that benefit everyone than to drink espresso and oppose public spending in order to support the interests of the wealthy? I can't afford a boat or an S.U.V., even if I wanted either, but I splurge on a cappucino sometimes, when I really shouldn't according to the budget. That makes me an elitist? Come off it already.

Brainstorm NW really isn't very much like National Review. It's mainly a magazine of the libertarian right; think Cato Institute rather than Heritage Foundation. However, unfortunately for the values that Tim Hibbetts purports to want to promote, the magazine takes part in the anti-intellectual, anti-deliberative, anti-persuasion politics of trying to win by ridicule rather than substantive engagement with ideas. The result is that it reads like something written by recent graduates of the Dartmouth Review who were always a little embarrassed and secretly ashamed of its racism, but were too cowed to speak up, and are trying to grow up now, but haven't quite figured out that ridicule lacks substance. It thus contributes to the current polarization, which takes place within a very narrow right to center-left spectrum for the most part, and is not really caused by ideology, but rather by demonization and vicious cycles of defensiveness and retribution.

Tim H. equates what he calls "anti-corporate" with "anti-capitalist." Both are meant to be bashing terms, and he bashes Portland and Multnomah County with them. However, this shows that he is out of touch with what is really happening on the leftier part of the broad left in the metro area. According to his lights, which in this area coincide perfectly with Brainstorm NW's libertarian-lite outlook, anyone who thinks that regulated capitalism sometimes works better than unregulated capitalism, or who thinks that the public sector can be more efficient than private enterprise in delivering certain kinds of social goods, is "anti-corporate" and ipso facto "anti-capitalist." For the Brainstorm NW ideologues, questioning their dogma that privatization is a panacea and that the answer to any problem is to throw a market at it is anti-corporate and anti-capitalist.

What most interests me about Hibbett's piece is that he seems to share that outlook, at least now. Back in the supposed days of partisan moderation and comity, nostalgia for which, based on very incomplete views of history, he seems to share with many on this list, part of what made Portland a city he would regard as substantial rather than epehemeral was regulation and planning.

This however was an atypical period in Oregon's and Portland's history, driven partly by the fact that developers had limited new forms of regulation and planning at two earlier periods in the 20th century when many other cities adopted them, amidst state and local politics that were anything but moderate . . . but that's another story, as is the fact that at every census since statehood Oregon has had more people born outside the state than inside it -- and lots of old school Oregonians, like Richard Neuberger, thought that a good thing.

Erik Sten's big crime is noticing that the principle that "natural monopolies" work best under well-organized public ownership applies to PGE. If you track his position back a way, though, you will find I believe that he opposed the creation of a P.U.D. to take over PGE. My recollection is that at the time he supported a regional private consortium, although I may be wrong and am willing to be corrected. At any rate, he certainly was not the leader of those on the left who first pushed for public ownership, nor of those of us who voted for a P.U.D. despite an inept campaign based on an unintelligible slogan.

The idea that many of Portland and Multnomah County's establishment liberals are anti-corporate, never mind the DP establishment as a whole is pretty silly. Those who have Tim H. most exercised, the ones who have the effrontery to have gained relatively high incomes and wealth and still think they owe some duty to the public good beyond conflating it with the best conditions for the privately wealthy, mostly make their money as owners, high level managers, or providers of professional services to corporations. Even those few who are willing to criticize disproportionate corporate power openly, who, by and large, do NOT come from wealthier parts of the DP or its constituencies, seek mainly rather limited reforms to the conditions of such power.

There is of course a fairly large part of the metro area grass-roots left who are in their own view anti-corporate. Because they are, they also tend to be critical of much of the DP and liberal establishment. Then they go on to fight among themselves about third party strategies vs. trying to work inside the DP somehow vs. looking elsewhere than to electoral politics. For this reason they (we) tend to come together best in anti-(whatever) movements. However, if you look at that left, it is not made up of wealthy liberals. Actually a fair number of them work selling espresso drinks to wealthy conservatives & liberals, to nurses and students and teachers and office workers, to Portland cops whom they may later protest over the latest shooting, or clash with over "liberal" efforts to restrict freedom of assembly, etc., etc.. Or they work in other retail service jobs. Others belong to trade unions, or run small businesses (sometimes in worker owned co-ops or collectives) or are self-employed. Others have regular jobs where they hide their politics mostly, disproportionately in underpaid work for non-profits or social service agencies.

Of that real anti-corporate left, a perhaps substantial fraction feel at least ambivalent about capitalism. But there is a genuine ambivalence, which their focus on corporations rather than the system as a whole reflects. For the most part this is the contemporary version of old-style populism, hostility to the power of concentrated wealth. Only a small fraction of the minority of the metro area left that is anti-corporate have systematic anti-capitalist views. They in turn, like the rest of the minuscule U.S. green, socialist and anarchist left, are riven by sectarian divisions (esp. socialists) and by philosophical, strategic and tactical divisions.

For a guess, based partly on the size of Portland's anti-war demos and their composition, I would say that the self-identified anti-corporate left numbers in the tens of thousands rather than Hibbetts' hundreds of thousands. Again, his idea that they mostly come from out of state is just silly, though some of us do. As for the systematically anti-capitalist left, I suppose it gets up into the low thousands, maybe, though a chunk of that is a student population that may or may not remain in the area. But that might be a generous estimate.

Brainstorm NW is pretty trashy. I remember they were calling Oregon Democrats the Taliban in one issue last year. It's the same polarized, knee-jerk, jingoistic, hateful, irrational, rabid extremism we've come to know and expect from the Republican media empire. They're our National Review in the sense that Lars Larson is our Rush Limbaugh. (Oh yeah, and "The View from Planet Lars" is a regular bit in BNW - go figure. But Ron Saxton's a regular contributor, too - we'll see who gets the GOP nod in the next primaries.) And BNWs' based in Lake Oswego - go figure.

Nonetheless, it'd be cool if someone got a counterweight going...

As for Hibbits, who's had three discussions devoted to him already here on BlueOregon (here, here, and here), he really does seem to be getting a bit off with his language. Maybe his opinions are okay, but "tin foil hat conservatives" just doesn't mean diddly compared to "rich, left wing whackos and latte leftists" - the latter has an acquired and powerful meaning in today's political climate. Similarly, while many leftists would have severe problems living in Idaho or Utah, neither of those places have the same quick jab-power of France. In other words, Hibbits' language is playing into conservative frames. Maybe not his poll numbers, but his sour curmudgeonyness for sure.

I screwed up and didn't close an italic bracket properly. I don't know how to fix it. Can anyone say?

This draws my attention to a problem with the redesign (maybe the old design too). There is no explanation of how to get more info on how typepad works, and no FAQ on fixing glitches.

It occurred to me that mysterious trackback feature offered in the comment box might be what you use to fix something or maybe enter a new link, but I don't really know and I can't get the trackback link to do anything except give me a number -- but what do I do with the number? Or trackback might be something else entirely.

Chris, I fixed the itals thing. When you use an out-of-the-box blogging system, there are advantages and weaknesses. One of the weaknesses of Typebad (our software) is that it allows editorial controls only by the author of threads or the owner of the blog. On my own threads I can close an itals, but not on someone else's (Kari has to do that)--and commenters can never re-write their comments. One way to avoid the problem is hit "preview" before you hit "post"--but I recognize it's easy to forget.

Nice analysis, Chris. Much more reality there than in anything Hibbits has to say.