Homo Cosmopolitus Won't Count the Costs

Institutions tend to only find data they want to find, so the City of Los Angeles last counted street deaths among the homeless — in their description, “Deaths of Unhoused People” — from 2023. There were 900. Sample detail: “Black people were 31% of deaths. Black people are only 8% of the City’s general population, but are 33% of the City’s unhoused population.”

The last numbers from Los Angeles County as a whole were for 2024, when 2,208 homeless people died on the streets. County officials celebrated, because that number was a sharp reduction, and a reflection of the success of programs like overdose intervention teams stationed around public parks.

Remember those numbers, and let’s talk about something else for a moment before we come back to them.

The Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinoviev told a joke that speaks fluent Californian: “In some institution a routine meeting was in progress. There were two points on the agenda: 1) the construction of a barn; 2) the creation of an abundance of consumer goods under communism. As they didn't have enough planks to build the barn, they moved on at once to the second question.”

Maybe that joke doesn’t land if you don’t live in Los Angeles or Seattle, but from here it’s flawless. Take a quick look at the campaign page for María Elena Durazo, a state senator who just won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Infrastructure and fire departments are in bad shape in the place where elected officials think that government exists to provide “economic justice” that restructures communities. When government exists to pay your rent, 911 response times soar.

They can’t fix a street, so they move on at once to managing all of society.

Here’s what Senator Durazo boasts about on her “Meet Maria” page: “Arrested over 13 times for leading non-violent Civil Rights and Worker Rights protests.” It’s the line that appears below “State Senator” on her list of accomplishments. Gentry socialists have high-status-marker arrest credentials, without the burden of low-status prosecution and jail terms.

Zinoviev gave us the term “Homo Sovieticus,” describing the human creature that shaped itself around the postures and predilections of Soviet culture. Humorless, a sanctimonious scold, a deeply selfish schemer while professing adoration for collectivism, comfortable reciting official slogans without feeling the need to believe them or examine them, reflexively conformist, not worried about truth. (X) has been advanced as party doctrine, so (X) is correct, and anyone suggesting (Not-X) is highly suspect. The official account is always correct.

We live among these people. We have Homo Sovieticus in America.

As we've watched the ballot count dance around in Los Angeles, the liberal-but-heterodox journalist Matt Taibbi suggested that a return to universal in-person voting would be a good idea. Note the response:

I will no longer consume your intellectual product, you are a Trumper!

1. Voting in person seems to offer some advantages

2. YOU ARE AN UNPERSON I TURN AWAY FROM YOU

The discussion about the thing isn’t a discussion about the thing: It’s a discussion about the status of the participants.

Social media just gives me examples of what I’m hearing in my neighborhood: Of course the MAGA trash Spencer Pratt didn’t make the November ballot, he should go to flyover country and try to sell that crap to the trailer park people.

It’s just absolutely delightful that this sophisticated intellectual doesn’t know how to spell the word for taking something that isn’t yours.

Of course, what happened in the primary election for Los Angeles mayor that caught everyone’s attention is flatly not that more “Ds” showed up as the count went on, but rather that a DSA candidate polling at 18% got about 20% of the ballots that were counted on election night, then started getting 40% of the new ballots several days later, while Karen Bass flatlined. The first-place Democrat held steady in late counting; the third-place Democrat surged to pass the second-place Republican. (Open primary for an officially non-partisan office, is the answer to the question that may have just popped into your head.)

But the premise is about sophistication and cosmopolitanism: Los Angeles is too advanced to vote for some Republican. “A MAGA Republican was NEVER going to get elected Mayor in LA.”

Go back to the opening: 900 homeless deaths a year in the city, part of the 2,200 deaths a year in the county as a whole. That adds up to tens of thousands of homeless people dying on the streets of the county every decade, thousands of them in the City of Los Angeles.

The last time Los Angeles had a Republican mayor was 1993-2001, when Richard Riordan held the office. As Riordan left, the five-member Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors had two Republicans, Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe. (You can find that board composition by clicking through the years here.)

It’s hard to find a count of deaths among homeless people twenty-five to thirty-three years ago, but the Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness published a report in 2007 that started counting near the end of Riordan’s term and with two Republican county supervisors, in 2000. You can read that report here, and find a countywide count of homeless deaths by year on pg. 10.

The Los Angeles that had party balance, debate in contested governance, and a substantial role for Republican elected officials had under 300 homeless deaths a year, countywide. Single-party-rule leftist Los Angeles celebrates getting the number of deaths down to just 2,208 in a year. Such a huge improvement! The cost of leftist derangement and appalling but smug misgovernance is a little over 1,900 lives a year. Another four-year term for a Los Angeles Democrat costs about 7,600 deaths.

What people in Los Angeles discuss when they choose who to elect is status and fashion. We would never elect a disgusting Republican to be mayor of such a cosmopolitan city.

They have no idea. They’re only discussing how personally important they are. They vote only on the question of not signaling low social status. The only consequences they count are the social costs of voting for the right team. “I’m not some Republican.”

Under 300 / Over 2,000. Every year. They don’t know, and they don’t care to know, but that’s what it costs.