You don’t need to have been paying particularly close attention, at least here in Portland, to sense an atmospheric shift in public attitudes towards the unhoused over the last few years. Most consequentially, politicians voicing retrograde critiques of the homeless — that they are barely distinguishable from criminals, that they are vectors for disease, that the main cause for concern is the aesthetic blight they impose on the city rather than their actual forlorn circumstances — have won election in the Portland metro area, a locale otherwise known for fairly liberal politics. The turn has been a bit head-spinning, given that area voters had in recent years passed a significant bond measure raising property taxes in order to supercharge affordable housing. Certainly the rise of visible homelessness and public disarray has played a part, but has something else also shifted in the broader culture?
In a recent article at The Nation, Ned Resnikoff shines an illuminating light on this question by pointing to the role a group of far-right ideologues have played in recent years to introduce hard-line rhetoric and policies into otherwise mainstream discussions of the issue. Resnikoff observes that, “the rise of state and vigilante attacks on unhoused people isn’t an inevitable reaction to metastasizing homelessness; it’s at least in part the byproduct of a successful propaganda campaign. For years, a network of right-wing demagogues has been depicting unhoused people as subhuman, parasitical, and intrinsically criminal.”
Resnikoff points to the writings and public rhetoric of right-wing figures like Christopher Rufo, Michael Shellenberger, and Tucker Carlson as painting the homeless in demonizing and dehumanizing terms. Beyond this, a focus on the unhoused has also allowed such commentators to attack the liberal politicos and cities that are home to much of the country’s homeless population; Democratic failure to deal with homelessness became an easy attack line for the right. But Resnikoff points to a deeper and more synergistic motive behind this rhetorical push — it provides an opening to attack particular populations that are also over-represented in the unhoused population:
Racism, homophobia, and transphobia aren’t incidental to the anti-homeless smear campaign; they’re part of the point. Disgust with unhoused people is a gateway into an entire politics built around the murderous contempt for subaltern groups. Conveniently, Black and queer people are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness in America; to reactionaries, homelessness becomes both a consequence of their subaltern status and an explanation for it.
With an instinct for the divisive and the predatory, the right sees misanthropic attitutudes towards the homeless as a way to divide Americans against each other, and to help paint minority and vulnerable populations as not as human/American/decent as the rest of us. Put bluntly, the right sees demagoguery around homelessness as a path to inciting Americans into hatred of their fellow citizens and fellow human beings.
On the flip side, all of this perversely reinforces my intuition that a more just and democratic American politics would do well to mirror the right’s obsessions in this instance, and aim directly at the complex of issues that we think of as “homelessness,” rather than treating it as a side issue to manage or downplay — not only as a way to counter the right’s abuse of this humanitarian challenge, but because the right has rightly seen it as a potent fault line for manipulation within American society. But where the right seeks to make that fault line tremor and shake, the left should see an opportunity to stitch this wound back together. The right to housing is fundamental, necessary not only to living a life of dignity but also to one’s ability to live to the best of one’s potential and to contribute to society, whether economically, socially, or politically. For any American to go unsheltered is an offense to our common humanity and to bedrock rights a democratic government should protect.
Just as it should be no surprise that a right wing in love with the discipline of the market and the reign of the powerful would see homelessness as the fault of the homeless, so no progressive movement can call itself truly progressive if it doesn’t tend to the basic rights of even the least powerful members of our society. It’s a matter of principle, yes, but also of practicality: when a society and a politics says that no one will be left behind in terms of the basics of life, you promote a solidarity that even the most determined right-wingers will have difficulty corroding.
Resnikoff notes that, unsurprisingly, right wingers have been training their fire on the purported failures of the Housing First model, which he summarizes as “a strategy that prioritizes moving unhoused people into subsidized permanent housing, along with social services as needed.” But as he correctly observes, shortcomings in Housing First’s deployment are due less to a problem with prioritizing the humanity and basic needs of people without homes, and more with problems of funding, coordination, and our economy’s ongoing failure to create sufficient housing (and, I would add, government’s failure to offer proper aid to those in poor economic straits so that they can avoid falling into homelessness in the first place). It is not unexpected that the right would go after policies that get to the root of the homeless crisis, as such extremists have an interest not only in perpetuating the crisis and exploiting it politically, but also in attacking the basic premises of dignity and equality that underly something like Housing First.
It’s fair to say that right-wing efforts to subvert and inflame discussions of how our society should approach homelessness should make progressive and Democratic politicians think twice about their own embrace of punitive language and policies. Demonizing the homeless is clearly a weapon in the authoritarian playbook increasingly deployed by the Republican Party and its right-wing allies; those on the left who echo such language and policies amplify attitudes that run contrary to basic progressive values, and that serve a broader agenda of degrading vulnerable groups beyond just the unhoused.