Supporters of ousted San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin can’t afford to dismiss the movement against meaningful reform as a purely astroturfed coalition of Tucker-watchers.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is out — sent packing Tuesday by a coalition of the far right, wealthy liberals, and it’s important to note, a sizable percentage of multiracial working-class residents who are genuinely worried about being targeted by crime and violence. It was potent and perhaps lasting alliance that criminal justice reformers will need to soberly address if the movement away from carceral ideology is going to have any chance of survival in San Francisco or anywhere else.

I’d be remiss if I failed to point out that recall mechanisms in San Francisco and throughout California couldn’t have been designed in a lab by Tucker Carlson to better serve right-wing demagoguery. This was especially true of the Boudin recall. Because Boudin’s opponents were not required to get behind an alternative, the actual politics of who is replacing him couldn’t drive a wedge between the somewhat ideological diverse anti-Boudin coalition. Which is to say, it permitted wealthy, white liberals who fancy themselves enlightened and progressive, to vote against Boudin, without the messy social costs of having to actually back a foaming right-wing candidate the Republican funders and many on the vanguard of the movement would no doubt prefer.

But Boudin supporters can’t afford to dismiss the movement against meaningful reform as a purely astroturfed coalition of Tucker watchers and wealthy, liberal homeowners cynically allying with the far right to protect property values and remove homeless people from outside their artisan pet food store.

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Boudin’s election predated the 2020 uprisings of the George Floyd movement by five months, but a culmination of six years of Black Lives Matter activism animated his campaign. Frustrated by a lack of meaningful reform, younger and more radical in its demands, this movement unleashed genuine and long overdue reckoning with our country’s racist past and present. In doing so, it led to the occasional useful reforms, bloated a much less useful corporate racial justice consultancy economy, and helped Democrats with voter turnout in 2020. But as homicide rates rose across the country (regardless of the political party of the local district attorney) and homelessness became more visible, modest reforms stemming from the broader Black Lives Matter movement were routinely blamed for these social ills.

A simultaneous rise in anti-Asian hate crimes led to grassroots frustration among San Francisco’s Asian American community. Simply brandishing graphs showing that overall crime is down or static did little to assuage these real and grounded fears.

Moving forward, reformers have to be careful not to flatten the anti-Boudin coalition or reduce it to a caricature of mindless Trumpers — as the Boudin camp sometimes attempted to do. Working-class people of all races see the rise of visible homelessness, see high-profile hate crimes and attacks, and are asking fair questions about their relation to progressive policy choices.

Reformers need to explain to these voters how carceralism does little to address systemic issues (which, to the Boudin camp’s credit, they also sought to do), how America’s unique homicide rate has long coexisted with its historically high incarceration rate and how these same social ills are also playing out in every major American city, even those tough-on-crime prosecutors the anti-Boudin coalition cries out for.

In other words: Reformers have more convincing to do. But true reform has always been a marathon, not a sprint.

The anti-Boudin coalition wouldn’t have been nearly large enough to win in a city like San Francisco without a groundswell of support from white liberals. As the backlash to the George Floyd uprisings began in earnest in late 2020, the money for true and lasting reform began drying up. Of course, the widespread social disruption of COVID-19, not protests, was almost certainly to blame for any rise in violent crime. And yet to the wealthy, largely white progressives — who watched Ava DuVernay’s “13th,” observed the Ferguson protests and wanted to do good — there’s been an uptick in certain crimes the past two years (or what was perceived as such — at this point, reality is secondary to meta-narratives), had their car broken into or knew someone who did, saw the viral Walgreens shoplifting video, observed more unhoused people (or thought they did, again, reality doesn’t matter) and they grew scared. They withdrew and moved right — as did countless other urban liberals.

The “I’m a progressive, but ... ” demographic emerged, speaking the language of social justice and hand-wringing over mass incarceration. But when it came to actually locking fewer people up in jail and prison, when it came to actually supporting electeds like Boudin who worked to decrease the incarcerated population, they balked. Or worse, they donated and supported his demise.

San Francisco is far from unique in this regard. A similar coalition has emerged in Los Angeles, where wealthy liberals who once paid lip service to Black Lives Matter — typified by celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and Gwyneth Paltrow — have given their full-throated endorsements to former Republican and billionaire mayoral candidate Rick Caruso. Like Boudin opponents, Caruso insists — against all evidence — that we can arrest and jail our way out of the homelessness crisis.

The lesson of the successful Boudin recall and the growing Caruso campaign is that feeling guilty, putting up BLM yard signs and buying a copy of “White Fragility” is easy. Actually supporting decarceration and meaningfully changing our racist systems is much more difficult, messier process that requires patience and commitment.

For too many, however, the goal was never to meaningfully change anything: It was to simply Feel Bad and move on to business as usual.

Adam Johnson is co-host of the “Citations Needed” podcast and writes at his Substack, the Column.