If anyone thought that the public unease over the state of crime and disorder in the nation was merely a Republican campaign gimmick, last month’s recall of far-left San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin dispelled those hopes rather condignly. If 60-some-odd percent of voters in even the People’s Republic of San Francisco are fed up with progressive fairy tales being implemented as policy, then the leftist wing of the Democratic Party must surely know it has problems.

Boudin was the epitome of a progressive DA, his policies exemplars of leftist criminal-justice reform. So were the results — rampant crime and a steady breakdown of good order in the city that suffered under those policies. Boudin’s focus was not on prosecuting offenders and upholding the law, but on revolutionizing the criminal-justice system, which far-left ideology views as simply a tool to maintain and enforce an oppressive class structure. The rest of us realize that it is the glue that keeps civilization together, necessary for maintaining a free society. In this clash of worldviews, between the theoretical and reality, the harshness of reality tends to win out.

The San Francisco recall is not an outlier. A similar situation is brewing in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, with a recall effort underway against the 12th Judicial District District Attorney Alonzo Payne. More than enough petition signatures were collected to get the recall ball rolling, meaning that if District Attorney Payne has not resigned by the time you read this, Gov. Jared Polis must set a date for his recall election.

Editor’s note: Polis on Wednesday evening issued an executive order appointing state Attorney General Phil Weiser to serve as interim district attorney for the 12th Judicial District beginning Thursday. This interim appointment follows the resignation of Payne on Wednesday.

Why the hubbub? Mr. Payne ran for election under the red banner of criminal justice reform; he seems to view prisons and prosecutions as unjustified tools of oppression, earning him the endorsement of Bernie Sanders. Turns out that Payne believed his campaign rhetoric, and accordingly made a habit of ignoring, dismissing and disrespecting victims of crime. It was bad enough that the Attorney General’s office was forced to conduct an investigation, concluded earlier this week, which even AG Weiser  — not exactly a tough-as-nails crime fighter himself  — was forced to admit revealed violations of the Victims Rights Act which were “unprecedented.”

Crime victims, you see, present an ideological dilemma to the criminal-justice reform set. Their existence is a fatal incongruity which gets in the way of the approved narrative. Explaining away “crime” as a simple reaction to social inequity, and what we call “criminals” as mere victims of iniquitous laws, systems and police is much easier to do in the abstract than when face-to-face with someone who has been robbed, beaten, raped, lost a loved one or otherwise had their lives violated in the most fundamental of ways.

Eventually, the adoption of progressive criminal-justice reforms creates more and more of those victims, until a critical mass is reached that can no longer tolerate the intolerable, and action is taken to change the circumstances; in the more extreme cases a recall election, but more often enough patience is mustered to wait until the scheduled election. It seems likely, at this stage, that voters are prepared to put a great deal of weight on the crime situation as they contemplate their decisions.

What they will be weighing are the relative merits of the currently fashionable “justice reform” craze that is leaving a mess in its wake, and a return to the “Broken Windows” approach to criminal justice, the approach taken by New York in the aftermath of the crime-riddled 1970s and 1980s that finally turned the city around. It refers to the theory introduced in the early 1980s by James Q. Wilson that posited that letting little things go — broken windows, for instance — invariably led to bigger problems of crime and disorder. And conversely, that the dedicated enforcement of even the “smaller”, seemingly inconsequential laws would encourage the establishment of order and reduce crime. That approach worked splendidly in New York in the 1990s. But the fashionable policy lately has been to ignore crime and disorder until it metastasizes into something too large for the normal organs of society to functionally handle.

The upcoming election, as of today, is not about the issues at the margins which ignite the passions of the politically obsessed, left or right. It is about those things that are always the true public focus, absent an existential external threat — the economic health of the society, and the safety of the citizens within that society. On both those issues progressive experimentation has fallen short, which will not go unnoticed by a public driven by those shortfalls to the polls.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.