THE LEFTIST LUNACY SPAWNED IN BERKELEY and the rest of the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s now shows early signs of dying there. The fog and drug smoke that clouded minds from Peoples Park to Haight-Ashbury is dissipating. And as the light of reality dawns, many Leftists there are dazed and disoriented by the withdrawal symptoms.

“S.F. isn’t moving to the right — it’s just dizzy,” read the headline of a recent column by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Rob Morse. In his funny, fuzzy spin about the Bay Area political spectrum, Conservatives are merely “Those who disagree with progressives,” and Liberals are “Everyone and no one.”

But Morse’s jokes were unable to refute Chris Nolan’s argument in the September 30 issue of the liberal The New Republic that “San Francisco politics…is moving to the right,” an argument we shall later describe.

“San Francisco may get labeled as one of the most left wing places on Earth,” wrote Michael Stoll in the October 4 San Francisco Examiner. “And it still may be on social issues such as abortion, gay rights or affirmative action — but not on economic issues.”

A new study by the University of California Berkeley’s Institute for Labor and Employment, reports Stoll, found that surveyed Los Angeles area residents now on average hold views to the left of San Francisco Bay Area residents.

The researchers found that Angelinos were now to the left of San Franciscans by a margin of 7 percent on government healthcare, 8 percent on minimum wage increases, and a whopping 16 percent on whether the respondent would join a labor union.

Despite professions of liberalism, wrote Nolan, San Franciscans in November now seem likely to pass two ballot propositions. One is nicknamed “Care Not Cash” that “would slash cash payments to homeless residents.” The other is called HOPE, “Home Ownership Program for Everyone,” that would “loosen city regulations to make it easier to convert rental apartments into condos that occupants can buy.”

Passage of these initiatives, wrote Nolan, “would go a long way toward disabling, even crippling, two of San Francisco’s largest and most powerful advocacy groups: homeless activists and tenants’-rights organizations. The two have worked happily in concert for years….”

Why are voters tilting right to slash handouts to the homeless and rent control? “It’s partly the result of all those dot-this and e-that arrivistes,” writes Nolan, “who moved here searching for Internet gold” in California’s latest Gold Rush.

The newcomers’ “bottom-line approach to life,” writes Nolan, has brought more common sense to the Bay Area’s bleeding-heart and greedy-tenant liberals. And the maturation of older groups, from 60s radicals to the gay community, had led to growing disgust with excessive bureaucratic control, homeless people defecating on public streets, and ever-rising taxes spent by politicians in wasteful ways.

Two U.C. Berkeley political scientists made news in late September with their survey of more than 1,200 local parents and children. To their surprise, Merrill Shanks and Henry Brady discovered that on certain issues the children — like the Michael J. Fox character, a conservative born to 60s radical parents in the sitcom “Family Ties” — were now politically to the right of their parents’ generation.

Should the Federal Government provide funding for faith-based charities? The Berkeley researchers found that only 40 percent of adults supported such a policy, but 59 percent of college-aged people and 67 percent of younger teenagers did.

Should the government restrict abortions? The survey found that only 34 percent of adults over age 26 answered yes, but abortion restrictions were approved by 44 percent of those aged 15 to 22 in the upcoming generation.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Berkeley professors found that 59 percent of adults ages 27-59 thought that prayer should be allowed in public schools — but fully 10 percent more, 69 percent of teenagers surveyed favored allowing school prayer.

The old adage has held that anyone who isn’t a liberal at age 20 has no heart, and anybody who hasn’t changed into a conservative by age 30 has no brain. But in America’s ultimate fever swamp of liberalism, Berkeley, the younger generation is already exhibiting signs of the brains that many of their parents never acquired.

Berkeley still goes loony when the moon is full. Its City Council in September passed a resolution declaring the space 60 kilometers and higher above Berkeley to be a “space-based weapons free zone” and urged other cities to follow its spaced-out example.

Berkeley’s politically-correct tyrants conspired to place on the November ballot a measure requiring all coffee sold in the city to be brewed only from beans carrying a “fair trade,” “shade grown,” or “organic” label. Critics have noted that this wacky law will require “coffee cops” and a “coffee-control board,” and that it will do more to harm than help poor people who grow the beans in Third World countries.

But Berkeley High School has stopped serving the “gourmet organic lunches” because the kids simply wouldn’t play guinea pig in this once-vaunted social experiment. Kids just wouldn’t eat the politically-correct dog food foisted upon them.

“The whole philosophy is to have food become part of the education,” said one official at the outset of this Brave New World effort to cram edible Leftist ideology down kids’ throats. But this effort to deny choice and individual preferences has gone bust in Berkeley because, as poet e.e. cummings wrote, “There is some s. I will not eat.” It is the cry of emancipation that humankind ever-louder is screaming in the face of our senile socialist oppressors. . (And at Berkeley High School, the kids this week made and set off a bomb with teacher approval.)

Oddly, too, the Berkeley City Council took a break from condemning space-based weapons in September to crack down on local brothels masquerading as massage parlors. Berkeley Daily Planet reporter Matthew Artz wrote that the Council was cracking down because brothels “did not fit in with a family oriented atmosphere.”

And so in a city that once practiced free speech and free love, prostitutes are arrested in the name of family values. But one has to wonder: is the prostitutes’ real crime providing sexual services for all comers in Berkeley — or is it that they are entrepreneurial capitalists who make love for money?

The answer will come if and when the Berkeley city government, as Denmark recently did for one sexually-deprived man, allocates such sexual services as part of the welfare state so that the poor may be given at taxpayer expense what now only the rich can afford. These women, too, may be forced to wear labels identifying themselves as “fair trade,” “shade grown,” and “organic.”

The liberal San Francisco Chronicle trembles and prays for forgiveness of its faults to San Andreas as it reports more and more signs that Northern California’s tectonic rightward drift seems irreversible. California’s demographics are realigning the Golden State’s political polarization from north-south to east-west and leaving its politics fragmented along new fault lines that threaten to shake the Leftist establishment down.

Worst of all, cries the Chronicle in anguish, an ongoing huge influx of conservative Christians is altering the culture and politics of Northern California.

The 1960s fog that for decades kept San Franciscans blinded, lost and wandering in ever-Leftward circles is now lifting. Here and there rays of sunshine are breaking through. Residents are awakening from the auto-hypnotic hallucination that makes driving in fog so dangerous. And those who Left their hearts in San Francisco are returning to their Right minds. Somebody say: “Hallelujah!”