The Democrats’ Governance Problem

They’re bad at it and getting worse.

The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.

In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.

Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?

I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.

Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:

In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.

The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.

Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….

Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.

Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.

Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:

Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.

Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.

And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Predictably, this dramatic surge in illegal immigration and the diffusion of immigrants into overburdened cities countrywide caused a spike in the issue’s salience and negative sentiment toward Biden and the Democrats for letting the situation get out of control (where it remains to this day). In voters’ view, this was very poor governance indeed.

Leonhardt identifies the ideological roots of the Democrats’ cavalier attitude toward border security and tolerance of illegal immigration:

To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin…

In the 2000s, the Democratic Party…moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record. Many liberals have grown uncomfortable talking about restrictions and criticize both Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions. Obama combined full-throated support for immigrants, including legalization for many who were undocumented, with support for border security. When “an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers,” Obama said, it violates America’s promise.

Top Democrats would not make such an argument today. They are also unlikely to revere assimilation, as [Barbara] Jordan [black Texas Democrat, who chaired a 1990s commission on immigration policy] did. To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic…

Today, immigration is the one issue on which even the left flank of the Democratic Party continues to support the neoliberal position. Democrats have grown more skeptical of deregulation and the free flow of trade than they were during the Clinton years. But they have grown even more supportive of the deregulated flow of people across borders. Many liberals are passionately universalist on the subject….

Because of this discomfort [with deciding who should be legally admitted to the country and who should not], the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.

There you have it. Democrats have developed a philosophy about immigration that prizes ideological commitments over the mundane realities of a secure border, public order and enforcement of the law. Until Democrats decisively reject that philosophy and show by their actions that they are committed to stopping illegal immigration with every tool at government’s disposal and restoring order to the immigration system, voters will continue to regard Democratic governance in this area as very poor indeed. And who can blame them?

As Democrats’ governance problems go—a target-rich environment—few things loom as large as how insanely difficult, slow and expensive it is to get things done in this country. It’s just too damn hard to build stuff! And Democratic governance, with its support for a metastasizing regulatory/permitting regime, has a lot to do with this. As liberal Ezra Klein despairingly remarks:

I’m worried about the inability to affordably and quickly build homes, build trains, deliver services, permit clean energy, fund science without burying it in bureaucracy and process. I’m worried about how absent the huge accomplishments of the Biden administration—the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill—how absent they are in people’s lives. In part because the way government works and spends and delivers under Democrats is very slow.

If you look at the election, Democrats lost the most support in blue states and blue cities. They lost the most support in the places where people are most exposed to Democratic governance—and yeah, Democratic institutions. I always find this amazing.

The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later—four years—the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

That’s terrible! As is the fact, that “[a]t $2.5 billion per mile, construction costs for the 1.8-mile Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway [in New York] were 8 to 12 times more expensive than similar subway projects in Italy, Istanbul, Sweden, Paris, Berlin and Spain”. As is the failure of a $42.5 billion allocation for rural broadband in the 2021 infrastructure bill to connect anyone at all so far. As is the absurdly slow buildout of EV charging stations from a $7.5 billion allocation in the same bill—only a few dozen chargers are now operational from the 2021 bill.

There are countless examples of such inefficiencies and delays. The culprit is an ideologically-driven Democratic commitment to ensuring that development is not socially harmful in any way and does not transgress the interests of any “stakeholders.” That is implemented through endless paperwork and opportunities for litigation by those stakeholders or, more accurately, interest groups that claim to represent those stakeholders. The unsurprising result is that it takes way, way longer than necessary to get anything done and many projects are simply abandoned because of delays and additional costs.

This is what happens when concrete accomplishments and results take a back seat to fundamentally ideological factors unrelated if not orthogonal to effective governance. Nothing crystallizes this problem more than the ongoing effects of NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) regulations which go back to 1970 and have become an ever-greater development obstacle over time. Noah Smith once again is not afraid to excoriate a Democratic shibboleth:

NEPA and other environmental review laws (like California’s CEQA) are the most important kind of regulation holding back American development, be that housing, green energy, or reindustrialization. These are procedural requirements—even if a development project obeys every single substantive environmental law, NEPA allows NIMBYs to sue to force the developer to complete years of onerous paperwork for the courts before proceeding. This exerts a massive chilling effect on new projects, because developers know they’ll get sued and might have to spend years on paperwork.

To make matters worse, NEPA only applies to projects with government involvement, meaning that the U.S. government has specifically tied its own hands. This has been a huge barrier to industrial policy and the abundance agenda, but progressives have nevertheless fought permitting reform every step of the way, preventing Congress from acting. This resistance to any change in environmental review law has basically hamstrung progressives’ own ambitious project of state-led development, and called U.S. state capacity as a whole into question…

America went way too far with anti-development regulation in the 1970s, and left itself utterly unprepared to deal with the new challenges of the 21st century—the housing shortage, Cold War 2, the green energy transition, and re-industrialization. We froze our built environment in amber in the 70s.

Progressives had the chance to change all that when it become apparent that a 1970s-style world was no longer sufficient. They passed on that chance…

Democrats like to believe they can avoid confronting their governance problem. They cannot. They prefer to rend their garments over ways the Trump administration is going too far (pretty soon they’re going to run out of garments!) and problems Republicans themselves have with governance. But physician—heal thyself! As long as Democrats are seen to prioritize their ideological commitments over governing well and getting things done voters care about, they will be far less attractive to voters than they fancy themselves to be. Or just flat-out unattractive.