Democrats and the Government Trap
June 17, 2025
November’s defeat has prompted much Democratic soul-searching. Wringing hands over alienation of the party’s traditional working class base. Democrats must be seen to serve their needs. But how, exactly?
The party’s “progressive” left thinks that to win requires pushing their muscular “social justice” activism. But this is not a left-wing country; it’s center-right. Indeed, the Sandernistas could not even win within the Democratic party — beaten in 2016 and 2020 by more centrist choices. How can such lefty politics win among the broader electorate?
It actually taints the Democrats’ brand. Republicans overdid the “wokeism” charge, but many voters were so put off by it, they went for Trump (conned too by his lying about having their backs).
Coming to the fore now among some Democrats is a new alternative to the party’s left — an “abundance” ethos. A recent book so titled by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argues that liberal solutions to past problems often transmogrify into impediments today. The focus should be on helping economically strained Americans by improving access to housing, public transport, energy, education, etc. But that can conflict with what Democrats have long been doing.
The role of government is central to all this. The stereotype is Democrats promoting big activist government while Republicans distrust it and want it smaller. Their “Department of Government Efficiency” will actually make it less efficient, a sledgehammer gumming up its works, any savings swamped by the harms and their eventual costs. Meantime Republicans unashamedly deploy government’s power when it suits them, like restricting women’s medical procedures. Talk about big bossy government.
But back to Democrats: a recent “Lexington” column by The Economist’s U.S. political observer talks of an exhibition celebrating Robert Caro’s 1974 book, The Power Broker, about Robert Moses. A maestro of government, now widely reviled as having run roughshod over local interests to implement his grandiose plans. But Lexington thinks an exhibit visitor might be most struck that Moses completed the huge Triborough Bridge project in just three years. Whereas “restoration of a stretch of highway in Queens has been trudging along since 2010.”
Nimbyism was part of the backlash against Mosesism. And Democrats became so obsessed with protecting every interest that government is ever bigger but ever less effectual. Everything slowed to a snail’s pace, costing more, strangling in red tape. Historian Francis Fukuyama has written of vetocracy, where so many interests can stymie almost any initiative.
This afflicts not just America, but other advanced democracies. Like Great Britain, where a huge rail upgrade was abandoned before completion, as costs spiraled, while actually increasing travel times!
New York State’s dysfunctional cannabis market roll-out exemplifies modern governmental ham-handedness. I’ve already mentioned housing, a more consequential case in point. Anti-Mosesism has empowered locals to impose zoning restrictions that bar much development. While fears of landlord gouging have led to rent control in many Democratic cities. It’s been said that the two best ways to destroy a city are carpet bombing and rent control.
Because entrepreneurs are so dissuaded from building or maintaining apartments; the resulting scarcity actually pushes up prices and rents. So ever fewer Americans move to greener pastures — deadly for our economic dynamism.
All this should point Democrats to a new vision of government, recognizing how their old one, however well-intentioned, has outlived its rationale. The new emphasis should be not on checking boxes but pragmatic, striving for what works, in getting stuff done.
This would include not demonizing and battling against business and market forces, but rather seeing them as a necessary aspect of human society, and working to enlist that power for the public good. I’m reminded of Deng Xiaoping’s line, in abandoning China’s Communist ideological orthodoxy: it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.