Punching left or punching back?

Steve Teles, Derek Thompson, and Ezra Klein offer the self-critique we need.

I remember ten or so years ago when a former Code for America staffer started working with the City of San Francisco on improving the affordable housing lottery. There was a lot for her to do to digitize and streamline the process to make it less onerous: entering the lottery involved not only lots of paperwork that was very hard to fill out properly, but also sitting in a dangerously overcrowded auditorium all day long, nervous that your number would come up just as you went to the bathroom. But your number wasn’t going to come up. There were tens of thousands of applicants for around a dozen units. It was an exercise in wishful thinking, statistically. I remember thinking, Why are we even bothering to improve the lottery? There’s a far deeper problem here. You can’t redistribute what doesn’t exist. What do we do about that?

Two things came out this week that address that question: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, and Steve Teles’s article on Minoritarianism. Derek and Ezra’s argument is essentially that we’ve own-goaled ourselves by artificially restricting the supply of the things people need, including but not limited to housing. We’d have a more flourishing society, and better politics, if we removed the barriers we’ve imposed on ourselves to building not just housing but also clean energy infrastructure and transportation, to providing healthcare and education, to enabling and advancing scientific discoveries. Steve picks up on one critical reason we don’t do these things: we’ve let decisions that should be made in the broad public interest get captured by small groups with self-serving interests.

All three authors are going to get the same pushback from the left about what might seem like awkward timing. Kara Swisher starts right out with it before the conversation with Derek and Ezra on her podcast even starts: “I want to talk about their strategy to punch left, so to speak, with a book that shames liberals and whether that's the best strategy in our current times.” Their conversation is much friendlier than that lead line suggests, but you get the feeling that it's liberal malpractice not to start with the warning that, of course, NOW IS NOT THE TIME. There is one source of what ails us, and one source only. Stay on message.

Of course, punching left is by no means the total — or, outside of the hoopla of a book launch, even the majority — of any of these authors’ work. Listen to Ezra’s audio essays on Trump in particular for a reminder of how seriously he takes this moment, and how clearly (sometimes bone-chillingly) he articulates what’s at stake. But a consistent message for Derek and Ezra in particular has been that countering Trumpism requires a compelling alternative. Some on the left insist that liberals have one. Polling suggests otherwise: Dems’ approval ratings just hit record lows with “27% of registered voters saying they view the party favorably and only 7% of survey respondents said they said they have a ‘very positive’ view of the party.” Perhaps more importantly, look around at places governed by Dems, where prices are high, housing, transportation, and renewable energy are scarce, homelessness is rampant, educational attainment is low, and inequality slaps you in the face. Lived experience, to use an overused term, suggests otherwise.

There is no one source of dissatisfaction with Democrats’ leadership (and I mean in federal, state, and local politics, not just the fights in Congress) but understanding that dissatisfaction requires peeking under the hood of how liberal jurisdictions are run. We say good things. We just don’t deliver. Lack of capacity at government at all levels is part of why — and what we talk about here a lot. Capture by interest groups is another.

Minoritarianism is an eight syllable word. I normally keep it to six here, up from five to accommodate proceduralism, my favorite.¹ But it’s just what it sounds like. “Minoritarianism is a political and governance condition in which a small, organized, and often unrepresentative group wields disproportionate power over decision-making, policies, or institutions, often at the expense of the broader majority.”² In other words, decisions that should be made in the broad public interest are captured by a minority. (We’re generally not talking about racial, ethnic, gender or religious minority groups here — see examples below.)

Both works address housing and land use. This is not the same, exactly, as my affordable housing example above, in the sense that building any housing at all is the larger problem in a city like San Francisco, where utter lack of supply has met ever-increasing demand and sent prices into a territory few can afford.³ But even I (not a housing expert) have talked about how we end up with such low supply multiple times. So let me harp on a different example from Steve’s excellent paper: professional licensing. Roughly one in five American workers needs a government-issued license to do their job. Depending on the state, you may need a license to braid hair, sell a casket, or recommend a paint color for a client’s living room. In theory, this protects consumers and ensures high standards. In practice, licensing boards—staffed largely by members of the professions they regulate—act as gatekeepers that restrict competition, inflate wages for insiders, and make it harder for workers to switch careers. (Not to mention creating enormous amounts of paperwork that burden small business owners.)

Some of the worst abuses are in medicine: doctors and dentists often prevent nurse practitioners or dental hygienists from performing routine procedures, not because it’s unsafe, but because it threatens their monopoly. A dental board tried to outlaw independent teeth whitening—not for public health reasons, but to protect dentists' profits. Yascha Mounk ranted the other day about losing his glasses in the Connecticut River, and not being able to get new ones because his prescription hadn’t been checked recently. Sure, a requirement for a recent exam catches eye disorders that may otherwise have gone untreated, but it’s a stiff price to pay —- those eye exams aren’t cheap. Were it left to the majority, this requirement would not exist, and we’d have abundant eyeglasses, when we need them, as they do in other countries.

If it were left to the majority, we’d also be optimizing for more abundant education. But as public school parents found out during the pandemic, the rules that dictate how our schools work aren’t set by a broadly democratic process. In K-12 education, Steve explains, “almost every consequential decision regarding schools — hiring and firing policies, teacher evaluation, class size, the organization of the school day, etc. — is enshrined in teacher contracts rather than ordinary laws.” Those teacher contracts are decided by a process with “exceptionally low transparency and participation: collective bargaining” between the teachers unions and elected officials like school board members who are themselves chosen disproportionately by the unions, since union members vote at higher rates, especially in off-cycle elections, which unions advocate for. Same with police officers. The reason your local elected official can’t do anything about that abusive cop is that we’ve ceded power from the laws of our communities to provisions in contracts around things like discipline. Those contract provisions are decided by a tiny and non-representative minority, and that’s a problem.

Public sector union contracts are one way that decisions that matter get captured by highly motivated minorities. Public input processes, which we’ve also covered here, are another. When asked on Kara’s podcast, “how do we get the right input on things like building housing in San Francisco?” Derek answered, somewhat provocatively, “Democracy is input. Mayor Lurie was elected. The people have entrusted in him the ability to have the courage to make decisions that help the city….Every single time someone decides they want to build something new in San Francisco, the comments will be overwhelmingly negative because the incumbents have more to lose and are more empowered and aware of these review process. And if you subordinate democracy to [these] politics, you will get outcomes that are status quo and stasis.”

He’s right. And Democrats lost to Trump in large part because we are seen as the party of the status quo.

Yes, I see the obvious problems with greater executive authority at this moment. But to wish for liberals to make majoritarian decisions, stick with them, and carry them through to visible, tangible outcomes is the opposite of empowering Trump. It is the very thing that would defang his appeal. And what Dems are doing now is clearly not working. So is this really the right time to listen to Ezra, Derek and Steve? To distract ourselves from the real fight? Hmmm. To be clear, there is a lot to do. But to butcher the saying, the right time to have engaged in self-reflection, adjustment, and self-renewal (let’s stop calling it punching left) was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

1. Actually, my favorite is deproceduralization, which is seven. So never mind.

2. Thanks, ChatGPT.

3. No one believes me when I tell them this, but in 1992 I paid $450/month rent to live in SF’s Mission District. For a while I lived in a rent-controlled room with 14-foot ceilings for $187.50/month. Times changed.