Ezra Klein Is Here to Save the Democratic Party

It’s a manifesto for a new vein of liberalism, one that’s outcome-based rather than procedural-based. According to his book’s description:

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

His central conceit is this: Liberals want the government to be an active agent for social change, but all too often, their noble intentions are undermined by all the red tape, DEI rules, environmental regulations, and a zillion other things. It’s why conservative, pro-MAGA states (like Texas) can outbuild and out-innovate liberal states (like California) on things like housing and clean energy:

I mean, we cite specifically that Texas is building—and by the way, so is Georgia—a lot of renewable energy, but that’s because the default in Texas is to build things very easily. And so when the market sees an opportunity to make money building things—which, particularly under the IRA, it’s seen a very big opportunity to make money building renewable energy—it’ll be able to build it there, because they’ve simply made it straightforward. … Like, I think you should, as a liberal, look at how much easier it is to build renewable energy in Texas, and feel ashamed and try to change things.

Rush Limbaugh used to call it “symbolism over substance,” and it’s been the Democrats’ go-to legislative strategy since the 1970s: Whatever the problem is, pass nice-sounding legislation that stops it — at least on paper — and then take the victory lap ASAP! Whether or not the legislation actually helped, hurt, or was neutral was immaterial; all that mattered was the intent of the politicians.

It made things simple: You wanna make housing more affordable? Easy-peasy: Just pass a law that caps prices. Problem solved! And that’s exactly what the big-hearted liberal Democrats did in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Spoiler Alert: It didn’t work.

As Klein explained:

[P]art of the difficulty in building enough housing is that there is an ineradicable tension between making housing a core financial asset and building enough of it—because financial assets, valuable ones, become more valuable in conditions of scarcity. And so there is good reason for people who already live on a block where the housing, you know, is going up and up and up to not want to see that block suddenly get a very large apartment building in it.

But the politicians didn’t care about the housing scarcity because they could still campaign on the “success” of their good intentions. And, by the time the voters noticed that nothing had changed, they were already reelected.

The road to Hell may — or may not — be paved with good intentions, but the road to reelection absolutely is.

This shell game lasted nearly 50 years, but eventually, voters began voting with their feet: Millions of Americans fled from Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and so many other cities, and began relocating to red states like Florida and Texas.

You can’t blame conservatives for the housing shortages or lack of high-speed rail in California. L.A. and San Francisco are under one-party rule! Their failures were 100% the byproduct of unchecked liberalism! And that’s a crippling liability for Democrats on a national level, because it’s hard to win hearts and minds in Flyover Country when “Let’s govern America like we govern California!” sounds more like a threat than a promise.

Herein lies the heart of Klein’s dilemma: Is it really possible to get the government to stop acting so much like… the government?

The problem with liberalism has always been its overreliance on government because the government itself is innately inefficient. That’s simply the nature of the beast. 

It’s not competitive with the free market. Not now, not ever.

And the more time that elapses, the less competitive it gets. That’s because free markets are self-correcting; efficiencies and innovation are rewarded. But government programs do the opposite: They grow endlessly, adding new rules, new regs, and new employees. Each year, it gets a little worse.

It’s gotten so bad that liberals like Klein are searching for ways to get the government… out of government.

Good luck with that.