(I am putting some finishing touches on a housing piece that I hope is out later this week. In the meantime, here is a short diversion)
I wrote a long piece two weeks ago on the California recall, wherein I detailed my frustration with the recall process. For those who missed it, or for whom the post was too long, the topline takeaway was that while I do not think Gavin Newsom has been a good governor, I plan on voting no on the recall. I also plan to vote for a moderate alternative (likely Kevin Faulconer) for the 2nd question. I have deep problems with how much faith California puts in direct democracy: and the recall process is another example of the flaws of that symptom.
One might (like I do) that Newsom has not been a good governor; Newsom has too often placed his own ambition ahead of tackling California’s genuine problems. The best remedy is to organize around a more competent figure to challenge him in next year’s primary election. Or you might think Newsom has acted in unethical ways that have fatally compromised the trust that Californians have in him. I personally do not think his actions have done that, but I realize this is a subjective question, and others may disagree. But the best remedy to this would be to remove him from office, replace him with our current Lieutenant Governor (Eleni Kounalakis) since the whole point of a Lieutenant Governor is to step in and take over for the governor in case of breach of conduct. But as it stands, the recall appears to be playing out largely as an exercise in political hobbyism by those frustrated with the current governor, with little heed to the consequences that could come. The leading candidate to replace Newsom is Larry Elder, a bomb-throwing talk, very conservative radio show host with little to no executive experience or track record of compromising with those he disagrees with.
I was prepared to leave the subject and move on until I saw yesterday that Tyler Cowen, one of the public intellectuals I find most interesting, wrote a piece in Bloomberg arguing that the recall could have positive effects. I respect Cowen a lot, but I think he is wrong on this point. Serious right-of-center Californians will ultimately have more long-term success by organizing a GOP platform that has a real chance to win 51% of the vote here in California sustainably. I ultimately believe the recall will be bad for that effort. So I thought I would take the time to respond.
Symbolic vs. Substantive Politics
I will start with Cowen's point that I wholeheartedly agree with: California’s Democrats need reform. But, unfortunately, our politics in the state have become embroiled in symbolic culture war fights that ultimately do not help solve local problems:
One of California’s biggest problems, especially in its wealthier and more influential parts, is the degree of attachment to symbolic politics and posturing over substance.
Do you remember earlier in the year when the San Francisco school board started renaming its schools (later rescinded) rather than trying to fix their Covid problems? Or how about the banning of plastic bottles in San Francisco International Airport? Or the recent court decision that the University of California, Berkeley, could not expand student enrollment because the school had not done an environmental impact statement? Or why do they call it the People’s Republic of Santa Monica?
Cowen goes on:
While this is happening, California is being devastated by wildfires, and NIMBYism and the cost of living are out of control. Middle-class residents are leaving the state, poverty problems are perhaps the most serious in the country, and work from home is endangering the traditional revenue sources from employment at the big tech companies. Ezra Klein, co-founder of the Vox website, a columnist for the New York Times, and hardly a right-winger, described the current California predicament as a failure of progressive governance.
I agree with Cowen that Democrats need to pivot to focus on substantive issues to see progress in California. However, as I pointed out in my longer recall piece, a recent poll found that the majority (54 to 39%) of non-college-educated voters favored the recall, as did the majority of Hispanic voters (51 to 40%). I suspect that this is because working-class Democrats in California are frustrated that so little has been done to fix our housing crisis, make our schools better, and better mitigate the problem of wildfires and droughts our state is facing. As Gustavo Arellano wrote in the LA Times:
recall proponents keep hammering on the point that Latinos should be angry at Newsom for making their lives worse — and there’s little that the Democrats can say to show that Newsom has made things better.
I’m as angry as my 20-year-old self — at Newsom for his many mess-ups, at his campaign for treating the recall as one giant joke for far too long, at recall backers for making the state spend a quarter-billion dollars when all they had to do was wait another year to try to beat Newsom in the general election.
They would’ve had my vote then, but not now. But I’m angriest at Democrats. They had a quarter century to plan for the moment when angry Latino voters might turn their fury against them.
Because sometimes, you can’t just bank on the anger. You’ve got to give people a reason to love you. And Newsom is about as loved by many Latinos as a stale Mexican Coke.
It is clear that there is a shakeup happening in California’s politics, and it would be wise for Democrats to take note.
Extremeism Begets Extremism
Where I'm afraid I have to disagree strongly with Cowen is that having Larry Elder as governor will make this better:
If Californians had a governor whom people found to be their exact opposite on rhetoric and expressive attachments, they would be forced to wake up and realize that … actually, not very much had changed on the ground. That might nudge some California voters into seeing the emptiness of rhetorical gestures, and perhaps they would instead focus on the actual substance of governing.
I think this is 100% wrong. While this trend towards symbolic over substance is long-running in California, you can pinpoint when it accelerated: 2016 when Donald Trump came into office. I lived through that time, and I saw its effect on people: it radicalized people in opposition, both politicians and regular liberal-leaning people who suddenly saw politics as a struggle between good and evil. Trump was so bombastic and seemed to care so little for those who disagreed with him that many left felt the need to go all-in on symbolically opposing Trump in every way possible.
This radicalization towards symbolic politics was even more apparent in local politics. It became easy for left-of-center politicians to avoid talking about California’s problems closer to home and instead talk about Trump and how much they opposed him. My city councilman introduced a measure that would defund any contractor that worked on Trumps’ border wall:
Likewise, in 2018 my State Senator ran her campaign with billboards premised on “disobeying Trump.”
My point is not to pile on these particular local politicians (who have done quite commendable things on housing in the past few months) but rather to demonstrate how political incentives work. When one side of the political aisle goes “All in” on extreme rhetoric, the motivation for the other side is to fight back in kind. Local politicians grandstanding about Trump is terrible for trying to get local things done.
Its also true that during the Trump years, the Democratic party moved substantively to the left. The Democratic Socialists (DSA) went from a marginal political group to a seriously effective organizing operation. Their Wikipedia page credits Donald Trump to their rise in membership! And while very few DSA-affiliated people are actually in national elected office, they have an impact: Joe Biden, who for years was a somewhat Moderate figure in Democratic politics, ran a campaign in 2020 that was far more progressive than Obama or Hillary Clinton ever did, and he was the “moderate” in the 2020 Democratic primary! So the political incentives for Democrats in the Trump age were to move to a more extreme position.
So to my right of center friends: do you think we will not see more of this kind of move left if Larry Elder, who, similar to Trump, has run his campaign based on not compromising symbolically, will make this better? Or will this be just another data point left-of-center people use to discredit the California GOP as not serious?
The GOP’s Symbolic over Substance Problem
The style over substance problem is not just limited to California Democrats; it’s deep within the California GOP as well. One of my friends in LA with right-of-center sympathies once commented that he lost faith in the California GOP when he showed up to one of their meetings, only to find most 65+ white people who were deeply supportive of Donald Trump. The California GOP used to win elections: As recently as 2010, California had a Republican Governor, and as recently as 2001, LA had a Republican mayor. While California has become a very Democratic state in recent years, I still think the GOP can develop an appealing platform to 51% of voters in the state.
For instance, one of the biggest obstacles to getting affordable housing done in California is the building and trades union, which is very powerful in Sacramento. Because most of the elected officials in California are Democrats, they are petrified to cross the building trades for fear of their money going to their opponents in Primary elections. Thus, building and trades have escalated their requests over time, asking that almost any housing reform bill contain more generous provisions for their members. Anecdotes abound of construction sites where the elevator operator is being paid well over 100k a year. Privately, I have long heard from affordable housing developers that they are deeply frustrated with this status quo, as these provisions are pushing subsidized housing costs to almost 1 Million dollars a unit. These are very progressive people who believe in unions but think that the trades have gone too far. Finally, those sentiments are becoming public, as affordable housing developers say that the building and trades are bad faith negotiating partners.
One way to cut through this, of course, would be to have a GOP governor come in and take a much harder stance on the union since they are not beholden to their influence. For example, I often suspect that if a GOP governor came into office with the promise to cut out the rent-seeking, selfish behavior of the construction trades, that many on the left would be privately very pleased, and many centrists would celebrate that platform. Likewise, I think you would see that on housing and many issues, including education, wildfires, people would be open to common-sense GOP reforms if those were the issues that the California GOP led on.
But alas, the GOP has not sufficiently moderated for this kind of a substantive reform to be considered. Again, Donald Trump, a figure without much interest in governing and mostly prioritized conservative style over substance, set the California GOP back a long way. Trump’s presidency gave left-of-center people reason to believe that the GOP was more interested in “owning the libs” (often including being mean to immigrants) than actual policymaking. I see this among housing advocates I am friends with: even firm believers in the market are deeply skeptical of the GOP in California.
Electing Larry Elder will not reverse that image: it will simply accelerate it. Elder, like Trump, seems just as invested in “owning the libs” as Trump was. After all, Elder mentored Stephen Miller, the guy who architected much of Trumps’ “own the libs” policy, especially Trump’s immigration policies. I cannot believe that Elder would make California’s politics more substantial; instead, he will undoubtedly spend the next year focused on campaigning and focusing his rhetorical fire on the Democrats in the legislature. Larry Elder is not a recipe for getting practical reform on the agenda of the GOP.
State Capacity
I also think Cowen’s stance on the recall contradicts his most interesting idea in recent years: State Capacity Libertarianism. Cowen wrote back in January of 2020 that as a right of center Libertarian, he thought people in the Libertarian movement had misplaced priorities when it came to their advocacy. He wrote at the time that:
Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity. Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality. I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either.
I found Cowen’s diagnosis to prove quite apt, especially as COVID hit the US a few months later, and much of the nation’s response has been mired in a thicket of incompetence. It was not that the US did nothing to mitigate COVID or that there was no political will to do so; the problem was that our institutions and politicians often were not competent enough to know which levers to pull to get the pandemic under control.
California is no different. Many of our most pressing issues (housing, homelessness, wildfires, education) are issues where it is unclear that the root of the problem is ideological. In all of those cases, it seems more apparent that we have failed to create an institutional culture that gets competent people into government and empowers them to run their institutions competently.
Singapore is a country that no one would mistake for a traditional libertarian state. But to Cowen’s point about state capacity, Singapore is an excellent example of a government premise on a market economy alongside a competent state. Singapore has excelled at partnering private markets with public infrastructure, which has made Singapore one of the most successful economic transformations of the 20th century. One could argue that Singapore, a state that quickly moved to get COVID under control in 2020, allowed its residents to experience more freedom in 2020 because they used their state capacity to avoid costly lockdowns in favor of competent testing and tracing. Likewise, in August 2021, Singapore is also arguably freer, having vaccinated far more people than the US, which has allowed it to start opening its borders to international travel more than the United States has to date.
This is where I find Cowen’s support for the recall so strange: if state capacity is vital not just to progressive priorities, but to Libertarian ones, how does he expect someone like Larry Elder, with little executive experience to step in and manage California well? Of course, I realize that Cowen argues that the Governor is not powerful enough to set back state capacity. Still, if you believe in state capacity, you need to prioritize it on the margins. You cannot just vote for people because of their policies: their competence and character must take center stage.
Please Compete for Centrists
Some of this is born out of personal frustration: I do not feel like either side of the political aisle is genuinely competing in the way they should be. Too many people have become convinced that the other side is so stuck in their thinking that competing for undecided voters is a fool’s errand. So instead, you pick a candidate who can stridently yell at the other side, hoping to motivate your base to turn out in the next election.
I think this premise is wrong. The 2020 election saw considerable shifts in the electorate, primarily because of genuine efforts to persuade swing voters. We could see even more significant changes in California, as people should be more open-minded about state and local issues. But even if you are unconvinced the political science works, it is clear this is necessary for our social norms in society. I believe in political competition, but competition should be on the axis of pragmatic reforms that help ordinary people. Unlike competing for extreme rhetoric, competing to get things done is a positive-sum activity: one side’s attempts at positive reform can inspire the other side to build on those reforms in slightly different ways. Instead of the doom loop we currently find ourselves in, competing for reform can be a positive feedback loop. If only our state’s elected officials would try it on for size.
Is it too much to ask? I think not.