In “What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds,” Ezra Klein argues that the progressive project is often impeded by Democratic processes as much as by Republican obstructionism. And he uses arguments from a libertarian think tank to build his case. His core complaint:
In a series of columns over the last year, I’ve argued that we need a liberalism that builds. Scratch the failures of modern Democratic governance, particularly in blue states, and you’ll typically find that the market didn’t provide what we needed, and government either didn’t step in, or made the problem worse through neglect or overregulation.
We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper. At the national level, much can be blamed on Republican obstruction and the filibuster. But that’s not always true in New York or California or Oregon. It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak.
This is where the liberal vision too often averts its gaze. If anything, the critiques made of public action a generation ago have more force today. Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult.
The thing is, we were world-leading good at this sort of thing once upon a time. We managed to build transcontinental railroads and telegraph networks in record time a century and a half ago and this continued well into the 20th century.
[T]he Empire State Building was constructed in just over a year. We are richer than we were then, and our technology far outpaces what was available in 1930. And yet — does anyone seriously believe such a project would take a year today?
“We need to unpack the many constraints that cause America to lag other major countries — including those with strong labor, environmental and historical protections — in delivering infrastructure on budget and on time,” [Brian] Deese [the director of Biden’s National Economic Council] continued.
Nor is it that we don’t spend a lot of money on infrastructure projects.
[T]he United States is notable for how much we spend and how little we get. It costs about $538 million to build a kilometer of rail here. Germany builds a kilometer of rail for $287 million. Canada gets it done for $254 million. Japan clocks in at $170 million. Spain is the cheapest country in the database, at $80 million. All those countries build more tunnels than we do, perhaps because they retain the confidence to regularly try. The better you are at building infrastructure, the more ambitious you can be when imagining infrastructure to build.
The problem isn’t government. It’s our government. Nor is the problem unions — another favored bugaboo of the right. Union density is higher in all those countries than it is in the United States. So what has gone wrong here?
I’m not sure he gets the answer right but it’s one to which I’m sympathetic:
One answer worth wrestling with was offered by Brink Lindsey, director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center, in a 2021 paper titled “State Capacity: What Is It, How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back.” Lindsey’s definition is admirably terse. “State capacity is the ability to design and execute policy effectively,” he told me. When a government can’t collect the taxes it’s owed or build the sign-up portal to its new health insurance plan or construct the high-speed rail it’s already spent billions of dollars on, that’s a failure of state capacity.
But a weak government is often an end, not an accident. Lindsey’s argument is that to fix state capacity in America, we need to see that the hobbled state we have is a choice, and there are reasons it was chosen. Government isn’t intrinsically inefficient. It has been made inefficient.
And not just by the right:
What is needed most is a change in ideas: namely, a reversal of those intellectual trends of the past 50 years or so that have brought us to the current pass. On the right, this means abandoning the knee-jerk anti-statism of recent decades, embracing the legitimacy of a large, complex welfare and regulatory state, and recognizing the vital role played by the nation’s public servants (not just the police and military). On the left, it means reconsidering the decentralized, legalistic model of governance that has guided progressive-led state expansion since the 1960s, reducing the veto power that activist groups exercise in the courts, and shifting the focus of policy design from ensuring that power is subject to progressive checks to ensuring that power can actually be exercised effectively.
Klein expands on this by quoting one of Lindsey’s colleagues:
A place to start is offered in another Niskanen paper, this one by Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at the University of Michigan. In “The Procedure Fetish,” Bagley argues that liberal governance has developed a puzzling preference for legitimating government action through processes rather than outcomes. He suggests, provocatively, that that’s because American politics in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, is dominated by lawyers. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris hold law degrees, as did Barack Obama and John Kerry and Bill and Hillary Clinton before them. And this filters down through the party. “Lawyers, not managers, have assumed primary responsibility for shaping administrative law in the United States,” Bagley writes. “And if all you’ve got is a lawyer, everything looks like a procedural problem.”
This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism,” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule-making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.”
The justification for these policies is that they make state action more legitimate by ensuring that dissenting voices are heard. But they also, over time, render government ineffective, and that cost is rarely weighed. This gets to Bagley’s ultimate, and in my view, wisest, point. “Legitimacy is not solely — not even primarily — a product of the procedures that agencies follow,” he says. “Legitimacy arises more generally from the perception that government is capable, informed, prompt, responsive, and fair.” That is what we’ve lost — in fact, not just in perception.
Comparing the modern United States to the frontier of the 1860s or even the early 1930s is in many ways unfair. There are real obstacles to building that simply didn’t exist then. But it’s perfectly reasonable to compare ourselves to other OECD democracies. And we’ve tied our own hands with well-intentioned regulations that practically invite long and costly litigation.
Rebuilding that kind of government isn’t a question of regulatory tweaks and interagency coordination. It’s difficult, coalition-splitting work. It pits Democratic leaders against their own allies, against organizations and institutions they’ve admired or joined, against processes whose justifications they’ve long ago accepted and laws they consider jewels of their past.
The environmental movement cheers when Biden says he wants to decarbonize and fast. But if he said that in order to achieve that goal, he wanted to reform or waive large sections of the National Environmental Policy Act to speed the construction of clean energy infrastructure, he’d find himself at war. What if he decided to argue that government workers shouldn’t just be paid more, but they should be easier to both hire and fire?
The problem here is that Klein and I are wonks, interested in solving problems efficiently, first and ideologues second. And, on the domestic policy side at least, Klein is wonkier than me.
I’ve spent most of my adult life trawling think tank reports to better understand how to solve problems. When I go looking for ideas on how to build state capacity on the left, I don’t find much. There’s nothing like the depth of research, thought and energy that goes into imagining health and climate and education policy. But those health, climate and education plans depend, crucially, on a state capable of designing and executing policy effectively. This is true at the federal level, and it is even truer, and harder, at the state and local level.
So this is what I have become certain of: Democrats spend too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not nearly enough time imagining how to make a government capable of executing them. It is not only markets that have failed.
I find it interesting that Klein couches all of this in terms of “industrial policy,” which Third Way Democrats rejected in the early 1990s in favor of more market-based approaches. But little of this is about the state picking winners and losers (a concept he eschews earlier in the essay) but rather about the nature of the regulatory state. The Empire State Building was privately-owned and financed; the regulatory system simply allowed it to be built quickly.
While I’m still fundamentally conservative in preferring government to be involved only where necessary, I’ve long understood that certain infrastructure projects—roads, rail, airports, mass transit come readily to mind—are only possible with government footing the bill or at least securing land rights. It may well be that various “clean energy” projects will need public subsidy. But I’ve never really thought of infrastructure-building as “industrial policy,” which I’ve always seen as being about making the country’s manufacturing sector more robust and globally competitive.
Similarly, while I prefer regulation to be as modest and unintrusive as possible, it’s been decades since I thought the market would take care of workplace safety, environmental impacts, and the like. But we do seem to have created a regulatory structure that’s more burdensome of that of Western Europe, Canada, and Japan—all of which I tend to think of as more highly-regulated than the United States. Clearly, we’re doing something wrong.
