1115: Why Are Democrats Afraid of Power?

30:34I'm trying to figure out, like, how do corporations do this? Now, I was looking at the NEVI program at one point, and someone told me this story. It was sort of interesting. I was thinking about it just as a private sector example. When they were doing the NEVI program, Elon Musk had the supercharger program for Tesla. And already, people were buying Teslas not only because they liked Teslas, but because if you bought a Tesla, There were already lots of superchargers all over the country. And the people who had inside Tesla who had the supercharger program, like they were running those, were like, we could license this to Ford and to the other companies.

31:18And we could get some of that$7.5 billion. And that would significantly augment the overall size of the EV market. Maybe we should do it. the people inside Tesla who were selling Tesla cars were horrified that anyone would suggest it because, well, that was what they were selling their cars with, right? Right. It was an advantage. It was an advantage for Tesla as a value proposition. Correct. So the question for Elon Musk as the CEO is, do I want to have a larger slice of a smaller pie or a smaller slice of a larger pie? That's a hard decision. And whatever he chooses, he's going to be pissing off some portion of his, you know, of his company, of his employees.

32:03But it's a hard decision. He could have come into Doge and said, you know, I understand what this is like. I'm the CEO. I want to make it so when you are the head of NOAA, right, the National Oceanic Administration, The bureaucracy that is regulating offshore wind, animals, right, right, right. And you are faced with a dilemma, right, where you have some burden, where some people want to put offshore wind and some people are worried about the animals that are going to be interfered with. that you have more discretion to choose more expeditiously between these choices, understanding that there are costs, that there are going to be some animals or some flora or fauna.

32:55I don't know what that— There are tradeoffs in every policy. There are tradeoffs that you can make that choice more expeditiously. That would have been a useful thing for Doge to have done. Instead, what we know Elon did is that he took the approach in Doge that he took when he took over Twitter. Just fire a bunch of people. Less useful. Right. But there is – that's something for us as progressives to think about. Are there ways that as we are thinking about the next time we are in office that we can write legislation in ways that give more authority to people to make choices more expeditiously?

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36:24There's two other parts of this, too, which is about the habit of government and how it works and about the people that are in charge. because not only have our ability to do big projects slowed or stopped they've also become far more expensive and there's a lot of different reasons and when people try to dig into what the causes are it's actually kind of often hard to find exactly what it is because people will say oh well it's too deferential to unions but they've got unions in Spain or it's environmental protections they have environmental protections in Italy or it's because we're so overbuilt they can build subways in Rome and and sometimes what it does seem to boil down to in part is a kind of habit and expertise.

37:07And I do wonder part of this is like we've made being a city administrator or someone kind of in charge of parts of these bureaucracies just a less fulfilling and kind of empowered role. But that also means we don't have kind of the people in place who kind of were the kinds of people that in the past might have gone into that that work because they were excited about the possibility of using government to do good and i and i i do wonder how much of this is going to take even if we had the right policies a lot of time to to get ourselves out of so that may be true i'm working this is not in the book but it's something that i'm working on now and i've just been thinking about it for now a month or two and it's on my mind perpetually i can't exactly figure it out great um that's football You know?

37:58Okay. We've gone. Well, absolutely. There's a new line that's opened, a new railroad line that's opened between Boston and New Bedford, Massachusetts. New Bedford is historically sort of a beaten down old industrial city on the south coast of Massachusetts that has not had rail service. It's one of the few cities that has not been connected to Boston. And it took them 35 years, but they finally opened the rail line. And there was a meeting that I've heard about in 2007 where MassDOT, the Department of Transportation, which intended to build this line, called a meeting of all the stakeholders who were involved.

38:35And they called a couple of Indian tribes and they called the Massachusetts environmental groups. They called the Army Corps of Engineers who are responsible for water quality. And they called the Environmental Protection Agency. So Massachusetts has called the meeting. They're sitting at the head, but they've got these two federal agencies. And one of the routes that was under consideration was a route that was most direct, and it went through a swamp, a swamp that had vernal pools. I didn't know what a vernal pool. A vernal pool is a pool that only is wet during the spring. And they're important because turtles can lay eggs in the water during the spring, and they are then protected from predators in the water.

39:16and those turtles, in this case, the eastern box turtle is endangered. And so those vernal pools are important ecologically. And the guy from the EPA is very worried about these vernal pools and if you were to run this train through. And this became, I learned, like a real issue of contention. The EPA really wants to protect these vernal pools and these turtles. And like, I remember hearing the story for the first few times and people sort of rolling their eyes about the turtle guy and like, like, like really like, like these poor people in New Bedford don't have access to these great jobs in Boston.

39:56And like, it's going to be a much longer commute if you avoid this swamp. And like, there's sort of like a real frustration that like the EPA, are you really gonna like force these, like, like that's great housing for people in Boston who are starved for housing. Like how much are these turtles really worth? And then I began thinking about the guy from the EPA who's sitting there. Like I think he's an older guy, probably took the job at the EPA maybe like not long after the power broker came out. Like right in this age where like America has woken up to the degree to which the country has just totally destroyed much of the country's environment.

40:37just to, you know, in every case we've chosen economic expediency over the environment, like just destroyed whole, you know, forests and deforest, just done terrible damage. And he'd taken this job and like probably like had joined the EPA because he was going to speak up for these animals who couldn't speak up for themselves. He was going to protect. Speak up for that turtle. He was the turtle guy and he was proud of it, right? Like, and he was going to stand up. So moreover, like he said at that meeting, if he had said, all right, I'll let you run that train line through my turtle habitat, right?

41:14He'd gone back to the EPA and told his boss, like, I can only imagine that like they would have been, like our mission is to protect the, you can't just unilaterally. And then if news got out that the EPA had given up on their turtles, they would have been subject to a lawsuit from the Friends of the Wilderness who weren't, right? Like there are a whole series of interventions that would have made it almost impossible for this turtle guy to actually come to some sort of collaborative solution with the Massachusetts transportation folks who want to do it. Now, there probably was some way to fix it where he could have said, listen, I'll let you take this little portion of the turtle habitat if you buy me a bunch of private land and we'll make that a new turtle, right?

42:01That's why things are so expensive here, right? is that we will buy it off, right? Like, why are things expensive in the U.S.? It's because each time you find a barrier, there is a way to have it all, but it's expensive, right? Like, oh, there's an old Indian burial ground. We need to avoid that. Or we need to properly move the site to have it reburied. I mean, there are all sorts of things that we are trying to be conscious of. We're not making trade-offs. And we don't have a great system for that. But between just allowing Robert Moses to run rampant through the South Bronx and destroy a borough of New York City and, on the other hand, doing nothing so that we are millions and millions of units short of housing and unable to take advantage of the clean energy revolution so that we have more affordable, clean, electricity and, you know, the Acela train is, you know, running at a third, the pace of the TGV and running between Paris and, you know, we're way behind China and Japan.

43:14I mean, like we, we can get this stuff going, but at root, this is a question of, are we willing to make the trade-offs and are we willing to create systems that allow us to do that? Yeah. It sounds like part of what you're circling is the idea that people need to have their voice, but not a veto, and that at different points along their way, there needs to be individuals empowered to make final decisions. Maybe not one person at the top, but individuals making decisions. Here in Los Angeles right now, there was this debate in the city council. So a couple of years ago, Los Angeles passed Measure ULA.

43:51I don't know if familiar you are with this, but it was a transfer tax for when properties over a certain amount were sold. Roughly, I'm going to get the number slightly wrong, but it's like a roughly 4%. There's a tax that kicks in at$5 million, a tax that kicks in at$10 million. I think it's about roughly 4 % and then 5%. But it turns out it also applied, it's called the mansion tax, but also applied to multifamily apartment buildings. And so So a lot of researchers looked at the data and they said it is pretty clear that the application of the tax to new apartment buildings has probably cost the city far more in affordable housing units than the revenue has allowed the city to build.

44:37And so in the city council, there was a proposal. The proposal was to delay the tax on new family apartment, new apartment buildings for that have been constructed in the last 15 years. And it would cut revenue that the city wants and needs by 8%. That's a tradeoff. Right. In order to allow the construction of multifamily apartment buildings, you would lose 8 % of revenue on what the tax had been collecting. An extremely contentious debate. And it is now, as of right now, tabled because it would need to be passed by the city council so that it could be put to a vote by the city in order to be ratified as a citywide ballot measure.

45:20And the amount of consternation in both directions, it is a gift to developers, the infighting about it has basically left Los Angeles kind of where it is right now with a measure designed to create more affordable housing, in all likelihood preventing the construction of vast amounts of affordable housing. and there are so many people who want to fix this, but they live in the system that they are in. And forget passing a small reform like this, the system, even if everybody involved wanted to have a version of what you're describing with a person who could be empowered at some level to address some of this, the system itself now has so many points of failure that the vetoes that exist would prevent that from happening.

46:03And I just don't know how we get out of this kind of doom loop. I mean, what's so interesting to me, I hear that. And certainly you feel that on the federal level as well, right? I mean, it feels super weird to me to be a progressive who sees what Donald Trump is doing and finds it horrifying. And then is writing on his little computer, like, I think that we should give the federal government more power and more discretion to make decisions. Like I hear myself seeing what's happening. Like I hear what I'm saying and I can hear people being like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like the guys, like look what he's doing in Minnesota.

46:45Like what do you mean you want to give more discretion to the federal government? And of course like my answer is like, you know, in order to have more faith in government, you need to see that government works. And like so like in the scheme of things, the reason that we have Trump is because people have seen government not work. So they went to a like, you know, an orange madman to like to fix things. Right. Like like the worst things got like they finally just wanted someone to break all the rules. Or another like people just given how little government changes or does, they don't really think of government having a big impact in their lives.

47:26and said this feels like a TV show. But the thing that I do say, which I hope provides some sort of comfort, you know, when the progressive movement was born at the turn of the 20th century, it was at a moment when the federal government was small, when almost everything felt broken, like there were trusts and like railroads and steel barons and like private industry was huge and government like was not built to handle it. Government was corrupt. Like, you know, like the federal government was like the U.S. Postal Service and like a really corrupt pension system for people who like hadn't fought the Civil War but were collecting pensions.

48:06Like it was a mess. And people realized that. And the progressive movement was born essentially to say like we've got all this sort of scientific knowledge. We know that like we need better sanitation systems and transportation systems and electricity systems and regulatory systems. And like we need something better. And so like from this like mishmash of incompetent bureaucracy, like we created what became the New Deal. Like there's no way in like 1906 you could have imagined the breadth and depth of the bureaucracy that was the New Deal or that existed in the 1950s, let alone like Robert Moses and the Triborough Bridge or the Tennessee Valley Authority.

48:49Like the idea that government bureaucracy could be this competent, efficient, like powerful, or that like Robert Moses could be unimpeachable, right? Like to think that in 19 – you know, in the first decade of the 20th century, there would eventually be the man that Robert Caro would describe, you know, in the 1950s as like this – I mean this powerful 50 years later, unimaginable. unimaginable to read the power broker in 1973, 74. And this sort of idea of an establishment figure who's so unimpeachable, who, you know, who Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman and the Chicago seven, like when they were protesting these sorts of characters on the outside of the 1968 DNC and like talking about the man and the establishment and, you know, up against the wall, motherfucker.

49:43And right. Like this, this sort of notion in the port here on statement and see right. And like this sort of notion that there was this, uh, that this establishment, uh, that, that sort of hovered over American life and that was impossibly large and beyond our, uh, beyond anyone's control. Um, that, that, that, that powerful institution would 50 years later, like be completely incompetent, but like, there's no establishment. Right? Like we can't build housing. We can't build clean energy lines. Think of the things that we can't do and there's no one to turn to. We go through these periods in American life where the broader structure of power just completely changes.

50:32So right now, it feels like nothing can get done. There's no one to turn to. There's no way to make decisions. I think that 20, 30 years from now, we will have completely rebuilt some sort of governing mechanism that makes it possible for us to do things. I don't know exactly how it's going to happen, but I feel pretty confident. Like, people aren't happy with this. They're not going to be happy with what we've got now. and like we will figure out a series of ways organically through reforms like ideas are popping like the fact that Ezra and Derek's book did well and Yoni Applebaum has a book and Jen Polka has a book and Nick Bagley's coming out there's lots of literature coming out the books are the books will save us the books will there you go the books will save us all right we're gonna take a break but before we do we just launched a brand new show for paying subscribers Pod Save America Only Friends.

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53:44It's interesting because then the other side of this is an effective governing bureaucracy, effective institutions those are not an end they're a means to an end and part of why the new deal was able to be stood up so quickly is because a democratic party had a vision for what the role of government needed to be in an emergency and that built not only public enthusiasm and legitimacy and support it created a phalanx of people at every level who wanted to be a part of intellectuals experts managers all the way down to people who just wanted to to to work as part of these or needed work by the way as well but but that momentum around the goal the mission of what the government was meant to do made it more possible for the government to be effective how much of what we're dealing with here is a need for a democratic party a progressive movement to have a clear understanding of what the goal is, whether it's high-speed rail or wind or a better education system or a better healthcare system?

54:49How much of this could follow a kind of broader, more enthusiastic democratic mission? I think mission is a huge part of it. I also think, to the point you made earlier, lots of people graduate from college and imagine that they're going to go into public service, take a job at one of these agencies and like do great things. I think that if you had gone to engineering school in the 1940s and gotten a job as a Moses man, uh, inside, you know, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in New York and like spent years working for Bob Moses, who was imperious as a boss, but like gave you a great deal of, you know, freedom to design parks and like you could end your retirement, like you probably wouldn't have made as much if you'd gone to a private engineering firm, but you could show your grandchildren, like I built that playground or I, you know, designed that bridge or what, like, that would have been very satisfying.

55:51I think that people today who go into public service and go work at a, what seems like a very important bureaucracy, spend their days frightened. They're frightened that they're going to get their boss in trouble. They're frightened that they're going to get – their boss is going to get yelled at by an appropriator because they did something wrong or that they're going to make a decision that's going to get them subject to a NEPA lawsuit or that someone in the Office of Management and Budget is going to screw – that they don't have real authority to make the changes they want to do. And they come out after a bunch of years and like I was just pushing paper around.

56:27Like I wasn't really given the sort of leash to make the positive change that I wanted to do. I think like that is an extension of the changes we made after the Robert Moses era and that we overdid. I think we want to re-empower people who go into public service to be able to make those sorts of changes. And you'll get different kinds of people who go into service that way. Well, we're going to make mistakes. Like government is going to make mistakes. It's going to be controversial. Like people are not going to like it in all cases. But like, I mean, I think that there's like there's so many things that we need to do and that only government can do.

57:08But I think a very hopeful I think it's a very hopeful moment for all that that we're all sort of aghast at what's happening in Washington right now. That's sort of the level of potential is really remarkable. Yeah, I do. It's interesting because I read your piece on sort of lessons from the way Trump operates and I feel the same conflict that you described there and describe here. But there is some part of me that takes from it that one thing we need elected officials to do sometimes is to tell the lawyers to fuck off and just say, no, no, fuck off. And we're gonna try this. We're gonna push the bounds a little bit and then get stopped a little more frequently.

57:47Because I do think that part of this is a style of consensus leadership, a kind of like front of the classroom style of Democrat that doesn't want to seem like they're breaking the rules. But I say that I think, am I describing basically something that if it were towards a policy goal, I would hate I'd be disgusted by. But I wonder if there is something in the middle here where we need to somehow, you know, we have to sometimes we need to go out to want to leave the house. You know, we have to like start acting as though we live in a world in which things can happen, pretend as if things can happen and then suddenly they might.

58:25I mean, yes, and I've heard that several. I mean, people saying, you know, in order to plan a new subway line, we need to study the alternatives. How many do we really need to study? Like, we know in the end that we're not going to dig up this particular street. We're not going to go, you know, we're not going to dig up downtown, right? So like I understand that that is a theoretically a possibility, but we're not going to spend$100 ,000 doing in six months looking at, you know, which streets in which order we would dig up to do that possibility. We're just going to set it aside and we're actually only going to study these three alternatives, right?

59:07Like that was something that someone maybe would sue saying, well, you didn't look at all the alternatives. But we could expedite that, right? Like there's an example of where a bureaucrat could tell a lawyer to F off, right? Maybe there's a mild example of where something like that, yeah, I think probably could work and we don't do it. Are there any Democratic politicians that you think are saying interesting or smart things about how this can work? Are there places where you think people are pushing this forward and pointing to a way for how we make progressive governing work again? I'm going to say yes.

59:49You want me to name a bunch of politicians? I just think that lots of the new Dems, I mean, I think Dems left, right, and center are trying to do this. You're putting me on the spot here. Well, Mom Donnie, would you say Mom Donnie's doing it? I think Mom Donnie is trying to do it. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've absolutely, I mean, you know, I think the way that Rom has looked at what's happening in schools, there's sort of an obvious thing. We've been having this stale conversation about charters and vouchers and bathrooms. And he's focused on how are kids learning in schools.

1:00:33That's the stuff that matters. that feels to me like trying to push through the sort of arcane BS that we tend to talk about in our political dialogue. I don't know if it's right in line with this conversation, but like that feels like a real conversation. I mean, you know, Shapiro's identity nationally at the moment feels like it's really tied up in that 95. He got that thing up so fucking quick. That was cool. That was. I like that. And I feel like Newsom has a similar story. He's going to build something even faster. He's not going to get, he's not going to get, he's not going to lose in the road competition to Shapiro.

1:01:11Whitmer, fix the damn, I mean, anyway. They're trying, they're trying, yeah. Everyone, I think people are catching on to this stuff. And I do hope that this becomes, like, I really do hope that this conversation can be a way for people on the left and the, you know, sort of in the more progressive circles and more modern circles to come together. You know, those, you know, if I'm not a single payer guy, but if I were a single payer person, I would think to get there, you have to believe that people will need to have faith that government is going to administer health care better than Aetna or CVS or whoever, Blue Cross, Blue Cross.

1:02:09shield like whoever you're right and like right now like is your is your experience with government such that like you feel like you go into the dmv and like that's a happy place like like like are are those the people that you trust to do things uh in an expeditious way and like like that like you know the rhode island dmv i'm from rhode island i love those guys like my my license has come up for renewal and I just want to put that on the record. But, uh, but like generally I, I, I, I, I'm not sure that people have the experience in seeing like if, if, if these guys can't successfully accomplish the things that are already within their mandate, why are we going to expand their mandate?

1:02:59So let's get these things done and then let's have a discussion about whether government bureaucracies are better poised to accomplish for ordinary people the things that they can't attain for themselves in the current environment yeah i also think part of it too is having the confidence in a worldview in which you can fight trump's efforts to undermine the government without viewing it as a concession to on in another conversation talk about government's failures needs to need neat ways it needs to improve right ways you could save money and i think part of this too is there's a um a credibility gap you know mom donnie this week uh uh obviously he's like you know he's uh the socialist menace that's you know going to drive the billionaires to florida i suppose but then at the same time he's signing an executive order to find ways for government to save money and he has the kind of credibility to do that because he has the trust over here.

1:03:55And I sometimes do think that mainstream Democrats, because they lack that kind of clear mission of what they're trying to achieve, sometimes they're a bit squeamish about saying something that might sound like they're inviting a criticism from the left, which is, I think, a part of our problem. Our kind of soft democratic establishment does not have the kind of aggressive toughness that might make it more palatable to have them kind of pick some fights. I don't know. Yeah. I don't, I don't like calling to the establishment. The establishment to me is like this old thing. Like there is no democratic.

1:04:29So we've got, we've got, we've got sort of, well, it's all the mainstream center left democratic officials would be the group of people I'd be talking about that. Um, I think sometimes feel a little bit unsure of what, of who they're supposed to be. Okay. Well, take out the word establishment and I will, I, and and we're on the same page. Oh, great. And that's a perfect place to leave it. Let's leave it. Mark Dongleman, thank you so much for talking to me. I genuinely really enjoyed the book. It is called Why Nothing Works, Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back. I think anybody who has either dipped into the abundance discourse or decided to avoid it, I think it's a good history to help you through it, even though I will say, and I will say it to your face because I saw it on the pod, how many fucking times are you going to hammer the Hamiltonian Jefferson?

1:05:09We're smart people. We're in the book. You got us. You got us. Stop selling us so fucking hard. Yeah, well, sometimes I got confused. So I was just guiding myself. But thank you so much. Thanks. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Illick-Frank, and Saul Rubin.

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1:06:20you