The Do-Nothing State

California is an opportunity for Democrats to turn things around

The book on the nightstand of every Democrat in Washington — before “Original Sin” is officially released today — is “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Its thesis is simple: Democrats, once the party of social and economic justice, have become the party of sclerosis, where nothing gets built anymore. Or if it does, only at exorbitant costs and infinite timelines. It’s time to start building again, argues “Abundance,” for the good of the party and the good of the country.

Here’s Klein explaining it in a nutshell.

This is a learned helplessness that we have gotten into. We built the Empire State Building in a year. When Medicare was passed, people got Medicare cards one year later. It took the Affordable Care Act four years. Under Biden, it took three years for Medicare to just begin negotiating drug prices. We have chosen slowness. And in doing so we have broken the cord of accountability in democracy. The reason we didn’t get rural broadband after appropriating $42 billion for it in 2021 isn’t because it takes that long to lay down broadband cable. It doesn’t. It’s a 14-stage process with challenges and plans and counterproposals. We have chosen slowness because we thought we had the luxury of time. We need to rediscover speed as a progressive value.

Look, we can’t make nuclear fusion tomorrow. But we can build apartment buildings. We can build infrastructure. We can deliver healthcare. We have chosen to stop. And we’ve chosen to stop because we thought that would make all the policies better, more just, more equitable. There would be more voice in them. And now we look around. And did it make it better? Is liberal democracy doing better? Is the public happier? Are more people being represented in the kind of government we have? And the answer is no. The one truly optimistic point of this book is that we chose these problems. And if you chose a problem, you can un-choose it. Not that it’ll be easy, but unlike if the boundary was physics or technology, it’s at least possible. We made the 14-stage process, we can un-make it.

The Democrats arrived here with the best of intentions. The 1960s and 70s witnessed a wave of monumental legislation intended to secure a safer, healthier and more just society. Think, for example, of the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and everything downstream from there — legislation begat regulations, which begat the administrative state and eventually priorities shifted from actually building things to, as Klein points out, bringing more “voice” to the process. The notion of “equity” crowded out the values of speed and accountability. Perfect became the enemy of the good.

Wallace Stegner once said that California is like America, only more so. To witness sclerosis up close — the epitome of the Democratic predicament — simply turn your gaze to the West Coast, where the Golden State has morphed into the Do-Nothing State.

Take the bullet train. Please. This Pharaoh-like project, which was envisioned to whisk passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a few hours, was approved by voters in 2008 with a planned completion by 2020. Wanna buy a bridge?

Currently, a truncated portion in the state’s Central Valley, connecting Merced to Bakersfield, is under construction but isn’t expected to be completed until 2035 or so. The cost of the bullet train is currently $100 billion over budget with no funds secured for future construction. If the train is actually completed at some point, say 2060 or so, we’ll all be traveling by hyperloop or personal drones. The train will be a relic on opening day.

Then there’s energy. In its relentless war on fossil fuels — those products that enable the state’s transportation system of planes, trains and automobiles — California’s regulatory assault has pushed fuel prices higher than any other state except Hawaii. Arcane rules regarding fuel blends prevent imports to alleviate supply shortages. The business environment has led to the closure of two refineries in recent years, reducing the state’s capacity for gasoline production by 20 percent. And oh, by the way, Chevron decided last year that despite its nearly 150-year history in California it’s moving to Houston.

Housing? Forget about it. California is crippled by a severe shortage of affordable homes, skyrocketing prices, and widespread homelessness. Rigid zoning laws and the metastatic monster that the California Environmental Quality Act has become have effectively shut down the creation of affordable housing. NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) has morphed into BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). In Pacific Palisades, where a January fire destroyed more than 7,000 homes, only four permits for rebuilding had been issued by the end of March. Median home prices now exceed $800,000 (almost double that in coastal cities) and rents average more than $3,000. Nearly 200,000 people are now homeless in California.

Making the housing crisis even worse is the meltdown of the state’s property insurance market. Increasing and more intense wildfires, exacerbated by climate and the state’s lasseiz-faire attitude toward forest management, have cost carriers more than $65 billion in losses over the past eight years. State Farm and Allstate have stopped writing new policies. Existing policies are seeing rate hikes of as much as 50 percent. The state’s response — a public insurance pool called the FAIR Plan — isn’t solvent enough to withstand a major fire, potentially stranding hundreds of thousands of homeowners.

California’s education system benefits from robust funding but struggles with declining performance, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and external pressures like the housing and insurance crises. Student achievement is dropping rapidly. Only 35 percent of California students meet age-appropriate math standards and just 51 percent meet English standards such as reading and composition.

But wait, there’s more. The town of Pasadena, population 130,000, studied a proposal to underground its utlity lines, a move that would provide many benefits, ranging from fire prevention to aesthetics. But it was quickly nixed when planners said it would take more than 400 years to complete, which would put it in the year 2425.

This is a state that invented blue jeans and the personal computer; built world-class public universities; created a water delivery system that serves 40 million people and the so-called bread basket of the world in the Central Valley; built the ships that helped us win WWII; created Kaiser-Permanente, one of the country’s first HMOs; designed the iPhone; and introduced America to Irish coffee. It’s come a long way since then, just in the wrong direction.

But, as Churchill once mused, we should never let a good crisis go to waste. This is an opportunity to test some of the ideas that Klein and Thomas offer in “Abundance” — deregulate, reduce bureaucracy, streamline the permitting process, tame CEQA, start building things again.

It’s also an opportunity for Gavin Newsom to prepare for a presidential run in 2028 in a meaningful way beyond podcasts and photo ops. On the bullet train, Newsom should obey the First Rule of Holes, declare an immediate suspension of construction, and redirect all current and future funding to a system of desalination plants off the state’s coast. He should suspend the state’s strict regulation on fuel blends and provide tax incentives for the rehabilitation of aging refineries and the construction of new ones; fast-track the construction of new, small-modular nuclear reactors; use the power of the state’s purse to accelerate the construction of more housing; declare a state of emergency in K-12 schools and demand a turnaround of test scores in the next three years; and celebrate the private sector as an engine of growth instead of demonizing it and looking for a way to tax every widget.

If states are the laboratories of democracy, the party should rush to endorse an agenda like this, then take it further. Like-minded Democratic governors should rally around a common goal, a “Declaration of Abundance” whose goal is to build things again, make them work better, and create a runway for prosperity. For the past two years, Democrats have stood for little else than thwarting Trump. It’s time they move on to the point where they can articulate a vision of growth and competence, of compassion balanced by pragmatism, and of common sense over identity politics. For a party that has shown how adept it is at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, it’s time to flip the equation. Build things. Make them work. Be accountable. And be quick about it. All it takes is a little courage.