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The Right’s Vision Sucks

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 19, 2025

How about our own?

Yesterday, we once again discussed where the Digital Medicis want to take this country. Remake the United States in Silicon Valley oligarchs’ image is more like it. You won’t like it.

Ezra Klein summarized that vision in three words last night: Their visions sucks.

Klein and coauthor Derek Thompson are on tour promoting their book, “Abundance.” I haven’t read it yet, but it seems like a “look yourself in the mirror” moment for Democrats wondering why voters are turning away from them.

The difference is Republicans have embraced autocracy while Democrats have embraced bureaucracy.

Sanuel Moyn at The New York Times offers:

Klein and Thompson rightly argue that conservative politicians aren’t the only ones who have hobbled the government’s essential role in a dynamic and innovative society. In recent decades, Democrats across the country exchanged novelty for NIMBYISM, progress for process and roaring growth for regulatory government. An anti-growth mentality changed many cities into gilded lairs closed to newcomers priced out of inadequate housing. Meanwhile, risk-taking science devolved into grant-seeking for small gains as government support waned and research became less about breakthroughs than paperwork.

Even worse, Americans gave up the ability to follow through, failing to get the most out of what they had already invented. Cheap, multistory apartment buildings, made practical by the emergence of the elevator in 1850s New York, could help ease the housing crisis in big cities. But today, Klein and Thompson write, ungainly regulations and baroque production methods mean that an elevator installed in America costs four times more than its Swiss counterpart.

This story of how American originality lost its way is arresting and well told. On an alternate timeline without Donald Trump in office dismantling the American scientific establishment and Elon Musk kneecapping the American state, it might have been the manifesto of a new politics. Still, there could be life after Trump and, if so, “Abundance” might inspire a demoralized Democratic Party to think big again.

The “idée fixe” is a problem for politics on the left. Ideas that become dogmas that won’t let go. And fads that come and go. Remember safe spaces, microaggressions, call-outs, and tagging every bio with pronouns? For example:

I once asked my late mother-in-law, a Columbia-trained school librarian, how she and her colleagues navigated the educational fads that blew in and out of public education over the course of her career.

“We tried to ignore them until they went away.”

(That’s my approach too.)

Democrats prioritize process over outcomes, Klein and Thompson argue. In the process — very expensive process — they are not delivering for people and in that process pricing young people out comfortable lives their parents took for granted. Hence the “a plague on both your houses” response seen in voter registration.

A Facebook commenter this morning remarked that while her college-age kids are registered Democrats (because she is), none of their peers are. We need to have a serious conversation about why “without regurgitating tired talking points,” she wrote. In my bright blue island, our county is now 43% Unaffiliated, 34% Democrat, and 21% Republican. “We have to turn out our Democrats” is a losing strategy. The rest of the state is more evenly divided, just with independent registrants outpacing Democrats by a bit less. Statewide, they vote Republican. Democrats are figuring out they need a reboot.

It’s not that we can’t do things right (see below), but that we have to fight not only the well-funded, think-tank right, but the factions in the Democratic coalition that insist that if their concerns are not voiced expressly in every ppolicy decision, they’ll take their balls and go home. Except that’s happening despite Democrats’ efforts at inclusivity.

Klein and Thompson argue that delivering a physically better world will be more beneficial politically than ideological posturing. At least, that’s what I hear. Will have to read the book.

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