Reihan Salam | The Atlantic

An American Problem

2025-05-26T13:59:43-04:00

This story was updated at 5:28 p.m. on June 6, 2025.

On Wednesday night, a young couple left an American Jewish Committee event in Washington, D.C. Moments later, they were gunned down. As police arrested the suspect, he shouted, “Free Palestine.”

The victims—Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim—were 20-something Israeli Embassy aides. Lischinsky, a devout Christian born to an Argentinian Israeli father and a German mother, had just bought an engagement ring. Milgrim, a Jewish American with a master’s degree from the United Nations University for Peace, was devoted to humanitarian work and cross-cultural dialogue. They were idealists. They were in love. And they were murdered—not for anything they had done, but for who they were and what they represented.

Their alleged killer, Elias Rodriguez, was at one time affiliated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation—a U.S.-based Marxist group. The group lionizes Hamas and calls for violent “resistance” against Israel. (“We reject any attempt to associate the PSL with the DC shooting,” the group said on X, adding that Rodriguez has not been associated with the group since 2017. “We have nothing to do with this shooting and do not support it.”) It’s hard not to conclude that this was a political assassination, fueled by a deranged but coherent ideology that’s spreading with alarming speed through American institutions.

Rodriguez didn’t invent this worldview. It has been cultivated for years—by groups that venerate terrorists, by academics who excuse anti-Jewish hate as anti-colonial resistance, and by students chanting “Intifada” while shutting down bridges and storming campus buildings. It is a worldview that divides people into fixed categories of oppressor and oppressed, resents Jewish achievement, embraces violence, and sees Western civilization as inherently illegitimate. It targets Jews first—but never only.

Some call it protest. Our Manhattan Institute colleague Tal Fortgang calls it “civil terrorism”: the use of lawless disruption to intimidate and destabilize. Over the past 18 months, we’ve watched it escalate—from public rallies romanticizing Hamas after October 7, to anti-Semitic harassment on campuses, to slogans openly demanding ethnic cleansing. In this climate, the leap from vandalism to murder was all but inevitable.

The D.C. shooting was not the first incident of its kind. Just weeks ago, the home of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, was allegedly firebombed on the first night of Passover by a man upset about his support for Israel. In Michigan, Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel initially pressed charges against demonstrators who assaulted police during a campus encampment—then dropped them under pressure from the left flank of her party. But when extremists escalate and the law falters, the risks to public safety grow.

What we’re witnessing is an issue not with Israel, but with America. When violence aimed at Jews—or those seen as aligned with them—is dismissed, excused, or rationalized, it undermines the civic norms that hold our society together. Elite institutions that once upheld liberal pluralism now indulge a form of identity politics that prizes grievance over justice. Some of the ugliest reactions to the D.C. shooting treated the murders as incidental—or even deserved. That’s not just moral failure. It represents a worldview that treats violence as politics by other means. Such rationalizations have been used to justify the ideological murder of a health-care executive, coordinated arson attacks on Tesla dealerships by anti-capitalist extremists, and, now, executions outside a Jewish museum in the nation’s capital.

The denial of Jewish legitimacy—whether of the state of Israel or of American Jews participating in public life—is no longer a fringe opinion. In too many quarters, it’s treated as respectable. It is not. It is bigotry. And when paired with the belief that those claiming oppression are justified in doing “whatever it takes,” the result isn’t justice. It’s carnage.

We do not argue that speech should be criminalized; our First Amendment freedoms need to be protected. And it is possible to criticize Israeli policies, or those of any other government, without crossing the line into incitement.

But we must be honest about what’s happening. When networks of activists treat unrepentant killers as heroes, coordinate illegal activity, and agitate for the collapse of Western society, they’re not engaged in civil disobedience. They’re waging political warfare. That some of these groups are backed by hostile foreign regimes only underscores the urgency of a serious response.

The way forward is not to panic, but to draw a clear line. We must reaffirm that no political grievance justifies murder. That Americans—of any faith or background—should not have to fear for their lives while leaving a museum event. That violence in the name of justice is still violence. And that democracy works only when we preserve the norms that keep politics from devolving into civil conflict.

The murders of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were horrific. They were also predictable. If Americans continue down this path—excusing, indulging, and minimizing political violence when it comes from favored factions—we will see more such tragedies.

It is not enough to mourn. We must act. Not by censoring ideas, but by enforcing the law, defending civic order, and refusing to normalize an ideology that leads, inexorably, to bloodshed.

This story was updated to clarify its description of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and to acknowledge the group’s denial of a connection to the shooting in D.C.

Americans Want to Be Rich

2025-04-09T11:38:32-04:00

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In a February interview, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona observed that when talking with Latino men on the campaign trail, he had been struck by their emphasis on earning money as a source of pride. As he put it in underscoring the point, “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.” What more perfect emblem is there for making it in the America of 2025? Now imagine how those young men Gallego spoke with might be reacting to the prospect of paying $10,000 to $12,000 more for the big-ass truck of their dreams.

President Donald Trump’s newly imposed tariff regime sent the market into free fall, wiping away trillions of dollars in a matter of days. Administration officials have largely dismissed the decline; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, labeled it a “short-term” reaction. Others have bristled at the idea of caring about a drop in the market: Senator Eric Schmitt responded to the financial panic by saying, “America isn’t an economic zone. America isn’t a strip mall with an airport attached to it. America is a place. It’s our home. It’s our people.”

But Americans aren’t buying it. A majority—not just a wealthy few—opposed the tariffs even before they went into effect. More recent polling found a majority agreeing that “Republicans are crashing the American economy in real time and driving us to a recession.” The source of public fear and outrage is not only the 61 percent of Americans who own stocks, many of whom just saw much of their wealth evaporate. It is also the small businesses with razor-thin margins that just saw their input prices explode, and the consumers still recovering from the last round of inflation and fearful of the next.

Millions of those now alarmed by surging tariffs voted last year for Trump to return to the White House. They did this not because they wanted tariffs, but because they thought a second Trump presidency would mean fulfilling that most American of desires—the desire to get rich. Trump’s move has consolidated an anti-wealth political consensus that excludes these upwardly mobile voters. Which raises the question: Is either party brave enough to stand up for the aspirant middle?

[Annie Lowrey: The only way to stop the financial crisis]

When we refer to the American desire to get rich, we are not thinking just of insatiable one-percenters collecting second, third, and fourth homes. Most Americans care deeply about building wealth: Roughly 79 percent describe their money as “extremely” or “very” important to them. Eighty-four percent say there’s “nothing wrong” with trying to make as much money as possible, while 60 percent believe that “most rich people earned their wealth.” American parents put a far greater weight on their children being “financially independent” and having an enjoyable career than they do on those children getting married or having children themselves.

The desire to earn manifests in many admirable ways. Consider the ambitious young barista who moonlights as a ride-share driver, or the immigrant parents working the night shift to provide their kids with a better future. Think of the millions of young adults saving for a down payment for the home where they hope to raise a family. In each case, the slow but steady accumulation of wealth is part of a noble purpose. You can even think, in fact, of the one-percenters—analysis of the sources of their wealth finds that roughly 46 percent of it derives from business-related income, far more than the 26 percent coming from passive fixed-income-generating assets.

Such aspirations are nothing to be ashamed of; they’re fundamental to what makes America America. In Pew Research Center survey data from 2014, for example, 73 percent of Americans said it was “very important to work hard to get ahead in life,” compared with 60 percent of Brits and just 49 percent of Germans. And Americans continue to realize that aspiration: Federal Reserve data indicate that as of 2022, median household net worth was at its highest point on record. Measured properly, Millennials and Zoomers are in real terms wealthier than preceding generations, holding more than twice what Gen Xers did at the same age.

Belief in the importance of building wealth helped return Trump to the White House. Fed up with the inflation of the Biden years, voters backed the businessman who promised to slash regulation and bring an end to government overreach. That explains why, for instance, Trump won large majorities of voters concerned about the economy, voters shied away from Kamala Harris’s economic message, and a plurality of voters expected to be better off when Trump took office.

The desire for wealth also helps explain how Trump significantly expanded his constituency, securing not only an Electoral College victory but a plurality in the popular vote.

Consider the contrast between the coalitions that backed Trump in 2016 and 2024. In his 2016 campaign, he crucially won the support of white working-class voters in the Rust Belt who had backed Barack Obama in 2012. Many of these voters had personally experienced the economic dislocation that had followed the China trade shock of the 2000s, and were still living with the consequences.

In 2024, by contrast, Trump made major gains in large, immigrant-rich urban counties, where service-sector employment is dominant. These new, urban Trump voters were chiefly motivated by the cost of living and the ideological excesses of the cultural left, not dreams of restoring the Rust Belt to its former glory.

That explains Trump’s unexpected success among young, nonwhite, and immigrant voters—he may even have won that last group outright. Why did these previously stalwart Democrats break for Trump? Because they are all upwardly mobile groups, for whom pocket-book issues are central. More than progressive pandering, they want the opportunity to participate in the American dream—and Trump seemed to promise that.

Unfortunately, their faith is being tested. For decades, the Republican Party differentiated itself by its commitment to ambitious and enterprising workers of every social class. But over the past 10 years, a new class-war conservatism has come to the fore, arguing that “financialization” and corporate greed have hollowed out the American middle class. Drawing on leftist critiques of “late capitalism,” class-war conservatives have embraced a politics of scarcity and resentment, attempting to pit Rust Belt voters against those who have benefited most from the modernized, technologized American economy.

Class-war conservatives rely on a romanticized vision of America’s economic past. They long for a return to mass manufacturing employment. Yet working-class America has transitioned from manufacturing to service-sector employment for a reason: The jobs are, in general, of far higher quality. Being a nursing assistant or a maintenance worker can be just as challenging and meaningful as working in a 1950s coal mine, only the work is far less likely to leave you profoundly disabled. Today’s manufacturing jobs are safer, more stimulating, more productive, and more remunerative than their mid-century equivalents. Yes, there are fewer of them, as the least safe, least stimulating, least productive, and least remunerative jobs have been either automated or offshored. We can certainly try to bring the lowest-paid, most physically demanding jobs home, perhaps by rolling back domestic labor standards or imposing a new “robot tax” to deter labor-saving automation. But don’t be surprised if those jobs become a magnet for low-skill immigrants.

To the class-war conservatives, every dismaying social indicator—declining life expectancy, family breakdown, the collapsing fertility rate—somehow comes down to declining manufacturing employment in the aftermath of NAFTA or China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. The trouble is that many of these same maladies plague societies where manufacturing employment has proved more robust. You can believe that, for example, we ought to pursue economic decoupling from China without also believing that we should wage economic war on our Canadian neighbors. Dynamiting the dense web of multicountry, multifirm production networks that undergird our economy is not, in fact, our only option. Yet some on the right have black-pilled themselves about an economy that remains the envy of the world: The stock-market valuations are fake, everyone is addicted to fentanyl, and therefore we should blow everything up.

[Read: Trump has a screw loose about tariffs]

We saw the right’s new battle lines at play in the recent struggle within the Trump coalition over high-skilled immigration. On one side was the “tech right,” advocating for more high-skilled visas and the benefits they bring. On the other were the class-war conservatives, who dismissed even high-skilled immigration as a scam. But Trump voters are on the side of the former: They overwhelmingly endorse high-skilled immigration, with 71 percent supporting it in an Economic Innovation Group poll.

To their credit, some liberals have tried to fill the void created by this anti-capitalist conservatism. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and his co-author, Ezra Klein, have pushed for an “abundance” liberalism in their new book, which prioritizes the increase of wealth through targeted deregulation alongside traditional big-government liberalism.

[Derek Thompson: The political fight of the century]

But Democratic messaging shows what a long road the abundance liberals have to travel. House Democrats’ recent decision to highlight Representative Chris Deluzio defending tariffs was not an accident. Nor was the Biden administration’s protectionist trade agenda. The Democratic Party is systematically beholden to the unions that stand to benefit most from protection. Such structural cronyism is a feature of state-led building initiatives, meaning that any liberal move away from rent-seeking is a move away from some core constituencies.

Instead, we now have two major parties infected by the gospel of no-wealth. Both parties embrace, in Klein and Thompson’s phrasing, a “scarcity” mindset rather than an “abundance” mindset. The result? Trillions of dollars lost in a matter of days.

This is a mistake—and an opportunity. The party that becomes unabashedly, unapologetically pro-wealth-creation will position itself to capture the broad American middle that wants to get rich. That’s a coalition at least as durable as either party’s currently is.

Such a party would spurn economic protectionism and embrace free trade with our friends and allies. It would back deregulation and special-interest busting in zoning reform and right-to-work laws. It would endorse energy opportunities including solar cells and shale fracking. In short, it would propound an agenda that has at its No. 1 priority making Americans richer—like they want to be.

Just as important, such a party would not apologize for its belief in wealth; it would not shy away from the view that “greed is good.” Instead, it would forthrightly defend the idea that hard work, entrepreneurialism, and the profit motive are central to what makes our nation the greatest on Earth.

Voters backed President Trump in November because they thought, or hoped, that this was the party they would be getting. If the president wants to preserve his legacy, he still has the opportunity to give them such a party. If not, he and the GOP risk losing America’s strivers for a generation or more.

The Question Hanging Over Harris’s Campaign

2024-10-14T06:00:00-04:00

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Contra Donald Trump’s claims, Vice President Kamala Harris is not a Communist. For one, no evidence suggests that she seeks the collectivization of the means of production, or even that she is especially hostile to corporate America. When outlining her vision for an “opportunity economy,” Harris speaks of “a future where every person has the opportunity to build a business, to own a home, to build intergenerational wealth.” This is rhetoric that brings to mind George W. Bush’s “ownership society,” not the liquidation of the kulaks.

Granted, we’re not obliged to take Harris’s campaign pronouncements at face value, and there is no question that she has supported a number of policies that place her firmly on the left of the Democratic Party. But since emerging as President Joe Biden’s chosen successor, Harris has jettisoned her past support for Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, a ban on fracking, and the decriminalization of illegal border crossings, conspicuously distancing herself from the ideological commitments of her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign.

Moreover, Harris and her closest political allies, most notably her brother-in-law, the Uber executive Tony West, have made a concerted effort to cultivate influential CEOs and investors, many of whom have come away encouraged by her openness to their policy priorities. As if to demonstrate the seriousness of her pro-business pivot, Harris broke with Biden by proposing a more modest tax increase on capital gains and dividends. And while she continues to call for taxing the unrealized capital gains of households with more than $100 million in assets—a policy that is anathema to investors—the Dallas-based venture capitalist and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, perhaps her most visible champion in the business world, has flatly told CNBC, “It’s not going to happen.”

So no, Harris is not a radical. But when she claims to be a pragmatic capitalist who will take “good ideas from wherever they come,” the pitch doesn’t quite land. How, then, should we understand her ideological sensibilities?

The most straightforward interpretation is that Harris is a Democratic Party loyalist who reliably moves in line with the evolving consensus among left-of-center interest groups, activists, intellectuals, donors, and campaign professionals. She stands in favor of whatever will keep the fractious Democratic coalition together. If the climate movement insists that fracking is an obstacle to the green-energy transition, she’ll take up its cause by backing a ban. If support for a fracking ban jeopardizes Democratic prospects in Pennsylvania, she’ll reverse her stance while underscoring that her values haven’t changed, careful not to rebuke the climate movement for its excesses. In this regard, Harris is strikingly similar to Biden, who has followed the Democratic consensus—to the right in the Bill Clinton era, to the left under Barack Obama and Trump—throughout his half century on the national political scene.

If I’m right, the good news is that a Harris victory wouldn’t mean the end of American capitalism. The bad news is that her lowest-common-denominator progressivism wouldn’t fix what’s broken with American capitalism either.

Before turning to the content of Harris’s economic agenda, it’s worth thinking through what we can learn from the arc of her political career.

Harris rose to prominence against the backdrop of the Silicon Valley wealth boom and the collapse of two-party politics in the Golden State in the 2000s and 2010s. Unlike Clinton, who, as governor of Arkansas, navigated the Reagan-era realignment of the South and had to learn to appeal to swing voters, Harris’s chief political challenge has been winning over enough California Democratic voters to deliver a majority.

With the notable exception of her 2010 race for attorney general, Harris managed to avoid facing off against a meaningful Republican challenger until she was named Biden’s running mate in 2020. She also seldom faced difficult fiscal trade-offs. As the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California, she was charged with making any number of important decisions but not with balancing budgets. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris saw her tenure perfectly coincide with the Trump presidency, when the job of the junior senator from California was to be a voice of the anti-Trump resistance, not to strike bipartisan bargains.

One lesson from Harris’s political climb is that “reading the room” has proved to be a much better way to make friends in blue-state Democratic politics than making hard choices. No one can accuse Harris of ever having cut a social program or denied a public-sector union an item from its wish list, which is a very good place for a Democratic presidential candidate to be.

The downside, of course, is that we don’t have a good sense of whether Harris is capable of saying no to her political allies as Clinton, the architect of welfare reform, and Obama, who resisted calls for single-payer health care, did before her. Among Harris’s contemporaries, consider the contrasting political trajectory of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who has the distinct misfortune of having been a hard-nosed and highly effective governor of Rhode Island in the midst of a budget crisis, when she earned the lasting enmity of the Democratic left by saving her state from fiscal doom. That, I suspect, is why Raimondo is being discussed as a possible Treasury secretary in a Harris administration and not the other way around.

Harris is not alone in evading hard choices. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign has been defined by a series of improvisational policy initiatives—including “No tax on tips,” “No tax on overtime,” “No tax on Social Security for our great seniors”—which, taken together, would blow an enormous hole in federal revenues. Recently, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a careful analysis of the fiscal impact of the Trump and Harris campaign plans, and it found that although Harris’s plan would increase projected deficits by $3.5 trillion over the next decade, Trump’s plan would increase them by $7.5 trillion. Given the unseriousness of so many of Trump’s tax and spending proposals, many have concluded that Harris is the more credible presidential candidate.

But the closer you look at Harris’s economic agenda, the more the gap in seriousness between the two campaigns starts to shrink.

Shortly after the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released its much-discussed analysis, Harris proposed an ambitious new Medicare benefit for home-based care on ABC’s daytime television program The View, a policy aimed at easing the burden of the “sandwich generation,” or working-age adults who find themselves caring for children and aging parents at the same time. This is a large and sympathetic group, and Harris deserves credit for speaking to its needs. From a fiscal perspective, however, the deficit-increasing impact of a new Medicare benefit along these lines could be in the trillions.

Though a number of press reports have suggested that a home-based-care benefit could cost $40 billion a year, drawing on a Brookings Institution précis of a “very-conservatively designed universal program” with strict eligibility limits, my Manhattan Institute colleague Chris Pope projects that it could cost more than 10 times that amount. Harris has suggested paying for this new benefit by having Medicare drive a harder bargain with pharmaceutical companies, but Pope estimates that that would yield no more than $4 billion a year in savings. At the high end, this proposal alone could see the deficit-increasing impact of Harris’s campaign plan surpass that of Trump’s.

Of course, much depends on the details of a new Medicare benefit, just as much depends on how Trump would operationalize his own scattershot campaign promises. Rather than offering a more sober approach, though, Harris is racing to outbid her Republican opponent. To swing voters who don’t have much faith in the federal government’s ability to spend money wisely or well—skepticism that I would argue is more than justified—Trump’s promise of further tax cuts might prove more resonant than Harris’s plans for an expanded welfare state.

If, instead of just adding to the deficit, Harris were to pay for all of this new spending, she would have to do much more than raise the corporate income tax or tax unrealized capital gains, the same tax that her admirers in the business community insist will never see the light of day. She’d have to break her pledge to shield households earning $400,000 or less from tax increases, a move that would be difficult to reconcile with the Democratic Party’s increasing dependence on upper-middle-income, stock-owning voters.

Harris does, however, have one way forward that could yield real political dividends. She just needs to say no.

Drawing from a wide range of progressive thinkers, the Harris campaign has embraced ambitious goals that enjoy considerable public support, including a revitalized manufacturing sector, abundant green energy and housing, and increased public support for low- and middle-income families with children. Yet remaking the American political economy along these lines will necessitate saying no to interest groups that wield enormous power within the Democratic coalition—unions demanding concessions that threaten to undermine a manufacturing revival, environmental-justice activists who oppose permitting reform, and welfarists who want to create new entitlements for the young without rightsizing existing entitlements for the old.

Judging by her past experience, Harris’s instinct will be to placate these constituencies, to take the path of least resistance when confronted by the Democratic left. That same ideological drift has plagued the Biden White House, and there is growing concern among Democrats that though voters might see Harris as younger and more vigorous than the incumbent president, they otherwise see her candidacy as representing more of the same. With early voting already under way in more than a dozen states, she’s running out of time to prove her doubters wrong.

Kamala Harris and the Black Elite

2024-08-29T06:00:00-04:00

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If you want an illustration of the extraordinary racial progress America has made over the past 59 years, look to the life of Vice President Kamala Harris, who could now become the second Black president.

Born in Oakland, California—a city deeply divided by race, where the Black Power movement gained ground by explicitly rejecting the cause of racial integration—just months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Harris has achieved great distinction in multiracial milieus, where her cultural literacy and deft code-switching have proved enormous assets. In the mid-1960s, Black elected officials almost exclusively represented Black-majority jurisdictions, and a Black presence in elite institutions was exceedingly rare. By the time Harris first won elected office in 2004, in contrast, she had settled in San Francisco, a city with a small and shrinking Black population, where it was essential for her to build a multiracial political coalition.

Harris’s political “launching pad,” according to the Politico reporter Michael Kruse, was “the tightly knit world of San Francisco high society,” which embraced her as one of its own. Harris came of age amid a rapid expansion of economic opportunity for Black Americans, and especially Black women; her ascent reflects the diversification of the American elite and a growing openness to Black political talent among non-Black voters, both developments that are very much worthy of celebration.

One could argue that Harris’s emergence as the Democratic presidential nominee, like Barack Obama’s before her, is a fulfillment of the civil-rights-era promise of racial integration. Consider, for example, the striking racial diversity of her inner circle, which includes her brother-in-law, Tony West, chief legal officer at Uber; Disney Entertainment Co-chair Dana Walden; and of course her husband, Doug Emhoff, an accomplished entertainment lawyer. Harris’s social world is anything but segregated.

Yet there are rival conceptions of racial progress in American life, and the discourse surrounding Harris’s political rise has overlooked a potential vulnerability for the Democratic coalition in the long run—the cultural and ideological distance separating the progressive Black elite from the working- and middle-class Black majority.

[Read: Identity politics loses its power]

Because Blackness has historically been treated as monolithic, informed by a shared experience of persecution and marginalization, scholars and policy makers have long ignored the Black elite and its central role in America’s racial landscape. As a multiracial daughter of skilled immigrants who is very much at home among upwardly mobile professionals, Harris is best understood as a pioneering member of a Black elite that has been powerfully shaped by rising educational attainment, affluence, immigration, and intermarriage.

From 2002 to 2022, for example, the share of Black adults over 25 with a postgraduate degree increased from 5.3 to 10.6 percent. Over the same period, the share of Black families earning $200,000 or more, adjusted for inflation, rose from 3.9 to 8.4 percent. Those gains haven’t erased inequality; the share of Asian and white adults with a postgraduate degree remains significantly higher than that of Black adults (27.1 percent and 15.7 percent respectively), as does the share of Asian and white families earning $200,000 or more (28.1 percent and 18.2 percent). Nevertheless, these numbers speak to the emergence of a large and flourishing Black upper-middle class.

Rising Black immigration from the Caribbean and Africa, meanwhile, has infused the Black American population with self-selected newcomers who are more likely to be high earners than their native-born counterparts. More than one-fifth of Black Americans are either foreign-born or second-generation, and Black newcomers tend to settle in higher-opportunity neighborhoods and regions than Black natives.

And though Black-white interracial unions remain rare, the number has increased in recent years. As the number of interracial unions has increased, so too has the number of mixed births. Although finding detailed demographic information on all multiracial Black households is difficult, a Pew analysis of data from the 2022 American Community Survey shows that they have a median household income 21.2 percent higher than that of monoracial non-Hispanic Black households.

Needless to say, these various social developments don’t perfectly intersect. It is certainly not the case that all high-earning Black adults have postgraduate degrees, are immigrants, or are partnered with non-Black adults. But compared with the Black population generally, the new Black elite, forged in selective colleges and universities, is disproportionately first- and second-generation, intermarried or mixed-race, and suburban.

[Read: What Trump’s Kamala Harris smear reveals]

The distinctiveness of the Black elite could have a number of political implications. One is that as the cultural and socioeconomic distance between the Black elite and the Black majority increases, so too could the power of the Black elite to shape Black political behavior.

No one is surprised when educated and affluent white voters vote differently from working-class white voters. The notion of a Black “diploma divide” is less familiar. Despite considerable ideological diversity among Black voters, the Black electorate has been largely united behind Democratic candidates for decades. For years, the dominant explanation for the persistence of Black political unity has been the idea of “linked fate,” or the notion that Black voters see their individual interests as bound up with the status and well-being of Black Americans as a group. More recently, the political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird have attributed Black political unity to the practice of “racialized social constraint,” in which some Black individuals work to protect the interests of the group by shaming or otherwise punishing other Black individuals who threaten to defect from the group’s partisan norm. This practice of enforcing group partisan norms occurs through predominantly Black social networks, including in online spaces, such as Black Twitter. If White and Laird are right, the question becomes which Black individuals and communities have the authority to establish group political expectations.

In his 1903 essay on “The Talented Tenth,” the renowned sociologist and civil-rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois envisioned an elite cadre of exemplary Black women and men—an “aristocracy of talent and character”—that would provide the wider Black population with civic and social leadership. Though a man of the left, Du Bois was a frank elitist, who believed that it was “from the top downward that culture filters,” and that in the history of human progress, “the Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground.” He took for granted that there would be a durable link between this educated ethnic vanguard and the Black masses, and that elite norms and behaviors would trickle down over time. The Black elite would set the agenda for Black advancement, and the Black majority would fall in line.

But as the Black elite grows apart from the Black majority—in its ethnocultural self-understanding, level of education and wealth attainment, and commitment to cosmopolitan ideals—expect its political authority to diminish.

Consider the politics of immigration, a major flash point in the 2024 presidential election. During Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, she backed a number of progressive immigration priorities, including decriminalizing illegal border crossings, a position that her campaign recently reversed in a statement to Axios. This is one of several issues where a meaningful gap separates college-educated and non-college-educated Black voters. In 2020, before an intensifying border crisis moved public opinion in a sharply restrictionist direction, the American National Election Studies survey found that although 40 percent of college-educated Black respondents favored increasing immigration levels, the same was true of only 27 percent of non-college-educated Black respondents. When asked if immigrants were likely to take away jobs from Americans, 71 percent of non-college-educated Black respondents said they were at least somewhat likely to do so; among college-educated Black respondents, just 53 percent said the same.

Given that the college-educated Black population is more cosmopolitan, affluent, and likely to have recent immigrant ties, it makes intuitive sense that they would be more favorably disposed toward immigration. But those differences in lived experience might also diminish the ability of elite Black political actors to enforce a pro-immigration partisan norm against Black dissenters.

Then there are the differences between the Black elite and the Black majority when it comes to the role of race in public life.

Over the course of her long career in elected office, Harris has not evinced many fixed ideological commitments. But she has been consistent in her adherence to “progressive racialism,” or the belief that the cause of racial justice demands a more vigorous embrace of race-conscious policy making. In the U.S. Senate and the White House, she has championed race-preferential college admissions and hiring programs, environmental-justice initiatives, and cultural-competency training, among other race-conscious policy measures. In this regard, Harris is representative of her class.

Shortly before the Supreme Court ruled against race-preferential college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, a Pew survey found that although U.S. adults opposed them by a margin of 50 to 33 percent, Black adults favored them by a margin of 47 to 29 percent. However, this overall level of support masked a telling divide among Black respondents. Sixty-four percent of Black college graduates backed race-preferential admissions; support fell to 42 percent for Black respondents with some college or less. This wasn’t because a far larger number of non-college-educated Black respondents were opposed to race-preferential admission—it’s because a much higher share said they weren’t sure.

One explanation is that elite discourse has greatly exaggerated the role of racial preferences in redressing racial inequality. For one, only a small fraction of U.S. undergraduates attend colleges and universities selective enough for racial preferences to matter. In a recent working paper, the economists Francisca A. Antman, Brian Duncan, and Michael F. Lovenheim compared underrepresented minority students in four states which banned racial preferences in public higher education to students in states that left preferences in place. Comparing outcomes before and after the bans and between states, they found that prohibiting preferences had virtually no impact on educational attainment, earnings, or employment for Black or Hispanic men, and may even have improved Black men’s labor-market prospects. While banning preferences produced worse outcomes for Hispanic women, in most cases there were also no statistically significant harms to Black women.

Assuming that these findings hold true more broadly, the impact of racial preferences on the life chances of Black Americans appears to have been negligible. Moreover, defending unpopular racial preferences may have made it more difficult to advance other policies that would have done more to foster Black upward mobility. Viewed through this lens, it is not surprising that many middle- and working-class Black voters are indifferent to the fate of race-preferential admissions, or that so many oppose them outright.

[Read: ‘White Dudes for Harris’ was a missed opportunity ]

Even if we stipulate that race-preferential admissions did not benefit Black Americans as a whole, they did offer concentrated benefits to the relatively small number of Black individuals who were in a position to take advantage of them. A 2023 YouGov / Economist survey found that only 11 percent of Black respondents felt that affirmative action had a positive impact on their lives, or just over half of the 19 percent who felt that it had had any impact at all. But Black women and men who believe deeply in the benefits of race-preferential admissions have been well represented in high-status jobs, and they’ve played an outsize role in shaping the domestic-policy agenda of the progressive left. That could be part of why progressive policy makers have made such a sharp turn in favor of race-conscious policies in the post-Obama era, despite their deep unpopularity.

As Black political unity starts to fade, Harris has a choice to make. Building on the policy agenda she developed for her 2020 presidential campaign and the record of the Biden-Harris administration, the vice president can champion the race-conscious policies that have proved so resonant among the progressive Black elite in the hope that doing so will inspire a renewed politics of Black solidarity. The challenge for this Talented Tenth approach is that the Black voters who have been most receptive to Donald Trump are younger and working-class. These are Black Americans who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s, against the backdrop of rising Black cultural and political influence. They are less embedded in the Black Church, an institution that has played a crucial role in inculcating norms of racial solidarity. And they are not embedded in the modern university, where racial identity and preferences have been most salient. In short, they seem skeptical of the profound racial pessimism so common on the progressive left.

Rather than lean into progressive racialism, Harris could seek to appeal to middle- and working-class voters of all groups, including disaffected Black voters, by downplaying race consciousness in favor of populist and patriotic themes, drawing on the lessons of Obama’s successful 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Doing so would make life more difficult for those of us on the right who oppose Harris’s vision for American political economy and our role in the world—but it would be an encouraging portent of racial progress to come.

The End of Progressive Elitism?

2023-08-12T07:00:00-04:00

A renowned political philosopher, Amy Gutmann was in some ways an inspired choice to serve as President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Germany. Over the course of a long and fruitful academic career, she has made enormous contributions to the theory of deliberative democracy, identity politics, and the role of educational institutions in a pluralistic society, lines of inquiry that are as urgent as ever on both sides of the Atlantic. And in the thick of Russia’s war in Ukraine, there is an undeniable resonance to having the daughter of a German Jewish refugee represent U.S. interests in Berlin.

But I suspect it was not Gutmann’s considerable achievements as a public intellectual or her ancestral ties that won her one of the nation’s most prestigious ambassadorial appointments. A more likely explanation is that the president felt he owed her a debt of gratitude, as she gave him something more precious than even the most eye-wateringly large Super PAC contribution.

Prior to taking on her new role, Gutmann served as president of the University of Pennsylvania for 18 years, where she was celebrated, and well compensated, for her prodigious fundraising and strategic acumen. Notably, she presided over the establishment of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in February 2017, which was initially led by Joe Biden, who at the same time was named the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Having a former vice president on your faculty is no small thing, and Gutmann and Biden appear to have developed a strong rapport. And when Biden’s granddaughter Maisy Biden applied for admission to Penn in 2018, he intervened personally to press her case to Gutmann, who seems to have given the former vice president valuable advice about improving her chances. Despite an imperfect academic record, the younger Biden matriculated at Penn in the fall of 2019 and graduated this past spring. By then, Gutmann was comfortably ensconced in Berlin.

[Annie Lowrey: Why you have to care about these 12 colleges]

I don’t begrudge Biden for doing whatever he could to secure his granddaughter’s admission to a prestigious university, an admirable act of grandfatherly devotion, or Gutmann for having been receptive to his entreaties, as her job was in no small part to add luster to the University of Pennsylvania. The relationship between them is striking nevertheless. One would normally expect a university president to be solicitous toward a former vice president of the United States, not the other way around.

But Gutmann wasn’t the president of just any university. She was the president of an Ivy League university, and that made all the difference. Her relationship with the Biden family is a perfect distillation of the immense influence of the Ivy League and its peer institutions—and it points to how that influence might come undone.

Armed with billion-dollar endowments, America’s most selective universities have in recent decades transformed themselves into “the makers of manners” for the nation’s mass affluent population. By mixing the children of the rich and powerful with the children of designated disadvantaged groups, they’ve given rise to a new progressive elite that holds enormous sway over the nation’s cultural and political life. Now, as Ivy-plus admissions practices come under intense scrutiny from left and right, this potent alchemy is at risk, opening the door for a new set of elite-making institutions.

One of Gutmann’s distinguished predecessors as U.S. ambassador to Germany is James Bryant Conant, who served as the U.S. high commissioner for Germany and then as the first U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic at the dawn of the Cold War. In a neat parallel, Conant took on the role after a highly consequential 20-year tenure as president of Harvard University.

Between Conant’s era and Gutmann’s, elite higher education in America reached the zenith of its power. But Conant’s vision for Harvard and Gutmann’s vision for Penn were strikingly different.

The product of a working-class childhood in Boston, Conant famously sought to transform Harvard from a finishing school for the WASP elite into a more meritocratic institution, tasking administrators at the university with finding an aptitude test that would select for the nation’s brightest, most capable young people, which later formed the basis of the SAT. He believed that Harvard could help realize “Jefferson’s ideal,” a nation led by a public-spirited intellectual elite, chosen through a rigorous, evidence-based process. To many Americans, some version of Conant’s thesis is the most compelling justification for the elevated status of Harvard and institutions like it, which is why departures from the meritocratic ideal tend to undermine the legitimacy of Ivy League eliteness.

This brand of meritocratic elitism has never been fully realized in practice, certainly not in the Ivy League. For one, Conant himself presided over Jewish quotas, and he’s been accused of indifference—at a minimum—to the scourge of antisemitism. A long line of university administrators in the decades since have abandoned meritocratic elitism, converging on a different and arguably more robust foundation for eliteness. In lieu of a single-minded focus on academic excellence, elite higher education has taken a more pluralistic approach, one that blends students selected solely on the basis of academic credentials with others whose presence is meant to enrich university life, figuratively and literally. For much of this period, these departures from a meritocratic paradigm were seen as concessions to the imperative of fundraising and other prosaic institutional objectives. In more recent years, however, this brand of admissions pluralism has been given a moral makeover. Call it progressive elitism.

In May 1995, Gutmann, then the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Politics and dean of the faculty at Princeton, delivered the esteemed Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford. Her remarks were focused on racial injustice, which she referred to as “the most morally and intellectually vexing problem in the public life of this country.”

One of Gutmann’s central arguments is that because “public policies and individual practices that would effectively address racial injustice are collective goods,” it is fair and reasonable “for blacks to criticize other blacks who benefit from their efforts to combat racial injustice but who do nothing to aid this cause or an equally urgent one.” That is, Black Americans “need to unite in order to combat racial injustice” by, for example, supporting affirmative-action policies.

And according to Gutmann, it is not just Black Americans who have a special obligation in this domain. “The fewer burdens of race we have to bear,” she argues, “the greater our obligations are to overcome racial injustice.” Americans who are not Black “have a special obligation to fight racial injustice so as to decrease the likelihood that they will be the beneficiaries of unfair advantages that stem from the racial stereotyping of social offices and other forms of institutionalized injustices that unfairly disadvantage blacks.”

If Gutmann is right that advantaged individuals and groups have a special obligation to eschew unfair advantages that reinforce racial inequality, how should one understand the concerted effort of President Biden to secure his granddaughter’s admission to the University of Pennsylvania—or rather, how should we expect the political philosopher Amy Gutmann to understand it?

One potential resolution is that the end justifies the means. That is, it is reasonable and appropriate for privileged people to leverage their status, relationships, and wealth to secure high-status educational opportunities if doing so serves the larger cause of racial and social justice.

Someone in Gutmann’s position could maintain that because the institution she controls is aligned with causes she and her peers deem worthy, admitting students who can enhance its centrality and prestige is in itself a noble pursuit. A commitment to egalitarianism gives Penn and universities like it not just moral license but moral imperative to fortify their student bodies with the children and grandchildren of the nation’s most privileged families. Doing so gives progressive university presidents like Gutmann a powerful tool to shape the rising generation of the American elite.

Crucially, this project of elite-making needs a more broadly acceptable theory of legitimacy. If meritocratic elitism is justified by the need to inculcate a sense of patriotism and civic duty in the best and brightest, progressive elitism is justified by the need to diversify the American elite. That means increasing the representation of Black Americans and other historically disadvantaged groups in prominent roles in American public life—but it also means protecting and strengthening the role of the Ivy League as an opportunity choke point. Under progressive elitism, the Ivy League isn’t just where dynastic wealth meets the dynamism of first-generation strivers. It is where America’s elite gains its moral imprimatur.

The Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case shed light on how this approach to elite-making has worked in practice. Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit legal advocacy group opposed to racial preferences, retained the Duke University labor economist Peter Arcidiacono to analyze who was admitted to Harvard and who was not, drawing on years of closely guarded data that the university was obliged to share with the plaintiffs. His expert testimony revealed the extent to which the university’s admissions practices disadvantaged Asian American applicants, which helped galvanize conservative critics of race-conscious admissions. Arcidiacono and his co-authors also drew attention to Harvard’s preferences for recruited athletes, legacies, prospective students on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs), which were in some cases strikingly large.

Alarmed by Arcidiacono’s findings, critics and champions of race-conscious admissions united in denouncing preferences for ALDCs, a rare instance of cross-ideological agreement. But racial preferences and preferences for ALDCs are fundamentally complementary, and it is this complementarity that serves as the cornerstone of progressive elitism.

Consider the mounting evidence that the chief advantage of an elite education is not the quality of instruction but rather the access it gives to relationships with powerful people. In a recent New York Times op-ed, the Princeton sociologist Shamus Khan described how the social binding together of students from privileged and less privileged backgrounds can redound to the benefit of the latter.

“Graduating from an elite school,” writes Khan, “affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquette of high-status settings.” But while students from privileged backgrounds have access to networks of affluent, educated, professionally accomplished adults even before attending institutions such as Harvard or Penn, less privileged students do not. When these students are brought together, the privileged students gain a sense of validation—of their intellect, accomplishments, and character—and the less privileged gain social and cultural capital that can hasten their post-college professional ascent.

Though Khan is no defender of legacy preferences, he observes that “legacy students, with their deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of elite schools.” This logic applies not just to legacy students but to other privileged students as well, including the children and grandchildren of prominent elected officials, major philanthropists, academic and cultural luminaries, and perhaps even accomplished equestrians and squash players.

And progressive elitism is doing much more than just shaping the manners, mores, and life trajectories of students attending elite universities. It allows admissions officers to engage in soulcraft on a much grander scale.

In 2010, the economists Valerie and Garey Ramey found that intensified competition for prestigious college slots from the mid-1990s on led to a dramatic increase in the time and resources college-educated U.S. parents devoted to their children’s development. In contrast, there was no comparable increase in rivalry among parents in Canada, where the prestige hierarchy in higher education is not nearly as steep. The Rameys conclude that the net result of this intensified competition has been a wasteful, zero-sum “rug rat race.”

Building on this empirical foundation, the essayist Matt Feeney goes further still. In his 2021 book, Little Platoons, he denounces the hubris of selective college admissions, accusing admissions officers of arrogating to themselves extraordinary power over the inner lives of aspirational parents and their children.

Faced with a surge of applications as Millennials came of age, Feeney posits, “admissions people came to grasp that the selection power this competition had given them was also a deep and subtle sort of moral power … They could now tell their applicants which extracurriculars were better, and which sort of personal confessions were more pleasing in admissions essays, which sorts of person, as manifest in these essays and extracurriculars, they liked more.” By signaling these behavioral preferences to parents, teachers, counselors, and anxious young strivers highly susceptible to small gradations of status, admissions officers found that “they could now induce their applicants to become such people.”

A number of scholars and practitioners have called for using selective college admissions to “nudge” parents and students in several ways. In 2017, for example, Thomas Scott-Railton published a provocative article in the Yale Law & Policy Review urging elite colleges to give a substantial admissions bonus to applicants who had attended high-poverty K–12 schools even if they were not from low-income households themselves. “By rewarding applicants for attending socioeconomically integrated schools,” he argued, “colleges would mobilize the resources of private actors across the country towards integration.”

Leaving aside the merits of this particular proposal, it speaks to the extraordinary power that elite higher education has over the nation’s middle-class-and-up families. Scott-Railton’s proposal could be seen as an exercise in having Ivy League institutions advance a policy objective that Congress would likely reject. Striking legislative bargains in a culturally plural society is hard. Winning over the admissions office is a significantly lighter lift.

This disciplinary power has an ideological character, and it’s not always subtle. In 2018, an admissions officer at Yale University published a note reassuring prospective applicants and admitted students that they wouldn’t be penalized for suspensions or other disciplinary action imposed by their high schools for taking part in gun-control activism. “For those students who come to Yale,” she wrote, “we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Imagine a similar note cheering on prospective applicants to Yale for taking part in the March for Life—and then imagine the opprobrium that would follow for the admissions officer who published it.

The result is that the opportunity choke point of elite college admissions has become, in the hands of progressive administrators and admissions officers, a tool for transforming progressive pieties into elite social norms.

And that leads us to why Ivy League eliteness may have peaked.

If progressive elitism has allowed selective universities to reconcile moralistic progressivism with the elitism that is the source of their desirability, what happens when Ivy League admissions officers’ power to reshape social norms is no longer undergirded by an appeal to racial justice? Since the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision curtailed racial preferences, legacy preferences have come under vigorous attack, not least from the Biden administration, which has launched a civil-rights investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice. Amherst College abandoned legacy admissions in October 2021, and Wesleyan University announced this July that it would follow suit. If Shamus Khan is right, although the symbolic value of an elite education for less advantaged students might persist beyond the end of legacy admissions, its value as a source of social and cultural capital will be greatly diminished.

[Richard V. Reeves: The shame deficit]

This in turn could create an opening for a different set of higher-education institutions committed to a different set of values—perhaps even a revival of the midcentury vision of elite institutions that would promote social mobility while instilling patriotism and a sense of civic obligation.

That, at least, seems to be the impetus behind a slew of new higher-education initiatives in red and purple states, where many voters, policy makers, and philanthropists are wary of Ivy League progressivism. The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, a public research university that has seen surging enrollment in recent years, is pioneering an approach to civics that welcomes debate and encourages a deep understanding of the nation’s founding principles. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee is creating a similar institute, which aims to inculcate an “informed patriotism,” through the state university system.

And then there is the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, a new initiative that is being led by Will Inboden, a distinguished scholar of international relations who most recently taught at the University of Texas at Austin. With more than 60,000 students at its Gainesville campus, UF is already one of the nation’s most respected public universities and, in light of the Sunshine State’s rapid economic and demographic expansion, it is well positioned for further growth. The Hamilton Center, aimed at fostering diversity of thought and improving the quality of civic education on campus and throughout the state, represents a bet on UF’s enormous potential. One possibility is that it will serve as the seedbed of a new liberal-arts college that would compete with the likes of Penn and Harvard, attracting bright and capable students from a wide range of social and ethnic backgrounds. To date, UF hasn’t distinguished itself as a beacon of social mobility. But that could soon change.

No one expects these fledgling efforts to dislodge the Ivy League and its peers from their place at the top of America’s higher-education status hierarchy, at least not yet. What we can say is that many young Americans and their families are looking for alternatives to elite education as we’ve come to know it, and a growing number of civic entrepreneurs are hoping to revive something like the still-resonant meritocratic ideal.

Why YIMBY Righteousness Backfires

2023-07-15T07:00:00-04:00

If it’s wrong to want to live in a bucolic neighborhood largely populated by people who can comfortably afford exorbitantly high housing prices, most Americans don’t want to be right.

That is the central challenge facing the YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement, an ideologically diverse collection of scholars, policy makers, and grassroots activists committed to the disarmingly simple idea that building new homes in the nation’s most prosperous cities and towns would be a really good thing to do. As an intellectual project, YIMBYism has been wildly successful, and for good reason. The evidence that boosting housing supply to meet housing demand can foster economic growth and spur upward mobility is overwhelming. There is even tentative evidence to suggest that curbing local land-use regulation could help reverse the collapse of marriage among working-class families, which is no small thing. Among economists and legal scholars who work on local land use, the debate over zoning reform is essentially over.

Yet the YIMBY movement has failed to overcome deep-seated skepticism among voters, who intuit that new homes mean new neighbors, and that new neighbors can mean new headaches.

Consider California, where YIMBY lawmakers have made their greatest strides. Since 2016, the California state legislature has passed a series of measures preempting some of the most egregious local land-use regulations, prompting a boomlet in accessory dwelling units. But despite incontrovertible evidence of a housing-affordability crisis, one that is still driving hundreds of thousands of low- and middle-income families out of the state, many Californians are bitterly opposed to the recent housing push, so much so that there is a real danger that voters will pass a ballot measure in 2024 rolling back the reforms.

[Jerusalem Demsas: California isn’t special]

To understand why California voters have proved so hard to win over, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, one of the leading philanthropic champions of YIMBYism, commissioned a series of focus groups and surveys, culminating in a report published last year. According to the authors, “Most renters and owners we heard from expressed that they are wary of affordable housing solutions in their neighborhood, citing worries that it will result in crime, noise, litter, illegal dumping, and a general lack of property upkeep.” Moreover, although a large majority of respondents “broadly embraced diversity as a current or aspirational feature of their neighborhood,” they expressed deep discomfort with the idea of having neighbors significantly poorer than them.

This skepticism is not unique to the Golden State. In January of this year, Governor Kathy Hochul unveiled the “New York Housing Compact,” an ambitious set of reforms aimed at boosting housing production in New York City and its notoriously expensive suburbs. By May, the Housing Compact was dead. Statewide zoning-reform proposals in Colorado, Arizona, and Texas also went down to defeat.

None of this is to suggest that YIMBYism is doomed. But if YIMBYs want to nudge more Americans in their direction, they’d do well to hector less and listen more.

Convinced of their righteousness, some of the most ardent YIMBYs have adopted a moralistic posture, denouncing recalcitrant homeowners as snobs or bigots, and calling for sweeping legislative measures that would strip local governments of their land-use authority and further circumscribe the ability of landlords to choose their tenants. Richard Kahlenberg’s new book, Excluded, is a perfect distillation of this sensibility.

Best known for his contrarian critique of racial preferences at selective colleges, Kahlenberg has dedicated his public life to making the case for racial and economic integration. Not content to make a prudential case against exclusionary zoning that might appeal to the self-interest of homeowners, Excluded argues that the practice is a moral outrage—classist, and implicitly racist as well—and that we need a moral campaign to eradicate it backed with the full force of the federal government, one modeled on the fight against Jim Crow in the previous century. To that end, Kahlenberg calls for an Economic Fair Housing Act that would allow lawsuits to challenge zoning policies for discriminating against the poor or having an unnecessary disparate impact by class, with judges deciding what counts as necessary. This would amount to a de facto federal ban on single-family zoning, would threaten countless other zoning policies as well, and would work, in large part, by cowing local governments with the threat of expensive lawsuits based on vague, subjective legal standards.

While this line of argument is sure to resonate with some number of social-justice progressives, it is unlikely to persuade anxious homeowners and renters who dread the prospect of neighborhood change. Chris Elmendorf, a professor of land-use law at UC Davis, has warned that framing zoning reform as a matter of economic justice is likely to backfire. Today’s affluent suburbanites might resent the suggestion that they’re guilty of racial animus, but they’re entirely comfortable with being accused of colorblind class prejudice.

Opponents of new housing in their backyard might not be especially enlightened, but they aren’t delusional either. Exclusionary zoning is, as the name suggests, a strategy for improving the local tax base by deploying local land-use regulation to attract rich residents and deter poor ones. Local public services in the U.S. are largely financed by local property taxes and other municipal revenues, such as sales taxes and parking and sewerage fees. One needn’t be a hateful snob to recognize that while some newcomers will generate more in local revenues than they receive in services, others will not.

Indeed, these local fiscal pressures are arguably the central force shaping America’s fragmented metropolitan geography. As the Princeton economist Leah Boustan argues in Competition in the Promised Land, the “white flight” of the postwar era was driven in no small part by these fiscal concerns. As poor Black migrants made their way to urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, large numbers of more affluent white families moved to suburban jurisdictions with higher average incomes than the cities they left behind. Some of this outmigration was undoubtedly driven by white reluctance to live alongside Black neighbors, but because U.S. cities were so intensely segregated in this period, most of the flight was from neighborhoods that remained exclusively white. Urban departures from these white neighborhoods were motivated less by fear of social intermingling with Black neighbors than by fear of fiscal intermingling with lower-income neighbors who had different needs and priorities. “Moving to the suburbs,” Boustan writes, “allowed white households to isolate themselves from the changing bundle of local public goods and fiscal obligations offered in the central city.”

[Read: White flight never ended]

Given these powerful fiscal incentives, NIMBYism in small suburban jurisdictions is almost inevitable. Rather than expect moral suasion to change the politics of zoning in these communities, YIMBYs would do well to embrace a more humble and realistic approach, one that endeavors to meet suburban NIMBYs halfway.

One straightforward way to win over suburban homeowners is to advance housing reforms that help them build wealth, as Elmendorf has recommended. Legalizing accessory dwelling units, for example, enriches ordinary homeowners, who enjoy more public sympathy than large-scale developers, fairly or otherwise, and who can be mobilized against cost-increasing municipal-impact fees and discretionary review procedures. As an added bonus, this brand of reform allows YIMBYs to make a more optimistic appeal grounded in respect for property rights and personal freedom, a pitch that’s helped pass zoning-reform laws in Oregon, Utah, and Montana.

When faced with determined suburban resistance, as in downstate New York, where Hochul’s Housing Compact proved an immense political liability, YIMBYs ought to focus their efforts on dialing back land-use regulation in large cities. Opposition to housing production tends to be less intense in more populous jurisdictions, in part because their ratio of rich to poor residents is by definition harder to change. Urban neighborhoods are also more dynamic than suburban neighborhoods: They’re disproportionately populated by renters, young adults, low-income families, and other populations that experience above-average levels of housing churn. Neighborhood change is a fact of life in these communities. If zoning reform in urban cores proves successful, the case for housing growth in smaller communities will be that much more compelling.

At the risk of rankling anti-business progressives, YIMBYs should also do more to cultivate large employers as political allies. Lower housing costs are a powerful tool to attract and retain workers, and large employers can exert significant influence in state legislatures. That employers in California’s technology sector have played an important role in the fight against tight zoning is no coincidence—they’re keenly aware that as housing costs in the Golden State rise, they can either pay higher wages or watch as their workers decamp for cities in Idaho or Nevada.

And finally, YIMBYs should work to soften the local fiscal incentives that drive exclusionary zoning in the first place. Zachary Liscow of Yale Law School found that when states take on a larger share of school funding, rich people become more willing to move into poorer jurisdictions, likely because doing so would no longer saddle them with the special burden of supporting services for large numbers of neighbors who pay little in taxes. Consistent with this pattern, he found that centralized school funding led to lower taxes in lower-income municipalities.

A similar logic would apply to state funding for policing and public-safety efforts. If NIMBYs worry that an influx of lower-income migrants will lead to a surge of crime and disorder, as the Chan Zuckerberg Institute’s findings strongly suggest, increased state aid to local law-enforcement agencies might allay their concerns. Some arch social-media leftists have disapprovingly dubbed this blend of support for zoning reform and “broken windows” policing “carceral urbanism,” but of course social-media leftists are not the target audience.

Granted, changing local fiscal incentives would be a significant undertaking, one that would meet with resistance from voters who’d fear losing out under the new fiscal dispensation. But 30 percent of local-government revenue already comes in the form of transfers from state governments. Increasing state-government responsibility for funding local policing or public education would represent a relatively modest and potentially very welcome change, especially when compared with, say, fair-share requirements that mandate the production of deed-restricted affordable-housing units and other priorities of the YIMBY left.

Tinkering around with local fiscal incentives, forging alliances with regional business elites, and helping some property-rich homeowners get richer won’t usher in an egalitarian new millennium of integrated neighborhoods from coast to coast, but it will help YIMBYs build a more persuasive case that housing growth is in the enlightened self-interest of suburbanites who might otherwise be concerned about rising tax burdens and sinking home values. That’s not a bad start.

The Fiscal Choice the GOP Needs to Make

2023-05-11T07:30:00-04:00

Can the GOP be both the party of the middle class and the party of small government? That is the central question facing Republican lawmakers in the Biden era, and a great deal hinges on how they decide to answer it.

Restraining the growth of government has for decades been a unifying cause for the GOP. Though elected Republicans have only rarely succeeded in halting the advance of welfare liberalism, they have at times managed to slow it down. But as Speaker Kevin McCarthy is learning the hard way, even that has become an arduous task.

Since the Obama presidency, Republicans in Congress have been trying—and mostly failing—to reconcile two conflicting imperatives. Recognizing that the party’s core constituency now consists of older, non-college-educated voters with a concrete interest in protecting Medicare and Social Security benefits, they’ve largely abandoned the pursuit of cost-saving entitlement reforms. At the same time, the GOP electorate remains opposed to the broad-based tax increases that would almost certainly be needed to finance Medicare and Social Security expenditures if the programs remain untouched.

[Reihan Salam: Searching for a conservatism of normalcy]

One way to address this dilemma is to ignore it. Under President Donald Trump, congressional Republicans chose to embrace deficit-increasing policies, such as the partisan Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and bipartisan COVID-relief measures. Political incentives undoubtedly played a role. Republican lawmakers are more likely to acquiesce to borrowing under Republican rather than Democratic presidents, both for reasons of political expediency and because they have more leverage over how borrowed dollars are spent when their party controls the executive branch. Deficit spending on the military, for example, tends to raise fewer objections from the congressional GOP than deficit spending on student-debt cancellation.

Critics might therefore dismiss renewed Republican calls for spending discipline under President Joe Biden as little more than partisan opportunism. The substantive case for fiscal consolidation, however, has grown much stronger in recent years. Before the COVID crisis, it briefly looked as though Trump’s cheap-money populism was the wave of the future. But the era of persistently low interest rates, which facilitated the Republican turn toward fiscal expansion, appears to be over, not least because of the sharp increase in inflation sparked by the American Rescue Plan. And as Greg Ip recently observed in The Wall Street Journal, “The combined effect of bills Mr. Biden has signed on infrastructure, veterans benefits, semiconductors and energy subsidies is to raise, not lower, budget deficits,” a policy approach that cuts against the Federal Reserve’s ongoing efforts to bring inflation under control.

Confronted with mounting federal deficits, McCarthy has rallied House Republicans around the Limit, Save, Grow Act both as an opening bid in their negotiations with Biden over a debt-ceiling increase and as an exercise in drawing distinctions. Among other things, the bill gives lawmakers the power to rescind federal regulations that have economic impacts, curtails domestic discretionary spending, and reforms permitting policies to foster energy and industrial development, all long-standing GOP policy priorities aimed at improving federal finances over the coming decade.

Passing the Limit, Save, Grow Act would trim federal spending by 0.6 percent of GDP, greatly alleviating inflation pressures and easing the burden on the Federal Reserve.

That said, no one expects Biden to sign anything like the Limit, Save, Grow Act into law. The White House and congressional Democrats have attacked the bill for its stringent limits on domestic discretionary spending, and they’ve characterized its tightening of work requirements for working-age, able-bodied beneficiaries of Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families as draconian. Assuming the latest round of budget brinkmanship ends in a debt-limit deal, it will entail much higher levels of deficit spending than what is outlined in the House-passed debt-ceiling bill.

It is therefore worth examining the Limit, Save, Grow Act less as the basis of a bipartisan legislative bargain and more for what it tells us about where GOP domestic policy is headed.

First and foremost, the House-passed bill is a marked departure from the Tea Party moment of the early Obama years. By punting on meaningful reforms to Medicare and Social Security, ring-fencing defense expenditures, and limiting revenue increases to rolling back tax expenditures included in the Inflation Reduction Act, House Republicans have abandoned the once-sacrosanct goal of balancing the federal budget, at least for the foreseeable future.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that the Limit, Save, Grow Act would slow future growth in federal debt, not halt it outright. Whereas debt is expected to rise from 98 to 118 percent of GDP in fiscal year 2033 under current law, the House-passed bill would reduce the increase to 106 percent. Not long ago, GOP fiscal purists would have rejected such a proposal, but even the most recalcitrant Republican lawmakers appear to have concluded that the confluence of rapid aging and the COVID fiscal overhang has dimmed the prospects for chipping away at the accumulated federal debt burden anytime soon. Speaker McCarthy deserves credit for moving his members toward a more realistic posture.

And yet House Republicans are still drawing the wrong lessons from budget battles of the past. The basic logic of the Limit, Save, Grow Act—declare Medicare and Social Security off-limits, focus deficit-cutting efforts on whatever is left of domestic spending—is plainly inadequate for addressing both the long-run fiscal challenge facing the federal government and the political challenge facing the right.

The broader context is that in recent decades, both parties have worked to lighten the fiscal burden on America’s middle-income families. From 1979 to 2016, middle-income families headed by non-elderly adults saw their average net fiscal contribution to the federal government—that is, the amount they paid in federal taxes less the amount they received in federal benefits—fall from 17 to 7 percent, according to a 2020 analysis by the economists Adam Looney, Jeff Larrimore, and David Splinter. Over that same interval, income per person in these households increased by 39 percent before taxes and transfers and by 57 percent after taxes and transfers.

Politicians who promise to offer middle-class families a better deal are running into the fact that it would be exceedingly difficult to raise enough revenue from high-income households to further subsidize the broad middle of the income distribution. The status quo has served middle-income families reasonably well, and this all-important constituency has good reason to fear that any changes will leave it worse off.

It follows, though, that the same loss aversion that makes voters resistant to reforming Medicare and Social Security also makes them resistant to tax increases—and this is especially true among Republican voters.

[Reihan Salam: Supply-side progressivism has a fatal flaw]

As the Democratic coalition grows more affluent and the Republican coalition grows less so, GOP voters remain more skeptical of wealth redistribution, less concerned about economic inequality, and more favorably disposed toward billionaires than their Democratic counterparts. Low-income Republicans are consistently more opposed to progressive economic policies than high-income Democrats, including raising taxes on the rich. This is not to suggest that there is no support for more progressive tax policies on the right, but the differences between the major parties are stark. In April, for example, the Pew Research Center found that 77 percent of Democrats supported raising taxes on households earning $400,000 against 46 percent of Republicans. When respondents were asked if they personally felt that they paid “more than their fair share” in federal taxes, the partisan divide remained significant: 50 percent of Democrats agreed against 63 percent of Republicans.

The durability of anti-tax sentiment among Republican voters represents a political opportunity for the party’s fiscal conservatives. Although voters often report that they’d prefer raising taxes on the rich to forestall an overhaul of Medicare and Social Security benefits, those sentiments are being expressed in the absence of a focused political debate. Even large, economically damaging tax increases on high-income households cannot close future budget deficits without addressing rising federal spending. One way or another, voters will have to choose between cost-saving reforms and higher taxes on the broad middle class—and among Republicans, that choice is clear.

The good news is that cost-saving reforms don’t have to be political losers.

Look no further than the Inflation Reduction Act, which trims future Medicare expenditures to cover more than half the cost of its grab bag of new spending initiatives. In a February op-ed in The Hill, my Manhattan Institute colleague Chris Pope notes that this use of Medicare savings to finance other priorities also formed the basis of the bipartisan 1997 Balanced Budget Act and the 2010 Affordable Care Act. “Policymakers of both parties agree that Medicare’s escalating expenditures need regular trimming,” Pope writes. “The real fight is over who gets to control the savings.”

Why, then, are congressional Republicans refusing to reform Medicare to finance their own priorities, including holding down middle-class taxes? Such a stance amounts to unilateral disarmament in the contest over how federal dollars are spent, and it will only grow more impractical over time. From 2022 to 2050, the Congressional Budget Office projects, the federal government’s primary budget deficit will increase by 3.9 percentage points. Roughly three points of this anticipated increase would stem from rising Medicare costs alone. Leaving Medicare untouched is not a serious option.

Fiscal conservatives would also do well to revisit their approach to Medicaid. For years, GOP budget-cutters have focused more on Medicaid than Medicare, in part because Medicaid’s rolls have grown so dramatically following the passage of the Affordable Care Act. They need to recognize, however, that Medicaid has many champions, including in deep-red states. Indeed, the fundamental problem with Medicaid is that because it is based on federal matching grants, affluent states, which can generate more revenue at a given level of taxation, are in a better position to maximize federal aid than poor states, which generate less. And it just so happens that affluent states are turning blue and poor states are turning red.

With this disparity in mind, Pope has proposed fully federalizing responsibility for mandatory Medicaid beneficiaries, a reform that would represent a fiscal boon to cash-strapped state governments, especially during economic downturns, and giving states the responsibility for covering optional beneficiaries if they choose to do so. One of the many virtues of this approach is that it obviates the case for imposing federal work requirements, because states would be able to decide eligibility rules for their portion of the program.

And finally, fiscal conservatives should do more than just impose arbitrary caps on domestic discretionary spending. They should endeavor to improve how the federal government invests in public goods, from the military expenditures that undergird U.S. global leadership to federal funding aimed at fostering scientific breakthroughs.

Infrastructure represents the most straightforward case. Conservative opponents of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 focused primarily on its overall cost, which was indeed prodigious. But the critics would have strengthened their case had they zeroed in on the dramatic cost inflation plaguing American public-infrastructure projects, which has greatly undermined public support for infrastructure investment. Going forward, conservatives in Congress ought to develop their own playbook for infrastructure spending, one that would emphasize reforming or rolling back “Buy America” provisions and other cost-increasing regulations while otherwise strictly limiting federal infrastructure investment to projects that will ultimately pay for themselves.

Republicans can move the federal government in the direction of fiscal sustainability without risking electoral doom. To do that, however, they’ll need to get over their fear of reforming the entitlement state and start addressing the practical concerns of their middle-class constituents.

Searching for a Conservatism of Normalcy

2023-04-25T07:00:00-04:00

As the race for the GOP presidential nomination gets under way, the party’s ideological divisions are sharpening.

Consider the opening salvo of Donald Trump’s third Republican presidential campaign. The former president and his allies have fusilladed Ron DeSantis over the Florida governor’s past support for curbing the growth of Medicare and Social Security spending, echoing a similar line of attack from President Joe Biden. This all comes before DeSantis has even formally announced a presidential bid, an indication, perhaps, that Trump aims to deter his most formidable Republican opponent from entering the fray.

Faced with a pincer movement from an adroit former president and Democrats keen on a Trump-Biden rematch, DeSantis finds himself in the most vexing position of his strikingly successful political career. His chief advantage in running against Trump has been the widespread perception that as the governor of a competitive, vote-rich state, he would be more appealing to suburban independents and other marginal voters. But with Trump pivoting to the political center—on entitlements but also, more tentatively, on the scope of abortion regulation—DeSantis is at risk of losing the electability argument. Despite his many liabilities, the former president is positioning himself as the only candidate capable of cementing working-class moderates as a core part of the Republican coalition.

Assuming that DeSantis does move forward with a presidential campaign, he’ll have to decide how to counter Trump’s moderate turn on entitlements. He could charge the former president with hypocrisy, pointing to the fact that the Trump administration explicitly called for reducing future safety-net spending in its fiscal 2021 budget. But it’s hard to see that approach succeeding. A famously protean figure, Trump has always worn his ideological commitments lightly. As the political strategist Liam Donovan recently observed in an interview with The New York Times, “In 2016, Trump was exempt from the punitive standards we hold conventional politicians to, and what’s remarkable is that seven years and a presidential term later, that still holds true.”

[Read: The glaring contradictions of Republicans’ rhetoric of freedom]

Recognizing that Trump will continue to press his advantage on entitlements, DeSantis could instead offer a vigorous defense of entitlement reform, leaning into his own apparent vulnerability. In the absence of a larger narrative connecting fiscal consolidation and American renewal, however, the Florida governor would risk reinforcing Trump’s role as the GOP’s defender of middle-class economic interests. And of course DeSantis wouldn’t be the only Republican aspirant to face this dilemma.

What the former president’s Republican rivals are missing, in short, is a compelling ideological thesis, one that offers a clear alternative to Trump’s class-war conservatism and that resonates with the “somewhat conservative” voters who are the party’s center of gravity. What they need is a conservatism of normalcy.

In his influential 1957 essay “Conservatism as an Ideology,” the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington defined conservatism as “that system of ideas employed to justify any established social order, no matter where or when it exists, against any fundamental challenge to its nature or being, no matter from what quarter.” Conservative ideology is thus best understood as situational, not ideational. Rather than offer a substantive vision for the remaking of a given social order, the task of conservatism is to defend established institutions and beliefs against those with the power and determination to remake them.

Given the anti-establishment ethos of contemporary conservatism, this definition might at first seem out of date. But it still captures something important about how conservatives understand their role in American life. Conservatives see themselves as guardians of the nation’s distinctive constitutional and cultural inheritance and their opponents as partisans of destructive innovations that would make Americans less prosperous and free.

The question for conservatives, then, is which threat to the American social order merits their focused attention?

Last month, Jay Caspian Kang of The New Yorker examined the differences between two clashing conceptions of what the right should support: rural economic populism, which he associates with Trump and Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, and “the ‘anti-woke’ educational crusade that has captured other corners of the GOP.”

In keeping with his class-first sensibilities, Kang sees the populist political formula as more potent. As much as he might doubt the credibility of Vance’s and Trump’s populism, Kang warns that the two politicians “understand how to sell a message to the rural, economically depressed white voting population.” Viewed through Huntington’s lens, this rural populism identifies the most urgent threat to American flourishing as a cosmopolitan corporate elite committed to shredding the social protections, both formal and informal, that have undergirded the civic and economic health of the nation’s middle-class communities.

As for conservative anti-wokeness, Kang deems it little more than a distraction from class politics, “a smoke screen of supposed cultural principles that allow the establishment to feel comfortable with a candidate who likely will protect business interests without inviting the potential chaos of a Trump Presidency.” Michael Lind offered a similarly biting assessment of anti-wokeness in UnHerd, characterizing it as “just a revival of the old culture-war politics of the Bushes, particularly George W. Bush.”

But new cultural fault lines can give rise to new coalitions, and discounting the power and resonance of anti-wokeness would be a mistake. Critics on the left take the notion that there is something deeply flawed with America under “late capitalism” for granted, hence their begrudging respect for class-war conservatism. A large majority of Republican voters, by contrast, describe themselves as believers in capitalism for whom hard work is its own reward, and one of the main conservative objections to wokeness is that it represents a rejection of meritocratic ideals.

Although class-war conservatism undoubtedly has a constituency, it remains a minority persuasion on the right. For example, when Gallup asked voters if they favored imposing heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth in 2022, 24 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed, far lower than the 79 percent support among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. And in April, a Wall Street Journal survey found that 55 percent of GOP respondents prioritized fighting “woke ideology in our schools and businesses” over protecting entitlements. It would be foolish to overinterpret this finding, not least because the same survey found that Republicans oppose entitlement reform by a wide margin. Nevertheless, it speaks to the potential for a conservative synthesis that would incorporate anti-racialism into a larger politics of normalcy.

In 1920, the Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding successfully campaigned on a “return to normalcy,” an implicit rebuke of the dislocation the nation had endured under Woodrow Wilson, who was very much a modernizing progressive. Our own era has been similarly tumultuous, and one can imagine a new return to normalcy having broad appeal. Indeed, as Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation noted in January, DeSantis explicitly contrasted woke ideology with “normalcy” in his second inaugural address. DeSantis’s formulation—“We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy”—offers a way forward for those on the right who consider class-war conservatism a distraction from the threat of militant progressivism.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

Rooted in growing Sun Belt suburbs, this ideological tendency would be less nostalgic and more aspirational. If class-war conservatives define business elites and entitlement-cutters as the fundamental challenge to America’s social order, a conservatism of normalcy would stand in opposition to the divisive racialism, unlimited welfarism, and cartel federalism of the progressive left. It would celebrate America’s multiethnic mainstream, defend law and order, and demand responsive, efficient, and limited government. And above all else, it would aim to competently advance its policy priorities.

It might be too much to expect this still-inchoate brand of conservatism to emerge victorious in the coming months. For one, a not-inconsiderable number of Republican primary voters are in no mood for normalcy. But as the right looks to the future, and to an electorate exhausted and demoralized by the politicization of every aspect of public life, the prospects for a conservatism of normalcy will grow only stronger.

Supply-Side Progressivism Has a Fatal Flaw

2023-04-12T07:30:00-04:00

The Democratic Party is in the midst of an important debate about the future of America’s political economy. Even as mainstream progressives campaign for further increasing public subsidies for medical care, housing, and higher education, a rising chorus of “supply-side progressives” is urging the left to focus instead on using the power of government to loosen the bottlenecks that make these goods so expensive and inaccessible in the first place. In a number of domains, supply-side progressives embrace prescriptions drawn from market liberalism, most notably in their calls for reforming stringent land-use restrictions that drive up the underlying cost of housing and liberalizing skilled immigration. But what separates supply-side progressives from supply-side conservatives is their enthusiasm for activist government. The movement is united by a belief in the need for a more venturesome and efficient administrative state, one capable of driving down the cost of building complex infrastructure projects and making visionary investments in clean energy, among many other things.

As much as I might disagree with the supply-side progressives on the limits of government power, their openness to market-oriented policies and willingness to at least acknowledge the mismanagement and sclerosis plaguing much of the public sector makes for a favorable contrast with their opponents in the progressive mainstream. Yet supply-side progressivism suffers from a serious weakness, particularly when compared with the mainstream progressivism it is hoping to dislodge as the Democratic Party’s unifying ideological thread. Judging by the visibility and prestige of its intellectual champions, the movement has gone from strength to strength, having captured the imagination of a number of key philanthropists, academic social scientists, opinion journalists, and, perhaps most important, Biden-administration officials. But it’s not clear that supply-side progressivism, as a political project, has a way forward.

[Annie Lowrey: The economy’s fundamental problem has changed]

Consider Ezra Klein’s recent critique of “everything-bagel liberalism” in The New York Times, which perfectly captures mainstream progressivism’s fundamental flaw. Drawing on the case of Tahanan, a supportive-housing complex in San Francisco, he laments the accretion of local and state regulations that inflates the cost of public projects in communities throughout the country, and that therefore greatly limits the horizons of progressive governance. Klein, one of the most prominent supply-side progressives, details the various regulatory hurdles facing Tahanan, and offers a larger argument about why so many ambitious progressive initiatives run aground. “Government needs to be able to solve big problems,” Klein writes. “But the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities—to pile too much on the bagel—is itself a choice.” He sees that same failure to choose in many other domains as well, including the Biden administration’s push to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry.

The problem with mainstream progressivism, Klein argues, is that it is “much better at seeing where the government could spend more than at determining how it could make that spending go farther and faster,” and this lack of focus risks discrediting progressive governance. This is, of course, a line of argument that will resonate with conservative partisans of limited government, who object to the unlimited welfarism that has come to define mainstream progressivism. But it is also a challenge to supply-side progressives who want to change the Democratic Party’s policy direction. If mainstream progressivism’s failure to make hard choices is doing so much damage, why has it been so politically durable—and why is supply-side progressivism, for all its virtues, proving such an uphill climb?

Rather than evaluate mainstream progressivism as a policy program designed to achieve some well-defined ideological objective, it is instructive to see it more as a political formula, a set of commitments aimed at binding together a diverse Democratic coalition. By that standard, mainstream progressivism has proved incredibly potent. The Democratic Party represents tens of millions of American voters, but voters organized into cohesive interest groups are more powerful than those who happen to show up at the ballot box every now and again. Within the coalition, interest groups wield disproportionate influence, and all the more if they’re capable of bringing significant financial and organizational resources to bear. When elected Democrats strike legislative bargains, they’re keenly aware of the need to incorporate the priorities of these groups, even if that means undermining the efficiency or coherence of their policy initiatives. Contra Klein, the problem is not that progressives aren’t being sufficiently disciplined in their approach to policy design. It’s that the political imperative of holding together the coalition will always win out over high-minded idealism.

Everything-bagel liberalism reflects the priorities and nonnegotiable demands of the Democratic Party’s most efficacious constituencies: unionized public employees and affluent metropolitan liberals, groups that to some extent overlap. Though members of both of these groups might have idealistic reasons to embrace supply-side progressivism, their material self-interest is well served by the progressive mainstream.

First, let’s look to the core interests of public-sector labor. Supply-side progressivism envisions a more effective, efficient, and accountable government. At a minimum, achieving that goal will require extracting concessions from public-employee unions, if not limiting collective-bargaining rights in the public sector altogether, as many supply-side progressives will privately concede. But if elected Democrats even inch in this direction, they can expect intense backlash.

As Klein suggests in his essay, regulations that inflate costs, such as buy-American provisions and prevailing-wage requirements, often do so to create employment opportunities and raise wages above the market-clearing rate. Measures designed to lower costs in public projects—to ensure that taxpayer dollars purchase more and higher-quality public goods and services—often involve making the terms of public or subsidized employment less generous, for example by lowering the overall level of compensation, or demanding increased work effort, or substituting capital for labor outright. From the perspective of a union that relies on membership dues, doing more with less labor is profoundly unattractive. This is particularly true for public-employee unions, as their members are unlikely to be anxious about driving their employer out of business by pressing their demands too aggressively. Like all unions, public-employee unions are obliged to defend the interests of their members, regardless of their productivity, and they do so in part by devoting significant financial resources to electing Democratic candidates. Campaign contributions aside, unionized public employees play a crucial role in voter-contact efforts and as influential advocates for union interests in their families and communities. Any policy initiative that risks sapping the enthusiasm of this constituency would be profoundly damaging to the Democratic Party’s political prospects.

[Morgan Ome: What the labor movement can learn from its past]

Second, consider the implications of the Democratic Party’s growing reliance on affluent residents of large metropolitan areas, both as voters and as small-dollar donors. According to the political scientist Sam Zacher, a necessary precondition of Democratic gains among affluent voters is that President Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders have embraced a less redistributive economic agenda, grounded more in support for “relatively economically costless forms of extensions of civil rights to more subgroups of Americans” than in deeply held egalitarian convictions. And though there is some evidence to suggest that affluent Democrats support economic redistribution in the abstract, Zacher points to surveys that find that these voters are far less supportive of concrete progressive-taxation policies that affect them directly. One predictable result of the Democratic Party’s rising dependence on the affluent is that elected Democrats are growing reluctant to raise taxes on upper-middle- and high-income voters, as evidenced by President Biden’s commitment to shielding households earning as much as $400,000 from tax increases.

What does the rise of these ActBlue Democrats mean for supply-side progressivism? At first glance, the emergence of a more tax-averse Democratic Party might not seem detrimental to that movement’s prospects. It could be an impetus for an increased emphasis on public-sector efficiency. More difficult to overcome is the fact that affluent Democrats tend to support exclusionary zoning policies in their neighborhoods, a stance that puts them directly at odds with supply-side progressives for whom YIMBYism is a core commitment. Assuming that supply-side progressives don’t intend to reinvent themselves as anti-tax NIMBYs dedicated to breaking the power of organized labor, they’re likely to encounter resistance from affluent Democratic voters.

And so the political prospects for supply-side progressivism aren’t especially bright. The Democratic Party has made a deal—for votes, for manpower, and for money—with public-sector labor and affluent metropolitan liberals. While leading Democrats may celebrate the merits of supply-side progressivism in the abstract, they will generally choose protecting the material interests of their most powerful allies over effective policy design. This dynamic isn’t an accident. It’s a necessary consequence not just of who the Democrats’ supporters are, but the party’s need to hold together a fissiparous majority coalition.

To change the Democratic Party’s political trajectory, supply-side progressives will have to make its core interest groups a better offer, and how they’d do that without vitiating the substance of their policy vision is not obvious. Or they can mobilize new constituencies capable of changing the balance of power within the Democratic coalition, which is easier said than done. Until the supply-side progressives find new friends, and figure out how to say no to their old ones, they will remain thought leaders without thought followers.

We’re Underfunding the Police

2023-03-08T09:22:44-05:00

Why is the United States so exceptionally violent? In 2021, for example, more than 26,000 Americans were murdered—a homicide rate that would be unthinkable in the affluent market democracies of Europe and East Asia. There are any number of explanations for America’s outlier status, including deep-seated cultural characteristics and the prevalence of firearms. But we suggest a different, more parsimonious perspective: This high level of violence is a policy choice brought about by insufficient action. We are so violent because we underinvest in our criminal-justice system.

That may seem counterintuitive amid claims that the U.S. spends excessively on public order and safety, and a movement to “defund the police.” But across all levels of government, the U.S. spends less than 1 percent of its GDP on policing, a share that has declined since the Great Recession. Our level of spending and the number of police officers we employ per capita put us in the middle of the pack relative to our OECD peers, even though our crime rate is far higher. And police-employment rates are declining, a concern police leaders were raising as early as 2019.

Then there is the structural fact that U.S. police departments are far more fragmented than those of our peer countries—the U.K. has 43 distinct police departments, whereas the U.S. has about 18,000. One result of our idiosyncratic approach to financing law enforcement is that poor and nonwhite jurisdictions have far less police protection than richer and whiter jurisdictions do. All this “under-policing” contributes to higher murder rates, especially in predominantly Black communities.

The problem doesn’t stop with policing. Court backlogs ballooned during the coronavirus pandemic, but even before then, courts were already taking too long to clear cases: According to research from the National Center for State Courts, just 30 percent of felony criminal cases were disposed of within 90 days, compared with the national standard of 75 percent. Our data on crime are in disarray too—in 2021, the FBI was forced to statistically guess at nationwide crime rates.

[Alec MacGillis: The cause of the crime wave is hiding in plain sight]

Some might object that the United States is home to a large and well-funded network of prisons, at least as measured by the number of people we incarcerate in them. But by other measures, we surely don’t spend enough. In-custody deaths are at shockingly high levels. A quarter to half of former prisoners reoffend within five years of release. And ex-offenders are massively overrepresented among the homeless population—a reflection, in no small part, of the inadequacy of the services available to people transitioning out of prison. Our penitentiaries house a large number of offenders, but that doesn’t mean they have the resources to protect and rehabilitate them.

One could trace this chronic underinvestment at least as far back as the Jim Crow South, when underfunded law-enforcement agencies were strikingly indifferent to violence against Black Americans. In The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, the legal academic William J. Stuntz observed that whereas killers of white Americans in that era could generally expect a vigorous response from the criminal-justice system, killers of Black Americans, regardless of race, were very likely to go free. And, as the journalist Jill Leovy observed in Ghettoside, that era’s absence of effective crime control in Black communities gave rise to vigilantism: Many Black individuals who found no recourse in turning to the law felt compelled to take matters into their own hands.

That pattern reverberates even now. In 2020, for example, Black Americans were the victims in 61 percent of all gun homicides, most of which go unsolved and unpunished by the law. Assuming they are apprehended and punished at all, offenders whose victims are Black can be expected to receive lighter sentences than those whose victims are not Black. In some zip codes in the United States, young Black men are more likely to be killed than if they served in wartime Iraq and Afghanistan.

This endemic violence has devastated the civic infrastructure of many American cities. Lawlessness gives rise to middle-class flight, which in turn shrinks the tax bases that finance local law enforcement. The isolation and deprivation that result are nothing less than a moral scandal.

[Nicholas Dawidoff: Poverty is violent]

The criminal-justice system affects millions of people every year, yet this crisis of underinvestment has been largely overlooked. Indeed, recent years have seen renewed liberal support for disinvestment in the criminal-justice system, propelled by the widely held view that we over-police communities of color and over-incarcerate.

The woefully unpopular “defund the police” movement is only the most visible manifestation of rising liberal support for disinvestment. It has also appeared in the push to shift many functions—including traffic enforcement and public-order maintenance—out of the criminal-justice system and often into the (less accountable) NGO sector, and in the imposition of unfunded mandates on police departments and prisons in the name of reform.

This approach is perhaps best understood as a sort of progressive version of “starve the beast,” the conservative theory that slashing taxes forces cuts in government programs. Advocates of criminal-justice reform argue in effect that because the system is broken, we should defund rather than fix it. They point to police misconduct and violence as evidence that policing doesn’t work, not that policing needs more resources. They point to slow courts as a reason to release suspects pretrial, rather than asking how to ensure speedy trials. They point to the worst conditions in America’s prisons and jails as a reason to decarcerate, but they don’t talk about how to make incarceration more humane and less criminogenic.

This “starve the beast” approach is particularly peculiar from the left, which usually identifies government dysfunction as a product of underinvestment. In this case, that prescription is correct: Improving our criminal-justice system means spending the requisite money to address America’s horrific and long-standing problem with criminal violence.

One leader who seems to understand this is President Joe Biden. The White House has pushed back against “starve the beast” progressivism, floating a $37 billion public-safety plan. Some of its investments—including $13 billion for the COPS Hiring Program and investments in court case-management tools—are smart steps in the right direction. But it also spends billions on alternatives to the criminal-justice system, including community-violence-intervention programs whose efficacy is at best unproven, and alternative responders who address just a fraction of police calls for service. It’s worth researching how these programs work at scale, but handing them $20 billion before that’s done seems unwise at best.

What could and should garner bipartisan support is a more focused package, one that concentrates federal dollars on improving the institutions we know keep us safe. Hiring tens of thousands of police officers, as Biden wants to do, is a good start. So is funding to help courts expedite case processing, particularly by modernizing case-management software and practices—which would in turn help bring backlogs under control. An obvious third area is rehabilitating failing prisons and jails. In addition, funding for research, evaluation, and statistics—which pays for both crime data and criminological research—has plummeted in recent years. Charging the Justice Department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, with making creative investments would make our system both smarter and tougher.

Why are these more traditional tools of crime control the right way to fight crime? Because decades of evidence show that they work. Studies of federally subsidized police-hiring grants consistently find that cities that receive the grants reduce crime compared with those that don’t. One study found that the burst of hiring overseen by the Obama administration prevented four violent crimes and 15 property crimes for each cop hired. For every 10 percent increase in police-force size, another estimate suggests, violent-crime rates drop by 13 percent and property-crime rates by 7 percent.

The benefits of funding don’t stop with police. The speed with which courts dispose of cases has been considered central to criminal deterrence for centuries. Supporting this, probation programs that impose what experts call “swift, certain, and fair” sentences—a short jail stay—have been shown to deter drug offenders in Hawaii and drunk drivers in South Dakota. And it’s intuitive that worse prisons engender more crime: Research from Colombia finds that as-if-random assignment to a newer, better prison reduces an offender’s risk of reincarceration within one year by 36 percent.

In short, spending on our criminal-justice system’s capacity offers palpable, proven returns. This is particularly significant against the enormous costs of crime, estimated at more than $600 billion in 2017 alone—mostly due to violence. If we have a pressing problem, and tools that can address it, how can we not use one to resolve the other?

Some conservatives may blanch at expanding federal spending amid soaring inflation and a looming debt crisis. But a small increase in the federal government’s already limited outlays for public safety—about $66 billion in 2021—could be compensated for with spending cuts on less-effective programs. And although state and local policy makers should lead the way, the federal government has long used the power of the purse to backstop the provision of the state’s most basic function: public safety.

Standing up to “starve the beast” progressivism makes sense electorally. But it is also the right thing to do for our too-violent nation. Every year, tens of thousands of people are murdered. We can do more, much more, to stop the bleeding, if only we spend what’s necessary to meet our most basic civic obligation: protecting public order and safety.

Conservatives Can Win By Embracing ‘Selectionism’

2022-06-17T06:00:00-04:00

The conservative intelligentsia is in the grip of a profound demographic pessimism—a sense that a diversifying America necessarily spells doom for the right, and that the movement’s only hope is therefore to halt, or at least sharply reduce, immigrant inflows. Portents of demographic doom have long been a mainstay of conservative media, whether on the Fox News prime-time lineup or in highbrow journals of opinion, and embracing restrictionism has become a surefire way for ambitious Republicans to signal their edginess and resolve.

But a funny thing has happened on the road to conservative demographic doom. Since 2016, a rising number of first- and second-generation Americans have been gravitating to the political right, a trend that predates the current political travails of the Biden administration and that has grown particularly pronounced among voters of Latin American origin. Cosmopolitan liberals who have long imagined themselves the vanguard of a rising progressive majority are now confronting the possibility that they are an overrepresented rump, with political influence that stems more from their control over elite institutions than widespread popular support.

Given this emerging political realignment, immigration, and the incorporation of immigrants and their descendants into American civic life, is proving less an obstacle to conservative political ambitions than an opportunity to expand the conservative coalition. Rather than cower in fear at the progressive left’s supposed efforts to use immigrant inflows to remake the U.S. electorate, as some on the restrictionist right would have it, why don’t conservatives embrace an immigration strategy that can move America in a more conservative direction?

The term restrictionism conflates two distinct ideas: that our country should take in fewer immigrants, and that Americans, and Americans alone, have the right to choose whom to admit to the United States. If the former is polarizing, the latter commands broad public support, which helps explain why Americans have traditionally drawn a sharp distinction between legal and illegal immigration, perceiving the latter as a violation of the rules the country has established for selecting newcomers. Further, there is good reason to believe that what matters to GOP voters is not absolute reduction but control. The big question, in other words, is not “How many immigrants?” but “Who decides, and on what grounds?”

[From the May 2021 issue: America never wanted the tired, poor, huddle masses]

The key is to focus on what I call selectionism, or the unambiguous defense of the American people’s right to choose whom to admit and whom to exclude, and to do so on the basis of promoting the national interest. By abandoning restrictionism for selectionism, ambitious Republicans could not only assuage the concerns of their base while promoting the interests of the country—they could also, potentially, chart a path out of the current immigration deadlock that would appeal to a broad, multiracial majority of Americans.

The politics of this moment represent a striking reversal. As recently as a decade ago, many of the Republican Party’s rising stars were calling for a major increase in immigrant admissions. Today, in contrast, virtually all Republicans have united around the cause of immigration restriction. And though this is true for a number of reasons, perhaps the most salient is the aforementioned conviction that immigrants and their descendants are destined to become foot soldiers of the progressive left.

Anxieties over ethnic change are a familiar feature of U.S. politics, and calls for immigration restriction grounded in a belief in fixed ethnic identities and political allegiances have a certain realpolitik logic. Cosmopolitan liberals really have described immigrants and their descendants as part of a “coalition of the ascendant” that can foster progressive political dominance, and at least some of their opponents have taken this demographic triumphalism seriously. The trouble with this brand of ethnocultural determinism, however, is that it reflects a political era that is drawing to a close.

Until very recently, one could take this notion that immigrant origins are a reliable predictor of support for Democratic candidates for granted. Drawing on data from the 2016 presidential election, for example, the political scientist George Hawley found that established Americans—native-born Americans with native-born parents and grandparents—were significantly less supportive of Democratic candidates than first- and second-generation Americans, even after controlling for a wide range of individual-level attributes. And though one could argue that the unique circumstances surrounding Donald Trump’s polarizing presidential campaign played a role in this outcome, as Hawley readily acknowledges, it nevertheless helped make the case for conservative demographic pessimism.

Yet today, the conservative movement finds itself on the cusp of what could be a prolonged period of political success. If non-college-educated voters continue to move rightward, as many observers on the left and right confidently expect, Republicans will soon have an even larger advantage in contests for the U.S. Senate and Electoral College, which Democrats will find exceedingly difficult to overcome. This possibility has engendered dread among progressive intellectuals, who fear the prospect of a more powerful GOP, and it has given rise to “popularist” calls for a new Democratic politics that is more responsive to working-class interests and sensibilities. But to take full advantage of this opportunity, the right would do well to embrace selectionism.

Consider that most Americans strongly prefer educated immigrants in high-status jobs over other immigrants, and this preference varies very little according to education, partisanship, labor-market position, and ethnocentrism, according to a study by the political scientists Jens Hainmueller and Daniel Hopkins. As a result, high-skill immigration has had a markedly different political impact than low-skill immigration.

In 2018, the economists Anna Maria Mayda and Giovanni Peri released an analysis of the impact of immigrant inflows on county-level election outcomes from 1990 to 2010. They found that an increase in the proportion of college-educated immigrants in a given county’s population was associated with increased support for Democratic candidates, while an increase in the proportion of non-college-educated immigrants was associated with increased support for Republican candidates, a result that they hypothesized was tied to the perceived costs and benefits of immigrant inflows. That is, because higher-skilled newcomers were seen as generating positive spillovers for their communities, they boosted support for the more pro-immigration Democrats; a lower-skilled influx, in contrast, buoyed restrictionist Republicans.

[From the October 2021 issue: Plan Z for immigration]

In the years since 2010, however, the immigration landscape has changed. In the 2000s, it was not uncommon for Republicans to back the expansion of low-wage guest-worker programs to signal their pro-business bona fides, a stance that, as Mayda and Peri’s work suggests, engendered a conservative backlash in rural regions. Outside of agriculture, however, GOP-aligned employers and donors have lost interest in spending their political capital on making it easier to recruit low-skill immigrant labor. The rise of offshoring has meant that large domestic employers have less economic interest in lobbying for low-skill immigration today than in earlier eras, when low-skill, low-wage manufacturing represented a larger share of the U.S. economy. We’ve seen this pattern in many of the world’s market democracies. More and more, support for low-skill immigration is rooted in humanitarianism, not hard-nosed economic self-interest. The result is that the Republican elite has largely jettisoned its politically costly commitment to low-skill immigration, thus allowing for a pivot to a more politically appealing selectionist stance.

At the same time, as the Democratic Party’s activists and donors have moved leftward, Democratic policy makers have come to reject the default expectation that new immigrants should be economically self-reliant, an expectation closely tied to selectionism. During the welfare-reform era, conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats worked together to pass limits on immigrant eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, non-emergency Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, and a range of other programs, an approach dubbed “immigration yes, welfare no.” This proved politically effective for immigration advocates, as there is evidence that U.S. voters are more concerned about immigrants collecting public benefits than they are about the prospect of immigrant wage competition.

More recently, however, progressives in the media and the nonprofit sector have come to place a heavy rhetorical emphasis on the moral and humanitarian dimension of immigration policy, suggesting that denying entry, and public benefits, to almost any would-be migrant would be unacceptably cruel. Democrats in state legislatures and in Congress have worked to expand access to public-benefit programs to immigrants, including unauthorized noncitizens. On the left, “immigration yes, welfare no” is giving way to “immigration yes, welfare yes,” a stance that remains anathema to conservatives and moderates. The implication of this position is not only that U.S. citizens have no say in who is admitted to the country but also that American taxpayers must foot the bill for immigrants who can’t support themselves. Given the unpopularity of this arrangement, restrictionism is becoming a more potent wedge issue for Republicans running against Democrats who find themselves constrained by elite progressive opinion.

But if restrictionism has greater appeal—at least to some voters—than the more self-flagellating forms of progressive humanitarianism, it is still not a position capable of building a durable national majority. Indeed, these two poles in the immigration debate feed off each other, locking the country in an unproductive, zero-sum dispute. Conservatives and some moderates, fearful that liberals wish to pursue a de facto open-borders policy, embrace restrictionist politicians as the least-bad option. Meanwhile, elite progressives, correctly judging that full-blown restrictionism alienates many voters, feel little pressure to moderate their rhetoric or take concerns over low-skilled and irregular migration seriously. The result is an immigration debate pitting the “woke” against the “MAGA,” with the broad majority of Americans of all colors left out. For Republicans, selectionism offers a way to break this impasse—one that meets the concerns of their existing voters while broadening the party’s appeal to the first- and second-generation voters already trending in its direction. The children and grandchildren of post-1965 immigrants would be especially drawn to a selectionist approach that welcomes productive newcomers while rejecting any compulsion to set immigration policy on the basis of the racialist fixations of cosmopolitan liberals.

[Adam Serwer: The real border crisis]

As for what a selectionist immigration agenda might entail, much depends on whether it should center on bloodless materialism or some robust vision for how newcomers might shape America’s cultural and political character. In light of the changing global economic and demographic landscape, and challenges and opportunities as varied as renewed great-power competition and the rise of intelligent machines, there is a strong case for focusing on attracting superstar talent. As Caleb Watney of the Institute for Progress has observed, “the advantage to a country that attracts geniuses compounds over time, as clusters form around them—talent attracts more talent—which helps all the individuals and firms in such clusters become more productive than they would be in isolation.” Post-Brexit Britain has moved sharply in this direction. Having asserted the sovereign right to control immigrant inflows, the British government is adopting a points-based immigration system and launching a new “high potential individual” visa aimed at graduates of the world’s most prestigious research universities. And though populist critics warn that the government’s selectionist approach is inviting an anti-immigration revolt, the survey evidence thus far suggests otherwise.

Progressive humanitarians and conservative restrictionists alike would no doubt denounce this frankly elitist approach to immigrant selection, but 78 percent of U.S. adults support encouraging high-skill immigration, including 63 percent of the minority of voters who favor reducing immigrant inflows overall. While evidence on the economic and fiscal impact of low-skill migrants on the native-born is contested, there is an overwhelming academic consensus on the economic benefits associated with high-skill inflows.

Nevertheless, I don’t anticipate that a selectionism grounded in a narrowly utilitarian calculus will carry the day. If conservatives do eventually embrace a more creative and aggressive approach to immigrant admissions, as I believe they will, it won’t be because of arguments about maximizing America’s growth potential, important though they may be. I suspect it will be in response to more-contingent developments. The ongoing incorporation of anti-socialist Venezuelans into the conservative coalition, for example, might lead Republicans to look favorably on other South Americans seeking to flee the rising influence of Marxist political movements in their homeland. In a similar vein, the political awakening among Asian Americans opposed to racial preferences and alarmed by rising urban violence might cast Chinese émigrés fleeing their native country’s intensifying authoritarianism in a more favorable light. Rank-and-file conservatives might also see wisdom in welcoming Ukrainian refugees, or in raiding the most-skilled scientists, workers, and entrepreneurs from Russia and other geopolitical adversaries. And though the demands of progressive humanitarianism don’t resonate with the right, at least some religious conservatives can be counted on to champion the interests of Christian minorities facing persecution in Africa and elsewhere, a brand of selectionism grounded in cultural affinity.

It would be foolish to expect Republican politicians to suddenly start disavowing their restrictionist commitments. But as more and more first- and second-generation voters turn right, the shrewdest conservative political entrepreneurs will come to recognize that immigration can represent a demographic boon more than demographic doom.

America Needs Anti-Racialism

2022-05-26T06:00:00-04:00

President Joe Biden has declared war on white supremacy. Shortly after the hideous racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, he urged his fellow citizens to banish this hateful ideology from our public life: “We need to say, as clearly and forcefully as we can, that the ideology of white supremacy has no place in America.” But what exactly do we mean by white supremacy, and what would it mean to bring it to an end?

Debates over race and racism—their importance to U.S. history, their salience for present-day politics, and what steps the government should take to address them—are central to our politics. Although there is widespread agreement that the state of race relations in America is a matter of urgent concern, there is deep disagreement over the nature of the problem. Is it the persistence of racial disparities in income, wealth, and elite representation, regardless of whether they’re the product of state-enforced racial discrimination or the uneven distribution of social capital across families and informal networks at a given point in time? Or is the problem the brightness of the boundaries separating minority ethnic groups from the societal mainstream? Call this the distinction between anti-racists and anti-racialists. Both want racial progress, but they have a drastically different understanding of what racial progress would look like.

[Ibram X. Kendi: The double terror of being Black in America]

In some circles, the default position is the ideology known as “anti-racism,” often derided by its critics as “wokeness.” According to prominent proponents of this view, such as the Boston University professor and Atlantic contributing writer Ibram X. Kendi and the New York Times Magazine writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, racism is the defining fact of American life, and the old color-blind liberalism is woefully insufficient to address it. The only way our racist history can be overcome, in their view, is for Americans to become more explicitly conscious of race and racism, embrace educational paradigms that center race, and pursue policies that aim not for equal treatment but for “equity,” or equal outcomes among groups. As Kendi summarized this position, “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”

Over roughly the past decade, anti-racism has made huge inroads in liberal institutions, including universities, media, and the Democratic Party. This shift has trickled down through the wider Democratic electorate, especially among educated and affluent Democrats, for whom anti-racism has become an intellectual lodestar. Consider the Biden administration’s “equity agenda,” an ambitious effort to embed race consciousness in federal policy making. At the state and local level, a rising generation of progressive elected officials has embraced decarceration and depolicing to address disparities in criminal-justice outcomes. Many have also sought to dismantle selective public education and the use of standardized testing on broadly similar grounds. Bracketing the question of whether anti-racism offers an accurate diagnosis of contemporary American life, it has a clear appeal to certain powerful constituencies, which have been willing to advance its tenets even when doing so has proven politically costly.

What is less understood, however, is the opposition to liberal anti-racism. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a wave of parental complaints and legislation against anti-racist school curricula (“critical race theory,” or CRT), and backlash against politicians and district attorneys who have adopted anti-racism-inflected approaches to crime and public safety. One of the more striking illustrations of this phenomenon can be seen in progressive San Francisco, where local voters ousted three of the city’s school-board members in a successful recall effort in February. The recall received particular support in precincts with larger proportions of Asian and Jewish voters, many of whom were reportedly alienated by, among other things, the school board’s decision to end selective admissions at the renowned Lowell High School. Judging by recent polls, a similar coalition is poised to recall Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s district attorney and an exemplar of the anti-racist progressive-prosecution movement, next month.

[Annie Lowrey: The people vs. Chesa Boudin]

In the eyes of the anti-racists themselves, the campaigns against CRT, affirmative action, and progressive criminal-justice reform are just racism—a form of “white backlash” against the growing political power of minorities, which is all the more insidious for professing to be “color-blind.” Slightly more difficult to account for is the fact that, on many sensitive racial issues, nonwhite minorities are aligned against the positions of the progressive anti-racists. In a Pew Research Center survey from April, for instance, 59 percent of Black respondents, 68 percent of Hispanic respondents, and 63 percent of Asian respondents agreed that race should not be a factor in college admissions. Research from Zach Goldberg, a doctoral student in political science at Georgia State University, has shown that white liberals consistently express stronger agreement with many tenets of the anti-racist worldview than do minorities. More generally, as the Democratic Party has become more and more identified with anti-racism, it has actually shed support among nonwhite people, especially Hispanics.

Some anti-racists have sought to explain away these phenomena by invoking concepts such as “multiracial whiteness”—the idea that minorities adopt “white” values in order to curry favor with a white-supremacist system. There’s a grain of truth there, in that many nonwhite people really are aligned with the mainstream American values derided by liberals as racist. But a better way to interpret their worldview—and that of many of the top critics of liberal anti-racism—is that it’s not racist at all. Instead, it’s what I call “anti-racialism.”

If liberal anti-racism is grounded in the idea that raising the salience of race is essential to achieving racial justice, anti-racialism holds that heightened race consciousness, and the racialization of disparities and differences that would obtain in any culturally plural society, more often than not cuts against fostering integration, civic harmony, and social progress. Among anti-racist scholars, efforts to lower the salience of race tend to be denounced as manifestations of “laissez-faire racism,” as they ignore or downplay the cumulative and multidimensional nature of racial disadvantage. Yet anti-racialism is a potent political force precisely because it resonates with important aspects of our country’s new racial landscape.

First, anti-racialism speaks to the emergence of a new multiethnic mainstream, which marks a departure from the system of minority- and majority-race relations that prevailed for most of American history. Put simply, mainstream American culture is no longer “white” in any narrow sense. Here it’s useful to draw a distinction between whiteness and mainstreamness, a more inclusive and capacious concept. In 2020, the legal academic Ian Haney López and the human-rights lawyer Tory Gavito, both of whom have long been involved in progressive political organizing, reported that though one-fourth of Latinos identified as “people of color,” a large majority disagreed. “They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.”

[Adam Serwer: Demography is not destiny]

This idea of an expanding mainstream is central to the work of the sociologists Richard Alba and Victor Nee, who’ve defined it as “that part of American society within which ethnic and racial origins have at most minor impacts.” For Americans who’ve been fully incorporated into the societal mainstream, ethnic identity is more voluntary or symbolic than a powerful force that constrains their choices. In The Great Demographic Illusion, Alba underscores that the American mainstream is not coterminous with whiteness. “Just as the white Protestant mainstream that prevailed from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century evolved through the mass assimilation of Catholic and Jewish ethnics after World War II,” he writes, “the racially defined mainstream of today is changing, at least in some parts of the country, as a result of the inclusion of many nonwhite and mixed Americans.” This is especially true of Americans with roots in Latin America and Asia. Among Hispanic and Asian Americans, intermarriage rates now match or surpass those of Italian and Jewish Americans from the postwar era, a powerful indicator of their incorporation into the mainstream.

Granted, one could argue that the divide between Black and white Americans is simply being supplanted by a divide between Black and non-Black Americans that is no less pernicious or impermeable. Consider that the intermarriage rate among Black Americans lags noticeably behind that of other minority ethnic groups, even after accounting for cross-group differences in educational attainment and income. In The Diversity Paradox, the sociologists Jennifer Lee and Frank Bean dub this phenomenon “black exceptionalism,” and it is one of many reasons our discourse over race relations continues to center Black Americans. Even if we accept that some Black Americans are being incorporated into the expanding mainstream as residential integration, rising educational attainment, and geographic and social mobility continue to take hold, the intense racial isolation experienced by most Black descendants of enslaved African Americans remains an important social fact.

Nevertheless, there have always been Black conservatives who embrace an anti-racialist perspective. For example, when asked if Black Americans should work their way up without special favors the same way the Irish, Italians, and Jews did, a statement that would be considered beyond the pale in many elite media and academic institutions, the 2020 American National Election Survey found that about 20 percent of Black respondents agreed or strongly agreed with that statement; another 20 percent said they neither agreed nor disagreed.

Though ideologically conservative Black Americans remain underrepresented in elite discourse, they’re playing an important role in urban Democratic politics. This is especially true in the intensifying debate over crime and disorder, in which a multiethnic coalition of anti-racists calling for decarceration—on the grounds that mass incarceration disproportionately burdens Black Americans—finds itself arrayed against a muliethnic coalition of anti-racialists demanding reinvestment in policing—because all citizens, regardless of color, deserve to be safe from criminal violence.

Might this inchoate contest between anti-racists and anti-racialists augur a larger realignment? The answer is far from clear. The main challenge facing anti-racialism today is that it is still a non-elite phenomenon. Although it represents the unarticulated common sense of vast swaths of the electorate, it has few high-status champions and scant presence in mainstream media. For ambitious people looking to ascend through prestigious legacy institutions to positions of national influence, it is simply not the done thing to dwell on the ways in which the current progressive consensus is unrepresentative of how most Americans, including many Americans of color, think about race. But when politicians—including conservative politicians—articulate these values, they can appeal to the untapped anti-racialist majority.

How to Fix H.R. 1

2021-04-14T10:35:23-04:00

The For the People Act is the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s effort to remake American democracy. The legislation has galvanized a large and well-funded coalition of left-wing activists, elected officials, and advocacy groups, many of whom still insist that victory is within reach. Indeed, in light of the controversy over Georgia’s new voter-access law, this coalition might soon expand to include some of the nation’s leading corporate executives. Nevertheless, the bill, which passed in the House, seems doomed in the Senate. The most obvious problem it faces is that Joe Manchin, the all-important senator from West Virginia, has made it exceedingly clear that if he’s going to get behind voting-rights legislation, it will have to be bipartisan.

Even though the measure is co-sponsored by the 49 other senators who caucus with the Democrats, and was opposed by only one House Democrat, Manchin is far from alone in his misgivings. If there were a serious danger that the bill in its current form might be signed into law, its support among congressional Democrats would quickly evaporate.

If the reform movement wants to see changes actually enacted, instead of denouncing the bill’s opponents as enemies of democracy, it ought to consider appealing to the sensibilities of Manchin and other political misfits who are wary of framing democratic reform as a partisan cause.

[Christopher J. Regan: What the media are missing about Joe Manchin]

Before considering a better way forward, it’s important to understand why the For the People Act is making so many Democratic regulars anxious. The bill is a sprawling collection of different proposals, and not all of them enjoy universal support. The bill’s redistricting reforms, for example, represent a threat to a number of Democratic incumbents who stand to benefit from partisan gerrymandering in the months to come, which hasn’t escaped their attention. And at a time when left-of-center Democratic candidates are raising prodigious sums from affluent donors living outside their district, many moderates are wary of the bill’s small-donor matching program, which could supercharge the campaigns of progressive primary challengers.

As it stands, the For the People Act aims to encourage small donations to congressional campaigns by providing a sixfold federal-government match to donations of $200 or less. Congressional candidates who opt in to this program would be forced to accept a maximum donation level of $1,000, which is significantly lower than the current maximum of $2,900. The stated objective of the program is to dampen the influence of wealthy donors by reducing the size of the largest donations and multiplying the impact of small ones, making small-donor fundraising a more lucrative proposition

The small-donor matching program, inspired by a similar effort in New York City, sounds innocuous enough. As Richard Pildes of the NYU School of Law has observed, however, there is an important difference between the two programs. While the New York City program matches only small donations made by city residents (and not those made by people living in Palm Beach, Florida, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, no doubt to the disappointment of the national-fundraising phenom Andrew Yang), the For the People Act does not limit matching funds to in-district contributions. Rather than mitigating the growing tendency of House candidates to rely on out-of-district donors over in-district donors, this provision will almost certainly increase it.

Given that congressional candidates already rely heavily on out-of-district donors, this aspect of the small-donor matching program might seem immaterial. But evidence shows that the rising influence of out-of-district donors has already led House members to be less responsive to their own constituents. In a recent article in Legislative Studies Quarterly, the political scientists Brandice Canes-Wrone and Kenneth M. Miller report that “when the national donor base prefers a different outcome than a representative’s general and primary electorates, overwhelmingly the member chooses the donor-favored position.” This could merely reflect the ideological proclivities of the members in question, whom you’d expect to be more in tune with their like-minded donors than a random assortment of their neighbors. But Canes-Wrone and Miller also found that “the higher the proportion of out-of-district donations a member has received in recent years, the more responsive they are to the preferences of the national donor class” and, relatedly, that “responsiveness to national donor opinion is higher the safer is the district.”

Though the For the People Act’s campaign-finance provisions haven’t attracted nearly as much attention as its voting reforms, there is good reason to believe they’d have a larger impact on the shape of our politics. Making voting more convenient may be a worthy thing to do, but there’s scant evidence that it increases voter turnout, let alone changes the outcome of elections. Campaign-finance subsidies, in contrast, can have a significant influence on who runs and wins, depending on their design. Intentionally or otherwise, the small-donor match in the For the People Act is likely to boost ideologically extreme candidates who devote their time and energy to cultivating a national donor base.

[George Packer: The man who waited 50 years for this moment]

One response would be to abandon the idea of a small-donor matching program outright, which may well be the right call. There is another possibility, however: Congress could devise a different program, one designed to encourage candidates to be more responsive to their voters by limiting small-donor matching funds to in-district donors. It wouldn’t prevent national donors from supporting candidates they believe in, as is their right. But it might push against the intensifying nationalization of American politics, at least a bit. As such, it might appeal to senators such as Susan Collins of Maine, the centrist Republican who won reelection in November after overcoming a massive fundraising disadvantage, and other moderates in Congress who’ve been forced to reckon with the rise of the ActBlue fundraising machine.

The redistricting reforms in the For the People Act raise a different set of issues. One is that even in the absence of explicit partisan gerrymandering, it can be exceptionally difficult to draw competitive single-member districts, given the intense concentration of Democratic voters in dense communities, as the political scientist Jonathan Rodden has observed. The only way to ensure election outcomes in strict proportion to statewide partisanship, which seems to be the goal of the bill’s independent redistricting commissions, is to establish a more proportional voting system, a solution that I’d happily embrace, but that is, for now, a nonstarter.

If independent commissions won’t do very much to advance their ostensible purpose, congressional Democrats who believe they will bear some cost from taking redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures will be even less inclined to do so. This is particularly relevant in the case of House members who represent majority-Black districts, who’ve reportedly been particularly wary of redistricting reform. Given the near uniformity of Black partisanship, it can be difficult to disentangle partisan gerrymandering from efforts to draw majority-Black congressional districts.

Rather than fixating on independent commissions, a bipartisan democratic reform effort could include a modest expansion in the size of the House of Representatives, one of several worthy proposals endorsed by the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. The House has been capped at 435 members since 1929, when the U.S. population was just over a third of what it is now. In addition to improving the quality of democratic representation by making congressional constituencies (modestly) smaller, this reform would have the added benefit of easing the pain of the next round of congressional reapportionment, which since 1929 has inevitably entailed stripping congressional districts from states that are shrinking in relative terms and bestowing them on states that are growing. Adding an additional 50 members, as the commission suggests, would eliminate the need to shrink the size of any state’s congressional delegation.

Moreover, this increase in the size of the House would lend itself to the creation of at-large districts, an idea that’s been championed by Anne Kim, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Under Kim’s proposal, states with more than two representatives would allocate one seat to an at-large member, who would represent all of the state’s voters. This at-large district would, of course, be impossible to gerrymander, and it would ensure that every voter in the state would have two House members looking out for their interests. Kim maintains that these at-large districts would be more likely to elect moderates, which is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw. This would surely make at-large districts attractive to Manchin, Collins, and other self-styled centrists who’d welcome an infusion of moderate members.

Neither of these proposals is a guaranteed winner. A small-donor matching program of any kind will surely meet with resistance, not least from limited-government conservatives who have legitimate qualms about using taxpayer dollars to fund political campaigns, as will expanding the House, a step that would necessarily dilute the clout of each individual House member. Yet Democratic moderates, many of whom resent the influence of a national donor base that is to the left of their voters, and Republican populists, many of whom are concerned about the leftward drift of corporate America, would have much to gain from this more modest agenda for democratic reform, and that’s no small thing.

Is America’s Educational System Becoming More Pluralistic?

2021-02-08T06:00:00-05:00

Updated at 1:49 p.m. ET on February 11, 2021.

President Joe Biden has made it clear that he wants to “reopen school doors as quickly as possible,” and that he’s willing to spend generously to make this happen. But he’s not going to get his wish. Even if Congress passes the president’s pandemic-relief plan, which includes $130 billion for the reopening of K–12 schools, in addition to the $67.2 billion Congress has already authorized under the CARES Act and the pandemic-relief legislation that passed in December, some teachers’ unions are setting out conditions for reopening that will be exceedingly difficult to meet, and threatening further “safety strikes” if they don’t get their way. In some districts where the teachers’ unions are especially powerful, the return of in-person learning might not happen until well into the 2021–22 school year. And the longer the COVID-19 disruption lasts, the more likely it is to have a deep and lasting impact on the politics of public education.

The heavy toll of school closures—on parents who are finding themselves under intense economic and emotional strain, on students who are experiencing profound learning loss that threatens to compound over time—might have been expected to put teachers’ unions at a political disadvantage. That’s certainly the impression you’d get from recent reports of fierce battles over school reopenings in cities and towns across the country. Judging by recent surveys, however, parental opinion of teachers’ unions has barely budged since the start of the pandemic.

[Derek Thompson: The truth about kids, school, and COVID-19]

Why has the political response to school closures been so muted? For one, at least 28 percent of students are receiving instruction that is fully in-person, and many reside in Republican-leaning districts. As the political scientists Michael T. Hartney and Leslie K. Finger recently observed, the best predictor for whether a school district offered in-person learning this fall was Donald Trump’s vote share in that district in 2016. In California, for example, public schools in politically competitive and right-leaning areas such as Fresno, San Diego, and Orange Counties are mostly in-person while schools in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles remain entirely remote. Reopening battles between unionized teachers and parents desperate for in-person learning are mostly taking place in Democratic cities and suburbs.

Moreover, blue-state parents are divided on the question of reopening schools. Though learning loss has been particularly pronounced for low-income students of color receiving instruction remotely, working-class Black and Latino parents are far more reluctant to send their children back to school than white parents and more affluent parents, many of whom are clamoring to do so.

One might therefore conclude that parental outrage over prolonged, evidence-defying school closures is a niche phenomenon, which teachers’ unions and their allies can safely ignore. But that would be a mistake. The upper-middle-income parents who are most exercised by union resistance to school reopenings play a disproportionately large role in shaping the structure of American public education. If a growing number of these parents decide that they have an interest in alternatives to union-dominated district schools, expect the educational landscape to start looking very different.

Consider that support for educational choice among Democratic voters has, for years, followed a bifurcated pattern, in which Black and Latino people’s support for targeted vouchers, universal vouchers, and charter schools has surpassed support among white people. Nevertheless, Black and Latino support for educational choice hasn’t made much of a difference in national Democratic Party politics. One explanation is that the organized and focused power of the teachers’ unions has proved more meaningful in Democratic primary elections than the diffuse sentiments of working-class parents of color, many of whom do not vote.

Yet the teachers’ unions have been at their strongest when they’ve had grassroots support. More often than not, that support has come from upper-middle-income parents who are deeply invested, literally and figuratively, in their suburban district schools. In an age of civic decline, district schools remain a powerful tool for fostering social ties and a sense of shared purpose among parents in a given community, as the Dartmouth economist William A. Fischel argued in Making the Grade.

Since the advent of the school-choice movement, its most tenacious and effective blue-state opponents have been affluent suburban parents who have an interest in defending the exclusivity, perceived quality, and fiscal stability of their schools. That has meant ensuring that district borders are stringently enforced, local property-tax wealth flows into local district schools, and exits to nondistrict alternatives are kept to a minimum. School-choice policies threaten to undermine every one of these pillars: Interdistrict-choice programs would allow out-of-district students to enroll, thus undermining schools’ exclusivity and perceived quality, and they’d enable parents dissatisfied with district schools to find alternatives, diverting resources in the process.

Over time, however, suburban school districts have been growing less fortress-like. A number of states, including California and Texas, have made significant efforts to equalize school funding across districts, which have lowered the stakes of interdistrict choice. And with 14 percent of all public-school students now receiving special-education services of one kind or another, a growing number of suburban parents are embracing the idea that their children might benefit from specialized options beyond their local district schools.

Just as important, I suspect, the COVID-19 school closures have disrupted the community-specific social capital that has been so essential to the political strength of district education. They’ve led some families to relocate, and many more to consider doing so. If you believe that the rise of remote work is going to lead to a reordering of America’s economic and social geography, it follows that schooling patterns will change as well.

Though not all of the families that have been forced to embrace “pandemic pods” to educate their children are thrilled about it, at least some of them will decide that micro-schools are a better option than traditional district schools after the pandemic subsides. Others will look to the relative success of high-performing charter networks and Catholic schools in navigating the tumult of the past year as a reason to welcome increased choice. And while support for the teachers’ unions has remained stable in recent months, some evidence indicates that support for educational-choice reforms has been rising. Why fight over reopening your local district school if you can send your child somewhere else, without having to move to another town or another state?

[Elliot Haspel: The debate about school safety is no longer relevant]

None of this is to suggest that the deconsolidation of American public schooling is inevitable. Demand for alternatives to one-size-fits-all district schools will mean nothing without an increased supply of attractive educational options, and the teachers’ unions and their allies can do a lot to stymie the emergence of alternatives. What’s also true, however, is that a cross-class coalition for educational choice that reaches deep into the suburbs will be much harder to marginalize and defeat than one centered in low-income urban neighborhoods.

As disastrous as the pandemic has been for education in the short term, it might be the deus ex machina that leads to a more pluralistic educational system in America.

Why Conservatives Are Turning Against Higher Education

2019-08-20T10:46:25-04:00

This article was updated on August 20, 2019 at 5:53pm

A native of small-town Missouri who excelled at Stanford and Yale Law School, Josh Hawley, the junior senator from Missouri, is keenly aware of how higher education can serve as a springboard into the elite and the challenges facing those it leaves behind. But that’s not to say he’s a cheerleader for the higher-education industry. Like many on the right, the senator often speaks of the higher-education sector as a kind of cartel, one that has left America’s non-college-educated majority out in the cold.

At a recent gathering of conservatives, for example, Hawley drew a straight line from the declining economic prospects of non-college-educated workers to a number of social maladies. “Just about any American worker without a four-year college degree will have a hard time in the cosmopolitan economy. Maybe that’s one reason why marriage rates among working-class Americans are falling, why birth rates are falling, why life expectancy is falling. All the while, an epidemic of suicide and drug addiction ravages every sector, every age group, every geography of the working class.”

This divergence of the economic prospects of the college-educated and non-college-educated is hardly a new development. What is new, though, is the growing interest among Republican lawmakers, Hawley included, in doing something about it legislatively. One implication of the senator’s remarks is that Congress ought to be more solicitous of the interests of the non-college-educated, and to that end the senator recently introduced legislation that, according to The Hill, would allow low-income students to use federal dollars currently earmarked for higher education to pursue vocational training.

[Read: The rural higher-education crisis]

Leaving aside the merits of Hawley’s proposal, there is reason to believe that it is good politics, or rather good Republican politics. As the Pew Research Center finds in a new survey, there’s been a sharp increase in dissatisfaction with America’s colleges and universities among Republicans in recent years, and it makes perfect sense for right-of-center policy makers to want to do something about it.

Consider the changing composition of America’s major-party coalitions. Shortly after the 2018 midterms, Adam Harris observed that the Trump presidency was accelerating the “diploma divide,” which refers to the starkly different voting patterns of college-educated white voters and those without a degree, a split that is unique to whites. In the midterms, Republicans did 16 points better among whites without a college degree, while securing the votes of only 45 percent of their college-educated counterparts. In contrast, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988, he did so in part by winning college-educated white voters by 20 points.

Another factor in the diploma divide is the gender gap in college attendance and completion. In the 1980s, women began graduating from college in higher numbers than men, and since then, their advantage has only widened. Today, you have to go up to the 60-and-over demographic before you find men outnumbering women among college graduates. The diploma divide has also had implications for partisan geography. When Republicans lost the House in 2006, half of their vulnerable seats were in districts that had more college graduates than the national average; that number was 70 percent for the 2018 midterms.

Finding themselves firmly on the college-educated side of the diploma divide, Democrats are naturally committed to increasing subsidies for higher education. Plans to cancel outstanding student-loan debt and eliminate tuition at public universities, such as that of Senator Bernie Sanders, would subsidize the industry to the tune of several trillion dollars. While Sanders’s sweeping plan might be understood as an appeal to the younger voters who have buoyed his presidential candidacy, it also reached a more niche audience: the many people who earn their livelihood—in one way or another—from what Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Grant Addison, a deputy editor of the Washington Examiner, unaffectionately call “the college-industrial complex.”

Much as supporters of robust military spending tend to have both ideological and more prosaic political reasons for their position, Democrats interested in subsidizing higher education are presumably not oblivious to how much their party relies on college towns like Ann Arbor, Madison, and Raleigh-Durham for votes and small-dollar donations. And, of course, a growing share of non-elite universities could use a hand from government as their business models come under strain.

[Read: Here’s how higher education dies]

The higher-education sector is more and more threatened by growing numbers of graduates whose diplomas are not the golden tickets they had hoped for. A report prepared by my Manhattan Institute colleague Oren Cass observes that 41 percent of bachelor’s-degree holders work in jobs for which their degrees are unnecessary. Even people who graduate with a coveted STEM degree are facing challenges in the labor market. A report prepared by Hal Salzman, Daniel Kuehn, and B. Lindsay Lowell found that half of STEM grads move into non-STEM fields, and a third of these lane-switchers say they pivoted because their preferred field lacked opportunities. Broadly speaking, the wage premium conferred by a college education has not risen since the start of the century, and the bottom quarter of bachelor’s-degree holders have seen their wages fall below those of the average high-school graduate.

Colleges nervous about these lackluster outcomes must also must contend with unfavorable demographic trends. America saw a brief spike in births in the 1980s and ’90s as the large Baby Boomer generation reached its prime childbearing years, but has witnessed a precipitous decline in the years since. Writing in Bloomberg, Justin Fox describes how colleges survived previous demographic dips because of growth in the share of graduating high-school seniors drawn onto campus by the growing college-wage premium.

With that incentive dulled, America’s many non-elite colleges, universities, and community colleges are expecting their enrollment numbers to begin to decline in the middle of the next decade. That is, unless a large-hearted politician from one of New England’s most charming college towns can push through a bill to dramatically subsidize the cost of attending these schools.

As for college-skeptical Republicans, who now find themselves firmly on the other side of the diploma divide from their Democratic counterparts, their political imperative is rather different. With their growing reliance on the votes of non-college-educated adults, and in particular non-college-educated men, they have much to gain by dislodging higher education from its lofty position as the gatekeeper of middle-class prosperity. Hawley’s proposed legislation represents an effort to capitalize on this opportunity, but there is more that could be done.

According to higher-education critics on the right, the problem with America’s current approach to post-secondary education is that it channels the lion’s share of resources to colleges, which service a relatively privileged third of the country, while the remaining two-thirds of Americans are left to fend for themselves without the funding or training necessary to acquire a skill that offers an attractive wage in our globalized economy. What’s more, at some point along the way, the value of college became divorced from skill acquisition, to the point where 61 percent of employers told researchers at Harvard Business School that they turned away employees who possessed the requisite skills and experiences for job openings simply because they did not have a diploma, as Hess and Addison report in a recent essay in National Affairs.

[Read: The commodification of higher education]

Hess and Addison argue that the rise of the diploma as a signaling mechanism dates back to the Civil Rights Act. As late as 1963, 84 percent of jobs required some sort of general aptitude or job-specific test during the interview process. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was drafted, though, it included language aimed at ensuring that these interview exams were not stalking horses for discrimination. In the 1971 Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Company, the Court ruled that employer tests were only acceptable if the material was job related (as opposed to general or aptitude based), and in cases where preemployment tests have a disparate impact on protected groups, employers must show both that the test is predictive of job performance and that there is no less discriminatory method of separating out unqualified applicants. Hess and Addison argue that the fear of being sued pushed employers away from tests and toward the pursuit of bachelor’s-degree holders, which serves to signal a set of core competencies, many of which are what we consider basic character and social skills, rather than hard skills.

One way of understanding recent history, therefore, is that changes in the law led employers to place a higher value on college diplomas at the same time that the availability of middle-skill jobs came under pressure from the rise of offshoring and automation. Both of these trends contributed to the polarization of the U.S. labor market, which provides high-skill, high-wage jobs at one end and low-skill, low-wage jobs at the other, with a hard-to-bridge chasm in between. Understandably, policy makers responded by devoting more resources to the higher-education industry, which was meant to act as just such a bridge.

But whatever hopes we had for higher education acting as our bridge from the industrial age to the knowledge economy, conservative thinkers are now urging a different path. For their part, Hess and Addison argue that we need to once again allow employers to select for skills, rather than for crude proxies of skill. They note that private actors could begin bringing legal action against employers who insist upon college degrees for seemingly low-skill jobs under the same Griggs v. Duke Power Company precedent. College degrees are far from evenly distributed across racial and ethnic groups, and the fact that degree requirements have not already been challenged on these grounds is evidence of the rarefied place college education occupies in our culture.

[Read: American higher education hits a dangerous milestone]

While Hess and Addison focus on the demand for higher education, which they see as inflated by a signaling mechanism run amok, Oren Cass’s recent report focuses more on the supply of post-secondary opportunities suited to the non-college-bound. Specifically, he calls for shifting federal subsidies from traditional higher education to a new workforce-training grant that would give employers a larger role in preparing the non-college-bound majority for success.

The core insight of Cass’s proposal is that the current training regime fails because it is insufficiently tailored to employer needs. This point is best understood by examining the Cass proposal in detail. The $10,000 payout tied to workforce-training grants would go to any private-sector employer who takes on a trainee, defined broadly as someone who spends 15 hours a week on the job and another 15 hours receiving some type of training, with limits to help ensure that the program benefits those who need it most. The government can afford to take a hands-off approach in regulating what type of training is offered, because as Cass says, participants will vote with their feet, abandoning unproductive training programs for more interesting options.

As for how the federal government would finance this new program, Cass suggests repurposing some of the money that currently goes to colleges, perhaps redirecting half of the $150 billion over a 10-year period, giving colleges enough time to adjust to a leaner business model and employers a chance to think about how to best attract and spend the grant money.

Will conservative politicians embrace ambitious ideas like those advanced by Hess, Addison, and Cass? The idea that college is an invaluable engine of upward mobility is firmly planted in the national imagination, and no doubt many conservatives will balk at efforts to diminish its central role. But the diploma divide will, I suspect, continue to concentrate the minds of Hawley and other ambitious politicians on the right looking to create more accessible, lower-risk paths to upward mobility than gambling on college degrees that might not pay off.

Governors Are Losing the Space to Govern

2019-08-19T06:30:00-04:00

After gamely crisscrossing the country for months in pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, John Hickenlooper, once one of America’s most popular governors, announced on Thursday that he was dropping out of the race. Though his faltering campaign had recently become the cause of mirth, Hickenlooper wasn’t crazy to think he had a shot at the job when he started.

It wasn’t so long ago that the surest route to the White House was first to serve as a governor. As Alan Greenblatt of Governing recently observed, governors won seven of the eight presidential elections from 1976 to 2004, hardly ancient history. During this golden age of governors, having served at the helm of a state government was seen as invaluable preparation for the Oval Office. Running the show in Sacramento or Little Rock might not have been quite the same as being the leader of the free world, but it contrasted favorably with, say, senatorial grandstanding. In the years since, however, gubernatorial experience has plummeted in value.

Consider that among the many current or former chief executives still vying for the Democratic presidential nomination now that Hickenlooper has exited the scene, the most popular is Steve Bullock of Montana, who is averaging a decidedly unimpressive 0.5 percent in surveys of primary voters. Though Bullock can tout having won reelection in a state that Donald Trump carried by 20 points, and that has an adult gun-ownership rate of more than 50 percent, he is tied with Tom Steyer, a hedge-fund manager and political novice best known for bankrolling environmental causes, whose chief distinction is his ability to blanket early-primary states with campaign ads. Jay Inslee, the well-regarded governor of Washington State, barely registers, despite his green bona fides. Not every governor looks at himself in the mirror and sees a future president. But to those who do, the dismal reception of Bullock and his fellow gubernatorial also-rans can’t be encouraging.

One explanation for this reversal of fortune for America’s governors is that in an ever more nationalized political climate, they find themselves at a distinct disadvantage relative to, say, U.S. senators. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are within easy reach of the D.C. press corps, and so number among the most obvious Democratic standard-bearers for reporters to turn to when they are looking for a response to President Trump’s latest missive. Governors, by contrast, toil in relative obscurity in state capitals, where they find themselves knee-deep in important yet unavoidably parochial issues.

[Read: The 2020 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

But I suspect there is something else at work in this apparent eclipse of America’s governors. What if the diminishment of state governors reflects the diminishment of state governments?

Recently, scholars at the Tax Policy Center made an effort to suss out how much state spending is locked in on the basis of formulas, legal injunctions, and federal mandates, and the results were eye-opening. In 2015, for example, 40 to 86 percent of California’s budget was restricted. The lower-bound estimate reflects the percentage of the state budget belonging to pensions, other postretirement public-employee benefits, debt service, and Medicaid. You get to the staggering upper-bound estimate by adding in K–14 education, which is funded through a formula that passed into law as Proposition 98 in 1988; transfers to local governments; TANF; corrections expenditures; and federal receipts. A closer look suggests that much of what is included in the upper-bound estimate really is mandatory, leaving today’s California lawmakers with very little say over how their state government taxes and spends. In times of significant fiscal duress, a supermajority vote can give California the leeway to provide less funding for K–14 education than the formula calls for, but the law also dictates that these shortfalls be made up for in later years.

In recent years, considerable growth in restricted spending has come from Medicaid. Specifically, Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, has accounted for 68 percent of the growth in restricted spending since 2000. Moreover, across all these states, lawmakers are faced with the same agonizing Medicaid problem. In order to receive federal matching funds, you must meet minimum service and eligibility requirements, which are costly. Refusing these funds, though, is essentially a political nonstarter because they are what pushes many public hospitals out of the red and into the black.

Across the United States, the combination of Medicaid costs, pension obligations, and K–12 education-funding formulas are capturing an ever-growing share of state budgets. In Florida, the lower-bound estimate is 33 percent, and the upper-bound is 78 percent. Those numbers are 32 and 71 percent for Illinois, 47 and 85 percent for New York, 37 and 84 percent for Texas, and 27 and 85 percent for Virginia.

[Annie Lowrey: The Supreme Court is bad for your health]

This drift toward restricted spending obtains across right-leaning and left-leaning states, and as a result, the substantive differences between conservative and liberal governance at the state level can be hard to discern. Every state, regardless of political coloration, spends far more on Medicaid, public education, and public-employee benefits than it did a generation ago, in no small part because of the availability of federal matching funds, part of a sprawling federal grant-in-aid system, that powerfully influence state spending decisions.

By promising to match state spending, federal grant-in-aid programs lower the effective cost of delivering services that Congress deems desirable, usually with strings attached that limit the autonomy of state officials. The advent of these programs then creates state-level constituencies that are deeply invested in their continuation, which in turn helps ensure that they can never be rolled back or substantially restructured. Even when federal grant-in-aid programs do afford some room for state-level creativity, a certain learned helplessness tends to creep in. State officials are so fearful of losing federal funds that they tend to stay well within the lines.

While grant-in-aid federalism flattens policy differences across states on matters of substance, cable-news controversies come to the fore. Battles over the regulation of guns, abortion, and immigration take up time and energy in state capitals that might, under conditions of greater autonomy, be devoted to bread-and-butter questions of what state governments ought to be doing in the first place. The more state governments fixate on nationalized cultural clashes, the less there is to distinguish governors from telegenic senators yelling at judicial nominees for the viewing pleasure of a small minority of die-hard partisans.

As for John Hickenlooper, it seems he’s not quite ready to give up on politics. The former governor reportedly is seriously considering running for the U.S. Senate.

New York’s Socialist Revolution Isn’t What It Seems

2019-07-08T06:00:00-04:00

Bernie Sanders has a new rival in Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, who recently made a feisty case that he, not the senator from Vermont, should be the tribune of the Democratic Party’s socialist left. Jaded New Yorkers have for the most part treated de Blasio’s presidential campaign as a joke, one that reflects the delusions of a mayor notorious for his laziness and gargantuan self-regard.

Notably, disdain for de Blasio seems to unite New Yorkers from across the political spectrum, including more than a few young leftists who toil in his administration. So it has been striking to see the warm reception for de Blasio’s performance at the first Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign in Miami, where he distinguished himself with his eagerness to interrupt his fellow presidential aspirants and to stake out the most leftward position available on any given issue.

Whether de Blasio has staying power is an open question. I’ll admit I’m skeptical. Nevertheless, it is fitting that de Blasio is contesting Sanders’s hold on the country’s democratic socialists, for it is the gentrifying precincts of New York City, not the college towns of rural Vermont, that are the heartland of American socialism. Even if avowed socialists are ultimately vanquished in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, as seems likely, socialist politicians are gaining real power and influence in the Empire State. Though many socialists will no doubt attribute this development to the widespread appeal of their ideas, the truth is that it is more an artifact of low-turnout Democratic primaries and the Republican Party’s precipitous decline in America’s densely populated urban regions.

Shortly before de Blasio’s coming-out party in Miami, Tiffany Cabán, a 31-year-old public defender endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, appeared to have narrowly defeated Melinda Katz, a veteran local politician, in the Democratic primary for district attorney of Queens. (When all the ballots were counted, Katz had a 20-vote lead; the race is now headed for a recount.) Cabán’s strong showing was, of course, touted as a sign that New York’s socialist insurgency has staying power. What it also reflected, however, is the fact that primary turnout was dismally low. Whereas 217,000 Queens Democrats voted in their party’s 2016 primary, a presidential year, only 85,000 turned out in June.

Primary voters in off-year elections tend to be more educated, more affluent, and more ideological than in other elections, which is a recipe that has served socialist candidates in New York City rather well. If she ultimately prevails with the support of a 34,000-vote plurality from a small pool of Democratic primary voters in Queens, Cabán is almost certain to win the general election and then to shift criminal-justice policy sharply to the left. And she’ll be in a position to do so even if a far larger number of Queens residents object.

None of this would have been possible without the withering of the New York GOP. For much of the postwar era, New York Republicans were able to maintain an ideological profile separate from their national party’s, one that offered fiscal rectitude and bourgeois morality rather than the Sun Belt libertarianism and overt piety associated with the GOP in other regions of the country. The New York GOP undoubtedly made missteps during the Giuliani and Pataki years, but the real driver of its decline was the larger nationalization of American politics.

As David Schleicher of Yale Law School has argued, “there is a mismatch between the level at which party identification is created and the level of government at issue in [local] elections.” Voters today come to their political opinions by aligning with either the Republicans or Democrats on questions of national concern, and then applying those allegiances to local and state races. The result is that because most New Yorkers reject the party of Donald Trump, local politicians like Tiffany Cabán and Bill de Blasio face only token opposition in general elections.

A similar dynamic has helped transform the New York State legislature. To understand why New York’s politics have moved sharply to the left since the 2018 election, it is helpful to ignore the state’s many outsize personalities and focus instead on a series of long-term trends. First, a growing share of the state’s population can be found in New York City. When you add in the city’s suburbs, downstate New York accounts for two-thirds of the state’s population. Second, downstate New York has grown more monolithically Democratic in state and local elections as the Republican Party has come to be seen as the party of socially conservative rural whites hostile to the region’s more socially liberal sensibilities.

Of course, this is not unique to downstate New York. The decline of the GOP in dense urban areas can be seen throughout the country, in blue states and red, as Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford University, observes in his important new book, Why Cities Lose. But it has been especially pronounced in the New York City region.

For several years, a small band of New York’s moderate Democratic state senators, the Independent Democratic Conference, formed a pivotal bloc that caucused with Republicans in the upper house of the New York State legislature to form a narrow majority. They did so in part out of an opportunistic desire to hold the reins of power, but also out of a sense that they needed to temper the ideological enthusiasm of New York’s activist left.

As long as this coalition of Republicans and rogue Democrats held the state Senate, left-of-center Democrats in the state assembly couldn’t get their way on taxes, charter schools, and rent regulation, among other issues. But in 2018 six of the moderate Democratic state senators who had previously aligned themselves with Republicans lost their seats to self-described progressives who campaigned on legalizing the recreational use of cannabis, single-payer health insurance, and extending new protections to unauthorized immigrants. In short, the sensibilities of the urban activist left triumphed over those of the suburban center.

Armed with majorities in both houses of the state legislature, Democrats have begun clearing the backlog on the progressive wish list, including the most stringent rent-control law since New York City was flooded with GIs returning from the Second World War. The law’s main thrusts are twofold: It forecloses the path to market prices and greatly reduces landlords’ incentives to maintain their buildings and units.

After a series of reforms passed under former Governor George Pataki, the number of rent-regulated units in New York City fell as property owners were given greater freedom to raise rents, old tenants were replaced by new ones (vacancy allowances), and monthly rents passed the state’s vacancy-decontrol threshold (which was set at $2,000 in 1993 and then raised to $2,733 in 2015), after which a unit was eligible to be rented at market rates once its current tenants moved out. Additionally, though yearly rent hikes in stabilized apartments are set by the Rent Guidelines Board, owners were previously allowed to tack on additional rent increases of up to 6 percent if they invested in the building or the unit.

New York’s progressive lawmakers thought this provision was too often used as a cover for excessive rent hikes, and so they’ve tightly constrained the extent to which landlords can recoup capital investments through higher rents. One likely consequence is that New York’s landlords will grow less inclined to invest in maintaining or improving rental housing. As for those who’ve made large investments in rent-stabilized housing in recent years in the expectation that they’d eventually be able to charge market-rate rents for their most valuable units, well, they’re about to see their investments crash in value, which in turn will discourage other investors from pouring their money into rental housing. The legislature could have taken steps to address this problem—for one, it could have paired new rent regulations with measures that would make it more attractive to invest in new market-rate rental housing in New York, which is in desperately short supply. But it did not.

The new legislation promises trouble along a number of other fronts as well. As The Wall Street Journal has detailed, the bill’s benefits will be concentrated in the hands of relatively well-off Manhattanites, who, though not rich per se, are far from the neediest New Yorkers, many of whom live in dangerously crowded illegal apartments on the edge of the city. It is in the city’s wealthiest borough where the largest gap exists between market and regulated rents, and where renters are effectively being subsidized to the tune of thousands of dollars.

It is not at all clear that these renters are more deserving than low-income outer-borough renters. The other challenge, endemic to rent-control efforts across the country, is that the forces that generate the political appetite for rent control are also the ones that ensure it will be counterproductive.

According to a report from the state comptroller, more than a quarter of the city’s renters pay 50 percent or more of their income in rent. Generally, policy makers and experts consider an affordability crisis to be an environment where a sizable share of the population is paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent. By that measure, New York’s housing crisis really did warrant major intervention. It’s just a shame that the more than 6 million New Yorkers who don’t currently reside in rent-regulated units, and all those looking to move to New York City in search of opportunity in the years to come, will now see their housing situation become more dire.

The reason, as Roderick M. Hills Jr. recently argued in The Washington Post, is that price controls encourage “producers to move investments out of price-capped commodities—namely, rental housing—into owner-occupied housing such as condominiums,” which in turn “diminishes the total supply of rental housing and increases the rents of any units that are not controlled.” Again, relaxing local land-use regulations might mitigate this effect, but the New York State legislature has betrayed no interest in going down that route.

Since 2018, despite a governor who is clearly wary of the far left, it is the democratic socialists who’ve seized the policy initiative in New York State, as moderate Democrats, fearful of left-wing primary challengers, have put up little resistance to their agenda. The long-term viability of this left-wing politics, though, is unclear.

Whether it be in two or six years, at some point Donald Trump will no longer be an omnipresent figure in our politics, and while he will undoubtedly have left his mark on the Republican Party at that point, it is hard to imagine another candidate so perfectly designed to raise the ire of suburban moderates. Additionally, by that time, suburban New Yorkers will have been reminded of all the places where they diverge from the fiscally expansive agenda of the urban socialist left.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has shown an Olympic gymnast’s flexibility on so many issues, has been unbending in holding down property taxes. Moreover, the suburban state senators who flipped the chamber balked at the prospect of statewide single-payer health care, not least out of concern for what it would have done to the finances of New York’s major hospitals. Should New York’s Democratic left stray too far from Cuomo’s political formula of marrying progressive symbolism with (relative) fiscal discipline, expect the revolution to fizzle out.

Los Angeles Is in Crisis. So Why Isn’t It Building More Housing?

2019-06-19T06:00:00-04:00

A few short months ago, Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, was giving serious consideration to running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Now he finds himself in the midst of a homelessness crisis that could doom his political future.

If you were to conjure up the ideal California politician, you could do worse than Garcetti, a Jewish Mexican American Rhodes Scholar with a gift for gab, in English and Spanish, and a winningly unpretentious style. As if channeling a young Barack Obama, the mayor is fond of invoking storied moments from the American past—the Great Depression, the Second World War, the civil-rights movement—to suggest that if previous generations were able to turn daunting challenges into historic accomplishments, then we ought to hold ourselves to the same exacting standard, a welcome alternative to the sourness and fatalism of other politicians on the left and right. But when it comes to Los Angeles’s long-running battle with homelessness, the mayor’s rhetoric looks more delusional than inspirational.

A month after Garcetti delivered his rousing State of the City address, California released its annual homelessness count, revealing that after an encouraging 4 percent drop from 2017 to 2018, Los Angeles’s homeless population grew by 16 percent in 2019, bringing post-2011 growth up to 52 percent. These numbers would be alarming in any city, but in Los Angeles they are especially so, because the city is the epicenter of a particularly brutal style of homelessness. Seventy-five percent of the city’s homeless population is unsheltered, typhus and typhoid threaten to create a public-health emergency, and a growing number of homeless people are either the perpetrators or the victims of violent crime.

[Read: Medieval diseases are infecting California’s homeless]

The mayor’s response has been to increase public spending on homelessness sharply, but he’s had frustratingly little to show for it. When the homelessness issue burst onto front pages a few years ago, Garcetti jumped into action with an ambitious plan to build emergency shelters in all 15 districts of the city. But as the mayor soon discovered, the issue with an “emergency” plan oriented around construction is that Los Angeles is a far cry from Bob Moses’s New York. Eighty percent of the shelters have been held up by red tape and community resistance. The short-term measures, then, must take the city’s built environment as a given.

A new sales tax boosted the city’s budget for dealing with homelessness to more than $600 million, or $20,000 per homeless person, while a bond issuance brought in $1.2 billion to go toward constructing an estimated 10,000 housing units over the next decade, all of which would be preserved for people transitioning off the street or in danger of ending up there. Los Angeles has taken about 16 percent of the funds from its recent sales-tax increase and packaged it as vouchers to offer to a share of its homeless population, allowing them to buy into the rental marketplace with the understanding that their subsidy will fade over the course of a year, shifting the burden onto the new renter.

While Los Angeles is right to want a program that moves people toward self-sufficiency—both for the sake of the homeless themselves and to protect the city’s coffers—the steep monthly increases as the vouchers fade out often outpace the low-wage, part-time work the recipients are able to find. Unsurprisingly, for an alarming share of recipients, the program is more of a one-year reprieve than the start of a new, stable life. Short of doing something serious about the underlying cost of housing in Los Angeles, a limited pool of voucher dollars will forever chase rising rents.

Before the city’s new homelessness count was released, the mayor had been touting the 20,000 people the city had moved off the street and into some form of housing. What we now know, however, is that while the Garcetti administration was helping to move 380 people off the street each week, some 480 others were joining the ranks of homeless Angelenos. Put another way, until someone does something about the city’s larger housing crisis, homelessness will be as much a part of the city’s landscape as Runyon Canyon.

[Reihan Salam: Gavin Newsom’s big idea]

Would building more housing bring an end to homelessness in L.A.? That might be too much to ask. As in most U.S. cities, a large share of the city’s homeless are thought to be mentally ill. The slice of Los Angeles’s homeless population dealing with mental illness is believed to be about 25 percent—relatively modest when compared with San Francisco, where an estimated 35 percent are struggling with mental illness, but still a substantial portion of the total.

Moreover, the city’s mild climate makes living outdoors a more viable option than in colder communities. The notorious encampments at Skid Row and in Venice Beach do not have counterparts in Manhattan, and it is safe to assume that a large number of seriously mentally ill people live in these parallel communities. Los Angeles also attracts an enormous number of homeless young adults from elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Among the 18-to-24-year-olds living on L.A.’s streets, whose numbers grew by nearly 25 percent this past year, a disproportionate share are newcomers to the city, who don’t have strong ties to the region.

These populations present knotty issues for city officials. Still, the fact that these populations are a distinct minority ought to give us hope that the majority of the city’s homeless can be reached through conventional public policy—that is, through reforms designed to increase the supply of housing, including low-cost, no-frills housing that can meet the needs of the very poor. If 10 years down the road, Los Angeles’s median rent has been pushed downward as a result of denser building, Skid Row might very well still exist as a home to people facing down hellish battles with mental illness and addiction. But at that point, the city would have the breathing room to focus on helping the hardest cases. Getting there is the hard part.

One of the ironies of this unfolding humanitarian disaster is that homelessness is a problem most pronounced in successful cities, where dynamic economies all too often meet rigidly regulated housing markets. As my Manhattan Institute colleague Stephen Eide observed in National Affairs, homelessness is not the product of poverty per se. Rather, homelessness is in no small part an artifact of being poor in a place where ferocious competition for a severely constrained supply of homes drives up rents. To offer one example of this dynamic at work, Detroit’s poverty rate is twice that of New York City’s, but because of its notably inexpensive real estate, it maintains a homelessness rate a third the size.

[Read: Why housing policy feels like generational warfare]

Los Angeles offers an example of this dynamic in extremis. In his incisive American Affairs essay on L.A.’s homelessness crisis, Jacob Siegel highlighted a study by Zillow that showed that you start to see a rising rate of homelessness once a city’s average rent reaches 22 percent of median income, and an even more rapid rate of increase once that number hits 32 percent. In Los Angeles, the average rent is 49 percent of median income. Some studies have shown that the city has as many as 600,000 people who regularly put as much as 90 percent of their monthly income toward rent. Simply put, these people need a lucky bounce to not end up homeless.

This lucky bounce might have come from California’s state government, where ambitious fixes to the statewide housing shortage have been in play. Earlier this year, to his credit, Governor Gavin Newsom set the goal of building 3.5 million new housing units in California over the next seven years, an implicit acknowledgment that insufficient housing supply was the driving force behind the state’s ruinously high rents.

This was a controversial stance for a progressive politician whose ideological allies often prefer to blame profit-hungry landlords and absentee owners. The substance to make good on Newsom’s promise was to be found in Senate Bill 50, an ambitious proposal from Scott Wiener, a state senator from San Francisco with unimpeachable left-wing credentials. In essence, S.B. 50 would have preempted local restrictions on density within neighborhoods that are well served by public transportation or in close proximity to employment centers.

In a nod to political reality, Wiener and his allies softened some of the bill’s more controversial provisions as it made its way through the legislature. Both its supporters and detractors understood that the bill would have done a great deal to boost California’s housing stock over time. But the bill died in committee, sunk by anti-growth legislators who denounced it as a threat to local control.

When a bill to help the most vulnerable people in California fails, one can hardly blame Sacramento’s dwindling band of conservative legislators, because they are very much on the margins of the state’s political life. They can hardly muster the votes to name a park bench, let alone decide the fate of California’s housing regulations. As Michael Hendrix, also of Manhattan Institute, has observed, the real culprits are self-described progressives, such as Paul Koretz, who represents most of the west side of L.A. on the Los Angeles City Council and suggested that S.B. 50 would take his district’s neighborhoods of single-family homes and make them “look like Dubai in 10 years.”* Then, from the other side of town, Damien Goodmon, the president of the Crenshaw Subway Coalition, suggested that the potential gentrification of his neighborhood amounted to a “Twenty-first century Trail of Tears.”

I sympathize with Koretz’s and Goodmon’s devotion to the built environment they know and cherish. Many of the sprawling single-family neighborhoods of Los Angeles are quite beautiful. It is hardly surprising that they’d want to fight against what they perceive to be disruptive change. The trouble is that their resistance to one form of disruptive change, as represented by the gradual replacement of single-family homes with higher-density apartment buildings that could house many more families at far lower cost, is contributing to another form of disruptive change—the transformation of large swaths of Los Angeles into unsanitary homeless encampments, where women, men, and children are forced to spend much of their waking hours fending off vermin.

And what did Garcetti have to say about S.B. 50? Though he refused to sign a Los Angeles City Council resolution denouncing the bill, the mayor didn’t come out in favor of it either, choosing instead to triangulate. In an exchange with Liam Dillon of the Los Angeles Times, Garcetti suggested that while he favored allowing the construction of duplexes and triplexes in keeping with the character of existing single-family neighborhoods, which he claimed had the potential to boost the city’s housing supply by as much as 50 percent, he felt Wiener’s bill went much too far.

It was exactly the sort of statement one would expect from a shrewd politician. By touting the virtues of duplexes and triplexes, Garcetti sounded righteous without committing himself to anything concrete enough to anger the likes of Paul Koretz. Meanwhile, L.A.’s homelessness crisis rages on.

* This article originally stated that Paul Koretz represents West Hollywood on the Los Angeles City Council. In fact, he represents District Five. West Hollywood is a separate city.

The Age of ‘Chimerica’ Is Coming to an End

2019-06-05T06:00:00-04:00

The story of the Chinese technology giant Huawei is, in miniature, the story of China’s extraordinary economic rise. Founded in 1987 in Shenzhen, which at the time was still an unglamorous backwater, Huawei’s early efforts centered around reselling telecom equipment imported from neighboring Hong Kong and, at the same time, working feverishly to figure out how to manufacture low-cost imitations of such equipment.

In less than a decade, Huawei went from being little more than a middleman to being one of Asia’s leading manufacturers of network technology, helped along by the support of the Chinese party-state, including the People’s Liberation Army, an early and devoted customer. Today Huawei is by one account the world’s seventh-largest tech company, and a mainstay of Shenzhen’s thriving hardware ecosystem. In recent years, the company has routinely sold more smartphones than Apple, and in 2018 it generated roughly as much revenue as Microsoft.

But that was all before Donald Trump made what could ultimately be one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency: By adding Huawei to what is known as the “entity list,” the Trump administration has cut off one of China’s most successful multinationals from the U.S. technology that it has heretofore needed to function. This is a decision that will have profound implications for the Chinese economy. Yet it will also test the United States, which has grown dependent on Chinese manufacturing prowess in building out its own network infrastructure. What happens next could forever transform the relationship between the world’s largest economies.

[Richard Fontaine: The China problem isn’t going away]

Trump’s decision to clip Huawei’s wings was not made lightly. It came in the face of evidence that Huawei’s growing reach poses serious security challenges to the United States and its allies. For one, Huawei has evinced a willingness to aid China’s clandestine intelligence-gathering efforts. In 2017, it came to light that Huawei-made servers in the African Union headquarters had been surreptitiously feeding classified information to a server farm in Shanghai on a nightly basis for more than five years. To date, nothing this brazen or damning has come to light in a G20 country, but there have long been concerns about Huawei’s eyebrow-raising security shortcomings. A March report from the British government suggested that despite Huawei being at the bleeding edge of 5G hardware, the security of its technology was “very, very shoddy,” a fact China hawks attribute to intentional design rather than a lack of sophistication.

To many in China, however, Trump’s blacklisting of Huawei looks rather a lot like a frontal assault on one of their country’s foremost national champions, if not an echo of the Opium Wars of the 19th century. The Chinese government has promised a forceful response that will target U.S. companies, and even individual U.S. citizens, it deems “unreliable.”

Understanding China’s vehement defense of Huawei is impossible without situating the company in China’s long-term vision for its economy. As Matthew Klein has perceptively noted in Barron’s, since the financial crisis China has moved away from its old strategy of deluging wealthy Western markets with low-cost goods. Despite China’s continued suppression of living standards, the cost of labor in China’s cities has risen as a result of a shrinking working-age population and sharp inflation in housing costs. Apple CEO Tim Cook has gone so far as to say that these pressures have moved Chinese manufacturing outside the low-wage target that multinationals such as Apple seek. This move away from being the “workplace of the world” is not a problem in itself. In fact, the “Made in China 2025” program reflects the Chinese Communist Party’s hope of aiming a new “China shock” at Silicon Valley. The issue, though, is that China’s enormous debt overhang might not allow for the seamless pivot the party is counting on.

Whereas the United States and Japan can service their debts at little cost, at least for now, debt service in China comes out to 20 percent of GDP. Given this debt burden, China was counting on its high-tech industries to win large market shares abroad and free up subsidies for the country’s struggling state-owned enterprises, which absorbed 70 percent of all new loans from 2013 to 2017.

[Read: The Huawei drama is a gift to U.S. tech companies]

Huawei, with its stratospheric rise, was the poster child for this approach. Yes, part of its competitive advantage still stemmed from government largesse, but the overall performance of the company more than made it a net benefit for the country. If the United States kicks off a trend of barring high-tech Chinese companies from lucrative Western markets, though, the Huawei model will be severely damaged. China would still press on with its push into high-tech sectors out of a desire to limit its own vulnerability to the type of supply-chain disruptions it is now facing, but the cost to the state would be far higher.

The purpose of “Made in China 2025” is to cultivate national champions, not create more wards of the state. Beneath all of the fawning media attention, the obstacles facing the Chinese economy are formidable. China is facing down the Japanese cocktail of high debt levels and an aging population, only it’s doing so before joining the ranks of the world’s richest countries. And unlike the government in Tokyo, the Chinese Communist Party cannot countenance a deep and lasting recession that could prove fatal to its legitimacy.

A recognition of China’s structural challenges, though, should not obscure that the United States has vulnerabilities of its own. With the exception of the dot-com decade from 1995 to 2005, the Unites States has seen lackluster productivity growth since the 1970s, which has contributed to wage stagnation and all of its associated ills. The economic wonders of 5G remain highly speculative, but unlike previous generations of wireless technology, there is reason to believe that 5G will have major cross-industry effects. To highlight a single but very promising example, when Ericsson installed its early 5G-sensor system in a factory for jet-engine blades, the defect rate was brought down by 10 percent, reducing the per blade cost by more than $4,000. Even if the 5G boosters are proved wrong, and its contributions to the economy end up being marginal, the upside is too large for the United States not to get in the race.

If blacklisting Huawei appreciably raises the cost of deploying 5G networks in the United States, American firms might find themselves at a distinct disadvantage. Over the next few years, as AT&T and Verizon build out their 5G infrastructure, swearing off Huawei means they will do so with hardware manufactured by Ericsson, a Swedish multinational, or Nokia, a Finnish one, as if to underscore the extent to which the United States has allowed its industrial know-how to atrophy. And Ericsson and Nokia hardware can be as much as 20 percent more expensive than Huawei’s offerings. When you consider this per unit premium compounded over the upper-bound estimate of 800,000 new 5G cells, the premium U.S. telecom companies will be forced to pay to guard against the threat of Chinese subversion is staggering. For smaller companies, particularly wireless providers for rural communities, the cost of moving away from Huawei could be prohibitive, unless the government steps in.

[Peter Beinart: China isn’t cheating on trade]

Consider the case of Nemont, as relayed by Charlie Campbell of Time. A pint-size wireless carrier operating in rural Montana, its tight margins forced it to rely on Huawei technology for its 4G hardware. Turning to a higher-cost supplier was simply not an option. Smaller players in the heartland such as Nemont would look to the federal government for relief should the Trump administration stick with the Huawei blacklist. The White House had already pledged $20 billion to expand rural broadband before the ban, a bill that may have to climb higher still.

While there’s nothing to say that either Ericsson or Nokia won’t find some cost-cutting innovations over the next few years to change this basic calculus, we should not bank on it. Instead, it would be wise to be seek out opportunities for cost-cutting and efficiency gains elsewhere in the process. At a minimum, the United States must overcome regulatory obstacles that have all but thwarted every other major effort to build out 5G infrastructure in recent years. Many of America’s larger cities and metros find themselves squeezed by soaring expenditures and cash-strapped voters who rightly resist new taxes. This has left ambitious politicians scrambling for revenue sources to paper over fiscal imbalances, even when this strategy risks deterring productive investment.

Take Portland, Oregon, where installing a 5G antenna required a $7,500 builders fee and then a recurring annual fee of somewhere between $2,500 and $3,500; or Dallas, where the right to build 5G antennae would cost you a one-time fee of $280,000. A recently announced Federal Communications Commission policy would constrain revenue-hungry local governments. Under the new guidelines, cities would be required to set their fees at however much it cost them to review the 5G-antenna application, which itself would have to be approved or declined within 90 days. It’s a policy that can’t hurt, but it won’t make the challenge of replacing Huawei’s technology all that much easier to overcome.

And so Trump has to make a decision. If he doesn’t want to cede the emerging 5G economy to a Chinese tech giant, whether out of security concerns or a larger anxiety about the loss of U.S. technological superiority, he must decide on an alternative course. One option would be to work with other market economies to reduce their collective dependence on Huawei’s low-cost networking technology. But that would require deft diplomacy—not the president’s strong suit—as America’s partners in this endeavor would need to be reassured that they have something to gain from willingly paying higher prices to fend off an amorphous Chinese challenge.

Alternatively, Trump could commit to a more ambitious strategy of rebuilding the U.S. industrial commons, and perhaps even building up U.S. national champions that can outcompete Huawei in manufacturing networking technology. In short, he could craft a “Made in the U.S.A. 2025” agenda fit to compete with “Made in China 2025.” Suffice it to say, the United States is not known for its ability to engage in this sort of long-term industrial planning, and even attempting to do so would raise hackles among free traders on the left and the right. Blacklisting Huawei is one thing. Figuring out exactly what to do next will prove to be quite another.

Regardless of the outcome of the Huawei controversy, it is yet another sign that the enmeshment of the Chinese and U.S. economies that has defined the past 20 years—the age of “Chimerica”—is coming to an end, and this will mean a painful adjustment for Chinese and Americans alike.

Modi's New Challenge Is Embracing Urbanization

2019-05-30T06:00:00-04:00

When Narendra Modi led his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to an outright parliamentary majority in 2014—a feat no party had been able to achieve in the previous 25 years of Indian politics—the hopes and expectations for his first term were straightforward, if lofty. Modi promised to build a “new India” that would curb corruption, spur economic growth, and advance the interests of the growing “neo–middle class” of erstwhile villagers striving to reinvent themselves as consumers.

Five years later, the BJP has secured a new electoral mandate even more impressive than the last, a testament to Modi’s unmatched political prowess. Yet it has done so despite an economic record that can be described only as underwhelming. If Modi hopes to do more than simply stay in power, if he still aspires to bring his new India to life, he’d do well to heed the advice of a small clique of economists who’ve been calling on his government to more fully embrace urbanization.

Why is it that Modi’s premiership failed to deliver robust growth? During his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat, one of India’s more prosperous and industrialized states, Modi envisioned India as a manufacturing powerhouse in the making. But that was not to be. To his credit, on his ascension to national office, Modi was clear-eyed enough to recognize that his preferred development strategy—cultivating a labor-intensive manufacturing sector that could sell its wares overseas, as China had done with such great success—was ill-suited to emerging global economic trends.

[Read: How Hinduism became a political weapon in India]

Modi and his advisers quickly came to understand that a combination of depressed demand in the mature market democracies and robust competition from other low-wage countries had essentially foreclosed the export-driven model of development, as Amy Kazmin and Lionel Barber report in the Financial Times. Instead, Modi reached for a grab bag of reforms and public investment, an approach one of his advisers described as “light many fires at once—to see if any of them would catch.” Modi’s policy mix has indeed succeeded in lighting many fires, though not all of them are burning quite as he might have wished.

It must be said that Modi has achieved some modest successes. His move to overhaul the tax code is a step in the right direction. The previous tax system vested too much power in the state and local levels, such that India’s domestic market was littered with internal trade barriers. The newly instituted VAT promises to facilitate more interstate trade and, hopefully, raise some badly needed revenue for India’s chronically under-resourced central government. In just two years, India’s tax base has increased by 50 percent.

The creation of a streamlined bankruptcy process is another long-overdue reform. An IMF report cited by the Financial Times found that under the old regime, creditors who turned to the courts to settle bankruptcy disputes could expect a process that would take four years to resolve itself and would, on average, end with them writing off three-quarters of the debts they were owed. Though far from perfect, Modi’s new bankruptcy code appears to have leveled the playing field for creditors, which should, in time, make Indian firms more attractive to investors at home and abroad.

The stimulus from these important reforms, however, has been dulled by a simultaneous liquidity contraction provoked by an ill-conceived policy of demonetization. Modi attempted to smoke out nefarious actors who were hoarding their wealth in hard-to-track cash, but instead produced a complicated and protracted financial crisis.

[Read: Misinformation is endangering India’s election]

In November 2016, in characteristically secretive and dramatic style, Modi announced that following a 50-day grace period, the country’s high-denomination bills would be worthless. What happened next was a short-term cash crunch as people took money out from under their proverbial (and sometimes literal) mattresses and poured it into bank deposits and mutual funds. Much of this $220 billion liquidity surge found its way into the hands of shadow banks, which in turn sparked a series of financial ructions that I won’t pretend to fully understand.

On balance, though, Modi has failed to deliver on his promise of faster growth. Under his government, India’s GDP has grown at about 7 percent a year, which looks more like the growth produced by the preceding government than it does the 10 percent average growth China maintained from 1990 to 2010. Moreover, the failure to jump-start manufacturing employment has left the country with an unemployment rate of 7 percent, driven in large part by a 20 percent jobless rate for urban men under 30, a slice of the population not known for its quiescence.

Perhaps the most high-profile undertaking of the Modi government has been its war against graft and corruption. Lest voters miss the point, Modi updated his Twitter handle to include the prefix Chowkidar, or “watchman.” Here too, it is unclear that Modi’s successes outnumber his failures. During the campaign, Modi’s opponents played off his own self-branding, telling voters “chowkidar choi hai” or “the watchman is the thief.” His success at the polls notwithstanding, 42 percent of Indian voters felt as if corruption had grown worse under Modi, compared with 36 percent who thought it had improved.

Interestingly, Kazmin and Barber of the Financial Times suggest Modi’s anti-corruption fervor has deepened his country’s credit crunch. They point to the case of Jet Airways, India’s oldest private airline, which went bankrupt because no state bank was willing to extend it credit, despite the fact that these same banks had taken managing control of the company and had been shopping around for a buyer. Kazmin and Barber present the view of an anonymous businessman who thinks this curious series of decisions can be attributed to fear of prosecution: “There is a subtle difference between being anti-corruption and anti-business. If I feel I am going to be persecuted, I’m going to be very careful in how I take my investment decisions.”

[Read: India’s prime minister is addicted to his iPad too]

Given that Modi failed to deliver rip-roaring economic growth, how do we account for Modi’s irrefutable political success? Those who attribute Modi’s success exclusively to his willingness to indulge and promote Hindu chauvinism, a sentiment not uncommon among English-language interpreters of Indian political life, miss an equally important, if more prosaic, explanation: the efficient delivery of generous welfare benefits, particularly to rural citizens.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Srinivas Thiruvadanthai of the Jerome Levy Forecasting Center argued that Modi deserved more credit for his effective administration of the welfare state, which is exceedingly important when you consider that more than 70 million Indian citizens live on less than $1.90 a day. One particularly impactful policy provided bank accounts to 300 million previously unbanked citizens. Though the program is still in its infancy, preliminary research has shown that areas with high exposure to the program saw upticks in health-related borrowing. Separately, in an effort to cut down on pollution and improve sanitation, the government has built 81 million household toilets and provided financing for more than 60 million cylinders of Liquid Petroleum Gas, which is a much cleaner home-cooking fuel than the cheap alternatives of firewood and kerosene.

While latrine building and small-dollar banking are not the most glamorous subjects for foreign correspondents to take up, they mean an awful lot to the citizens who no longer have to relieve themselves in fields or rely exclusively on informal networks for credit. Presumably, it was these tangible, bread-and-butter outcomes that allowed Modi to fare so well in left-leaning regions—such as West Bengal, which had long been a Marxist redoubt—and, more striking still, among Muslim women.

But all the latrines in the world won’t make India an economic dynamo. To pull off that feat, Modi must persuade Indians to embrace an urban future. Reuben Abraham and Pritika Hingorani, both of India’s IDFC Institute, a small but enormously influential think tank based in Mumbai, have made a convincing case that at present India’s state governments—which are each empowered to decide what qualifies as urban—systematically underestimate the urban share of their populations. According to the Indian Census, only 31 percent of the country’s population resides in urban areas. If, however, you were to adopt Ghana’s or Lebanon’s definition for what amounts to an urban area, India is almost 50 percent urbanized.

This definitional game has consequences—classifying an area as urban completely shifts the statutory responsibilities of local governments. Urban governments must do the important work of funding fire departments, building sewage lines, and drafting building standards. India’s current policy of closing its eyes to emerging cities is helping to ensure that its cities are filthier, more chaotic, and less economically productive than they would be otherwise.

And if India’s growth strategy is going to be defined by high-value services rather than labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing, it ought to heed the lessons of the world’s most successful postindustrial metropolises. Abraham and Shashi Verma, the chief technology officer of London’s transportation office, have argued that India should recast Mumbai, India’s financial capital, in the mold of New York or London, primarily by converting its shrinking port into a sleek new business district offering a high quality of life. Trivial though this effort might sound, the rise of Shenzhen, and the creation of Shanghai’s Pudong financial district, did a great deal to spur China’s urban development.

Ideally, Abraham and Verma’s Mumbai project would demonstrate that educated Indians needn’t move abroad to enjoy decent services or to build successful businesses. In The Other One Percent, a comprehensive analysis of the Indian-origin population of the U.S., the social scientists Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh posit that “controlling for quality, it will take decades for India’s system of higher education to simply match the stock of India-born doctorate-degree holders in the science and technology disciplines.” Only by building attractive global cities of its own can India hope to compete with the San Franciscos and Singapores in its efforts to attract and retain intellectual and entrepreneurial talent. And in doing so, Modi might finally deliver the accelerated growth that he has promised his voters.

Trump’s Immigration Proposal Is a Step in the Right Direction

2019-05-20T14:23:24-04:00

In an address last week, President Donald Trump offered an immigration proposal that, in his words, “establishes a new legal immigration system that protects American wages, promotes American values, and attracts the best and brightest from all around the world.” As just about every news outlet that’s covered it has made clear, the proposal is very unlikely to make its way through Congress. But that is hardly surprising. Short of a no-strings-attached mass amnesty, it is difficult to envision Democrats in the House endorsing any legislative proposal from the Trump White House on an issue that has proved so divisive, and so richly resonant to left-of-center activists and donors.

But Trump’s proposal actually gets the framework right for a new approach to immigration policy. Rather than reducing the number of green cards the U.S. grants every year, Trump is now calling for rebalancing admissions to ensure that a higher proportion of new immigrants are poised to achieve labor-market success. Trump has been inching away from steep reductions in legal immigration for some time. If congressional Democrats took this proposal seriously, they could push the administration to follow through on the logic of this plan, adding provisions that would make it both more politically viable and more effective. And for congressional Republicans, the plan offers a chance to turn a divisive issue for their coalition into a unifying one.

I’ve advocated for something like this approach in these pages on a number of occasions, and it is a centerpiece of my recent book. And so I’ve been struck by the Trump proposal’s reception. In short, the vagueness of the proposal has allowed the president’s critics to paint it in the darkest possible light, which is, of course, to be expected. But it is easy to see how a more refined proposal would prove broadly popular among conservatives and moderates, which is why the Trump White House would be wise to stay the course.

[Read: The U.S. system for ‘skilled’ migrants is broken]

The political case for moving from reduction to rebalancing is strong, even if it’s not a position that will satisfy immigration maximalists who see the notion of a more skills-based system as an affront, a group that appears to be overrepresented among the journalists who have been covering Trump’s proposal. Consider that a 37 percent plurality of U.S. adults wants to keep legal admissions at their current levels, while 68 percent are opposed to increasing them, proportions that would be higher still among voting adults. Moreover, there is considerable evidence to the effect that most Americans would favor prioritizing educated, English-speaking immigrants employed in high-wage occupations over those who are more likely to find themselves in need of a helping hand. Again, this might irk immigration maximalists, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Many observers see rebalancing without reduction as a nonstarter, not least out of an expectation that it would alienate the GOP’s restrictionist wing. No doubt there are Republicans who insist that reducing legal-immigration levels is essential, but support for their position has been falling among GOP voters in recent years, from 43 percent in 2006 to 33 percent in 2018, and it has fallen even more sharply among voters at large. Trump’s proposal is therefore best understood as a clear-eyed recognition that the classic restrictionist position is incapable of commanding even a narrow majority, certainly for now.

Then there is the fact that the immigration status quo has a number of quirks that are awfully unattractive from the perspective of many intending immigrants and naturalized citizens hoping to be reunited with their families. In 2017, 46 percent of the 1.1 million people granted lawful permanent-resident status were the spouses, minor children, and parents of U.S. citizens. This group always comprises the lion’s share of permanent visas, because there is no limit on the number of green cards issued to intending immigrants who are considered the immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. Notably, Trump’s proposal appears to leave this category untouched.

[Stepehn I. Vladeck: Yes, Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act to deport immigrants]

An additional 21 percent of green cards were given to so-called family-preference immigrants, who might be the adult siblings of U.S. citizens or the relatives of lawful permanent residents who have yet to naturalize, categories that are subject to maddeningly complicated per-country caps and other numerical limits. Taken together, 67 percent of all permanent visas fell into one of the family-sponsored categories. As for the rest, 13 percent of green cards were granted to refugees and asylum seekers, 12 percent to employment-based immigrants, and 5 percent to winners of the diversity visa lottery.

Among family-preference immigrants, it makes a big difference if you’re petitioning from a country with a large pool of potential green-card holders—including Mexico, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, and China—than one with a small pool, such as Switzerland or Tuvalu. Petitioners from high-pool countries are always bumping up against per-country caps, and so they’re often subject to long waitlists. Because the employment-based categories are so tightly constrained, an intending immigrant waiting for a family-preference visa doesn’t generally have the option of, say, mastering the English language and acquiring valuable skills to improve her chances of gaining admission. Indeed, she’d be better off persuading a U.S. citizen to marry her than to acquire skills that would help ensure she’d be able to thrive in America’s labor market. Needless to say, these incentives are perverse, and the insistence that our current approach to family-based immigration ought to be treated as sacrosanct is nothing short of bizarre.

At the same time, it is also true that Americans value family reunification as a core principle of immigration policy, and they’re wary of proposals that deprecate its importance. With that in mind, I’d suggest modifying, or rather clarifying, Trump’s immigration proposal so that its merit-based system would take family ties into account. Drawing on the Canadian experience, petitioners could be granted points for having an extended-family member who is already a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the U.S., but this wouldn’t be the be-all and end-all. Having a U.S. citizen sibling could give you a boost, but you could move up the queue by gaining valuable skills, or by securing a remunerative job offer from a U.S. employer for whom you’ve been working remotely.

[Read: The last time the U.S. seriously considered merit-based immigration]

This approach would prove enormously valuable to petitioners from high-pool countries, who are badly disadvantaged by the current system, and it might win over naturalized citizens from such countries, many of whom are frustrated by the decades-long waitlists they’re forced to endure to reunite with loved ones, and who’d welcome a system that would reward their relatives for speaking fluent English. On its own, the case for skills-based immigration risks sounding arid and abstract. While an increased emphasis on skills might stimulate human-capital investment among intending immigrants living overseas, which would benefit them and their neighbors whether or not they manage to settle in the U.S., we tend to neglect the welfare of people we can’t see. Emphasizing that a blended points system of the kind I’ve sketched out would help Filipino Americans and Mexican Americans reunite with loved ones willing to put in a bit of effort would make for a more vivid pitch, and it has the added benefit of being entirely true.

And there is another opportunity the Trump administration could seize: It could draw a more explicit and direct connection between immigration policy and human-capital policy. For example, the U.S. Department of Labor devotes a share of the revenue generated by application fees for the H-1B temporary work visa to fund apprenticeships for U.S. workers, a program with obvious appeal to an administration that often touts its “Hire American” agenda. Revamping the H-1B program by allocating its visas by auction rather than by lottery, as recently proposed by Alessandra Casella and Adam Cox, could improve the program itself by making sure H-1B visas are granted to the most valuable foreign workers and could generate a large increase in revenue, which could then finance the expansion of apprenticeships and other initiatives designed to develop the potential of U.S. workers, perhaps with a particular focus on struggling regions.

Do I expect the Trump White House to pursue the president’s immigration proposal, and to make it more attractive to a larger number of Americans, including naturalized citizens? I’m sorry to say that I’m skeptical. The Trump administration is divided between those who adamantly favor deep reductions in legal immigration and those who back a large-scale expansion of low-skill guest-worker visas, and so the middle ground of rebalancing without reduction is always at risk of being squeezed out. But that is not to say that other ambitious Republicans, and indeed Democrats, couldn’t pick up the baton.

Beto O’Rourke Was Right, and Democrats Might Not Forgive Him

2019-03-18T12:01:53-04:00

Beto O’Rourke has been doing a lot of apologizing since entering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination just days ago. Among other things, the former Texas congressman has expressed regret for having made light of his negligent parenting, for the extent to which he had benefited from “white privilege,” and for having penned a gruesome murder story as a teenager. Given the mood of the Democratic Party’s activist base, however, I suspect all these will be considered venial sins in comparison to the fact that he once flirted with entitlement reform.

While O’Rourke’s exploits as a teenage hacker could be dismissed as youthful mischief-making, The Wall Street Journal reports that he called for raising the Social Security eligibility age and means-testing federal entitlements as recently as 2012, when he was in his late 30s, old enough and wise enough, presumably, to have reached a considered judgment on such important questions of public policy.

Recall that O’Rourke was hardly alone among Democrats in championing entitlement reform during the Obama years. President Barack Obama, for one, had on several occasions called for restraining the growth of Social Security benefits, and the Affordable Care Act, his signature legislative achievement, introduced a series of new cost-control mechanisms designed to keep Medicare spending under control.

[Read: Beto wants to be Obama—but came off like Trump]

Of course, this is not news to those on the left who favor increasing Social Security benefits, an idea that now commands considerable support among Democrats in Congress, or who’ve condemned the White House for outlining a series of reforms that would reduce future Medicare spending, many of which were first proposed by the Obama administration. Whereas Democrats in the Obama era felt obliged to at least gesture toward fiscal rectitude, Democrats in the Trump era are increasingly convinced that doing so is at best a politically profitless undertaking. By 2018, O’Rourke had joined 150 of his Democratic colleagues in the Expand Social Security Caucus.

But the truth is that O’Rourke’s younger self was right on the merits. There really is a rock-solid egalitarian case for preventing old-age entitlements from gobbling up an ever-larger share of federal spending, and if O’Rourke hopes to build his presidential candidacy on something more than his supposed Gen X magnetism, he ought to consider making it while his many rivals race leftward.

As of now, the U.S. federal government devotes far more spending to the old than to the young. Eugene Steuerle, a scholar at the Urban Institute, estimates that federal subsidies per child are roughly one-sixth the level of subsidies per senior citizen, and federal benefits for children are set to decrease over time. This is despite the fact that 45 percent of infants and toddlers in the United States live in households with an income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level, a low-income share substantially higher than among the elderly.

Redressing this imbalance is a perfectly legitimate policy objective, and a number of proposals, such as the American Family Act recently introduced by Senators Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown, aim to do just that. But Bennet and Brown are largely silent on the small matter of how they would finance their generous new child benefit. Unless we’re willing to contemplate drastic middle-class tax increases, and not just the boutique taxes on the ultrarich that are all the rage among Democratic politicians wary of alienating their upper-middle-income constituents, the only fiscally sound way to increase spending on the young will be to contain the growth of old-age entitlement programs. In other words, O’Rourke’s heretical thoughts about Social Security and Medicare are perfectly compatible with his professed desire to boost public investment in America’s younger generations.

[Read: O’Rourke mostly gets a pass for his lack of specifics]

Entitlement reform needn’t mean abandoning the federal commitment to protecting the elderly from poverty. Social Security in its current form leaves large numbers of older Americans out in the cold. Only those with 10 years or more in formal employment are eligible for any benefits at all, which excludes a not inconsiderable number of Americans with sporadic attachment to the labor force. Moreover, Social Security benefits are tied to lifetime wages, which means those who’ve earned low wages throughout their working lives often find themselves in dire straits.

By transitioning Social Security to a flat universal benefit and a supplementary savings account, as Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute has proposed, the federal government could make the program more generous to the poorest of the elderly poor while also making it more fiscally sustainable. Would this be a wildly popular proposal? Surely not. It would, however, be rather more attractive than hiking taxes on working- and middle-class younger workers to finance benefits for affluent retirees, which is why the idea of means-testing will never die.

Again, I’m under no illusion that Beto O’Rourke will run for president as the candidate of fiscal sobriety. What is striking, though, is the extent to which he seems to be keeping his options open, a strategy that suggests he’d prefer to run on personality than on a detailed manifesto that could prove unduly constraining in the months to come. And so O’Rourke the fiscal conservative could reemerge when we least expect it, as Senator Bernie Sanders and his various imitators and acolytes are sure to point out. Democratic primary voters appear poised to look past all the other controversies swirling around him, but whether they’re prepared to forgive him for a sensible approach to entitlement reform is an open question.

What Fiji Can Teach America About Immigration

2019-03-12T06:00:00-04:00

The Republic of Fiji is perhaps best known as an earthly paradise, dotted with luxury beach resorts catering to the global elite. Yet Fijian history has a dark side to it. Since the colonial era, Fijian society has been divided between the country’s indigenous population, which is itself fragmented by status hierarchies, and Fijians of Indian origin, most of whom are the descendants of impoverished and illiterate indentured laborers brought to the islands more than a century ago. Intermarriage between these two groups remains exceptionally rare, and ethnic conflict between them, often over the control of land, has periodically erupted into rioting and constitutional crises.

Starting in 1987, Fiji saw a number of military coups d’état, in which indigenous Fijian military officers sought to curb the rising political power of the Indo-Fijian community, which was roughly equal in number to the indigenous Fijian population at the time. To entrench the superior status of the indigenous population, the post-coup government adopted a constitution that limited Indo-Fijians to a minority of seats in Parliament and barred them from ever serving as head of government or head of state. In the social realm, the post-coup government implemented racial preferences in the allocation of housing, education spending, and aid to businesses that further disadvantaged Indo-Fijians, notwithstanding the fact that they were on average no richer than their indigenous fellow citizens.

One unanticipated consequence of this campaign of legal discrimination, however, is that it spurred Indo-Fijians to invest in their human capital, as Satish Chand and Michael Clemens observe in a fascinating working paper. Unlike land or other material possessions, skills and knowledge can’t be seized by even the most predatory government, and they are almost perfectly portable. And so many Indo-Fijians took their skills and knowledge with them to other countries. Much can be learned from Fiji’s experience, and its lessons ought to inform the ongoing debate over U.S. immigration policy. Reorienting America’s approach to immigration to focus on skills wouldn’t only benefit the United States—it might also spur the development of other countries around the world.

[David Frum: If liberals don’t enforce borders, fascists will]

As Chand and Clemens make clear, Indo-Fijians found the post-coup diminishment of their status and economic freedom profoundly threatening, and the two decades that followed saw a mass exodus of skilled Indo-Fijian workers and their families. Why was it skilled workers who were most likely to emigrate? Most Indo-Fijian émigrés settled in Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, all of which had adopted immigration systems that prioritized the admission of skilled workers. During this 20-year period, the Indo-Fijian population plummeted, from roughly half of the Fijian population to fewer than 40 percent, and it has since fallen to under a third.

Given that skilled Indo-Fijian workers were in the best position to secure permanent visas in desirable destination countries, one might assume that the Indo-Fijian community experienced a sharp drop in its level of educational attainment as the best and the brightest rushed for the exits, an oft-discussed possibility in those years. But that is not what happened. After the 1987 coup, Indo-Fijians started enrolling in higher education at far higher levels than before, creating a much wider gap with indigenous Fijians in educational attainment than in years past. Older skilled Indo-Fijians did indeed emigrate in large numbers, shrinking the supply of skilled Indo-Fijian workers in the short run. At the same time, however, rising Indo-Fijian educational attainment soon replenished the stock of skilled Indo-Fijian workers, and then some.

Notably, Indo-Fijians didn’t just boost their educational attainment. They were particularly inclined to seek precisely the postsecondary credentials prized by Australia’s visa points system, a system designed to select immigrants on the basis of their prospects for success in the Australian labor market. In short, in the post-coup era, many young Indo-Fijians did everything they could to ensure they had a Plan B in Australia if things went south at home. Of course, not all skilled Indo-Fijian workers gained admission to Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, and so they’ve made do at home. Others found that while they wanted the option to leave Fiji, they’d prefer to remain in their native land. And as Fiji’s political situation has grown stable, it has been greatly enriched by a more educated workforce.

[Read: How the Democrats lost their way on immigration]

What should we Americans take away from Fiji’s recent history? For one, the priorities of immigration systems in desirable destination countries can have powerful effects on the decisions made by potential immigrants. Many thoughtful scholars, including Clemens, have argued that the best thing affluent market democracies can do regarding immigration is admit larger numbers of intending immigrants, both high skill and low skill, because doing so would yield enormous humanitarian benefits, and they have strong arguments on their side. For example, the Fijian case illustrates the importance of offering the citizens of poorly governed societies a way out. If skilled Fijian workers had no prospect of finding a market for their talents abroad, they would have had fewer options in the face of legal discrimination.

Another lesson of Fiji’s experience, however, is that a constrained and skill-selected immigration system can also yield significant humanitarian benefits. Such a system would offer individuals the possibility of an exit option, provided they first acquire skills that would help them achieve economic self-sufficiency in their chosen destination and, importantly, they enter an open competition with prospective immigrants from elsewhere, therefore giving rise to a race to the top. By adopting visa points systems that placed high value on educational attainment, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada helped kick-start mass skill creation among Fiji’s citizens of Indian descent, a development that has redounded to Fiji’s benefit in all sorts of ways.

Apart from strengthening Fiji’s tourism sector, which can now benefit from a surfeit of skilled managers, many in the country’s skilled workforce have embraced offshoring in other forms. It is growing more common for Fijian professionals to work remotely for firms headquartered overseas, where their skills and cultural knowledge make them enormously valuable, even when they’re far away. And unlike emigration, which can mean the severing, or at least the attenuation, of ties to loved ones at home, remote work gives skilled professionals the opportunity to access global labor markets without uprooting themselves.

With this in mind, it is worth reflecting on the message that the U.S. immigration system sends to would-be immigrants around the world. In 2017, 66 percent of the 1.1 million foreign nationals admitted to the U.S. as lawful permanent residents were admitted on the basis of family ties, while 12 percent were admitted on the basis of employment and 4.5 percent on the basis of diversity, which is to say that they hailed from countries that have sent relatively few immigrants to the U.S. in recent years. Most of the balance of green cards are granted to refugees or asylum seekers. Unless you have a close relative in the U.S., there is precious little you can do to secure a green card, even if you make a concerted effort to acquire skills that would put you in an excellent position to thrive in the U.S. labor market. Had they faced an immigration system like America’s, Indo-Fijians would not likely have responded by embracing skill creation—they might have been better off finding U.S. citizens looking for a Fijian spouse, or filing asylum claims that might not pass muster.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The nationalist case for amnesty]

It is not hard to imagine a system that would work rather differently, and that would do far more to stimulate skill creation around the world, even if the number of new lawful permanent residents was kept roughly the same. We could continue to treat the immediate relatives of U.S. citizens exactly as we do now—they secured roughly 46 percent of all new green cards in 2017. We could also continue to place extended family members of U.S. citizens, relatives of lawful permanent residents, citizens of countries that haven’t sent many immigrants to the U.S. in recent years, and employment-based petitioners, who altogether represented 37 percent of all new green cards in 2017, in a broader pool that uses a modified points system. If you have a relative or if you come from an underrepresented country, you’d be granted a modest number of points, on the grounds that having family members in the country could help you get on your feet and that a more diverse immigrant pool can be beneficial. Otherwise, points would be granted on the basis of skills that are strongly associated with lasting labor-market success.

To those who believe that people are utterly unresponsive to economic incentives, points systems might seem like a cruel rigging of the rules to benefit intending immigrants who are already privileged. What Fiji’s experience teaches us, however, is that many people will invest in their own human capital if they know that doing so will give them a shot at achieving a better life overseas. A well-designed points system would benefit the U.S. by ensuring that newcomers can make larger economic contributions sooner, because they’ll have a better sense of the challenges involved in successfully navigating the American economy.

Yet it would also benefit the world by stimulating human-capital investment—investment that will benefit all who choose to pursue it, including those who don’t (yet) gain entry through America’s Golden Door. Some immigrants would venture elsewhere, to countries offering entrepreneurial opportunities closer to home, and then they might take another shot at gaining entry to the U.S. in the future. Others would remain in their native countries, where they’d be well positioned to take part in the ever-expanding offshoring economy, which is poised for a boom in the coming decades, and where they’d share the fruits of mass skill creation with their neighbors and their loved ones, including those who can’t bear the prospect of leaving home.

The Trouble With Elizabeth Warren’s Child-Care Plan

2019-02-26T08:05:28-05:00

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s call for a new federal child-care program is nothing if not shrewd. The dream of a comprehensive federal program that would liberate working parents from having to scrap for a seat in a safe, clean child-care facility that will provide for their little ones for a full day, and all for a price so low as to be negligible, has obvious appeal across the Democratic Party’s class divide. But it’s also an object lesson in the unseriousness of how we think about social policy. Instead of just helping working families, her proposal risks increasing the federal deficit, driving up the cost of child care, and squeezing stay-at-home parents. And that last risk is one Warren should understand particularly well because she made her reputation as a public intellectual by warning against it.

There is no question that a lack of affordable child care is a thorny problem facing almost all working parents, especially those who can’t rely on extended family members or other informal arrangements to meet their needs. This is true not only for low-income families, for whom access to affordable child care can be a matter of economic survival, but also for a not-inconsiderable number of affluent professionals, not least those residing in high-cost cities, where well-intentioned licensing and training requirements can combine with labor and land costs to render even rather spartan day-care options prohibitively expensive.

With this bleak landscape very much in mind, Warren proposes that households earning 200 percent of the federal poverty line would pay absolutely nothing for child care, and that those earning more than that would have their fees limited to no more than 7 percent of their income. Given that many high-income households pay many multiples of that amount for child care now, this would be nothing short of a bonanza for them, assuming the child care in question is as high-quality as advertised.

[Read: Elizabeth Warren’s theory of capitalism]

Yet this is where our brows should start furrowing. If costs are capped at 7 percent of household income for better-off families, what reason would they have to shop around, and what reason would the new day-care facilities that would surely spring up to take advantage of this new federal program have to contain their costs? As far as their customers are concerned, any expenditures that push the underlying cost of providing day care above the 7 percent of their income they’d be obliged to pay would be of no interest—indeed, they’re to be encouraged, insofar as they contribute to a more salubrious day-care experience for their kids.

One assumes that the federal government would eventually seek to impose various cost-control mechanisms to keep its spending on the program from spiraling upward, as it has in the case of Medicare. In principle, the federal government could do some good by, say, voiding burdensome state and local regulations that contribute to high and rising child-care costs, though of course the federal government could presumably take such bold action now if lawmakers were so inclined, and at minimal budgetary cost.

But if we’ve learned anything from efforts to control rising Medicare expenditures, it is that providers that come to depend on government largesse can do an awfully good job of extracting more of it over time, especially when the populations they’re serving are sympathetic. Lawmakers are notably reluctant to strip benefits from the elderly population served by Medicare, and it’s not a stretch to assume that they’d feel much the same way about the small children who’ve been signed up for federally subsidized day care, and more precisely, about their loving parents.

[Read: When “universal” child care isn’t universally high quality]

In fairness, Warren claims that her child-care plan could easily be paid for by her proposed “ultra-millionaire tax.” Leaving aside the fact that this new federal wealth tax is very unlikely to pass constitutional muster—this is where the new enthusiasm for court packing would come in, I assume—Warren expects it to raise $2.75 trillion in new federal revenue over the next 10 years, a truly impressive-sounding sum. To put this number in context, consider that federal deficits are expected to exceed $2 trillion per annum by the end of the next decade, and that debt held by the public is expected to increase by $12.5 trillion over the next 10 years under current law.

Spending on social-insurance programs will increase sharply as the U.S. population ages, longevity increases, and expensive new medical therapies continue to emerge. Closing future federal deficits with a wealth tax would require importing a slew of new ultra-millionaires from another dimension and then taxing them with abandon, and that’s before we start contemplating Medicare for all or a Green New Deal, let alone a new federal child-care program.

But imagine for a moment that Warren’s federal child-care program could indeed be paid for, and that fretting over cost control is a hateful exercise. Even then, there would still be reason to tread lightly. In the late 1990s, the Canadian province of Quebec embarked on an eerily familiar experiment. To better the lives of parents and children alike, its government offered heavily subsidized child care at an out-of-pocket price of $5 a day. In short order, Quebec families flocked to the new program, including many who had previously relied on more informal child-care arrangements.

The results were, on one level, a great success. Labor-force participation surged among mothers in the province, which was one of the Quebec policy’s chief objectives. As the economists Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan have found, however, the outcomes for the children enrolled in the program were less encouraging. In a 2015 working paper, they reported that the Quebec policy appeared to have had “a lasting negative impact on the non-cognitive skills of exposed children,” one that was particularly pronounced among boys. Needless to say, the findings of Baker et al. are hardly the last word on the subject, and it is certainly possible that a federal child-care program in the United States would yield far superior results, perhaps by drawing on some of the lessons of the Quebec experience. But we can’t dismiss the results of the Quebec policy as the result of negligence or incompetence. Its designers were serious, thoughtful people who wanted to do right by Quebec families, yet their experiment had decidedly mixed results. It would be foolish to discount the possibility that the same might happen south of the border.

[Read: When expanding access to child care isn’t enough]

Then there is the fact that, as Patrick Brown observes in the latest issue of National Review, a large number of parents would much prefer to care for their children at home than to enroll them in day care. A 2015 Gallup survey found that 56 percent of mothers with children under the age of 18 reported that they would “ideally like to stay home and care for their house and family,” a number that might well be higher for the parents of young children.

Warren’s proposed federal child-care program would do nothing for stay-at-home mothers and fathers. Indeed, the sheer size of the benefit is such that it would nudge many parents who’d otherwise prefer to devote all of their time and energy to raising their children into the workforce. Apart from the fact that this would mean privileging one normative conception of family life over another, a controversial proposition in itself, another danger lurks. By boosting parental labor-force participation, a federal child-care program along these lines could boost household incomes (a good thing), which in turn could drive up home prices in neighborhoods with high-quality schools (a less good thing), thereby setting off a series of “frenzied bidding wars” that compel all two-parent families to become two-earner families, whether they want to or not. Or at least that’s what Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, argued in their provocative book The Two-Income Trap, published in 2003. At the time, Warren was a professor at Harvard Law School known for her deep interest in the financial fragility of middle-income families and, unusually for academics of her stature, for her heterodox political sensibilities, which blended economic populism with a culturally conservative streak. Judging by her child-care proposal, that Warren has been replaced by someone else entirely.

None of this is to suggest that there’s no room to improve federal child-care policy. One can imagine other approaches that could do more good at a lower cost. In 2017, Grover J. Whitehurst, formerly of the Brookings Institution, proposed a new child-care-and-education savings account (CESA) that would be financed by repurposing existing federal funds devoted to child care and by trimming tax expenditures. Targeted at low-income households, Whitehurst’s CESA has a carryover provision that would encourage families to spend their child-care dollars wisely while not leaving stay-at-home parents out in the cold. It is the opposite of a one-size-fits-all policy, and it is one that could command broad support across the political spectrum. Overshadowed by chimerical promises of free lunches for all, CESA deserves a long look from Warren’s rivals, and from all those who want a federal child-care policy that is fiscally sustainable and fair to all families.

Gavin Newsom’s Big Idea

2019-02-15T08:11:51-05:00

Not long ago, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was dismissed as a showboating opportunist who cared more about climbing the political ladder than he did about the finer details of public policy. But his decision to abandon the dream of a high-speed train that would ferry passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco, at least for now, suggests that he’s made of sterner stuff. Lamented by romantic environmentalists, for whom high-speed rail has long served as an emblem of ecological virtue, and cheered by critics on the right as a rare reversal for California’s ascendant left, the decision to pare back this misbegotten project is best understood as a wise strategic retreat from a governor with far larger ambitions for his tenure.

To the surprise of hardened cynics, myself included, Newsom has moved swiftly since his inauguration to address the state’s housing crisis, championing initiatives that have the potential to transform the face of urban California. Between now and 2025, he has called for the construction of 3.5 million new housing units, or an average of 500,000 a year. Considering that California has built an average of 80,000 new homes per year over the past decade, this is a pretty lofty goal. Newsom is envisioning a building boom that would surpass that of the postwar era, and that is exactly what the state would need to make up for lost time. This effort will require every ounce of his political capital, and it made the choice before him clear. Newsom could either fight tooth and nail for a bullet train for the classes, or devote his energies to building housing for the masses. So far, he seems to have made the right call.

California’s high-speed rail project was, from the very start, a textbook example of getting your priorities wrong. Nothing about passenger rail is remotely objectionable per se, and the diversion of some travelers from California’s overburdened airports, and from carbon-intensive air travel itself, would be a welcome development. The question, as ever, was whether the benefits of high-speed rail were large enough to justify the mounting cost of construction, which was expected to surpass $77 billion.

[Read: California’s high-speed rail—the critics’ case]

This is a sum that could finance a dramatic expansion of mass transit throughout the state’s largest metropolises, or a network of “driverless roads” that could unlock enormous efficiencies in moving people and goods. Alternatively, $77 billion could underwrite the spread of innovative technologies such as mass-timber construction, modular permeable pavements, and, well, you name it. If California’s goal were to achieve the biggest bang for its environmental buck, building high-speed rail would be far from the top of the list. It would make far less sense than, say, using those same funds to lower housing costs in cities in California, where the average carbon footprint is considerably lower than in more humid U.S. cities that are further east.

Even leaving environmental considerations aside, completing the high-speed rail project meant securing a right-of-way through the South Bay, home to some of the country’s most affluent, and most effective, opponents of development. That effort had met with limited success, to put it mildly, and the potential political dividends from kicking up that hornet’s nest were always slight: There you go; now you have a train you will use rarely, if at all. Watch as it rumbles by your hideously congested freeway. As of now, the plan is to complete the high-speed route currently under construction in the Central Valley, where it will serve as a monument to the armies of shortsighted elected officials, overpriced consultants, and delusional local boosters who inflicted it upon California, where a large and growing share of the population can’t afford decent housing.

Which leads us back to Newsom’s housing crusade. Given the political clout of California’s homeowners, many of whom can be expected to resist even the most modest densification of single-family-home neighborhoods, the governor’s housing effort is fraught with danger. Overcoming their objections will be exceedingly expensive, because it will require spending generously on measures designed to curb congestion, and cementing a pro-growth coalition of Silicon Valley employers, construction workers, public-sector employees, and renters desperate for relief. And Newsom’s off to a decent start.

[Read: The Bay Area’s housing crisis is even worse after the wildfires]

In recent weeks, the Newsom administration has, among other things, proposed spending $1.75 billion to incentivize housing production, boosting housing targets for local jurisdictions, and more controversially still, giving those housing targets new teeth by threatening to deny transportation funds to jurisdictions that fail to meet them. A small coterie of California lawmakers is devising proposals of its own to capitalize on Newsom’s enthusiasm, some of which are very ambitious indeed.

Yet much more needs to be done, as evidenced by the fact that cities and counties throughout the state have only set aside enough land for 2.8 million new homes to be built. There is simply not enough zoned land to reach Newsom’s target of 3.5 million new housing units, even if everything went swimmingly. To achieve his objectives, the governor will have to make the case not just for casitas, or accessory dwelling units that can be added to existing homes, or for the occasional smattering of duplexes and townhomes in postindustrial corners of the state where NIMBYs are few and far between. He will have to make an affirmative case for a new way of life, in which Californians embrace multi-family dwellings, walkable neighborhoods, and, sacrilegious though it may sound, trading their private automobiles, or at least their second private automobiles, for increased reliance on buses, bikes, and of course, electric scooters.

Is Newsom up to the challenge? I can’t really say. Because I don’t share his ideological proclivities, I’m inclined to be skeptical. What I do know is that the billions of dollars he might otherwise have wasted on a doomed high-speed rail project could be more productively spent bribing NIMBYs into becoming YIMBYs.