By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
December 12, 2022
Arizona
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (who hates the
attention) has
announced that she is leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent
who will caucus with the Democrats. We already have two of those: Bernie
Sanders, famously, who came within spittin’ distance of winning the Democratic
presidential nomination in spite of not being a member of that party (nothing
like that has ever happened to Republicans, ho ho!), and Sen.
Angus King of Maine.
Her
statement on the decision was … exactly the sort of mushy, stale baloney you’d
expect. And it is, to some degree, simply wrong on the substance: “There’s a
disconnect between what everyday Americans want and deserve from our politics,
and what political parties are offering,” Sinema writes in the Arizona
Republic. But that isn’t quite true: If the parties had the power to impose
their agendas—and their will—on American politics, American politics would look
radically different.
My
colleague Jonah Goldberg has been talking about this a lot in recent months—I
disagree with him on one point, which I’ll get to below—but it is worth really
chewing over the fact that the two most important developments in American
politics (which are, from one point of view, the same development) have
happened over the sometimes frenzied objections of the two major political
parties. I mean here the election of Donald Trump following his emergence as
Republican standard-bearer and the analogous rise of professing socialists such
as Sanders among Democrats. Because Sanders is not the kind of celebrity Trump
is, the personality cult that developed around him was relatively minor,
whereas Trump’s is a political megachurch. But the two phenomena are similar:
On one side, there are angry, generally ignorant populists who insist that
those who are not quite as rage-addled as they are must be in the pocket of
donors or some corporate interest, who believe that the key to victory is more
extremism and more bumptiousness, who are ensorcelled by conspiracy fairytales,
etc. On the other side, there are figures such as Chuck Schumer and Lindsey
Graham, men of flexible principle who will go along with the mob to whatever
extent they calculate doing so to be in their interest. There isn’t really an
“establishment” that is opposed to the populist interests, though there are a
smattering of sensible and/or decent figures who will tell the truth when doing
so is not popular. But the idea that Mitt Romney or former President George W.
Bush, or sundry factota operating in the shadows on their behalf, are calling the
shots in the Republican Party is nonsensical. The problem with the two big
political parties isn’t that there is somebody secretly pulling the strings
from behind the scenes—the problem is that there isn’t.
As Jonah
Goldberg and Jonathan Rauch discuss in their recent Remnant conversation, the political parties have been
neutered by a number of factors, including a primary process that rewards
imbecilic posturing and punishes compromise and moderation, the emergence of
small-dollar fund-raising that has made candidates independent of party
financial power, and social media. In 1940, the political parties had the power
to simply strangle the political career of a dangerous crank such as Charles
Lindbergh before it took off, and in 1992 billionaire Ross Perot was obliged to run his amateur-hour
campaign on his own steam. In 2016, Donald Trump essentially ran the Perot
campaign—with its paranoia, its clabbered xenophobia, its “run the government
like a business” idiocy—inside a Republican Party that was too weak to resist
the infection.
Where I
disagree with Jonah is in his assertion that the process that produced the
Trump nomination and made a national figure of Sanders is unrepresentative.
I think the process is almost perfectly representative—and that is the problem.
Political preferences have more than one aspect—the direction of a preference
is important, but so is the intensity of the preference, among other factors.
The maniacs care intensely about their program and their candidates, and the
moderates, being moderate, care moderately. And here comes ol’ Billy B.
Yeats:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Our
primary system, and the general rage-monkey tenor of our social-media–driven
politics, reflects the direction and intensity of political preferences—in
particular, it captures the passivity and apathy of the great largely
disengaged part of the population, the real “silent majority”—that has the
numbers to radically reshape U.S. politics but no real desire to do so. I am
generally pro-apathy when it comes to politics—most of the year, people should
have better things to do—but the problem is that there is a feature of our
politics that empowers the lunatics and monomaniacs over the comfortably
sensible and the sensibly comfortable, and that feature is: democracy. The
process by which political parties select candidates wasn’t really democratic
in the past, and now it is, and this is what you get.
Writing
in some magazine I’ve never heard of, Shadi Hamid raises a question he
has considered at some length—that of the relationship between democracy and
liberalism, meaning individual rights, the rule of law, due process, free
enterprise, and all that stuff—which, in turn, raises the even more fundamental
question: Is democracy good in and of itself, or is it good because it gives us
results we like? As Hamid puts it: “An outcomes-dependent approach to democracy
is dangerous because it leads to instrumentalism, i.e. democracy is good only
insofar as it produces good outcomes. Which makes it all the more easy to
discard if it doesn’t produce those other, ‘good’ outcomes.” Hamid is right to
offer the word of caution about discarding democracy, though I will note that
his argument against instrumentalism here is instrumentalist.
Of course we
should think of democracy in instrumental terms: It is, after all, an
instrument, and a pretty good one—in the right context, used the right
way. As I have argued at some length, there is no obvious moral
good to be derived from taking a crude, self-selecting measure of the views and
preferences of an electorate, giving absolutely equal weight to the views of
the fools and the wise, to the good and the wicked, treating the preferences of
Archbishop Chaput and the ringleaders of neo-Nazi gangs as though they were
morally or intellectually on the same footing, aggregating all this pseudo-data
together every few years in a series of contests in which practically every
issue is lumped together in a messy wad with every other issue, and decocting
from that mess a series of decisions about who occupies which representative
office and whether this or that ballot initiative is to be enacted. We don’t do
things that way because it is good or smart—we do things that way because it is
the only workable alternative to violence we’ve come up with. We don’t want to
go around bonking each other over the head. Democracy is precious for that
reason, to achieve a public life of “rien de bonk.” Democracy in the sense of
majoritarian voting (or even super-majoritarian voting) is only a procedure—it
is useful, but it is not sacred.
Getting
comfortable with that proposition shouldn’t be too hard for us Americans. We
have a Bill of Rights that puts certain questions beyond the reach of mere
democracy, and we have many other undemocratic and anti-democratic institutions
in our public life—and thank God for them! I care a great deal about free speech,
due process, property rights, the prohibition of slavery, and other goods that
cannot be taken away by a mere majority. And once we are comfortable with
saying, “Democracy, yes, but in its place,” then we shouldn’t have to go
through too many intellectual or moral contortions to say: “The problem with
our primary process is that it is obviously too democratic. We have parties
because they are themselves counter-democratic institutions. Our
country—including our democratic processes—would be better off with healthier
and more effective political parties, so, let’s let them run their own affairs
rather than imposing binding primary elections on them.”
Our
country is better off without giving political power to cranks and
crackpots—even if 50 percent +1 of some electorate wants the crackpot. Cranks
are dangerous and counterproductive, and all the “democracy” talk in the world
isn’t going to change that. Democracy doesn’t wash away the stupid or the evil.
Democracy doesn’t sanctify recklessness and stupidity, even if we call those
“the will of the People.”
You can
put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make ’em biscuits.
Economics
for English Majors
They
almost get it! A headline from the New York Times: “Adams Plan
Would Relax Rules for Developers Amid N.Y.C. Housing Crisis: The mayor proposed
reducing requirements that he said slow the construction of new homes as the
city contends with a housing crisis.”
Question:
Where did the housing crisis come from?
We all
know the answer to that, or at least part of the answer, because we have seen
the same problem play out in big, Democrat-run cities and metros across the
country: New York, the Bay Area, Boston, Austin, etc. New York City has some
special challenges in that four of its five boroughs sit on islands, meaning
that it cannot grow like Houston, but the story has been much the same in less
geographically constricted places. You make it expensive to build and builders
don’t stop building—but what they build is expensive. You take the profit out
of building housing or operating rentals for low- or moderate-income people,
and businesses stop doing that. You make it difficult and expensive to make
changes to existing real estate, you lose the flexibility you need in a big
market.
Might it
make sense to take a more intelligent approach to regulation and let housing
markets work before there is a crisis? Not only when it comes
to housing but when it comes to, say, imported baby formula? Or electricity?
First
off: Mayor Eric Adams is more or less on the right track—eliminating some
environmental reviews and streamlining the permitting process will make it
easier and less expensive to build new housing in New York City. More joy in
heaven and all that. And while the relationship between supply and demand is a
very big deal—more is more!—there is a lot more dysfunction in the New York
City housing market than low inventory.
In fact,
it is not even obvious that inventory is all that low. A significant portion of
the city’s rent-stabilized apartments sit vacant, apartments earmarked for
supported housing for the homeless remain vacant, vacant and abandoned housing
units are common across the city, etc. New York’s housing crisis is the kind of
housing crisis that matters to politicians and the press: a crisis for middle-
to upper-income people—not the billionaires and Wall Street sharks and such but
the lawyers and college professors, the New Yorkers struggling to get by on
a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
New York
has a number of different programs aimed at addressing housing challenges,
which range from the acute—people sleeping in subway tunnels—to the more
mundane challenges of having to pay highly skilled workers 50 percent more to
work from a New York office than you’d have to pay them to work from Charleston
or Dallas. And New York pretty consistently mismanages every one of those
programs.
To take
the most galling example: New York City has its own inventory of city-funded
apartments in which to house homeless people—and here I mean the rough-sleeping homeless,
i.e., the people who sleep on the street or in train stations rather than the
more liberal definition of “homeless” that includes people who have beds to go
to at night but in non-ideal circumstances. (This isn’t to shout, “Bah!
Humbug!” at that other kind of homelessness, but there is a big difference
between having to crash with friends for a few months and holing up in the
Tremont Avenue Station.) In fact, the city has access to enough apartments to
house every one of the people sleeping on the street in New York, who, contrary
to much of the reporting you hear on the subject, number fewer than 2,500. The
supply is there, the demand is there, the city funding is there—why are the
homeless people still on the streets and the apartments set aside to house them
vacant? The answer is mostly that homeless of that kind is much more a
mental-health and substance-abuse problem than it is an economic problem.
The New
York program (I recommend Nolan Hicks’ New
York Post writeup from March) isn’t even targeted at those sleeping on the
streets—it is targeted at those in shelters, but freeing up those shelter beds
would, in theory, make more room available for those sleeping on the streets.
(Again, it is complicated; there are lots of people sleeping outdoors in New
York even when there are shelter beds available.) But many of the people living
in shelters also have serious mental-health and substance-abuse problems, and
the providers who run the city-funded apartments reject applications from the
more challenging cases to try to get themselves matched with clients who are
less intensely needy, a process known as “creaming.” The city agency charged
with administering the program complains that it is—all together
now!—underfunded and understaffed, while critics note that the agency relies on
an essentially 19th-century working model rather than employing
modern information technology. The result: Lots of money spent, lots of
homeless people, lots of vacant apartments meant for homeless people.
New York
has neighborhoods with large numbers of vacant and abandoned housing
units—parts of the South Bronx, where I used to live, have boarded-up housing
on practically every block.
The
city’s rent-stabilization program doesn’t work very well, either.
By one estimate, some 88,830 of the city’s
rent-stabilized housing units were vacant last year—a tenth of the rent-stabilized
inventory. Dysfunction in the rent-stabilized market is critical, because
nearly half of the rental units in the city (and about 28 percent of the
overall housing stock) is rent-stabilized. Landlords end up “warehousing” some
of these units because regulations make it unprofitable to rent out those
apartments at the stabilized rate. Warehoused units may be off the market
entirely, but, in some cases, they are rented off-the-books to tenants without
leases or other paperwork, sometimes to profit from criminal
activity.
When you
have market-rate rents for only half the available rental properties, then you
have only half a market. There are no ironclad laws of economics, though there
are some pretty good rules of thumb, one of which is: Price controls result in
shortages. So do artificial constraints on supply. New York City has had more
than half a century to figure that out, ever since people started noticing that
Carly Simon and Mia Farrow were enjoying Central Park views subsidized by laws meant to
help out poor people.
If you
want an idea of how silly this stuff gets: When I lived in Manhattan, I lived
in a very nice building where the rents topped out—and this was a few years
ago—at $60,000 a month. But the apartments were rent-stabilized as a condition
for the developer’s access to subsidized financing and certain tax
breaks. The gentleman who occupied the penthouse drove a lovely
Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé and was in New York something on the order
of 12 weeks a year, spending the rest of his time at what I imagine was a
selection of really nice homes elsewhere. But his apartment was
rent-stabilized, like every other apartment in the building.
And
Furthermore …
I’m not
a New York hater—I like three big cities in the United States, and they are:
New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. (Your city is fine, sure. So is mine.) I
don’t see why people who want to live in a big city and have free choice about
it choose a different one: San Francisco has everything you hate about New York
and very little of what you love about it, Seattle seems to me like a
second-rate version of San Francisco, etc. I know, I know—you have a great job
in one of those places, or some particular personal or community connection, I
get it. You do what makes you happy. Some people like Washington a great
deal.
New York
has a lot going for it, but what it doesn’t have going for it is being New
York. People have been writing “New York Isn’t What It Used To Be” essays since
the 19th century, but what I mean is this: What made New York
New York was the fact that it was the center of a dozen culturally and
economically important businesses and enterprises that were complementary. At
its height, New York was the center of finance and most non-finance business,
news media, book publishing, art, fashion, theater, advertising, and it had a
pretty good claim to being the co-capital, with Hollywood, of television. These
businesses worked together economically and culturally: The media people helped
the art people and the theater people build careers, they helped the book
people sell their books and wrote books in turn, the finance people were
investors and consumers of art and theater, the advertising agencies employed
aspiring artists and their commercials put money into the pockets of actors,
Broadway people married Wall Street people, their children had rich social
networks through which to connect with creative and financial resources, etc.
That kind of thing is what makes cities work and makes the great cities special
places—and New York was an extreme version of that. But it isn’t any more: New
York has venture capital, sure, but California is where that business really
lives; you don’t have to have a Manhattan address to be taken seriously in
fashion or art or advertising; a lot of that salad-days, “If I can make it
there” ambition has been redirected to Silicon Valley, Austin and any number of
second-tier cities, even—angels and ministers of grace defend us!—Washington.
There’s a whole body of literature about how the internet’s decoupling of
commerce from geography has been counteracted by the desire of young, moneyed,
educated people to enjoy a mode of life associated with cities, and there’s
something to that: I don’t expect to see very much of Apple’s workforce
relocating to Marfa. But New York’s former position as a kind of monopoly at
the top of American urban life—there’s New York, and there’s everywhere
else—has been gone for some time.
And that
means New York has to compete more than it once did, which means it has to do
something about the dumb housing regulations, the subways, the rats …
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