Can Democrats Govern?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, January 16, 2025

 

How in the heck did the Republicans become the party of good governance?

 

Relatively good, I mean. 

 

The joke about the GOP used to be that Republicans campaigned on the belief that government doesn’t work and then worked hard to prove that once in office. The Republicans were, for a long time, a party that really did only one thing in power: cut taxes. Republicans didn’t cut spending, didn’t reform entitlements, didn’t radically reorganize government along lines of greater efficiency or accountability, but they would—whether it was economically appropriate or not—cut taxes when given the chance. Even Donald Trump, who promised to be (and, unfortunately, is) a different sort of Republican, did almost nothing else with Republicans’ 2017 trifecta except sign into law an utterly conventional Republican tax bill put together by Paul Ryan. 

 

Democrats are the party of government employees. But the party of the bureaucrats isn’t necessarily good at bureaucracy—and, in spite of the low reputation of the word “bureaucracy,” there is no substitute for effective, competent bureaucracy in a free society. Ultimately, competent bureaucratic administration is what determines whether schools are worth a damn or the trash gets picked up.

 

Or whether, instead, wildfires are permitted to burn out of control. 

 

Democrats’ reputation as a party of governance is at a low ebb just now, and it isn’t only their incompetence in California. The wildfire story isn’t primarily a policy story or a political story—wildfires have ravaged California since prehistoric times—but thinking people with a little bit of long-term memory might ask themselves how it is that Ron DeSantis’ government in Florida always seems about as prepared for hurricanes as they can be—down to having extra linemen and equipment pre-positioned to swoop in and restore electricity service—while in California the Palisades reservoir has been out of commission for nearly a year because of a defective “covering designed to preserve water quality,” i.e., a torn tarp. 

 

Thomas Jefferson believed that “the best government is that which governs least,” which is a sentiment dear to my libertarian heart. And, while it is not exceptionlessly true, there is a lot of truth to that maxim: My native Texas is not what I would call an especially well-governed state, but it is not in most things a much-governed one, at least at the state level. And that seems to work about well enough. 

 

Here’s one way to think of the current state of affairs: These United States have altogether about 335 million people living in them, but 1 in 3 of those millions live in California, Texas, Florida, or New York. I suspect that it is really in these states that the relative reputations of the red-state model and the blue-state model are being made, in the main. 

 

Florida was for a long time a kind of a political mystery: It was a purple state by the numbers but one in which Democrats couldn’t win an election to save their lives. Florida is many things to many people, but one of the things it is is what you get when you have more or less unified control of state government by Republicans who—this part is critical—have a living memory of real political competition. 

 

Democrats have not got a whiff of the governorship in Texas since 1995, haven’t controlled the state Senate since 1997, and have basically been relegated to the kiddies’ table in the state House since 2003. Republicans have enjoyed similar dominance for a similar time in Florida, but the elections have been a lot closer, and Florida has sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate as recently as 2012. And Texas is a little more Republican and a little less Democratic than Florida. (The Pew numbers are not what you’d expect, showing a small Democratic affiliation advantage in both Texas and Florida. Color me skeptical.) Texas Republicans are, in my experience, more confident in the durability of their commanding position than their Florida counterparts are. That confidence may be misplaced, but that’s for another column. 

 

Florida has enjoyed a string of very competent governors with a strong orientation toward ensuring the reliable delivery of state services and encouraging a business-friendly tax and regulatory environment. Jeb Bush, Rick Scott, and Ron DeSantis are very different kinds of men and politicians, but all did very fine executive work in Florida. And Florida remembers. George Bush and Rick Perry were popular in Texas for a reason; and, while I don’t know anybody who points to Greg Abbott and his circle as the personifications of administrative excellence (and Texas politics is fertile ground for grotesques such as Ken Paxton), it is hard to argue with the state’s growth and its generally attractive economic environment—though housing affordability has become more of a problem in the Lone Star State as the workforce grows faster than the housing supply. 

 

Texas and Florida tend to lead the lists when it comes to rankings of business-friendliness, as indeed do Republican-leaning states generally. California and New York are not at the bottom of those lists, but they aren’t at the top, either, in spite of being home to premier cities such as New York City and economic powerhouses such as Silicon Valley. 

 

Perversely, Republican governors other than George W. Bush have had a hard time of it as presidential contenders in recent years, precisely because good governors must perforce do a lot of clear-eyed, nonideological, necessarily bipartisan work—governor stuff—that irritates ideologues and hyperpartisans. The kind of thing that might read as “bipartisan pragmatism” to the general electorate reads as “sellout” to GOP primary voters. But their big-state Democratic colleagues lately spend a lot more time auditioning for Jonah Goldberg’s “parliament of pundits” than they do making a good job of governor stuff. California’s Gavin Newsom acts like he’s running for secretary general of the United Nations half the time, and New York’s Kathy Hochul cannot muster the courage of her convictions even when she happens upon something that is both good policy and popular with her progressive allies, such as congestion pricing, which she has partly undermined, out of pure political cowardice, by reducing the toll from $15 to $9. (Want to actually change commuters’ behavior? Try $40. Want a real radical change? Try $200.) Meanwhile California burns, and the State of New York cruelly reminds residents of the state of New York, which isn’t exactly what anybody wants it to be. 

 

And so Republicans do, amazingly enough, appear to be the party of slightly but meaningfully better state governance. If mostly by default.