The Crisis of Democratic Overconfidence

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 09, 2025

 

Nate Glazer had it all figured out decades ago. In a 1993 lecture, the author and social scientist identified the foremost conceptual cul-de-sac that had produced so much dysfunction in American cities by the late 1960s — a diagnosis that boiled down to the fact that the people voters elect to manage urban life simply got bored with the job description.

 

“New York,” Glazer said by way of example, “stopped trying to do well the kinds of things a city can do, and started trying to do the kinds of things a city cannot do.” The city subordinated “keeping its streets and bridges in repair, building new facilities to accommodate new needs and a shifting population, picking up the garbage, and policing the public environment” to grander objectives. But in the pursuit of those lofty goals, cities stopped doing the things cities know how to do and started trying to do things that no one knows how to do. “Among the things it can’t do are redistributing income on a large scale and solving the social and personal problems of people who, for whatever reason, are engaged in self-destructive behavior,” Glazer added.

 

Even if America’s municipal officials did know how to end the scourge of racism, eradicate poverty, and change the weather, that is not within their remits. Glazer concluded his lecture with the prophetic observation that cities can quickly restore elementary governmental functionality if that’s what the people vote for themselves. New York City’s trajectory would bear that observation out in the years that followed Glazer’s talk. But to get there, urban polities had to abandon the high-minded abstractions that led them to convince themselves they had to endure discomfort and hardship lest they tacitly sanction some evil somewhere in the world. Only when voters no longer accept excuses from their elected leaders does the public see proficiency in municipal government again.

 

Democratic elected officials at the highest levels of local, state, and federal government excel when they are tasked only with waxing grandiloquent about the metaphysical ills that plague American society. That is their core competency. Indeed, they’re often prone to subordinate the elementary functions of government to virtuous abstractions. And when those misplaced priorities give way to a level of maladministration their constituencies resent, those abstractions provide a convenient excuse to justify their failures. The scourge of climate change, the rapacious capitalist enterprise, the prejudice that lurks in men’s hearts — it’s all just too much to overcome.

 

California is a prime example of this woeful phenomenon. Angelenos have long elevated politicians who believe they have a writ to, for example, “eliminate racial disparities and achieve equality and equity by disrupting harmful trends and transforming systems and policies,” in the words of Cynthia Mitchell-Heard, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. It was that outlook that led L.A. Mayor Karen Bass to treat the city’s fire departments as a social experiment.

 

The deadly wildfires that have leveled whole neighborhoods in L.A. this week have made Bass’s decision to cut the city’s Fire Department budget by $17.6 million seem pretty short-sighted. That was, in fact, a compromise on her part; she had sought $23 million in cuts amid the city’s efforts to contain its growing homelessness problem. Bass inherited from her predecessor, Eric Garcetti, an initiative designed to solve the problem of too few women volunteering to serve as firefighters — a problem that persists, perhaps, because too few women want to serve in that role. The city seemed focused more on ensuring the LAFD flattered its leaders’ ideological pretensions than on whether it was optimized to fight fires.

 

And when disaster struck and Bass returned to her stricken city from a junket in Ghana, the mayor appeared quite literally dumbfounded. “If you need help, emergency information, resources, and shelter is available,” she told residents at an overdue emergency press conference on Wednesday. “All of this can be found at URL,” she added, while neglecting to share the actual address of the website. Good luck, Angelenos.

 

We shouldn’t pick on Bass too much. She is just a manifestation of the problem — a product of a progressive milieu that elevates functionaries whose specialization isn’t governmental acumen but retailing the linguistic signifiers that convey membership in the club. The problem runs deeper.

 

Many of the Californians who lost their homes this week may be underinsured because private home insurers have been fleeing the state, forcing residents to rely on a publicly funded stopgap program. But those insurers made that calculation because regulatory agencies imposed a ceiling on prices that could not compensate for the increased risk from fire damage — a policy that regulators frantically sought to pare back only after the problem got out of hand.

 

But what accounts for that increased risk? The theoreticians in government blame climate change, but better-governed states with similar exposure to increased threat from wildfires have somehow managed to navigate the challenge. A 2018 study conducted by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office found that “overcrowded forests” contributed to an abundance of combustible materials on California’s forest floors — a condition exacerbated by the state’s “permitting requirements” and “constraints” on vegetation removal. But little was done to address the findings. In 2021, a CapRadio and NPR’s California Newsroom investigation determined that Governor Gavin Newsom “overstated” the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns by a staggering 690 percent.

 

And why was it that the first responders who attempted to contain the blaze quickly ran out of water? Real estate developer and former mayoral candidate Rick Caruso maintains that local reservoirs were not filled to meet emergency demand. That, and brush management, contributed to the scale of the crisis. “This is basic stuff,” he mused, “this isn’t high science here.” Indeed, Southern California’s water problems are not new, but tackling the problem is difficult in a state where the French firm contracted to build a high-speed rail line from L.A. to San Francisco gave up and abandoned California for more business-friendly environments like . . . North Africa. The state has failed to address the issue in response to the requirements imposed on contractors by the California Environmental Quality Act and also in deference to environmentalists groups that blocked the expansion of reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping plants over the risk posed to endangered species.

 

For years, the boutique priorities of influential but minority interests have crowded out elementary good governance. The problem is pronounced in California, but it is apparent in any local where the “blue state model” is practiced. Democratic elected officials stopped doing the things municipal officials know how to do — the quotidian, unglamorous work of public life — and made themselves champions of the glossy causes that reward them with attention and donor contributions. Perhaps their constituents have convinced themselves that they must suffer dysfunction to see a more just social compact in their respective cities, but that is a rationalization.

 

Democrats are wildly overconfident in their ability to not just govern competently but solve the intractable conundrums that plague modern life. That delusion has produced intolerable dysfunction. Until voters in blue locales start demanding basic competence of their politicians first and ideological purity second, they will be rewarded with more of the same.