Defining Mediocrity Down – Joe Klein What Democrats Refuse to See
We unite our coalition
by making sure everyone’s at the table. As DNC Chair our
leadership team will lift up our full coalition—Blacks, Latino, Native,
AANHPI, LGBTQ. Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran and Disability
representation. —Ben Wikler, candidate
for DNC chair. No one could watch his
final performance at the Resolute desk and think that he could go on in the
job, no matter how much one dreads the dreadful alternative. —David Remnick, on
President Joe Biden The Democrats are
about to recede for a while. They’ve proven they have nothing of interest to
say right now. They will be reduced to sullen opposition in Congress. Donald
Trump—for better or worse, or even worse than that—will dominate the news.
The Democrats will spend the next few weeks worrying over the least inspiring
field of candidates for National Chairman that I can remember. (See Wisconsin
Ben Wikler’s myopic nonsense quote above). They will continue their rather
pathetic efforts to come up with a rationale for their revival or, perhaps,
their very existence. The latter is assumed, but I’m not sure it’s
guaranteed. I have been reading
the various proposals for the reinvigoration of the Democrats. They have been
shocking in their thin, reflexive nostrums. The party’s left sings its old
song—the problem is the economic anxiety of the working class. Left-populism
is the answer. Tariffs, tax the rich, industrial policy (gussied up in
green), Medicare for all. They hope that blather will camouflage the fact
that the Left lacks the courage to stand up to the real cause of the party’s
demise—identity politics and its permissive impact on race, crime,
immigration, education, traditional families. A New York Times poll today has
49% of the American people thinking Donald Trump will not be able to do much
about inflation. If so, why did they vote for Trump? Because he was strong
and appeared real. Meanwhile, vast majorities in the Times poll think he’ll
do a lot about the border and illegal immigration. The Democrats, in the
thrall of their consultant class, use too-much focus-tested language to sound
real. They are the party of synthetic sensitivities, a ministry of pronouns,
policing micro-aggressions unnoticed beyond the precincts of Ibram X. Kendi
and his sham “anti-racism” center at Boston University. It would be nice to
report that the moderate center of the Democratic Party has come up with some
creative alternatives. It hasn’t. And even the party’s best thinkers, like
Matt Yglesias, seem to be running on empty.: Yglesias called on
Democrats to redouble their party’s commitment to economic growth, honor the
electorate’s moral values, reject identity politics, abandon language
policing, and moderate on a wide assortment of issues. That seems pretty
comprehensive…except it isn’t. What’s missing from this picture? There is no
mention of the Democrats’ decisive failure to manage our public institutions.
They are, after all, the party of government, or so it is said. The truth is,
they’re not. They’re the party of government employees. Now, there are some excellent government employees—and
I’ll recommend yet again that you read The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, and keep up
with his incredibly worthy reporting on the damage that Donald Trump and his
oligarchs will do to our government. But there are a fair number of
prohibitively useless government employees, too; there are whole bureaus of
the floating useless—and more, there is a sedimentary landfill of regulations
and procedures that prevent government, especially local governments, from
doing their jobs. Look at the recent
California forest fires. Take it, Nellie Bowles: Infrastructure that
could have provided more water for those fires has been on hold, tied up in
red tape. Ten years ago, California voters approved spending $7.5 billion to
build water storage and improve state water facilities—but by 2023 not one
dam had been finished, per the Los Angeles Times. Not a single one. But a
decade into various environmental regulations and reviews, they are moving. And there is the hapless
mayor Karen Bass, who depleted the resources of the fire department by
granting her local public employees unions vast wage increases. Needless to say, few
additional responsibilities or accountability were imposed on those city
workers. It will be nice if someone keeps track of how many LA employees will
be fired for incompetence during the life of the contract. In fact, there may
be a sliver of good news on that front: the excellent Matt Bai of The
Washington Post has decided to take on the Department of Government
Efficiency (DOGE) beat, not just to follow the amateurism of Elon Musk and
Vivek Ramaswamy, but also to chronicle the embarrassments of the federal
sector: Consider that in 2021,
the Biden administration trumpeted the $7.5 billion
dollars it had secured to build half a million charging stations by 2030,
urging more Americans to go out and buy electric cars; at last count, states
receiving the money had managed to build a few dozen. This is a chronic
problem. I’ve been writing about it for years. People joke about my obsession
with the militant, dreadful teachers unions. But let’s briefly, and with
simple sentences, describe the history of government service reform, a good
idea gone bad: It used to be that
politicians could hire anyone they wanted. Urban machines like Tammany Hall
hired a lot of brothers-in-law (and more than a few no-shows). Abraham
Lincoln hired hacks to run local post offices, as did his predecessors. It
was a scandal. Eventually, in the late 19th century, Congress created civil
service reform—you had to pass a test to be hired by the government and you
could not be fired simply because a new politician came in and wanted his
personal set of hacks to get jobs. But that last part became a problem: If
you couldn’t be fired for political reasons, it became hard to be fired for
any reason. And that zinc-lined employment guarantee was reinforced with
titanium when the Democratic Party allowed workers to join public employees
unions in the 1960s. These unions have become the dominant force in the
Democratic Party. How dominant? They represent the largest block of delegates
at any given Democratic Nation Convention. And when was the last time you
heard a Democratic politician tout serious government reform? Paul Vallas
tried when he ran for mayor of Chicago in 2023. He lost to a teachers union
executive. The problem extends
beyond the classroom. Exorbitant union contracts have nearly bankrupted Chicago and other large cities.
Here’s Fareed Zakaria on the difference
between Miami and New York: They have comparable populations — New York with about
20 million people, Florida with 23 million. But New York state’s budget is
more than double that of Florida ($239 billion vs. roughly $116 billion). New York City, which is a
little more than three times the size of Miami-Dade County, has a budget of
more than $100 billion, which is nearly 10 times that of Miami-Dade. New York
City’s spending grew from 2012 to 2019 by 40
percent, four times the rate of inflation. Does any New Yorker feel that they
got 40 percent better services during that time? What do New Yorkers get
for these vast sums, generated by the highest tax rates in the country? (If you
are well off in New York City, you pay nearly as much in income taxes as in
London, Paris or Berlin — without free higher education or health care.) New
York’s poverty rate is higher than
Florida’s. New York has a slightly lower rate of homeownership and a much higher rate of homelessness. Despite spending more than twice as much on education per
student, New York has educational outcomes — graduation rates, eighth-grade test scores — that are roughly the
same as Florida’s. Fareed might have
added that New York State spends an astonishing $36,293 per K-12 student per
year. Here are the average class sizes in New York City: ·
Elementary
Schools (K-5): 24.0 students ·
Middle
Schools (6-8): 25.1 students ·
High
Schools (9-12): 23.7 students Let’s do the math: 24
students at $36,293 per head equals $870,432 per classroom! Let’s be generous. Let’s pay the teacher $150,000 with
health and pension. Where does
that other $720, 432 go? I will tell you: It
goes to maintenance (necessary but bloated beyond imagining), and layers upon
layers of bureaucrats—the wilted flowers of Advanced Education degree
programs—who try to make sure that Mediocrity is Defined Down, that
curriculums are scrubbed of anything even vaguely interesting or challenging,
that rigorous testing is not pursued (New York is in the process of getting
rid of its rigorous Regents exams). The waste is breath-taking. During this era of
Rule by Public Employees, a great many problems have been
ignored—scandalously—because union contracts are crowding budgets. The Los
Angeles fire department is Exhibit A. But think, for a moment, about
homelessness. By most estimates, 75-80% of the homeless have either mental
health or addiction problems—but we have no facilities for them, due to 50
years of liberal irresponsibility, a combination of the ACLU working with the
courts to shutter mental hospitals and local governments refusing to pony up
for more humane versions of such facilities…in large part, because of the
constant, exorbitant wins that the unions are getting at the bargaining
table—where they, increasingly, bargain against themselves. One wonders: What if a
nice percentage of that money had been used to “solve” the homeless
problem—by reopening state facilities for those who can not deal with the
reality of the streets—and provide adequate “broken windows” policing, and
making sure that the public sector provides non-stop excellent services.
Would the public put two and two together—and think, hey, Democrats really
take taking care of us seriously? What if government employees—police, for
example—were trained with the same rigor as the military? What if the
Democrats became the party of excellence in government, rather than the
custodians of a national swamp? Would anyone notice? Maybe not, but it
wouldn’t hurt. That will have to
remain a thought experiment. The Democrats have absolutely no interest in
reforming the way they manage the government. They simply will not
acknowledge that the lawyers who produce tides of regulations, and the unions
who paralyze our governments with work rules, are part of the problem. The
smartest Democrats I know listen patiently when I rant about governance,
smile condescendingly and do nothing. They are not willing to have a
conversation about it. They simply can’t imagine a Democratic Party that
doesn’t cater to the public employees. If the teachers were alienated from
the party, who’d be left? This is similar to the party’s unwillingness to
acknowledge the impact of absent fathers on underclass poverty (of all
races). And so, they are left
with platitudes—rather than performance. The Democrats stand for every
overweight postal worker who can’t be bothered to put your mail in your slot.
And they stand for every teacher who leaves parent-teacher night at the
stroke of nine, even if parents are waiting to meet, because the contract
says you can leave at nine. And the Democrats stand for all the schools that
remained closed during Covid, and for all the regulations that forced barber
shops and other small businesses to shutter, at the risk of their livelihood,
and they stand for every public school janitor who only mops the cafeteria
floor once a week—because that’s what the contract says. And can you blame the
public if it extrapolates? If the government can’t keep the water flowing to
fight fires—or can’t wade through the red tape to get dams and ports and
airports and highways up to international standards, and allows crazy people
to toss my aunt onto the subway tracks, and can’t seal the southern border,
and have allowed an infestation of shoplifting so severe that Tylenol has to
be kept under lock and key at my CVS, why should we trust them with the White
House? Those are all real
examples. Some happened to me. Others were brought to my attention by
frustrated Democratic politicians. They are not, so far as I know, under
discussion in the post-Biden Democratic Party. When I came to
political consciousness, the Democrats stood for idealism and charisma and
the thrill of being part of the greatest country on earth. That was a long
time ago. That party outlived its usefulness because it abandoned its bargain
with the people: it stopped governing effectively. I may be wrong, but I
think the Democrats are sunk until they begin to find candidates who carry
the charisma of getting things done—not just passing legislation, but
restoring our pride in the way we run our institutions. That probably means
we’re going to need a very different Democratic Party…and maybe, in the
coming months of darkness, as Donald Trump holds center stage, the Dems may
take the opportunity to have an actual conversation about it. |
