Democrats are Losing Because they Give Not a Fig About Governing, Only Virtue Signaling

Their idea of rebellion is to stop the system from making life better for ordinary Americans

Frederic Ghanbar, Shutterstock

We Democrats like to think of ourselves as the sane and reasonable party, the party offering real policy solutions for real problems, as opposed to the madness on the other side of the aisle—145% tariffs, scrapping the 14th and 22nd Amendments, invading and annexing Greenland. The other side of the aisle may well be mad. But this does not imply that we are sane. After the disaster of the recent election, it’s time to take a hard look in the mirror. Is what Democrats are offering in terms of real material policy—our total governance package—that much better than the Republican package?

In a word: no. There is a genuine crisis in Democratic governance. Until we fix it, we will never consolidate the electorate under the blue banner.

Justice Louis Brandeis once said that American states are laboratories of democracy. One might turn this around for our hyper-partisan era and say instead that states are the showroom floors of political parties. Deep red and deep blue states each exemplify what the party stands for—what they would actually do, given consolidated control over government. By that standard, how do the parties stack up?

Consider then the two marquee showrooms for each party’s platform, the states that most represent each party in the public mind: California and Texas. California high school students average a 1086 score on the SAT; Texas students 971. California’s life expectancy at birth is 79 years, Texas’ is 76.5. Average hourly earnings in California are $40.93; in Texas they are $34.49. According to the libertarian Cato Institute, California is ranked 11th in the nation for personal freedom, Texas is dead last at 50th.

So far so good, right? But all of those facts pale in comparison to one: Americans are voting with their feet against blue states. About 102,000 people left California for Texas in 2022. In that year, Texas saw a net immigration growth of 175,000 residents. Meanwhile, between July 2021 and July 2022, California saw a net out-migration of more than 400,000 people.

The Housing and Jobs Blues in Blue States

This should be a five-alarm fire in Democratic circles; it should be inarguable proof of the failure of the Democratic Party to deliver what the American people want. Whatever the total package of blue state governance is, people demonstrate that they prefer the total package of red state governance.

At this point, you might leap up to defend blue states. You might say that, actually, most Americans want to live in blue states—just look at the surveys! But you can say anything on a survey. The preferences you reveal by your actions are far more telling. For many Americans, their all-things-considered preference is to move from a blue state to a red state.

To understand why, we have to talk about some other numbers. The median price of a home in California is $866,100. In Texas it is $339,500. In 2024, California had a homelessness rate of 48 per 10,000 people, while Texas had a rate of nine. These numbers are stark. Housing is the most visible, painful aspect of the crisis in Democratic governance, because housing is fundamental to modern life. Where you live shapes where you work, where your kids go to school, where you spend your free time. For many families, it is the single biggest line-item expense in their budget. And when there is not enough of it—when there is a deliberate, artificial scarcity of it—that distorts and undermines all those activities. California’s homelessness crisis is simply the dark mirror of its unending housing crisis.

---

Neither Trump Nor Democrats Care About American Prosperity

---

But housing is hardly the only aspect of the crisis. Consider some more numbers. Texas created 192,100 jobs over the last year. California created 46,500—and California has eight million more citizens than Texas. Texas, home to oil, gas, and cowboys, is also building vastly more green energy than crunchy hippie California. The cost of living in California is 44.8% higher than average. In Texas it is 7.3% lower than average. On infrastructure, green energy, new factories and new jobs, we Democrats have consistently made it harder to do anything.

It is sometimes said that Democrats don’t have the political will to spend money to solve social problems. But money is not the problem. Los Angeles voters appropriated billions of dollars to build housing for the homeless; you only need to look around to see that it hasn’t solved the problem. The California legislature appropriated $300 million for first-time homebuyers, a fund that was depleted in less than two weeks by fewer than 3,000 people. In New York City, the Second Avenue Subway extension project, underway since 2016, is estimated to cost more than $6 billion—for about a mile and a half of subway. We spend enormous amounts of money to get nothing. An unwillingness to do what’s necessary to turn that money into results is the problem. Vetocracy is the problem.

The crisis of Democratic governance goes well beyond problem of pouring concrete. The physical infrastructure necessary for New York City’s congestion pricing program was relatively trivial. But from the program’s approval to actually activating those cameras took 18 years, partly due to “environmental” litigation from New Jersey, but equally because of New York’s unwillingness to simply do it—witness Governor Kathy Hochul’s bizarre “pause” on the program in 2024.

Let me tell you a story from my own neighborhood in Pittsburgh whose mayor and city council are all under Democratic control. There is a busy commercial street; parking is always packed during business hours. The city passed a trial program to allow the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to increase both the rates and the hours for paid parking on that street and then use the money to perform minor infrastructure improvements in the neighborhood, like curb repair, daylighting, bus stop improvements.

The department then spent so long simply studying whether it should increase the rates, talking with the community about increasing the rates, and so on, that the trial program’s legislation came close to expiring. This program involved no physical infrastructure changes, simply updating the programs of parking meter kiosks. And there was no actual lawsuit or any other legal delay. The city was simply afraid to act. They couldn’t charge a quarter more for parking without studying, exhaustively, whether this was definitively the right thing to do.

The Progressive Hang Up with Power

The modern Democratic Party—and the progressive movement generally—is defined by a single, crippling obsession: the fear of power. Democrats lament the perception that we’re all talk, no action. But the perception is correct: Democratic politicians talk a lot in highly moralized tones without doing much with the power we are vesting in them. Progressives will lecture you about compassion for the homeless while resolutely opposing measures to build them new homes. Democratic elected officials are content to pat themselves on the back for doing a ribbon-cutting ceremony on 20 units of affordable housing while their city has a deficit of 20,000 units.

And local housing issues are hardly the only policy arena I might name. We talk about the rising costs of raising children, of education, of housing, we talk about the climate and green energy, about immigration and the border. We talk a lot about all of these things—Democratic politicians can’t shut up about them. But what have we done about them in the last 10 years?

So we are afraid of power. But what is the root of this fear? There are converging ideological and structural factors. Let’s begin with the structural ones, which, being more material, seem more important.

We all know that the Democrats and Republicans are the only parties that matter in America. We also know that in deep blue or red states, the general election is usually a foregone conclusion: whoever has a D or R next to their name wins, respectively. Therefore, the “real” election is the primary election. Take progressive firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her election to Congress was celebrated not on Nov. 6, 2018, when the general election was held, but on June 26, when she defeated incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary.

---

A Liberalism Without Apology or Fear...

---

Some 29,780 people voted in that primary election; 141,122 voted in the general election; 740,963 live in that congressional district. In other words, to win the right to represent three quarters of a million people, it suffices to win the votes of fewer than 15,000 committed Democratic partisans—a mere 2% of the total population. This is no shade on AOC personally, who has been an outstanding congresswoman. But it puts into stark relief the structural features of politics in one-party states. Winning elections does not require delivering results for the majority of the actual population: it requires pleasing the fractional minority of people who turn out for the party primary.

Preaching to the Choir

Political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith distinguish between the nominal electorate and the real “selectorate” whose support is actually necessary to win power. A narrow selectorate inherently warps political incentives away from the needs of the electorate and towards the desires of the selectorate. The dynamic is clearly illustrated by another story from my neighborhood.

A canvasser for a progressive candidate for local city council came to my door. He assured me that the candidate cared about climate change, immigration, abortion. She had all the right stances on all the great issues of the day. Of course, as a councilwoman, she would have power over approximately none of these issues. When I asked about housing, the canvasser was caught flat-footed; he mumbled something about ensuring that communities have a say in what gets built. In other words—the status quo. The “progressive” candidate was promising exactly no material change in city governance. But she said the words that politics-obsessed Democrats like me want to hear—because she understood that winning power depended on those politics-obsessed Democrats, not the public at large.

I said that structural factors appear to matter most in explaining why the Democratic Party in blue states and municipalities prioritizes rhetorical signaling over real change. But in fact it begs the question of why committed Democrats themselves demand talk over action.

After all, Republicans seem to evince no fear of aggressively deploying state power for conservative ends—and their position in deep red states is structurally identical. But they do not seek community feedback about whether they should do a study to see if they should ban books about queer kids. They just do it.

The Dead Hand of the New Left

To understand the Democratic fear of power, we therefore need to talk about deeper currents in culture and ideology. In particular, we need to understand how deeply the inheritance of the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s has shaped progressive thinking. So let us wind the clock back to 1968 and see the world through its eyes.

Cuyahoga River was on fire. Chicago was on fire. Vietnam was on fire. From the New Left’s perspective, The System was a great machine of evil that was everywhere grinding up humanity. Robert Moses at home, Robert McNamara abroad. Hence the rallying cry: “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate!” Leftism consisted in stopping the machine from doing its evil work. It wanted to stop “urban renewal” from bulldozing Black communities for the sake of new highways. It wanted to stop the construction of filthy, environment-destroying industries. It wanted to stop the American military from firebombing civilians abroad. In a world full of wicked power, it seemed like fighting power was the only thing that mattered.

Fifty years later, we remained consumed with this ethos. We remain obsessed with preventing the state from doing bad things—even as our tools are now mainly used to prevent good things. Environmental laws are leveraged to delay or deny green energy construction. Community feedback is used to block dense housing in rich neighborhoods. Our elected officials prioritize communicating that they have “the right politics” over actually getting anything done. We are all talk, no action.

---

---

This gets to the heart of the recent storm of criticism over “the groups” or “the nonprofit industrial complex.” For the structural reasons discussed above, these groups have an influence that outruns their actual size in Democratic party politics. And for ideological reasons, they’re all obsessed not with doing anything, but with obstructing the operations of government while making sad noises about the evils of the world.

Even in cases where progressives inarguably wield state power—often quite extensive state power—they remain convinced that they are rebels against the system. Every time environmental regulations are used to shut down a nuclear power plant, every time apartment buildings are blocked by permits denied, every time a wind-turbine factory is put on hold because of community feedback, that is a hard-won victory by plucky rebels fighting the system. Our fear of power prevents us from recognizing that in many parts of America, we are the system. We are the power. It is time to use that power in a way that delivers real material results for Americans.

A Better Alternative?

So what is to be done? If we want blue states to be our bastions and our showroom floors at once, what must we change?

1. Tell the wreckers to pound sand. Groups, staffers, and ideas that prioritize virtue-signaling process over material results need to get kicked out of the tent. This is, first and foremost, a work of culture and ideology. We need to change the definition of progress from “throw your body on the gears” to “build the future.”

2. Build housing—and everything else. The lack of sufficient housing is the single biggest policy failure of blue states and cities. And the only way to build enough is to reform and remove the thicket of regulations that prevent people from building housing. Enough! It needs to get done. Whether we call it YIMBYism or Abundance or whatever else matters little—we need to build.

3. Reform the electoral structure. Both of the above reforms—and successful change generally—will be easier to pursue if general elections are more competitive. Competition forces you to perform. It is no accident that purple-state Democrats are more dynamic and energetic than blue state Democrats, as a rule. Multimember proportional elections can be implemented at the state level without going through the federal government.

We need to get our act together. Despite being cartoonishly awful, Donald Trump has won two of the last three elections. Democratic states are projected to get hammered in the 2030 redistricting, while Republican states continue to gain. Americans will keep voting with their feet against Democrats and for Republicans until we start actually delivering real material change, not just carefully worded statements evincing the right kind of concern and deeply held principle.

Let’s get to work.

An earlier version of this essay first appeared in Liberal Currents.

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.

We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.