A commenter recently asserted that Blue States provide “better government services” than Red States. That sounds plausible. Blue States spend more therefore they must provide better services, right?

No.

Spending is not performance. Condition is not adequacy. Raw outcomes are not system contribution. If you want to measure “best services,” you need to define what “best” means. I built a framework to do exactly that.

My organizing principle is simple: a state should be judged on whether it delivers services commensurate with the operational demands it actually faces not on what it spends or on how difficult its job is. On whether it does the job.

What Changes When You Measure It Properly

The State Service Performance Index (SSPI) looks at four domains:

• Infrastructure (traffic-weighted)
• Education (poverty/ELL-adjusted)
• Public safety (crime-load-weighted)
• Health (need-weighted)

Then it applies a fiscal sustainability modifier because a service level you cannot afford is not a real service level. When you do that, the partisan narrative dissolves.

Midwest: Illinois vs Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa

Illinois underperforms its neighbors in infrastructure even after accounting for Chicago’s enormous traffic load. The problem is not that Illinois has a harder job. The problem is that it is not meeting the job fully.

Education is more interesting. Once student poverty and English-learner burden are accounted for, Illinois performs better than raw NAEP rankings suggest. Iowa’s edge narrows once its lighter demographic burden is accounted for.

Public safety is weaker in Illinois even after crime-load adjustment.

Then comes the fiscal adjustment and Illinois collapses. Pension underfunding and structural imbalance materially reduce its composite score.

The lesson is not ideological. It is structural: Illinois’ problems are institutional and fiscal.

The West: California vs Arizona, Nevada, Utah

This case is more revealing because it upsets simple narratives. California’s raw NAEP rankings look terrible. Once you account for the largest English-learner burden in the country, the picture changes. California’s schools add more than raw scores suggest. That doesn’t make them excellent. It does mean the usual talking point is statistically crude.

Arizona, by contrast, does not improve much under burden adjustment. Its lower education scores reflect genuine system underperformance, not demographic distortion.

Utah performs strongly across most domains and remains strong under both efficiency and equity weighting scenarios. Some of that is demographic windfall (young population). But its nearly fully funded pension system is not a demographic accident. That is institutional discipline.

Nevada’s tourism economy complicates measurement because millions of visitors generate service demand not reflected in resident statistics. That volatility shows up in its fiscal score.

Again: there is no clean partisan story.

The Real Finding

Blue States do not automatically provide better services; Red States do not automatically provide worse services.

What matters is:

• Are infrastructure systems aligned with actual traffic demand?
• Are schools adding value relative to student burden?
• Is public safety performance strong relative to crime load?

Is health delivery strong relative to clinical need?

• Can the state sustain what it promises?

When you measure those things, the rankings are mixed. Some Red States perform strongly (Utah, Iowa). Some Blue States show real strengths (California education gains). Some Blue States are dragged down by fiscal mismanagement (Illinois). Some Red States show genuine system deficits (Arizona education).

The partisan label is not the independent variable. Institutional structure is.

The Hard Truth

Many political arguments rely on raw statistics because raw statistics are easy: raw NAEP, raw road grades, raw crime rates. But raw metrics conflate composition with contribution.

If a state has more poverty, more immigrants, more freight traffic, more density that does not excuse failure. But neither does it justify simplistic comparisons. The only serious question is: given the demands you face, are you doing the job?

That is measurable. When you start measuring, the slogans fade.

I have included details of my State Service Performance Index on separate pages here. I don’t pretend it’s perfect but at least it’s a best effort.

Francis Fukuyama has a post at Persuasion in which he gives his two cents on why the American government can’t “get things done”. Here’s his conclusion:

The private sector has complained for many years of over-regulation by the government. But the government itself faces decades of accumulated regulations that limit its ability to act effectively. There are many powerful interest groups who want to limit regulation of the private sector, but relatively few voices advocating de-regulation of the government itself. Indeed, many on the right and left believe that the government has too much discretionary power and needs to be further constrained.

Restoration of state capacity will thus depend on a culling of the veto points that have been delegated over the years to different stakeholders in and out of government, and delegation of actual authority to the appropriate parts of the government to carry out the people’s wishes. We need new mechanisms to hold that form of delegated power accountable to the people. It has been done before in American history—remember the Apollo program?—and can in theory be done again.

I can summarize my explanation in a single sentence. The federal government bureaucracy is 250 years old.

That is how bureaucracies work; it is what they do. And there is no known way of organizing something as large as the federal government other than bureaucracy. There is no solution to the problem without doing a major disruption of the federal bureaucracy which would be fought tooth and nail by anyone with a stake in things as they are.

Said another way, it’s not going to get better. It will only get worse.

William Galston recently argued that immigration has become so central to American politics, economics, and society that it warrants a new cabinet-level Department of Immigration. He suggests that immigration policy has outgrown the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after 9/11 primarily to fight terrorism. The implication is that a structural reorganization would better align federal institutions with present realities.

I find the argument unpersuasive—not because immigration is unimportant, but because reorganizing government without diagnosing the structural defect it is meant to cure is a category error. When the Department of Homeland Security was first proposed in 2002, I argued against it on two grounds. First, it would add an unnecessary layer of management. Second, consolidating multiple but not all domestic enforcement functions into a single department would make that department insular.

Both predictions have come to pass.

The Redundancy Problem

The creation of DHS merged 22 agencies under one umbrella. But “merged” is misleading. What actually happened was not simplification but accretion. Existing agencies retained much of their internal culture, operational autonomy, and statutory authority. What was added was a superstructure: a new secretary, new undersecretaries, new compliance offices, new review processes, and new coordination mechanisms.

In other words, we added a layer.

In complex systems, corporate or governmental, adding a coordination layer without eliminating underlying complexity rarely produces clarity. It produces reporting overhead. It produces bureaucratic friction. It produces delay. The core statutory frameworks governing immigration, border enforcement, disaster response, and intelligence did not meaningfully change when DHS was created. What changed were reporting lines.

Twenty-plus years later, DHS is one of the largest federal departments. It is not simpler. It is not notably more coherent. It is simply larger.

Reorganizations are seductive because they create the appearance of action. But unless they alter incentives and statutory authority, they mostly rearrange boxes on an organizational chart.

The Insularity Problem

Before DHS, immigration enforcement and related functions were embedded in larger institutional ecosystems. They were part of Justice, Treasury, Transportation. They were subject to broader departmental cultures and cross-pressures.

DHS consolidated many enforcement-heavy agencies into a single department defined by a unifying mission: homeland security. Mission framing matters. When an organization’s identity is tied to preventing catastrophic risk, it naturally evolves toward risk aversion, secrecy, and internal cohesion. Those traits are not inherently bad but they are self-reinforcing.

At the same time, not all enforcement agencies were consolidated. The FBI remained in Justice. ATF remained separate. So we did not create a unified domestic enforcement system. We created a large enforcement bloc with its own culture and intelligence apparatus, operating alongside other enforcement bodies.

That is a recipe for institutional insularity.

Over time, large consolidated departments tend to defend their turf, justify their budgets, and interpret data in ways that reinforce their mission. That is not a moral failing. It is bureaucratic physics.

Does a Department of Immigration Solve Anything?

Galston argues that immigration is no longer primarily a security issue and therefore should not sit inside DHS. He proposes a new Department of Immigration, along with a Bureau of Immigration Analysis to assess economic needs. But what specific dysfunction would this cure?

Is the asylum backlog caused by DHS reporting lines? No. It is caused by statutory design, procedural rules, and insufficient adjudicative capacity.

Are deportation controversies caused by departmental placement? No. They are driven by executive priorities, prosecutorial discretion, and political mandates.

Is the emphasis on family reunification versus economic migration a structural problem inside DHS? No. It is embedded in immigration law enacted by Congress decades ago.

You do not fix statutory architecture by moving boxes.

The proposed Bureau of Immigration Analysis raises a deeper issue. It would assess “the needs of the economy.” But that phrase hides an assumption. Which economy? At what wage levels? Under what capital-labor balance? With what automation trajectory?

If the bureau takes current sectoral dependence on immigrant labor as given, then it is not analyzing needs it is ratifying existing business models. That is circular. It treats present economic structures as optimal and adjusts immigration policy to sustain them.

But immigration levels influence wages. They influence labor force participation. They influence automation incentives. They influence fiscal burdens on states and localities.

Those are political choices. They are distributional questions. They cannot be rendered technocratic simply by creating a bureau.

The Lesson of DHS

The lesson of DHS is not that we need another reorganization. The lesson is that structural consolidation without incentive reform produces bureaucratic insulation. If immigration policy is obsolete and I believe much of it is, then the remedy lies in:

• Rewriting the statutory balance between family and economic migration.
• Reforming asylum procedures.
• Designing workable guest-worker programs.
• Enforcing employer verification consistently.
• Clarifying federal-state responsibilities and compensation mechanisms.

Those are legislative and policy questions.

Creating a Department of Immigration would not answer them. It would elevate immigration symbolically to cabinet status. It would trigger new congressional committees, new political appointments, and a multi-year transition process. It would consume administrative energy. It would not necessarily produce clarity.

In large organizations, structural reorganization is the most expensive and least reliable form of reform.

I opposed DHS because it added a layer and consolidated enforcement culture in ways that encouraged insularity. Both occurred. We should hesitate before repeating the experiment.

If there is a structural change worth considering, it would be more modest and more surgical: separating adjudication from enforcement, creating independent immigration courts, or embedding economic migration functions within departments already oriented toward labor markets and economic analysis.

In complex systems, decomposition by function is usually more stable than centralization by theme.

Immigration is indeed central to our national life. That is precisely why we should resist cosmetic reorganizations and instead focus on the harder work of statutory reform and incentive design.

Rearranging the chart is easier. It is also less likely to work.

It’s never too early to start speculating about 2028. That’s what Matthew Continetti is doing in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. In it he opens by considering the present state of the race:

Former Vice President Kamala Harris leads with 31%, followed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom at 22%. From there, the drop-off is steep. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is in third place with 9%. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is close on Mr. Buttigieg’s heels. The only other Democrat to earn more than 5% in national polls is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

You may notice that at this point everything is proceeding exactly as I have predicted. I’ll repeat myself: barring the entry of a dynamic, new figure not presently running Kamala Harris is the favorite to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer in 2028. Her 2024 loss will be explained away by the party in the same way she has: she didn’t have enough time; it was all Joe Biden’s fault.

He continues with some prognostication:

Socialism’s rise raises troubling questions about the party’s future. The shift has electoral consequences. A radicalized base, animated by anti-Trump resistance, may be an asset in special and midterm elections. But open borders, social disorder and transgender ideology have hurt Democrats in presidential years. They will do so again if unchecked.

Success in 2028 thus depends on finding an appealing candidate who embodies change not only from Mr. Trump, but also from the Democrats’ reputation. That requires exactly the sort of self-examination Democrats are determined to avoid. The Democratic National Committee won’t release its autopsy of the 2024 election—a telling refusal to debate the party’s future.

For the moment, an ascendant left celebrates presidential aspirants who oppose Mr. Trump’s values and policies root and branch. What happens, though, when the moment passes and the public must decide between two non-Trump alternatives?

He continues by examining various candidates’ shortcomings.

The question that needs to be asked is who can win in a Democratic primary? The Democratic primary voter is more likely to be progressive, more likely to be black, and more likely to be a party insider than the average Democratic voter. That rules out most of the candidates stepping forward. Since 2008, Democratic nominations have been determined in large part by which candidate consolidates black primary voters early. White candidates who succeeded did so only after receiving visible validation from trusted black political figures. That has not happened yet.

Every single one of the present candidates has serious what are called in sales “knock-offs”, i.e. disqualifications.

I continue to believe that, unless she withdraws from the race, Kamala Harris remains the odds-on favorite. She is the most experienced and the most acceptable to a larger number of likely Democratic primary voters. At present, there is no visible path for another candidate to assemble a broader and more cohesive primary coalition.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a brusque op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. In the op-ed he challenges Europe’s leaders to literally put their money where their mouths are, i.e. to back up their speeches. Here’s his peroration:

The last time I looked, the U.S. supplies 70% of NATO spending and almost all of its nuclear deterrence (depending on what you believe about the French force de frappe), as well as 95% of heavy-lift capacity.

European leaders need to be serious. They either need to show that they mean it—that they are willing to do something big, risky and strategically autonomous to help Ukraine, which they show no sign of doing—or else they need to put a sock in it.

I think his earlier prediction is also just about correct:

Unless these European leaders are prepared to do something brave and perhaps very expensive to make good their rhetoric, the best hope for this economically stagnant, welfare-addicted Continent is to maintain the strategy that has worked for the past 100 years and more. That is to do everything we can to persuade Americans of the truth that their security is bound up with ours, and that in return for that commitment we are willing to spend more on defense, and glad to accept the continued reality of American military hegemony in Europe.

The additional food for thought I would offer them is that American military hegemony requires American economic hegemony. We cannot afford the former without the latter. The implications of that are extremely broad, extending beyond military spending to their trade within the European Union, their trade with China, and the inexpensive consumer goods that accompany that.

Mr. Johnson is right about the dependency. But he understates the cost structure. American military primacy in Europe is not merely a function of defense budgets. It is a function of dollar dominance, trade flows, and industrial capacity as well. If Europe wishes to preserve American security guarantees, it must consider not only its defense spending but also its economic alignment. Military hegemony without economic hegemony is unsustainable.

The opinion piece that caught my eye this morning was this one in the Washington Post by A. Wess Mitchell contrasting the differing visions articulated by Sec. of State Marco Rubio and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, respectively, at the Munich Security Conference. Each was hortatory but they differed markedly in their underlying premises and what they were exhorting their audience to do. Sec. Rubio emphasized shared history, culture, and values:

The secretary of state told the Europeans that this civilization was in peril from within. He pointed to years of domestic policies — open borders, deindustrialization, outsourcing of sovereignty, obeisance to the “climate cult” — that have weakened the West not just materially but spiritually. He called on Europeans to stop tinkering with a broken status quo and turn their attention to rekindling the West’s very identity and confidence as something worth defending.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, assumed universal values and focused on an administrative structure:

Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, called for a restoration and refinement of the international “rules-based order.” She described this order not in organic and moral terms as Rubio did but as an essentially administrative construct built in the service of certain abstract goals, which revolve around fighting “income inequality” and “social instability.”

The problem, she said, was not the construct itself but the fact that in recent years its rules have been applied unevenly, in ways that treat the West more favorably than the developing world. “What we are seeking,” she said, “is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates … hypocrisies.” She called for a return to “dozens of global compacts” that the Trump administration has “withdrawn from” and a redoubling of efforts to “stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.”

Dr. Mitchell correctly notes the issues with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s formulation:

Rubio’s speech put its finger on what has long been a fundamental problem for the progressive vision of order: that it attaches value (indeed, the ultimate value) to institutions that are the by-product of a civilization that it holds to be uniquely and irredeemably iniquitous.

I would articulate that slightly differently. The rule of law is part of the superstructure of Western civilization and honored more in the breach than the observance.

Dr. Mitchell clearly favors Sec. Rubio’s formulation. I think that both views are severely flawed and peculiarly American. IMO the idea of “the West” as presently articulated is largely a sales pitch by the British over the last century or so to draw the United States into wars they feared they were losing. It lies in stark contrast to the disdain in which our European cousins held us for the previous century. There is a kernel of truth in it but it is greatly exaggerated.

The other problem with Sec. Rubio’s formulation is that although we do derive much from our European heritage we also derive aspects of our culture and values from Africa, Asia, and native Americans which the Europeans do not share other than as they have been mediated through us, something the French and Germans, in particular, actively deny. Perhaps more of their cultures and values will be derived from other sources in the next century but they are not now.

The additional problem with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s formulation is that there are no universal values. The two to which she drew attention, income equality and social stability, are conditional goods not universal. The “hypocrisy” about which she complains is inherent in that lack of universality, i.e. they are honored on a strictly instrumental basis by virtually every country, not just the United States or the countries of Europe.

American culture is not marble; it is tectonic. Its dominant substrate shifts over time and place, absorbing new populations, new experiences, and new pressures but it does not dissolve into abstraction. Institutions and policies are superstructures resting on that moving ground. When the ground drifts gradually, reinterpretation is possible, indeed necessary, and the civil religion expressed in the Declaration, the Constitution, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and our national mythology can be renewed without being discarded. When the ground is denied or despised, however, when reinterpretation gives way to repudiation, cohesion fractures and institutions become hollow. America’s strength has never lain in static purity or imported theory, but in its capacity to let its cultural plates shift without shattering the republic built upon them.

I’ve been thinking about a strategic question in Democratic politics.

Do Democratic leaders believe they can keep winning elections primarily by running against Trump and Republicans or does governing eventually have to justify itself?

Negative partisanship works. Fear is a powerful mobilizer and modern politics runs heavily on it. But it has usually functioned as a supplement to performance rather than a substitute for it. Voters will accept anxiety about the alternative for quite a while. They don’t accept unsatisfying daily experience forever.

State government is where the wheel hits the road.

In states where one party governs consistently politics isn’t a message it’s a condition. People experience housing costs, taxes, schools, disorder, services, and whether ordinary transactions of daily life are easy or difficult. They may disagree about causes but they don’t experience them as abstractions.

At the moment many of the states most durably governed by Democrats are showing visible strain: budget stress, high living costs, or residents relocating elsewhere. Every state has problems but these are places where Democrats unmistakably own the outcomes.

That creates a real strategic test. A national campaign built around stopping the opposition can win elections. The question is how long it can outrun accumulated experience.

So the coming elections may tell us something broader than who voters like or dislike.

Are they still primarily voting to prevent the other party from governing?

Or are they beginning to judge the places where one party already does?

If the latter starts to dominate, then politics shifts back toward results — and fear stops being enough.

Once upon a time there was a norm in American politics, first articulated by Arthur Vandenberg: “Politics ends at the water’s edge”. That norm is well and truly gone, as events at the Munich Conference have demonstrated. “Politics ends at the water’s edge” did not just mean Americans agreed about foreign policy; it meant that when speaking abroad they spoke as Americans rather than as campaigners.

In a world of social media and 24 hour news an American political campaign speech in Munich will be instantly heard in Muncie. The voters’ ears in Muncie are the actual targets for the speech not those of the assembled dignitaries in Munich.

In the past I have warned Americans that the histories, views, and politics in other countries differ from ours. Context is important. “Right wing” and “left wing” don’t mean the same things in Hungary or Romania that they do here. We should be wary of seeing allies in foreign political figures who actually believe in and pursue very different things than we do despite being labelled the same way in their own countries that we are in ours.

I can see now that the same warning applies to foreign politicians. They shouldn’t see likely allies in American politicians who oppose the same American president they do. Their goals and objectives are likely very different from yours. Their context matters as much as yours does.