BANANA Republic

I didn’t want to let Fareed Zakaria’s recent Washington Post column disappear into the memory hole without comment. In it he argues that Democrats should abandon identity politics or, at least, put it on the backburner while emphasizing actually performing and building:

There is plenty of evidence that the Democratic Party has moved left, that it is out of sync with Americans on many of these cultural issues, and that it needs to correct course. But it needs to do so clearly, forcefully and repeatedly. Republicans are clever at weaponizing the words of a few left-wing Democrats and branding them as the face of the party. For example, I have not found a single senior national Democratic leader who has ever endorsed the idea of “defunding the police” — Biden actually proposed increased funding for cops — and yet Republicans have repeated this mantra constantly.

Democrats need to learn how to fight back — for example, by highlighting the most extreme abortion laws passed in Republican states and branding the Republican Party with them. In Oklahoma, abortions are now banned, with very few exceptions, from the moment of conception onward. In Mississippi, a doctor could face 10 years in prison for performing an illegal abortion.

Yet Democrats have another big weak spot, and it centers on performance. Democrats in power often seem unable to get anything done. Democrats squabble more — and more in public — than Republicans. Despite the fact that much of the GOP establishment despised Trump, once he was elected, they nearly all fell in line, mostly passed his agenda and supported him unfailingly. Democrats, by contrast, rarely remind the public of the two big bills that they did pass — covid-19 relief and infrastructure — and in fact spent months bickering over the third one they’ve proposed, Build Back Better. Why is the Biden administration not announcing large new public works projects every week, financed by the federal funds appropriated in those two bills?

The answer is that it has become very difficult to build anything in America, especially in blue states. President Barack Obama, who passed another big infrastructure bill in 2009, famously said later that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” That’s because, as New York Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted, the number of permits, reviews, and delays that have become part of the normal approval process have delayed or doomed the prospects of large-scale public projects. Democrats have become paralyzed by their own ideas and interest groups, and no one seems able to break through and actually get things done.

Ironically, this column provoked a furor on social media, less over its contents than about its caption. The original caption, still present in my browser, was

Now it’s

The irony is that the argument itself substantiates Mr. Zakaria’s point. For a segment of Democrats, clearly pronouns are vitally important. That segment may not be large but it is vehement, noisy, and influential.

Let’s consider an example. In California a highspeed rail project has been in progress for 14 years and has spent $5 billion of the estimated $105 billion the project will ultimately cost. At the end of 14 years not a single usable mile has been built. By comparison the entire 1,911 miles of the transcontinental railroad was built in just 6 years. How could that possibly be? There are many reasons including litigation, regulation, and the sad fact that for some just plain jawboning about a project is actually more important than completing it. They get paid one way or the other.

Let’s consider another example: Boulder Dam was built in 5 years. Modern Southern California would be impossible without it. It was brought in on time and under budget. It’s what put Bechtel on the map. I don’t believe it could be built at all today.

When I think of the prodigious amount of making and building that the ambitious plans of those for whom anthropogenic climate change is the pressing issue of the day would require I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. If past performance is any gauge, should their plans be approved by 2050 very little would have been accomplished but they’d have talked about it a lot.

Footnote

“BANANA” is an acronym for “build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything”, generally used as a criticism of advocacy groups opposed to land development. Such steadfast opposition is one of the impediments to what Mr. Zakaria is proposing and there is yet another small but vehement, loud, and influential group of mostly Democrats providing such opposition.

All of this reminds me of Will Rogers’s response when he was asked whether he were a member of an organized political party. He said, “No, I’m a Democrat”.