In any political moment, where the rage collects, where the opposition rallies tells you a lot. Behind Matt Gaetz, the liberals I know have been far angrier about the choice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services than any of Donald Trump’s other picks.
Which is strange because the distance between most Democrats and R.F.K. Jr. is a lot smaller than between them and most of the people Trump or the Republicans are naming. R.F.K. Jr. was a Democrat until — what, the end of 2023? And yes, he is a vaccine skeptic, part of a broader set of beliefs that corporations are poisoning our health to line their pockets.
But that used to be a recognizable wing of the Democratic Party. I grew up around that Democratic Party. And R.F.K. Jr. holds a lot of positions most Democrats do hold: like, he’s pro-choice. Who would have thought Trump would name a pro-choice Health and Human Services secretary? My point is not to dismiss or downplay the danger R.F.K. Jr. could cause. My point is not that I want him at H.H.S. — I don’t. I want an Operation Warp Speed — for everything.
Operation Warp Speed to me was the one policy you simply could not deny that Donald Trump got right. You had to hand it to him. Saved a huge number of lives at a very low cost. That is the one policy Trump is razing to the ground and disowning, salting the earth over.
I think his choice is a disaster. But both the pick and the reaction are revealing as to what the parties are really about now.
Democrats are angrier about R.F.K. Jr than they would have been about a well-credentialed pro-life, anti-Medicaid pick — a normal Republican, the kind of person Ron DeSantis would have named. And they’re angrier because Democrats right now prioritize respect for institutions and expertise: In this house, we believe science is real. And under Trump, Republicans have become the opposite kind of party: In this house, we believe science is woke and corrupted by D.E.I.
What we are polarized over has changed. What our politics is about has changed.
The core conflict right now, the irresolvable one, the ones that two parties will not compromise on, is over institutions: Democrats staff and defend them. Republicans loathe and seek to raze them to the ground, seek to take them over and turn them to their own ends. That’s how you got Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney and Donald Trump choosing the kookiest Kennedy for one of the most important positions in government.
And I think this is really bad.
It’s bad for the institutions, which are now under extraordinary danger when Republicans get elected. But it’s also bad for the institutions because they face a different kind of danger when Democrats are elected. They face a danger the Democrats are too quick to defend — and to fortify them, even when they don’t work. The Democrats are often committed to the institution in name, to the process as it exists — as opposed to the outcomes the institution is supposed to deliver.
I’m worried about the inability to affordably and quickly build homes, build trains, deliver services, permit clean energy, fund science without burying it in bureaucracy and process. I’m worried about how absent the huge accomplishments of the Biden administration — the Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill — how absent they are in people’s lives. In part because the way government works and spends and delivers under Democrats is very slow.
If you look at the election, Democrats lost the most support in blue states and blue cities. They lost the most support in the places where people are most exposed to Democratic governance — and yeah, Democratic institutions. I always find this amazing.
The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later — four years — the first 28 stations opened.
Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.
So, yeah: I’m worried about our institutions. I’m angry at our institutions. I don’t want to defend them.
I want them to work.
In this house, on this podcast, we believe government should deliver fast, affordably, reliably. We believe institutions should work. They should build trust rather than spending it.
And so I don’t want to see Democrats become a party of the institutional status quo, and that is a political necessity, too. Democrats left a huge opening for the right by refusing to admit what so many Americans constantly see and feel: The institutions that have power over them are often doing a really bad job.
And if you don’t get good, well-grounded critics and reformers, what you’ll get is bad ones. If Democrats don’t have an answer to at least some of what went wrong during the pandemic, then you get someone like R.F.K. Jr.
This is not one of those shows that can offer a clean, easy answer to a hard problem. This is me doing some thinking aloud with some people I respect.
Steven Teles is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. Jennifer Pahlka is the founder of Code for America, a senior fellow at Niskanen and the author of one of the very best books on why government doesn’t deliver: “Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age, and How We Can Do Better.” Highly recommend reading it.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
Ezra Klein: So Steve, we talked for a column right before the election, and one of the things you said to me was that American politics was polarizing around something different than it usually does. Something different than people are used to. What is that?
Steven Teles: As I’ve been thinking about it, when people think about class, they usually think about it in terms of who your employer is and who the employee is. And class is really that difference between who owns capital and who is labor.
And I’ve increasingly been thinking about another dimension of class, which is about who are the sort of objects and the subjects of professional authority. Who are the people who are on the receiving end of our professions, and who are the people who actually run them? And that does not entirely overlap with the classic ways we think about class.
So if you think about it — going back to Covid, for example: There was a class divide between the people who were sending their kids to school, who wanted to work, and the people who were closing down schools and the teachers who didn’t want to go to school.
That’s a kind of cultural class dimension that hasn’t entirely taken over the more classic economic class dimension. But I think an increasingly big part of our politics is really about these sort of professional elites, which are different than some of the more classic economic elites.
I keep thinking, Steve, about this Pew survey I saw. And it was a survey of attitudes toward 16 federal agencies. In all the ones that you would expect, Democratic support was way higher than Republican support. But it was higher for every single federal agency. That included the Department of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, the C.I.A. — these things that I think traditionally in American politics have been right coded. How do you think that happened?
Steven Teles: Well, this is really a kind of longer-term story about how Americans think about institutions and, in particular, where they think institutions fit in our larger party system. And when I think about this historically — you can think about it going back all the way to the ’60s — that attacks on institutions used to be thought of as a left-coded sort of thing.
So people who were attacking the university president or who were attacking the C.I.A. or who were associated with conspiracy theories were much more on the left. And something really dramatic happened to America in that period, in that the elites, the establishment, the people who ran universities and foundations and professions, made a kind of calculation that in order to protect those establishments, they really needed to bring these sort of left energies into them.
And in the process — and I talk about this in my book, “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law” — what happened is that the professions became liberalized, but liberalism also became professionalized. To the point where both all those institutions, including government institutions, are now seen as kind of part of the Democratic Party extended network. And Republicans, almost by default, have become the party of being opposed to those institutions and suspicious of them and skeptical.
I’m thinking about that line you just said: that the institutions became liberalized and liberalism became professionalized. And something I’ve heard you say elsewhere is that Democrats have become the party of etiquette, the party of manners.
What do you mean by that? And is that related?
Steven Teles: So if you think about what do institutions do, institutions of all sorts, is that they tell people what to do and how to behave and to sit up straight. And there’s classic versions of that. When I was a boy, I used to go to South Carolina, and my grandparents, who were good Christian folk would, tell me to sit up straight and use my knife and fork in the right way and give a man a proper handshake.
And one way to think about a lot of the new things that people associate with D.E.I. and race or on campuses is they’re a sort of new form of cultural class etiquette. And Democrats and liberal professions are the ones who generally tell people what to say and how to say it. And that’s whether it’s the media or universities or schools, all the way through: All those institutions that are basically in charge of setting the rules and setting the sort of standards of decorum are now closer to being on the liberal side.
And that’s also the case that a lot of the regulatory institutions we have, the things that both regulate us economically and regulate us culturally, are connected to that larger liberal governing project. And so you can think about populism in part as a reaction to that degree that the etiquette- and/or manners-setting parts of our institutions are on one side, and that therefore the residual — the people who are actually the subjects of that regulation — have gradually moved into the Republican Party.
And I think you can actually see some of that in the movement of young men into the Republican Party who often tend to think of themselves as the subjects of regulation and discipline — rather than the people who imagine themselves actually doling it out.
So Jen, there are these two coalitions now. You have the anti-institutional coalition around Donald Trump. This is a coalition so committed to the destruction or degradation or weaponization of these institutions that it would try to name Matt Gaetz as attorney general.
And you have the pro-institutional coalition: In this house, we believe in science. Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney. A coalition that has broadly united to try to stop these institutions from being burned down.
When we cut politics along that line, what positions or textures or realities about these institutions does a pro-institutional coalition miss?
Jennifer Pahlka: You said something in a column recently to that effect: that with Kamala Harris standing in front of the White House as her sort of closing remarks, she’s absolutely signaling that this party is for these institutions.
And then you’ve got the Republicans on the other side. And it was like the first time I sort of wasn’t happy with your framing, because it’s missing those who want to defend the need for institutions, especially in the face of everything that is coming at this country, but don’t want to defend them, want to reform them.
And I think, what Steve was just talking about with this etiquette: There’s an aspect of it that is not just etiquette. It’s this sort of, you might refer to it like Nick Bagley’s procedure fetish: this cramped professional thinking where you’re sort of basking in the complexities that run these institutions that I think has become part of that defense that’s at this point less defensible than it should be.
It’s different to say: We need these institutions to face the 21st century. Than it is to say: The way they run today is OK. There is a center of gravity, I think, starting to emerge that’s neither the blow-it-all-ups nor that sort of cramped, professionalized liberal defense of the institutions.
You talk a lot about the way in which you see liberals being focused on process, not outcomes.
Jennifer Pahlka: Yeah.
You’ve related the point that political elites celebrate policy and the public feels delivery.
Jennifer Pahlka: Yes.
Tell me about those disconnects.
Jennifer Pahlka: I think we saw it a lot, unfortunately, in the Biden administration, and I think it was part of the backlash. Certainly not all of it. But probably the biggest example of it would be the Biden administration’s insistence on the success of the big bills that were passed — the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure, where they are incredible accomplishments legislatively. And if you look at it from that perspective, he is absolutely a hero.
But if you look at from the perspective of people in states in the U.S. whose economies have been hollowed out: It took so long to get that money out the door. In fact, most of it isn’t out the door. It hasn’t started actually building much yet. That, of course, there’s less excitement about those legislative wins because the delivery just isn’t there. And it’s not there in part because the administration, I think, didn’t pay equal attention to the implementation.
They kind of take it for granted that it’s going to take forever to get that out the door because that’s the way this institution’s built — and we’re going to have to live with that. So have the team run as fast as they can at the problem. They’ll work 20-hour days. They’ll heroically jump through these hoops.
But no one is actually trying to remove those hoops to get that out the door. They’re just counting on public servants working 20 hours a day.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed that you and I share a very uncomfortable opinion inside liberalism. Which is, Donald Trump and his allies have been very clear in their intention to use an authority called Schedule F.
Jennifer Pahlka: Yeah.
Which can turn much of the federal work force into political appointees, who could be fired at the will of the president.
And they want to use this to hollow out much of the so-called deep state and replace it with their people.
And because that is legitimately dangerous, if what you want to do is hollow out skilled employees and replace it with people who will prosecute your political enemies, the liberal response in many ways has been: Absolutely not, no Schedule F.
And your response, and to some degree mine, has been: OK, but does the civil service actually work as it is constructed?
Putting aside the question of whether or not you want Donald Trump in control of it: Is hiring and firing authority, is management — is it working?
So tell me a bit about how you’ve thought about that.
Jennifer Pahlka: I don’t think Schedule F is the only reason we haven’t been looking at meaningful civil service reform — it is the latest thing that’s become the distraction. Also to be really clear, I don’t think Schedule F is civil service reform of any kind.
My metaphor for it is: The foundations of the building are fantastic. Go read the Merit System Principles. They’re in the U.S. code; they’re great. We would all agree with them. They go back to the 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Act that says: Hey, let’s stop doing this based on favor. Let’s hire people based on merit. Let’s give them jobs that they can do with skill and integrity. Let’s hold them accountable to working in the public interest.
It’s all great stuff.
What has been built on that foundation over the past many decades no longer actually gets those outcomes, those principles direct. It’s all the cruft that’s been sort of layered on top isn’t serving those principles, and we have to admit that now.
If you’re going to renovate a house, you’re going to have to bring some sledgehammers, and you’re going to have to take some stuff down to the studs and rebuild from those principles up. That is something that the status quo, in which I do implicate the Democrats, hasn’t taken it as a court agenda. It has just not been on the table.
The problem with Schedule F is it’s not taking things down to the studs. It’s going at the foundation; it’s going at the independence and integrity of the civil service. Which I don’t want at all, and I don’t think does anything to help you with performance management or hiring on the basis of skills and experience.
You wrote something that I’ve been thinking about. You said, “Don’t get rid of all guardrails and let government run wild. But yes, pull back on processes that no longer serve us, that turn what so much of what civil servants must do and what taxpayers foot the bill for into [expletive] jobs. And stop pretending those mountains of procedures protect the vulnerable. In practice paperwork favors the powerful.”
You were talking about bureaucratic process.
Jennifer Pahlka: Mm-hmm.
And process always exists for a reason. And oftentimes the reason, certainly the stated reason, are good reasons. We want to protect the powerless. We want to protect against fraud.
What for you are the most common places where process and the values that led to those processes diverge?
Jennifer Pahlka: Maybe it’s helpful to give you a concrete example. I mentioned civil service. It’s something that’s on my mind a lot for office reasons, given the amount of attention we’re giving to Schedule F — which, again, I don’t think is civil service reform.
You have a system that is supposed to hire people on the basis of merit. But when you interpret that very, very, very rigidly, what you do is say: OK, we don’t want to have people involved in selecting candidates who aren’t familiar with all the ways in which we try to reduce or eliminate, really, bias in the process. And so what we’ll do to hire civil servants is we will have human resources people screen their resumes and look for — and I’m not kidding you — exact matches in the language between the job description and what’s on their résumé.
Because that’s — if you’re taking things very literally — an indicator that they have the exact, right skills for the job. And then once you’ve found all the people who were great at cutting and pasting, then you send them all a self-assessment questionnaire. Because it’s safer to have them self-assess than it is to have, say, if it’s a programming job, have programmers interview them — where they might bring their own biases to the table.
And then you’ve down-selected twice on the basis of their ability to copy and paste, and then essentially lie about their skills. Because if you don’t put “master” on every single level of the self-assessment, you don’t make it to the next cut. And then we apply veterans preference, and that’s the certification that gets handed to the hiring managers.
And that is not consistent with merit. You really are then hiring people just who know how to work the system. That process that I just described, where we rely entirely on self-assessments, is how 90 percent of competitive jobs are done in federal government. Ninety percent we do not assess independently.
But presumably, people come in and interview.
Jennifer Pahlka: Yes. But the people who get interviewed are the people on that cert list — sorry, to use a technical term — who have been selected on those three steps.
And what is your understanding of how this evolved?
Jennifer Pahlka: I think it — “evolution” is the right word. That did not follow directly from the Pendleton Act and the subsequent legislation on civil service.
But over time, people create regulations and rules and processes and forms that they think are the correct interpretation of the law that came, or the regulation that they’re working off. And they have this culture, I think, that supports that very literal interpretation is the safest one. And you have a culture of fear in which, again, you’re trying to defend essentially against the use of judgment.
If you use judgment, somebody can criticize your judgment. If your process has no judgment in it, what is there to criticize?
Steve, I’m going to ask you the same question: How do you understand how — not necessarily that specific process — but the culture that leads to that process evolved?
Steven Teles: Yeah, so lots of cases in American history, we’ve had agencies that had sufficiently strong leaders who were, had, what Dan Carpenter calls reputations and networks. They were able to get their agencies out of the — sort of pull down to the lowest common denominator and make them into really dynamic organizations focused on achieving something.
So my dad entered into NASA in the 1960s, and this was an agency that actually had a lot of what political scientists called bureaucratic autonomy. It had a lot of ability to organize itself, to hire, to fire on the basis of very high standards for performance. And part of our story is just we’re not creating new examples like NASA or the F.B.I. in the 1930s or the Forest Service in the progressive era.
And so part of the problem is simply that a lot of agencies that used to be really high performing, because they were viewed as having critical national tasks, have fallen back down. And the other part of it is something I talked about, an essay I wrote a few years ago called kludgeocracy is, again: There’s no necessary system principle here.
It’s that things go wrong. There’s a scandal. We add a new process, we add a new procedure — without really thinking about how it interacts with all the rest of it. And so we shouldn’t necessarily think that the problems that Jen is describing are a result of the fact that anybody designed this thing to operate this way.
It’s really the result of just additional layers of accretion without corresponding layers of destruction. And that’s where I think Jen’s earlier point, that we actually do need, in some cases, a moment where we’re clear-cutting through a lot of this stuff to go back and think about how would we design organizations if we really thought that their missions were critical and urgent and needed to happen fast.
Whether it’s climate or building infrastructure or anything else, we would not design organizations that looked like this.
Jennifer Pahlka: But we’re skipping over a really important point here that Steve touched on when he mentioned scandal, which is the adversarial nature of all this. So when I said you have to be able to defend the candidate you just chose or the regulation that you just wrote — because the process was right. And the less judgment that was involved in it, the easier it is to defend it.
The reason for that is that people attack you all the time. It’s a political world in which somebody is going to say, “I don’t like that decision.” Much more than in the private sector. And so we really shouldn’t understate the degree that the adversarial nature of this drives that risk aversion. And I think that’s true earlier, too.
I mean, we were talking about Democrats being the party of defending these institutions: There are those like Marc Dunkelman out there who — he has a book coming out on this — who will say: I don’t know — I actually see a lot in the Democratic Party which is about attacking the institutions.
Steve was referring to that earlier, sort of the ’60s and ’70s that’s still very much in our DNA as Democrats — that is to sue, sue, sue. Well, if we sue, sue, sue all the time for all sorts of reasons —
Suing government, here, you mean?
Jennifer Pahlka: Exactly. Suing the government. Then every time we sue, we make the government more risk averse. There’s a lot of adversarialism out there, and the natural result of that is going to be a system in which you defend your judgments by using no judgment.
Steven Teles: I think Jen’s right: that a lot of that suspicion of judgment really comes in two layers. It comes in the, one, is the ’60s and ’70s layer, when the left and liberals were mostly on the outside attacking institutions. They were attacking government institutions that they thought were building too many dams and not using public lands in the right way, and we’re too close, and we were worried about capture.
And so we built a lot of these institutions and rules and procedures in order to stop that. And then simultaneously, there was also a feeling on the right that these government institutions were connected to professions that were viewed as being ideologically not sympathetic to them. And so they wanted to govern them and get rid of the discretion of them for those ideological or cultural reasons.
And so we have, in a way, a bunch of legacy institutions from an earlier era of liberal distrust layered onto a bunch of institutions and rules and supervision of contemporary right-of-center distrust of bureaucracy. And the result is that it’s really hard to create agencies that are focused on doing stuff and achieving relatively consensual goals
In the market a company is vulnerable to profits and losses. If they’re not selling their product, eventually they’ll go out of business. And the government is vulnerable to political critique, and that critique can express itself in elections. It can express itself through having the agency head dragged before Congress.
But what the agencies, what the bureaucracy does in response to critique, at least when critique gets to a certain level, is adopt or have imposed upon it some kind of process that at least facially answers the critique. And so some of these critiques are on the left. There’s bias in your hiring.
Some of them are on the right: The National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation are funding stupid studies: Why are you studying the sex lives of beetles? Something you’ve seen coming up right now with Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk getting ready for their government efficiency commission. But it’s not really about the delivery of services, and it doesn’t get answered that way.
Jennifer Pahlka: A thing you see a lot, and I’ve seen this particularly around things like the slowness in permitting the new green infrastructure that’s been enabled under the Inflation Reduction and infrastructure acts, is staff saying: We have to do all this process because if we don’t do all this process, we’re going to get stopped from getting the outcomes.
And it’s just weird because they really actually do care about the outcomes, but they’re defending the process — which is going to take so long that the stuff doesn’t get built in the time that we need it. And it’s a little hard to argue because they really are going to get sued. And part of what we need to do in this next era, I think, is not just criticize them for being obsessed with the process — but reduce the surface area for attack by adversarial legalism.
And that is profoundly uncomfortable for the left. I mean, go to lefty funders and say: Hey, stop suing the government — it’s not good for it. Well, this is a particularly unwelcome message at this particular moment where they are gearing up to sue the life out of the federal government under Trump — and probably should be.
But it’s a very difficult, nuanced situation. I mean, this is part of how we got here.
One of the things I think is hard for liberalism, as the party that tries to reform government, sometimes is that process is neutral, but politics is not. And so there are a lot of processes you might put in place because you need a neutral way of asking a question, like, How do we protect communities and ecosystems from the downsides of government building? When what you really want to say is: It would be good if the government was building things that were good for the environment and not doing things that were bad for the environment.
But you need things that are responsive to the actual outcome being sought. You want to protect against building things that are terrible for the environment, not just building things full stop, without a sufficient amount of environmental valuation beforehand.
Jennifer Pahlka: There is starting to be more recognition of that now. Pete Buttigieg said this at Harvard: Democrats are starting to look at the ways in which by trying to stop bad things from happening, we have stopped too much from happening at all.
And we’re looking at ourselves in the mirror now, given the outcomes of election. That’s part of that self-reflection.
I think another part is, what Jerusalem Demsas and others have talked about in terms of the way that we’ve created affordances for public input that feed that, that in the interest of stopping bad things from happening are just hugely captured by special interests.
And there’s all sorts of different kinds of reflections going on now after the election. I’m glad to see that in the mix.
Steve, one thing I’ve been thinking about is the actual election results. I think after any campaign, we tend to think about the things that worked or didn’t work in the campaign.
And so in testing Donald Trump’s ad about Kamala Harris’s support for gender reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in prison — was a very effective ad. So there’s a lot of talk about transgender issues and wokeness. And I’m not saying all that is not politically worth talking about.
But I was looking at some election results. And it was weighting the shift in the vote by the density of the place. And what it shows is that in the most dense places, which is to say the big cities, the vote turned against Democrats the most. That was really where Democrats lost huge amounts of support. That’s not necessarily where that ad was playing a lot, because these typically were not as contested — Los Angeles and New York were not huge battlegrounds. But there are places where people were very exposed to blue state governance, exposed to the cost of living, exposed to housing crises, exposed to disorder on the streets, homeless encampments.
I’m sort of curious what you make of the relationship between blue states and the shift against Democrats, which was a lot bigger than in battleground states. And big cities and the shift against Democrats, which I think speaks to something about living under current liberal urban governance.
Steven Teles: So I’ve thought a lot about this. And we do need to always remember that all of us are susceptible to believing that the reason that our candidate lost is they didn’t come close enough to our own preferences.
But I actually think that Harris lost because she wasn’t close enough to my own preferences. But more particularly, I think that a lot of people, especially the people who are the closest to blue-state/blue-city governance in its purest form, have recognized what I call party groupthink. That they’ve been through wave after wave of being asked to deny things that seem like the evidence of their own eyes.
They’ve been asked to deny that people doing fare jumping at subway stations is just bad, and it’s disorderly, and that they have to put up with people stealing stuff from CVS in a kind of environment of complete impunity. And again, when you think about just the last five or six years, the number of things that, arguably, liberals just got wrong.
You mentioned the transgender ideology stuff. I do think there’s a good argument that the United States, that public health authorities and medical authorities, actually got away from the opinions of other medical authorities in other countries. So it wasn’t just that the problem was that this is a reaction against expertise.
It’s actually something ideological happened inside of these professions. You think about the environment of the 2019 primary — there was a kind of convergence all on a move to the left: the summer 2020 freakout on race and crime, the Covid convergence on school closures.
I could go on and on, but I think at some point it wouldn’t be surprising if a lot of people who were the closest to blue state governance, who are not necessarily conservatives, just looked around themselves and said: Something’s not right about these people. These people actually — who claim to be the experts and to know what they’re doing — seem like they keep getting stuff wrong. And it wouldn’t be surprising at all if that ended up in the election results.
Jennifer Pahlka: That wasn’t just a shift right in who we voted for, for the presidential. You look at a city like San Francisco, where the mayor and the City Council also shift or city supervisors shifted — at least more moderate.
And you look at the dialogue I think that has sparked that shift — and what Steve says, I think, is certainly borne out. They’re less worried now about the sort of performance of liberal values or getting their elected leaders to say the right things that sound liberal and more worried about real outcomes. Because it’s in their face. And they’re starting to build power around the idea that this institution actually has to work no matter what we say our values are.
They’re looking at these issues that have been really, I think, at the federal level until now: How do you have the capacity to actually do this? Are we going to have the right people in place inside government in a city like San Francisco? How are we going to reduce the burdens on those people, so that can actually get the housing built, for instance? And then how are we going to close the loop between the intentions of law and policy and its implementation?
And you see groups like the Abundance Network actually building power behind those ideas, not just the: We’re a liberal city — we’re going to say nice things.
I think, Steve, there is a connection with some work I know that you’re doing.
So after 2016 Democrats, I think, become rightly alarmed about minoritarianism in elections and at the federal level. You have Donald Trump winning with the electoral college, but not the popular vote. There’s a very big red preference in the Senate for Republicans. And you sort of have years where one of the main things Democrats are talking about — and again, I don’t dismiss this — I think this is a real problem — but is the capacity of the Republican Party to wield very large amounts of power without actually winning a majority of the electorate. This time looks like Donald Trump did win at the very least a plurality of the electorate.
But something you’ve been writing about, Steve, is minoritarianism in the institutions of American life and in the institutions that Democrats largely control — and the ways that has turned people off. Tell me a bit about how you’re thinking on that has been shifting.
Steven Teles: So I’ve been thinking a lot about this argument that you see, especially among first, among comparative politics scholars, but also American politics: the idea of Democratic backsliding. Which comes out of a belief that demographic change is turning against right of center parties and movements. And that predictably, their response to that is not going to be to shift their appeal but to try to use electoral skullduggery or institutional hardball to avoid having to adapt and being able to govern from a minority basis in the electorate.
Now that obviously is a little bit of a hard argument to hold on to, given especially the moves in the Hispanic vote in the election. It actually turns out that populous parties have an appeal to at least parts of the ethnic or racial minorities. But I’ve also always thought there’s a little bit of a gaslighting quality to the argument for minoritarianism because it sort of presumes that the status quo other than that was majoritarian.
But actually liberal Democratic governance of the kind you’re talking about has gotten more and more minoritarian over time. And you can think of just a couple examples. We talked about Jerusalem Demsas earlier, about anti-development minoritarianism, in housing — the ways that lots of reforms and laws that are were passed again in the 1970s gave often affluent people a veto over building and that has caused prices to go up.
Similar stories could be told in infrastructure, where very small minorities have a lot of blocking power. And the final example I would give is what I call regulatory-professional minoritarianism: A lot of the regulation, especially social regulation, that comes out of agencies around things like Title IX — which was all over the discussions of trans issues in this — are really driven by small professional consensuses and that end up generating things that make entire sense within those small professional groups — but often seem weird to people on the outside.
And so I think one of the challenges that we need as we’re starting to think about what a Democratic Party looks like going forward is actually to think about whether this party, the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the party of winning big majorities, has become so captured by the various different forms of minoritarian governance that it’s hard for them to really think in encompassing ways about what building broad majorities would look like.
Jennifer Pahlka: It’s sort of tragic in a sense the way that the discussion about the threat to democracy is entirely about Trump. Completely, understandably. There is a threat to democracy here, but it means that discussion of what democracy is and what we need to do to protect has no room for the majoritarianism discussion that Steve brings up. And I think we have to make room for it, even in this time of great threat.
I think one way to think about that is, Steve mentioned a second ago, this sort of era where people are thinking about the Democratic Party going forward. And I want to do some of that in this conversation.
But before that, I want to think about what the Democratic Party looked like going backward. I think that Bill Clinton has fallen very far out of favor in Democratic Party circles, not as a political talent but as a political thinker.
People are mad, still mad, that he said, “The era of big government is over.” I’ve got my critiques of Bill Clinton. But I was thinking, as we’ve seen the sort of emergence of the Department of Government Efficiency, or D.O.G.E. — because we are run by meme lords now — how there was something like that that was very high profile. It was after Clinton won in 1992, Al Gore’s very, very high-profile role was to run this reinventing government effort.
Archived clip:
Letterman: Um, uh, so have you, have you fixed the government?
Al Gore: We’re, it’s, it’s, it, it certainly needs it.
Letterman: Yeah.
And here he is on David Letterman’s show, trying to popularize what he’s doing, but also positioning him and his administration as critics of a government that doesn’t work that well.
Archived clip:
Letterman: All right, what do we have here?
Al Gore: OK. We, the government spends $200 billion a year buying goods and services. One of the things we found was ashtrays, which they call ash receivers tobacco desk type.
Letterman: But this is a quality item.
Gore: Yeah. But, but this is a designer ashtray, because the taxpayers have paid lots of people to specify everything about this, including the testing procedure, which has to be on a plank made out of maple, for some reason.
Letterman: Now, this, this is not one of your jobs, is it?
Gore: No. This is, no, not, not until tonight.
Letterman: I, I know you break ties in the Senate. I didn’t know about this.
Gore: Oh, I like that. I like that.
Letterman: Thank you very much.
I’m curious, Steve, when you look back at that era in the Democratic Party and the sort of complicated relationship it had with the government — both the party of government and really trying hard to be the party of government reform. How is that possible then, and what lessons are in it now?
Steven Teles: I think we should go back to the point that Jen made, which is that there’s a space for what you might think of as internal institutional critique where we do think that expertise and institutions of various sorts are really critical.
But that you can love institutions to death. You can love them enough to always defend them. Whereas actually being a good institutionalist often means you have to be willing to reform the thing you love in order to make it actually worthy of defense.
I actually think about this a lot in terms of universities. So universities are about to be facing a lot of attacks, and I think some of them are justifiable, that we’ve seen gradual increases in ideological homogeneity. And there’s an attack from the outside that really wants to, in many cases, destroy these universities or at least bring them to heel.
Whereas I think there’s a kind of internal critique that we can have in these institutions to say: Look, these places need to become more ideologically heterogeneous. They need to have a more of a culture of free speech in order to preserve themselves as institutions.
And I think you saw the same thing in Bill Clinton and Al Gore, that they realized that if people are going to trust institutions and they’re going to trust them to do big important things, that people have to think that the people who are running them are actually willing to grab them by the scruff of the neck and reform them.
Now I think a lot of the reforms that came out of the Reinventing Government initiative, especially the early outs for civil servants, once often led the best people to leave the government, didn’t exactly work out the way they should. But I think Clinton definitely recognized that for people to be willing to let government do big things, they needed to trust that government was actually on their side and wasn’t entirely captured by their own employees and processes.
I want to pick up on that word “trust,” Jen. Because I’ve been thinking about, What is my relationship to these institutions? And I’ve been working on a book called “Abundance,” with Derek Thompson — sort of all about why it has become so hard to build, why it has become hard to fund the kind of science that leads to new inventions.
And one thing I just keep coming back to is the question of trust. If you ask me what is my single principle for forming the government, I would say it’s to give the people running major parts of the government and making decisions the trust, the discretion, the freedom to act without so much process on them, without so many audits being done to them.
And yes, some things will go wrong, but more things will go right. In the way I love government or love institutions — like, what it means to me to believe in something — is to give it some trust. And my worry is that the culture of reform is not a culture of trust — it’s a culture of oversight.
The culture of reform is not a culture of giving discretion — it’s a culture of taking it away: You fail — now we’re watching you. Or: We’re going to break you. Which is like the right-wing version of this: We’re going to take all your money. We’re going to fire all your people.
I’m curious how you think about this. What are your principles?
Jennifer Pahlka: I think you’re exactly right. Trust goes both ways. We also don’t trust people when they interact with government. We ask you to verify everything 10 times before we give you a benefit. We talk to you often in really insulting terms.
So both sides are doing something uncomfortable and probably destructive of that relationship right now.
But I think one of the big things that we need to do if we’re serious about reform is recognize that the way we practice oversight today increases risk aversion. So what is usually happening when oversight needs to occur is: We’ve waited until something went wrong, we are outraged and having hearings about it, and the person who can shout at the bureaucrat the loudest and say the meanest thing to them is the person who wins.
And what we’re upset about is that they didn’t use judgment: that they didn’t go for the outcome, that they followed the procedure, and they’re hiding behind that — but the outcome didn’t actually result.
HealthCare.gov is a pretty good example of that, but there are plenty of others. And I’m seeing more recognition of that on the Hill than I ever thought I would. I’ve gone to talk to staffers on the Hill. After the book came out, it was it was great. People wanted to engage, like: Obviously what we’re doing isn’t working — I can see that.
And I got into these discussions with these staffers who would be like: Help us craft the right mandates and constraints on this agency that we think is underperforming. And I would say to them, “Look, you’ve been imposing mandates and constraints on this agency for decades. I mean, not you, personally — you got here last year. But everybody before you has. How is that working?”
And they’re going: Yeah, it’s, it’s really not. But we don’t have another model.
And there is another model: You work to remove constraints. You work toward enablement and capacity building in that agency. And there’s more interest in those ideas now than there ever has been before.
And I think there’s the glimmers of a new kind of relationship, not just between the public and government. But I think it has to start with between the executive and legislative branches so that they can start to build this feedback loop.
Is trust possible though, Steve, when the institutions are so lopsided in terms of who is part of them?
You were talking a minute ago about the way minoritarianism and the sort of control of these institutions and the staffing of them by a fairly ideologically narrow slice of the country weakens him. And I’m obviously not sympathetic to the Trumpist desire to have a Shermanesque march through the administrative state and burn it down and replace it with their own lackeys.
But I am sympathetic to a sort of underlying complaint here, which is that conservatives are not represented in the government. Even when they take power, they feel that they’re at war with it. They’re fighting it. Now, maybe that was less true when it was the party of George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. But I do think they’re, as part of the sort of educational polarization we’ve seen, the institutional polarization, we’ve seen the sense that these agencies are not ideologically diverse, that they do not represent people, is not wrong.
And so, yes, on the one hand, it has led to a really toxic reaction on the right: a belief that these can never be fair, that they’re not fair now and that they just need to be made unfair in the right’s favor.
But on the other hand, it’s a little hard to imagine: What are you going to do to an ideological affirmative action program for the Department of Transportation? That doesn’t exactly sound like a solution, either.
Steven Teles: I would say, I think a lot of these parts of government could be better at admitting when they mess up. One thing that’s way back underneath the psychological substructure of this election is Covid.
This was an enormous — and I think people can underestimate to remember — just what an enormous exercise of the government’s coercive authority was involved in the Covid shutdowns: the degree to which lots of people had their basic movements, the degree to which they could send their kids to school, whether they had to wear a mask, whether they had to put a needle in their arm.
All of these things are remarkably coercive, and people were mostly told that they had to do it, and the experts had all made the right judgment and they were stupid because they didn’t do it. And lots of them now we know — the evidence is in — were just the wrong calls. Closing down schools was an enormously bad call.
I think there’s a good argument that at least in cost-benefit terms, closing down the economy was a bad call. But there’s really been no post hoc self-assessment by all the people who made these decisions. And that’s a rational basis of distrust. And that’s one thing I want to go back to is saying: Distrust is not irrational. Lots of people distrust for rational reasons.
The other part of this is, again, the waves that these professions — and this is how we govern ourselves, we govern ourselves through expert institutions — because they become more ideologically homogenous, that leads to distrust in two ways: One, people think that their views are not represented inside these professions. But also they’re more likely to think — you go back to this groupthink point, that institutions that don’t have conflict and seem to be entirely averse to conflict and disagreement — they, again, reasonably, rationally suspect that somebody is hiding something. And I think that if our institutions became more open to critique, open to disagreement, that would actually increase trust.
And I think there’s also one last part I was reading about the discussion of Kamala Harris and her decision about whether to go on the “Joe Rogan” show and the account that was given of why she decided not to. And they were apparently thinking it was because the staff decided they were uncomfortable with it. And I think that shows something about this sort of substructure that’s underneath the governance of Democrats, that there’s a kind of just buzz that’s at a low level that influences the vibes of decision-making.
And I think this is where the factional stuff I’ve written about is concerned. I think a party, a Democratic Party, that was more diverse at that staff level would also be less likely to make what were in retrospect big mistakes, too.
I’m glad you brought up Rogan, who I think is interesting for a few dimensions of this.
I’ve not known, to be honest, what to make of that reporting about why Harris didn’t end up going on the show. Because on the one hand that is named — that’s not an anonymous campaign official, that’s Jen Palmieri, who’s a very senior campaign official in the Democratic Party. She was advising Doug Emhoff, and she put her name to that. Which is, I think, an important thing for taking it seriously.
And on the other hand, the story as I understood it was that they wanted Rogan to fly to them, and they were limiting it to an hour. And that they weren’t — they had not made a decision not to go on “Rogan.”
So it implies to me that even if there was staff dissent, which I’m not shocked to hear there was, it may not have been the only or the decisive factor.
But Democrats lost Rogan long before October 2024. And the specific period in which they lost Rogan was Covid. And actually a lot of the people were, we might be sort of thinking about here: Elon Musk clearly turned much more hard right wing in the pandemic period. And you were talking a second ago, Steve, about how the pandemic was an extraordinary period of governmental coercion.
And by the way, not just from Democrats. You look at what Mike DeWine was doing in Ohio. There are a lot of Republican governors who were also locking down economies and trying to figure this out. It was a very hard time, and people were making decisions under very uncertain information.
But one other thing that was happening, and you saw it applied to people like Rogan, was cultural coercion. It wasn’t the power of the government yelling at you. It was the liberals online. It was the public health authorities who were just tweeting — but who were saying: Everybody has to stay inside. We’re locking down the economy. But definitely go protest for George Floyd because racism is a public health issue, as well.
For people who were already skeptical, that was a real shattering of any trust left. But the school lockdowns were another big piece of that. I was just interviewing Jared Polis for a column, the governor of Colorado. And one reason I think he had such a huge resounding re-election in 2022 — he won by almost 20 points in a not-easy year for Democrats. I mean, his win was no less impressive than what Ron DeSantis did in Florida, to me. But also, I think one reason Colorado did not shift right very much this year — it was only a point or two — is Polis among Democrats was a very — he was a sort of Libertarian-adjacent Democratic governor. He wore a mask, he got vaccinated, he gave out good information — but he was much quicker to reopen Colorado. And he was much more respectful of the idea that individual liberty was one of the equities that needed to be weighed here. And he was telling me that people still come up to him on the streets and thank him for the way that he managed the pandemic in Colorado.
So that’s a bit of a long take. But I do think of the pandemic as a space where there was a lot of repulsion of some of the people we now think of as representing the sort of institutionally skeptic side of this that Democrats lost. And that a lot of that was cultural.
It wasn’t just the government. It was this sort of allied network of institutions and then a lot of people from those institutions wielding that authority online and in the public square.
Steven Teles: I do think if I was thinking about people like Joe Rogan — and I can’t admit that I listened to all 4,000 hours of podcasts that he records every year.
But one thing I think both him and Musk clearly had in common was: First of all, the Covid closures really did affect Musk’s core business. So he was, in fact, the subject of what he would reasonably think of as coercive authority.
That also interacted with the trans issue, which I think was very important for both Rogan and for Musk. So it wasn’t just the Covid part.
And I think the other part, the thing that — again it’s important to remember how many of these things are all happening at the same time. The response to George Floyd, the at least temporary spike in crime — that all happens at the same time that we call the Great Awokening.
One way to think of it, the Great Awokening is it was also a moment of gigantic groupthink. There was enormous social pressure against diverging from any of those quite exotic elite consensuses that had emerged in that period. And I do think that that drove parts of the Democratic Party into, not all the way where activists were, but too far toward them for what a majoritarian political institution should be.
And again, that’s another reason I think this party really needs more durable internal factional conflict that can maintain a culture of disagreement — in part in order to keep the Democratic Party from getting too close to the rocks. Which is part of what happened I think in 2020, ’21, ’22.
Jennifer Pahlka: I was reminded yesterday of the other thing that pushed Musk right, after the things that were just mentioned, was not being invited to the Electric Vehicle Summit by Biden. And that was described to me as “the thing” that pushed him over. And it’s tied together. I have no idea why they didn’t invite him — but clearly he was no longer in the tribe.
Does that reflect on something broader though, in the way Democratic culture, including policymaking, culture operated in this period? Which was, on the one hand, it was very allergic, has been extremely allergic, to dissension within the coalition.
If you are inside the tent, they want you on board. All the way. Bernie Sanders all the way, in a way, to Liz Cheney. But if you’re not, if you’re culturally outside the tent, then you’re really gone. If things operated, not through disagreement and argument but marginalization and ostracism. You could feel this happening.
There was incredible management of the broad spectrum of liberals. And I think it’s one reason Joe Biden in many ways was a very popular president, even very late in the game, among sort of Washington democratic types. He never disappointed them until maybe Gaza. He was really worked very hard to keep every part of it on board.
But the going into spaces where you didn’t like the people, that kind of fell off in part because there was this backlash. There was backlash to Bernie Sanders going on “Rogan” years ago. There was a view that you should gatekeep, that there were certain voices that should not be elevated in the public discourse.
It was platforming them. Every time I have people on the right on, I get emails that I’m platforming them. And I also say there’s nobody who comes on the show, who doesn’t have a platform. And the idea that the question is whether or not you give people a stage to stand on rather than whether or not you are talking to them — it misses that there is an exchange happening here.
How do you think about the relationship to discriminant conflict among Democrats?
Jennifer Pahlka: I’m not in Democratic politics. I am on the policy and implementation side of it. So I see the tendencies that you’re talking about from the struggles of public servants to implement things like the CHIPS Act, which famously, and you’ve written about this, has a lot in there for all the different groups and the ways in which they are working 20 hours a day.
And yet what was it? Two years after those bills, we had 17 percent of the dollars out the door. And I think what we miss is that there are already a bunch of requirements that when we’re throwing all that stuff in a bucket and calling it a bill, we are not even thinking about.
So you have companies applying for grants for projects that are already in process, which was smart. You don’t want them to just stop and wait for the money.
But then they have to go tell the companies: By the way, in addition to all the things we needed you to talk about in your grant application to cover all these liberal checkboxes, you also need to comply with the Davis-Bacon Act — which is going to be thousands of hours of work.
You’ve got them complaining about things that are still around, like the Paperwork Reduction Act. And I think it’s not just that tendency to say yes to everybody. But also not to go clear out some of the requirements that already exist and really interrogate the burden of administering these programs — the full burden that has come from that sort of accretion. Or barnacles on the ship.
Steven Teles: There were two things in what Ezra said earlier that I think are worth taking note of. One is this point about the groups, which Ezra discussed with my old friend Mike Lind on a previous podcast. That part of the problem with the Democratic Party is that liberalism has a lot of what in another work I’ve called advocacy organizations rather than representative organizations.
That is, they’re groups that claim to speak for populations that they themselves have not mobilized or organized. And that part of the coalitional etiquette of the Democratic Party is not really questioning the basis of many groups to speak for the groups that they’re claiming to speak for. And I think that’s one part of it.
And I also think that: Ezra was talking about how previous Democratic presidents had more of an instinct to at least punch around a bit of their own coalition. The Sister Souljah thing is obvious with Bill Clinton, but I think we forget how much Barack Obama was an incredibly strong supporter of education reform. And I think he believed in it. The people he trusted believed in it. But I think he was entirely aware that the getting in fights with teachers unions was a good look for him.
Whereas Biden, especially because of the sort of treaty he had to do with Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, was — part of that treaty effectively was not doing any of that — even though the Democratic Party desperately needed to send some signals that teachers unions needed to go back to work right in the beginning of 2021. Which they weren’t able to do. And that crime in especially Democratic cities, that they needed to do something about it and pass a bill immediately.
It was criminal political malpractice not to push for a significant policing and other kind of reforms in the beginning of 2021. That would have given additional resources and that at least would have sent the signal that Democrats took these things seriously and they weren’t engaging in a kind of self-censorship to not see what lots of ordinary voters saw.
One thing you’ve said, Jen, is that you think the Democrats need to be prioritizing what you’ve called I-95-ness. I think that might be a nice place to end here. What is I-95-ness?
Jennifer Pahlka: It’s the ability to say: We’ve got to get this thing done. As Josh Shapiro did when I-95 collapsed. He said: Even though there are all sorts of barriers to getting this roadway open again, we’re going to suspend those barriers and make this happen.
And you can see in the election results. There’s so much enthusiasm, I think, for that kind of leadership. Obviously, he’s a Democratic governor, but yeah, it takes a lot of backbone. A lot of people pointed out that he did not suspend every rule to make that happen. He did it with union labor, but he chose which ones he would suspend.
And it only took them days to get I-95 back open. A similar construction project could have taken five years, 10 years, to get approvals. So it was a really remarkable kind of show of leadership that we want to see more in Democrats.
So then always our final question — and this time to you both. Because there are two of you: What are two books you would recommend to the audience? Steve, I’ll start with you.
Steven Teles: So I’m going to do some articles instead to mix things up. The first is a classic by Theda Skocpol called “Voice and Inequality: The Transformation of American Civic Democracy.” And Theda argued there that American democracy has experienced a remarkable decline in a wide range of cross-class civic organizations that used to be the real backbone of how America was organized for politics and society. And we’ve replaced it with a bunch of organizations, think tanks — like the one I’m in, just to own it — and public interest groups and litigation organizations that have no members but have supporters in foundations. And the consequence of that is we’ve replaced a kind of democratic form of organization with an oligarchic form of organization in which professionals and those who can fund them are the power. And I think in a way Democrats need to grapple with the fact that that is in fact how much of the groups that we’re talking about are organized.
And the second is a piece by Leah Brooks and Zach Liscow with the incredibly boring title “Infrastructure Costs” that was in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in 2023. And they show in exhaustive detail just how much the costs of building infrastructure in the U.S. have gone up, which Jen was talking about earlier. And they demonstrate that the explanation for that increase, which I think is behind a lot of Americans’ sense that nothing works, is citizen voice. That there’s so many opportunities for often quite minoritarian intervention in building things, that everything takes very long. It takes a lot more. And the other thing is government doesn’t get big wins that translate into trust and a willingness to invest it with new resources.
And Jen?
Jennifer Pahlka: Perfect transition to my first one, which is “Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back,” by Marc Dunkelman. Cheater — because it’s not out yet — comes out in February. But you can pre-order it. And it’s essentially a lecture from the left to the left about how we’ve gotten in our way.
What I really appreciated about it was helping understand why we got in our way, the roots of this in our culture, and the ways we’ve sort of, we’ve swung wildly between two instincts that we need to balance a lot. And I highly recommend it.
The second one is “The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How The World Lost Its Mind,” by Dan Davies, which is just a fantastic exploration of why, when things go very wrong in our society, at the end of the day, after all of the investigations, there’s sort of no one to blame — and it’s the structures of our institution that we’ve created to do that. I think it’s a fantastic pairing, actually, with the articles that Steve just mentioned and with “Why Nothing Works,” but it’ll really make you think about how we have structured our society to have no one to blame.
Jen Pahlka, Steve Teles, thank you very much.
Steven Teles: Great to be here, Ezra.
Jennifer Pahlka: Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Ezra.
You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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