Defining Mediocrity Down

What Democrats Refuse to See

We unite our coalition by making sure everyone’s at the table.

As DNC Chair our leadership team will lift up our full coalition—Blacks, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ. Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran and Disability representation.

—Ben Wikler, candidate for DNC chair.

No one could watch his final performance at the Resolute desk and think that he could go on in the job, no matter how much one dreads the dreadful alternative.

—David Remnick, on President Joe Biden

The Democrats are about to recede for a while. They’ve proven they have nothing of interest to say right now. They will be reduced to sullen opposition in Congress. Donald Trump—for better or worse, or even worse than that—will dominate the news. The Democrats will spend the next few weeks worrying over the least inspiring field of candidates for National Chairman that I can remember. (See Wisconsin Ben Wikler’s myopic nonsense quote above). They will continue their rather pathetic efforts to come up with a rationale for their revival or, perhaps, their very existence. The latter is assumed, but I’m not sure it’s guaranteed.

I have been reading the various proposals for the reinvigoration of the Democrats. They have been shocking in their thin, reflexive nostrums. The party’s left sings its old song—the problem is the economic anxiety of the working class. Left-populism is the answer. Tariffs, tax the rich, industrial policy (gussied up in green), Medicare for all. They hope that blather will camouflage the fact that the Left lacks the courage to stand up to the real cause of the party’s demise—identity politics and its permissive impact on race, crime, immigration, education, traditional families. A New York Times poll today has 49% of the American people thinking Donald Trump will not be able to do much about inflation. If so, why did they vote for Trump? Because he was strong and appeared real. Meanwhile, vast majorities in the Times poll think he’ll do a lot about the border and illegal immigration. The Democrats, in the thrall of their consultant class, use too-much focus-tested language to sound real. They are the party of synthetic sensitivities, a ministry of pronouns, policing micro-aggressions unnoticed beyond the precincts of Ibram X. Kendi and his sham “anti-racism” center at Boston University.

It would be nice to report that the moderate center of the Democratic Party has come up with some creative alternatives. It hasn’t. And even the party’s best thinkers, like Matt Yglesias, seem to be running on empty.:

Yglesias called on Democrats to redouble their party’s commitment to economic growth, honor the electorate’s moral values, reject identity politics, abandon language policing, and moderate on a wide assortment of issues.

That seems pretty comprehensive…except it isn’t. What’s missing from this picture? There is no mention of the Democrats’ decisive failure to manage our public institutions. They are, after all, the party of government, or so it is said. The truth is, they’re not. They’re the party of government employees. Now, there are some excellent government employees—and I’ll recommend yet again that you read The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, and keep up with his incredibly worthy reporting on the damage that Donald Trump and his oligarchs will do to our government. But there are a fair number of prohibitively useless government employees, too; there are whole bureaus of the floating useless—and more, there is a sedimentary landfill of regulations and procedures that prevent government, especially local governments, from doing their jobs.

Look at the recent California forest fires. Take it, Nellie Bowles:

Infrastructure that could have provided more water for those fires has been on hold, tied up in red tape. Ten years ago, California voters approved spending $7.5 billion to build water storage and improve state water facilities—but by 2023 not one dam had been finished, per the Los Angeles Times. Not a single one. But a decade into various environmental regulations and reviews, they are moving.

And there is the hapless mayor Karen Bass, who depleted the resources of the fire department by granting her local public employees unions vast wage increases. Needless to say, few additional responsibilities or accountability were imposed on those city workers. It will be nice if someone keeps track of how many LA employees will be fired for incompetence during the life of the contract. In fact, there may be a sliver of good news on that front: the excellent Matt Bai of The Washington Post has decided to take on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) beat, not just to follow the amateurism of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, but also to chronicle the embarrassments of the federal sector:

Consider that in 2021, the Biden administration trumpeted the $7.5 billion dollars it had secured to build half a million charging stations by 2030, urging more Americans to go out and buy electric cars; at last count, states receiving the money had managed to build a few dozen.

This is a chronic problem. I’ve been writing about it for years. People joke about my obsession with the militant, dreadful teachers unions. But let’s briefly, and with simple sentences, describe the history of government service reform, a good idea gone bad:

It used to be that politicians could hire anyone they wanted. Urban machines like Tammany Hall hired a lot of brothers-in-law (and more than a few no-shows). Abraham Lincoln hired hacks to run local post offices, as did his predecessors. It was a scandal. Eventually, in the late 19th century, Congress created civil service reform—you had to pass a test to be hired by the government and you could not be fired simply because a new politician came in and wanted his personal set of hacks to get jobs. But that last part became a problem: If you couldn’t be fired for political reasons, it became hard to be fired for any reason. And that zinc-lined employment guarantee was reinforced with titanium when the Democratic Party allowed workers to join public employees unions in the 1960s. These unions have become the dominant force in the Democratic Party. How dominant? They represent the largest block of delegates at any given Democratic Nation Convention. And when was the last time you heard a Democratic politician tout serious government reform? Paul Vallas tried when he ran for mayor of Chicago in 2023. He lost to a teachers union executive.

The problem extends beyond the classroom. Exorbitant union contracts have nearly bankrupted Chicago and other large cities. Here’s Fareed Zakaria on the difference between Miami and New York:

They have comparable populations — New York with about 20 million people, Florida with 23 million. But New York state’s budget is more than double that of Florida ($239 billion vs. roughly $116 billion). New York City, which is a little more than three times the size of Miami-Dade County, has a budget of more than $100 billion, which is nearly 10 times that of Miami-Dade. New York City’s spending grew from 2012 to 2019 by 40 percent, four times the rate of inflation. Does any New Yorker feel that they got 40 percent better services during that time?

What do New Yorkers get for these vast sums, generated by the highest tax rates in the country? (If you are well off in New York City, you pay nearly as much in income taxes as in London, Paris or Berlin — without free higher education or health care.) New York’s poverty rate is higher than Florida’s. New York has a slightly lower rate of homeownership and a much higher rate of homelessness. Despite spending more than twice as much on education per student, New York has educational outcomes — graduation rates, eighth-grade test scores — that are roughly the same as Florida’s.

Fareed might have added that New York State spends an astonishing $36,293 per K-12 student per year. Here are the average class sizes in New York City:

• Elementary Schools (K-5): 24.0 students

• Middle Schools (6-8): 25.1 students

• High Schools (9-12): 23.7 students

Let’s do the math: 24 students at $36,293 per head equals $870,432 per classroom! Let’s be generous. Let’s pay the teacher $150,000 with health and pension. Where does that other $720, 432 go?

I will tell you: It goes to maintenance (necessary but bloated beyond imagining), and layers upon layers of bureaucrats—the wilted flowers of Advanced Education degree programs—who try to make sure that Mediocrity is Defined Down, that curriculums are scrubbed of anything even vaguely interesting or challenging, that rigorous testing is not pursued (New York is in the process of getting rid of its rigorous Regents exams). The waste is breath-taking.

During this era of Rule by Public Employees, a great many problems have been ignored—scandalously—because union contracts are crowding budgets. The Los Angeles fire department is Exhibit A. But think, for a moment, about homelessness. By most estimates, 75-80% of the homeless have either mental health or addiction problems—but we have no facilities for them, due to 50 years of liberal irresponsibility, a combination of the ACLU working with the courts to shutter mental hospitals and local governments refusing to pony up for more humane versions of such facilities…in large part, because of the constant, exorbitant wins that the unions are getting at the bargaining table—where they, increasingly, bargain against themselves.

One wonders: What if a nice percentage of that money had been used to “solve” the homeless problem—by reopening state facilities for those who can not deal with the reality of the streets—and provide adequate “broken windows” policing, and making sure that the public sector provides non-stop excellent services. Would the public put two and two together—and think, hey, Democrats really take taking care of us seriously? What if government employees—police, for example—were trained with the same rigor as the military? What if the Democrats became the party of excellence in government, rather than the custodians of a national swamp? Would anyone notice? Maybe not, but it wouldn’t hurt.

That will have to remain a thought experiment. The Democrats have absolutely no interest in reforming the way they manage the government. They simply will not acknowledge that the lawyers who produce tides of regulations, and the unions who paralyze our governments with work rules, are part of the problem. The smartest Democrats I know listen patiently when I rant about governance, smile condescendingly and do nothing. They are not willing to have a conversation about it. They simply can’t imagine a Democratic Party that doesn’t cater to the public employees. If the teachers were alienated from the party, who’d be left? This is similar to the party’s unwillingness to acknowledge the impact of absent fathers on underclass poverty (of all races).

And so, they are left with platitudes—rather than performance. The Democrats stand for every overweight postal worker who can’t be bothered to put your mail in your slot. And they stand for every teacher who leaves parent-teacher night at the stroke of nine, even if parents are waiting to meet, because the contract says you can leave at nine. And the Democrats stand for all the schools that remained closed during Covid, and for all the regulations that forced barber shops and other small businesses to shutter, at the risk of their livelihood, and they stand for every public school janitor who only mops the cafeteria floor once a week—because that’s what the contract says.

And can you blame the public if it extrapolates? If the government can’t keep the water flowing to fight fires—or can’t wade through the red tape to get dams and ports and airports and highways up to international standards, and allows crazy people to toss my aunt onto the subway tracks, and can’t seal the southern border, and have allowed an infestation of shoplifting so severe that Tylenol has to be kept under lock and key at my CVS, why should we trust them with the White House?

Those are all real examples. Some happened to me. Others were brought to my attention by frustrated Democratic politicians. They are not, so far as I know, under discussion in the post-Biden Democratic Party.

When I came to political consciousness, the Democrats stood for idealism and charisma and the thrill of being part of the greatest country on earth. That was a long time ago. That party outlived its usefulness because it abandoned its bargain with the people: it stopped governing effectively.

I may be wrong, but I think the Democrats are sunk until they begin to find candidates who carry the charisma of getting things done—not just passing legislation, but restoring our pride in the way we run our institutions. That probably means we’re going to need a very different Democratic Party…and maybe, in the coming months of darkness, as Donald Trump holds center stage, the Dems may take the opportunity to have an actual conversation about it.