Thread by @ezraklein

This is a good thread, and it's both what I was thinking about when I tied the parklets to broader problems of liberal governance, and worth talking about at a bit more length.

https://twitter.com/atrembath/status/1468649176372158468

A key failure of liberalism in this era is the inability to build in a way that inspires confidence in more building.

Infrastructure comes in overbudget and late, if it comes in at all. There aren't enough homes, enough rapid tests, even enough good government web sites.

I've covered a lot of these processes, and it's important to say: Most decisions along the way make individual sense, even if they lead to collective failure.

If the problem here was idiots and crooks, it'd be easy to solve. Sadly, it's (usually) not.

Take the parklets. There are fire safety concerns. SFMTA is losing revenue. Some pose disability access issues. It's not crazy to try and take everyone's concerns into account.

But you end up with an outcome everyone kind of hates.

I've seen this happen again and again. Every time I look into it, I talk to well-meaning people able to give rational accounts of their decisions.

It usually comes down to risk. If you do X, Y might happen, and even if Y is unlikely, you really don't want to be blamed for it.

But what you see, eventually, is that our mechanisms of governance have become so risk averse that they are now running *tremendous* risks because of the problems they cannot, or will not, solve.

And you can say: Who cares? It's just parklets/HeathCare.gov/rapid tests/high-speed rail/housing/etc.

But it all adds up.

There's both a political and a substantive problem here.

The political problem is if people keep watching the government fail to build things well, they won't believe the government can build things well. So they won't trust it to build. And they won't even be wrong.

The substantive problem, of course, is that we need government to build things, and solve big problems.

If it's so hard to build parklets, how do you think think that multi-trillion dollar, breakneck investment in energy infrastructure is going to go?

This isn't a problem that just afflicts liberal governance, of course.

All these problems were present federally under Trump and Bush. They are present under Republican governors and mayors.

But it's a bigger problem for liberalism because liberalism has bigger public ambitions, and it requires trust in the government to succeed.

I'm going to be working a lot over the next year on the idea of supply-side progressivism, and this is an important part.

One thing you see in blue states is that even when Republicans can't obstruct, there are huge obstacles to a liberalism that builds. nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opi…

And those of us who want a liberalism that builds, who think that's necessary for decarbonization and housing and health and simply creating the public goods people deserve, need to pay special attention to these quiet failures, because they imperil the whole project.

Adding this older piece to the thread, as it gets at a lot of these ideas, and also why I think it's so important to look closely at the institutions of governance when thinking about these problems: vox.com/2020/4/22/2122…