To Govern, Govern Well. | Peter Banks

If Democrats want a popular mandate to rule, including permission to implement their preferred social policy, they should govern competently at home.

There are, and will continue to be, countless articles explaining exactly why Trump was re-elected for a decisive second term after the catastrophe of the 2020 election and his failed coup. I wrote an article in the lead-up to the election where I made a case for why Trump might be uniquely strong, and in retrospect, I likely underestimated his real support across a diverse group of people. Even accounting for the "2024 effect," where every democratic government suffered at the polls, inflation and illegal immigration seem like the obvious culprits¹. Americans simply prefer to live in Red (and Purple) states over Blue ones.

For decades, when people thought of the most poorly managed states, the image that came to mind was of the deeply socially conservative states in the South and Appalachia. But at some point in the late 2010s, the picture of dysfunctional governance in the U.S. shifted. Note: This is a story of relative decline. You could argue that this broader trend stretches back to the 1970s, but by 2024, the gap in perceived governance quality had become wide enough that millions of Hispanic voters affirmatively voted for Republicans who had spent the last eight years vilifying them—because they viewed Republicans as the more capable party on kitchen-table issues. It was argued that Republicans will cut welfare, and this is probably true in real terms, but the majority of Americans, including racial minorities, are not dependent on state generosity. Issues like the quality of education or highway systems are simply more important to most people, particularly the kind of hard working get up and go people you candidly want in your society. 

I’ve lived in Chicago and California, and almost without fail, when I tell someone from out of state where I lived, I’m met with questions about crime and homelessness. San Francisco has become a literal symbol of international dysfunction at this point. To the extent that Gavin Newsom “joked” about having to clean it up for Xi, much like you would “clean up your room for a guest”[not a literal quote].  Resources are so misused that, simultaneously, the state allows a huge amount of freshwater to pour into the Bay—rising sea levels—in order to, and I’m not exaggerating, protect the local fish population ², while simultaneously investing huge amounts of money into desalination plants to retrieve the water they just allowed to flow into the ocean at great cost. Chicago has its own basket of issues I’m confident you can think of with minimal effort.

Whatever the political-economy reasons at play, I would simply argue that the values of the government and the people are fundamentally out of step. The desires of the population—for quality services, orderly streets, and economic growth—have been pushed to the back burner while state governments litigate a host of other issues, unable to say no to progressives.

By contrast, Republican governments in states like Florida, Georgia, and Texas have implemented pro-growth and pro-meritocracy structural reforms that have simply paid off. We have reached the point that there is substantially more green energy construction in Texas than in California.

Even the education system of many Blue states has fallen off a cliff in the last few years. I’m not even going to cite the Chicago public school system records because they are so horrifying they would sound fake. But both Texas and Florida, however, score comparably to Midwestern states on many education metrics, despite having far more Hispanic and Black students. That is incredible and should be celebrated as a potential to live up to. But instead, California and New York are removing gifted programs on the basis of equity concerns. Now this is not to say that all Red states have good education systems—states like West Virginia and Alabama have failed to improve outcomes sufficiently. But the national Republican party isn’t dominated by figures from Alabama and West Virginia to the same degree that the Democratic party is influenced by California and New York. People aren’t holding Democrats' feet to the fire because they have failed to turn New Mexico into a bastion of prosperity but because of how much they have allowed states like California to slip. If you do not currently have kids in the education system I really recommend that you spend some time just looking at the posts on r/Teacher to get a sense of how dysfunctional classrooms across America have become.

2022 map of the percentage of U.S. 4th graders at or above "basic" math levels. Darker-colored states have higher percentages. The national average is 74%, with Florida at the second highest at 81%. In contrast, California and New York are near the bottom at 67% and 66%, respectively. More maps can be found here. 

If you hear nothing else I’m saying, just look at rent prices in Austin and Miami and compare them to similarly up to date and spacious apartments in a desirable Blue state city. Come on California what are we doing? 

On a more personal level, I was playing with a thought experiment. Here in California, I pay a lot in taxes—what services do I receive that I wouldn’t get in my home state of Virginia? I couldn’t think of a single one. In fact, anecdotally, the services would all be superior in Virginia. Btw yes, Blue states do have a higher tax burden than Red ones. 

My explanation for where my tax money is going is that California spends relatively more on social services like welfare and relatively less on infrastructure. Even on an absolute level, the roads in California are noticeably less well maintained than those in Virginia, despite my living in Palo Alto - a city with average home prices of over $3m. Rather than focusing on building or improving the state’s education system, progressives have doubled down on transfer payments, which, once implemented, are almost impossible to repeal.

Despite millions of working-class people both voting with their feet³ and ballot that current equilibrium is undesirable and they would rather have a more pro-growth government, the state is unwilling or unable to change. An egregious example is California's elaborate boondoggle with its high-speed rail, where the government appears to be more interested in bragging about how much money they have managed to spend(see image below) than the progress they are making in actually building the route. Meanwhile, Florida has constructed a rail system connecting Orlando and Miami in record American time. Wasting taxpayer money while failing to provide an environmentally useful service is simply unacceptable. I’m not interested in complex legalistic arguments explaining why this has happened unless they’re in pursuit of removing these obstacles.

It is, frankly, a tragedy that states as awesome as California or cities as cool as Chicago are hemorrhaging people. Blue states often have the most dynamic and interesting cultures, the broadest civil liberties, and the most beautiful architecture and geography. More Americans should get to enjoy the beauty of our inheritance and the fruit of our labors. If rents were as cheap in SF as they are in Austin or the streets of LA were as clean, people would crawl over broken glass to live in this land of plenty. 

I'm not trying to paint a dystopian nightmare. Blue states like California are expensive because they offer a lot of incredible qualities—but that appeal has serious limits, and the cracks are starting to show. Much of California is genuinely awesome, from the exceptional food to the state university system ⁴. Yet people increasingly notice that these states are falling short of their potential, due to the governing preferences of the current iteration of the Democratic party. 

Part of what makes growth in Blue areas so much more difficult than Red(or Purple) states is that there is a popular feeling, in my experience, that the government is basically disinterested in trying to constrain disorder. To me, this is the simplest explanation for Blue state NIMBYism. Since America has a huge violence problem, people in Blue states know that growth will come with increased violence as home prices come down. Since the state/city government will side with the perpetrators of chaos and disorder rather than the victims - if not always than far too often for voters' private taste - citizens adopt anti-growth policy positions to insulate themselves from disorder. Since, to progressives, the idea of the coercive power of the state being used to stop weirdness is synonymous with facism it is totally off the table. Instead, if anyone does anything to try and implement tough on weirdness policies an army advocacy organizations that represent every niche group imaginable will turn their fury on them. Fear of disorder being at the heart of NIMBYism is made doubly complicated by the fact that violence in this country is disproportionately concentrated within the Black community. This makes honest conversations about policy tradeoffs almost impossible in progressive circles and so people respond by slow walking everything. 

In my, and many Americans' eyes, the progressive project in this country has failed. We have within the laboratory of democracy tried for the last 10 years to implement an openly expensive, divisive, and experimental basket of social and economic reforms only for them to result in worse social services, worse crime, and more suffering for the neediest than the neoliberal regime it replaced. States like Colorado where Jared Polis has acted as an effective manager managed to hemorrhage far fewer votes than New York, Illinois, or California. 

I really want to end with this. Many blue states are not some historically impoverished corner of the world. These areas were, at one point not very long ago, the most interesting and dynamic areas in the world. That they have declined so aggressively should be taken as a symbol for how progressive Democrats govern. If they want to be given a popular mandate to rule, including permission to implement their preferred basket of social policy, they should govern competently at home. 

1. Look, nothing would bring me more joy than to say that “progressives” are to blame. I simply think that cultural progressivism is not the cause of the Democratic party losing the popular vote. Although, the margins in the swing states were close enough that basically any niche issue could have tilted the election either way. 

2. The centrality that the document places on the spiritual significance of the area to the indigenous population is, frankly, surprising. “These Native American Tribes have historical and current reliance on the Bay-Delta ecosystem to provide food and to support cultural and spiritual practices, a profound connection with the watershed that must be taken into account.”

3. Many deep Red states are also poorly run but they are small, traditionally poor, states. Once you start putting New York and California in the same basket as Louisiana and Mississippi you are looking at evidence of massive mismanagement. 

4. Although the UC system's intense meritocracy is more a byproduct of popular will resisting state governments than well managed reform by progressives.