People want competence, seemingly over everything else

All elections are about state capacity

This is my politics post. Well, politics-adjacent. Everyone has one, but this is mine. I’ll say upfront that it’s not trying to relitigate the US election. Others have done that better and with more vehemence.

Noah Smith

writes about how Democrats had a wokeness problem and pandered either insufficiently or inefficiently to other interest groups.

Matthew Yglesias

writes about the need for a common sense democrat policies, a centrist coalition, where saying things like “less crime is good” isn’t demonised. They’re right.

But the US incumbent party did the best amongst the other developed economies, just like the US did the best amongst all the other countries in and after the pandemic. Just not enough to win, and bad enough to cause soul searching.

Some blame the information environment. This is also true. Definitionally so, since the information environment is what informs people and naturally that has an impact¹.

But why it is this way is a more interesting question. I wouldn’t expect most people answering a poll to understand most things about the world². I don’t either. Staying informed and current is hard. I can probably do it for a few percent of the things that I might conceivably care about if I work really hard at it.

People are not answering policy questions there, they’re giving you an indication of whether things are “good” or “bad”: take them “seriously, not literally”. The problem is that they’re fed up with what they see as the existing system which seems to screw them over. What people call the deep state or the swamp or the system.

TracingWoodgrains

has a great post on his problems with The Machine, the impersonal bureaucratic manifestation which takes away all human consideration from creating the playground we run civilisation on.

I will vote first, it must be said, for a Machine: the Machine that has the allegiance of the bulk of my country's civil servants and professional class, no matter who is in office; the Machine that coiled up tightly around Biden while it thought it could hide his decline, then spat him out with a thousand beautifully written thinkpieces when it realized it could not. I will vote for a Machine that sneered at a few of its more independent-minded members—Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, others—when they pointed out the obvious truth that Biden should have dropped out a year ago. I will vote for a Machine that knows it needs my vote but can hardly hide its scorn for independent voters who push against parts of its plan, one that put an ostensible moderate in office before crowing about accomplishing the furthest left political agenda in decades.

This observation comes from lived experience. An enormous number of people dislike living in what they consider to be a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. One that they think is impersonal, hobbled by regulations that work at cross purposes to their intended one, and cause anguish. Anthropomorphised, that’s The Machine.

This is because of a fundamental disconnect. Politicians love policy but people love execution. People prefer “competent” government over any other adjective, whether it’s “bureaucratic” or “rigid” or “big” or sometimes even “democratic”. Politicians think having the right policy is the answer to most questions. Ban this, regulate that, add a rule here. Whether it’s climate change or tax or entrepreneurship or energy shortage or geopolitical jockeying for status.

But policies don’t mean much to anyone without it being implemented. In Berkeley apparently it’s illegal to whistle for a lost canary before 7 am, though I doubt this is being policed rigorously.

What people in power hear are policies, what people on the ground see are its implementations.

That's why The Machine exists. It was created, painstakingly, over decades and centuries, to make our lives better. It was built to be the instrument to enact the will of the people.

And so, when it starts doing things that the system optimises for but is silly, everyone gets rightly upset. Like this.

For 7 chargers they spent $8 billion. (I got this wrong. Most of the money isn’t disbursed yet, we got 61 charging ports at 15 stations, and 14k more are in progress. As of mid-April 2024, 19 states had awarded $287.6 million in NEVI funds. ) This is a dramatic example of a lack of state capacity that we’ve seen time and time again in a hundred different ways.

In California they just got $5 Billion to add to the 7 they had to help build four stations in a 5 mile extension. As of 2024, after nearly 30 years of planning and 15 years since voter approval, no segment of the high-speed rail system is operational yet. Regarding costs: The initial 208 estimate for the entire 800-mile system was about $33 billion. By 2023, the project had received about $23 billion in combined state and federal funding. Current cost estimates for just Phase 1 (San Francisco to Los Angeles) range from $89 billion to $128 billion. Nearly all of the initial $9.95 billion in bond funding has been spent and 0 miles have been built.

Whether that’s spending $45B on rural broadband without connecting anyone or building high speed rail, we see the tatters of what could be. Whether it’s the need for Vaccine CA by patio11, or CHIPS Act not moving fast enough with disbursements, or a bloody bee causing Meta to not be able to go forward with a nuclear reactor to power its datacenter, or every problem that the city of San Francisco has in spades, or the overreach and underreach of the FDA simultaneously during the pandemic, or bioethicists gatekeeping individuals from curing cancer, or suing SpaceX over trivialities, or the rural broadband rollout which hasn’t connected anyone, or medical ethics strangling research, or NEPA or … the list is endless.

People feel this. The process as currently enshrined tries to impose considerations that stop things from happening everywhere, not just to stop trains in the United States! Just read this.

My USAID grant to curb violence among the most young young men in Lagos, Nigeria—through a course of therapy and cash proven in Liberia & Chicago—is bedeviled by an internal environmental regulator concerned the men will spend the money on pesticides. In the middle of one of the world’s largest cities.

This isn't caused by the federal govt or the President. But it's linked inextricably because they seem to defend the Machine. To not acknowledge it or to promise to stop it makes everyone think you’re part of the problem, especially because you promise to be the solution³.

This isn’t at all to suggest most of the government is like this. The Fed is excellent. NOAA seems great. FEMA too. There are tons of pockets of exceptional performance by dedicated civil servants. They even fixed the DMV.

But bad implementation is endemic. It’s everywhere. State capacity is anaemic. And until it can be fixed, there can be no party of competence. Only parties shouting at each other about who created which mess instead of cleaning anything up. This is why people argue to death over taxes, one of the few things that can be implemented properly. This is why people think the “experts” who said you need to do this aren’t experts any longer, and shouldn’t be trusted. This is why people argue over details like how many sinks should you have before peeling a banana, or argue over eliminating the DoE, with no middle ground.

It's the only way to bring some positive energy to politics⁴. Not about right or left or ideologies writ in stone, but about competence. Building something meaningful and bulldozing what's in your way to get it done⁵. This is a strong positive vision of what the world could be, and it needs a champion. We should embrace it.

1. This seems a problem, though not the same problem that most think.

2. Have you seen the number of debates on Twitter about what inflation actually means?

3. Doesn’t help that you end up becoming the defender of the status quo unless you rail against it. Which is hard when you’re the one in power. But that’s the ballgame. In 2008 you had a convenient villain in the “bankers”.

4. Not just politics. Every large organisation has this problem. Whether it’s FDA or IBM the problems are the same - death by a thousand papercuts.

5. “Why We Love Robert Caro And His Work On Lyndon Johnson”