My book, Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Here is a chart I think about a lot:

Source: Zillow

I like to whip out this chart (and the research it’s based on) whenever I’m trying to make the point that America’s homelessness crisis is the result of structural conditions in the housing market, not a mass epidemic of mental illness or fentanyl abuse. Homelessness, as the book says, is a housing problem.

But if we’re going to be hyper-pedantic for a moment (something I would never do unless I absolutely had to), then we might tweak the above formulation to say that homelessness is, more specifically, a housing affordability problem. There are many extremely high-cost suburban enclaves that have virtually zero homelessness. Similarly, there are many American cities with very high poverty rates but comparatively little homelessness. It’s not high housing costs or low incomes that produce homelessness on a large scale, but the interaction between those two phenomena. That’s the main reason an expensive metropolitan area’s anchor city (say, San Francisco in the Bay Area) is almost always going to have considerably more homelessness than its outlying suburbs: the original architects of those suburbs generally designed them to lock out low-income households. The anchor city may have caught up with or even surpassed many of its exclusive suburbs when it comes to housing costs, but it’s still where much of the metropolitan area’s low-income population resides.

Another way to put this is to say that the housing shortage is the result of a broken housing market, and widespread chronic homelessness is what happens when a broken market and a broken income distribution collide. I’ve pilfered this framing from Becky Chao and Mike Konczal’s Affordability Framework, which they wrote last year for the Economic Security Project. The interaction between broken markets and broken incomes structures their entire framework; I found it pretty clarifying, and not just when applied to housing.

So it was a real pleasure to work with Becky and Mike on a follow-up report that does tackle housing specifically. Last week, ESP published “Building Affordability: The Policy Agenda for America’s Housing Crisis,” our attempt at developing a comprehensive housing policy agenda that can fit within Becky and Mike’s affordability framework. Here’s a brief summary of where we landed:

On the “broken markets” side of the ledger, we incorporate the standard YIMBY land use reform toolkit. But we also look at how the public sector can take a more active role in financing housing production—especially housing targeted at low-income households, and especially countercyclical financing that can keep production humming along during economic downturns. (On both fronts, our report owes a debt to the work of Paul Williams and the rest of the team at the Center for Public Enterprise.)

On the “broken incomes” side, we focus on directly lifting the incomes of the low-income households who, even in a well-functioning housing market, would not be able to access decent market-rate housing without some kind of subsidy. We also call for stronger tenant protections that can act as a bulwark against sudden price shocks and predatory landlords.

Our recommendations will be broadly familiar to people who closely track housing policy discourse. They would reflect an emerging progressive consensus that the optimal housing platform combines aggressive pro-supply YIMBY policies with strong tenant protections, income supports for low-income renters, and public investments in new housing to be offered at below-market prices. Mike, writing for his own Substack, notes that our approach rhymes with Zohran Mamdani’s housing philosophy; he might have added that Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman has adopted a very similar posture as well. And they’re just two of the more prominent faces in a swelling crowd of progressive and democratic socialist politicians who now subscribe to an all-of-the-above left-YIMBYism.

That said, I think our report makes a couple of important contributions to this discourse. One is that it situates left-YIMBYism inside the broken markets/broken incomes framework—and therefore within the broader, national conversation about affordability of all types. The left-YIMBY agenda is probably least developed at the federal level, and we also discuss a few ideas for how a future Congress might put it into action. Two, I think it’s important that we put so much emphasis on interventions specifically for very low-income households—precisely the households that our current housing policy regime is pushing into homelessness at an astonishing clip.

The most important contribution probably has to do with the audience we’re addressing in the report. The Economic Security Project is not the Center for Public Enterprise or the Metropolitan Abundance Project; we didn’t produce this report for the urbanism nerds who by and large already agree with us. Nor is ESP like the Bipartisan Policy Center or the Searchlight Institute; we are pitching our ideas at a decidedly progressive audience that includes some advocates and policymakers who are not already bought into left-YIMBYism as a program. My hope is that this report speaks to their concerns and interests in language that they recognize, and that it can play a role in strengthening the consensus that has already powered Mamdani and Raman’s political careers.

Here’s a link to the full report again.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

This weekend brought the welcome—and to me, at least, unexpected—news that Los Angeles Councilmember Nithya Raman will face incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the November election, having jumped ahead of ex-reality TV star Spencer Pratt in the jungle primary. Raman is going to be the underdog against Bass, but my sense is that she has a real shot. And if Raman does, in fact, manage to become mayor, it could augur the start of a genuine renewal for America’s most dysfunctional big city.

Raman gets a lot of comparisons to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and for good reason: both are young, highly charismatic DSA members running longshot campaigns. (Both are also of South Asian descent.) Their most significant commonality, in my view, comes down to how they think about city planning: Raman and Mamdani are both unambiguously of the left, but they reject the New Left-inflected allergy to private housing construction that remains prevalent among a lot of their ideological compatriots. Instead, their platforms are more reminiscent of the New Deal-era left: a left that builds things to advance the common good and raise everyone’s standard of living.

Like Mamdani, Raman is a YIMBY who understands that her city’s housing and homelessness crisis is the product of a severe housing shortage. They both treat private housing development, public investment, and tenant protections as complementary programs instead of mutually exclusive avenues. And they both understand that transportation policy and housing policy must necessarily move in the same direction: if Los Angeles needs much more dense housing construction, it also needs the transit and active transportation infrastructure that enables circulation through dense cities.

But Los Angeles has a steeper uphill climb than New York. The latter city has solid bones: it’s already the least car-dependent big city in the United States, with what is by far the most robust and extensive transit network. And even before Mamdani assumed office, the city had taken some important steps in the right direction; the long-delayed implementation of congestion pricing, Eric Adams’s City of Yes initiative, and the passage of Questions 2, 3, 4, and 5 in the same election that propelled Mamdani to Gracie Mansion. That means the new chief executive of New York started off with a few key things already going his way.

If Raman becomes mayor of Los Angeles, she won’t be similarly blessed. Los Angeles is a city built for cars, at least as much as it is built for people; unlike Mamdani, she’ll be working against the city’s existing layout and built environment as she tries to make it more hospitable to non-drivers. And Los Angeles has nothing like City of Yes or Questions 2-5 in its recent past; the closest equivalent is probably Executive Directive 1, a Bass administration measure that streamlines 100% affordable projects. (Characteristically, Bass substantially pared back ED 1 after it threatened to produce a decent amount of new housing.)

But that just goes to show why electing a YIMBY in Los Angeles would be so transformative. The city has been stuck for a very long time; the existing Democratic establishment has spent decades fighting dense housing construction, even as the city’s shortage has led to widespread overcrowding and a large-scale epidemic of unsheltered homelessness. Things have been a little better on the transportation side, but not by much.

When Bass was first elected in 2022, I held onto some dim hope that she would be different from her predecessors. ED 1 in its original form seemed promising. But everything since—including the confounding decision to defang ED 1 just when it was starting to work—has demonstrated Bass’s firm commitment to the untenable status quo in Los Angeles.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a work trip to downtown Los Angeles for the first time in a little while. Every time I visit that neighborhood, it feels a little more broken. The unsheltered homelessness, poverty, and human suffering is a little bit more in your face on each visit; Skid Row always seems a little bit larger than the last time I was there. And while individual LA neighborhoods are eminently walkable, I’m always struck by how hazardous getting between neighborhoods can be. One late afternoon, I decided to take a walk to Echo Park to meet up with a friend, and quickly found myself marooned on a dead-end sidewalk with no crosswalk to the other side, cars whizzing by at high speeds.

Bass is the candidate of letting conditions continue to deteriorate. Spencer Pratt was the candidate of reactionary LA’s shrieking id, a creature of the same malarial swamp that gave us Howard Jarvis. Only Raman has real ideas about how to bring down housing costs, house the city’s enormous homeless population, and open up the city to people who don’t own cars.

One might reasonably wonder how much she can accomplish in the face of such long-metastasizing crises and a deeply entrenched NIMBY political culture; the answer is probably not enough, but a lot more than anyone else has done for the city. For starters, she could restore ED 1 to its original strength. And perhaps even more importantly, she could reverse the city’s long-running official opposition to the YIMBY legislation coming out of Sacramento. Under Bass, Los Angeles fought SB 79 (last year’s big transit-oriented development bill) tooth and nail; she also moved to nullify the state’s duplex construction law in post-fire Pacific Palisades. Raman could instead endorse pro-housing bills that would benefit her city, giving them a boost on their way to passage. Even if she implemented them faithfully instead of actively undermining them, that alone would be a significant change. Simply getting Los Angeles out of its own way would be a huge improvement. Doing more than that could bring about a new era for the city and the people who live there.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

 Last week, the political scientist Seva Gunitsky, whose Substack I highly recommend, posted an interesting summary of recent research on the features that contribute to autocratic regime stability. As Gunitsky sums it up, “The central technology of autocratic rule is not repression but administration.” The dictators with the most staying power tend to be the ones who are most concerned with the boring day-to-day work of keeping the regime humming along smoothly. The more dramatic spectacles that people tend to associate with tyranny—purges, violent suppression of protests, and so on—are often symptoms of regime weakness, not strength.

Longtime readers know that I am a big believer in the power of bureaucratic administration to make or break governments, so the findings Gunitsky highlighted were not hugely surprising to me. But it was nonetheless clarifying to explore the details and nuances of some of these findings. And they once again got me wondering how to classify whatever it is that the Trump regime is up to.

On the one hand, we have a pretty straightforward answer to this question: fascism. The years-long “fascism debate” about Trumpism has been settled. No less an authority than Robert O. Paxton, the foremost English-language scholar of fascism, said after January 6 that calling Trump a fascist “now seems not just acceptable but necessary.” Trump’s own former chief of staff agrees. Even some dead-enders have been forced to concede that, at minimum, Trump has moved in the direction of fascism during his second term.

On the other hand, “fascist” is a broad and, at times, sort of fuzzy category. Trumpism is not Nazism or Francoism; it is its own thing, and it emerged out of a very different set of circumstances. That difference in material conditions forms the basis of Adam Tooze’s argument against the fascism thesis; in 2022, he wrote:

I don’t find this especially persuasive; successful ideologies always outlast the material conditions that gave rise to them in the first place. You might as well say that the 21st century is so different from Enlightenment Europe that it makes no sense to speak of modern American liberalism.

But we should grant Tooze half a point. The modern United States is a very different place from 1920s Italy or 1930s Germany, and those differences are critical to an accurate understanding of Trump’s fascism. So we should ask ourselves: what kind of fascism is MAGA fascism?

I would like to suggest that Trumpism is best understood as a species of what I’m going to call hyperfascism. By “hyperfascism,” I don’t mean “superfascism” or anything like that. Instead, I’m using the hyper- prefix in a way similar to how Baudrillard deploys it in his definition of hyperreality as a sort of representation that is more “real” than whatever it was originally meant to represent. (He uses Disneyland as an example of the paradigmatic hyperreal space.) I’m also influenced by Anton Jäger’s suggestion that “hyperpolitics”—or constant and frenetic political activity in the absence of any structures that might convert this activity into real institutional change—is the dominant political register in 21st-century Western democracies.

So what is hyperfascism? It is hyperreal, hyperpolitical fascism. It’s a dramatic reenactment of totalitarian domination in a time and place where the infrastructure for real totalitarianism is nowhere to be found. It’s the signs and symbols of fascism detached from the machinery of the Nazi war economy or the large-scale, organized street violence of the Italian blackshirts.

Make no mistake: hyperfascism is still fascism. But it is a shallow sort of fascism, obsessed with outward appearances and completely uninterested in everything else. It is as if the architects of the Trump regime had cribbed their entire governing agenda from cheap cyberpunk thrillers about fascist dystopias. They certainly haven’t given much thought to how authoritarian regimes consolidate popular consent; in fact, they’re acting like the 2024 election represented the end of politics, and therefore the end of any need on their part to modulate their behavior in order to ensure regime stability.

This helps to explain the key difference between the Trump regime and the more successful, long-running authoritarian regimes that appear in Gunitsky’s literature review. As Gunitsky notes, “the most resilient autocracies are those that look the most ‘normal’, with somewhat functioning bureaucracies, legislatures where people sometimes argue, and cabinets with ministers rotating in a way that, if I take my glasses off, kind of resembles the churn of democratic governance.” Trump’s regime has a dysfunctional bureaucracy, tolerates no dissent, and is prone to erratic firings and staff purges. And it kicked off Trump’s second term by voluntarily plunging into the sort of fiascoes that typically signal profound regime weakness: violent confrontations with protestors, open and unpredictable campaigns of terror, and needless provocations against other countries. Why? Well, one possible explanation is that violent purges and jackbooted pogroms are the sort of thing that fascist bad guys do in movies and TV.

That is why I say Trump is practicing a form of hyperreal fascism; its models are less prior fascist regimes than lurid media representations of those regimes. If you think I’m being a little glib when I say that Trump’s acolytes are self-consciously imitating pop culture supervillains, don’t take my word for it. Government departments now regularly post winking references to cinematic monsters like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, to say nothing of outright Nazi iconography. Everything else—the threats to invade Greenland, the concentration camps for undocumented immigrants, the invasion of Minneapolis—exists on the same continuum. It’s all part of the show.

The fact that all of this is being done for the sake of spectacle sometimes leads liberal elected officials and talking heads to mistake it for a “distraction” from real issues like the Epstein files or the price of gas. But that’s a mistake, and not only because the spectacle of ICE raids ruins real human lives. Spectacle is not a distraction from Trump’s real agenda; it is Trump’s real agenda. That does not make it any less dangerous. In some ways it is more dangerous, because the logic of spectacle is the logic of constant escalation.

We live in a hyperpolitical age, and so hyperfascism is not today’s only major hyperpolitical movement. The streamer Hasan Piker, for example, is probably better described as a “hyperleftist” than a bona fide socialist; his work bears little resemblance to what used to be understood as the meat and potatoes of socialist movement-building, with its emphasis on building up trade unions and other tightly organized institutions. Like the vast majority of political influencers, he is not a leader or organizer but an entrepreneur offering parasocial identification with a charismatic celebrity in place of anything resembling organized political action.

This is the form so many self-identified radical movements take at the end of history. They may advertise themselves as concrete alternatives to liberalism, but there’s nothing inside the tin. The good news is that this means hyperfascism can’t survive long as a governing ideology, because it has no program for long-term institution-building. The bad news is that there may be no limits to the damage it can cause if left unchecked. Hyperfascism’s sole imperative is to produce one horrible, transfixing image after another; the images themselves may be hyperreal, but the cost of creating them is all too real.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the titular character, a 20th-century French poet and essayist, sets out to “compose the Quixote.” Not a translation of Don Quixote, much less a contemporary spin on the original; in the words of the story’s narrator, Menard goes through a series of mental and physical exercises that will make it possible for him to "produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes."

The story’s humor and central idea come from the narrator’s insistence that Menard has written a better Quixote than Cervantes, even though the two texts are literally identical. The only difference between them is the context in which they were written. For example: "Cervantes crudely juxtaposes the humble provincial reality of his country against the fantasies of the romance, while Menard chooses as his 'reality' the land of Carmen during the century that saw the Battle of Lepanto and the plays of Lope de Vega."

The story is essentially an extended parody of modern literary criticism, or at least one strain of literary criticism. And it’s a pretty funny parody. But when I read the story now, I can’t help but think Borges’s unnamed narrator has a point. The context in which an artwork is created and the means of its creation are both part of the final product. When we read a novel or poem, or listen to music, or watch a movie, part of what we’re doing is absorbing the hyper-concentrated accretion of an artist (or group of artists’) life experiences, choices, and artistic practice. That’s what makes good art so personal and idiosyncratic, and it is also why there is some truth to the cliché that all writing is a form of autobiography.

I’ve been thinking about what goes into artistic creation ever since I learned of the recent death of jazz giant Sonny Rollins at the age of 95. Rollins was one of the greatest saxophone players of all time; some of this greatness might have come from his native genius, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that he drilled himself on the saxophone relentlessly. Famously, between 1959 and 1961, Rollins spent up to 16 hours a day practicing his instrument alone on the Williamsburg Bridge. He also developed a disciplined spiritual practice built around yoga.

I think you can hear the fruits of both these disciplines in his music, and not just because he was extremely technically proficient. This is a man who really knew his saxophone and was dedicated to exploring the full range of its rhythmic and melodic possibilities. Like any good jazz practitioner, he was also clearly interested in timbre, and subtle variations in sound and color that are untranscribable in Western musical notation.

In other words, Rollins was a consummate artist. His life is, in fact, an object lesson in what it means to be a true artist. Compare his obsessive self-discipline with the sort of just-one-click artistic output promised by generative AI’s boosters. If you ever pop over to X (which, to be clear, I don’t recommend), you’re likely to encounter some venture capital guy talking about how generative AI democratizes art by allowing people to “draw” without learning how to draw, or “compose music” without knowing a single thing about the art of composition.

But that’s not really artistic creation, no matter how convincing the results may be. Because the point of creation is never just the end product; it’s the practice. Rollins didn’t spend 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge trying to achieve a particular outcome. He was exploring musical possibilities and changing himself in ways that even he may not have understood. That process of exploration and self-definition is itself the point. It’s also the reason why his music conveys something meaningful, something irreducible to a verbal synopsis.

It’s possible to imagine a generative AI program that can perfectly reproduce a Sonny Rollins track that isn’t in its training data. We’re already years past the point where such programs can create “new” Bach compositions. But the narrator of “Pierre Menard” would pan these compositions, and he’d be right to do so.

That isn’t to say you can’t make art with generative AI. Another favorite musician of mine, Brian Eno, was developing procedurally generated soundscapes well before the current AI boom. But the process by which he arrived at these soundscapes is extremely important. He didn’t just type “give me a very long track that sounds like Brian Eno” into a chat box. In the case of his 2017 piece Reflection, a procedural algorithm that endlessly generates new musical variations, the app itself is part of the work of art. It is the result of a theoretically infinite number of subjective taste judgments and micro-adjustments made by Eno and his collaborators. It is also the product of one man’s more than 50 years of restless experimentation with ambient music. Eno, the artist, permeates Reflection; in a sense, he is offering an example of how generative models can be part of an artistic practice instead of serving as a hollow substitute.

Those years of work, that development of an idiosyncratic taste and sensibility, and all of those small choices are where art comes from. It originates somewhere in the hazy territory between mastery and surrender: mastery of one’s craft, but also surrender to one’s own instincts about what “feels” right. The generative models being pushed by those aforementioned X denizens minimize the role of both personal mastery and personal taste; instead of democratizing the ability to make art, they encourage people to fake artistry without engaging in the set of practices that gives art its meaning.

From one perspective, “Pierre Menard” is a sort of prank on literary critics, but from another, there’s something very admirable about its title character: he understands that to produce Don Quixote, he first needs to undergo a set of personal transformations. Borges makes clear that he isn’t trying to become Cervantes: he is trying to become the version of Pierre Menard who would write Don Quixote, a subtle but rich distinction.

Sonny Rollins was engaged in a purer artistic practice because he wasn’t trying to reproduce anything; he was exploring the possibilities of his own sound so that he could create Sonny Rollins’s music. There’s a lesson there, and not just for full-time artists.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Way back in March 2023, the Urban Institute released a paper that broke new ground in the study of how pro-housing land use reforms affect housing supply. For the first time ever, the paper’s authors wrote, they would “use a machine-learning approach to identify a diversity of reforms, and then examine their effects in multiple cities simultaneously.” Finally, we would get something like a generally applicable formula describing how zoning changes relieve—or fail to relieve—housing supply shortages.

The results were disappointing. Based on their analysis of 180 different pro-housing reforms, they found that upzoning was associated with a mere 0.8 percent increase in housing supply within three to nine years. Worse, “this increase occurs predominantly for units at the higher end of the rent price distribution; we find no statistically significant evidence that additional lower-cost units became available or became less expensive in the years following reforms.” In other words, YIMBY land use reforms don’t benefit low-income households.

This finding was, of course, catnip to left-NIMBYs. In the three years since the study’s publication, numerous supply skeptic pundits and journalists have held it up as Exhibit A demonstrating that YIMBY reforms are, at best, futile. Supply skeptics Brian Callaci and Sandeep Vaheesan (who I later debated in Dissent) cited it in their anti-YIMBY Harvard Business Review essay. Michael Friedrich relied on the study in his New Republic essay, “The Case Against YIMBYism.” And it was featured in not one but two pieces from the Washington Monthly: one on “the meager agenda of abundance liberals” and another on why policymakers should “ignore the YIMBY playbook” (which, strangely, endorsed strategies that are very much part of the YIMBY playbook).

I always found the paper’s methodology to be suspect at best. Here’s what I wrote about it in my response to Friedrich, “The Case Against the Case Against YIMBYism”:

As it turns out, I was being too kind. The Urban Institute study doesn’t just fail to capture the nuances of land use reform; it’s also rife with serious factual errors.

Recently, researchers at the center-right American Enterprise Institute went back and checked the Urban Institute’s work by examining each data source and zoning reform in the study. The results of AEI’s own research are damning; so damning, in fact, that I think it’s fair to say I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of academic debates over housing policy.

Here’s what the AEI researchers found after looking at all 180 of the Urban Institute’s data points [emphasis mine]:

No less than a fifth of the 180 land use changes were “attributed to the wrong city.” For example, the Urban Institute researchers said that a height limit increase in Aventura, Florida had actually taken effect in Miami. Why? Because the article about this increase appeared in the Miami Herald. (The article’s lead sentence is: “Developers who had plans to build in Aventura on hold can now proceed, but face stricter zoning laws.”)

As mentioned, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. There’s a whole cottage industry for anti-YIMBY academic papers with shoddy methodology, but this specific combination of poor methodology and pervasive data entry error is a novelty. As best as I can tell, it’s because the Urban Institute researchers were so confident in their machine learning tool that they didn’t bother to check the computer’s work. There’s a lesson here for anyone using large language models or machine learning for social science research: always check the computer’s work.

There’s another lesson, too. The academic consensus is that eliminating restrictive land use rules will generally lead to more homebuilding in high-demand areas, which will consequently drive down housing costs. There’s nothing wrong with publishing research that challenges an academic consensus; but in the case of this particular consensus, very few, if any, of the countervailing studies hold up to serious scrutiny. Because, as it so happens, YIMBYism does actually work.

Apologies for not publishing anything last week. I was wrapping up edits on my forthcoming book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It. The good news is, the book is done! You can preorder it now from Bookshop.org. Now that I’ve gotten it in the best shape I can, back to our regular publication schedule.

Remember “The Flight 93 Election?” Almost exactly 10 years ago, the right-wing intellectual and tailoring aficionado Michael Anton penned an essay for the Claremont Review of Books that soon became one of the defining texts of the Trump era. Writing under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, Anton framed the 2016 presidential election as an existential battle; electing Hillary Clinton would mean certain destruction for the American republic, whereas electing Donald Trump would ensure that the United States retained at least a fighting chance.

Here’s the essay’s now-famous opening:

“To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic,” he confesses. And not just to ordinary conservatives! Revisiting the essay this past week, I found it overheated to the point of unreadability. Here are just a few examples of the social ills that Anton attributes to liberalism: “the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers”; “Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents [and] the gaslighting denial by the media”; “the wars on ‘cis-genderism’—formerly known as ‘nature’—and on the supposed ‘white privilege’ of broke hillbillies”; “the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism”; you get the idea. As with a lot of what passes for the Right’s more intellectually sophisticated output, this is basically Limbaugh-ism seasoned with a few scattered references to Livy.

And yet I’ve found myself thinking about “The Flight 93 Election” a lot recently. Not so much the essay itself, but its central conceit: the notion of an election that, depending on its outcome, augurs either the end of the American experiment or the thin possibility of its renewal. As the reference to Flight 93 suggests, the patriots who stared down that choice would be obliged to take extraordinary measures in order to prevent disaster.

Which brings us to last week’s election in Virginia, where voters narrowly signed off on a partisan gerrymander that advantages Democrats. This, like last year’s California gerrymander, was a tit-for-tat response to Republicans’ own efforts to rig the 2026 midterm map in their favor. My sense is that most Democrats have reconciled themselves to this sort of hardball politics, but a certain squeamishness remains, even among some of those who voted for the redistrictings. A common view holds that Democratic gerrymandering is an unpleasant necessity to check Republican gerrymandering.

I don’t disagree with this view, but I would add one more consideration. It’s not just that refusing to gerrymander Democrat-controlled states would be tantamount to unilateral disarmament; it’s that the stakes in 2026 and 2028 are so high that the Democratic Party must be permitted to play legal and constitutional hardball—in fact, that it has a moral obligation to play hardball.

Consider just a few of the outrages we’ve collectively witnessed since January 2025. Trump has turned ICE into his own secret police force and had them conduct what can only be described as a series of state-sanctioned pogroms. The administration has built concentration camps and sought to turn asylum seekers into stateless peoples. Pete Hegseth has been systematically re-segregating the armed forces. Trump launched an illegal and unprovoked war against Iran and then publicly threatened genocide against the Iranian people. Elon Musk’s DOGE illegally dismantled USAID, a move that may ultimately kill 14 million people.

In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton writes that the United States has been sliding into terminal decline for at least the past 20 years. “If you haven’t noticed, our side has been losing consistently since 1988,” before trying to remind us all of his erudition with a reference to the Carthaginian commander Hannibal. As with Anton’s notion of an existential election, we can easily apply this declinist narrative to the Left/liberalism’s current predicament. The United States has only been a full liberal democracy since, at earliest, the mid-1960s, and that democracy has been under attack from the Right since more or less the moment of its birth. In the 1980s, Reagan—the last president under whom the Right wasn’t “losing,” according to Anton—helped cement the conservative movement’s monopoly on the GOP and ushered in a post-New-Deal-coalition political order that saw the steady erosion of the New Deal social contract.

Trump is sui generis, but he is also a culmination and the climactic figure in this political order. He is also an avatar for the dark forces that the Reaganites once relegated to junior partner status, which is no doubt part of his appeal to Anton. Similarly, “The Flight 93 Election” presents Hillary Clinton—Hillary Clinton—as a radical whose administration would be “pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments.”

Trump doesn’t have a consolidated, authoritarian regime, and he probably lacks the temperament and competence to build one. But in the unlikely scenario that Republicans retain unified control of Congress after November, and/or that they elect a successor to Trump in 2028, regime consolidation will stay within the realm of possibility. And it’s no great mystery what MAGA would do with a firm lock on federal power. After the 2020 election, in a piece for another Claremont publication, Glenn Ellmers wrote that “most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” JD Vance has endorsed a book by a regime ally that goes even further, referring to progressives as “unhumans.” They are creating a permission structure for domestic terror on an unimaginable scale.

If that isn’t a “Flight 93” scenario, I don’t know what is. Things have reached a point where it is no longer sufficient for Democrats to win back the House this year and the presidency in two. If the current structure of American politics remains basically unaltered, and thermostatic politics sweeps Tucker Carlson or JD Vance into the Oval Office in 2032 or 2036, then the United States will have only delayed catastrophe, not averted it. What makes the next couple of elections into “Flight 93 elections” is not just the stakes of defeat, but the scale of the political challenge that would follow victory: restructuring the American political system to establish a revitalized social contract and lock fascists out of power.

Which means that we don’t just need victories but generational blowouts. With those stakes in mind, it scarcely makes sense to ask whether time-limited Democratic gerrymanders are going too far; they can both increase the likelihood of such a blowout and act as a demonstration of Democrats’ newfound willingness to do what is necessary to preserve (small-r) republic government. To quote Michael Anton: “I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Truer words, etc.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

This is just a quick one because I’m neck deep in final edits for Build or Die. But I did want to post a few reflections on the sorry state of California’s gubernatorial race.

That race took an especially sordid turn late last week when the San Francisco Chronicle reported credible allegations that Eric Swalwell, the Democratic frontrunner, had sexually assaulted at least one staffer in his congressional office. (Swalwell resigned over the weekend.) But even before the evidence against him came to light, the Democratic field was in a sorry state. On the merits, all the candidates hovered somewhere in a narrow band between “absolutely not” and “okay, fine, I guess?”. The failure of any one of them to break ahead of the pack—along with the failure of the California Democrats’ half-hearted attempts to persuade some of the no-hope contenders to drop out—raised the odds that the two main Republicans in the race could grab the top slots in the jungle primary, locking Democrats out of the November runoff and forcing the voters of a deep blue state to choose between a MAGA candidate and an even more MAGA candidate. Only Trump’s inexplicable decision to endorse one of the Republicans and thereby anoint a clear frontrunner on the GOP side may have saved Democrats from a lockout.

All of which makes one wonder how Democrats ended up in such an embarassing (or, as of last week, far worse than embarassing) position. California is a big state with no shortage of talented, ambitious Democrats. So why does the party’s gubernatorial bench look so dire?

One reason is that we currently find ourselves in a very Californian version of the Year of the Four Emperors that followed the collapse of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty. The Julio-Claudians had ruled Rome since the establishment of the empire under Augustus circa 27 BCE; in 68 CE, the dynasty came to an ignominious end with the assassination of Nero, leaving no obvious successor. Over the course of 69, various claimants marshalled their armies and jockeyed for the throne, but no one was able to consolidate power until Vespasian finally restored some semblance of order near the end of the year.

No one has been assassinated, but California similarly finds itself foundering in the aftermath of a dynasty’s extinction. For the state’s entire post-war history, every single Democratic governor has been either a member of the Brown family or someone connected to the Browns: Pat Brown from 1959 to 1967, Jerry Brown from 1975 to 1983, Gray Davis (Jerry’s former chief of staff) from 1999 to 2003, Jerry again from 2011 to 2019, and finally Gavin Newsom (Jerry’s lieutenant governor) from 2019 to the present day.

Of the four, Newsom had the weakest dynastic claim; lieutenant governors and governors do not run on the same ticket, and by all accounts Jerry did not think much of his heir apparent. But Newsom was closely connected to another Brown: Willie Brown (no relation), the former Assembly Speaker, San Francisco Mayor, and foremost practitioner of machine politics in the California’s modern history. It was Willie who helped mold the early political careers of both Newsom and Kamala Harris.

So Newsom is a sort of transitional figure, poised between the end of the Pat/Jerry Brown dynasty and whatever comes next. But he has shown little interest in succession planning, much less California politics in general. Kamala Harris would have been the obvious choice for a successor, but she opted not to run, probably because she wants to take a third crack at running for president in 2028. Attorney General Rob Bonta, another strong contender, also opted out of running; after it became clear that he was staying out of the race, some California Democrats made a hail mary attempt to draft Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, but she also demurred.

In an organized party system, Democratic elites might have been able to coordinate internally and put forth a consensus pick to replace Newsom; at the very least, each distinct party faction could have put forth their own candidate. (To my great frustration, the demurral of both Bonta and Wicks means there is no clear YIMBY favorite in the race, even though most of the candidates are making pro-housing noises.) But American political parties are anemic, and they’re especially anemic in California, thanks in part to institutions like the jungle primary. To borrow a term from the political scientist Julia Azari, the Golden State is a land of strong partisanship and weak parties; most voters and elected officials are Democrats, but the California Democrats have few mechanisms for enforcing anything resembling party discipline. No one is in charge.

A lot of readers will probably regard that as a good thing; isn’t it better to let the people decide, rather than party elites? But it’s difficult for voters to reach any sort of satisfying decision when they are presented with choices that are so underwhelming and indistinct. And that’s not even the worst case scenario when it comes to a weak party system; the worst case scenario is that an authoritarian demagogue like Trump pulls off a successful coup within one of the major parties.

That isn’t likely to happen in California, but the state may have just gotten alarmingly close to electing a serial abuser as governor. To be fair, Swalwell was the choice of many party elites as well: he snagged early endorsements from Senators Adam Schiff and Ruben Gallego, along with almost 20 other House members. He also rose to prominence in the House thanks in part to the stewardship of Nancy Pelosi.

All of which raises another question: what did all of these Democratic leaders know, and when did they know it? Since the news about Swalwell broke, a number of congressional staffers and journalists have suggested that his alleged misconduct was an open secret in Washington. His top supporters should be made to publicly explain whether they knowingly endorsed someone they knew might be a rapist to govern the largest state in the country.

My book, Build or Die: How America Suffocates Its Cities and What to Do About It, will be published by Princeton University Press on December 8, 2026. Preorder the book now from Bookshop.org.

Phoenix, summer of 2015. Netroots Nation, an annual conference for what was once called the progressive blogosphere, was in town, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren was doing the Friday morning keynote. I was there in the audience, covering the event for Al Jazeera America.

Warren was the perfect headline act for a netroots audience; it is difficult to think of anyone else who could command such unanimous and uncomplicated loyalty from that particular crowd, and she knew it. I was an admirer myself, although I endeavored to maintain the emotional distance that I felt my profession demanded. Maybe that distance was the reason why I left the ballroom with a bitter taste in my mouth. Or maybe it was just my chronic allergy to rhetorical red meat. Either way, Warren’s closing peroration left me feeling more unsettled than rapturous. I didn’t buy it; I would have liked to, but I couldn’t.

The problem was her big applause line, the thesis she kept returning to: “The American people are progressive, and our day is coming. Our values are American values, and America’s values are progressive values.” “On the economic issues that will shape the future of this country, America is progressive.” “It’s on us to show that our agenda is America’s agenda, and that America’s agenda is a progressive agenda.” You get the idea.

What if she’s wrong? That’s the question I kept asking myself. Sure, minimum wage increases, paid family leave, and a more progressive tax rate all seem to poll well. But what if there’s something that the polls are missing? What if the forces of reaction weren’t just astroturfed into existence by the Koch Brothers, but instead bubbled up from somewhere deep inside the American psyche?

A little over a year later, Donald Trump was elected to his first term as president.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Warren’s Netroots Nation speech as I’ve tried to make sense of her recent behavior. One of the reasons why I and many others have long held Warren in high esteem is because she always seemed to take policy and implementation extremely seriously. It was her research and advocacy, after all, that led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. When she ran for president in 2020, her semi-official campaign slogan was “I have a plan for that.” Yes, her Medicare For All proposal seemed pretty dubious, but 2020 was a weird time; everyone was doing it. Overall, I considered Warren to possess one of the rarest and most precious virtues that an American politician can have: she was a bona fide serious person.

But lately, she’s been coming off as considerably less serious. One warning sign: her apparently sincere efforts to work with the Trump administration on capping credit card fees. Her endorsement of Graham Platner — the guy who sported a Totenkopf tattoo for the better part of two decades until it became politically inconvenient — was even more concerning. And then there were her efforts to turn genuinely bad policy ideas into statutory language: her work with Sen. Josh Hawley to turn a Trump executive order regarding defense industry stock buybacks into law and, most alarming of all, her insistence on clinging to a poison pill amendment in her own housing bill.

Taking all of these baffling missteps as a whole, it would be tempting to argue that Warren has changed over the past 10 or 20 years. But I think it’s rather the opposite. Circumstances have changed; the political economy of Washington, D.C. is no longer what it was. Elizabeth Warren has failed to change with it.

“Full-Throated, Economic Populist Ideas”

In a sense, Warren is a victim of success — a perverse, be-careful-what-you-wish-for type of success. She was a populist at a time when populism, in both its left and right variants, was largely relegated to Washington’s margins. Now an especially malignant strain of right-wing populism is one of the dominant political tendencies in American politics.

The political scientist Cas Mudde is one of the foremost scholars of modern populism. Here’s how he defines the term:

The language and structure of populism, as Mudde defines it, is all over Warren’s Netroots Nation speech. “We believe that the real strength of this country starts with people, not with corporations,” she says at one point. Corporations and “Insider Washington” are the corrupt elite in Warren’s cosmology; “the American people,” “working people,” and “hard-working families” are the labels she assigns to “the pure people” at various points. The volonté générale naturally demands a progressive economic platform. This sort of language recurs again and again throughout Warren’s political thought, most recently in a speech on the future of the Democratic Party from January of this year. Notably, she herself dropped the P-word in those remarks: “Running on small, vague ideas that may also raise costs for families—instead of on full-throated, economic populist ideas—is a terrible plan for winning elections.”

Regardless of how we decide to label Warren’s analysis, we should recognize that it commands some genuine explanatory power. Billionaires do command outsized influence over the American political system. Regulatory capture by multinational corporations and financial institutions is a real phenomenon. And it is one that Warren got to see up close even before she entered the U.S. Senate; in the 1990s, as a professor at Harvard, Warren joined a commission intended to propose reforms to U.S. bankruptcy law, only to see institutional creditors successfully lobby for legislation that made bankruptcy rules even more hostile to debt-ridden households.

By the time of that experience, Warren—a former Republican—had already grown disillusioned with the version of free-market capitalism that had previously commanded her loyalty. As Will Wilkinson has put it, “what Elizabeth Warren wants is the kind of democracy and market economy she thought we had when she was a Republican, but was scandalized to discover we didn’t have, thanks to the undue influence of self-dealing moneyed interests in the policymaking process.” There is a lot of power to her insight that corporate lobbyists have manipulated the rules of American capitalism to serve their own ends.

But a simple populist analysis ends up blurring some critical distinctions when it comes to America’s capitalist class. By focusing so much on Wall Street and multinational giants, Warren downplays the influence of local economic barons; the car dealership moguls and cornfield titans who the historian Patrick Wyman has crisply described as American gentry.

This was perhaps a forgivable oversight for someone who primarily operated on the federal level in the 1990s and 2000s. The American gentry may have commanded quite a bit of power in their respective communities, but they were junior partners in the national parties. Shareholders in colossal firms held the balance of power in Washington, not partnerships and sole proprietors.

But then came the 2010s.

The Revolt of Family Capital

In November 2010, the Republican populist insurgency known as the Tea Party movement arrived in Congress. Though the movement received support from some right-wing billionaires (notably the Koch Brothers—more on them later), it drew much of its grassroots support from the middle and upper-middle class. In 2011, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin noted that “Older, white, and middle class is the typical profile of a Tea Party participant.” They bore a certain familial resemblance to the Middle American Radicals (MARs) who proto-MAGA intellectual Sam Francis once wrote would overthrow the cosmopolitan elites in charge of both major political parties.

They certainly bloodied the Republican elite, particularly those who were perceived as aligned with Insider Washington against the interests of the pure people. Williamson, Skocpol, and Coggin observed that there was a very strong ethno-nationalist and welfare chauvinist component to this revolt from the very beginning: the Tea Party activists they interviewed were very preoccupied with the threat that undocumented immigrants would come to the United States in droves, live the high life on federal welfare subsidies, and serve as the foot soldiers for permanent Democratic supremacy.

The money that supported Tea Party organizations did not, primarily, come from the traditional mainstays of corporate capitalism — the banks, energy companies, and health care firms that traditionally hedged their bets by giving vast amounts to both parties. Instead, the biggest Tea Party funders were almost certainly Charles and David Koch. The Koch Brothers were billionaire businessmen, but that was about all they had in common with consummate insiders like Jamie Dimon. Their political activities had a harder ideological edge. And, notably, Koch Industries did not answer to the stock market; Charles Koch once said that the company would go public “literally over my dead body.”

The Kochs were not titans of Wall Street; they were titans of what scholar Melinda Cooper calls family capitalism. In both the Tea Party and in Trump’s subsequent rise to power, Cooper writes, “what is at stake here is less an alliance of the small against the big than it is an insurrection of one form of capitalism against another: the private, unincorporated, and family-based versus the corporate, publicly traded, and shareholder-owned.” Even Trump II’s alliance with the tech right fits into this framework: even those tech oligarchs like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos who preside over publicly traded companies have successfully insulated themselves from anything like accountability to a broader class of shareholders.

Notably, one of the main fissures between family capitalism and shareholder capitalism pertains to so-called identity politics. Shareholder capitalism has proven adept at metabolizing social movements like feminism, the gay rights movement, and Black Lives Matter; this is the source of the now-defunct “woke capital” tendency that populists of both the left and right deplore, albeit for different reasons. Family capitalism is different, because its governing philosophy is more bound up with traditionalist white patriarchy. The Middle American Radicals, Francis wrote, adhere to “a domestic ethic that centers on the family, the neighborhood and local community, the church, and the nation as the basic framework of values” as opposed to cosmopolitanism’s “abstract universalism, its refusal to make any distinctions or discriminations among human beings.”

Shareholder capitalism is far from dead, but the shareholder capitalists are now the junior partners in the Republican coalition — to the extent that they can be considered part of that coalition at all. Trump’s tariffs, his attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve, and his bloody misadventures in Iran and Venezuela have all undermined the interests of shareholder capitalism’s key stakeholders. He is not a servant of Wall Street; he is a warlord backed by America’s landed gentry.

The Populist Blind Spot

Warren’s political thought cannot accommodate the family capitalism/shareholder capitalism distinction that Cooper highlights. The populist dichotomy—the people versus the elites—leaves no room for distinguishing between different sets of elites with mutually exclusive goals. To the extent that Warren divides the capitalist class into different categories, she usually pits small businesses (overseen by hard-working real Americans) against big businesses (ruled by corrupt elites). This blinds her both to how family capitalism cuts across both categories and to the ways in which the owners of small and mid-sized businesses can be brutal tyrants in their own right.

A related category error helps to explain why she’s sabotaging her own housing bill. The American housing shortage simply cannot be understood in terms of a populist, people-versus-corporations Manichean framework; adopting that political analysis leads one to embrace policy ideas that either do nothing or actually throttle housing production where it is badly needed. Thus, Warren’s attachment to a ban on build-to-rent single-family home construction which, if it survives conference committee, could potentially offset all of the bill’s other benefits.

Worse, Warren’s populist orientation blinds her to the true nature of the Trump phenomenon. If “America’s agenda is a progressive agenda,” how is one to make sense of Trump’s 2024 popular vote win? To my knowledge, Warren has not directly answered this question. But her indirect answer is troubling. As she said in January: “Americans are stretched to the breaking point financially, and they will vote for candidates who name what is wrong and who credibly demonstrate that they will take on a rigged system in order to fix it.”

Did Trump “name what is wrong”? Did he “credibly demonstrate that [he] will take on a rigged system”? Warren does not say. But if we follow the line of her intellectual trajectory—including her adoption of some Trump administration policies as her own—then it at least seems like she believes Trump was tapping into the righteous anger and dissatisfaction of “hard-working families.” It follows that the problem with Trump is not in the content of his promises but in the fact that he broke them; on some level, his own brand of populism and his attack on “Insider Washington” (or, if you prefer, “the deep state”) is to be accommodated and even welcomed.

But to get to that conclusion, you need to either ignore the fascist and white supremacist currents in Trumpism or downplay their centrality. You certainly can’t confront the reality that many Trump voters—including many Trump voters who are not members of America’s top 0.1% in terms of wealth—voted for him specifically because he campaigned on a promise to ethnically cleanse the United States and restore patriarchal hegemony.

But this is the ideological core of Trumpism. When Donald Trump calls Somali immigrants “low-IQ” and promises to deport them en masse, he isn’t simply trying to distract people from the failures of his economic agenda. He’s articulating his essential value proposition for his political base.

For the record, I think Warren is genuinely appalled by Trump’s racism and authoritarianism. But I don’t think she understands these as essential features of MAGA-style right-wing populism. The problem with being a populist yourself is that once you accept populism’s essential premise—that the essence of politics is the struggle between a homogeneous cadre of “elites” and a homogeneous mass of “the people”—you become relatively defenseless against other, more poisonous populist factions. You may even be tempted, as Warren has been, to form tactical alliances with those factions against the elites.

But that is a misguided, even self-destructive strategy. It redirects our attention from the main threat to American democracy, to global stability, and to the lives of tens of millions of people. Just this morning, Trump threatened genocide against a country of 90 million. There can be no accommodation with the political coalition behind these threats, not even against common enemies. One would hope that a standard-bearer for modern American progressivism understands this. In the pivotal fight of our time, “the people” are not one of the two main combatants; instead, “the people” is contested territory. Progressives won’t be able to contest it if they take their own popular legitimacy for granted. It’s not enough to position yourself as a tribune for working America; at some point you need to start doing politics.

I’m very pleased to share the cover and publication date for my book, Build or Die: How America is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It. Mark your calendars for December 8, 2026. Here’s the description of the book from the publisher’s website:

A big thank you to Heather Boyer and the rest of the Princeton University Press team (and a special shoutout to their art team for the beautiful WPA-ish cover). I couldn’t be more excited.

PUP is not doing preorders yet, but you can sign up to get notified here. It also appears that you can preorder from Bookshop.org already!

So go ahead and reserve your copy now, or sign up for updates from PUP. As is my prerogative, I’m going to keep nudging people to do that in every newsletter update between now and December.

When asked to articulate his political aims, Bernie Sanders likes to point to the Nordic social democracies. Whatever you think of this vision, it has the advantage of being an actual vision: not just a grab bag of vague promises, but a coherent agenda. Here’s how he summarized this agenda in 2013: “In Denmark, social policy in areas like health care, child care, education and protecting the unemployed are part of a ‘solidarity system’ that makes sure that almost no one falls into economic despair. Danes pay very high taxes, but in return enjoy a quality of life that many Americans would find hard to believe.”

The key word here, I believe, is “solidarity.” In the Nordic social democracies, everyone contributes to the greater whole; in exchange, the state automatically insures them against the vicissitudes of circumstance. Per Albin Hansson, one of Swedish social democracy’s founding fathers, described his ideal state using the word folkhemmet, or “the people’s home.” As he said in a 1928 speech, “The foundation of the home is community and solidarity. The good home knows no privilege or neglect, no favorites and no stepchildren.”

Solidarity both protects and obliges you. As Sanders noted, Danes across the economic spectrum are taxed at a much higher rate than their American peers. That’s the price of the Danish social insurance system, and Sanders is correct that it’s a good trade.

Which is why it was a little bewildering to discover that Sanders is now apparently a fan of middle class tax cuts. He is one of the cosponsors for a new Senate bill that would slash federal income taxes for people making up to $80,500 a year. The list of endorsers and cosponsors also includes Senators Jeff Merkeley, Brian Schatz and Ed Markey; major labor organizations like AFL-CIO and AFT; and other progressive groups including Indivisible, Demos, and MoveOn. Katie Porter, who is currently running for Governor of California, has proposed her own state-level version of this policy that would eliminate state income taxes for anyone who makes less than $100,000 annually.

Unlike the Norquistian Republicans of a bygone age, these Democrats aren’t promising to commensurately shrink the size of government; in fact, Porter has vowed to create a single-payer health care system in California. Instead, the implicit bargain behind these proposals seems to be that Democrats can build a social democratic insurance state that is basically free to most Americans (and/or most Californians), because it will be primarily funded by higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires.

This is more or less already the model in California, albeit largely by accident. The state’s taxation system is still broken as a result of the 1970s suburban tax revolt; leaders of the revolt, most notably Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, successfully campaigned for a series of amendments to the state constitution that slashed taxes and constrained the legislature’s ability to raise them again. Their most famous victory came with the 1978 passage of Prop 13, which, among other things, did the following: it capped property taxes at 1 percent of a property’s assessed value, prevented these taxes from rising more than 2 percent per annum, and barred reassessment unless the property was either redeveloped or changed hands.

In the year immediately following Prop 13’s passage, property tax revenues fell 60 percent, which set off a scramble for new income streams. The state compensated for the loss of all that tax revenue by becoming increasingly reliant on income taxes. Income taxes in California are pretty progressive, meaning that wealthy households pay a larger share of their income than most middle- and lower-income households. Though California is widely believed to be a high-tax state, a 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that “[o]nly the top 5 percent of California families pay tax rates that are more than 2 percentage points higher than the national average.”

Which sounds nice, especially when combined with California’s fairly generous social safety net. But incomes for the top five percent are volatile; the state can be flush one year and deep in a hole in the next, depending in part on whatever’s going on in the tech industry. It would be an exaggeration to say that the difference between a massive surplus and a massive deficit depends on the health of tech executive Christmas bonuses in any given year, but it’s an exaggeration that gets uncomfortably close to the truth.

A more evenly distributed tax burden might smooth out some of the volatility, because middle-class incomes tend to be a bit more stable. Property values are also more dependable than executive compensation. But broad-based income tax hikes are politically unpalatable and property tax hikes are constitutionally impossible, so state and local government mostly need to muddle through a succession of short-term fixes to budget problems. On the revenue side, that means asking the voters to authorize bond issuance, levying steep impact fees on new housing development, and coming up with ad hoc policies like a one-time billionaire tax levy. On the spending side, it tends to mean addressing long-term social problems through a succession of time-limited fixes—except when it comes to constitutionally mandated spending (the state constitution sets a floor on annual education funding) and federally supported programs (Medi-Cal).

As for single-payer health care: good luck. According to legislative policy committee staff, single-payer at the state level could cost hundreds of billions of dollars—possibly as much as twice the cost of last year’s entire $226 billion spending plan. I don’t know if there’s any scenario where the state could realistically raise that sort of revenue, but I know they can’t do it in a sustainable way by only taxing the top income brackets.¹

Of course, the federal government can run deficits, unlike California. But that doesn’t mean that federal policymakers can simply ignore the question of where the money for a social democratic safety net would come from. Unfortunately, I think the left is probably going to need to become more attentive to that question in the coming years. Creating enormous new social programs without funding them through taxes is a recipe for inflation—and we’ve seen how voters respond to inflation, even when it’s more than offset by wage growth. Further, the next president is going to have to deal with a truly dire fiscal situation: a massive hole in the federal budget thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, a federal bureaucracy that is in tatters, and an international community that has lost faith in a US-centric global financial system. In the face of these pressures, I don’t see how we can sustain (1) a truly comprehensive social insurance system, (2) low taxes for all but the wealthiest Americans, and (3) a stable dollar. At best, we can have two out of three.

I’m not saying that Democrats should campaign on a vow to raise everyone’s taxes; just that they shouldn’t make irresponsible promises about how they’re going to pair Medicare For All with tax cuts for the middle class. That sort of thing may poll well, but at some point whoever wins the next election is going to need to govern. What happens when all the goodies you said were coming after November turn out to be unworkable? How do you prevent a fascist resurgence in the election after that one?

In my view, Democratic policymakers and consultants have been devoting far too much time to coming up with appealing soundbites, and not enough time to coming up with a real governing vision. Vision is what we really need right now. And if that vision includes some sort of aspiration to resuscitate representative democracy and foster an ethic of true solidarity, then it is probably going to mean taking voters somewhat seriously instead of trying to sell them magic beans. If what Sanders et al really want is social democracy, then they should make a real case for it.

Here’s a question that no one, to my knowledge, has asked any of California’s Democratic candidates for governor: If, in January 2027, Trump decides that he’s going to turn San Diego into another Minneapolis, how would you respond?

There are any number of related questions you could ask. What do you do if Trump dispatches ICE officers to polling stations in California in November 2028? What if he illegally impounds federal Medicaid funds? And then there are the more delicate questions: In the event that federal agents run amok in California, what steps can you take to ensure the loyalty, or at least neutrality, of state law enforcement? Who is actually going to protect Californians from getting abducted or murdered by ICE? And, if and when it all goes down, how sure can you be that the governor’s security retinue is going to be a guarantor of your safety instead of another potential threat?

These are not idle questions. We’ve all seen what the Trump administration is capable of. Even now that the sack of Minneapolis has abated somewhat, the White House is still finding new ways to harass the state of Minnesota — for example, by blocking the Congressionally mandated transmission of more than a quarter of a billion dollars in Medicaid funding. There’s nothing to stop them from launching similar assaults on California.

In fact, they’re already casting around for a cassus belli. In last week’s State of the Union address, Trump announced a “war on fraud,” citing “Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer.” Other states, including California, “are even worse,” he said.

This “war on fraud” has alread been in progress for months, according to Trump. The racist slander against Somali immigrants in Minnesota was just one part of it. In January, Trump attempted to illegally freeze billions of dollars in childcare subsidies to California. Nick Shirley, the regime-affiliated propagandist who helped lay the groundwork for ICE’s invasion of Minnesota, was subsequently spotted skulking around San Diego day cares.

And Shirley isn’t the only apparatchik who has gone fishing. Last year, the Trump administration tried, unsuccessfully, to get access to California’s voter registration data. In February, just a week before the State of the Union, Customs and Border Protection asked San Diego County to tell them who owns every parcel of land in the county.

It is clear that the Trump administration wants another domestic invasion, and that California is a likely target. Based on Shirley’s whereabouts and that strange CBP request, I would guess that they’re zeroing in on San Diego as a potential site for their next siege. It’s something that the State of California, and in particular the next governor of California, should be prepared for. Given how much we already know about the Trump playbook, there’s no excuse to not be prepared.

And yet I haven’t seen much evidence that any of the Democratic candidates for governor are taking the threat from Trump-occupied Washington seriously. Cruising around the candidates’ campaign websites, I can find barely any mention of specific, actionable strategies for resisting Trump. Swalwell says he will “work to unmask ICE,” which is certainly worthwhile but deeply insufficient; Becerra notes that he sued Trump when he was attorney general, but doesn’t say anything about his future plans to fight the administration; Tom Steyer and Katie Porter are vocally anti-Trump but I’m not aware of any specific recommendations they’ve made regarding, for example, anti-ICE counter-measures.

In the absence of a serious and sober analysis of the threats to California, we have fairly conventional issue platforms. There’s nothing wrong with a conventional issue platform; needless to say, I am extremely interested in what all of the candidates have to say about housing policy, among other things. But this moment calls for something more than a normal campaign and a conventional governor. I’m still waiting for one of Newsom’s potential successors to recognize this.