This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Nov. 16, 2021. It is shared here with permission.
Among the most memorable sections of Thomas Frank’s 2016 book Listen, Liberal is the chapter on blue states. Setting out to interrogate a common refrain from national Democrats, Frank’s line of inquiry is a straightforward and useful one:
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It’s an argument you hear all the time, and one that’s now recurring thanks to the Biden administration’s steady climbdown from many of its own campaign promises: Democrats, or so the story goes, would do everything short of seizing the means of production if only they had the votes and faced fewer institutional barriers. The myth is a tidy and convenient one, and rings true insofar as America’s political institutions are quite obstructive and antidemocratic.
But what happens, Frank asks, when Democrats govern with big legislative majorities and little to no obstruction? An obvious and recent national example (and one which hardly suggests Democrats suddenly legislate a transformative agenda when given the presidency, a big majority in the House, and 60 votes in the Senate) is 2009–10, but there are arguably many better case studies represented by Democrat-controlled governments at the state level.
In an excellent video essay recently published by the New York Times entitled Blue States, You’re the Problem, Johnny Harris and Binyamin Appelbaum set out to answer exactly this question for themselves. Their basic method, like Frank’s, is to contrast official Democratic commitments (in this case, as represented by the party’s 2020 platform document) with actual outcomes in various blue states where liberal lawmakers effectively wield total control of both state and local governments. The results are, to say the least, quite revealing.
In California, for example, housing policies have effectively made NIMBYism the law of the land, with municipal zoning laws rigged to privilege the construction of pricey, low-density homes and liberal residents in some cases voting to overturn measures designed to increase affordable housing. Here’s the 2020 Democratic platform on housing:
Washington state, meanwhile, boasts a tax system more regressive than even Texas, such that the poorest 20% of residents pay nearly 18% of their incomes in state and local taxes while the top 1% pays a miniscule 3%. Here’s what the Democratic platform says about taxation:
School districts in Illinois (specifically Chicago) and Connecticut have effectively been gerrymandered so that children who live in wealthy neighborhoods get educated at well-funded, palatial schools while those who live mere miles (and, in some cases, mere meters) away sit in crumbling classrooms without proper resources. Once more, with feeling:
In 14 minutes, of course, Harris and Appelbaum can only cover so much. But there are undoubtedly innumerable other potential case studies in the same vein — all of which might be used to demonstrate the fundamental disconnect between the values Democrats officially profess and what they actually do with unobstructed legislative majorities. For Harris and Appelbaum, this disconnect is largely about the hypocrisy of affluent liberals who, as they put it, are awfully good at showing up at marches and proclaiming their love of equality but who, in practice, live by the credo “not in my backyard.”
What’s so revealing about the exercise is that it shows — contrary to the more common (and altogether more self-serving) narrative about why national Democrats don’t govern differently — that plenty of the opposition to a broadly progressive agenda has, for quite some time now, come not just from the political right but also from within the bosom of American liberalism itself. This may not be particularly revelatory to many on the Left, but it’s a truth that urgently needs to be grasped by both by progressively minded Democratic supporters and the kinds of voters who’ve been serially conditioned to give centrist politicians the benefit of the doubt even when they disappoint.
As Harris and Appelbaum’s short and excellent case study demonstrates, the blue state model operates by fusing progressive rhetoric with business-friendly policies catered to appeal to a numerically small but politically influential constituency of well-off voters — the latter being what largely determines real world material outcomes.
But, rather than viewing the divide between affluent liberals’ behavior and social justice rhetoric as merely contradictory or hypocritical, we might also see them as symbiotic. As Frank wrote in 2017:
