There is an asymmetry between America’s political tribes. Republicans venerate their red states, gushing about the “free state” of Florida and the wonders of Texas—guns anywhere, anytime—and reveling in news of population loss from Democratic-run localities. Liberals can’t quite do the same for New York, California, or Illinois. The political boosterism coming out of those states, whether it’s the unctuousness of Gavin Newsom or the anti-charisma of Kathy Hochul, rings hollow. Within these states, certain cities can be championed, despite the severe dysfunction they have suffered lately. Anyone who thinks “New York City is dead” has spent far too much time rapping on keyboards in the suburbs, and Los Angeles and San Francisco remain more enchanting than anything offered up in red states.
Yet blue America lacks a Gov. Ron DeSantis: someone remaking a state or major city in the image of a well-articulated ideology. There are plenty of Democratic governors, and some of them, like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, are quite popular. What they don’t offer—and this is true of most Democratic executives—is a greater organizing philosophy. What are you for? What great and exciting things do you want to do for the citizenry? What does it mean to be a left-of-center leader running a big city or state today?
Ironically, it is Robert Moses—a hero of New Deal-era urbanism reviled by many on the left—who offers a robust, viable model for what progressive urbanism can be in the 2020s and beyond, especially as stagnation sets in.
As it is, progressive urbanism is heavily focused on controlling consumption. It was Republican-turned-Democrat Michael Bloomberg who popularized the concept of the nanny executive: a politician who aggressively polices individual choice and punishes anyone who dares defy the new regime. The billionaire media mogul was the three-term mayor of Gotham, and while he deserves to be celebrated for glittering new parks and the pedestrianization of Times Square, he is probably better remembered for wanting to ban large, sugary drinks. Some of his public-health crusades were genuinely successful—he was right to chase smoking out of bars—but the push for a soda ban backfired and turned his tenure into a punchline. Like tobacco, these drinks are detrimental to the body. The trouble for Bloomberg was that there is no such thing as second-hand drinking or sugar poisoning that comes from being in proximity to a Big Gulp. Most working-class New Yorkers found his scrutinizing of their dietary choices offensive.
“A Democratic-run city or state is more likely to take away your plastic straw.”
Blue-state executives have become associated with other well-meaning but ineffective crackdowns on individual consumption. A Democratic-run city or state is more likely to take away your plastic straw and plastic bag. Plastic generates litter and is terrible for the environment. But Americans are responsible for a minuscule share of the plastic polluting the oceans, and there were plenty of people who reused their plastic bags for trash or picking up dog excrement—who must now purchase plastic bags for these purposes. The cheap reusable bags sold at supermarkets also require resources to produce and get tossed out sooner or later.
Making matters worse, this micromanaging of individual consumption occurs in the absence of a broader vision of civic improvement. Progressive governance, historically, was about delivering durable public goods to ordinary people. Liberal Republicans and populist Democrats alike belonged to this tradition, which saw the state play a far-reaching role in the expansion of infrastructure, industry, and technology. There is no interstate highway system or National Park Service without this animating mission, just as there is no moonwalk or internet without the federal government pumping billions into research and development. In New York, there would also be no public housing that currently keeps 360,000 poor residents off the streets, ensuring that despite the city’s struggles with homelessness, there is no equivalent of Skid Row or the Tenderloin.
To be sure, the center left does have a vision of improvement at the national level. The Biden administration to its credit has been attempting to conceive a national industrial policy that ensures the United States is no longer dependent on China and Taiwan for the manufacture of necessary public goods and technologies, not least semiconductor chips. If Donald Trump wins, it will be difficult for him to unwind the achievements of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, since federal cash is already flowing to the states, and politicians of both parties are eager to cut ribbons.
Since Kamala Harris has barely formulated a policy vision, we don’t know whether she will try to expand on Biden initiatives or pivot elsewhere. The anti-monopoly movement spearheaded by Lina Khan, the Biden-appointed chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, revives the progressive tradition of robust state intervention to foster competition. Khan enjoys some support in the MAGA wing of the GOP and among economically populist Democrats, suggesting antitrust will retain momentum beyond 2024—unless Trump guts the FTC or Harris listens to the Democratic mega-donors who want Khan’s head on a platter.
None of this national activity entirely informs what urban progressives in the 2020s should be accomplishing. It forms a base, a theory, but to offer a genuine counter to the red-state model, progressives will have to care about building again. Some of this has recently been called the “abundance agenda”; a lot of it is just what urban machine Democrats did before 1960. “Abundance,” in the current context, means boosting America’s capacity to innovate and to build. Scarcity in health care, housing, and transportation are things younger left-leaning pundits and politicians now talk about—an encouraging development. The restraints imposed on builders in the second half of the 20th century—tight community control of zoning, for one—have made America a weaker and less dynamic nation. Thus far, however, blue-state and -city governance has failed to offer a compelling proof of concept for this approach.
Congestion pricing in New York City, which is now embroiled in lawsuits after Gov. Kathy Hochul abruptly halted the program just before it was to be implemented, is emblematic of where urban progressivism has succeeded and utterly failed. Automobiles should be tolled for entering Manhattan’s core; the sheer range of public transit options demand that most commuters stop driving into Midtown and the streets below. Street space is finite, and a price must be placed on the minutes spent in Manhattan spewing pollutants.
“Progressives of an earlier era understood that carrots had to accompany sticks.”
But the progressives of an earlier era understood that carrots had to accompany sticks. It wasn’t enough to dissuade or punish. Robert Moses, the master builder of New York, isn’t well-liked by today’s left, mostly due to simplistic readings of Robert Caro’s biography, The Power Broker, first published 50 years ago. But Moses knew that effective urban governance meant delivering tangible goods to citizens, and this was why the great progressives of his era like Fiorello LaGuardia ultimately championed him, even if they resented his imperiousness and megalomania.
Moses built most of the public housing that stands to this day. He built the parks, the playgrounds, and, yes, those disruptive highways and parkways and bridges. Before Moses, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Valley of Ashes. Jones Beach was a deserted stretch of sand. The New Yorkers of the Robert Moses era believed in Big Government because Big Government got so much done, and they could see that in their daily lives.
Conversely, congestion pricing had little political buy-in because New Yorkers understood the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—the unwieldy, opaque bureaucracy invented, ironically enough, to depose Moses—has a long history of wasting enormous sums of money and blowing deadlines by years, if not decades. The Second Avenue Subway and the Long Island Rail Road’s extension to Grand Central were grossly late and heinously over budget. The Gateway Tunnel project, overseen by Amtrak and New Jersey Transit, is no better, and will be finished sometime in the 2030s. There is an understandable feeling among tristate-area residents that nothing really gets done.
Moses tolled his bridges, but he could sell the concept to the public because the projects were always getting finished. The sheer number of ribbon cuttings—the George Washington Bridge, Triborough Bridge, Throgs Neck Bridge, Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge—under his watch is still difficult to fathom. The popular view of Moses is that he was an island of power unaccountable to no one but himself; if there is truth to this, it’s equally true that most of his infrastructure projects succeeded because they were backed by organized labor, local politicians, and broad swaths of the public. When he ran for governor, Moses campaigned as a Republican, and his relationship with Franklin Roosevelt was always frosty. But he was, in spirit, a New Deal Democrat, harnessing federal largesse to reimagine the future of his city and state.
When progressives rallied around congestion pricing, they failed to offer an affirmative vision of a better transportation future. Outer-borough and suburban motorists were asked to pay for a toll that would fund the capital plan, but beyond an extension of the Second Avenue Subway to East Harlem (only a few stops north), there was barely anything to get excited about. The Queens and Brooklyn neighborhoods that don’t have any subway access will remain unconnected to the system. The most promising project, the Hochul-backed Interborough Express—a new rail route on pre-existing freight track that would take commuters between southern Brooklyn and northern Queens—is still many years away, with no discernible date for completion. Most New Yorkers have never even heard of it.
Congestion pricing, then, was little different from the Big Gulp and plastic-bag bans: all punishment, no tangible payoff. If New York Democrats had instead unveiled the plan as an element of a sweeping transportation vision for the city and state—like an expansion of subway and commuter rail to rival that which is routinely constructed in Europe or Japan and even much of the developing world—congestion pricing might have been a success out of the gate. New Yorkers might have had infrastructure to believe in, subway and rail lines to match the impact of the Moses-era highways and bridges. Instead, they got a government that was decidedly bereft of ambition. Their resentment and rage were well-earned.