To be clear, I think most of Trump’s policies and many of his stories are quite different, bad and often false. But to give some credit to the Republicans, they are having these big internal policy debates, and the people coming up behind Trump are having even more of them. The world has changed, their party has changed, their voting base has changed, and so they need to change.
On the Democratic side, you haven’t seen as much change. That would be normal for a party running an incumbent president. There wasn’t a presidential primary this year in which candidates hashed out their different visions in front of the voters. Biden has not been a strong messenger. Kamala Harris hasn’t had much time to build out an agenda of her own. The Democratic Party has been unified the past few years, but it has been unified against Trump, against MAGA. It’s not been — in its communications, in the way it runs elections — primarily about its policy vision.
Schatz joined me for a conversation on my podcast. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Democrats Need a Better Answer on Affordability. Here’s One. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii discusses policies that can make housing and college more affordable.
What’s it been like to be a Democratic senator over the past month or two?
There’s a saying in Hawaii that everything in Hawaii is political except politics, which is personal. And that’s what it felt like. It was obviously politically difficult. But more than anything, a lot of us really revere Joe Biden. To accomplish everything that we’ve accomplished together and then to say, “Hey, thank you very much. We don’t think you’re our standard-bearer anymore” — it’s just deeply, deeply painful.
But people have been underestimating Kamala Harris all along and underestimating the pent-up demand of the anti-Trump coalition, which basically was just sitting there latent. I actually thought the algorithm wasn’t going to permit us to feel hope anymore. And suddenly the internet was fun again, and fund-raising was going crazy, and people were making jokes. I always think the campaign that’s having fun is the one that’s likely to win. And we are definitely having fun now.
The level of anger about prices, about affordability, feels to me like something Democrats have not fully faced up to. It’s something that you’ve begun to talk a lot more about over the past couple of years. I’m curious about your evolution on this.
The fact is we passed the biggest climate action in human history, and basically nobody knows about it. And whether it’s the biggest climate action we’ve ever taken or the biggest investment in Native American communities that we’ve ever taken, it’s true to say those are the biggest actions ever taken. It’s also true to say that that’s not enough.
So I do think Kamala puts us in a better position to just talk about the future. And it’s very, very challenging, I think, for Donald Trump and JD Vance to talk about the future at all.
Let me show you how they’re talking about this particular part of, if not the future, the past.
[Audio clip of JD Vance] Months ago, I heard some young family member observe that their parents’ generation, the baby boomers, could afford to buy a home when they first entered the work force. “But I don’t know,” this person observed, “if I’ll ever be able to afford a home.” The absurd cost of housing is the result of so many failures, and it reveals so much about what’s broken in Washington. I can tell you exactly how it happened. Wall Street barons crashed the economy, and American builders went out of business. As tradesmen scrambled for jobs, houses stopped being built. The lack of good jobs, of course, led to stagnant wages. And then the Democrats flooded this country with millions of illegal aliens. So citizens had to compete with people who shouldn’t even be here for precious housing. Joe Biden’s inflation crisis, my friends, is really an affordability crisis. And many of the people that I grew up with can’t afford to pay more for groceries, more for gas, more for rent, and that’s exactly what Joe Biden’s economy has given them.What do you think of that diagnosis?
I think there are parts of it that are pretty effective, right? He basically touches on what people are experiencing, and then he goes straight to racism and xenophobia and a bunch of right-wing tropes. But I think your point is well made by that clip, which is to say, we don’t really talk about the affordability crisis. Not all of us, right? And we don’t talk about struggling families.
I don’t think it’s that hard for us to live where people are, which is: You are actually struggling to make ends meet. That is not imaginary. We are not going to talk you out of it. But I think all they do is scapegoat. And what we need to do is talk about solutions going forward.
There’s some reason that not enough homes have been built, and that’s been particularly bad in places Democrats have power. It’s bad in Hawaii, where you’re from. It’s very bad in San Francisco, where Kamala Harris had the beginning of her political career. So what is your diagnosis? What has happened in housing?
We have created the scarcity on purpose. We have elevated something called community engagement, but it’s not actually objectively community engagement. It’s the ability for a few people who already have homes to hijack the whole process above the needs of the many. We’re actually making it nearly impossible for people to build anything.
And I think the premise here is that we can have nice things. We can have enough of the things that we want. If you operate under the assumption that there will only be 100 homes built, it is not unreasonable to say, “Well, listen, I want 35 of the 100 homes to be capital-A affordable.” That’s a totally reasonable, progressive approach. But the truth is, if you require that, it’s likely that zero homes will be built and nobody gets any housing.
When you’re out making this argument, how do people in Hawaii respond?
My district, when I was in the State Legislature, was Makiki, Manoa, sort of by Punahou School, by the University of Hawaii — a very nice, beautiful suburb. And those are some of the folks that are most worried about what a deregulatory environment would look like, in terms of their neighborhood.
So after the Hawaii Legislature passed some aggressive housing reforms this session — and I’m strongly behind it — I was at Safeway, and I was running into people who contributed to my first campaign with 15 bucks, people with whom I went to high school, and they were not happy.
I don’t think it’s unforgivable, but this is an uncomfortable conversation among friends. And that’s one of the things that I think the progressive movement has to grapple with, that there are a lot of communities that are 70-30 or 80-20 Biden and are pro-immigrant and pro-L.G.B.T.Q. and certainly pro-choice and pro-climate action. And on housing, they’re [expletive]. And I don’t think that can stand.
I think there’s a real tension on this inside progressivism, because it pits two values against each other. There’s a real feeling that in post-New Deal liberalism, the government ran over marginalized communities and the people didn’t have any democratic input. And then on the other hand, there’s this other dimension that I always call the firefighter test: Can firefighters who work and risk their lives to keep a city from burning down live in the city that they keep from burning down? How do those come into conflict, and how do they get unwound?
I think the constituency for proceduralism is small but vocal. And it’s not that there should be zero public input. When it comes to housing in the state of Hawaii, we have extraordinary protections for natural and cultural resources, as we should.
One of the last standing bowling alleys in the primary urban center of Honolulu, called Stadium Bowl-O-Drome — it was the old stadium, not an ecologically significant site, still subject to all the same environmental review that some of our most precious places in the state of Hawaii were subject to. And I think most regular people are able to kind of go, “If you’re going to throw up a 10-story building with apartments, then you maybe don’t need the same sort of environmental, cultural analysis that you would if you’re a building in coastal Maui.”
And when I make that argument, everybody nods. Now, who doesn’t nod? The people who live adjacent to the Stadium Bowl-O-Drome. So I agree that there’s this tension sort of superficially. But I actually think you can kind of puncture it by talking to regular people and then finding out that the proceduralists are, like, 11 people who just consistently show up.
But the procedure is so profound here. I find a lot of people in your place are starting to wonder, “Are these environmental bills doing as much to stop clean energy as they are to stop fossil fuels? Are they doing more to stop clean energy than they are to stop fossil fuels?” What’s been your intellectual evolution on liberal proceduralism?
It’s been rapid, and it’s been sort of almost radical. We did pass the biggest climate action ever, but as you know, we need transmission and distribution, and that is going to be stopped by local communities and state governments and oppositional mayors and other NIMBYs. And what’s really clear is that right-wing groups and fossil-funded groups are now funding the so-called left-wing proceduralists to stop good stuff from happening.
We are going to have to make it easier to meet our clean energy goals. All of these environmental safeguards were about stopping bad stuff, and now the new progressive movement is not just about stopping bad stuff; it’s about building good stuff. We’re going to have to be the party of construction. We’re going to have to be the party of financing things. We’re going to have to be the party of breaking ground.
A couple of years ago, in some bills you passed, there was a ton of money for rural broadband. Let me read you a story from The Washington Times: “Residents in rural America are eager to access high-speed internet under a $42.5 billion federal modernization program, but not a single home or business has been connected to new broadband networks nearly three years after President Biden signed the funding into law, and no project will break ground until sometime next year.”
The Washington Times ends up blaming this on various requirements for obtaining the funds, climate change mandates, preferences for union workers, that sort of thing. I don’t know if that is why, but I do often find this problem where something big gets passed and then you check in on it a couple years later and actually people aren’t benefiting from it. These big priorities are exciting to people when they pass and then not that exciting when they’re being slowly implemented. What’s going on there?
Well, I think you pointed out one of the failures that we have, both governance-wise and politically. I don’t think we just, like, administer harder, implement better.
I think about the state historic preservation division of the state of Hawaii. The federal law says that you may consider something historic if it meets these criteria in the state of Hawaii. The assumption is everything more than 50 years old is historic. Now, the problem is we just have old houses. And so now they’re all potentially for state historic preservation division review. And so for four years, everyone was like, “We’ve got to get more bodies over there so they can process more applications.” And I sort of raised my hand and said there should just be fewer things on these people’s pile.
We have to clear the thicket here, and we have to be unapologetic about clearing the thicket. And by the way, this is really good for results, but it also is quite attractive to moderate swingy voters who just want government to kick ass and accomplish things. And they’re really looking for an effective mayor of the country.
The Covid relief plan, there were lots of really good things in it. But the thing that resonated with people was the checks. And I was kind of anti-U.B.I. and anti-direct-cash-assistance because I did think it was, like, the Silicon Valley way to wave a wand at the disintermediation of employment that they were causing. But I saw it impact people.
And I’ve got to say, boy, fast really works. It works on policy. It works for people. And the politics works. I think we should have the kind of impatience that regular people have, which is like, “What the hell? I thought you did this thing. Where’s my stuff?” And I don’t think we have that impatience. I think we have this sense that we enact, and then we take credit. (...)
Across the domains we’re talking about — housing, clean energy, I could name a bunch more — how do you deal with the fact that there are these national and actually global issues but the power is fractured down to the state level, to the local level, across a variety of condominium boards? It’s fractal, almost.
Well, the way I look at this is, I guess, two things. First, I do whatever I can on federal policy. But second, I do think we have to actually change the politics of this while we’re working on the policy.
I think the most important thing we can do is create a movement of young progressives articulating that in our collective progressive future, we’re all going to live together and in a Hawaii clean energy future — which probably polls at, I would say, 85 percent in the state of Hawaii — you think you’re not going to see a windmill? You think you’re not going to see a solar farm? You think we’re not going to do any geothermal? We’re a small place with 1.5 million-odd people. And if we are going to house the people we care about and if we are going to address the climate crisis, we’re going to see it. It can’t all be someplace else. And I think one of the most important things I can do is just say that as much as I can, as unapologetically as I can.
One of the things that I think is encouraging is that I’ve gotten pushback but it hasn’t been that ferocious. Because I do think, in a lot of people’s heart of hearts, they go, “Huh. He’s probably right.”
On the left, people talk a lot about affordability, and what they think about is subsidy. But affordability is a mixture of how much people have to pay for something and then how much of the thing there is. The supply side feels to me like something where the policy muscle of the Democratic Party is not what one might wish.
One hundred percent. I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, it’s just habits of the mind and habits of the political ecology of Washington and every other place.
But I think the truth is there are shortages for various reasons. Sometimes the government creates a shortage. Sometimes a corporation is creating the shortage. My own judgment here is that we need to tell people that they can have nice things. And we need to operate under the assumption that — whether it’s housing or clean energy, in particular, or the affordability of prescription drugs — we need to look people in the eye and say, “All of these scarcities are created either by corporations or by governments.”
And sometimes the solution is deregulatory. Sometimes the solution is more aggressive regulation. Sometimes the problem is a not big-enough subsidy. Sometimes the problem is that we’re subsidizing the wrong thing. But the premise here is that we do get to have enough of the things that we say we want and that the government should be working on that.
by Ezra Klein with Sen. Brian Schatz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: NY Times
[ed. What's the matter with this guy... sounds too sensible for a politician. See also:
The Democrats' new sunny vibes (Noahpinion).]
The Democrats' new sunny vibes (Noahpinion).]
