Can good policy compete with fascism?
Pete Buttigieg on the Democrats' dangerously long game
One guy was offering fury, a wall, scapegoats, ecstasy, venom, entertainment, purges. The other was promising to rebuild the nation, through projects that would mostly bloom when he was no longer the president.
A question that hovered over the administration of President Biden is whether doing worthy, ambitious economic policy, given the time horizon to see the fruits of that policymaking, would be rewarded by voters. This week, one might conclude: No.
It calls to mind this conversation below with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about his part in the Biden administration’s big commitment to building — something that’s been happening over the past four years on a scale not seen since the New Deal era. Maybe you’ve driven by those signs touting projects built under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
But it’s hard to sell a bridge. Or to sell democracy with a bridge. Or to use bridge building to stave off fascism. Those things take time to build, and people forget who built them. They forget more easily when you don’t put your name on the sign.
Indeed, the majority of American voters, as the results of the election have made clear, don’t associate those projects with Biden, or with Democrats, or, if they do know, the knowledge didn’t make much of an ideological difference. And to understand why, it’s worth looking back at what we talked about with Secretary Buttigieg, both about his faith in the power of good works over the long haul, and about the great difficulty of reaching people in a way that really touches their lives with an immediacy requisite to the political challenges at hand — challenges that have not been met this year.
We hope you appreciate the following excerpt. You can find the full conversation at the link below.
I want to ask you about your job and infrastructure and all these things in the context of an administration that has been very focused on the kinds of things you focus on, which are physical, material things. I think this has been a more literally materialist, physically oriented administration than any in memory.
And I think the president seems to have a kind of metric of success that is really in the built, physical environment, whether it's industrial policy and what is made here versus somewhere else, what infrastructure we have versus don't have. And I'm curious about the notion of selling people on those kinds of accomplishments and having the political opposition not offer a different vision of accomplishments, but really stuff that’s much more in the emotional and psychological realm, fear and hatred of others.
What is it like to say Hey, I got a bridge," and be up against someone saying, "Those people are endangering your child”? Is it not difficult to sell worthy things like a bridge when the opposition is playing so effectively on that really deep human stuff? And how do you think about selling against that opposition?
It's a real challenge for us because you know the nature of infrastructure is actually, like most things, you just kind of need to work. The only time you usually get emotional about it is when it doesn't work, right? So I'm kind of the exception. I'll be very emotional about a bridge being built perfectly well and doing exactly what it should without incident, right? But that's because I work on it professionally and I'm in a building full of people who work on it professionally. But for the most part, the nature of good infrastructure is you don't have to think about it.
And then the question becomes, okay, in a space where policy is often animated by people claiming and earning credit for things that get people excited about or pissing people off about something you can make people mad about. How do you navigate that when you generally see how good infrastructure policy is in people not getting mad?
Nothing about a bridge goes straight to your fear centers of your brain, except, of course, in those awful moments like when we saw one destroyed. So look, I think there's a couple of different layers on how you deal with that. One is you plug away and you make sure that you do actually draw attention to it. So the algorithm, the Twitterverse, and the cable news cycle will generally not arrive at telling the story of a well-done project going exactly the way you hoped it would.
But there might just be enough attention if the president shows up or even if I show up. And I'm standing next to the governor saying, "Hey, look at this." I was just doing this in North Carolina last week with Governor Cooper with a project that was being announced and another project that was going into construction. One of them was a relatively modest thing that's going to create a multi-use trail. Another is a billion-dollar grant that's going to set up a railroad going from Raleigh to Richmond. And just reminding everybody like, "Hey, this didn't just happen. This didn't just randomly happen. This happened because President Biden led, because Governor Cooper led, because my department worked on this.” That's why this is happening.
But I actually think some of the rewards — and even in kind of a political sense of it — they don't accrue because people consciously say, "Oh, you did this good infrastructure thing. I'm going to give you credit for it." It happens in a more indirect, but I would argue, actually, more foundational way, which is the more you do that, over time, the more you wind up having a level of stability and trust where all of the kind of negativity and the kind of anger-rousing that plays on social mistrust is less likely to find purchase.
Now, I know that's a very long-term thing to talk about in a kind of 24/7 news cycle kind of world. But I do think that's part of what's at stake in what we're doing. The challenge, of course, is it takes a long time for that to mature.
You're saying that — if I get it right — that essentially making people's lives less stressful, less full of anxiety because they have easier commutes, because their car doesn't get damaged, because of things they may not have been aware are happening, but are happening, reducing the collective stress and anxiety, increasing the mental health and well-being of the country at large through infrastructure and other things, makes toxic politics less salable?
Yes, I think so. Absolutely. I think toxic politics arise in conditions of policy failure, in conditions of shared stress, and in conditions of inequality. And we're addressing all of those. Nothing's more stressful than a commute that goes poorly. We're working on that. But also, the inequality thing is very real. I think it's perverse how some of the people whose agendas are to make inequality worse have benefited from the kind of psychological stresses in the public psyche that I think are attributable to inequality. But that's where we're at. That's how this happens sometimes. And probably an undersold story of what we're doing with transportation is using it to bring access to people whose lack of access helps diminish social mobility.
And you know, also in a way that you don't have to go through all these kind of deep, complex layers of sociopolitical examination to look at. Just like something like making sure that folks in the building trades have really good jobs, right?
I mean, when I became mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and I ran my first campaign out of the basement of the Building Trades Hall, so I was very, very close to these guys. And unemployment was in the double digits. And it was actually worse at times if you were a union construction worker in northern Indiana where I live.
That wasn't that long ago. We're talking 12 years ago. And now, the only conversations we have when we're out with the building trades are, "What can we do to keep getting more workers ready for all this work?" So getting things like that done, I think, really matters, not just explicitly because somebody will say, "Oh, I have this job because Joe Biden signed this bill. Therefore, I love Joe Biden." But more generally because I think those toxic impulses are less likely to take root if you're not just sour about your country and your economy.
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Policy wonkery has not won elections in almost 100 years (new deal)... I've said for decades that voters care only about emotional connection to a political party or leaders. They will never read a bill or policy white paper. They WILL have feelings about whatever it is. From the start of Biden's amazing policy presidential term I said that few voters would care about EV car battery factories, lead pipe removal, or massive climate change fighting incentives. Unfortunately I was correct. Emotion always Trumps policy.
Pete’s a good communicator, but this theory of change just suffered a massive blow. The three major investment bills championed by the Administration — which I think were mostly very good, on their face —appear to have generated little to no political benefit for Democrats. The exit polls, which need additional confirmation, point to even greater loss margins among union members than in 2020.