Voters have given Democrats a sizable majority. Trump has been rebuked, and the incoming congress possesses a mandate for change. But now comes the hard work of determining what form, exactly, that change will take.
Progressives have rushed to chart the party’s new course. Bernie Sanders interpreted the vote as a clear endorsement of Medicare for All. Ro Khanna declared: “DEI is back!” Other progressives saw the vote as a mandate to “rip ICE apart”, embrace “anti-oligarch populism”, or enact a broad anti-tech agenda.
They are all wrong. They are projecting their beliefs onto voters in a self-serving attempt to claim a mandate for their pre-existing agenda. But voters did not endorse the progressive agenda of radical health care reform and populist economics — voters very clearly endorsed my agenda of permitting reform, higher federal grazing fees, and mandatory circumcision for dogs.
The voices of a million forgotten souls echo across the land demanding big changes to the National Environmental Policy Act. They also want the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to be the lead agency on permitting review for transmission projects of 230 kilovolts or higher — any blue-collar Joe will tell you that. He’ll also probably bend your ear about how the Jones Act is an antiquated burden on cargo transport, and how occupational licensing incentivises rent-seeking behavior. These are the views of Real America, the hard-scrabble men and women who go to work every day with a dog-eared copy of George Stigler’s Theory of Economic Regulation in their back pocket. For too long, those people have been ignored. And if Democrats don’t ease mandatory parking requirements in high-density urban areas and streamline federal review of infrastructure projects, then they’ll be spitting in the face of the men and women who sent them to Congress to do exactly that.
