One thing I like about blogs is that no sooner do you stumble out with a not-fully articulated post than someone comes along and says it better than you. Yesterday, I tried to communicate why I preferred the more practically-minded council candidates over the progressives in the race. Today, Matt Yglesias writes,
There doesn’t seem to be any way to impress these basic points about where the responsibility for what lies or what the federal budget pays for on the citizenry, but it seems to me that the widespread ignorance of these topics seriously impoverishes our politics. I keep hearing from Kilgore on immigration (a federal issue) and Kaine on zoning (a local issue) and it’s simply not possible for anyone to propose a sensible plan to cope with a problem in an area that the office he’s running for isn’t empowered to deal with.
That in a nutshell is why the version of city council progressivism embodied by Felix Arroyo has failed to impress me. It’s one thing to oppose the Iraq War or the MCAS and to support wealth redistribution and bilingual education. For better or worse, though, these aren’t things Boston’s city government can do much, if anything, to change. Even problems that do fall in the city’s purview like the housing market involve large-scale coordination of market forces and state regulation that make full-scale control impossible. At its most ridiculous, the result of this approach is hunger strikes and Dixie Chicks resolutions; at its most serious it’s a political stance which promises social transformation in rhetoric but piddling obstruction in practice. The good thing about the empty rhetoric is that it engages voters put off by the ethnic machines of years past, people who felt that politics didn’t address them because politics didn’t address them. The bad thing is that it subsumes city issues to state and national hot-botton issues, because at base the progressive middle class voters really care about the latter and not the former (I mean that as sociological tendency, not categorical statement). In the process very real unintended consequences emerge, economic development stagnates, housing prices rise while a few are lucky enough to get affordable housing. The thing is, I could get behind a progressive candidate who said "X practice of the city hurts the poor, or helps the connected, let’s do Y instead to help them, or the general public." In practice, the case is rarely convincing.
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