Gavin Newsom and Joe Biden in Mather, California, 2021. Photo by Adam Schultz, White House.
There is a fault in contemporary left politics that is easy to miss because it looks like a virtue. The new new left is rich in moral clarity about ends and strangely indifferent to means, treating the winning of office and the announcement of good intentions as the substance of politics while neglecting the unglamorous business of delivery. It legislates aspirations and then loses interest in whether the housing actually gets built, the train actually runs, the benefit actually reaches the person it was meant for. For a tradition whose entire claim is that democratic control of the economy would serve people better than the boardroom does, the inability to make government work is a betrayal at the root.
Robert Dahl, across A Preface to Democratic Theory and his work on polyarchy, insisted that democracy is not an abstraction but a set of institutions judged by whether they are genuinely responsive to citizens. A democratic socialism worthy of the name must therefore care intensely about competence, about whether the agency answers the phone and the promise becomes a fact. Harrington’s vision of empowering people at the base presupposes institutions that function well enough to be worth controlling.
Yet the contemporary left often behaves as though the moral clarity of its goals excused it from the engineering of their achievement. It tolerates the procedural thickets that strangle its own programs, then is surprised when citizens conclude that government cannot do anything well. This matters because every failure of delivery is an argument for the other side. When a progressive city cannot build affordable housing at reasonable cost or speed, the lesson the public draws is not that the goal was wrong but that the left cannot be trusted to run things.
The tradition understood that socialism had to outperform, not merely out promise. Harrington and Nove both insisted that a feasible socialism must be economically serious, capable of allocating resources and rewarding effort, or it would deserve to lose. Indifference to competence is thus not a small administrative vice. A left that cannot govern has no business asking for more to govern.
The roots of this indifference lie partly in the capture and symbolism the earlier essays described. A movement led by people who experience government mainly as consumers of its services, rather than as the workers who must make those services materialize, will treat governing as a matter of declaring the right values rather than mastering the dull machinery of implementation. It is easier, and more congenial to the professional sensibility, to pass a sweeping statement of intent than to fix the permitting process and staff the agency. But the public does not experience values; it experiences outcomes.
There is a deeper irony here that the tradition would have felt keenly. Harrington and Bernstein argued that socialism was the extension of democratic control into the economy, the claim that ordinary people could run their common affairs better than a narrow ownership class. Every visible failure of public competence undercuts that claim at its foundation, handing the other side its most powerful argument, that collective action is inherently clumsy and the market at least delivers. A left serious about its own premises would treat administrative competence not as a distraction from the real struggle but as the proving ground of the struggle itself.