Republicans Risk a Descent Into the Theater-Kid Performative Governance of the Democratic Party

you have to actually do stuff

In 2015, the City of Los Angeles announced an ambitious plan (led by the person we then referred to as Mayor Yogapants) to completely eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. It was a vision: Vision Zero, they called it. Ten years later, traffic deaths in Los Angeles have doubled. A wonderfully progressive local government announced a plan to eliminate something, so we got much more of that thing. A community group, @peoplesvisionzero, is now trying to carry out some version of the failed plan with guerilla traffic engineering, sneaking new safety infrastructure into place without city permission. Recent result:

In similar fashion, Gavin Newsom announced his ten-year plan to end California homelessness in 2008. I struggle with the math, but there’s a possibility that we’ve passed the ten-year mark since then.

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Theater-kid governance is the empty-to-the-point-of-ruin declaration of a symbol-desire, a performance about what we want and don’t want. It doesn’t do anything; it’s a posture, not an action. To the extent that it does do any actual thing in physical reality, it creates pots of money to be looted by NGOs and metastasizing government bureaucracies.

Infamously, when California audited $24 billion in state homelessness spending last year, auditors couldn’t track where a bunch of the spending went, or figure out what it had paid for. See also the growing scandal over Somalian immigrant social services fraud in Minnesota. Facial expressions are made. Symbols are invoked. Money goes…somewhere. It’s a show, with a rich loot bucket, not an actionable set of policies that produce positive trends toward declared goals. By the way, it’s been fifteen years since the Obama administration and a Democratic-majority Congress made healthcare affordable.

California infrastructure is a persistent disaster, because the California legislature and our sociopathic idiot governor are deeply invested in signaling about warm and wonderful trans kids and standing up to Mean Orange Hitler. They don’t stoop to highways and bridges — they’re much too progressive. Related, the increasingly sharp near-term projected decline of fuel production in California is becoming a national security problem in a state that needs to gas up a lot of military traffic. The state performs constantly against Big Oil and its mean climate change agenda, and somehow keeps losing refineries. The endless symbol-gestures cause the loss of real things.

I’m thinking about the destructiveness of theater-kid governance this week because I just bought a skirt. I mean, not for me, and I’m still not transitioning, but Christmas is coming up, so someone is getting a bitchen’ Raven-print clothing item, let’s not say who. The thing shipped, then wandered around, and it still out in the delivery system several weeks later. When I mentioned this interesting shipping problem to the small-label fashion seller who made the skirt, I got a personal reply from the designer. She said shipping from China has been a nightmare lately, and she’d rather be making clothes in the United States, but domestic production is still totally untenable.

Of course, the premise of the Trump tariffs is that a cost added to foreign production will incentivize reshoring, moving bitchen’ raven-print skirts back to America. There’s a huge economic opportunity in textiles, since about 2% of the clothes that Americans wear are made in the country where we wear them. Shifting a big piece of a major industry back to domestic production brings a bunch of paychecks and profit back home. This is a much-discussed topic in the trade press. There are some signs of modest success:

And the not-noticeably-Republican American fashion industry is surprisingly effusive about their support for the Trump tariffs and the possibility of reshoring, which you can read about at length in this apparel-insider Q&A from this summer. But if you talk to people who make clothes, they’re still mostly saying the same thing: Oh, not here. I had a long discussion recently at one of those dads-waiting-around events in which another dad had just returned from a long and unpleasant trip to Bangladesh to secure fabric contracts for a big American clothing retailer. When I asked him how much longer it would take to start executing large contracts for textiles in the U.S., his answer was that LOL wut, but also that we can start making a lot of fabric here when we can compete with Bangladesh on labor costs. You can figure out the implied timeline in that answer on your own.

What’s becoming clearish is that the tariff-driven push for textile reshoring is roughly and inconsistently turning into two other trends: nearshoring and friendshoring. Production from high-tariff foreign countries is moving to lower-tariff foreign countries, to Mexico and Vietnam.

So a declared policy goal, reshoring, slips at the point of execution, having a Part One — tariffs as a disincentive for production in China — but a weaker Part Two. I’ve emailed commerce officials in the administration to ask them about the likelihood of successful and substantial textile reshoring in the near future, and I’ll send word if I get an answer.

Sustained execution matters. The right symbols have to make intended outcomes real. The Democratic Party completely stopped doing that a long time ago, endlessly gushing and emoting about symbols with no other intent, and there’s only one other avenue for doing things by politics in a two-party system. So far I see what the administration intends for reshoring, but I think we’re still waiting to see what happens. I’m not sure how long to wait.

Similarly, President Trump has signed a series of executive orders on parental rights and public education, starting a little more than a week after his inauguration:

But the action has been slower in arriving.

The Trump administration is overwhelmingly right on policy, and generally declaring its intent with clarity and discipline. But it needs to work, and among other things it requires the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress to join the project. Donald Trump can’t be the only person who shows up to work. We’ll see.