“Fight,” Progressivism, and Performative Politics — Michigan Edition

My sense is that the Democratic Socialists of America is kind of like the Working Families Party: you can’t point to any one of its candidates anywhere and say, “this is what DSA is up to” on a national level. The paradigmatic DSA candidate only loosely resembles any one actual DSA candidate.

I had thought that Yousef Rabhi’s platform had included expanding the role of the municipal housing commission to increase public housing, expanding bond-backed (not immediately tax-increase-financed) housing development finance, and implementing community land trusts (à la Bernie-Sanders-in-1980s-Burlingon). But I live in Dakar, and I think you live in Ann Arbor, so it would be silly of me to claim to know as much of this as you do. Certainly if Rabhi is a self-educated one-man-against-all-experts when it comes to housing matters, he is apt to be swiftly disabused.

Being a socialist mayor of a college town has got to be hard (though Sanders seems to have done it). Your constituency is intellectuals not as Gramscian leaders-of-their-classes, but as a class in and of itself. And you don’t need to exit Gramscian analysis to conclude that intellectuals, when considered as a class, are full of “Father Breciani’s Progeny” and “Lorianists” and much else besides—in plain language, are friggin’ weird and not anywhere near as progressive when it comes to their own interests as might otherwise be expected.

What if Rabhi won not because of radical vibes but because of Nimbyism? Opposing upzoning is totally nuts.

the hatred of women is not the sole provenance of any particular ideology. it should be thought of more as an addiction – early onset, no permanent cure, only a steady attempt to avoid relapse. the entirety of the american right is dedicated to it with the fervor of the alcoholic aficionado of domestic violence. “we must triple-strike the iranian girls elementary school with our drones – this lets us avoid the cooties we’d get if we bayoneted them. if we don’t do this our drunk rapist boss will call us gay.” the american left manifests its hatred in different ways, usually with the phrase “pussy hat” or “wine mom”. bedtimes and eating your vegetables, are, ultimately, if you think about it, bourgeois. daddy never makes us eat our vegetables!

In re mw @6:

Gosh, America has changed over the years. One of my grandparents was born in Michigan in the interwar years. The idea that a decoupling of the Detroit City Gas–Ann Arbor Gas merger might be considered was not on my bingo card. I’m used to only companies with “Warner” in their name merging and splitting like olive oil on the surface of a boiling water pot.

There is a legitimate role for public housing. But with taxes already high in Ann Arbor, this is can only meet a small fraction of housing needs.

High compared to what?

Tm @8:

I could support tactical opposition to certain upzoning proposals, that is, opposing upzoning not accompanied by regulations targetting the affordability of a city’s total housing stock. You want to maintain a certain level of owner-occupancy in most neighborhoods, because banks start to get really funky about lending in areas or developments where this is low—a point related both to the frequency with which lightly regulated upzoning contributes to rising real-estate values, and the frequency with which upzoning tends to be performed in economically depressed neighborhoods.

This second point relates to recent research showing that, ceteris paribus, upzoning is more common in low-income neighborhoods than in high-income ones, suggesting that a progressive approach to upzoning should want to see it accompanied by measures targetting displaced families. I doubt I will follow Ann Arbor politics closely enough to know how all this plays out there, and I’m lazy enough that, not having found data in OP’s links to clearly vitiate one side of the Rabhi/Taylor debate, I’m not apt to go digging for it. The fact that rents have been falling while homeless rates rise suggests that there is a bimodal distribution in the housing stock, with recent construction targetting the mid- to high-range of the market. But by now I’m just speculating.

Land in Dakar is mostly privately owned. Some public land—old airports and military bases—exists, though the land-owning class has sometimes “squatted” this land, pre-empting other uses with private multistory development. Here, a bimodal housing build-rate distribution seems quite likely, though there are major lacunae in the data that make it hard to point to numbers and say, “see, there.” Units are being built for the top of the market, especially childless families; rents in the most expensive neighborhoods rival those of Paris. New budget builds are rare outside of the banlieues, while the metropolitan area transport infrastructure is not set up to support a city whose residential stock is starkly segregated by wealth.

So we’re seeing new things as we go along.

D.S. Battistoli @11. For what it’s worth the recommended upzoning of single-family-neighborhoods in the new comprehensive land use plan is citywide, not limited to depressed neighborhoods (which, at this point in the gentrification process in Ann Arbor, barely still exist). And the proposal still contains fairly strict regulations of former single-family zoned neighborhoods (the height limit would be raised to 35ft or 3-stories and allow up to three families to live there, instead of just one). It’s far from anything goes. Nor is there any reason to expect the units would necessarily be rentals rather than owner occupied.

But the objections to all of this seem to have much less to do with any of those details than with the DSA simply disliking private ownership of housing and not believing that increasing housing supply through private, market-rate development can ever improve affordability. The problems of Ann Arbor, I suppose, are not really of general interest though, except possibly as an example of the conflict between ‘abundance’ Democrats and those who identify as DSA (or lean in that direction).

not believing that increasing housing supply through private, market-rate development can ever improve affordability

Under hypothetical, stable capitalist conditions it would but with today’s spiralling inequality and hoovering up of all assets by the rich it won’t.

Regardless of the economic arguments the build build build agenda is fairly obviously Deregulation 2 (Zombie Apocalypse) and it’s embarrassing to see so many liberals naively supporting it.

One perhaps latent point in Liz’ original post that we may be glossing over in this comments-discussion is that “Rabhi [might be] signaling ‘fight’ through a very performative style of intraparty us vs. them politics.”

Now, let’s imagine that, at the implementation level, there is not much to separate Rabhi and Taylor on housing. That is to say, there are constraints on what aspects of his platform Rabhi might be able to implement, and constraints on the impact that his implementable policies may have, given supply and price movements in the Ann Arbor housing market over the past several years.

If this were the case, Ann Arbor would be an instance of a place where the left-center wing of the Democratic party holds office, but the hard-left wing preponderates among voters. (We could imagine a similar circumstance if a Texas-style Democrat for some reason held office in San Francisco, or a California-style one in Houston). If, for any reason, the most operationally relevant policy dispute does not map well onto the electorate-majority–officeholding-minority ideological divide, it is reasonable to expect a “performative style of intraparty us vs. them politics” in the primary.

My sense is that the reason the Ann Arbor primary, and other DSA primaries in deep-blue territories, are so uncomfortable for the centrist wing of the Democratic party is that, since 1992, the party’s centrist wing has been, for the most part, accustomed to being able to dictate to the rest of the party what constitutes acceptable manifestations of progressivism. But there may now be certain parts of core Democratic territory where centrist Democrats now have to take the mickey on questions of policy and electoral strategy in the same way the party’s left wing has been doing for thirty years.

For many centrist Democrats, taking what their wing has been giving over the last three decades must be a rather uncomfortable proposition.

As a coda, the DSA, to prepare for any upcoming intra-party fight, likely ought to ensure that Alexandra Ocasio Cortez or another member of “the squad” becomes the face of their faction rather than a Rabhi or even a Zohran Mamdani. Given the way the sociology of politics works today, it will be a lot easier for the centrist wing to capture the feminist swing cohort against a male democratic-socialist standard-bearer than against a female one.

I agree entirely with what you’ve said about Rabhi, and the general movement of NIMBY, performative leftists is concerning. (The NIMBYism is also, as I take you to be suggesting, a particular example of the more general concern one should have about performative leftists without any credible conception of what affecting change requires–in a characteristic irony, fixated on ‘expressive’ aspects of politics while constantly using the vocabulary of ‘material conditions,’ ‘sewer socialism,’ etc.).

One worry that I have is that the relationship a candidate has to the DSA is beginning to be taken as evidence among voting leftists of a candidate’s progressive bona fides. One candidate is associated with the DSA, one is not, therefore the former is on the left flank. This wouldn’t be a valid inference were the DSA a tightly run organization, but it’s especially troubling when the DSA is an incredibly decentralized organization whose ideology differs substantially chapter to chapter (the relationship of ‘national DSA’ to local chapters is also quite tenuous, local chapters are highly autonomous). Trying to say what the ‘DSA’ is about is almost as difficult as trying to say what BLM was about–and charges in favor or against them just in light of the policies or expressions of particular members or chapters is something akin to associating supporters of BLM with supporting police/prison abolition (some chapters of BLM did state this formally). There should be no specific conception of leftist aura attributed to a candidate just because a candidate has a relationship to DSA (local or national).

But along these same lines, I do want to push back against your last sentence, which I take to be the other side of the coin–“If this is what DSA is up to, watch out.” This attributes the aura of performative, NIMBY-flirtatious leftists to those associated to the DSA. I think we’re better off differentiating as AOC did in an interview recently (‘”I’m not a member of national DSA and I don’t agree with the platform they put out, but I am a member of the NYC chapter”). And we’re even better off differentiating further still. DSA local chapters are themselves rife with internal division, ideological and personal (personally, I stopped participating early on for these reasons–but there are others who didn’t, and who don’t have the same avenues of political engagement easily accessible to them that I had/have, and among those are good apples and bad). A long-standing pathology of the left–reaching absurd heights in recent years–but it’s the left we’ve got, and I think we have a few examples of public figures navigating the mess intelligently (attempting to disassociate from the excesses, and to garner and mobilize support for significant policies).

engels 15: “Under hypothetical, stable capitalist conditions it would but with today’s spiralling inequality and hoovering up of all assets by the rich it won’t.”

The irony is that the people making that kind of argument against upzoning are already private owners and they oppose upzoning not because they oppose private property but because they are afraid their own property values might decline. What you are overlooking is that preventing housing from being built in cities won’t do anything about capitalism and inequality, it will simply mean more people forced to live outside of cities (where builting often is pretty much unregulated), which is not a good thing for a host of political and environmental reasons.

“the build build build agenda is fairly obviously Deregulation 2”

Cities can and should regulate building wrt to social, environmental and urban planning parameters. Only, limiting urban density is a kind of regulation that doesn’t serve any social or environmental goal nor is it sound urban planning. It’s bad regulation, serving only the interests of incumbent home owners, and suggesting that the Left needs to reflexively support it just because it’s regulation seems rather dumb to me.

arocca 12: “Socialist electeds and candidates are not viewed just as vehicles for public policy, but as agitators with large platforms who can advance socialist ideas, widen the country’s political inagination, and help to cohere larger movements around long term radical goals.”

Without commenting on the DSA specifically (which I have the impression is far less ideologically coherent than the label suggests), let’s point out that the Right has been doing exactly this for decades and it has been a roaring success. The argument that any whiff of radicalism is electoral poison is just nonsense. If it were true we wouldn’t have a fascist party capturing all branches of government.

preventing housing from being built in cities won’t do anything about capitalism and inequality

I don’t think planning rules (and building regulations) reduce inequality, I think they protect the urban environment. None of this is categorical but at this point “NIMBYism” has become a propaganda term, used to delegitimise local democracy in favour of Big Concrete. If I’m opposed to something in principle (eg butt-ugly, carbon-chugging, low-quality build-to-rent/“affordable”* yuppiedromes for example) then stopping it happening in my backyard is eminently rational and ethical. Please don’t listen to Ezra Klein about things like this, especially if you don’t even live in US!

(*) ie. completely unaffordable to anyone doesn’t work in private equity or similar

“especially if you don’t even live in US!”

Do you? Well I lived in US long enough. I remain convinced that the low density development still prevalent in many places is an urban planning disaster.

Regarding London, I’m in no position to comment. But I’m well aware that the housing market is not driven purely by supply and demand. It’s naive to think that building housing will automatically lower rents. Other factors play a role, particularly the power imbalance between renter and owner. Regarding housing prices, there are still other factors at play. Otoh, claiming that supply and demand play no important role would also be absurd.

So how much have house prices fallen and has this had an impact on rents? Also, how much space is there in London for infill development? I found conflicting numbers about London’s population density. Is London already densely built or not? I have no idea.