Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…good government, but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process… …but is more committed to them than it is committed to the process the government has erected and evolved over time. As you articulated the principle beautifully, and just to put some meat on the bones, abundance is about being incredibly concrete about what you want to accomplish in the world. Then it’s about understanding how to accomplish that. A stage of the process that I think Doge has entirely skipped. I don’t think we’ve reached the stage of understanding. We’ve destroyed and then maybe it’s sometimes promised to understand the thing that we’ve destroyed after the fact. You want to set goals, you want to understand how to meet those goals and then you want to meet them. And the problem with liberalism over the last few years, in the last few decades is that we’ve become disconnected from outcomes. Really, really crystal clear example. So Joe Biden in 2021 signs the bipartisan infrastructure law. And he and Pete Buttigieg call it truthfully, one of the most important infrastructure bills passed in the last few decades. $1.2 trillion to do exactly what Ezra and I want to do, to build in the world. There’s a piece of that law that’s a $42 billion program called BEAD stands for broadband, equity, access and deployment, I think. $42 billion to build rural broadband. Fast-forward to 2024, practically none of it is built. We’re now four calendar years after it was passed and the program is at this point, it seems like it’s going to die and they’re just going to transfer the whole thing to Starlink. So why? We want to understand why does government fail to achieve its outcomes? And how can we learn from those failures to allow government to succeed at its outcomes? Well, you look into it and it turns out that in order to take these $42 billion and send it to the states, the states had to go through a 14 stage process in order to get the money. First, the FCC had to draw a map of the places where America needed more rural broadband. And then there was a challenge period where people could question the map, and the FCC would remake the map and then the challengers would sue them to change the map again. Then the states had to file a letter of intent and a five-year action plan and a funding program, all of which could be subject to their own challenge periods. And in each of these challenge periods, the commerce department is going back to the states and saying, “We really like your five-year plan, but your workforce development program didn’t pass this matrix of equity. And you didn’t reach out to the right bidders over here. And if you try harder to reach out to more people who just aren’t white men to be your employees, that would be fantastic if you could put that into the new edit that you submit to us.” ers over here. And if you try harder to reach out to more people who just aren’t white men to be your employees, that would be fantastic if you could put that into the new edit that you submit to us.” And of course there are delays because every state has to do its own programs. The commerce department is backed up, yada, yada, yada. You get to a point where out of 56 states and jurisdictions that have applied to begin the 14 stage process, by the time the Democrats lose the election in November 2024, three out of the 56 have passed all 14 stages. And very little of the money has actually been spent because of all the problems that Ezra and I discussed about how hard it is to build in the physical world. $42 billion therefore dies upon contact with planet Earth. That’s not government achieving its goals. And a Doge that we were sort of duumvirate of in this parallel universe, is one that would try very clearly to A, articulate a goal. What are we trying to do here? We’re trying to build rural broadband. Why? Because we think connectivity is incredibly important to the economy of the future. It helps people’s health, it helps the economy of rural areas. Let’s build rural broadband. Two, what are the roadblocks? What are the bottlenecks? What’s hard about taking a pot of money that exists in Washington and actually creating broadband networks in rural Kentucky? Let’s understand what those roadblocks are so that we can do two things. We can take away the things that need to be taken away to accelerate the program. And maybe we can add new policies that will accelerate the spending because bottom line, we want to make a difference in the world. That’s a world where government is, to borrow Ezra’s language, deregulated itself. It’s easier for the government to achieve its goals. I think that it’s really important at the level of a principle here that liberals fall out of love with this procedural fetish that has dominated the left of the last half century and fall back in love with outcomes. To be ruthlessly obsessed with how liberalism has failed and how these kinds of failures aren’t just technocratic stories to tell in a podcast. e last half century and fall back in love with outcomes. To be ruthlessly obsessed with how liberalism has failed and how these kinds of failures aren’t just technocratic stories to tell in a podcast. I think this is fundamental to why Democrats are losing the communications war in an era of anti-establishment and anti-institutional. We find ourselves in a reflexive position of having all the cranks, so to speak, having left the Democratic Party and we’re the ones who defend all institutions. We’re the ones who defend the establishments. We’re the ones saying government can only do good. But as a result, we lose the ability to talk to people about how government fails and how they can see that failure. And how sometimes they’re literally leaving cities and states run by Democrats because that failure is so effing obvious to them. So this isn’t just about the BEAD program, it’s not just about 14-step programs, it’s not just about rural broadband. It really is about a higher level principle of political communication. How do you develop a liberalism that in an age of anti-establishment anger both reflects that anger and channels it for proactive purposes by not just doing destruction destruction but creative destruction.…

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