Democrats: Pay Attention to What’s Happening in California
About this episode
Klein asks why Democrats should learn from California politics, as embodied by state senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco. Wiener argues California is a deep-blue state that fails at its own goals because of its own governance: housing, homelessness, clean energy, and transit have all been strangled by a thicket of environmental review (CEQA), local veto points, and ballot-box initiatives. He defends streamlining housing production by overriding local zoning, explains why San Francisco produces worse outcomes than denser cities, and discusses the Tenderloin drug crisis, retail crime, and transit's fiscal cliff. Klein and Wiener explore how liberals embrace means — community input, local control — that block the ends they claim to want: abundance, equity, and decarbonization. The takeaway is that California is a cautionary tale of how a liberal one-party state can govern itself into sclerosis, and that Democrats should confront those failures before exporting the model.