Stupid Stupid Stupid

I sometimes wonder what politics was like when it was practiced by people like Gladstone. Maybe it's always been difficult, but it feels as though the advent of internet advocacy has made things ridiculous.

The most recent example that has come to my attention is the leftist push against housing density. The argument goes something like, "Well, we could upzone urban areas near mass transit, but then developers would profit through our capitalist economic system. Furthermore, for political reasons upzoning is likeliest to happen in poor neighborhoods. That's bad. Instead we should oppose all upzoning and build massive amounts of 'social housing' (projects)."

This is absurd for any number of reasons, but there it is. The left is forming an alliance with NIMBYs to prevent cities from upzoning.

I'll acknowledge that there's some merit to the argument that upzoning is likely to happen in poorer areas for any number of reasons. A reasonable leftist movement might join the urbanist coalition on the condition that the upzoning plans be equitable. (A separate question is whether it is bad for poor neighborhoods to be upzoned, but leftists seem to believe that this is the case.)

But the left is fragmented and incapable of forming a coalition on a rational basis, so we have the spectacle of leftists fighting for restrictive zoning in expensive urban areas that are desperate for housing. In short, you can sympathize with many of the left's ideological commitments, but it's hard to regard the left's role in politics as anything but deeply destructive.