You Should've Listened To Concern Trolls

The Left's Successes Turned Into Failures, And Their Failures Have Broken Them

Supporters of Congestion Pricing rallied last week to save its implementation, but Gov. Kathy Hochul canceled it, continuing the progressive movement's recent setbacks.

Last week, I was at an event chatting with an old friend of mine named Steve, whom I met during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011. A longtime vocal progressive who was most active during the early years of Trump’s term, he has since married, has a baby, and mellowed out a lot. We spoke about several local issues, including Congestion Pricing and the plan by the New York City Council to ban rental broker fees paid by a prospective tenant, a bane of every New York renter’s existence. I expected that he would be entirely for it, but to my surprise, he was indifferent. It’s not that he thinks broker fees are reasonable or anything; he doesn’t. He admitted that he felt they were “scams.” He couldn’t get excited about banning them because he was no longer confident in the results.

“Practically nothing we’ve enacted has turned out for the better,” he said. “Everything ended up having serious negative consequences.”

This admission surprised me. We spoke about one of the thorniest political issues for New York progressives – bail reform.

Bail reform, which was a signature issue of his in the late 2010s, may have ensured that poor people and people of color who are arrested for minor crimes don’t waste away at Rikers Island awaiting trial. Still, it has created, to quote Steve, “a public relations nightmare that has set back the criminal justice reform movement and all but ensured a return to the old ways, if we’re lucky.”

He rattled off a list of other “failures.” Attempts to mitigate COVID, something I’ve spoken out against as risky to the progressive movement, only “destroyed faith in science" and “breathed life into the anti-vax movement.” We closed libraries for a year, forcing some of New York’s poorest children to Zoom into school on their iPads from the steps from shuttered library doors so they can use their WiFi. We can’t even get a strong enough coalition to force Mayor Eric Adams to fund them now. Covid lockdowns and business closures caused supply chain nightmares that, with the help of the most significant economic investment from the state since probably the 1960s, triggered the worst inflation in four decades. The #MeToo fight sparked a backlash among men and some women, leading to figures like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan becoming idols to Zoomer men. This has helped fuel a far-right renaissance worldwide. Attempts to be inclusive of trans and nonbinary people led to resentment among some feminist circles, the same group progressives pushed men away from to appeal to with #MeToo. Steve called this “a spectacular failure of intersectionality.” Sanctuary city laws and laxer immigration enforcement to counter the oppressive xenophobic Trump-era policies created a migrant crisis that local communities are unable to grapple with. While minimum wage hikes for food services have been positive for those workers, Steve admits, “Big Macs now costing the same as Panera salads five years ago is frustrating.” For the workers, any gain in wages was eaten up by inflation.

This was predictable, and progressives should have been better prepared for it. They weren’t because progressives were unable or unwilling to preemptively plan for and message around any stumbling blocks in their policies. There is no such thing as crisis management in the progressive movement. It’s heresy even to suggest there may be something negative about their ideas that they will have to navigate. This results from progressives being too idealistic and unwilling to engage in even an iota of cynicism and dismissing anyone who did as concern trolls.

Steve felt similarly about congestion pricing, which Gov. Kathy Hochul punted on last week. While he supports the policy because it helps the environment and funds mass transit, he no longer believes it will “sell itself,” explaining that the “barrage of New York Post negative stories,” as well the potential for traffic snarling neighborhoods outside the tolled zone and the real possibility the MTA will “squander the money” will undermine public support. Steve and I agreed that the progressives "aren't prepared” to fight that.

As for the broker fee bill, Steve is okay with it passing but scoffs at the promise that it will lower rent and housing costs. He argues that progressives are again “making promises they can’t keep and risking their credibility.”

I’m biased on the broker fee bill for obvious reasons. Supporters have legitimate reasons and arguments around it. I’m not the best person to ask for a neutral opinion. Nevertheless, the one thing I can say with objective certainty is that it will not lower rents or housing costs. Those are entirely unrelated to the broker fee and have to do with New York’s incoherent housing policies, much of which progressives support. A broker fee “ban” will reduce upfront costs for renters, but if landlords pay them, broker fees will be priced into the rent, and rents will go up. Landlords will raise rents as high as someone is willing to pay. Further, it might become even more complicated for renters to find apartments. Since StreetEasy charges to list rental listings, landlords are less likely to post there unless they’re desperate, and they're currently not. Posting a “For Rent” sign in front of their property attracts enough attention. Without brokers using their own neutral means of conducting background and credit checks, there will be a greater risk of landlords discriminating against people they perceive as risky tenants. Read into that what you will. It will be nearly impossible if you want a rental in New York City unless you know a landlord or walk around looking for For Rent signs. Good luck if you don’t have a 750 credit score.

Some of these drawbacks might be things renters would be willing to deal with rather than shell out five figures every time they have to move. It is probably more tolerable for renters to pay $400 more monthly rather than $5000 upfront for a broker fee. Still, progressives are neither honest about the possibility nor sincere about all the other potential and predictable drawbacks.

One of the most significant potential ramifications of banning broker fees is the city law conflicting with the state law of agency in real estate transactions. If a “broker fee ban” law is interpreted as meaning landlords must pay when they enter an exclusive agreement with a broker, then they simply won’t. Instead, a tenant would have little choice but to hire a broker, sign a compensation agreement with him or her, and pay him or her 15 percent of the annual rent to find an apartment. The only way landlords would be pushed into hiring and paying a broker is when demand is low, and there’s no chance of that happening any time soon, or their apartment has an issue that makes it hard to rent.

For its part, the real estate industry hasn’t been very good at messaging these possibilities. Instead, it focuses on how the ban would hurt the bottom line of realtors, many of whom struggle to make minimum wage despite the erroneous belief that they’re all Ryan Serhants and Donald Trumps eating caviar in their limos. It’s an ineffective argument. The City Council putting realtors out of business wins them more votes than it loses.

But while these elected officials may want to run for reelection or higher office bragging about “sticking it” to brokers, it would be hard if they accidentally created a system that makes it more complicated unless you agree to pay a broker anyway or do the legwork yourself.

This is the dynamic plaguing them now on other issues. No one cares that we created a fairer bail system for poor 22-year-olds who commit a petty crime when the deodorant is locked up behind glass at CVS. It doesn’t matter that the 19-year-old at McDonald’s is making $17 an hour now if my Double Quarter Pounder costs $3 more. It’s excellent that migrant kids are no longer being taken from their parents and forced to sleep on dirt floors in Texas, but was immigration policy always a binary choice between that or Venezuelan gang members shooting at cops from mopeds? If so, most Americans will reluctantly go back to the kids sleeping on dirt. Trans inclusivity is not an issue to anyone until a high school swimmer from a working-class family looking for a scholarship to pay for college loses out on one because she was defeated in a meet by someone who was living as a boy just two years ago. If someone had suggested any of these scenarios would pose a problem for leftists five years ago, they would’ve been dismissed as “concern trolls.” Progressive activists would’ve called you racist and bigoted, argued that you were “finding reasons to get mad” and that even if those things did happen, the people who they would influence “are right-wingers anyway” whose opinions should be discarded. That’s a lot of votes being left on the table.

And yet, here we are. We live in a world where all those things happened, and all those things undermined progressives to the point where, politically, they went from being on the offensive to the defensive to fighting for their mere existence in some cases.

Some progressives seem ignorant of this, still choosing to believe that their movement is growing in numbers and is on the verge of massive victory over the evils of capitalism and imperialism. Others, however, have privately accepted this reality and are infuriated about it. As I said in a previous post:

“The public they expected to rally behind them a decade ago has rejected them. This has led to feelings of betrayal and bitterness.”

The failures are hard for them to explain, and the gaslighting isn’t working. Some leftists, like Steve and myself, have shifted away from the movement, declaring they had been wrong about the viability of many of the issues they fought for. Those who remain, like religious zealots protecting an increasingly discredited religion, have declared those who left apostates and turned the movement into a vehicle for revenge.

Just ask Brianna Wu, John Fetterman and Mondaire Jones.