A Liberalism That Builds
Top Stories of the Year: #2
I’m counting down the top stories of 2025 while I run the final day of a post-Thanksgiving sale. This sale ends tomorrow.
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The real top stories of 2025 are in my book. The second most important of those is the establishment of what I call the immigration police state. It is what we’ve seen since the beginning of the year: masked, heavily armed men showing up randomly on the streets of American cities, asking people for their papers, and detaining them without due process.
This is happening all the time. Here’s a new example from the ICE dragnet in New Orleans.
[Jacelynn Guzman] was walking back from a corner store near her home in Marrero, Louisiana, on Wednesday when an SUV pulled up next to her. More unmarked cars soon arrived, and men clad in masks and tactical gear poured out.
Guzman said she thought she was about to be kidnapped, and she sprinted toward her front door in plain view of a home security camera.
“Leave me alone!” she could be heard saying on the video, with at least one masked man running after her and two others trailing behind more slowly.
Guzman—whose family identifies as Hispanic—told WWL she had no idea why the men would approach her beside the fact that “I’m brown.” She said she had no criminal record and told one of the agents, “I was born and raised here. I’m a US citizen.”
“He did not care at all,” Guzman said to the station.
Another report from Florida show us how smoothly the “Kavanaugh Stops” are going.
Federal agents forcibly removed a woman from a car during a traffic stop in Key Largo on December 3, despite her repeated pleas that she was a U.S. citizen.
Video captured by Miami Herald reporter David Goodhue shows several agents pulling the woman, dressed in medical scrubs, from a car along a busy highway.
In the footage, she can be heard screaming, “I’m a U.S. citizen, please help me,” as agents restrained her and placed her in handcuffs.
Here’s how I described the importance of due process in my book.
David Woodruff, a scholar of Soviet economic history, quotes an old Russian joke about the NKVD, the Soviet secret police.
Foxes are fleeing the USSR in droves.
Q: Why are you running away?
Fox: The Soviets passed a new law that they’re going to arrest all camels.
Q: But you’re foxes!
Fox: Yeah, why don’t you try proving to the NKVD that you’re not a camel.
Due process is not just a legal concept. It is an epistemological concept—it has to do with the very concept of truth itself. Due process is a requirement that the government provide evidence and establish facts before it can act against an individual. By contrast, as journalist Greg Sargent observes: “Trump has tried to dictate reality by executive fiat. He said we are under invasion by Venezuela through gang members—objectively false. But he wants the power to declare it so and have this be unreviewable.”
The rejection of due process is an assertion of the power to overrule reality.
The ultimate example of this is not domestic, but overseas, in the military strikes against alleged drug smuggling boats in the Caribbean. But are they really drug smuggling boats, and how do we know that? Are we just supposed to take it on faith from the Trump administration?
And having taken it on faith that these have been positively identified as evil drug smugglers, we are supposed to take on faith that every use of force against them is justified. Thus, we have Admiral Frank Bradley openly testifying to members of Congress that, following orders from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he not only ordered a strike on a boat, but then ordered a second strike to kill its defenseless shipwrecked survivors.
Ultimately, Bradley told lawmakers, he ordered a second strike to destroy the remains of the vessel, killing the two survivors, on the grounds that it appeared that part of the vessel remained afloat because it still held cocaine, according to one of the sources. The survivors could hypothetically have floated to safety, been rescued, and carried on with trafficking the drugs, the logic went.
The other source with direct knowledge of the briefing called that rationale “f**king insane.”
If anything is going to really bring down the Trump administration, it’s this. The whole chain of command—from Trump and Stephen Miller (the idiotic mastermind behind the boat strikes) down through Pete Hegseth and Admiral Bradley—is directly implicated in an action universally recognized as a capital crime.
Please familiarize yourself with the Peleus Incident; see a good overview from the US Naval Institute. The upshot is that at Nuremberg we sent a U-boat captain to a firing squad for doing exactly what top members of the administration have just done.
The most interesting thing about that case is that the best witnesses against the captain were the common sailors on his own crew, who “almost to a man were bitterly critical of [Captain] Eck and the other officers for what had happened.” Every sailor knows that he, too, could end up shipwrecked, and the most basic code of the sea is that any vessel that encounters shipwrecked sailors—even the enemy—has a responsibility to aid them if at all possible. To deliberately kill them is such a basic crime that it leaves no moral ambiguity.
Keep watching this case, because the more details that come out, the worse it gets. But it all follows from the basic logic of throwing out the rule of law and due process in a frenzy of xenophobic hatred—another parallel to the Peleus Incident.
Again, buy the book.
Now to the second biggest of the other stories of 2025.
A Liberalism That Builds
Early in the year, I wrote about America’s problem with stasis, identifying 1970 as the year when, in many different respects, we just decided to stop growing.
I wrote about a specific court ruling which showed how deliberate this abandonment of progress was.
The first nuclear power plant in the US went online in 1957, and by 1973, there were nearly 200 nuclear plants across the country at various stages of permitting, construction, and operation. Then it all came to a grinding halt: In 1970, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, which imposed extensive new permitting requirements on any large project, and the 1971 Calvert Cliffs case applied this law to require stricter licensing of nuclear power.
The judges’ ruling declares their dedication to upholding “the commitment of the government to control, at long last, the destructive engine of material ‘progress.’” Well, mission accomplished.
But I saw hopeful signs this is reversing, “that some people are beginning to realize what a crisis this is, spurred by the political ramifications of ‘blue states’ essentially paying people to move to ‘red states.’” This is why California is losing congressional seats, while Texas has been gaining them.
As this realization has grown, I’ve been tracking the rise of curious creatures like the Supply Side Progressives, and as one of last year’s top stories, I described the “Rise of the YIMBYs,” the people who say “Yes, In My Back Yard” instead of “Not In My Back Yard.”
This year has been a year of particular triumph for the YIMBY movement. I covered a little of this in the middle of the year when I wrote about the “permitting revolution,” “a simmering national revolution in the permitting process for construction projects.”
California has had some of the nation’s most extensive restrictions on housing, so they have been the main battleground, and over the past ten years California’s state government has been leading the way in trying to undo the network of controls.
So far, this has produced surprisingly few results, however, due to the loopholes and poison pills introduced into the legislation, such as mandates to use union labor, and also due to dogged local obstruction. Reversing such an entrenched anti-building regime requires, not one piece of legislation, but multiple tries to find the sources of opposition and beat them down. The one big success story is ADUs, small extra cottages built on the lot of an existing home. But as one observer notes, “It took about like five years of revisions before they were really getting going.”…
[M]any more years of the kind of reform attempts in California are still required.
Yet the YIMBYs have made big gains this year, particularly in California. See a recent overview on this from Jordan Weissmann.
Governor Gavin Newsom defied wealthy donors, the Los Angeles political elite, and environmental groups to come out hard for two important pieces of housing legislation.
On Oct. 10, the governor signed SB 79, a years-in-the-making piece of bipartisan legislation that would overrule local zoning to allow the construction of apartments near major transit stops statewide. In doing so, he pushed aside howls of protest from his fellow Democrats in Los Angeles, where locals complained that the changes would encroach on many single-family neighborhoods, especially on its wealthy and donor-heavy West Side. (This was sort of the point.)
This was the year’s second big pro-housing move from the governor. During the summer, Newsom excited and surprised YIMBYs by throwing his full weight behind two bills reforming the state’s landmark conservation statute. Under the first, AB 130, the California Environmental Quality Act can no longer be used to stop new housing from being built in most urban areas. Activists had been confident in their chances of passing a version of the law, but, by demanding it be included in the state budget, Newsom turbocharged the effort.
The bill would not “have been as strong without the governor’s support,” Brian Hanlon, president of California YIMBY, told me.
A second bill Newsom decided to champion, SB 131, will limit environmental review of other key projects, like high-speed rail and advanced manufacturing plants. That one drew the full wrath of California’s environmental establishment: A group of more than 100 organizations released a letter to the governor calling it “the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory.” Again, he brushed off the complaints.
Weissman points out that part of the key to YIMBYs success is that it is nonpartisan, appealing to the “supply-side progressives” alongside supply-siders of the original vintage. But that means it gets support from a surprising number of people on the left, including Elizabeth Warren. “The progressive favorite has been YIMBY-friendly since at least 2018, when she proposed a $10 billion competitive grant program to encourage local zoning reforms and found enthusiastic partners on the issue from the Republican side.”
Similarly, see a new video from incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in which the “democratic socialist” describes his urgent plan to, er, cut regulations and fees and speed up the approval process for small businesses.
The phrase that sums it up is that people are now starting to talk about “A Liberalism That Builds.” It is one of the few things in American that is headed in the right direction right now.
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