His book also proceeds from the unquestioned assumption that people working on things like high-speed rail and affordable housing want it to come to fruition, much as you suspect that his critics do not want them to come to fruition. The alternative possibility that maybe needs a glance is that the projects' strongest backers have no intention of bringing those projects to pass, but rather desire to funnel the funds needed for the bureaucratic steps to their cronies. This is sometimes cited in criticism of California's high-speed rail: people working on the studies and processes necessary for bureaucracy are being paid, although the actual train will not be built. Maybe the train (or the Seattle parking spaces) are not actually what some part of the powers behind the project want, because they want really their friends to get paid for the bureaucratic work on the project.

Which leftist circles? The one US leftist circle I'm in (a random discord) was calling him "based" last week for writing an NYT article about the generational difference in attitudes towards Zionism within Jewish families, and seems to mostly hate NIMBYs and be bored by committees.

Examples might make this a lot less inflammatory by ensuring it's targeted at the people who deserve it.

Somewhat true, but needlessly partisan.

The reality is that a LOT of people have been radicalized by political dogmas that preach purity and sainthood. Every political is either the epitome of perfection of a literal baby-eating satanist. Every policy is either so vital that judicial and political norms must be brushed aside to advance it, or so vile that judicial and political norms must be ignored in order to block it.

I don’t at all think it’s limited to “the left”. It’s the zeitgeist and it sucks.

“Many on the left would choose” <preposterous thing>.

This is Hacker News, not Fox News or a Bret Stephens column. Let’s keep the unquantifiable unsubstantiated outrage rhetoric off of here.

> I can't wrap my head around this.

That is because you seem to have you view of reality be ultraprocessed for you. Stop letting (others misuse) a tiny minority represent a large proportion of the population.

I'm not acting as if every single conservative hates the federal government and would like to crucify gays either.

I feel that there's a strain of extreme neuroticism in certain leftist activist groups that would rather keep the problem in place (and themselves relevant in fretting about it) than take care of the problem and move on. The COVID emergency comes to mind: Biden kept the federal government in an emergency posture until mid-2023, which was a year after Democratic governors ended emergencies in their states, and two whole years after widespread availability of vaccines.

That's because many of these so-called 'leftists' have centred their entire identity around activism and agitation and as such realise that actually achieving their purported goals would rob them of their targets. You can compare them to the pharma industry which is far more interested in finding treatments for conditions than they are in finding cures for those conditions since the latter would cut off the market for the former.