It's time for abundance Democrats to embrace cultural moderation
The left argues that economic populism lets you ignore voters' cultural concerns. Abundance Democrats know that is wrong, and they should say it.
The project of Democratic Party renewal has essentially two distinct aspects — reforming and improving governance in the blue states and expanding the electoral appeal of the party so that it can better compete to win in swing states and stand a punter’s chance of winning statewide races in the red states.
Part of the appeal of “abundance” as a factional project is that it holds out the possibility of addressing both concerns. Had Kamala Harris won last November, committed adherents of abundance would still be active and focused on the blue-state reform project, but they wouldn’t have the opening they see now to transform the party nationwide. Her defeat has injected new energy into the abundance camp’s bid to become a full-blown Democratic faction, with many organizers and political entrepreneurs casting abundance as the big idea that can help the party return from the wilderness.
On the level of ideas, both Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works and Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance suggest that frustration with hyper-proceduralism and a sense that the system doesn’t work help bolster the appeal of Donald Trump’s strongman persona. That seems persuasive when you consider how J.D. Vance’s repeated claims that immigration restriction is the key to housing affordability sketch out a potent MAGA politics of zero-sum scarcity. The better answer, of course, is to increase the elasticity of housing supply.
And yet this pitch for abundance also provides a weapon to its factional enemies.
Does anyone really think that Iowa and Ohio voted for Obama twice and then flipped to Trump three times in a row because voters were frustrated with NEPA review?
When it comes to blue state reform, abundance’s critics don’t have a leg to stand on. No serious person can defend a status quo in which America’s most prosperous states suffer from domestic outmigration or hold up the California High-Speed Rail project as an impressive example of activist government at work. Which is why critics have instead assailed abundance as a national electoral platform, offering bland “to be sure” remarks about zoning in their critical reviews while commissioning push polls with loaded question-wording to scare off politicians and donors who care passionately about beating Donald Trump.
Here the critics aren’t always playing fair, but they at least are making sense.
It’s difficult to imagine a successful Democratic Senate candidate in Iowa spending a lot of time talking about housing scarcity in coastal cities or pitching her constituents on a better methodology of train construction. And while the point about dysfunction bolstering the appeal of autocracy makes some sense, it’s a little bit hard to connect the dots here in detail. Does anyone really think that Iowa and Ohio voted for Obama twice and then flipped to Trump three times in a row because voters were frustrated with NEPA review? Did the “blue wall” crumble because federal civil service hiring is too kludgy?
The primacy of culture
Any serious analysis of Democrats’ electoral struggles needs to center considerations that are outside the scope of abundance. Socioeconomically downscale secular white voters — later joined by a swathe of African-American and Hispanic voters — flipped to Trump because after Obama’s reelection the Republicans moved to the center on Medicare while Democrats shifted left on topics like guns, crime, and immigration while greatly elevating the salience of race and identity issues and running one candidate laden with decades of baggage and another who had clearly aged out of the job.
Nonetheless, the linkages between the strands of Democratic governance renewal and cultural moderation are real — though perhaps in ways that will pose awkward questions for the blue-state reformers.
The linkages between the strands of Democratic governance renewal and cultural moderation are real — though in ways that will pose awkward questions for the blue-state reformers.
One key intersection relates to climate change, an economic policy issue that often plays like a cultural values issue. Leading left-abundists have argued their framework is vital to speeding a clean energy transition by facilitating renewable deployment and driving innovative forms of clean energy like advanced nuclear and solar. During the Biden administration, at several points it appeared as if Congress might broker a permitting reform deal that would help unleash clean energy in exchange for also easing the regulatory burden on natural gas. A key dividing line of the period was that the nascent abundance movement was largely excited about the potential deals, while mainstream environmental organizations were largely hostile and succeeded in preventing them from passing. But this still poses the question — is abundance merely willing to make concessions to the oil and gas industry as an instrumental strategy for decarbonization, or is it willing to embrace American oil and gas production as a positive good for the foreseeable future?
Similarly, when Senator Ruben Gallego says, “Every Latin man wants a big-ass truck, nothing wrong with that,” he is not using the lingo of the abundance books, but he is arguably talking about an abundance agenda. And here the electoral angle is clear. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, and Alaska have oil and gas industries, and it’s obvious why a Democratic Party that was seen as friendlier to the existence of those industries might have more electoral appeal. There are swing voters all across America who don’t like the idea of being told which stove they are allowed to buy. There is a whole automobile industry centered in Michigan and neighboring states whose top products are big-ass gasoline-powered trucks and SUVs, companies whose basic viability of threatened by a police agenda of banning internal combustion engine vehicles.
Big-Ass Truck Abundance
Call this Big-Ass Truck Abundance in contrast to the High-Speed Rail Abundance of the books. It’s a message that is more appealing to swing voters, and therefore a more credible pitch to winning-oriented political entrepreneurs, but also a much tougher sell to existing Democratic Party donors and blue state primary electorates.
Even the pure culture war issues have an abundance angle.
A big factor in the rapid takeover of the Democratic Party by ill-conceived populist fads is that their purveyors have marketed hard left economics as an alternative to grappling with the party’s weaknesses on cultural issues. Populists have reassured decision-makers in the party that if you pound the table hard enough about “corporate power,” you don’t need to come to grips with the actually existing views of the electorate on race, gender, and related matters. None of the abundance books or major abundance organizations explicitly take on this view, but it’s a critical part of the meta-structure of the argument. They challenge “break corporate power” as a governing framework, but implicitly also critique it as an electoral salve. They may be bullish on the electoral potential of “abundance,” but nobody goes so far as to claim that such wonkery will work the same magic that populists claim for “corporate power.” So in the abundance worldview, there is no alternative to the hard work of aligning with mainstream cultural values.
To win the factional argument, partisans of abundance will need to topple economic populism from its claim to be a path around cultural moderation.
The reality is that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were the two biggest electoral underperformers in the Democratic Senate caucus, while the top overperformers in Congress — Kristen McDonald Rivet, Henry Cuellar, Gallego, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Jared Golden, and Adam Gray — are cultural moderates with a range of economic views. Rivet and Gray have both joined the abundance-oriented Build America Caucus while Perez and Golden have a much more populist approach. To win the factional argument, partisans of abundance will need to highlight these patterns over and over, and topple economic populism from its claim to be a path around cultural moderation.
But an abundance faction that embraces cultural moderation at the national level poses a risk to the fortunes of the blue state reformers. Entrenched interests in California, Massachusetts, New York and elsewhere will exploit any hint of unsoundness on core progressive values to discredit their opponents.
The easy resolution of the dilemma is simply to say that things will look different in different places. This is, in fact, how politics works. There is no reason that Rivet in her district should talk the same way that Jake Auchincloss talks in the affluent suburbs of Boston or the way Ritchie Torres talks in the South Bronx. They can all be part of the Build America Caucus, all share certain commitments to abundance, and all focus on issues and themes that make sense for their constituents. A faction needs a certain degree of coherence, but also benefits from a big tent approach.
The Grow SF model
And yet pure agnosticism on these points seems like a bit of a dodge. Contemporary politics is more nationalized than in the past, following the nationalization of the media in the digital era. People will draw inferences about the meaning of a factional affiliation from the behavior of its most prominent members.
Besides which, Gallego’s point about the big-ass trucks isn’t merely electoral. It’s a contingent fact of history that the leading theorists of abundance are city-dwellers with an affective preference for traditional walkable urbanism. This is reflected in what they (we, to be honest) are obsessed with and like to write about, but it’s not constitutive of the doctrine if you read it fairly. Abundance genuinely ought to move beyond the snobbish conceit that kayaking is an inherently more noble pursuit than jetskiing and embrace an honest reckoning of the genuine value of American fossil fuel production as long as the world needs oil and gas. High-Speed Rail Abundance critiques degrowth on the level of theory, but Big Ass Truck Abundance brings it down to the realm of practice on a policy as well as a political level — it’s just probably not as good a pitch for the audience at your local independent bookstore. The abundance movement needs a genuine Big Ass Truck wing to make it representative of the country it hopes to fix.
The rotten bargain at the heart of blue-state political economy is precisely that the increasingly liberal, affluent suburbs have been allowed to use NIMBYism as their shield against the problems of crime and education in the adjacent cities.
On culture, meanwhile, simply saying that the tent should be big is itself a provocative take relative to the prevailing climate of “cancellation” in progressive spaces.
But beyond that, even in the limited context of a blue state reform agenda it’s worth asking how you can possibly sell people on increased housing density without having credible answers on public safety and public school quality? This is not the place to sketch out exactly what those answers have to look like, but it is probably not possible to rise to the task if you’re not willing to question some of the shibboleths of the cultural left. Arguably the rotten bargain at the heart of blue-state political economy is precisely that the increasingly liberal, affluent suburbs have been allowed to use NIMBYism as their shield against the problems of crime and education in the adjacent cities. Which is just to say that in practice the issues cannot be fully cabined off from each other if you want elected officials to start putting them into practice.
It’s not a coincidence that new San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie and the slim moderate majority backing him on the Board of Supervisors were backed by a new organization, Grow SF, that espouses housing abundance and tough on crime and rigor in public education. The Lurie road is a harder struggle than just trying to get zoning reform added to the laundry list of demands espoused by any given city’s branch of the sprawling progressive NGO complex. But it makes for a more coherent governing agenda, and it’s also easier to explain why getting drug addicts off the street and taking public school curricula out of the hands of kooks helps you win elections in the Midwest than to make the case that speedier subway construction or taller apartments is the path to the hearts of rural Wisconsin.
Matthew Yglesias is the author of the Slow Boring newsletter and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.
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