Abundance crashes the party
We debate whether abundance should turn its momentum into a partisan project–and if so, how.
The abundance movement has burst into the national consciousness at an awkward time.
Democrats are obsessed with becoming more electorally competitive, and key party players are feeling vulnerable about their failures. Republicans who were optimistic that Donald Trump’s disregard for party orthodoxy would lead him to promote science and effective bureaucracy are now left to hope the slasher movie still gets to a happy ending.
The latest forum of Hypertext asks how abundance advocates should think about partisan politics now. The essays will be coming to your inbox one by one over the next two weeks. Here’s a preview.
Should the abundance movement embrace party affiliations at all, and if so, where and when?
Frank DiStefano warns that abundance advocates should avoid becoming too wrapped up in Democratic Party politics, countering Steve Teles and Rob Saldin’s call in these pages for a Democratic “abundance faction.” Abundance has the potential to offer Americans a broad vision to restore agency and dignity to their lives, DiStefano argues. But as a strictly partisan project, it will be doomed to tinker with slight improvements to people’s material conditions before fading into oblivion.
Chris Elmendorf and David Schleicher counter with an argument focused on the local scene, where YIMBY activism is most potent. They argue that the case for more housing can only be successful if fused with an agenda to make cities more livable. That project, they say, involves broad policy and cultural problems that inevitably require party politics.
On the Democratic side, where the debate over abundance has raged the hottest, how should the movement’s advocates frame their project?
Matthew Yglesias warns Democrats that an abundance agenda driven by a blue-state aesthetic of urbanism is unlikely to do much for their national fortunes. Instead, he counsels that abundance Democrats should lean into cultural moderation and puncture the progressive argument that populist economics is enough to draw in working-class votes.
Meanwhile, Henry Tonks shows that much of the bad blood between Democratic moderates and progressives rests on a flawed understanding of the 1980s and 1990s. He rebuts the widespread assumption that “New Democrats” willfully jettisoned the developmental economics of the New Deal. Instead, Tonks argues, they failed to execute on it politically–and we should study why to avoid repeating their mistakes.
Finally, in the nuts and bolts of Democratic governance, what might accommodation and success look like?
Olivia Kosloff dives into the debate between advocates of abundance and antitrust. Using the example of healthcare, she shows why the two approaches actually represent two sides of the same coin.
And finally, Chris Elmendorf explores how California Democrats bucked conventional wisdom by pushing through an ambitious reform of the state’s environmental-review law to enable more housing construction.
Please share the essays, let us know what you think on Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack Notes, and Bluesky, and reach out if you are moved to write a response.
And if you can’t get enough abundance content, check out the podcasts of our Niskanen Center colleagues Geoff Kabaservice and Marshall Kosloff—and stay tuned to Hypertext.