Abundance is asking the wrong question
When you focus on reviving a party, you miss the opportunity to revive faith in the American Dream.
What question is Abundance designed to answer?
The Abundance movement has diagnosed important problems, and it offers wise prescriptions. But countless reform movements have come and gone that were popular among good-government types, professionals, and intellectuals—Locofocos, Barnburners, Conscience Whigs, Greenbackers, Liberal Republicans, Half-Breeds, Mugwumps, and more. They all failed to leave a legacy of lasting change because they sought to answer the wrong question. If we want the Abundance movement to succeed, the question we must ask isn’t whether Abundance ideas are good. It is whether they’re designed to solve the national crisis of this moment.
We live in an age of crisis and America is in revolt. There is widespread consensus across the political spectrum that America’s leaders are ineffective, the country is heading down the wrong track, and our institutions are broken. Put simply, Americans from left to right blame their leaders for hollowing out America and destroying the American Dream. If we hope to rally Americans around Abundance, then it must become more than just a technocratic program or party faction. It must become a national movement providing answers to this growing fear of the American Dream’s decline.
Since the national debut of the Abundance movement, the media has mostly framed it as a Democratic Party faction designed to answer the question: How do we fix a broken Democratic Party to repair its electoral fortunes? The Washington Post placed Abundance “at the fore of Democrats’ new ideas sweepstakes” and suggested it might be “a bold and confident answer to the problems plaguing progressives.” Abundance advocates have contributed to this narrative. On Lex Fridman’s podcast, Derek Thompson framed Abundance as “trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party.” Matt Yglesias in a forthcoming essay for this forum frames the core problem as “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.”
The reason Democrats need Abundance isn’t because party leaders don’t understand how to build a more effective state. It’s because powerful party factions put other priorities first.
I appreciate why Democrats find this framing compelling. Democrats are the party of government, so a failure to govern discredits the party’s entire agenda. The party wants to reverse the loss in trust Americans have in its capacity to meaningfully fix big problems. Abundance ideas fix a serious Democratic Party vulnerability. I also understand why Abundance advocates focused on the Democrats. The movement began in response to misgovernance in blue cities, and ideas need politics to become action. The Democrats are more likely to accept Abundance than any conceivable alternative. Republicans are in the midst of their own ideological moment with limited appetite for arguments about restoring government competence. As Robert Saldin and Steve Teles wrote here in Hypertext last summer, we live in a two-party culture during a time of hyper-partisanship in which new-party efforts have no obvious path. If Abundance is to move beyond policy papers and theory, it needs a party’s backing. Democrats are the obvious choice.
None of that means turning Abundance into a mere faction of the Democratic Party is good for Abundance.
I have doubts about whether Abundance can ever fully capture the Democratic Party without fundamental change. The reason Democrats need Abundance isn’t because party leaders don’t understand how to build a more effective state. It’s because powerful factions within the party put other priorities first. Factions that currently control the party want the state to be effective in theory, but believe other issues matter more. That is why they accurately perceive Abundance as an assault against their priorities. These factions aren’t going anywhere, they are powerful, and they will fight Abundance relentlessly for as long as the current coalition holds. As good-government reformers have repeatedly learned through history, feeding fresh ideas into a political machine built to preserve the old order fails unless you can somehow alter that machine. Let’s assume, however, that Abundance is able to take control of the Democrats. What then?
Abundance should become a national ideology that answers Americans’ actual question: Not how to fix the Democratic Party, but how to restore a fading American Dream.
If Abundance is to implement its ideas, it must do more than convert party leaders. You can’t cram transformation into a brief legislative window, and if you did it wouldn’t last. Once the initial surge of enthusiasm ends, your work will be co-opted, hollowed out, or undone entirely. To implement transformational ideas and sustain them, Abundance must gain enthusiastic support from a majority of Americans sustained over years. It therefore must become more than a mere factional ideology, but a national ideology that convinces a majority that Abundance is the answer to the questions they want answered. Those questions aren’t how to make the Democratic Party more effective, or how to build more infrastructure, but how to reverse the hollowing out of America, restore opportunity and upward mobility, and restore a fading American Dream.
Abundance is positioned to do this, but not as a technocratic or partisan plan promising the same experts will administer the system better without fundamentally changing it. Abundance must become something more.
Abundance as a Democratic Party faction sounds like a technocratic project to empower experts just when Americans are losing faith in them. America is in revolt against experts. This isn’t simply coming from populists on the right, but anti-capitalists on the left, and most alarmingly, growing segments of the apolitical middle class. Whether you label this discontent as anger at elites, capitalism, the establishment, billionaires, globalists, or just America, there’s a rising national fury at those who run America’s institutions and the technocratic managerial system that selected them. Americans blame their leaders for hollowing out the middle class, ignoring their needs, and damaging the country. How can that be squared?
The key is copying the tactics of the historic Progressive Movement and broadening Abundance in both messaging and agenda from an idea promising material plenty to one promising an abundance of opportunity, dignity, and purpose grounded in the American Dream.
Abundance and the hollowing of the American Dream
To see how Abundance can become more, examine the nature of America’s present crisis.
Our national identity is built around the American Dream. This dream was never purely a dream of material prosperity. It has always at its core been about the opportunity to become whatever it is you dream to be. The American Dream was best described by Thomas Wolfe in his 1940 novel You Can’t Go Home Again:
To every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him.
Material prosperity—the good job, suburban house, and two Fords—is only half of the American Dream. The other half is dignity, meaning, opportunity, agency, self-determination, and respect. America is meant to be a land of limitless mobility. It’s a land in which ordinary people are due the same respect as presidents and CEOs, and the phrase “don’t you know who I am” earns not favors but contempt. It’s a nation that loves democracy, where ordinary people have agency and control their futures. America is meant to be a place in which every citizen can pursue meaning, however they define it, and have a fair and equal chance at a good life. Our current revolt is rooted in the belief that this dream has been hollowed out by the elites administering the system.
What answer does Abundance have to address this? Infrastructure cannot answer a loss of dignity and control. Nor can empowering the same experts Americans already distrust. Why should Americans believe Abundance is more than an agenda for the people who presided over national stagnation to now make it a bit more tolerable—a better subway to get to work in a job without meaning or mobility, a slightly better house, and perhaps one of those two Fords? Material plenty addresses the first part of the American Dream, but what about the second part? As mere material abundance, Abundance offers only half the American Dream, and therefore only half of the solution to what ails America.
As I explored in my book The Next Realignment, the political changes that usher in realignments always occur in the wake of national crises. I’ve since realized these crises are always of a kind—crises of legitimacy. The turmoil that brought us Jacksonian Democracy, abolition and the Civil War, the Progressive Movement, or the New Deal, involved challenges to America’s legitimacy its existing parties were incapable of addressing. These eras of turmoil only ended when America embraced a fresh vision offering what its old ideologies could not, restoring the legitimacy of the battered system. The New Deal was more than just a hodge-podge of economic relief programs. It was a program to restore faith in America by demonstrating our democratic institutions could still deliver prosperity in a more complex modern economy despite years of economic depression. We’re facing another legitimacy crisis now. Abundance has the right ideas to address that crisis, but must present itself within a different framework to succeed.
Why should Americans believe Abundance is more than an agenda for the people who presided over national stagnation to now make it a bit more tolerable?
Our model cannot be another mere “Mugwump movement,” as I’ve called America’s many short-lived good-government movements. Well-meaning reformers in a burst of great enthusiasm often make a bit of progress until the system pushes back, washing them away like sandcastles at high tide. Like the original Mugwumps—the 19-century reformers who walked out of the Republican Party in the name of fighting corruption and achieved little more than the destruction of their own careers—these movements always make the same mistake. They try to solve a legitimacy crisis by tinkering with a political party. Transformative movements that create lasting change do more.
Our model should be instead the historical Progressive Movement, which arrived a decade later and implemented the reforms Mugwumps wanted alongside a flood of other ideas. Unlike the Mugwumps, who merely sought to reform a political party, the Progressives targeted the problem and thereby sparked a national reform wave that brought America’s corrupt and stagnant Gilded Age to its end. The Progressive realized the problem wasn’t simply a few bad apples or even a rotten party system. It was structural transformation as the shock and turmoil of a rapid and disruptive industrialization turned the country upside down. Family farmers who made up America’s middle class were going bankrupt, small towns were emptying into the cities, and new immigrants were pouring into the metropolises to take hellish sweatshop jobs in new factories. A few positioned to seize industrialization’s opportunities were becoming millionaires, the middle class were falling behind, and the congressmen and senators sent to Washington by machines were doing little beyond leveraging their positions into lucrative railroad company directorships. America’s middle class understandably lost faith in the system and America. This was the crisis Progressives had to resolve.
The Progressives launched a movement not around fixing a party but implementing a shared idea—one that eventually overtook both major parties and allowed them to enact almost their entire agenda.
The Progressives thus launched a movement not around fixing a party but implementing a shared idea, that progressivism’s mix of social science, expertise, and planning could comprehensively reform America and bring back stability, fairness, and mass prosperity. We should not copy their leading idea—we should copy their strategy of coalescing around one. They launched a flurry of innovative and bold reforms around their idea that addressed every symptom of the problem: ending sweatshop conditions and child labor, public education, parks to replace vanishing green spaces, antitrust to control growing national monopolies, new ideas about efficiency, and women’s suffrage. They drew into their ranks not just politicians but writers, thinkers, activists, preachers, businesspeople, charity workers, and entrepreneurs. At first they worked mostly among Republicans under leaders like Teddy Roosevelt, but engaged with anyone open to their ideas, and eventually became a driving force inside Democrats as well under leaders like Woodrow Wilson. This is how they earned back America’s trust, making their ideas so popular they overtook both major parties and allowed them to enact almost their entire agenda.
Abundance, instead of casting itself as an effort to reform the Democrats as a junior party faction, should strive to become a movement to reform an ailing America too. Like the Progressives, it can work within a party without being of the party, so it’s not constrained by its short-term electoral orientation, its coalition, or its legacy ideas. It should target not just political problems but structural changes that have undercut the legitimacy of America, connecting its ideas about material abundance to every other aspect of this crisis. It should expand material abundance into an abundance of everything Americans fear is dwindling, including intangibles like opportunity, agency, meaning, and human flourishing. In this way, Abundance can answer the question Americans are asking: How do we restore faith in America and the full American Dream?
Abundance and citizenship
What is the Abundance movement’s answer to reversing the hollowing out of America and restoring opportunity, mobility, personal agency, and the American Dream? Re-embrace America’s lost national tradition of a government that creates systems that provide a good life to everyone.
This is what Abundance is already quietly saying. Aristotle, who rejected Plato’s philosopher kings, believed government’s role isn’t to play national manager but to architect good rules that create the conditions in which citizens can flourish. This ethic was the heart of America’s Founding, fueled the Whigs under John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, grounded Lincoln’s Republicans, and motivated Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Square Deal. The Abundance movement should start saying this out loud and about everything.
The movement is correct that a good life requires access to material things like housing, cars, and medicine. It requires education, public services, and government that does its job and works. Americans are angry there isn’t enough housing, education, healthcare, infrastructure, or employment to go around. They’re worried the post-industrial economy is leaving them behind. A good and flourishing life, however, also requires intangibles like social mobility, opportunity, agency, and a level playing field. It requires the security to take risks, ride out bad luck, and chase after big dreams. It requires a society that provides meaning, dignity, and respect. Americans are angry their leaders have failed to provide these intangible conditions for a good life too. They feel trapped in a system that will never give them a fair shot, hoards opportunity, treats them as a cog, and closes off the hope they will ever reach their dreams and truly thrive. These are related problems, and we can’t win back people’s trust by addressing one without the other.
Material abundance is but one of many abundances necessary for flourishing—an abundance of opportunity, freedom, accountability, personal agency, dignity, and the means to a good life.
Material abundance is but one of many abundances necessary for flourishing—an abundance of opportunity, freedom, accountability, personal agency, dignity, control, and the means to a good life. Taking a page from the Progressive playbook, create an agenda linking the idea of Abundance to all these other abundances, one that can reform every area of society in and outside government. How about linking causes like infrastructure and housing and other aspects of broken democratic accountability? How about restructuring a Congress that no longer legislates, addressing the imperial executive, or creating better mechanisms for transparency and accountability?
How about we look at other institutions culpable in the collapse of the American Dream as well? What about financialization undercutting the real economy? How about HR bureaucracies that treat workers as costs instead of collaborators, or Kafkaesque hiring processes that don’t treat people with respect? How about administrative bloat within universities that balloons costs, or admission processes that bottleneck mobility without accountability? How about the disruptive impact of AI on work, or the decline of avenues for upward mobility in the new economy? The point isn’t to create here an exhaustive list—that’s for another time—but to suggest we think more broadly and outside 20th-century political battlelines. As Yglesias recognizes with his proposal for “Big Truck” Abundance, connecting Abundance ideas to opportunity and dignity might even serve as a corrective to our national divisions over cultural issues—battles that often mask anger over a system people feel doesn’t offer them dignity, opportunity, or respect.
If we’re going to ask America to trust experts again, we need to offer a new breed of leaders Americans want to trust.
Fixing the crisis is also about more than merely policy deliverables. If we’re going to ask America to trust experts again, we need to offer a new breed of leaders Americans want to trust. Abundance must offer not just plans but also a new template for national leadership, one offering a clean break with new voices instead of a new gloss on a failed past. What makes someone an Abundance person? An Abundance person embodies civic virtue, empowers citizens by fixing broken systems instead of directing outcomes, and embraces America’s lost tradition of leadership as a duty, not a trophy. Like Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalists, we’re not seeking to be national managers but civic engineers looking to repair broken systems. We’re guardians and advocates undertaking to ensure the rules are fair, the playing field is level, hard work and character are rewarded, and ordinary people thrive. Just like the Progressives, Abundance should be a national movement with one foot outside politics as well. We promise a new generation of leaders dedicated to repairing not just government, but all of America’s broken institutions, from the Hill, to the Boardroom, to the Academy, to the Studios, to the Newsrooms, to the Street.
Abundance can do this, but to accomplish it our ambition must be more than just to win politically. It must be to meet this historic moment by rebuilding trust and creating better systems under which every American can thrive, one designed to allow citizens to flourish by offering them the means for a good life.
Frank DiStefano is the author of The Next Realignment and the Renew the Republic substack.
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