How to build the abundance movement
On party factions, moderation, business activism, and more.
Over the last two years, a group of thinkers coming from the center-right and center-left has coalesced around a set of important propositions regarding governance and economics:
We face a crisis of scarcity in key goods ranging from housing to healthcare.
One major cause of that scarcity is that incumbents have captured governance of these sectors so as to limit the entry of competitors.
American governments, from the local to the federal level, has become debilitated by complexity and a culture of extreme risk aversion and disregard for implementation.
This dysfunction makes the American state incapable of bold action to break supply logjams, vulnerable to falling into money pits, and less effective than it needs to be at pushing innovation.
People sympathetic to these ideas are already fiercely debating just what they should imply for political commitments and policy design. But even as those discussions continue, the latest Hypertext forum asks a different question: How will people who believe in the above propositions build power around them?
Our forum kicks off with Steve Teles and Rob Saldin arguing that the likeliest path to success is for an “Abundance Faction” to rise within the Democratic Party, led by intellectuals and certain segments of business.
Misha David Chellam explores what makes the emerging “abundance” ideology different from mere “moderation” in his essay “Abundant v. moderate,” cross-posted on Modern Power.
In her essay, “From stakeholder capitalism to state-capacity capitalism,” Didi Kuo dives into business' role in remedying the American government's dysfunctions in an era of populist turmoil. She argues businesspeople should learn from their 19th and early-20th century forebears, who recognized that a changing economy required an overhaul of state capacity.
More essays are in the works and will be posted soon. Meanwhile, please share these important pieces widely and let us know your thoughts.
Image generated with Microsoft Image Creator AI.