The rise of a new pragmatism

David Leonhardt identifies a real convergence, but it reflects a public that is more practical than "neopopulist" - and shows the way to an Abundance realignment.

The astonishing events of the past month — President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, followed by the assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump, followed in turn by Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris — have scrambled the confident political predictions of many pundits. Nonetheless, two of the most interesting recent essays attempting to make sense of the present political moment are still highly relevant: David Leonhardt’s New York Times essay “A New Centrism Is Rising in Washington” and “The Rise of the Abundance Faction” by Niskanen senior fellows Rob Saldin and Steve Teles.

The genesis for Leonhardt’s essay, as he explained in his newsletter, was his editors’ request that he explain the paradox of a supposedly gridlocked and dysfunctional Congress that nonetheless has succeeded in passing major laws, often with considerable bipartisan support, during the past four years. In fact, Leonhardt notes, President Biden “has signed a more significant set of bipartisan bills — on infrastructure, semiconductors, gun violence, the electoral process and more — than any president in decades.”

Leonhardt discerns in these votes the rise of “a new form of American centrism,” based on a rejection of the neoliberalism that followed the end of the Cold War. The best label for this new centrism, in Leonhardt’s view, is “neopopulism,” since it derives from a growing skepticism of free trade and support for industrial policy on the part of both Republicans and Democrats, former president Donald Trump’s rejection of key tenets of Reaganism, and a public shift toward economic liberalism and social conservatism.

Leonhardt’s analysis is, I think, important for the Niskanen Center to consider in our never-ending quest to define ourselves politically, which in turn has implications for what we ought to be doing. We are often described as centrist proponents of pragmatic, transpartisan solutions, so the supposed normalization of centrism and bipartisanism should be a welcome development for us.

But Niskanen has also been described as reformed-libertarian, broadly Never Trumpist, center-right, and anti-populist. To my mind, these descriptors have always given us some sort of kinship with the moderate Republican tradition — and what historically defined the GOP moderates was that they were fiscally conservative but socially tolerant. But according to Leonhardt, political experts — in which category he includes think-tankers like ourselves along with campaign donors and national journalists — “have long misread public opinion. The center of it does not revolve around the socially liberal, fiscally conservative views that many elites hold. It tends to be the opposite.”

The Niskanen Center advocates for policies that are popular, pragmatic, and politically plausible — and we argue for them with the passion that moderates are often claimed to lack.

In support of this verdict, Leonhardt brandishes the familiar two-by-two matrix that is an updated version of the widely circulated graph that was based on 2016 voter survey data and which plotted voters according to their social and economic views. As you might expect, both graphs show large numbers of Republican voters holding fiscally and socially conservative views, and large numbers of Democrats holding fiscally and socially liberal views. But there are also considerable numbers of both Republicans and Democrats in the quadrant of fiscally liberal but socially conservative, while there’s almost no-one in the quadrant of fiscally conservative but socially liberal voters.

It's reasonable to infer from this data that moderate Republicanism vanished because its voter base lost interest in its core principles. And it’s also logical to infer that a think tank that’s oriented toward this Empty Quarter of American political life will have difficulty finding legislative or public support for its programs. In fact, political scientists Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld specifically singled out the Niskanen Center for criticism along these lines in their important new book The Hollow Parties, claiming that the social basis for our preferred program, and the organizational forms a party might take to pursue it, “fail to enter the discussion.”

I happen to think that such criticism is overblown for the same reasons that I think Leonhardt’s diagnosis doesn’t quite capture the present political dynamics. Most importantly, Niskanen has been deeply involved, in one way or another, in the genesis and passage of many of the bills that embody Leonhardt’s new centrism. That wouldn’t have happened if we were coming from some unpopulated ideological-political terrain that combined austerity and wokeness. On the contrary, I think Niskanen has been successful because we are advocating for policies that are popular, pragmatic, and politically plausible — and we argue for them with the passion that moderates are often claimed to lack.

Quiet wins and ad hoc alliances v. “neopopulism”

For that matter, the intense motivation and dedication of the most ideologically committed activists isn’t always a plus. It's worth remembering that Biden’s legislative successes came after the failures of the progressives’ preferred agenda. The multi-trillion-dollar Build Back Better plan, the Green New Deal, the effort to rewrite voting and election laws — all went down to defeat because they were hugely ambitious and nakedly partisan programs based on an illusory belief that the 2020 elections gave Democrats a mandate to radically transform the country. The legislation that succeeded, by contrast, mostly passed through what Niskanen fellow Matthew Yglesias has characterized as “Secret Congress.”

Significant cooperation across the aisle still takes place in Congress, but mainly on issues that are broadly popular but don’t attract public attention — and so remain “secret.” Controversial and newsworthy bills are doomed because the combination of polarization plus media attention makes such issues into partisan litmus tests on which no compromise is possible. But low-salience bills that don’t attract the media spotlight — because they are too complicated to be reduced to sound bites, or because they can’t be easily slotted into culture-war frameworks, or because they aren’t identified in the public mind with either Biden or Trump — can and do pass with significant bipartisan support. Leonhardt alludes to this dynamic when he mentions that Biden can increase a bill’s likelihood of passing by stepping away from it, even though this incurs criticism from some Democrats that he’s failing to make full use of the bully pulpit.

Leonhardt also notices that the bipartisan majorities “have tended to include nearly all Democrats and a minority of Republicans.” What he doesn’t point out is that it’s rarely the same Republicans who sign on to these different bills. There hasn’t been a coherent moderate Republican faction in Congress for quite some time. But along with the high-profile nihilists and destructionists there are some Republicans who still believe in governing — or at any rate are interested in deal-making on particular issues, depending on whether they think the benefits outweigh whatever blowback may come from party leadership, the base, or the unpredictable personal-political reactions of Trump.

Key bills passed because Democrats negotiated issue-by-issue with ad hoc, shifting coalitions of Republicans whose motivations had little to do with any supposed neopopulist consensus.

Sometimes these calculations prove faulty, as Sen. James Lankford discovered when the border security bill on which he had secured many major Democratic concessions was killed by Trump — because it might have been too successful in reducing border crossings and thus immigration would no longer be the inflammatory issue that benefits Trump politically in the run-up to the November elections. But in any case, the non-reconciliation bills that passed Congress did so only because Democrats negotiated issue-by-issue with ad hoc, shifting coalitions of Republicans whose motivations had little to do with any supposed neopopulist consensus.

Leonhardt also notices that although Trump is too extreme on too many issues to be plausibly described as a centrist, “he did move his party toward the middle on several big economic issues.” By rejecting key Reaganite positions on trade and government intervention, he “made it easier for other Republicans to moderate their own positions.”

Trump’s threat to democracy falls outside of Leonhardt’s frame of analysis, but I think it’s another significant factor in explaining Republican voting behavior. Few Republicans in Congress, I suspect, genuinely believe that Trump won the 2020 election. But they understand that professing such a belief is the only litmus test that matters to Trump, and that bending the knee allows them some latitude from both Trump and the MAGA base to vote in a bipartisan way, at least on certain issues.

Is the public populist — or pragmatic?

As far as public support for populism is concerned, I do think that there is agreement among Republicans and Democrats alike that neoliberalism as it has been practiced has come with significant costs as well as benefits. Many Americans do embrace what Leonhardt describes as “a basic set of views”: “They favor both capitalism and government intervention to address the free market’s shortcomings. Most Americans worry that big business has become too powerful. Most are skeptical of both free trade and high levels of immigration. Most are worried about China and its increasing assertiveness.”

But does this add up to support for actual populism? Leave aside the fact that genuine populist movements of both right and left almost always revolve around a rejection of pluralism as well as fantasies about “the pure people” pitted against corrupt elites — none of which applies to the kind of bipartisan centrism that Leonhardt has in mind. The “basic set of views” that he enumerates seems more indicative of a pragmatic, bipartisan realization that the Clinton-era wager on China hasn’t panned out. China’s entry into the world economy did enrich global corporations and many of the best-educated and technologically sophisticated workers, but it also led to much larger U.S. manufacturing job losses than anticipated — and neither party did much to offset the damage done to the worst-impacted workers, families, and communities. China’s admission into the WTO didn’t have the hoped-for effect of making it more liberal and democratic, but did enable its rise to become our most powerful competitor. As the realization has dawned on both parties that we’re now in something like a Cold War with China, the bipartisan push to reduce our dependence on Chinese manufactured goods is driven far more by national security concerns than by an embrace of protectionism.

Genuine populist movements almost always revolve around a rejection of pluralism as well as fantasies about “the pure people” pitted against corrupt elites — none of which applies to the kind of bipartisan centrism that Leonhardt has in mind.

I also share Dan Drezner’s view, in his critique of Leonhardt’s essay, that while there has been a move in American politics away from neoliberalism toward “something resembling economic populism,” it is a great exaggeration to say that the median voter has become more socially conservative over time. On the abortion issue, most obviously, even voters in red states have expressed socially liberal preferences and punished conservatives in nearly every post-Dobbs referendum. Drezner also points out that voters have moved left on a number of other social issues including gay marriage, gun safety, and marijuana. I’d also argue that many voters are rejecting new forms of left extremism — on patriotism, crime and policing, marriage and family, gender and racial identity, DEI and other anti-meritocratic policies, and more recently anti-Israel protests on campus — more than they are moving toward social conservatism.

Abundance beyond Democratic factionalism

I am an outspoken admirer of Leonhardt’s recent book Ours Was the Shining Future, which is an inspired retelling of the economic and political history of the modern United States and a penetrating analysis of the rise and fall of the American Dream of “a better, richer, and happier life for Americans of every rank.” I share his belief, as he expressed it on my podcast, that “a lot of the frustration and the anger that Americans feel today … is rooted in the reality of our economy’s failure to deliver. And I think every problem we have in our society becomes much harder to solve if we don’t solve that.”

Where we may differ, I think, is in our views of how to address the root cause of that anger. I’m skeptical of Democratic remedies that call for increased redistribution or further subsidization of already overpriced services like housing and health care. The summons to Abundance set forth by Rob Saldin and Steve Teles, however, has real potential to address the economy’s “failure to deliver” that Leonhardt identifies as a key driver of populist anger and frustration.

In fact, I have been a convert to the Abundance cause at least since Teles and my Niskanen colleague Brink Lindsey first laid out an analysis along similar lines in their 2017 work The Captured Economy, followed by Steve’s 2021 New York Times editorial (co-written with two former Niskanen colleagues) decrying “cost-disease socialism.” The country’s political stability is threatened by the economic inability to produce more of what Americans need, more rapidly and more affordably, which goes hand-in-hand with the growing sense that government isn’t working. An Abundance movement could provide a better basis for an energized, activist consensus than the passive and defensive neopopulism that Leonhardt describes or the extremes of both the progressive left and the populist right.

But let me raise a few friendly demurrals to the Saldin-Teles thesis concerning the question of how Abundance advocates are to build political power.  

First, I think it’s a mistake to give up on moderation and bipartisanship. Could this have anything to do with the fact that I’ve spent twenty years advocating for those things? Quite possibly. But the fact remains that governing in our divided country is impossible without the deal-making and compromise that are the essence of moderation, even if it has become the political persuasion that dare not speak its name. And few radical social movements succeed unless large parts of their agenda are rooted in conservative constitutional principles and also are broadly appealing to moderates, as was the case with both the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements.

It may also be a mistake to give up on the Republican Party’s capacity to contribute to an Abundance agenda. As Leonhardt pointed out, Trump blew up much of the zombie Reaganism that had previously dominated the GOP, knowing that the working-class voters who now make up the base of the party rely heavily on the public goods and services that are at the heart of the Abundance agenda. Elements of Trump’s coalition still dream of further hobbling the government on which his base depends, and Trump himself may imagine that if returned to office he could repeat his previous tax-cuts-plus-tariffs formula. But such an approach, in an economy that no longer enjoys near-zero interest rates and is already close to full employment, likely would lead to ruinous inflation and even worse shortages. At that point, Republicans might have little choice other than to cooperate with Democrats to deliver the goods to a restive working class that can’t live on cultural grievance-mongering alone.

Patrick Ruffini also makes the excellent point, in his Hypertext essay, that many red states already are following what amounts to a supply-side Abundance agenda in areas like housing and energy. The low-cost, low-service model of states like Florida and Texas is perhaps less compatible with the incubation of high-tech clusters than he would have us believe, but Abundance advocates in both red and blue states can learn something from each other. And if the Abundance movement is indeed the heir to the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then it should be kept in mind that the Progressive movement succeeded in large part because it had a significant presence in both parties.

Outreach to Latino voters and private sector unions might allow Abundance advocates to avoid the fate of the Reformicons. Competition with China could accelerate the realignment.

It's entirely plausible that an Abundance faction could build political power through organizing the core groups that Saldin and Teles describe: intellectuals and activists, enlightened leaders from the business and tech sectors, and voters who are dissatisfied with both parties. To some extent such a coalition already has succeeded in gaining political power in blue cities where disastrous progressive policies have generated electoral backlash, as in San Francisco and Portland.

But there’s also a danger that the Abundance faction could repeat the experience of the Reformicon movement a decade ago, which garnered considerable media attention, an elite activist following, and the support of a few Republican politicians, but ultimately failed to find a popular constituency.

It may be, however, that a mass audience for abundance could be found in some unexpected places. For example, Hispanics are now the second-largest voting group in the country, and one whose political allegiances are in flux. Mike Madrid, in his recent book The Latino Century, argues that neither party has so far appealed to this group with an aspirational, multiethnic working-class agenda. He cites data showing that Hispanics are projected to account for 78 percent of net new workers between 2020 and 2030, that one in three workers in the U.S. construction industry is Hispanic, and also that one in five Hispanic men are employed in construction or related industries. “Neither party can have a Latino economic policy without home building and construction as a centerpiece,” he concludes.

Saldin and Teles correctly identify public employee unions as one of the key obstacles to achieving abundance and state-capacity reform, but it’s possible that the building trades and other private-sector unions might be a different story. The American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers, in his address at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, declared that the answer to what labor wanted was “more” — not merely in terms of more wages but of more public goods broadly conceived. There would seem to be a commonality of interest between labor and a political faction organized around delivering “more.”

Finally, the background to Leonhardt’s analysis is a brewing Cold War between the U.S. and China — and wars, even cold ones, have a way of reordering political forces. Think, for example, of how the once largely ignored issue of Southern segregation became an unsustainable liability in America’s Cold War competition with the Communist bloc for the hearts and minds of newly independent non-Western nations. Both left-wing NIMBYism and right-wing anti-statism would become increasingly hard to defend if more Americans came to view them as unpatriotic forces undermining the levels of production needed to overcome our adversaries. Political realignments previously thought impossible no doubt would follow.

The emergence of the Abundance agenda has been one of the most promising developments in what is otherwise a grim and dangerous moment in American politics. Abundance may be the force that breaks through the exhausting and unproductive trench warfare of left-right polarization. I am confident that its advocates will think as creatively about how to mobilize popular support as they do about policy innovation.

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Geoffrey Kabaservice (@RuleandRuin) is vice president of political studies at the Niskanen Center and the author of books including The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment (Henry Holt, 2004) and Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party (Oxford, 2012). He hosts the Vital Center podcast at Niskanen.

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