A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition. Its critics decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by “corporate-aligned interests”; “a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors”; “an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right”; and the historical and moral equivalent of the “Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.”
The factional disputes that tear apart the left tend to involve wrenching, dramatic issues where the human stakes are clear: Gaza, policing, immigration. And so it is more than a little odd that progressive activists, columnists, and academics are now ripping one another to shreds over such seemingly arcane and technical matters as zoning rules, permitting, and the Paperwork Reduction Act.
The intensity of the argument suggests that the participants are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if you look closely beneath the squabbling, that is exactly what they are fighting over.
The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.
In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been “progressive” and “progressive lite.” The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.
That dynamic has only raised the stakes of the abundance agenda within the party. Its ideas are ambitious enough, but its political implications have set off a schismatic conflict not just over a collection of proposals and the Democratic Party’s direction—but over who should have the standing to direct it.
After percolating for years among policy wonks, the abundance agenda—a term coined by my colleague Derek Thompson in a 2022 essay—ascended suddenly in response to the deflating failure of the Biden administration’s policy program.
“We have to prove democracy still works,” Joe Biden said in his first speech to Congress. “That our government still works—and can deliver for the people.” That summer, after the Senate had approved a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, Biden declared the mission accomplished. “Today,” he announced at the White House, “we proved that democracy can still work.”
But in the months and years that followed, an unsettling realization began to creep in. A massive law had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.
More than two years after signing the infrastructure law, Biden was “expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund,” CNN reported. The nationwide network of electric-vehicle-charging stations amounted to just 58 new stations by the time Biden left office. The average completion date for road projects, according to the nonprofit news site NOTUS, was mid-2027. The effort to bring broadband access to rural America, a centerpiece of Biden’s plan to show that he would work to help the entire country and not just the parts that had voted for him, had connected zero customers.
Rather than prove democracy still works, Biden’s experience proved the opposite.
The odd thing about this deflating record is that a very similar thing happened the previous time Democrats held the presidency. Barack Obama came into office facing a catastrophic recession that he believed he could resolve with a gigantic new program of public works. Obama harkened back to the New Deal, when millions of Americans had been employed constructing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, but quickly learned that, as he bitterly put it, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” The lesson sat there, mostly unexamined, for a dozen years, inspiring no efforts to understand or change it, until Biden came into office. A Democratic president again hoped to follow FDR’s model, and again discovered it had somehow become impossible.
This time, the failure inspired a little more introspection. Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?
Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.
The closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda is the Niskanen Center, formerly a heterodox libertarian think tank, which became a haven for Never Trump Republicans before veering, in recent years, toward promoting abundance. Some journalists, including several at this magazine, have also championed these ideas. Three new books have expressed abundance-agenda themes: Abundance, by Thompson and Ezra Klein; Stuck, by my colleague Yoni Appelbaum; and Why Nothing Works, by the Brown University scholar Marc Dunkelman. The proliferation of such works is a sign of the excitement these ideas have generated. And the abundance libs are rapidly winning over Democratic politicians, especially moderate ones.
The movement is still working out precisely what is, and is not, included in its program. But the canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.
The first, and most familiar, is the need to expand the supply of housing by removing zoning rules and other legal barriers that prevent supply from meeting demand. Over the past 90 years or so, and especially since World War II, American cities have thrown up a series of restrictions on new housing. Some 40 percent of the existing structures in Manhattan, for instance, would be illegal to build today, and where the rules don’t ban new construction outright, they make it prohibitively time-consuming and costly. The same dynamic has strangled housing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, and other places where people want to live but can’t afford to.
The second focus of abundance is to cut back the web of laws and regulations that turns any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. The cost of building a mile of interstate highway tripled in a generation. California approved a plan to build high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco 17 years ago and, despite having spent billions, still has no usable track. Permitting requirements, which have slowed the green-energy build-out to a crawl, are a special focus.
The third domain, and the one that has received the least attention from commentators, is freeing up the government, especially the federal government, to be able to function. Policy wonks call this issue “state capacity.” The government itself is hamstrung by a thicket of rules that makes taking action difficult and makes tying up the government in lawsuits easy. The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.
Revealingly, when the government does act swiftly, it frequently does so by suspending or ignoring its standard procedures. In January 2020, researchers in Seattle spent weeks trying and failing to get government permission to test the flu samples they had gathered for coronavirus, which was spreading rapidly elsewhere. Eventually, the researchers just ignored the rules and ran the tests, creating the first measure of the spread of COVID in the U.S. Similarly, Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s greatest and arguably only triumph, involved an end run around normal vaccine-development protocol. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro got an overpass on I-95 rebuilt quickly and safely, but only by suspending normal highway-construction bureaucratic requirements. The fact that the government has to ignore its rules if it wants to do something important ought to raise the question of why those rules have to be followed the rest of the time.
All of these policies sound so obvious and unobjectionable that one might understandably grow a bit suspicious. Who would favor keeping a bunch of pointless rules? Why would anybody oppose abundance?
You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century.
In the years after World War II, the New Deal seemed to have permanently triumphed, and the legitimacy and power of government were beyond contestation. Many liberals now believed they could direct their energies in new directions. The task was to prevent the government machine, powered by its unstoppable alliance of Big Business and Big Labor, from subordinating the needs of the citizens. A new vision took hold, shared by writers and activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader. In his 2021 book, Public Citizens, the historian Paul Sabin describes this citizen-activist movement as “a legal attack, led by liberals, on the post–World War II administrative state.”
Unlike the Roosevelt generation that had preceded them, these liberals saw their task as restraining the power of government, rather than establishing it. “The fundamental wrong,” Carson said in a 1963 speech, “is the authoritarian control that has been vested in the agricultural agencies.”
This new, anti-statist form of liberalism had two hallmarks. One was its reliance on lawyers and lawsuits. This reflected the influence of Nader, who rocketed to fame as a consumer advocate and became the most admired man in America by articulating a distrust of the system that defined public sentiment in the age of Vietnam and Watergate. “We are creating a new professional citizen role,” he boasted to Time magazine. Those citizens were lawyers, or were represented by lawyers, who would devote their power to prying open the works of the state and holding it accountable.
The second was its faith in groups of citizens outside of government who could serve as a check on its power. The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 New Left manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society, envisioned a huge network of citizen-activist groups: “Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues.”
These visionaries believed the future of activism would revolve around a collection of specialized citizen-activist groups. And they were correct. By 1971, The Washington Post reported that Nader had created a “bewildering network of organizations, all devoted to a staggering array of public issues” and bearing Nader’s imprint, many of which still operate today. They pushed for the passage of laws, then fought in court to expand their reach, creating tools to slow down or block government action.
They achieved some genuinely laudable results, including laws regulating pollution and consumer safety, and those protecting poor communities from being steamrolled by the likes of Robert Moses. But their emphasis on litigation and cumbersome legal requirements (what the law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish”), combined with the empowerment of interest groups, has over time inverted Roosevelt’s preference for results over legalism. The Naderites sought to prevent the government from doing harm, but in too many cases, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, provides the clearest example. Passed in 1969, at the zenith of the environmental movement’s influence, the law required the government to undertake environmental-impact studies before authorizing major projects and created elaborate legal hurdles to navigate.
Activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund saw NEPA as a potent tool to stop Washington (and, through state-level copycat laws, state and local governments) from building harmful projects. They pursued an energetic legal strategy to expand the law’s reach, turning it into a suffocating weapon against development. Over time, the environmental-impact statements required to start a project have ballooned from about 10 pages to hundreds; the process now takes more than four years on average to complete.
Most perversely, NEPA and similar laws have become a way to stop efforts to address climate change. The environmental movement was created during an era when activists saw their highest priority as preserving nature by stopping construction. In the era of global warming, however, preserving nature requires building new infrastructure: green-energy sources, pipelines to transmit the energy, and new housing and transportation in cities where density allows for a less carbon-intensive lifestyle. But environmental groups have not, for the most part, altered their desire to stop building, nor have they reconsidered their support for laws that freeze the built environment in place.
Joe Biden learned this the hard way.
After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, Democrats began to realize that, thanks to a maze of legal impediments, the hundreds of billions of dollars in green-energy infrastructure they had authorized would not materialize any time soon, if at all.
Democratic moderates, with support from the Biden administration, set out to negotiate a permitting-reform bill that would impose a two-year cap on environmental-review statements and allow the federal government to plan the transmission lines needed to connect the new green-energy sources. Many Republicans, suspicious of infringing on states’ rights, opposed it. More striking, so did hundreds of environmental groups. They objected to legislation that would, in the words of one letter to Democratic leadership, “truncate and hollow-out the environmental review process, weaken Tribal consultations, and make it far harder for frontline communities to have their voices heard.”
And because climate activists opposed the bill, many progressives did too. “This is a good day for the climate and the environment,” Senator Bernie Sanders said after the permitting-reform bill died in Congress. Two years later, in the waning days of the Biden administration, a second effort to pass permitting reform failed again, and while moderate Democrats expressed dismay, progressives celebrated. “Thanks to the hard-fought persistence and vocal opposition of environmental justice communities all across the country, the Dirty Deal has finally been laid to rest,” then–House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva boasted.
Last year, Biden prevailed upon Congress to suspend environmental review for new factories that would produce computer chips, under the bipartisan CHIPS Act. He did so by relying on a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats, over strident objections from environmental activists and progressive Democrats.
Progressives are not indifferent to building green-energy infrastructure or manufacturing computer chips, but they place greater value on defending the prerogatives of local activists. The New Left model of citizen-activist groups empowered by litigation remains the core of the progressive movement’s theory of change.
“Meaningful community engagement is the key to unlocking our clean-energy future,” Christy Goldfuss, the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said by way of explaining the group’s opposition to permitting reform. Some housing activists likewise oppose zoning reform because they see the key to housing justice as giving local activists the power to block new housing. The New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom has held up the tenant-union movement as a way to solve the housing crisis. “Its strongest political strategy at the moment,” she writes, “is pushing for local ordinances that give community members the authority to assess new housing developments that use city resources to determine whether they would displace residents or reduce a neighborhood’s affordability.”
The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.
This helps explain why much of the progressive left rejects the abundance agenda, not merely as insufficient or naive, but as directionally wrong. Anthony Rogers-Wright, then the director of environmental justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, told my colleague Jerusalem Demsas a few years ago that permitting reform means “taking away the ability for all communities, but especially environmental-justice communities, from self-determination and using the courts as a way to get relief if a project is found to be harmful.” A policy brief on solar power from the progressive Roosevelt Institute last year proposed that the government should provide subsidies for community groups fighting new solar plants.
The theory underlying this position is that Nader-style citizen engagement is an important component of democracy, and that building up activist groups engaging in these litigation strategies creates powerful constituencies for the left. David Dayen, the editor of the progressive magazine The American Prospect, wrote an essay in 2023 critiquing the abundance agenda as an attack on basic democratic rights. Dayen, approvingly quoting the economist Marshall Steinbaum, argued that the effort to sideline community activists “boils down to the idea that people can’t be trusted.” A better policy, Dayen proposed, was “a liberalism that builds power,” which means “the government actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”
Whether or not this strategy has actually built power—the evidence from Biden’s presidency is discouraging—it remains foundational to the party’s activist superstructure. The progressive movement seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others.
Much of the most vociferous opposition to the abundance agenda has zeroed in on its betrayal of this principle. The Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker attacked Ezra Klein on X for his “survivor island approach to coalitions—first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” David Sirota, a left-wing journalist, complained, “Abundance Libs are insisting the big problem isn’t corporate power & oligarchs, it’s zoning laws & The Groups? Come on.” Austin Ahlman, a researcher at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly advocacy organization, mused, “You have to wonder whether the Abundance faction stuff would have landed better if the proponents had not laid the groundwork for it by first broadsiding every other organized constituency in the democratic tent.”
This angry response is not merely a knee-jerk reaction to criticism, but the logical outgrowth of a well-developed belief system. Since the Obama era, many of the component groups in the progressive coalition have drifted further left on their core demands. (Single-issue lobbies are naturally incentivized to grow more extreme over time—what organization is going to decide its pet cause is too unpopular or costly to merit a strident defense?)
At the same time, they have grown more purposeful about their belief that each group must stand behind all the positions outlined by the others. That is why civil-rights groups will demand student-debt relief, abortion-rights groups endorse abolishing the police, or trans-rights groups insist that Palestine should be liberated. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune who became a full-time progressive organizer, and who has raised and donated millions to causes such as the Sunrise Movement, the Debt Collective, and Black Lives Matter, articulated the principle of cross-endorsements in her book, Solidarity. She argues for “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements,” and of resisting the opposition’s efforts “to weaponize a movement’s fault lines.”
Such progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.
But that dynamic also explains why the abundance agenda is likely to become the tentpole of the party’s moderate wing, even for politicians who have mixed feelings about its particulars. As the Niskanen Center’s Steven Teles and Robert Saldin have pointed out, the factional division between group-aligned progressive Democrats and the abundance Democrats opposed to them is already playing out in several cities. (San Francisco, where the failures of progressive urban governance are most pronounced, has the most organized abundance faction.)
In the 2020 Democratic primary, candidates competed for the groups’ favor by endorsing their most far-reaching and politically toxic demands, such as decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing private health insurance. Abundance may provide an escape from that dynamic in 2028. Democrats who reject the demand to maintain solidarity with the groups at all costs will find themselves free to endorse policies that the majority of the country supports.
The first fissures are already beginning to appear at the national level. Some elements of the abundance agenda have appeal to the left. (There are, in particular, left-wing YIMBYs.) But most of the elected officials who have identified with it come from the party’s mainstream and moderate wings, such as Pete Buttigieg; Governors Kathy Hochul, Wes Moore, and Josh Shapiro; and House members Jake Auchincloss, Scott Peters, George Whitesides, and Ritchie Torres. Torres offers the most instructive example: Having previously carved out an identity as a gleeful antagonist to the party’s left wing on Israel and other divisive issues, he announced in January, “I feel like the abundance agenda is the best framework that I’ve heard for reimagining Democratic governance.”
By contrast, the progressive icon Elizabeth Warren told The Bulwark in April that she hasn’t read Abundance and plans to steer clear of the debate around it—a strange decision for a proudly detail-oriented wonk, but one that makes sense given the divides the issue has opened up on the left.
The formation of ideological factions within political parties is a staple of American history. The divide over slavery ruptured the Whigs; the progressive movement began within both the Democratic and Republican Parties, before migrating entirely into the Democratic camp. A faction can reorganize a party’s priorities, generating new alliances and rivalries, and pull new constituencies into a party while driving others out. Many factions start among intellectuals and writers, eventually developing followings among politicians.
Because the abundance agenda has developed out of the work of policy wonks, rather than political operatives, it was not cooked up to help Democrats in elections. It is far from a complete response to the party’s dilemma. The abundance agenda says nothing about social issues; an abundance lib could be for or against Medicare for All, the participation of trans women in college sports, or any number of issues that split the party. It is not a theory of everything.
It does, however, meet several political needs of the moment. It addresses the lack of faith in public services, which plunged after COVID. It promises to bring down consumer costs, which remain the public’s top concern. It provides a direct response to Elon Musk’s assault on state capacity. And it offers a plausible route to improving living standards at a time when high inflation and elevated interest rates and debt make promising big new social benefits harder.
Perhaps most important, the abundance agenda supplies Democrats with a vision of the future that contrasts sharply and clearly with Donald Trump’s. The president has lectured the country about the need to make do with less in the service of his self-destructive tariff regime. He has attacked plans to build denser cities as an assault on suburbs, defunded scientific research, sought to shut down the green-energy transition, and paralyzed the bureaucracy with arbitrary restrictions. The abundance agenda creates a unified program to reverse all these retrograde ideas, along with a practical understanding of the impediments that must be overcome to do so.
What has drawn many Americans to Trump is his claim that the system is so broken that, as he promised, “I alone can fix it.” The last time they held power, Democrats did little to rebut that claim. Now they must decide if they will abandon their legalistic commitment to fragmentary proceduralism or allow Trump’s boast to be vindicated.
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