Can ‘abundance liberalism’ save the Dems? A reboot for progressive rule

The lessons of the Democratic Party’s painful defeat in November turn on whom you ask. Moderates blame the excesses of wokeness. The party’s Left wing faults a tepid centrism that failed to inspire the base. But while most are happy to blame rival factions in the party, an influential group of progressive thinkers is pointing the finger at progressive governance as such. These are the “abundance liberals”, also known as “supply-side progressives”.

The country is plagued by an affordability crisis, a housing shortage, crumbling infrastructure, and a general sense of diminishing expectations. For abundance liberals, it’s no accident that these crises are most acute in the states and cities where Democrats hold most of the political power.

The journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have emerged as the most prominent faces of this movement. In their buzzy new book, Abundance, they argue that scarcity is a choice, and that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need”. Progressives, in this telling, must be on the side of dynamism and productive capacity, even if this means bucking the Left’s orthodoxies.

The abundance movement gives hope for a progressive revival amid Trumpian gloom — even if proponents fail to fully reckon with the material incentives that keep many of their constituents on the side of the un-abundant status quo.

Supply-side liberals want to roll back regulations that make it harder to innovate and build. Yet it would be a mistake to cast them as neoliberals in the Clinton-Obama mould, as many on the Left are now doing. They emphasise the role of a strong, active government in shaping policy and directing markets. And while some abundance liberals describe themselves as moderates, many more are passionate for progressive ideals. The concern that unifies them is the tendency of progressive governance to hinder its own ostensible goals.

Stringent zoning laws block the construction of new housing, while burdensome rules around the use of public money make affordable public housing too expensive to build. Endless environmental reviews delay public transportation and green infrastructure projects. As Klein and Thompson put it: “Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do.”

Ordinary people suffer as a result. A majority of California tenants are now “rent-burdened”, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on housing. The same is true in New York City. Nearly a quarter of Seattle residents spend more than half of their income on rent. Even middle-class workers are being priced out of the most desirable cities and job markets.

Nonetheless, deep-blue cities permit far fewer new homes than those with more conservative governance. Despite having 8 million more residents than Texas, the Golden State issued only half as many residential building permits in 2023. Meanwhile, in Austin, the median rent has fallen a staggering 22 percent over the last two years, even amid a tech boom, thanks to a concerted push to build new rental housing.

Difficulty building isn’t confined to the housing sector. Large infrastructure projects in blue areas regularly run behind schedule and over-budget due to onerous regulations and activist litigation. In 2008, California approved funding for an ambitious high-speed-rail project stretching across much of the state. The project is now $100 billion over-budget and a decade behind schedule. Meanwhile, the Lone Star State, with its loose regulatory climate, beats environmentally friendly California in solar and wind power capacity.

These failures partly explain why blue areas drifted most dramatically to the Right in the 2024 election, with core urban voters in liberal bastions like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City shifting 8 percentage points toward Trump. This should terrify Democrats, but they appear incapable of correcting course.

To be sure, the toxic and inane cultural politics progressives championed over the last decade did Democrats no favours at the ballot box. But rebranding the party as more socially moderate — with performative gestures towards masculinity, sports, patriotic kitsch, and Joe Rogan fans — won’t solve the deeper problems of progressive governance.

For some supply-side progressives, the warning signs were flashing red long before the election. Thompson began to reconsider the cause of supply shortages during the Covid pandemic, when the country was short on protective equipment, drug supplies, and hospital beds. He saw these shortages as more than mere supply-chain failures. The authorities were failing to fast-track an appropriate pandemic response in the same way they failed at housing, energy, infrastructure, and skilled labour. In a January 2022 Atlantic essay Thompson called for a broad “abundance agenda” that would harness the power of both government and markets to supply more of what people need.

Supply-side has long been a Right-coded phrase. The term refers to the economic theory that low taxes and small government boost economic output and living standards for all. Progressives have instead generally focused, to borrow Klein’s words, on “the demand side of the ledger”: subsidising the cost of housing, food, health care, education, and other essentials.

But price controls and food stamps don’t put more eggs and other goods on supermarket shelves. Simply handing out money for people to buy a limited supply of goods drives up prices, as the inflation of recent years has made clear. Had Kamala Harris been able to follow through on her campaign promise to give $25,000 grants to first-time homebuyers, the likely result would have been a rise in the cost of housing.

When demand outstrips supply, especially for inelastic goods, redistribution is an insufficient response. Hence why supply-side progressives are calling for a political shift away from redistribution toward the production and supply of more goods and services. They want a liberalism that builds and innovates and therefore lowers prices, not just redistributes.

This is a radical departure from the last 50-plus years of progressive orthodoxy, which has focused mostly on inequality and, more recently, climate change. The climate dimension is especially prone to a combination of radicalism and pessimism that alienates ordinary people.  The “degrowth” movement — which calls for managed decline and even winding down industrial society in the face of ecological collapse — has gained purchase in many corners of the Left. Even many mainstream liberals espouse tacitly antigrowth sentiments.

Such policies sabotage progressive governance. Then, too, the legislative model was forged in a different era with different problems. The environmental regulations of the postwar era sought to ameliorate the harms associated with rapid economic growth and technological progress. The postwar American economy was vibrant. Suburbs and highways and factories were going up all across the country. But the air and water were polluted, manufacturing was degrading natural environments, and crime, smog, noise, and crowding had the affluent fleeing cities.

But these environmental regulation, zoning laws, historic preservation statutes, and “grassroots” public-interest policies, implemented to protect the public in a time of rapid change, have since been captured by special interests. Activist citizen and business groups weaponise these same laws to stymie construction and growth for their own personal ends.

A willingness to grapple with the failures of progressive governance — and the ideological choices underpinning those failures — sets supply-side progressives apart from many of the other rival factions seeking to remake or just rebrand the Democratic Party. But for now, the abundance faction consists mostly of policy wonks confined to media, think tanks, and academia. A few prominent politicians have expressed support for their ideas, at least as they appear on paper, and others hit on similar themes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently issued a State Economic Blueprint teasing new infrastructure, innovation, government investment, and dynamism. (The cover features hard hats, construction cranes, and a commercial farm that is notedly not bucolic.)

However, the “pathologies of the broad Left”, as Klein and Thompson put it, didn’t arise by happenstance, and they won’t be easily cured. Though regulatory hurdles were raised as well-intentioned solutions to the problems of another age, the entrenched interests keeping them in place are very much contemporary. In the cities home to much of the Democratic base, NIMBYism remains a potent force. Affluent homeowners have moved back into the cities, but they still fear the traffic, crime, noise, and blocked views that come with high-density affordable housing and infrastructure projects. They are unlikely to be happy about slumping home prices as new housing stock becomes available.

Klein and Thompson are too quick to excuse or brush aside the vested interest affluent liberals have in the status quo. Klein has asked for grace and understanding for the contradictory but human impulses of those practicing what he calls “lawn-sign liberalism”. Elsewhere, Thompson floated promoting the abundance agenda as pushback against greedy elites but stopped short of openly blaming homeowners.

Yoni Appelbaum, another supply-side progressive with a new book out, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, is more comfortable naming villains. Appelbaum points the finger at Jane Jacobs, the community activist famous for keeping planning virtuoso Robert Moses from running highways through Manhattan. Jacobs’s writing and activism against large “top-down” urban development in favour of community-based planning laid the blueprint for activist groups that would squash urban development for decades to come.

In Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back, yet another text simpatico to the abundance movement, Marc Dunkelman argues that such activists, and progressives in general, have leaned too far into a “Jeffersonian” impulse as opposed to the Hamiltonian tradition’s emphasis on developmentalism and large-scale solutions to mass problems.

Though such honesty is refreshing, Thompson is probably right that a politics vilifying homeowners would struggle to find a constituency among affluent liberals with property in major cities. No one likes to be told that they are the problem. Even if the movement can find support among young progressives struggling to break into the housing market, the youth vote isn’t easy for progressives to mobilise (just ask Bernie Sanders); many young people are now pivoting to the Right anyway.

Immigration is another sticking point. Supply-side progressivism shares traditional progressivism’s support for expanding migration. Matthew Yglesias, a longtime associate of Klein’s, made this argument explicitly in his book One Billion Americans, published in 2020 (the title gives away the gist). However, while supply-side progressives are mostly in agreement, few seem so eager to foreground the point — understandably, given the ferocious public backlash against an unrestricted border under former President Joe Biden.

Klein and Thompson make only passing mention of the need for more skilled immigrant labour to build new infrastructure and technologies, but they spend little time defending or even making the case. Obvious questions go unacknowledged. Why can’t American citizens do these jobs? Won’t more people create even more issues with supply? The reason is surely strategic: the public has soured on mass immigration, which has been electorally damaging for progressive parties across Western democracies.

Then there are unions. The abundance movement’s critics on the Left charge that making building easier would disrupt unions and be “politically ruinous”. It’s true that Klein & Co. identify labour laws as one of the factors holding back development. Yet Klein has also underscored his support for the labour movement, noting that countries with stronger unions build transit infrastructure faster and for less than the United States, with its much weaker labour movement. Klein is correct to warn, however, that nothing threatens the labour movement more than a public that blames it for the failures of progressive governance.

Still, criticising labour law risks making enemies for abundance within organised labour. Likewise, few affluent metropolitan liberals will take kindly to the movement’s criticisms of environmental regulations, DEI initiatives, and other progressive pieties.

That’s why some abundance liberals have sought to forge partnerships across the aisle. Colin Mortimer of the Center for New Liberalism, a think tank that serves as a home for this rising strain of progressive thought, pointed to the Abundance Institute as a “Right-wing institution” promoting an abundance agenda centred around science and technology. Then there is the economist Tyler Cowen and his “state-capacity libertarianism”, which can be thought of as an inverse movement tackling the pathologies of the Right: above all, a perverse adherence to laissez-faire principles and refusal to harness the unique powers of government.

Likewise, figures in the so-called Tech Right — such as the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, who have both lamented the country’s inability to build — get lumped into the abundance mix. “The degree that we can make this a cross-partisan, bipartisan issue, we think that’s fantastic, and it’s going to be all the more reason why this movement can be effective”, Mortimer told me.

Yet the danger is that Right and Left abundance proponents will each double down on their own side’s respective preferences without taking up the productive ideas of the other: that is, Republicans will deregulate without building up state capacity, while Democrats will splurge without deregulating.

The first months of the new Trump administration are instructive. The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, himself pro-building and pro-dynamism in the Andreessen-Thiel sense, doesn’t appear to share any interest in making government perform better — or at all. The new Trump administration, largely abandoning the pro-worker populist posturing of the campaign trail, now seems intent on realising Grover Norquist’s quip about shrinking the government until it can be drowned in a bathtub.

For their part, Thompson and Klein frame their agenda as an opportunity to step into the vacancy Republicans create by peddling what they call a “scarcity mindset”, in which, as JD Vance infamously claimed, illegal immigrants are taking up all of the homes that could go to native citizens. Their great hope is that Democrats might help forge a new political order that displaces the faltering neoliberal consensus.

Until recently, this did not seem so out of the realm of possibility: some Republicans had shown more openness to state interventions and industrial policy, and the Biden administration, which chose to leave many of Trump’s strategic tariffs in place, was able to garner enough bipartisan support to enact no fewer than three large spending bills centred around infrastructure and industrial policy.

Lately, however, supposedly populist Republicans have come more and more to resemble their tax-cutting, government-attacking, laissez-faire predecessors, while many Democrats are falling back into tired #Resistance tropes. Can abundance liberals (and thoughtful counterparts on the Right) cut through these familiar battle lines to forge creative new solutions to the nation’s supply problems? At stake is the future not just of the Left, but American prosperity in the 21^st century.

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