Radical, in a different vein
You can't blame Republicans for California's woes, and Dems need to grapple with that. There's a faction that is: the Abundants. And they see state capacity as critical to a fresh approach.
I need a break from the aftermath of the debate on Thursday. I have strong feelings about it. I think the Dems should have an open convention in August and select a new nominee. But the healthiest thing for me to do right now is engage in ideas that I care about and make me hopeful. So I’m sharing something I wrote a few weeks ago but let sit on the back burner.
After moving to the DC area in February, I’m back in California now for the summer – first in Oakland, one of the most progressive spots in the country, then in Nevada County, CA, which has sent exactly one Democrat to Congress since 1962. I like that I get to steep in both cultures, and I learn a lot particularly from being somewhere so red.1
On a practical basis, California is a very blue state. Yes, California gave the nation Ronald Reagan, but he was elected Governor …. wait for it… 58 years ago. Today, the California Assembly boasts 62 Democrats and 18 Republicans, while the Senate has 32 Democrats and 8 Republicans. That gives Dems a veto-proof supermajority in both houses. Except for a brief period from 1995 to 1996 in the Assembly and 1973 to 1975 in the Senate, the California legislature has been in Democratic hands since 1970. Let me do the math for you again here: Dems have basically ruled California for 54 years. So especially since starting to work much more with members of both parties more on the Hill now when I’m in DC, when I come back to California, I think of it as the place where you can’t blame Republicans for what’s gone wrong. And a lot has gone wrong here. We’re 40th among states in educational outcomes, we have sky-high housing prices and inequality, heartbreaking levels of homelessness, and only 9 other states spend more per capita than we do.23
On not being able to blame Republicans, you can certainly quibble with both the substance—California is part of the US, where Republicans do have power and influence—and the timing of saying that. Why would you question the effectiveness of the Dems in an election year, much less an election year with this much riding on it? On the other hand, in a year where Dems could well lose the national election to a convicted felon, how can we not be asking these questions? The questions are asking themselves. Trying to shush them is sticking our fingers in our ears. And history tells us we should be asking them. There are some pretty good answers around.
Two great articles came out recently that point to these answers. The first is Steve Teles and Rob Saldin’s The Rise of the Abundance Faction. Steve and Rob note the parallels between today’s political moment and the Progressive movement of the 1890s to the 1920s. The label “progressive” today connotes a focus on social justice but the Progressive agenda back then was a broad-based reform effort targeting the various social, political, and economic issues that arose during the country’s rapid industrialization and urbanization. It was not about being at or near one end of a political spectrum, but rather about challenging and redefining that spectrum. “This group was not defined primarily by its positions on the issues that had previously characterized party competition, such as the tariff and monetary policy, but by entirely new issues, like social insurance, economic regulation, and civil service reform, that it injected into the political agenda,” they write. The world had changed, but what the two parties were debating had not. It was Progressives who shifted the dialogue to what mattered.
Part of what mattered was state capacity. “Progressives thought that the entire way that the system was governed was wrong—how we govern ourselves through courts and through patronage machines,” says Steve in an interview about the paper. “And so while they had specific things they wanted to do, like regulation of monopolies, more broadly they had a critique of the fundamental DNA of the governing system. They said, ‘Look, we need to build a modern state.’”
And they did. It was early Progressives who pushed to establish a merit-based system for federal employment and created the Civil Service Commission to oversee it. They sought to professionalize public administration by promoting training and standards for public servants, ensuring that government employees were competent and qualified. Progressives also advocated for standardization of procedures and greater transparency in government operations to reduce waste and corruption. This included standardized accounting practices, open meetings, and public records laws.
Of course, yesterday’s modern state is today's dysfunction. What state capacity advocates today (like me) are frustrated with is largely the legacy the Progressives left us, but that’s because we’ve let the work they did rot over time. We went back to fighting about policy issues as if the capacity to actually deliver on those policies wasn’t equally important. We want to revive the spirit and themes of the Progressive era, just updated to the needs of the day. The problem is that, as during the Progressive era, neither party today seems to care much about that capacity to deliver.
But there is a faction, currently primarily of the Democrats, that does: the Abundants, or advocates of what’s called the Abundance agenda. What is Abundance? If you’ve heard of Ezra Klein’s concept of supply-side progressivism4 (and here he means the modern definition of progressive, not the turn of the previous century definition), you’re in the right ballpark. Both these ideas observe that subsidies and other forms of redistribution, while seemingly in line with values around equity, don’t actually help people when there’s not enough of many essential goods and services in the first place. It doesn’t help to subsidize housing when, especially in places like San Francisco, there just isn’t any because we have so drastically underbuilt relative to our needs for decades. (And increasing the demand for something without increasing the supply of it drives prices up, which can quickly erode the value of the subsidy.) Subsidizing energy may help a family in the short term, but what we really need are new sources of clean energy, like wind and solar, that will make energy both cheaper for everyone and less destructive to the planet. Both of these tasks (and many others) require a lot of literal construction, which is why this agenda has also gone by the name of “a liberalism that builds.”
There are natural limits to the abundance of certain things, like the rare minerals that go into the batteries we need to transition off carbon. But most of what’s in short supply is artificially constrained. We don’t have enough housing, for example, because we’ve allowed people who already own homes to stop the building of new ones, and because we’ve so thoroughly burdened the process of building—imposing hoop after hoop that must be jumped through, delay after delay that must be persisted through—that it becomes a herculean (and extremely expensive) task that scares off real estate developers. This is even more true for affordable housing. Today, both equity advocates and many governments explicitly want to build housing, but they can’t because of prior actions by government and advocates, and the interplay between them over the past century. Scarcity has been manufactured by both government’s accrual of processes and safeguards and by advocates’ efforts to constrain both developers and government through lawsuits. The legal grounds on which to sue steadily increased since the Robert Moses era. To achieve the policy goals of our decade and beyond, we have to address the causes of this artificial scarcity.
This is a pattern: capture by special interests combined with Kafkaesque bureaucratic hurdles (and these are usually related) mean that our administrative state is not so good at getting things built these days. We’re really good at stopping things from being built, or at least slowing them way down. Here’s a headline from last year:
The power project in question is not an oil or gas pipeline. It is a wind farm. I should say it will be a wind farm. From what I can find online, it appears that it’s now under construction and is expected to be completed in 2026, twenty years after it was proposed. The question then will become when it can actually hook up to the grid. Though massive transformation of our energy infrastructure away from carbon is a top policy priority since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the time it takes to connect a new power source to the grid has gone up in recent years, not down. That’s because of a lot of accrued process and a lot of caution, some of which is merited, but in total is simply too much, given the emergency of global warming. We can say we want to hit the gas (or better to say the accelerator—of an electric car) but the brake pedal is stuck to the floor and neither party seems willing to—or interested in—unsticking it. Republicans and Democrats can fight all they want about where we should be going, but it’s the Abundants, with their genuine attention to state capacity issues, who are working on how to actually get there.
Which brings me to the second article that I found so meaningful recently: Misha Chellam’s articulation of the difference between a moderate and an Abundant. Misha has previously defined Abundance, and it’s worth quoting that here.
What do we want to be Abundant in society?
We want abundant housing, such that fewer people are rent-burdened and more people can afford to move to areas with economic opportunity.
We want abundant clean energy, so we can avert climate change while increasing quality of life—everything from reduced electricity bills to enabling desalination, which could get us to abundant water.
We want abundant good education, such that opportunity exists for every kid, regardless of birth zip code.
We want abundant good jobs, such that people are able to provide for their families and feel dignity and security.
Fundamentally we want to make it easier for regular people to build good lives for themselves and their children, and we think we can do it by making the things above, and many other things in society, Abundant.
This is the vision I would like state capacity to be in service of. Matt Yglesias picked on me the other day (in a nice way) for seeming to gloss over the truth that a stronger state is a state more capable of achieving goals to which I (or anyone else ) might be fundamentally opposed. I know that. We’re not going to fix our state capacity problems by November, so I’m not worried that I’ll somehow have made things easier for Trump, should he regain the White House. This is generational work. So yes, I can work on state capacity because it is necessary to fulfill the vision Misha lays out, and in ways that increase the likelihood we’ll have the chance to do that, even as I know I’m trying to sharpen a sword that can cut both ways. “No one gets a sharp sword” may feel good when you’re out of power, but it’s like King Solomon telling the quarreling mothers to cut the baby in half. The baby needs to live, even if that means the other mother gets to be in charge some of the time. Otherwise, no one wins.
So Abundance needs state capacity, because, like the original Progressives, it recognizes that we can’t get to the good lives we want for people without a government that can do what it says it will. And state capacity (at least for me) needs Abundance in order to be in service of a set of values. But it’s more than that. They go together because they are both operating on dimensions that are missing in the rest of the political dialogue. Steve and Rob speak to this when they talk about how Progressives injected different issues into the debate in their era, and Misha nails this when he talks about the difference between moderates and Abundants.
If you’re stuck in the current framing of our political debates, your choices are various different spots between left and right. Because Abundance doesn’t look quite traditionally lefty, but also isn’t right, it's easy to confuse it with a moderate position. And with lots of analysis right now showing Biden losing the election because he’s too far left, there’s an interest in Democratic moderation. The most recent model for that would be the Democratic Leadership Council that formed in 1985 to win back middle-class voters by moving to the center on social order, government effectiveness, and the right-sized regulation of markets. But Misha thinks this is the wrong play today.
These ideas, on their own, seem reasonable and largely Abundance-aligned. But Abundants believe the problem is fundamentally about product, not marketing. Our problem is not how we talk about issues. It’s how we don’t deliver on them.
In the Abundant theory of the case, extremism is downstream of broken institutions that fail to deliver for regular people. In our estimation, moderation is a reaction to extremism, but extremism is a reaction to brokenness, not moderation. For moderation to succeed, it needs to tackle brokenness.
Absolutely. When 70% of the country thinks “the system” needs either major change or to be torn down entirely (per the recent Times/Siena poll), any strategy needs to tackle brokenness. Many voters are stuck this year between a presidential candidate whose ideas to tackle brokenness seem potentially unwise (but at least he has a view)* and one who wants to talk policy but not brokenness. The public feels in their bones that brokenness sits below the level of policy (see FAFSA). They’re right.
That’s why we need Abundance factions within the parties. Right now Abundants are largely Dems, especially in California where Republicans lack power and artificial scarcity is a huge problem in housing (enough said above), energy (highest prices in the country), transportation (our high-speed rail to nowhere), education, and even jobs (restricting many jobs in construction especially to those with unnecessary credentials.) Steve and Rob note that “For now, then, the factional action on Abundance will be among the Democrats.” But the Republicans really should get in the game.
In the long term, we can hope that many of the politically homeless elements that used to be firmly ensconced in the Republican Party will reemerge as a political force around their own version of Abundance rather than under the exhausted banner of Reagan-era fusionism. In fact, members of Congress like Sen. Todd Young of Indiana have already been leaders on many abundance-related issues. However, given Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP, in the short term, it is hard to imagine such a political faction emerging around these issues anywhere other than the Democratic Party.
Though it may be only the Dems who have an Abundance faction now (and let me go on record as being very eager to work with Abundance Republicans!), Steve and Rob make the point that factions are just what we need now.
Like the Progressives of the early 20th century, they will bring new issues to the forefront of our politics, in particular a focus on reforming the public sector at all levels of government. This faction will not be traditionally moderate or centrist. In fact, it will be radical, but in pursuit of issues that simply do not fit with the familiar left-right political spectrum.
Radical feels right to me. My general orientation is increasingly disruptive, increasingly frustrated and impatient with the status quo, but not usually around the issues that make the headlines (last week’s debate aside). Lots of news articles drive me crazy because neither the reporters nor those reported on seem capable of imagining a world in which we had the capacity to, say, process asylum cases in days or weeks instead of years, or spend more than 17% of the funding allocated in Biden’s signature policy wins. The things that slow us down no longer feel like choices that someone made a while ago that could now be made differently; they seem like laws of nature. We can develop a life-saving vaccine for a novel virus in weeks but we can’t review a permit for a clean energy project in under three years. We could, if we paid attention to a very different set of issues. And took a radical stance on them.
Just as state capacity isn’t a term that’s going to catch the popular imagination, the word Abundance itself isn’t perfect as a vehicle for mainstream support. It’s being used to mean a lot of different things right now, some of them adjacent to the vision I believe in, some of them pretty different. Maybe there’ll be a different term that comes along, or maybe the contested landscape will settle. But the ideas are important to me, because I think Abundants are asking the questions we need to answer today. It’s good to know many of these questions have been asked before, and answered in ways that helped our country thrive and live up to its ideals.
And it’s good to have something positive and forward-looking to focus on at times like this.
A map of California can look pretty red until you realize how few people live in those red areas (our town in Nevada County has 137 people), and how many live in the blue ones. (Los Angeles County has a bigger population than 41 of the US states).
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/public-school-rankings-by-state
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/opinion/berkeley-enrollment-climate-crisis.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/19/opinion/supply-side-progressivism.html
Supportive of your “broken fuels extremism” statements: my major concern, relevant for this fall, is that when Democracy fails to deliver, it justifies to many a strangulation of Democracy.
Build. Build. Build. Thank you for this terrific post.