In summer time 2023, American progressivism was spending huge and using excessive. Regardless of razor-thin majorities in Congress, Democrats had spent the final two years enacting a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} in new subsidies—for inexperienced vitality, public transportation, home manufacturing, scientific analysis, and extra. This progressive pork was now within the arms of Democratic President Joe Biden to distribute as his administration noticed match.
But when California Gov. Gavin Newsom seemed upon the piles of recent federal money, all he may do was despair.
“We’re going to lose billions and billions of dollars in the status quo,” he complained to New York Occasions columnist Ezra Klein in June. “The beneficiaries of a lot of these dollars are red states that don’t give a damn about these issues, and they’re getting the projects.”
Newsom was proper in regards to the distribution of the funds: Greater than 80 p.c of the brand new federal funding for clear vitality and semiconductors was headed for GOP districts, in accordance to the Monetary Occasions. His outburst spoke to the nervousness of a lot of liberal America.
Regardless of a string of progressive coverage victories on the federal degree, a Democratic Celebration below the grip of progressives, and ironclad Democratic management over a few of the nation’s largest and wealthiest cities and states, blue America simply wasn’t delivering what its boosters mentioned the nation wanted.
“We need to build more homes, trains, clean energy, research centers, disease surveillance. And we need to do it faster and cheaper,” Klein himself had written a number of weeks earlier than his Newsom interview was revealed. But “in New York or California or Oregon…it is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak—perhaps especially where they are weak.”
The blue strongholds’ failure to construct had added countervailing losses to all their wins.
These states aren’t simply dropping federal grants. They’re dropping residents to states the place housing building is simpler. They’re dropping corporations to locations the place the regulatory burden is lighter. They’re dropping voters, tax {dollars}, congressional seats, and extra to locations that construct the issues folks need. If the pattern retains up, the progressive imaginative and prescient for America could also be misplaced as properly.
This risk has provoked some shocking self-reflection from liberal wonks, writers, and officers.
America, and notably blue America, has consciously wrapped itself in pink tape, laws, and special-interest carve-outs, to the purpose that it has grow to be almost unattainable to transform both authorities subsidies or non-public capital into wanted bodily issues.
As Newsom mentioned to Klein, “We’re not getting the money because our rules are getting in the way.”
A hodgepodge coalition of legacy publication columnists, conventional think-tankers, upstart Substack writers, and obsessive Twitter posters have rallied across the simple concept that what the nation wants is extra stuff, and it is not going to get it with that thicket of guidelines standing in the best way. Their name to motion is what Atlantic author Derek Thompson calls the “abundance agenda.”
In response to Thompson, America has produced a variety of expertise that enables folks to complain about issues, however not a lot within the bodily world to truly remedy these issues.
Our “age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in atoms-related progress,” he wrote final yr. “Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing.” Thompson’s criticism echoes entrepreneur and enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel’s well-known 2013 quip that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” What we’d like as a substitute, argues Thompson, are insurance policies that can kick-start materials progress and technological improvement right here in actuality.
For libertarians and free entrepreneurs, this new abundance agenda has rather a lot to supply. A lot of its mental forefathers and coverage foot troopers are themselves libertarian-leaning. Even once they’re not, the abundance agenda stays a directionally deregulatory affair. As soon as seemingly fringe libertarian hobbyhorses akin to abolishing zoning, occupational licensing, and immigration restrictions are actually being aired prominently in mainstream center-left and progressive areas.
On the similar time, most of those that favor the abundance agenda are both agnostic about huge authorities or actively supportive of it. In its most statist iterations, the deregulatory parts of the abundance agenda are principally about clearing away the bureaucratic and constitutional obstacles to government-provided providers and government-sponsored megaprojects.
For some abundance-agenda adherents, it is a partisan venture as properly: The aim is to make blue America extra environment friendly, more practical, and extra interesting within the service of creating America extra Democratic.
And but: The elemental coverage aim of abundance agenda liberalism is to clear away bureaucratic and political obstacles to helpful tasks, particularly within the housing market. Is that this a satan’s discount that libertarians needs to be prepared to make?
Getting the Public Out of Public Coverage
Discussions in regards to the abundance agenda shortly get slowed down in wonky specifics. However its pursuit of limitless particular person potential powered by limitless progress and vitality is nothing wanting utopian.
In a 2022 essay for Works in Progress, Benjamin Reinhardt described this futuristic finish level by the eyes of somebody dwelling in a world of considerable vitality “too cheap to meter.”
You’ll get up in your synthetic island off the coast of South America, commute to work through a flying automobile and Singaporean area elevator, put in a number of hours engaged on new longevity medication in zero-gravity, after which jet off to Tokyo for a fast dinner with buddies earlier than commuting dwelling.
As you come dwelling, Reinhardt writes, you hope that in the future you’ve got “the resources to pull yourself out of the bottom 25 percent, so that your kids can lead an even brighter life than you do. Things are good, you think, but they could be better.”
As a way to obtain this sci-fi world of abundance, we’ve to unshackle ourselves from growth-phobic establishments riddled with “veto points” stopping new housing, vitality, and extra.
The American authorities of as we speak is a extremely participatory one. Particular person folks have substantial alternative to have their say in public hearings and courtrooms on the whole lot from new housing tasks to new energy vegetation.
It wasn’t at all times this fashion.
As recounted in Yale historian Paul Sabin’s e book Public Residents, this degree of citizen enter was the product of legal guidelines handed within the Seventies impressed by slow-growth activists akin to Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader.
This group of writers, legal professionals, and activists argued that the midcentury liberal period’s love of progress and bigness had left firms free to pollute the surroundings and flood the market with harmful merchandise. In the meantime, unchecked, opaque authorities bureaucracies constructed or authorised dangerous megaprojects that bulldozed non-public property, typically with out the homeowners’ consent, and devastated nature within the title of “progress.”
To carry essentially untrustworthy bureaucracies accountable, residents have been empowered to sue bureaucrats once they did not observe new environmental laws or disclose sufficient details about the tasks they authorised.
The pondering on the time, writes Sabin, was that “aggressive litigation might make the government work better.”
These anti-growth, anti-bigness insurance policies additionally drifted right down to the state and native degree. All through the Seventies, state legislatures handed their very own, typically rather more expansive environmental reporting legal guidelines that allowed residents to sue to cease non-public tasks akin to new housing and companies, in addition to main infrastructure tasks.
Native governments, in the meantime, tightened present zoning codes to drastically cut back the quantity of housing that may very well be constructed. In addition they gave native residents (through public hearings, referendums, and discretionary approval processes) extra say over the approval of housing that was nonetheless technically allowed.
Empowered to sue over tasks they did not like, native “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) activists grew more and more profitable in stopping the whole lot that smacked of progress of their neighborhoods.
Free entrepreneurs have been important of those legal guidelines from day one.
The California Environmental High quality Act (CEQA), which has enabled residents to problem the approval of each giant infrastructure tasks and single-family houses, was enacted in 1970.
By 1979, Purpose was accusing the legislation of having “done more damage to home building in that state than anything since the last ice age and the San Andreas Fault.” It took a number of a long time for mainstream Democrats like Newsom to begin making comparable complaints.
Certainly, these legal guidelines initially sparked little pushback from liberals. However as their prices have continued to mount by way of housing models not constructed and vitality not generated, a rising refrain of progressive voices has began demanding reform.
One instance is the rise of California’s rabidly pro-development “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) coalition within the mid-2010s. Irritated by ever-rising housing prices, the brand new YIMBYs began to demand that restrictive zoning legal guidelines and procedures that gave neighbors the flexibility to say “no” to new housing be abolished.
These largely left-wing YIMBYs have been combating for property rights and freer markets in constructing. But their rhetoric is extra prone to stress left-wing notions of equality and inclusion: The privileged few should not get to say “no” to housing for the hard-pressed many.
Zoning reform has since grow to be a core of the abundance agenda. Its critique of citizen veto factors over housing has shortly unfold to different areas of the regulatory state.
With regards to the approval of infrastructure tasks, group enter is “fundamentally flawed,” wrote Jerusalem Demsas for The Atlantic final yr. “It’s biased toward the status quo and privileges a small group of residents who for reasons that range from the sympathetic to the selfish don’t want to allow projects that are broadly useful.”
Riddling the system with these “veto points” has additionally given rise to a associated criticism of contemporary American governance: what the Occasions‘ Klein calls “everything bagel liberalism.” (That is a reference to the all-consuming “everything bagel” from the 2022 movie All the things All over the place All at As soon as that sucks up a lot of the universe that no particular person factor finally ends up mattering.)
The coverage implications of the metaphor are clear. If everybody can say “no” to your venture, then everybody goes to demand one thing earlier than they are saying “yes” to it. That in flip weighs down tasks, public or non-public, with prohibitively pricey carve-outs and payoffs.
The abundance agenda’s criticisms of extreme veto factors and the special-interest carve-outs they breed has made its supporters extra pleasant to the libertarian view that market incumbents typically convert regulation right into a safety racket.
Along with NIMBY housing laws, abundance agenda supporters criticize occupational licensing legal guidelines for propping up the earnings of incumbent day care staff and hair stylists on the expense of shoppers and excluded staff. They criticize immigration restrictions that hold out high-skilled foreigners to guard the wages of native-born People. They assault “Buy American” legal guidelines that power companies to buy domestically sourced supplies.
“I think a lot of people don’t know how much the government does to restrict access to a lot of kinds of goods that we don’t have serious disagreements about whether people should have access to them,” says liberal pundit Matt Yglesias. “There’s a lot of pretty pure rent seeking in the system.”
On the flip aspect, the rising reputation of the abundance agenda has seen free entrepreneurs use that framing to pitch their longstanding deregulatory beliefs to a wider left-of-center viewers that may in any other case tune them out.
Discourse, a publication of the pro-market Mercatus Middle at George Mason College, has revealed a sequence of essays on the abundance agenda, most of which argue {that a} lengthy checklist of free market insurance policies are crucial for true abundance.
Each libertarian and progressive abundance-agenda supporters have reached again in historical past to search out forgotten strands of liberalism that prioritized progress and progress.
An Abundance of Takes
In Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Anathem, there exists an order of rationalist monks whose entire goal is to elucidate that each supposedly new thought was truly mentioned to loss of life centuries in the past. If these monks existed in our universe, they’d possible say that, truly, there’s nothing all that novel a couple of progressivism that extols the virtues of rising the non-public sector and authorities.
As just lately because the mid-2000s, there was a growth in this type of pondering. Writers like Brink Lindsey (then a vp of the Cato Institute) and Gene Sperling (one among President Invoice Clinton’s financial advisers) made their respective instances for a “liberaltarian” or “pro-growth progressive” coalition.
The liberal-libertarian fusionists noticed dynamic markets as crucial for the great jobs and tax income progressives wished. In addition they acknowledged redistribution as a simply and politically crucial technique of shoring up common assist for the financial dynamism the libertarians prized.
As a bonus, a rising economic system would convert on a regular basis folks to socially liberal values, or no less than make them much less prepared to go in for reactionary politics. “It is easier to have a melting pot if it is a growing pot,” Sperling wrote in his 2005 e book The Professional-Development Progressive.
However, there’s rather a lot that distinguishes as we speak’s abundance agenda from the pro-growth progressives of outdated. The obvious one is the modern group’s technique of communication and group. However Thompson’s admonition about an excessive amount of venting and never sufficient inventing, the abundance agenda is certainly “too online.”
In the present day’s abundance-agenda liberals personal a variety of actual property at legacy media shops: Klein writes a column at The New York Occasions, whereas Thompson and Demsas write for The Atlantic. Most of the time, the status publications’ model of the abundance agenda is a filtered, polished rendition of broad concepts and particular insurance policies first circulated on social media and in digital newsletters.
The place else however #EconTwitter would hundreds {of professional} wonks and laypeople collect to chew the fats in regards to the newest Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis working paper explaining low progress charges, or dunk on clips of anti-housing activists saying a brand new condo constructing will spoil their neighborhood?
The place else however in subscriber-supported Substack newsletters may writers discover it doable (and worthwhile) to pen hundreds of phrases on the particulars of energy-permitting laws or worldwide variation in public transportation venture prices?
Out of this wonky web churn, particular person failures to construct get synthesized right into a coherent group id round an abundance agenda and its bigger name to motion.
A consultant episode was the uproar over La Sombrita.
La Sombrita was Los Angeles’ “radical” new design for shading its bus stops that, on nearer inspection, turned out to be a principally ineffective piece of metallic that forged nearly no shade.
Its main advantage was that it was so small and ineffective that metropolis staff may simply exit and cling them from bus cease indicators. Extra substantial shade constructions would wish a number of sign-offs and approvals from L.A.’s sprawling metropolis paperwork.
1 / 4-century in the past, this small-scale boondoggle might need attracted little discover. As an alternative, it shortly went viral within the abundance-agenda corners of Twitter, which then produced thinkier Substack items about how La Sombrita defined America’s materials stagnation, which have been then adopted by protection in main conventional information shops.
No “failure to build,” regardless of how small, would escape the motion’s all-seeing eye.
Yglesias, who writes the Gradual Boring e-newsletter on Substack, argues that the web nature of abundance-agenda liberalism has helped rehabilitate market-friendly centrist “New Democratic” pondering from its low ebb within the late 2000s and early 2010s.
That form of proto–abundance agenda “had a lot of purchase and a lot of institutional backing 20 years ago and then came to be discredited because the particular institutions associated with New Democrats came to be associated with the invasion of Iraq” and the Nice Recession, he says.
Due to new voices and establishments on-line, he provides, “there’s been a rebuilding and rediscovery of what was correct in that political tendency.”
As an indication of its success, the web motion has began to spawn conventional brick-and-mortar establishments in the actual world.
One can see this within the rise of an abundance-agenda-adjacent assume tank, the Middle for New Liberalism (CNL)—beforehand often known as the Neoliberal Challenge, and earlier than that r/neoliberal. (In its earliest kinds within the mid-2010s, CNL was only a humble subreddit, or on-line discussion board.)
“It was making really wonky memes about the federal funds rate,” says CNL co-founder Colin Mortimer. “It very quickly turned into a community and refuge for non-Bernie [as in socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders] Democrats who wanted a place to talk about still wonky but general politics.”
That subreddit group adopted the upward ape-to-man trajectory of any profitable internet-spawned political motion, rising right into a profitable Twitter account, a podcast, a web site, native in-person meetups, and finally acquisition by a decadesold center-left assume tank, the Progressive Coverage Institute, in 2020.
The CNL has since spun off into its personal unbiased group, the place a big a part of its mission continues to be convincing center-left coverage makers that “we just don’t have enough stuff” and “we should make it easier to replace that stuff or build new stuff.”
That is not the one abundance-agenda establishment to develop past the confines of easy posting.
For a time, billionaire Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison was content material to jot down in regards to the causes of and obstacles to financial progress on his private weblog. His firm has since plowed important sources into extra conventional publishing endeavors to develop on these concepts.
It has launched Stripe Press, which publishes and reprints various books serving to to put an mental groundwork for growth-obsessed abundance agenda-ers. That features J. Storrs Corridor’s The place Is My Flying Automotive?, which pins our stagnation on laws that crushed vitality manufacturing, and Cussed Attachments, by George Mason College economist Tyler Cowen, which argues we’ve an ethical obligation to future human beings to extend financial progress by as a lot as doable.
State Capability Statism
The abundance agenda and libertarianism have a major pure overlap. However, the previous’s targets are greater progress and “more stuff” typically, not a smaller state.
That aim has created an odd-bedfellows coalition of big-government liberals and small-government libertarians and conservatives, all thinking about some pruning of the regulatory state. However the progressive members of this coalition need that pruning to unleash the perfect huge authorities has to supply.
If free markets or small authorities establishments are seen as an obstacle to greater progress and empowered, competent authorities, then they too must go.
Klein’s “everything bagel liberalism” is a helpful framing for discussing the issues of extreme course of and particular curiosity carve-outs. He first deployed it within the context of all of the cost-increasing laws connected to inexpensive housing improvement in San Francisco. The event he profiled managed to flee a variety of these laws by relying completely on non-public cash.
However, Klein’s column made it clear he wished the federal government to play a major position in fixing the state’s inexpensive housing issues, and certainly, its issues typically.
“Government needs to be able to solve big problems. But the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities—to pile too much on the bagel—is itself a choice, and it’s one that California keeps making,” he wrote. That is a far cry from the libertarian view that authorities will inherently get slowed down with pointless course of and/or get captured by particular pursuits.
Even the place liberal adherents of the abundance agenda assist eliminating authorities regulation on market actors, it is typically half of a bigger political venture of creating progressive insurance policies work and progressive-dominated areas extra highly effective.
The abundance agenda in some ways began as an effort to liberalize zoning laws on new housing building in costly coastal metro areas. A big a part of that was early YIMBY activists and writers accurately understanding that restrictions on market provide are driving up market costs.
On the similar time, this concentrate on zoning speaks to a progressive nervousness that blue America is dropping folks, energy, and affect to locations the place housing prices are cheaper.
“The population center of gravity keeps shifting to places where they let houses get built is something everyone understands. The political economy consequences of that are dire,” says Yglesias. “Do you want to concede that the overall model in Texas is just better or do you want to zero in on how much of that excess growth is caused by housing elements and then do something about it?”
The libertarian political venture is to shrink the state typically, not simply cut back allowing occasions for federally authorised infrastructure tasks.
Many activists and coverage wonks who assist the abundance agenda argue it is typically undesirable and definitely a waste of time for anybody to pursue these bigger adjustments to the nation’s political economic system.
That is the view taken by Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress. Stapp acquired his begin engaged on the massive questions of tech coverage, akin to antitrust and privateness laws.
“It’s trench warfare,” he says. “Both sides are really well-funded. They’ve been having these arguments for decades. Has legislation been passed? Have rules and regulations changed? Not really.”
Stapp launched his institute with the aim of sidestepping these larger coverage fights in favor of specializing in the “inputs to innovations,” akin to high-skilled immigration and federal science funding.
“Lots of people talking about should we give [the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation] more billions of dollars or take away their funding,” says Stapp. As an alternative, his group asks: “For any given budget, whether it’s a little smaller or a little bigger, how are they spending it?”
That would properly be one of the simplest ways to be an efficient coverage entrepreneur. Nevertheless it requires one to make peace with a state far bigger and extra intrusive than any libertarian may very well be snug with.
Even some abundance-agenda adherents who share the aim of freer markets and a much less intrusive state have however embraced the concept the fashionable world requires us to have a greater functioning authorities earlier than we will have a smaller authorities.
“Our governments cannot address climate change, much [less] improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality,” wrote Cowen in a 2020 weblog put up advocating “state-capacity libertarianism.”
“Those problems require state capacity—albeit to boost markets—in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with,” he continued. “Even if you favor education privatization, in the shorter run we still need to make the current system much better. That would even make privatization easier, if that is your goal.”
Outdated-school libertarians have criticized this notion. David R. Henderson of the Hoover Establishment perceptively replied to Cowen that “the latent power that a large-capacity state would have could more easily be drawn on than the power that a small-capacity state would have.”
“Even if large-capacity libertarians wouldn’t want the state to throw people in prison for producing, distributing, or using drugs,” Henderson warns, “they might not get their wish.”
The Liberaltarian Second?
The liberaltarian motion by no means fairly panned out. Will the abundance agenda be an identical flop? It is at all times robust to learn the tea leaves, however there’s motive to assume a “liberalism that builds” is likely to be a stickier idea.
The pandemic period’s trifecta of giant spending, excessive inflation, and empty cabinets has strengthened the notion that you could’t simply spend your approach out of fabric deprivation. Middle-left coverage wonks and lay coverage lovers are more and more hungry for concepts about how you can develop the pie, not simply subsidize and redistribute it.
Pandemic-era migration from blue to pink America has made clear the position liberal states’ homebuilding laws are enjoying in pricing folks out. That has helped hold liberalizing zoning reforms on the highest of the agenda on the state and native degree.
Lastly, the success of congressional Democrats and the Biden administration at squeezing by huge spending payments has, paradoxically, eliminated one supply of friction between the big- and small-government sides of the abundance agenda. Prefer it or not, these billions in subsidies have already been authorised. That is one much less level to argue about.
Supplied it does stick round, the place will an abundance agenda lead us?
One optimistic view is that an abundance agenda will achieve smashing the veto level–riddled establishments of the Seventies. The inherent inefficiencies of presidency will imply that its schemes will nonetheless flounder, whereas non-public capital is finally unshackled to construct our housing- and energy-rich future.
Or maybe Henderson’s pessimism is on level. Abundance-agenda liberals (and some useful-idiot libertarians) will achieve making a more practical state solely to see it slide its interfering tentacles into increasingly more areas of the economic system and people’ lives.
Perhaps the abundance agenda will probably be really transcendent, as in Reinhardt’s energy-rich utopia. With the issues of fabric shortage mainly solved, questions on authorities management versus non-public initiative will grow to be hopelessly archaic. Taxation will nonetheless be theft, in fact. However when vitality is simply too low-cost to meter, who’ll even discover the state pirating a number of electrons?
Almost certainly, we’ll find yourself someplace within the center, with the abundance agenda including one other pro-growth, deregulatory spice to the “everything bagel” of Democratic governance. Laws will grow to be much less burdensome, however they will not disappear. Progressive politicians should be extra conscious of the prices of allowing procedures and “Buy American” guidelines, however they will not eliminate them fully.
That appears to be the route the place Newsom’s California is headed. After complaining bitterly about CEQA, the governor unveiled some extremely gentle tweaks to the legislation. They weren’t earth-shattering stuff by any means, and so they will not repair the state’s failures to construct.
However directionally, they’re deregulatory. Maybe actual abundance begins on the margins.