Why Abundance Will Have To Be Partisan
It must be defined, or it will be co-opted.
Something
said to during their recent conversation got me thinking about abundance, and what it means in an era of ascendant, predatory conservatism.I’ll return below to that conversation, which wasn’t really about abundance at all. The spoiler is, it drew me to the conclusion that the term abundance is abstract and capacious enough to smuggle just about any ideology into law, and if it is pursued as a bipartisan initiative, rather than a liberal moonshot, the right will transform it into something noxious, something I don’t think most left-of-center abundists intended.
My initial review argued that abundists didn’t seem to fully appreciate a) the depth and rot of Republican bad faith, or b) the hardwired timidity of the modern Democratic Party.
Republicans don’t want to see the state become more active and efficient, particularly toward ends like decarbonizing the environment or distributing AI’s productivity returns to regular people. To make the world like the one depicted in the book’s opening pages would require steamrolling Republicans at the local, state, and national level, and in all branches of government.
We need a Democratic Party that fights before we can have a liberalism that builds.
But there’s another possibility. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson seem to retain some hope for an eventual bipartisan synthesis, alluding graciously to “people seeking complementary reforms in the [conservative] coalition, such as James Pethokoukis, author of The Conservative Futurist; the economist Tyler Cowen, who has called for a ‘State Capacity Libertarianism’; and the array of policy experts organized in the Niskanen Center.”
Their solicitousness fuels left-wing criticism, which accuses abundists of lacking a “theory of power.” The real obstacles to a just form of abundance, these critics say, are rightists and corporate oligarchs and their agents in the government. Any agenda setters who gloss over the largest distorting forces in the political economy will see their project unraveled or swallowed whole by unprincipled crony capitalists. Look no further than the crypto barons financing “the abundance movement” for early signs of where we may be headed.
As it happens I tend to side with the abundists on the question of how to make liberalism more dynamic—Democrats will get much farther by unshackling themselves from self-imposed restraints like the filibuster or duplicative layers of review than by breaking up monopolies. But I do think progressives are right to worry about what will happen if Democrats do with abundance what they’ve done with every big idea they’ve had over the past 40 years: ask Republicans to provide them bipartisan cover.
Republicans might just say no. But they also might respond with a Trojan horse.
Abundance has to be a Democrat-only project, or at least an overwhelmingly Democrat-led project, or we won’t simply dial back the overreach of Naderite liberal proceduralism; if we’re not careful we’ll swing all the way back to the unencumbered laissez-faire exploitation of the early 20th century. We won’t unshackle government to build, we’ll empower Republicans to make government regulation of any kind illegal.
SAVE IT FOR THE ‘GIEG
Now back to that conversation between Buttigieg and Richardson. In his closing comments about how to appeal across information silos, Buttigieg coined FDR, and proposed an addendum to his four freedoms.