“Fix the damn roads!” was the winning campaign slogan for Gretchen Whitmir when she ran for governor of Michigan in 2018. The question is, is that approach – promising to make government work to the benefit of most people – enough to bring Democrats out of the wilderness in national elections?
Because it didn’t work for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Illustration by Ben Hickey
Like a lot of other people I know, I’ve hunkered down since the election. For one thing, I don’t have much to add to the ongoing debate over what Democrats did wrong in 2024 (though I’m going to include a couple of particularly insightful post-mortems – from Finian O’Toole and George Packer – at the end of this post). But I am interested in what they can do right going forward, primarily for its economic benefits but also as a way of achieving political gains.
And for me, the most promising alternative is what is becoming known, thanks to the iconclastic journalist Derek Thompson, who writes mostly for The Atlantic, as the “abundance agenda.”
You’re going to hear a lot more about this issue next year, with the publication in the spring of a book by Thompson and Ezra Klein, the brilliant journalist now at the New York Times, titled Abundance. Here’s an excerpt from the publisher’s blurb for the book:
To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.
Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions in matters of education and healthcare have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.
Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.
For now any efforts will necessarily be limited to what can be achieved by state governments rather than in Washington. But perhaps that’s a good thing, with the states that accomplish the most serving as a laboratory and model for a future in which – hopefully sooner rather than later – Democrats regain some effective power in Washington. If Gavin Newsom wants to run for president in 2028, for example, it would be a good idea to build enough new housing to show real progress in overcoming California’s homeless crisis.
Let’s start by diagnosing our scarcity problem. Take a look at this graph of prices in the 21st century, which shows that some products have become cheaper, such as TVs and computers, while many essentials have become more expensive, such as health care and college.
A mainstream liberal might look at the red lines and think: The government isn’t spending enough money to help people out; spend more! The typical conservative might think: The government is spending too much money and inflating the cost of these services; slash taxes and spending! What I’d prefer to focus on is perhaps the real problem: a national failure to increase the supply of essential goods.
An abundance agenda needs a target. What should we make more of? One answer that I’ve given you is: essential goods and services where productivity rates are declining. But that’s a bit fusty and technical. Let me try to offer a simpler answer. We should aim for abundance of comfort, abundance of power, and abundance of time.
By expanding access to essential services such as health care, we can reduce Americans’ pain. By going all-out on clean energy—solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and beyond—Americans can power more luxurious lives, free of the guilt that their luxury is choking the planet. By focusing on productivity and growth, we can become a richer country that shares its ample winnings with the less fortunate, reducing poverty and allowing us to work less with every passing decade, as economists once hoped.
This is an unabashedly utopian vision. But moving from venting to inventing, from zero-sum skirmishes over status to positive-sum solutions for American greatness, requires not just a laundry list of marginal improvements but also a defense of progress and growth. The abundance agenda aims for growth, not because growth is an end but because it is the best means to achieve the ends that we care about: more comfortable lives, with more power to do what we want, with more time devoted to what we love.
Just this week, Binya Appelbaum, my former newsroom colleague at the New York Times and now an opinion writer for the NYT, focused on the question of housing scarcity, which is essential to overcome as part of any successful abundance agenda.
There is a straight line from homeless schoolchildren to Donald Trump’s election victory.
Homelessness is the most extreme manifestation of the nation’s housing crisis. America simply isn’t building enough housing, which has driven up prices, which has made it difficult for millions of households to keep up with monthly rent or mortgage payments. Every year, some of those people suffer at least a brief period of homelessness.
Popular anger about the high cost of housing, which is by far the largest expense for most American households, helped to fuel Mr. Trump’s comeback. He recorded his strongest gains compared with the 2020 election in the areas where living costs are highest, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan think tank.
The results are more than a backlash against the party that happened to be in power. The animating principle of the Democratic Party is that government can improve the lives of the American people. The housing crisis is manifest proof that government is failing to do so. And it surely has not escaped the attention of the electorate that the crisis is most acute in New York City, Los Angeles and other places long governed by Democrats. . . .
A focus on housing is a chance for Democrats to rebuild public confidence in the party’s ability to deliver on its promises. And housing could be a particularly fruitful issue because it will require the party to work through some of its fissures and hypocrisies.
The only way to address the housing crisis in places like New York is to build housing in communities where people — potential Democratic voters — absolutely do not want it. This is a microcosm of the party’s broader issues. To build support for its economic agenda, the party needs to convince voters that lifting up everyone ultimately benefits everyone. Democrats need to revive a sense of shared responsibility for societal problems. They need to persuade the comfortable and complacent that homelessness is their problem, too. . .
Building a consensus in favor of building won’t be easy, but it is necessary.
In this bleak moment, Democrats might take a note from President Jimmy Carter about how to behave after losing an election: Grab a hammer and start making houses.
But hammers alone won’t do the job. There are still stark divisions among Democrats over cultural issues – particularly immigration, trans rights and crime – that won’t go away and add to the challenge of persuading both working class and more affluent voters to support a truly progressive economic agenda.
A lot of progressives despise the writer Matt Yglesias, but he is probably more insightful on these issues than almost anybody else. In his latest Slowboring post on Substack, he identifies some of the shortcomings of relying on an abundance agenda alone to achieve political success.
The people whose evasion politics I’ve been most annoyed by since the election are those who seem to think that if Democrats just pull harder on the “economic populism” lever, voters won’t notice their views on crime, immigration, and guns.
But in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I’ve also seen an inverse form of the politics of evasion, in which people I largely agree with have used the election as a pretext to talk a lot about housing, YIMBY/NIMBY disputes, and blue state governance. I very much agree with this as a substantive point. And I do think it’s true that if people thought of New York as a land of economic opportunity rather than just a place that has a lot of rich people, that would have second-order political benefits. If the election leads blue state elected officials to get more serious about assessing tradeoffs and making better decisions, I think that would be great.At the same time, it’s a lot easier to stand in a room of Democrats and say something sharp-but-nonspecific about housing than to say that the whole decade-plus arc of trying to ban assault weapons since Sandy Hook has cost a lot of votes without accomplishing anything. And it’s even harder to say that protesting Seth Moulton for taking a position that 70 percent of the public agrees with is a route to electoral success.
My sense from talking to Democratic members of Congress over the past few years is that a non-trivial number of them are pretending to be more left-wing than they actually are on various issues for the sake of coalition peace. And I think it’s good that in the wake of the election, more people are considering owning up to being heterodox on more issues, including on these crucial issues related to abundance. But while I think this stuff matters an enormous amount substantively, I think it’s a little bit foolish to believe that non-college voters in rural Wisconsin and South Texas have turned against Democrats because they’re worried about zoning. Neither populism nor technocracy will address the core political vulnerabilities that relate to moral and cultural values.
I also think that issues in the wonky YIMBY/abundance space are actually more linked to the cultural issues than many in this space want to admit.
I’ll have more to say about these issues in future Redburn Reads. But in the meantime, I’d like to end this post with excerpts from two longish post-mortems that are very much worth reading in full. Both are quite sobering in openly acknowledging that, like it or not, we are all living in the shadow of an era largely defined by Donald Trump.
Here’s Finian O’Toole, in a piece for The New York Review of Books headlined The Second Coming:
There has been, in recent times, something of a pattern here: the strongman gets elected, is thrown out of office, and then makes a triumphant return. This is what happened with one of Trump’s political models, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. It happened with Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Robert Fico in Slovakia, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. And what this pattern suggests is not just that the strongman comes back—he returns as a more radically authoritarian ruler. The second time he is infused with the swagger of impunity. The man they couldn’t kill is also the man they cannot inhibit. . .
And perhaps it applies to American society too; this disinhibited electorate. It is no longer, on the whole, frightened of its own worst impulses. Up to now it has been possible to take some comfort in Trump’s failure to win the popular vote in either 2016 or 2020, and in the fact that not once during his time in the Oval Office did a majority of Americans approve of the job he was doing. (This was true of no previous president in the era of polling.) It could be said with some justice that he did not really embody America.
But now he does. The comprehensive nature of his victory suggests that alongside the very large core of voters who are thrilled by his misogyny, xenophobia, bullying, and mendacity, there are many more who are at the very least not repelled by his ever more extreme indulgence in those sadistic pleasures. They know what he’s like and don’t much mind. . .
[This] tribe thinks the US can afford to gamble its future on a carnival barker, a wild improviser, a reckless disrupter. It has, paradoxically, a deep confidence in the America that Trump disparages with such dark relish, believing that a good shaking-up will not break the country but bring it back to its true self. Trump is a confidence man in both senses—he may be conning much of his own electorate, but they give him the benefit of their nonchalant belief that he is not destroying American norms, merely restoring an imagined American normalcy.
This is something else that made the campaign hard to comprehend. Trump drew a picture of an America on the brink of extinction—but many of his voters trust in an idea of an America that is so fundamentally resilient that it can afford to take breathtaking risks. Harris offered hope in the promise of America—but many of her voters see the country as too fragile to survive another disordered presidency.
This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the “browning” of the American people. Trump’s basic appeal is a vow to take power away from the elites and invaders who have imposed these changes and return the country to its rightful owners—the real Americans. His victory demonstrated the appeal’s breadth in blue and red states alike, among all ages, ethnicities, and races.. . .
The triumph of the Trump Reaction should put an end to two progressive illusions that have considerably strengthened it. One is the notion that identity is political destiny. For a long time, the Democratic Party regarded demographic change in America, the coming “minority majority,” as a consoling promise during interim Republican victories: As the country turned less white, it would inevitably turn more blue. In the past decade this notion was absorbed into an ideological framework that became the pervasive worldview of progressives—a metaphysics of group identity in which a generalized “people of color” (adjusted during the social-justice revolution of 2020 to “BIPOC”) were assumed to share a common experience of oppression that would determine their collective political behavior, driving them far to the left on issues such as immigration, policing, and transgender rights. . .
When Democrats lose a presidential election, they descend into a familiar quarrel over whether the party moved too far to the left or to the center. This time the question seems especially irrelevant; their political problem runs so much deeper. The Democratic Party finds itself on the wrong side of a historic swing toward right-wing populism, and tactical repositioning won’t help. The mood in America, as in electorates all over the world, is profoundly anti-establishment. Trump had a mass movement behind him; Kamala Harris was installed by party elites. He offered disruption, chaos, and contempt; she offered a tax break for small businesses. He spoke for the alienated; she spoke for the status quo. . .
In some ways, the Biden administration and the Harris campaign tried to reorient the Democratic Party back toward the working class, which was once its backbone. Biden pursued policies and passed legislation to create jobs that don’t require a college degree in communities that have been left behind. Harris studiously avoided campaigning on her identity as a Black and South Asian woman, appealing instead to a vague sense of patriotism and hope. But Biden’s industrial policy didn’t produce results fast enough to offset the damage of inflation—no one I talked with in Maricopa County, Arizona, or Washington County, Pennsylvania, this year seemed to have heard of the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris remained something of a cipher because of Biden’s stubborn refusal to step aside until it was too late for her or anyone else to make their case to Democratic voters. The party’s economic policies turned populist, but its structure—unlike the Republican Party’s mass cult of personality—appeared to be a glittering shell of power brokers and celebrities around a hollow core. Rebuilding will be the work of years, and realignment could take decades.
Still, there is reason to hope, faint though it may be at the moment.
The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems. Trump’s behavior in the last weeks of the campaign did not augur a coherent second presidency. He will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off. It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history.
