The Abundance Agenda— Neoliberalism Dressed Down In A Hoodie

Conservative Democrats Are On The Attack Again— Vs Progressives

There’s a new buzzword making the rounds among Democratic centrist thinkfluencers and podcast darlings of the liberal establishment like Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Matt Yglesias, Jerusalem Demsas: the Abundance Agenda. It’s the latest rebranding of a very old idea— if we just let the “smart people” fix the red tape, we’ll all get more stuff and everyone will win. Housing! Transit! Doctors! Clean energy! What’s not to love? A lot, actually. Because behind the feel-good language about “building more” lies a deeply ideological project: one that refuses to challenge capitalism, ignores class conflict and cloaks neoliberal supply-side dogma in a Patagonia vest.

Let’s start with the obvious: who’s selling this? It isn’t coming from labor organizers, tenant unions or climate justice movements. It’s coming from the same professional-managerial class that has spent decades sterilizing the Democratic Party into a flavorless mush of wonkery and incrementalism. They’re not radicals; they’re functionaries of a political elite that believes our problems stem from inefficiency bureaucratic delays and overly cautious environmental reviews, not from injustice, billionaire landlords and fossil fuel capitalism. In their world, everything is a process issue. Politics is software— and if the rollout sucks, well, let’s hire better product managers.

Let’s take housing, the cornerstone of the Abundance Agenda. The YIMBY crowd says we just need to “build more housing,” and prices will fall. Great, right? Except when we dig deeper, what we usually find is a plan to open the floodgates to private developers, deregulate zoning, and maybe toss in a few affordable units if we’re lucky. Meanwhile, there’s no serious, systemic challenge to landlord power, no push for universal rent control, no commitment to deeply affordable social housing built by and for working people. It’s trickle-down real estate: let developers build for the rich and hope it "frees up" old housing stock for the poor. That's not abundance. That's Reaganomics, maybe with some artisanal coffee and stevia.

The Abundance Agenda talks a big game about building more stuff—but says almost nothing about who controls it, who profits, who pays the price… and nothing at all about class analysis. Want more solar panels? Cool. But who owns the grid? Who’s making the profit margins? Who gets stuck with the utility bills while the investor class gets tax breaks and equity stakes? Want more nurses and doctors? We do too. But where’s the commitment to Medicare for All? To crushing Big Pharma and the private hospital cartels? To actually decommodifying healthcare, instead of simply “expanding capacity”?

The purveyors of the Abundance Agenda want us to believe that the main obstacle to progress is not capital, but red tape. That the villains aren’t bosses and billionaires, but overly cautious planners and environmental lawyers. It’s a politics of convenience, not confrontation. Some say it’s austerity in disguise. Yep, sorry to say, despite all the technobabble about “scarcity mindsets,” the Abundance Agenda often reproduces the very austerity logic it claims to oppose. By treating government as an enabler of private enterprise rather than as a direct provider of goods and services, it continues the neoliberal tradition of outsourcing the public good to the profit motive. It’s more Obamacare and less Medicare-for-All.

Want universal pre-K? Just give subsidies to private daycares. Want more housing? Hand out tax incentives to developers. Want better transit? Contract it out to Uber. This is not abundance. This is a shell game. A real abundance agenda would be coming from below— not just of goods, dignity, power, and democratic control. We should stop pretending that the problem is merely one of insufficient supply. The real scarcity is political will, and the real enemy is capital. The left’s abundance agenda must look very different:

• Public, social housing— decommodified and democratically run.

• Green energy in public hands— not privatized solar farms on stolen land.

• Free, universal healthcare— not “more providers” in a broken market.

• Labor empowerment— not gig economy “efficiency.”

• Universal childcare, not tax credits.

• Freedom from exploitation, not just GOP-aligned faster permitting.

Progress doesn’t come from streamlining bureaucracies for developers and venture capitalists. It comes from organizing, solidarity, and struggle. Power is not the property of one man or one office, but the collective capacity of people acting together. The Abundance Agenda tells us to build more. The left must say: yes— and build it for the people, by the people, and out of the hands of the oligarchs. And speaking about neo-liberals, Jonathan Chait was all over it yesterday, framing it as The Coming Democratic Civil War. He derides the skeptics as people decrying “it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by ‘corporate-aligned interests; ‘a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors’; ‘an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right’; and the historical and moral equivalent of the ‘Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.’”

He claims that the two sides “are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party.” Predictably, he defines the abundance agenda— this will sound familiar— as “a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work.” He then does what he always does: attacks progressives and sings the praises of the conservative Democrats like… himself.

“Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones,” he wrote, “began to ask why public tasks [tried by Obama and Biden] that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering— the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge— ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?”

Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.

The closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda is the Niskanen Center, formerly a heterodox libertarian think tank, which became a haven for Never Trump Republicans before veering, in recent years, toward promoting abundance. Some journalists, including several at this magazine, have also championed these ideas. Three new books have expressed abundance-agenda themes: Abundance, by Thompson and Ezra Klein; Stuck, by my colleague Yoni Appelbaum; and Why Nothing Works, by the Brown University scholar Marc Dunkelman. The proliferation of such works is a sign of the excitement these ideas have generated. And the abundance libs are rapidly winning over Democratic politicians, especially moderate ones.

… You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century.

In the years after World War II, the New Deal seemed to have permanently triumphed, and the legitimacy and power of government were beyond contestation. Many liberals now believed they could direct their energies in new directions. The task was to prevent the government machine, powered by its unstoppable alliance of Big Business and Big Labor, from subordinating the needs of the citizens. A new vision took hold, shared by writers and activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs and Ralph Nader. In his 2021 book, Public Citizens, the historian Paul Sabin describes this citizen-activist movement as “a legal attack, led by liberals, on the post–World War II administrative state.”

Unlike the Roosevelt generation that had preceded them, these liberals saw their task as restraining the power of government, rather than establishing it. “The fundamental wrong,” Carson said in a 1963 speech, “is the authoritarian control that has been vested in the agricultural agencies.”

… They achieved some genuinely laudable results, including laws regulating pollution and consumer safety, and those protecting poor communities from being steamrolled by the likes of Robert Moses. But their emphasis on litigation and cumbersome legal requirements (what the law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish”), combined with the empowerment of interest groups, has over time inverted Roosevelt’s preference for results over legalism. The Naderites sought to prevent the government from doing harm, but in too many cases, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all… The New Left model of citizen-activist groups empowered by litigation remains the core of the progressive movement’s theory of change.

… The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.

This helps explain why much of the progressive left rejects the abundance agenda, not merely as insufficient or naive, but as directionally wrong. Anthony Rogers-Wright, then the director of environmental justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, told my colleague Jerusalem Demsas a few years ago that permitting reform means “taking away the ability for all communities, but especially environmental-justice communities, from self-determination and using the courts as a way to get relief if a project is found to be harmful.” A policy brief on solar power from the progressive Roosevelt Institute last year proposed that the government should provide subsidies for community groups fighting new solar plants.

The theory underlying this position is that Nader-style citizen engagement is an important component of democracy, and that building up activist groups engaging in these litigation strategies creates powerful constituencies for the left. David Dayen, the editor of the progressive magazine the American Prospect, wrote an essay in 2023 critiquing the abundance agenda as an attack on basic democratic rights. Dayen, approvingly quoting the economist Marshall Steinbaum, argued that the effort to sideline community activists “boils down to the idea that people can’t be trusted.” A better policy, Dayen proposed, was “a liberalism that builds power,” which means “the government actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”

… Progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.

But that dynamic also explains why the abundance agenda is likely to become the tentpole of the party’s moderate wing, even for politicians who have mixed feelings about its particulars. As the Niskanen Center’s Steven Teles and Robert Saldin have pointed out, the factional division between group-aligned progressive Democrats and the abundance Democrats opposed to them is already playing out in several cities. (San Francisco, where the failures of progressive urban governance are most pronounced, has the most organized abundance faction.)

The first fissures are already beginning to appear at the national level. Some elements of the abundance agenda have appeal to the left. (There are, in particular, left-wing YIMBYs.) But most of the elected officials who have identified with it come from the party’s mainstream and [conservative] wings, such as Pete Buttigieg; Governors Kathy Hochul, Wes Moore, and Josh Shapiro; and House members Jake Auchincloss, Scott Peters, George Whitesides and Ritchie Torres. Torres [one of Congress’ biggest whores both to the pro-genocide PACs and the cyber-cartel] offers the most instructive example: Having previously carved out an identity as a gleeful antagonist to the party’s left wing on Israel and other divisive issues, he announced in January, “I feel like the abundance agenda is the best framework that I’ve heard for reimagining Democratic governance.”