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.
The movement is still working out precisely what is, and is not, included in its program. But the canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.
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.
The movement is still working out precisely what is, and is not, included in its program. But the canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.
The first, and most familiar, is the need to expand the supply of housing by removing zoning rules and other legal barriers that prevent supply from meeting demand. Over the past 90 years or so, and especially since World War II, American cities have thrown up a series of restrictions on new housing. Some 40 percent of the existing structures in Manhattan, for instance, would be illegal to build today, and where the rules don’t ban new construction outright, they make it prohibitively time-consuming and costly. The same dynamic has strangled housing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, and other places where people want to live but can’t afford to.
The second focus of abundance is to cut back the web of laws and regulations that turns any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. The cost of building a mile of interstate highway tripledin a generation. California approved a plan to build high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco 17 years ago and, despite having spent billions, still has no usable track. Permitting requirements, which have slowed the green-energy build-out to a crawl, are a special focus.
The third domain, and the one that has received the least attention from commentators, is freeing up the government, especially the federal government, to be able to function. Policy wonks call this issue “state capacity.” The government itself is hamstrung by a thicket of rules that makes taking action difficult and makes tying up the government in lawsuits easy. The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.
the formation of ideological factions within political parties is a staple of American history. The divide over slavery ruptured the Whigs; the progressive movement began within both the Democratic and Republican Parties, before migrating entirely into the Democratic camp. A faction can reorganize a party’s priorities, generating new alliances and rivalries, and pull new constituencies into a party while driving others out. Many factions start among intellectuals and writers, eventually developing followings among politicians.
Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic
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