Can Democrats Promote an Abundance Agenda?

I’ve got my doubts.

Unless you have been living without an internet connection for the last few weeks or so, you have certainly encountered a book called Abundance, which argues that Democrats must face up to the failures of liberal governance and embrace a politics of plenty. I note somewhat immodestly that I was for an “abundance agenda” before it was cool.

Back in 2022, when I was exasperated at the direction of my lifelong political party, I wrote a three-point plan to fix the Democrats.

The second point was precisely that “Democrats must promote an abundance agenda.” It would be good politics and good policy, I argued, for the party to take steps to increase the supply of essential goods and services. They should embrace regulatory reform, efficient governance, and the rapid completion of public and private projects—things that had been the purview of Republicans and the center-right. And they should back technological innovation and productivity rather than settling for the redistribution of scarce resources.

In other words: more stuff people actually want, more of the time.

More and more people seem to agree.

With Abundance, the OGs of the abundance movement, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, have aimed to write a definitive mission statement. But they aren’t alone. An ever-growing number of organizations, networks, blogs, and other initiatives are devoted to aspects of an abundance agenda, from housing to energy to transportation infrastructure to technological progress.

More and more, liberal analysts now lament Why Nothing Works, as the title of Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book puts it, and elicit widespread nods of agreement, rather than howls of denial. Brian Deese, Joe Biden’s director of the National Economic Council and a paid-up member of the Democratic economic establishment, just published a lengthy essay in Foreign Affairs on “Why America Struggles to Build”—the clear implication being that the Biden administration failed to do so.

Given my belief that without an abundance agenda this country is more likely to limp along than to soar, I can only applaud these developments. From the profound shortage of housing where America needs it most, to our shockingly expensive and slow infrastructure projects, this country is not delivering what its people need.

One infamous example—and one the new Abundance book focuses on—is California’s failure to build a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles. “Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America,” said then–President Obama the year after Californians voted in favor of the new line. It was supposed to cost $33 billion and be up and running by 2020. The cost is now expected to be more than triple that figure. The first tracks were laid only this January, and the first third of the line is not projected to open any sooner than 2030. As Klein noted in a recent New York Times piece, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail since 2008, when Californians voted to approve a plan to build the new line.

Why the delay? A big part of the answer is an overly burdensome environmental review process. As Klein explained, “Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner.”

But while the abundance agenda is badly needed, how likely is the actually existing Democratic Party to embrace it? In some alternative universe there may be a Democratic Party for whom this would be an easy sell. But this Democratic Party in this universe? I have my doubts.

Let’s start with an awkward reality: The Democrats were just in power for four years and did absolutely nothing that would recognizably be part of this agenda. Their revealed preference was to spend money on popular party priorities like the massive American Rescue Plan and the deceptively named Inflation Reduction Act rather than reform the system so things actually got done and money was not wasted.

Stories of Biden’s boondoggles are already passing into legend: the failure of a $42 billion allocation for rural broadband in the 2021 infrastructure bill to connect anyone at all so far; the absurdly slow build-out of EV charging stations from a $7.5 billion allocation in the same bill—only a few dozen chargers are now operational from the 2021 bill.

There are countless examples of such inefficiencies and delays. The culprit is a Democratic Party that puts ideology and special interests ahead of good governance. It is committed to ensuring that development is not socially harmful in any way, and does not transgress the interests of any “stakeholders.” In reality, that amounts to a promise that nothing will get done. The result is endless paperwork and litigation by those stakeholders—or, more accurately, interest groups that claim to represent those stakeholders. This includes countless environmental and “social justice” NGOs, local NIMBY groups and, of course, the army of lawyers who make their living from this sort of thing. Costs balloon and projects are delayed.

Nothing demonstrates the problem more clearly than the ongoing effects of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. These environmental review laws, first passed in 1970, have become a major obstacle to progress and prosperity. As the liberal economist Noah Smith points out:

NEPA and other environmental review laws (like California’s CEQA) are the most important kind of regulation holding back American development, be that housing, green energy, or reindustrialization. These are procedural requirements—even if a development project obeys every single substantive environmental law, NEPA allows NIMBYs to sue to force the developer to complete years of onerous paperwork for the courts before proceeding. This exerts a massive chilling effect on new projects, because developers know they’ll get sued and might have to spend years on paperwork….

America went way too far with anti-development regulation in the 1970s, and left itself utterly unprepared to deal with the new challenges of the 21st century—the housing shortage, Cold War 2, the green energy transition, and re-industrialization. We froze our built environment in amber in the 70s.

Progressives had the chance to change all that when it become apparent that a 1970s-style world was no longer sufficient. They passed on that chance.”

And what do progressives have to say about fixing this issue? Almost nothing. Their ideology, “the groups,” the nonprofit-industrial complex, and the priorities of liberal, educated voters to whom so many Democratic politicians are beholden all make it extremely difficult for the party to tackle this kind of problem—or embrace many other parts of the abundance agenda.

It’s a similar story on energy. The voters and groups that dominate the Democratic coalition give great weight to the need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy (chiefly wind and solar). They see “net zero” as an urgent priority. And they refuse to take seriously the major, undeniable trade-offs between energy abundance and a rapid transition to green energy.

That’s a big problem. Cheap, reliable, plentiful energy must necessarily underpin any abundance agenda worthy of the name. Cheap energy enabled the rise of industrial society and remains essential for today’s standard of living. Without it, every project envisioned by abundance agenda advocates is nothing more than a pipe dream.

And yet the Democratic Party remains committed to rapid decarbonization—including reaching net zero by 2050. This is unrealistic without dramatically sacrificing living standards. As the polymath Vaclav Smil, universally acknowledged to be one the world’s premier energy experts, has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline (gospel with the Democratic Party):

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

More Smil:

We are now halfway between 1997 (27 years ago) when delegates of nearly 200 nations met in Kyoto to agree on commitments to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases, and 2050; the world has 27 years left to achieve the goal of decarbonizing the global energy system, a momentous divide judging by the progress so far, or the lack of it.

The numbers are clear. All we have managed to do halfway through the intended grand global energy transition is a small relative decline in the share of fossil fuel in the world’s primary energy consumption—from nearly 86 percent in 1997 to about 82 percent in 2022. But this marginal relative retreat has been accompanied by a massive absolute increase in fossil fuel combustion: in 2022 the world consumed nearly 55 percent more energy locked in fossil carbon than it did in 1997.

The irony here is that Biden was, in his own unacknowledged way, a “drill, baby, drill” president and acted consistent with Smil’s analysis. Despite the strenuous Democratic rhetoric about the climate crisis, net zero, rapid elimination of fossil fuels, and radically ramping up renewables, energy realities forced the last Democratic administration to do something they swore they’d never do. They presided over record levels of oil production (both on federal lands and overall), record natural gas production, and record liquefied natural gas exports. Most Democrats saw these not as achievements but something to be embarrassed about—which exemplifies the contradiction between progressive climate dogma and running a modern economy, much less achieving “abundance”.

More generally, it is becoming clearer and clearer that action on climate, to be successful both as policy and politics, must be embedded in and subordinate to the goal of energy abundance and prosperity. In other words, abundance must be the paramount goal of energy policy. Such abundance cannot be achieved by wind and solar. It means way more nuclear and, yes, more drilling for America’s massive endowment of natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel.

Democrats are very far from acknowledging this reality, let alone taking corrective action. Even abundance advocates struggle to accept this fact, instead trying to market their agenda as the way that the Democrat dream of a rapid renewables–based transition can actually be attained. This claim, along with associated talk of an impending climate catastrophe that must be averted, is in fact central to the Abundance book’s argument.

Democrats, including abundance advocates, seem to forget that working-class voters have little interest in an energy transition. These voters—exactly the voters the party needs to win back—do not share the zeal of Democrats’ educated voter base for restructuring the economy around “green” industries and the clean energy agenda that underpinned much of Biden administration economic policy. The last election should have made that, well, abundantly clear.

Too few abundance advocates are willing to grapple with the ways in which their agenda is incompatible with the modern Democratic Party. Geoff Shullenberger has noted correctly that the abundance envisioned by advocates “already exists, at least in some form, for those who can afford it,” which just happens to include a huge chunk of the Democrats’ educated professional base. Josh Barro has chided Democratic abundance advocates for their support of “decarbonization policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego cuts to the chase: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.” The contrast between what most Democrats, including abundance advocates, want such voters to want and what they actually do want is a fundamental problem.

In general, abundance liberals do not seem to realize the extent to which the Democrats’ base is now educated liberal whites, especially women, for whom a vision of lovely green abundance that doesn’t include distasteful things like “big-ass trucks” is an article of faith. As the recent data released by David Shor clearly shows this vision is not shared by massive numbers of Latino, young, and working-class voters.

The first few months of Trump’s second term have underscored the scale of the challenge for Democrats who want to embrace “abundance.” Some of what Trump is doing is quite consistent with an abundance agenda (even if his overall economic program lacks coherence and may backfire). He is actually going after regulations and permitting requirements that make it harder to build stuff and get stuff done, for example by limiting environmental review under NEPA. He is actively pursuing energy abundance, guided by his very capable energy secretary Chris Wright.

It’s not that Democrats should necessarily applaud these steps by Trump. It’s that Trump is doing some important abundance-y things that Democrats have been too conflicted even to contemplate, let alone try. That should trouble those who assume the Democratic Party will eventually be the political vehicle for an abundance agenda. The Republican Party has some comparative advantages over the ideologically straitjacketed Democrats in terms of pursuing such an agenda. Republicans don’t typically balk at cutting excessive regulation, eliminating opportunities for endless litigation, and promoting energy abundance and economic growth. These steps fit into their worldview.

Abundance advocates would do well to keep that complicated picture in mind. Theirs is an agenda in search of a party—and it is not yet clear which party (or indeed whether any party) is truly capable of implementing it. The big-ass truck problem alone suggests that Democrats will not necessarily be the natural party of abundance that voters actually want.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.