Achieving Abundance Is Harder Than It Sounds
Much of the left remains committed to scarcity. Here’s how to change the debate.
This article is part of an ongoing project by American Purpose at Persuasion on “Abundance in America.” This series aims to analyze the challenges hindering growth and development, as well as how to build a coalition around abundance.
To receive future installments into your inbox—plus more great pieces by American Purpose and Francis Fukuyama’s blog—simply click on “Email preferences” below and make sure you toggle on the buttons for “American Purpose” and “Frankly Fukuyama.”
The “abundance agenda” is a promising political movement. It offers Democrats a compelling message for a supply-starved electorate, and, more importantly, its advocates have correctly identified some of the procedural laws that currently make it hard for America to build. At first glance, the movement’s core message of “build more” doesn’t seem very divisive at all.
However, the abundance agenda is far more controversial than it seems, and the movement faces a difficult political path to reform for two reasons. First, the “scarcity coalition” that it is up against is far more powerful than abundance reformers have been willing to acknowledge to date. Second, in order to make truly meaningful reforms, the abundance movement will need to more directly confront long-held shibboleths among Democrats regarding environmental policy and community input.
The “abundance agenda” refers to a series of recent arguments and a political movement on the American left that advocate for adjusting procedural or environmental laws to allow the government (or the private sector in some areas like housing) to build more or do more: to build infrastructure, or to build housing, or to procure stuff, or do scientific research and so on. The most prominent of these recent arguments was set out in Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Another great, recent entry is Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman, which argues that the American left took a clear “Jeffersonian” turn in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (contrasted with the “Hamiltonian” federal government of the New Deal) by enacting environmental and other laws that gave more power to stakeholders to sue or block governments trying to build. Yoni Applebaum’s Stuck is a similar entry that is focused specifically on housing. These arguments build on the ideas presented in Nicholas Bagley’s 2019 article “The Procedure Fetish,” which, broadly speaking, also argued that the Democratic Party had gone too far in promoting procedural rules and should refocus on building.
These are arguments for and about the American left, and I think this is the clearest way to understand the abundance agenda. I have also seen “abundance” terminology used to describe a broader coalition that includes deregulatory Republicans, or even parts of the MAGA movement—basically anyone who wants more growth or development. While it is certainly promising that abundance Democrats may be able to find bipartisan policy wins, I find that this broader definition of the “abundance” frame confuses more than it clarifies. The terminology of “abundance” is both informative and politically useful when it is used to describe one side of an internecine struggle on the American left, because it can unite a coalition of interest groups there that are otherwise disconnected and unable to effect change on their own.
Those groups that make up the abundance coalition include the burgeoning Yes-In-My-Backyard (YIMBY) movement to increase housing supply, the New Deal nostalgics, the centrist or deregulatory (aka “New Liberal”) wing of the Democratic Party, and a host of clean energy factions that want America to build more renewable energy or nuclear power infrastructure, or high-voltage, direct-current transmission lines. All of these groups on the American left want the state to not just have a bigger role in the economy; they want the state to be able to actually deliver on what it promises. The “abundance” framing is useful in that coalition-building sense, so that is how I’m using it here.
It also provides a useful contrast with the coalition that the abundance agenda is up against. I refer to this as the “scarcity coalition.” Its members would almost certainly object to that label as pejorative. However, it is apt for my purpose, which is to state that there is a large and powerful coalition of groups with a strong interest in preserving the status quo and resisting the reforms that the abundance agenda needs to enact in order to be successful.
I think that the abundance advocates have correctly identified the sources of difficulty America has building things today. I’m defining success as the act of actually reforming those laws, and winning political support among Democrats to do so.
The Scarcity Agenda
Abundance supporters tend to understate both the political power and the motivation of their opposition. Regarding its power, they too often characterize the scarcity coalition as limited to a few overzealous environmental groups that file lawsuits against infrastructure or housing projects. While “the groups” are themselves certainly powerful interests within the Democratic Party, they make up a small yet very visible part of the scarcity coalition.
The base of the scarcity coalition is not the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council; it is the relatively affluent urban or suburban Democrats. That is no small or powerless segment of the party. Its members own property in high demand urban areas or suburbs and have a homevoter’s interest in controlling the development around what is often their most concentrated investment.
The scarcity coalition’s political power is easy to underestimate. For any given project, the organized opposition tends to be a relatively small part of the community, along with environmental groups. Not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) groups today almost always note that their opposition is only to the particular project in question, as opposed to development in general. Yet while a small part of the scarcity coalition may oppose this or that infrastructure or housing project, the entire coalition has an interest in preserving the laws that grant small groups of stakeholders the power to intervene, delay, or veto those projects. Those very laws are precisely what the abundance agenda needs to reform in order to be successful.
Abundance advocates also tend to misunderstand or mischaracterize the motivation of the scarcity coalition. They often frame it as misguided idealism or as simply erring on the side of proceduralism too much. The best example of this is “everything bagel liberalism” in which well-intentioned procedural requirements—to complete an analysis, collect community input, or award contracts to small businesses, and so on—add up to very little getting done.
This significantly understates the motivation of the best-organized groups within the scarcity coalition. The status quo of laws that give small, well-organized groups the power to intervene in or threaten government actions or large private sector capital projects confers on those groups an extraordinary amount of political power, and in many cases direct funding. Today, big budget capital projects in the United States attract a veritable swarm of disparate interest groups claiming under-studied environmental or social impacts, and demanding compensation in the form of “mitigations.” Government agencies or private project sponsors are highly motivated to negotiate, because the outcome of any lawsuit is uncertain and financially devastating under current American procedural laws. This is why large infrastructure projects in the United States tend to become sprawling urban development initiatives, as a host of mitigating investments are added to the project scope.
My point is that the motivation of “the groups” is not simply ideological. There is an enormous amount of political power and money that would be disrupted by the reforms that the abundance agenda aims to make. This explains the ferocity of the criticism the abundance movement has received since it gained steam. It is also why so many of the arguments against the abundance agenda come off as tangential or even non sequiturs. Interest groups can be counted on to argue against reforms that disempower them.
Supporters of the abundance agenda have at times been surprised by the level of controversy it has provoked among left-leaning groups. I’ve been similarly puzzled—particularly by the amount of criticism that the movement has received on the grounds that abundance “centers” procedural reform instead of corporate power or oligopoly or antitrust. I simply do not see those things as mutually exclusive or understand why only one type of reform can be “centered” by Democrats.
However, I do have a simple explanation for the volume of pushback against the abundance agenda: the stakes are high.
How Abundance Can Win
The second reason abundance advocates have it hard is that their opponents will not allow them to have the argument that they want to have. They will need to more directly challenge some long-held ideas about environmental law and community input in order to successfully reform infrastructure development or increase housing supply in the United States.
The laws that enable various interest groups to intervene in public or private development projects were extraordinarily well-intentioned, and most Americans still broadly support the principles behind those laws. Those laws were intended to address issues like environmental protection, the preservation of historic buildings or endangered species, and to provide opportunities for local community input on development projects.
There is little to argue with regarding the principles behind these laws, which is why most Americans rightfully support them. The reason America has so much difficulty building is because of the way those principles were applied by the laws that the abundance agenda needs to reform. That is a nuanced distinction which is almost entirely lost in contemporary debates or news coverage of procedural reforms. For instance, when California’s legislature enacted some moderate reforms of its environmental law last year, the New York Times referred to the reforms as “a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns.”
That makes the policy debate challenging. The abundance coalition needs to raise the salience of the laws that make it difficult to build housing or infrastructure in the United States, but doing so pushes the movement into uncomfortable territory: the principles of environmental protection, community input, preservation, and the like. As long as the salient debate over development is simply highlighting America’s poor development outcomes, and the detailed policy debates are limited to think tanks, lobbyists, and legislative staff, the scarcity coalition is in a strong position.
That isn’t just a theory. States like California were trying to reform development laws for decades before “abundance” became a national movement. Currently, California has produced many reforms and very poor results, because the scarcity coalition has been successful at watering down reforms and protecting the laws that matter.
The crux of the problem for the abundance movement is that arguments for procedural reforms must be made in the abstract, and in the abstract any society must make tradeoffs in development policy. Efficient development is on one end of the scale and other important issues like environmental impacts, social impacts, community input, or the preservation of endangered species are on the other. Everything on the scale is important, but acknowledging tradeoffs is an uphill political debate. This explains the scarcity coalition’s broad public messaging success over the last five decades. It is far easier, politically speaking, to claim that there is no tradeoff between, say, environmental protection and infrastructure development. To point out that such a tradeoff obviously exists and argue that we should account for it is a far greater challenge.
Of course, in the real world, none of these tradeoffs are made in the abstract. Agencies, elected representatives, and judges never decide between environmental protection or community input and development. They instead make specific decisions regarding specific tradeoffs on specific projects. At its core, development policy is less of a debate over competing principles or values, and more of a debate over process. And to the extent American development policy has gone awry, it has been a matter of process, rather than environmental values.
Those are better terms of debate for the abundance agenda, too. But even if the movement is able to reframe the debate over development policy from environmental principles to decision-making processes, it will still face a difficult task. The abundance agenda will need to remain true to the broad principles of environmental protection and community input while arguing for the reform of a generation of laws that were intended to promote those very same principles. In other words, the abundance agenda needs to argue that the previous generation of reformers got the principles right, but the process wrong.
The abundance agenda is a promising political movement. Its message has the potential to unite a number of currently divided interests on the American left into a coalition that could meaningfully effect change. However, the road ahead is difficult. The scarcity coalition opposing them is larger, wealthier, better organized, and highly motivated. To be successful, supporters of the abundance agenda will need to do more to point out the obvious flaws of the status quo. They’ll need to argue against some specific policies that the environmental movement got right in principle but wrong in practice, and their internecine conflict with the scarcity coalition will need to become much more direct.
Michael Bennon is a Research Scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. He leads the center’s Global Infrastructure Policy Research Initiative.
Follow Persuasion on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.
And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below:
 | A guest post by
|