Don’t Squander the Potential of Abundance
It shouldn’t just be a partisan plan to reform the Democrats. It should be an American plan to reform America.
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America is talking about Abundance, and for good reason. Abundance is more than just a recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It’s the most successful new intellectual movement in center and center-left circles for at least a decade. Anyone paying attention to the Washington scene has noticed a surge of writers suddenly invoking the word “Abundance,” and think tanks becoming de facto Abundance affiliates.
I share much of the enthusiasm. I see the potential of Abundance to help reform what’s broken in America and address our national discontent. The basic idea is uncontroversial. America has institutions charged with important missions to accomplish things we need done. Countless people get paid well to advance those missions, and yet they never seem to happen. America should actually produce the things it says it wants.
I’m concerned, however, about how Abundance has been presented to America—as a partisan movement to fix a broken Democratic Party. It could be more, part of a broader American agenda to fix what’s broken in America. Put simply, I fear it falling into the Mugwump trap.
What Is Abundance?
National institutions with missions critical to people’s lives should fulfil their obligations with competence and excellence. Right now, many of them don’t.
As Klein and Thompson’s book accurately decries, we allocate billions to build high-speed rail, and years later there’s still no high-speed rail. We allocate billions to build broadband networks and charging stations, and years later we’ve built neither broadband networks nor charging stations. However, focusing just on government plans for infrastructure vastly understates the problem. This illness permeates every institution in America. It’s expensive schools that fail to reach students. It’s a corporate sector increasingly organized to provide frustrating and shoddy services on purpose. It’s a Congress that refuses to do its job to legislate. It’s incentives that allow finance to eat the real economy. It’s an America that costs a lot, has a lot of processes, and is presided over by people with impressive resumes and paychecks, but provides a barely acceptable experience to the ordinary American.
People tend to make this case in the neutral language of economics. We say America’s institutions are wasteful and inefficient, we lack state capacity, or we’ve erected impediments to investment. How about, it’s infuriating? Things ought to actually work. We need things done. People who live in nice houses and are paid well to accomplish tasks don’t accomplish them—and don’t seem to even care that they don’t. It’s a major source of the anger coursing through America.
The problem is in pitching this agenda as a partisan reform plan for the Democrats. I understand why Klein and Thompson believe Abundance is a good idea for Democrats. The Democratic Party’s worldview centers around using government and institutional heights to push economic and moral progress. The failure of the Blue model of governance to accomplish its agenda is a major drag on the party. Adopting Abundance thinking is a way for Democrats to earn back some of the squandered trust. However, it’s a blunder for the Abundance movement to turn itself into just another partisan reform plan.
To begin with, I’m hardly confident the Democratic Party is prepared to embrace an Abundance agenda given its present coalition. The unstated problem is that it isn’t an accident that the party doesn’t accomplish goals, so tweaking a few regulations can’t fix it. Influential factions inside the party are purposefully pursuing goals they consider higher moral imperatives than building things, fulfilling missions, or making things work. Many progressive groups perceive Abundance as hostile to their priorities for good reason—because it is. This is why there’s already been so much pushback in Democratic circles against Abundance. Reorienting the party around these ideas means disempowering powerful people, and they’re going to fight.
Even if you did somehow manage to reform the Democrats around these ideas, however, what then?
We live in an era of national rebellion built around the idea that America’s technocratic and professional elite ignored the interests of the majority, looked out for its own interests, and failed to govern wisely or well, creating a national breach in trust. Selling Abundance as a technocratic agenda to put the same people back in power on the promise that this time they’ll do better can’t address this discontent or calm the national storm. Maybe you can improve governance in a few Blue pockets, but that’s all. If you want to build a winning national coalition that can implement your ideas, sustain them over time, and create a new governing philosophy for America, a version of Abundance sold as a technocratic Democratic Party reform plan is a catastrophe.
Abundance, in other words, is in danger of falling into the Mugwump trap.
The Mugwump Trap
America has had a lot of good-government political reform movements over its history—Barnburners, Liberal Republicans, Half-Breeds, and all the modern movements you know—and they all ended up like the Mugwumps. They did a bit of good, couldn’t push back the political ocean, and eventually the system ground them down restoring the status quo.
The Mugwumps were a late nineteenth-century reform movement looking to address Gilded Age corruption. This was a dangerous time in America in which the middle class, mostly family farmers left behind by industrialization, was battered while new millionaires amassed fortunes, railroads dominated markets, new immigrants crowded into cities to find sweatshop jobs, and politics was a dirty pit of political machines and graft. Republicans, the more liberal party then, nominated the powerful but scandal-plagued James G. Blaine for president. A bloc of party reformers committed to clean government took a moral stand and walked out, helping to elect the rival Democrat, Grover Cleveland, who had a reformist reputation. Cleveland was elected, and was mildly better on corruption than most presidents of his era. Otherwise, however, the system remained intact while the Mugwumps got drummed out of politics as traitors without a party, their political careers destroyed.
Some version of this always happens when good-government reformers try to fix a broken party. You insert fresh ideas into a dysfunctional machine, and the rusty gears mangle them. As Tammany Hall boss George Washington Plunkitt said: “There have been reform committees of fifty, of sixty, of seventy, of one hundred and all sorts of numbers that started out to do up the regular political organizations. They were mornin’ glories—looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.” This is what I predict will inevitably happen to Abundance if it remains a purely Democratic Party reform.
But there’s a better alternative. Instead of reforming a party, operate across the system to reform politics and America. Tie your ideas to a larger agenda that addresses the source of the national discontent and create a paradigm-shifting movement to reorient the political order. Follow the path of the movement that, just a few years after the Mugwumps failed, accomplished everything they sought to do and more—the historical Progressive Movement.
American Abundance
The Progressives were without question the most successful reform movement in America’s history. Instead of trying to reform a party, they offered an ideology and agenda attacking the source of the popular anger of their era—the one-two punch of the economic shock of industrialization and Gilded Age stagnation, corruption, and decline. Their agenda attacked political corruption, but tied this to countless other reforms like ending child labor, imposing maximum work hours, breaking up abusive monopolies with antitrust legislation, creating public schools, ending sweatshops, and securing women’s suffrage. They framed these reforms as interconnected solutions rooted in a shared ideology aimed directly at the forces fueling public discontent—economic disruption, political dysfunction, abusive work practices, middle-class deterioration, corruption, stagnation, and a sense of national decline.
Instead of operating as a party adjunct, the Progressives organized as a force outside the system exerting political influence. In practice, they mainly worked at first through Republicans, becoming a powerful bloc inside the party, but gained influence with the Democrats, and in third-party movements too, eventually gaining control of both national parties and the system. The 1912 election was essentially a national referendum over which candidate was the most Progressive. In the end, they enacted almost their entire agenda and solidified it.
That should be the model for Abundance. Instead of a Democratic Party movement, it should be an American movement working to reform politics and America. It should be rolled into a larger and bolder agenda speaking directly to the causes of the rebellion tearing America apart. Americans from the political left to right are angry at the system and the people running it. They’re angry about ineffective government, as well as ineffective private institutions, lack of transparency, poor leadership, corruption, and unaccountable control. All these problems stem from interrelated causes with the same root—a painful collapse in national trust. Abundance can help address that lack of trust, but only if paired with other reforms targeting transparency, accountability, and the middle class. Abundance is bigger than many of its proponents think. It’s not just an agenda about helping governments build. It’s an idea about making institutions work.
This is how you build an agenda that will do more than just win elections, or fix a party, but will instead reshape the debate in America. Our institutions need to fulfill critical missions. We must build more, produce more, and do more. Our leaders should be more responsive and effective. America must earn back faith and trust. Abundance should be a movement to do that with a meaningful agenda for national renewal and reform.
A version of this piece appeared on Renew The Republic.
Frank DiStefano is the author of The Next Realignment and writes the Substack Renew The Republic.
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