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Steven Teles is a professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He is the co-author of a number of books, including The Captured Economy, Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites, and Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Steven Teles discuss what abundance means in practice, how it fits into a broader policy agenda, and the future of U.S. universities.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I have a question for you about the abundance agenda, which has been discussed a lot in recent weeks and months. You have a book that I read at the time and found really interesting, co-authored with Brink Lindsey, that touches on similar themes—about the ways in which various regulations make it hard to build or do things in the United States. Do you see that book as a precursor to the abundance movement? Or is it different in some way? Lay out for us what you argued back then and how that relates to the current discussion.
Steven Teles: Yeah, I think certainly Ezra and Derek would say that their book draws on a lot of stuff that came before. The idea of abundance or the word sort of comes from Derek. But there's a lot of people who've been working on similar themes for a long time. Brink Lindsey and I published this book called The Captured Economy back in 2017. The argument was that the economy had been simultaneously growing slower and getting more unequal. This was sort of a paradox if you had cut your teeth reading Arthur Okun's Equality and Efficiency when you were in school. That was not a thing that was supposed to happen—there was supposed to be a big trade-off between growth and inequality. We said that we've been getting a decline in growth and an increase in inequality. That's because of pervasive rent-seeking.
Mounk: What are some examples of that rent-seeking? I imagine you're talking, for example, about the fact that there's a real shortage of doctors in the United States—not because nobody wants to be a doctor, not because nobody would be able to become a doctor, but because the medical associations are limiting how many medical schools there are and how many people can go to medical school.
Teles: The usual story we told in the 80s and 90s is that it’s neoliberalism. This suggests that it's markets that have run rampant. We deregulated everything, and that led to an explosion of inequality. There's enormous growth in occupational licensing, for example in medicine, like you were just describing, throughout this period. This is not a period of deregulation. It's in fact a period in which there's sustained regulatory bias toward upward redistribution.
So the book is largely about this theme of upward redistribution—the degree to which the relatively affluent and advantaged have been able to rig the rules for their benefit. Now that again explains why you can get declining growth—because there's lower innovation, there's lower dynamism, and so you don't get lots of new products and ways of organizing economic activity. But it's also the case that the incumbents can protect themselves against competition. That's doctors, people in finance, and lawyers. In housing, which we've talked a lot about in the book, people who are already the incumbents in the housing market can protect themselves against competition from new supply, which drives up prices.
Mounk: So in housing, that's a fancy way of saying that if you already own a home, then your interest is potentially in driving up home prices, since a lot of your net worth is probably bound up in that home that you own. That is, in the short-term at least, in the interest of people who already own homes. But it makes life incredibly difficult for those who don't own a home, who therefore find homeownership more and more out of reach. And the long-term impact of this is that housing is really expensive when it really wouldn't need to be.
Teles: Yeah. Basically that's true in almost any case where there's an incumbent. Almost any incumbent—having gotten whatever position or resources they've got—wants to prevent competition from the outside: competition from new homeowners, competition from new doctors. And so the story really of the last 40 years is that incumbent, anti-competitive interests have won.
Again, that's opposite to the neoliberalism narrative that many people are comfortable with—this idea that this was a period of deregulation. In fact, it's a period of increasing regulation, increasing market constraint. I do think that fits into the general abundance story. There's a reason why that is part of the prehistory of abundance—because again, it tells a very different story than the neoliberalism story. It tells a story about how our dynamism is breaking down, our ability to build things is breaking down, because we have all of these anti-competitive, cartelized kinds of markets.
If you look at the people who people in abundance talk about—there's always a very clear reference back to Mancur Olson and the idea that economies generally start to break down and sand gets in the gears over time as you get anti-competitive cartels building up. You see even people on the very far left and the very far right of the abundance spectrum have that general way of thinking about the political problem—that the political problem is Gulliver getting tied down by the Lilliputians. It's all these small anti-competitive interests that grow up in a democratic society. And we need to find some way to actually get majoritarianism. I've recently published a paper called “Minoritarianism is Everywhere.” I think both in The Captured Economy and in the abundance narrative, that's the general power story that's behind it.
Mounk: We had this book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on abundance a little while ago that really built on this idea—and then got very quickly polarized. To what extent do you think that book is a continuation of what you were saying? To what extent is it saying something different from you? And to what extent do you think it gets things right or wrong?
Teles: I think, in a way, the direct continuity you can see is through a paper that I wrote with Sam Hammond and Dan Takash for the Niskanen Center called “Cost Disease Socialism,” which built in a way on The Captured Economy argument. At the time, a lot of Democrats were out there proposing all kinds of new subsidies for this or that—healthcare, housing, lots of other things. And the basic argument of the paper was: if you've got a supply domain—something where somebody is able to keep supply from adjusting to demand—and you add more money, you add more subsidy, that subsidy can only get processed through the price. It doesn't actually make it more available, it just pushes the price up.
Mounk: Just to explain that intuition to people who perhaps don't have an economics background—imagine that there's 10 places for schools in your local area. Let's say there's no public schools in some areas, only private schools, and there are 10 spots and 15 kids. Obviously, all the parents want to send their kids to those schools. And because there's very strong demand and limited supply, presumably those private schools are going to be able to charge enormous sums of money. Now let's say the government says this is a problem—we want to fix this, it's impossible for parents to pay $50,000 a year to send their kids to school. We're going to subsidize every kid with $25,000. Now, if that allowed new people to open up new schools and offer new places for kids, then that might actually bring the cost down. But if there's regulatory constraint—the incumbents, the existing school, is basically able to stop any new school from getting approved, and they don't have an incentive to increase the number of kids they themselves admit—then all that happens is those 15 parents now have more financial resources to compete for those 10 existing spots. And so actually what's going to happen is just that the price of these spots is going to go up. But five kids are still going to be without a spot at those schools. Am I roughly capturing this?
Teles: Yeah, and the same intuition works in healthcare. If it's impossible to get new doctors, nurses, hospitals, and you add more subsidies because people can't afford them, that subsidy is just going to go into the pocket of the provider. The same thing is true in housing.
Mounk: By the way, as a side note on healthcare, I think that's something that's really interesting to me in the American debate. Because whether it's people who want to emulate something like the British National Health Service, or whether it's more centrist or center-right reforms of the healthcare system, I'm struck by the fact that virtually nobody wants to talk—A, about the artificial limits on the number of doctors, which we've alluded to a number of times in this conversation, but B, even more so, about the very high salaries of medical professionals in the United States. Nurses in the United States make more than doctors make in most European countries. And it's just a simple question of arithmetic. If the median American household makes $60,000–$70,000 a year, and they need a certain number of hours of medical professionals intersecting with them—in order to help deliver their child, to help diagnose their diseases, to perform an operation if they're seriously sick—if a doctor is making $500,000 and the nurse is making well north of $100,000, it's just going to be incredibly expensive, or bordering on impossible, for average people to pay for those services.
In the end, it's just a question of basic underlying arithmetic. And I'm struck by the fact that people don't talk about the average. Now, I know that doctor salaries—nurse salaries—aren't the lion's share of healthcare costs, but I do think there's just an underlying problem there that people across the political spectrum aren't really willing to face head on.
Teles: Yeah, and I think the thing that The Captured Economy, the “Cost Disease Socialism” paper, and Abundance all have in common is the idea that, in fact, this is a problem that people across the ideological spectrum need to face.
In the “Cost Disease Socialism” paper, we argued that whether you want to get to single-payer, or you want to get to an environment like Paul Ryan envisioned—where people are paying for more of their own healthcare privately—you can't get to either one if you've got a system where the price pressure is so far up. With single-payer, you can't get there because you'll never be able to afford it. Every time you put in more money in order to allow people to buy healthcare, it's just going to send the price back up—and then you're going to be in the subsidy cycle. And similarly, if the price is so high that people are constantly going to the government trying to get help, then you're never going to get them to cover healthcare themselves.
So the basic idea is: you've got to solve the supply problem if we want to go either left or right. And that explains, to some degree, the feeling that we're stuck. We feel like we can't get anywhere—either left or right—because all these supply problems make these things immune to both left and right categories of solutions.
Mounk: I think it helps to lay out a lot of intellectual groundwork for the kind of movement that has arisen around these issues over the last 10 years including in the most obvious area that we've sort of touched on but not been very explicit about which is housing regulation and the so-called NIMBY movement. Traditionally, the people who’ve been very strong are the so-called NIMBYs—the people who say "not in my backyard"—who are all in favor of housing, renewable energy, all kinds of things. But if somebody wants to put a windmill in their neighborhood, or somebody wants to put up a house in their neighborhood, they're saying no—that's going to change the character of our neighborhood, that can lead to new traffic, or, in an honest moment, they might say it's going to lead to the wrong kind of people moving in, we don't want any of that.
We have seen some success in the last few years, including some recent legislative moves in California and elsewhere, towards a more YIMBY environment—where people are saying maybe we do need greater flexibility in being able to build these new kinds of housing. And there's, I think, some excitement about the idea that that could stand at the core of the message of a reform Democratic Party—that the Democratic Party could move toward being a somewhat more aspirational party that actually talks about material abundance in these kinds of terms.
Now, I have two reasons why I'm somewhat skeptical about how likely that is to happen, and I'd love to run this by you, since I know you've thought very carefully about this issue.
The first is that, instinctively, a lot of—not necessarily the voters of the Democratic Party, but the donors, intellectual leaders, etc.—still come from an academic and intellectual background where the instinct is to see problems rather than to want to do things. The instinct is always to say, but what about the adverse environmental effect, even if it's quite minor, of some kind of initiative—rather than to be excited about trying to do something, and change something, and build something.
And the second goes back to the power of the incumbents. A lot of Americans are sitting on housing wealth. And even though it is obviously, in the long run, a huge own goal for a country to make it so hard to build housing—we are all struggling to pay these artificially high housing prices, whether in the form of rent or mortgages—if a lot of people already own a home, their short-term interest is certainly in preserving those property values or even driving them up further.
So it's going to be very hard to make a political case for these kinds of changes. My hunch on the abundance movement is that it is right on the merits, but in terms of making it the center of an electoral platform, it’s a very uphill struggle, and it may never succeed. What is your thinking on this?
Teles: So politically, as I've been thinking a lot about varieties of abundance recently, I think there are, in fact, abundances across the entire left-right spectrum. We just nominated somebody for mayor of New York who at least claims to be in the category of left abundance, or "Red Plenty," or whatever you want to call it—someone who does recognize that there are all these coalitional problems. I always say, the joke is you can't get to full communism through the National Environmental Protection Act. If you really want to do really big things through public ownership, you're not going to be able to do it through the whole panoply of procedural systems we created in the 1970s.
And there are people on the right—who I've sort of jokingly called "dark abundance"—who also are recognizing we have problems. Now, they have other kinds of things they think stand in the way. They think what they call wokeness is the original source of all the seeds on the everything bagel. Therefore we have to get rid of that.
One pathway to the political success of abundance is that it's going to infect everything. It's going to affect every ideology, but it's going to appear differently depending on what people are most worried they can't build. So there are people on the right, and what they're most worried about is not being able to build battleships to counter China. They think we need to build internal state capacity in the Defense Department, in our ability to have a defense industrial base.
Obviously, the people on the left—there's one category I always call "Cascadian abundance," referring to places like Washington and Oregon—are focused on a massive, rapid transition to green energy. But in many ways, the same obstacles still stand in the way. So that's one pathway—that there's abundances across the whole political spectrum.
Now there's a separate question—and again, I've written a pretty widely read piece called “The Rise of the Abundance Faction”—that's about building a specific thing inside the Democratic Party. And the argument I make there is that abundance as an economic agenda—as a way to get growth going, to increase opportunity, to get more housing—goes together with what I would just call being a cultural normie. There's an elective affinity there between those two things. They're not necessarily supported by the same people, but if you think about what's the coalition that could break the power of the old interest group liberalism plus the far left that's been dominating the Democratic Party, it's going to be some combination of people who are motivated by abundance and growth, and people who worry that the Democratic Party has gotten too far out over its skis on crime, on schools, on social disorder, on homelessness, on all those other things.
You can already see that, in a way, in San Francisco. The winning coalition—even in San Francisco now—is this weird coalition of people who are for abundance on housing and economic growth, and who got rid of the previous district attorney in San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, and who also recalled the people who were on the school board. Those things really do fit together. Abundance on its own has to be matched with a kind of cultural appeal that it doesn’t have—but I think it actually fits with that appeal politically and coalitionally.
Mounk: I'm very predisposed to like this idea for a number of reasons that I'll spell out, but I also have one concern about whether I fully agree. The first thing I agree with is that I think there's a lot of temptation among people who focus on economic questions and who aren't necessarily on the far left on some of these cultural issues to say, let's just change the topic.
What they want to do is say: one of the reasons, for example, why left-wing social democratic parties and some of the Democratic Party in the United States are doing less well is that they no longer really have an economic promise to their historic core electorate. So what we need is a credible story to tell about how people are going to be doing better, including perhaps some amount of redistribution. And instead of talking about those losing culture war issues—instead of addressing immigration and trans rights, all of those kinds of things—we should just change the topic and focus on economic issues.
But the reason I've long thought that that's not going to work is that you first have to assure people that you are normie. You first have to assure people that you're not captured by deeply unpopular, alienating ideas.
Teles: That assumes you have control over what the topic is—which is a weird assumption in politics, because politics is a strategic interaction where your opponent gets a say in what the topic is too. That's where the idea that you can simply take your unappetizing set of issues and move the conversation elsewhere falls apart. Obviously, you want a sufficiently attractive economic message so that more of the conversation shifts to that. But that isn't a way to get out of the fact that you've got a bunch of unappetizing cultural offerings.
Mounk: No, exactly. And that, by the way, is a subset of a broader form of wishful thinking that I think is very strong on the left, because the left is now so heavily dominated by people who have spent much of their lives in academia, and to some extent media. There's this belief that if only The New York Times reframed how it talks about certain issues, or if only it never acknowledged the existence of debate around things like youth gender medicine, or didn’t report that a lot of people crossed the southern border during Biden’s term, then those issues wouldn’t enter the public debate and people like Trump wouldn’t be able to exploit them.
I think that’s incredibly naive, both about how much those kinds of institutions ever truly control the agenda, and especially about how much control they have over it in 2025.
So to go back to where we’re at, I agree with you that Democrats need to address those cultural issues without necessarily becoming focused on them. But they do need to assure people that they’re aware of them and willing to engage with them. And the second point I agree with you on, of course, is that a lot of the positions with which the Democratic Party is currently associated are deeply and noxiously unpopular, and they’re a huge problem for the party’s ability to win elections even against someone like Donald Trump.
Now, here’s where I think I might disagree with you. It’s on the extent to which there’s a cultural affinity between the abundance people and the cultural normies, the people who are relatively tolerant and progressive on cultural issues, but who are allergic to anything overly academic, radical, or extreme.
That is to say, I think a lot of the abundance people are cultural normies. But that doesn’t mean that most cultural normies are abundance people.
I think there are really at least three of the four quadrants here. There are people who are far left culturally and also very defensive of the kind of regulations, the kind of bureaucratic sludge that has historically built up. There may not be very many people who are both culturally far left and really into YIMBYism, really into abundance, etc. That seems like a relatively unoccupied quadrant.
There are definitely normies who like economic growth, who think we should be building more housing, who support high-speed rail, who think we should be doing all of those things. But I also think there are plenty of cultural normies who, when you ask them about a whole range of cultural issues, have pretty reasonable, tolerant views. They’re modern people in 2025. But they’re not woke, and they’re quite allergic to that whole vibe.
And yet, when you ask them about building new housing in their neighborhood, their instinct is to say no. When you ask them about cutting some of that regulation, at some level of abstraction they might say yes. But the moment it means they’ll be looking at a windmill in the distance from their house, they’ll say this is terrible, it’s destroying the landscape, and we absolutely don’t want that.
Aren’t there a lot of cultural normies who are going to have a pretty strong NIMBY instinct, whether out of cultural predilection or just plain material self-interest, because they’re already incumbents who own a home?
Teles: So to make sense of my position on this, I think you have to understand what I call the factional theory of party that underlies it. The basic idea here is that we've gotten used to more coherent, homogeneous parties than makes sense for the United States—or really for any country, but especially for a country as big as the United States.
I always use the example of Holland, which is not a very big country, but has an enormous number of parties with representation in the legislature. They have a Social Democratic Party. They have a far-left party. They have far-right parties. They have the Party for the Animals—that’s the actual name of a party that has representation in the legislature. And that makes sense, because they have a more parliamentary style of representation. The United States has two parties.
So we have to take all that heterogeneity—more heterogeneity than they have in Holland—and somehow make it work inside two parties. And historically, the way we've done that is by having institutionally factionalized parties. That is, they’ve been tents in which a number of groups—groups that are more like European parties—are sort of captured.
So you can imagine that back in the 1950s, the Democratic Party had a union faction. It had a Southern Democratic faction. It had a Northern political machine faction. And a party like that works by negotiating. It works by having primaries where you figure out whose relative strength is where, and then they have to somehow come back together.
So they're what I would describe as frenemies. They’re enemies when it comes to who’s going to have the most power in the party, and then they’re friends when they’re facing the other party.
My theory of abundance is not that the entire Democratic Party is going to become an abundance-normie party. It’s that we’ve already got a left DSA faction. We’ve already got the old-coalition Democratic, Joe Biden–Nancy Pelosi, interest group wing. What we don’t have is a faction—it doesn’t have to be anywhere near a majority—that combines abundance on economics and normie on social issues.
But that’s enough to get the party big enough to be consistently not just competitive, but big enough to actually keep out the MAGA right.
So the theory here is about both power within the Democratic Party and how you get the Democratic Party big enough to win. And I think the thing we’ve seen in the last few elections is that whether it’s Harris or Biden or whoever, if they’re going to win, they’re just going to sneak by. Which means they’re trying to squeeze the last drop out of a coalition that’s fundamentally too small.
The aspiration here is the creation of a new faction inside the Democratic Party that’s competing for preeminence. That’s part of that negotiated deal. If you think about 2020, that’s exactly what Biden and the Warren and Sanders left did. They had a primary. Biden won but then, just like a coalition party, everybody got around the table and said, okay, that’s the division of who won. Now we’re going to divide up the spoils.
So Warren got a lot of appointments in the Biden administration. Sanders got people placed in various positions. If you had an abundance faction that was part of that internal negotiation, then the personnel of the party would have to represent that. The message of the party would include more pushback on some of the cultural issues, as opposed to just having an internally homogeneous discussion.
And so that’s the theory. Even if it’s just 10 or 15 or 20 percent, that’s enough to actually get the party big enough to win and to push back against its crazier internal tendencies.
Mounk: Perhaps we're getting too in the weeds here. I guess my question is still, why should those two things be married to each other rather than remain independent? Why shouldn't we have an abundance caucus within the Democratic Party that’s pushing for all of these kinds of policies, but that isn’t necessarily taking sides in the cultural fights within the party? And perhaps there would be some people who are relatively far on the left on cultural issues who might join that kind of caucus.
Why, conversely, shouldn’t we have a cultural moderation caucus—which, to some extent, we already do in the Democratic Party, though it's not nearly sufficiently activated—that could include some people who might be on the NIMBY side of all kinds of things? If we had that, then maybe we’d need representation of each of those factions in the party. And perhaps having two factions fighting for these priorities would be even more influential, because even more of these people would have to be sitting around the table.
So again, I agree with the importance of each of those things. But why should they be one faction rather than two, given that there are issues at stake that, at least in theory, can be separated? And given that there will be at least some voters—perhaps a lot of voters—and even some representatives, who would get on board with the cultural moderation piece but wouldn’t get on board with the abundance piece?
Teles: I would say first that there are economies of scale in factions. If you want to actually push back against the existing power centers of the party, you need a large enough group—one that can include its own internal heterogeneity.
So I think there are going to be people who lean more in one direction or another. The other thing I’d say is, I don’t really like the term cultural moderation, because I think the really damaging set of issues for Democrats are more about social order. I think the trans stuff is a problem too. But the bigger problem for the Democratic Party is that it’s viewed, to some degree, as the party of disorder. It’s viewed as the party of people sleeping on the streets, of crime, of disorder at the border—all of those kinds of issues.
And I do think those actually go together with the abundance stuff more than you might think. Because for most voters, those are questions about whether government is working for them on the really basic things government is supposed to do.
What abundance tries to do is center the fundamental material challenges people have. The challenges of raising their kids, of whether the university they send them to seems completely crazy. For most people, that’s a public service. They want to feel that the public service is aligned with the relatively normal preferences they have. Same thing with the police. Same thing with the border.
So I actually think those go together—the emphasis on material issues, on economics, on really simple things like, can you afford housing? Can you afford healthcare? And also, is the government keeping you safe? Is it running schools you can send your kids to with a relatively high level of confidence?
It’s about trying to center those relatively normal considerations, instead of constantly pushing the cultural envelope with things that seem eccentric and are not really appealing to what most voters care about.
Mounk: A couple of thoughts on this. One is just, I guess, semantic. It’s not clear to me why those bread-and-butter, very important public order issues can’t be framed in terms of cultural moderation. It seems to me that how people think about that is, for example: yes, I too am concerned about police violence in general, and police violence against African Americans in particular. That is a very reasonable concern.
But if that leads you to the conclusion that we should defund the police, that is ridiculous. That is a form of extremism. I am a cultural moderate. I think that is way out there.
Yes, I think we should treat immigrants humanely, and that DREAMers, for example, deserve a road to citizenship. But if a Biden administration puts in place policies that lead to a huge surge of people coming across the border, that is a form of extremism driven by a set of cultural values that I strongly disagree with. I’m a cultural moderate. I don’t like that kind of cultural extremism.
So the first point is, why is it that you only seem to want to apply the term cultural moderation to topics which—if you listen to somebody like Sarah Longwell and her podcast and focus groups—I think are also very important to a lot of voters, but which I agree with you are perhaps ultimately less important than the public order stuff? Why apply that term only to those issues?
The second, related question, which is perhaps a little more substantive, is: aren’t you underplaying the extent to which these two concerns can actually cross-cut?
So if somebody is a homeowner in a nice but not incredibly affluent neighborhood, and they feel that the neighborhood one over—which is a little bit poorer, a little less affluent—has started to go a little out of hand, crime is up, public order is a problem, perhaps there’s some drug dealing going on, etc., and you come in with an abundance agenda—which, again, on the substance I think is absolutely right—saying: we’re going to upzone your neighborhood, there’s going to be new people coming in...
That person, who might be a complete cultural normie, is going to say, hang on a second, my worry here is that we’re going to bring the disorder to this neighborhood.
That is precisely why this idea of we don’t want the character of our neighborhood to change is such a dog whistle in those kinds of contexts. It sometimes comes from a, I think in the long run counterproductive, sometimes perhaps short-sighted, but ultimately in some ways understandable concern about those kinds of public order issues.
Teles: Well, let me actually answer the question in two ways. One is, I actually think substantively, YIMBY and public order go together because if you do want more housing, if you do want people to be able to build, I think you need to guarantee them that those new neighbors are not going to be a source of public disorder. So I do think there’s a kind of credible commitment thing there. Yes, we want more housing. We want apartments being built. But somebody is going to be on top of that. Somebody is going to be making sure that—again, most of the people who are going to be moving in also want police protection and order maintenance—so there’s not really a conflict there, so long as, as you were suggesting, the police are serving the public. So long as they’re not actually a source of risk or harm themselves.
That’s why those two things go together. Having police who are actually out there, who are aggressive, who are trying to prevent crime and who are well-trained not to abuse citizens. So one thing I’ll say is, those go together. If you want people to accept more housing, they have to believe it’s not going to be a source of disorder, and you have to be able to credibly make that argument. That’s why housing and increasing policing go together with these things politically.
The other thing I’d say is, I don’t think there’s any natural alignment in politics. There’s no set of positions that naturally go together. I’m influenced here by Hans Noel’s book on political parties, which argues that both liberalism and conservatism are not assemblages of positions that just naturally fit together.
If you think about fusionism in conservatism—the idea that Cold War hawkishness, religious conservatism, and free markets all belong together—those things aren’t natural. Somebody did political work to convince people that they fit, and to think about policies that made them work together.
So as we say in our business, that’s a socially constructed coalition, as opposed to a natural one. And social construction is something political entrepreneurs do. That’s why I think part of this project of actually making this work—of getting abundance to have enough power to get leverage inside the Democratic Party and in national politics—is that you have to make that thing feel natural in a way that it doesn’t necessarily already. You have to emphasize the places where there’s an affinity between those two things. That’s what coalition builders and makers do.
And that’s why—again, me and Matt Yglesias text each other all the time about how people don’t get this connection—they think you can do abundance and still have a lot of weird, exotic cultural politics. But if you really want to make this a power center over time, someone has to create that affinity. Part of that is also pulling people in from the sidelines of politics. It’s not about changing the minds of the already mobilized. A lot of normies are simply turned off by a politics that’s dominated by the kinds of issues we’re talking about.
This is even true in elite universities. If you think about the way politics happens at a place like Hopkins, where we both teach, there are a lot of normies out there. Seventy-five percent of our campus are STEM majors, who often think the political categories shaped by the rest of the university are just weird and don’t speak to them. But a lot of those people—especially engineers—have a vocation of making stuff. You could politicize that if you wanted. That would change the mix of people who are involved in politics.
Just to go back to the housing point—even the housing thing is more complicated. If you think about a lot of the YIMBY issues, yes, if you’re going to build more housing down the street and that increases supply, well, maybe that decreases the value of your own home.
But if you increase the possibility that you can subdivide your house, or build an ADU in the backyard, then deregulating actually increases the value of your house. Now you can subdivide it into two properties that are worth more than just one single-family home.
So again, this is another case where I think there are ways to appeal even to incumbents in the housing market. But somebody has to do that work. You can’t just deny that there’s a potential problem. Some political entrepreneur has to be creating policies that address that potential conflict—and then find ways to bring those people into a coalition with others they may agree with on other issues.
Mounk: I think you're pretty convincing on that. I'll just say one more thing to put a pin on this conversation. There's always a tendency to think that the set of policies one favors are also the set of policies that are going to be electorally popular. In primary elections, people nearly always believe that the candidate they favor on substantive and normative grounds is also the candidate who's most likely to win the general election. And I think that often isn’t the case.
And one of the areas where my instincts go furthest apart is some of this abundance stuff. It seems to me that, for the well-being of Americans—and for people in other countries that have their own problems of abundance as well, including where I currently am in Europe during a heatwave—the strange European idea that it’s perfectly fine for the environment to heat your house to your content in the winter, but if you air-condition any building in the summer then somehow the world’s environment is going to explode. I think an abundance agenda that proselytizes the advantages of having air conditioning in southern Europe would certainly be good for Europe as well.
So on substantive grounds, I’m very much in favor of the abundance agenda. I just worry that some of my friends and colleagues—and comrades in this fight, I suppose—are understating the extent to which, in the short run, it’s going to be an electoral liability.
Now, in the long run, it’s very important for the Democratic Party to show that it can govern. The contrast between California and Texas at the moment is very damaging to Democrats. So being able to govern on an abundance agenda is something that could improve the party’s brand over time. I just worry that there’s an understatement of how hard it’s going to be to put that message out there in a way that is electorally winning rather than losing. But since you mentioned universities, I want to talk a little bit about that—it's a related issue, but a distinct one as well.
First of all, what do you think the university environment is like nowadays? I think it’s hard to speak about the shortcomings of universities at the moment because I think they are real and of long standing, and at the same time there is a very dangerous political attack on universities that sees them as enemies to such an extent that it just wants to weaken them as institutions of American social life—which is bad for a number of reasons.
So first, how do you assess what the remaining strengths of universities are, and where some of the concerns about ideological monoculture are well justified? And secondly, how do you think the academic milieu—the fact that nearly everybody who has anything to say in the Democratic Party now is a product of elite universities, in a way that just wasn’t the case 50 years ago—is shaping and misshaping the broader intellectual conversation, especially on the left and perhaps the center, in the United States?
Teles: Yeah, so that’s a lot to chew on. First of all, to state my theory of universities—which I laid out in a piece that ran in National Affairs last summer on academic sectarianism—I think there is a problem in the politics of professors. Not in the sense that there’s some normative standard by which we know what the political preferences of the professoriate ought to be, and until we hit that number, we’re missing the mark. That would be a strange thing to believe.
But on the other hand, I think there is clearly self-selection out of academia, because people look at who’s in academia now and assume it’s not for them. There are lots of disciplines where the subjects being studied don’t reflect the kinds of interests they have. The obvious ones people keep talking about are things like the sociology or history of the military—or military history itself—or studies of religion and other subjects like that, which used to be major fields and now are not.
A lot of people who are somewhere between normie and conservative look at the absence of those subjects and conclude the field’s not for them. They look at who’s going into graduate school now—which, in my perception, leans significantly further left even than when I was in grad school—and they see a more activist conception of what the job of a graduate student is than what existed when I was coming up.
They say, well, that’s not for me. I might be interested in books, I might be interested in research, but if that’s what it is, then it clearly isn’t for me. And that process becomes recursive. That, I think, is what’s happened in academia.
That’s a problem for society. It’s a problem for research. Because research needs internal conflict. It needs people asking questions about the footnotes, rerunning the model, challenging assumptions. And doing all of that takes motivated cognition. That is, good scholarship doesn’t come from people being neutral. It comes out of the process of having motivation—often ideological motivation—to do the checking, to press people on the assumptions, to test and refine the work. That’s my theory of what’s gone wrong in academia.
I think we should try to work on that so that academia serves its own ends better, so that universities are better for students and produce better research.
But I do not believe, in any way, that doing so is going to prevent what this current administration is doing. Johns Hopkins—our university—has had a president who’s been as far out on these issues as anyone. We’ve created a partnership with AEI. We’re building a new school of government—which I’m sitting in right now—that has ideological diversity as a founding value. And we got all of our grants cut too.
So I think the people who believe this is going to give them some kind of Chris Rufo repellent are entirely wrong. There seems to be no evidence that the MAGA-type actors distinguish between the people who are actually trying to work on these issues and the people who aren’t.
Mounk: Well, I largely agree with that. But just to say first that, thankfully, so far as I understand, Johns Hopkins has not been in the direct firing line of the administration in the way that Harvard and Columbia have. Hopkins has lost a lot of funding—because Hopkins is very good at getting federal funding, given its excellence in STEM and other areas—but from my understanding, there hasn’t been a direct attack on Hopkins in the way there has been on some of those other universities.
More importantly, I think it’s a question of where the reasonable public is going to shake out. Ten years ago, a majority of Americans had a positive opinion of higher education. And if that were still the case, it might be somewhat more difficult for the Trump administration to be doing what it's doing now. That said, the Trump administration is doing plenty of unpopular things—plenty of things that are pretty far out there—so who knows?
But when I’m thinking over the course of 20 or 30 years, I’m thinking about where the willingness of the American public to invest in things like high-level research grants—grants that allow universities to do basic research into really important things—is going to shake out. Twenty or thirty years from now, what will the American public’s willingness be to tolerate endowments that enjoy some amount of tax-favored status? Those questions are going to matter a lot. So I don’t think we have a disagreement on that. In the short run, I don’t think this makes a huge difference. But there is, beyond the most important question of how universities live up to their mission, also a question of how universities continue to justify themselves to the broader public.
These universities rely on the goodwill of the taxpayer. And the question is: what can they do so that the average taxpayer looks at these institutions and says, I don’t agree with everything that happens at universities, I don’t agree with everything this university does, but I can recognize the value these universities provide to our country? And that, I think, is a legitimate question to ask—and it’s a question that’s responsive to some of the things universities do or don’t do.
Teles: When I think about the things that really damage universities’ reputations, I actually think a lot of the protests and sit-ins that followed the attack on Israel really damaged universities. Because it again seemed like universities were taking a side in a very highly conflictual way.
If the people who were sitting in at Columbia had all been protesting against America’s open immigration policy—and those people, as far as I can tell, often have a lot of equipment and guns—if that had been the group sitting in, universities would not have treated them the way they treated the protesters against Israel’s policy in Gaza. I think people saw that. And again, this goes back to my point about order. A large percentage of Americans just don’t like social disorder. And what they saw was universities allowing disorder—legitimizing it. This has happened all over campuses.
You go back to the 1960s—Ronald Reagan ran largely on the “mess in Berkeley,” and by that he meant the protests. I actually think there’s a question we need to be asking now about whether protest is even something we think should be part of the university experience. And this is one of my more far-out positions: I think we’ve sort of come to assume that protest is part of the all-American university experience, in the same way that sports and fraternities are. That it’s just part of the package.
Just as I think we might need to rethink how much sports and fraternities are part of the university experience, I also think there’s a real question about protest. Because protest, especially in a residential learning environment, often carries a kind of menacing quality. And it’s not the thing we’re supposed to be doing. The thing we’re supposed to be doing is learning how to argue with each other, how to discuss with each other. Protest is actually something different.
So I do wonder whether one of the responses universities should consider is not just getting more ideological diversity, but also returning in some ways to our knitting—reading, sitting together, discussing—rather than all these other things we’ve added onto the university experience.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Steven discuss declining trust in U.S. institutions, and how intellectual movements can actually have an impact on the world. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
