Democratic Party Rebuild

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StatUS said:
There just needs to be a trans issues megathread or something so they can post their updates on the sports thing.
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I heard a trans person was playing against girls at the local miniature golf place down the street. Sounds serious. Hope they drive the go carts next.
 
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www.theatlantic.com

The Coming Democratic Civil War

A seemingly wonky debate about the “abundance agenda” is really about power.
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

The Coming Democratic Civil War - The Atlantic
Summarize
By Jonathan ChaitMay 25, 2025, 9 AM ET
The Coming Democratic Civil War


A seemingly wonky debate about the “abundance agenda” is really about power.

Illustration of paperwork being blown away in a wind farm
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic
A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belli is a new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition. Its critics decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by “corporate-aligned interests”; “a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors”; “an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right”; and the historical and moral equivalent of the “Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.”
The factional disputes that tear apart the left tend to involve wrenching, dramatic issues where the human stakes are clear: Gaza, policing, immigration. And so it is more than a little odd that progressive activists, columnists, and academics are now ripping one another to shreds over such seemingly arcane and technical matters as zoning rules, permitting, and the Paperwork Reduction Act.

The intensity of the argument suggests that the participants are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if you look closely beneath the squabbling, that is exactly what they are fighting over.

The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.

In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been “progressive” and “progressive lite.” The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.

That dynamic has only raised the stakes of the abundance agenda within the party. Its ideas are ambitious enough, but its political implications have set off a schismatic conflict not just over a collection of proposals and the Democratic Party’s direction—but over who should have the standing to direct it.

After percolating for years among policy wonks, the abundance agenda—a term coined by my colleague Derek Thompson in a 2022 essay—ascended suddenly in response to the deflating failure of the Biden administration’s policy program.
“We have to prove democracy still works,” Joe Biden said in his first speech to Congress. “That our government still works—and can deliver for the people.” That summer, after the Senate had approved a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, Biden declared the mission accomplished. “Today,” he announced at the White House, “we proved that democracy can still work.”

But in the months and years that followed, an unsettling realization began to creep in. A massive law had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.
More than two years after signing the infrastructure law, Biden was “expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund,” CNN reported. The nationwide network of electric-vehicle-charging stations amounted to just 58 new stations by the time Biden left office. The average completion date for road projects, according to the nonprofit news site NOTUS, was mid-2027. The effort to bring broadband access to rural America, a centerpiece of Biden’s plan to show that he would work to help the entire country and not just the parts that had voted for him, had connected zero customers.
Rather than prove democracy still works, Biden’s experience proved the opposite.

The odd thing about this deflating record is that a very similar thing happened the previous time Democrats held the presidency. Barack Obama came into office facing a catastrophic recession that he believed he could resolve with a gigantic new program of public works. Obama harkened back to the New Deal, when millions of Americans had been employed constructing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, but quickly learned that, as he bitterly put it, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” The lesson sat there, mostly unexamined, for a dozen years, inspiring no efforts to understand or change it, until Biden came into office. A Democratic president again hoped to follow FDR’s model, and again discovered it had somehow become impossible.

This time, the failure inspired a little more introspection. Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?

Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.

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 tripled in 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.
 
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