PART 2:
Revealingly, when the government does act swiftly, it frequently does so by suspending or ignoring its standard procedures. In January 2020, researchers in Seattle spent weeks trying and failing to get government permission to test the flu samples they had gathered for coronavirus, which was spreading rapidly elsewhere. Eventually, the researchers just ignored the rules and ran the tests, creating the first measure of the spread of COVID in the U.S. Similarly, Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s greatest and arguably only triumph, involved an end run around normal vaccine-development protocol. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro got an overpass on I-95 rebuilt quickly and safely, but only by suspending normal highway-construction bureaucratic requirements. The fact that the government has to ignore its rules if it wants to do something important ought to raise the question of why those rules have to be followed the rest of the time.
All of these policies sound so obvious and unobjectionable that one might understandably grow a bit suspicious. Who would favor keeping a bunch of pointless rules? Why would anybody oppose abundance?
You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century.
In the years after World War II, the New Deal seemed to have permanently triumphed, and the legitimacy and power of government were beyond contestation. Many liberals now believed they could direct their energies in new directions. The task was to prevent the government machine, powered by its unstoppable alliance of Big Business and Big Labor, from subordinating the needs of the citizens. A new vision took hold, shared by writers and activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader. In his 2021 book, Public Citizens, the historian Paul Sabin describes this citizen-activist movement as “a legal attack, led by liberals, on the post–World War II administrative state.”
Unlike the Roosevelt generation that had preceded them, these liberals saw their task as restraining the power of government, rather than establishing it. “The fundamental wrong,” Carson said in a 1963 speech, “is the authoritarian control that has been vested in the agricultural agencies.”
This new, anti-statist form of liberalism had two hallmarks. One was its reliance on lawyers and lawsuits. This reflected the influence of Nader, who rocketed to fame as a consumer advocate and became the most admired man in America by articulating a distrust of the system that defined public sentiment in the age of Vietnam and Watergate. “We are creating a new professional citizen role,” he boasted to Time magazine. Those citizens were lawyers, or were represented by lawyers, who would devote their power to prying open the works of the state and holding it accountable.
The second was its faith in groups of citizens outside of government who could serve as a check on its power. The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 New Left manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society, envisioned a huge network of citizen-activist groups: “Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues.”
These visionaries believed the future of activism would revolve around a collection of specialized citizen-activist groups. And they were correct. By 1971, The Washington Post reported that Nader had created a “bewildering network of organizations, all devoted to a staggering array of public issues” and bearing Nader’s imprint, many of which still operate today. They pushed for the passage of laws, then fought in court to expand their reach, creating tools to slow down or block government action.
They achieved some genuinely laudable results, including laws regulating pollution and consumer safety, and those protecting poor communities from being steamrolled by the likes of Robert Moses. But their emphasis on litigation and cumbersome legal requirements (what the law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish”), combined with the empowerment of interest groups, has over time inverted Roosevelt’s preference for results over legalism. The Naderites sought to prevent the government from doing harm, but in too many cases, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, provides the clearest example. Passed in 1969, at the zenith of the environmental movement’s influence, the law required the government to undertake environmental-impact studies before authorizing major projects and created elaborate legal hurdles to navigate.
Activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund saw NEPA as a potent tool to stop Washington (and, through state-level copycat laws, state and local governments) from building harmful projects. They pursued an energetic legal strategy to expand the law’s reach, turning it into a suffocating weapon against development. Over time, the environmental-impact statements required to start a project have ballooned from about 10 pages to hundreds; the process now takes more than four years on average to complete.
Most perversely, NEPA and similar laws have become a way to stop efforts to address climate change. The environmental movement was created during an era when activists saw their highest priority as preserving nature by stopping construction. In the era of global warming, however, preserving nature requires building new infrastructure: green-energy sources, pipelines to transmit the energy, and new housing and transportation in cities where density allows for a less carbon-intensive lifestyle. But environmental groups have not, for the most part, altered their desire to stop building, nor have they reconsidered their support for laws that freeze the built environment in place.
Joe Biden learned this the hard way.
After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, Democrats began to realize that, thanks to a maze of legal impediments, the hundreds of billions of dollars in green-energy infrastructure they had authorized would not materialize any time soon, if at all.
Democratic moderates, with support from the Biden administration, set out to negotiate a permitting-reform bill that would impose a two-year cap on environmental-review statements and allow the federal government to plan the transmission lines needed to connect the new green-energy sources. Many Republicans, suspicious of infringing on states’ rights, opposed it. More striking, so did hundreds of environmental groups. They objected to legislation that would, in the words of one letter to Democratic leadership, “truncate and hollow-out the environmental review process, weaken Tribal consultations, and make it far harder for frontline communities to have their voices heard.”
And because climate activists opposed the bill, many progressives did too. “This is a good day for the climate and the environment,” Senator Bernie Sanders said after the permitting-reform bill died in Congress. Two years later, in the waning days of the Biden administration, a second effort to pass permitting reform failed again, and while moderate Democrats expressed dismay, progressives celebrated. “Thanks to the hard-fought persistence and vocal opposition of environmental justice communities all across the country, the Dirty Deal has finally been laid to rest,” then–House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva boasted.
Last year, Biden prevailed upon Congress to suspend environmental review for new factories that would produce computer chips, under the bipartisan CHIPS Act. He did so by relying on a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats, over strident objections from environmental activists and progressive Democrats.
Progressives are not indifferent to building green-energy infrastructure or manufacturing computer chips, but they place greater value on defending the prerogatives of local activists. The New Left model of citizen-activist groups empowered by litigation remains the core of the progressive movement’s theory of change.
“Meaningful community engagement is the key to unlocking our clean-energy future,” Christy Goldfuss, the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said by way of explaining the group’s opposition to permitting reform. Some housing activists likewise oppose zoning reform because they see the key to housing justice as giving local activists the power to block new housing. The New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom has held up the tenant-union movement as a way to solve the housing crisis. “Its strongest political strategy at the moment,” she writes, “is pushing for local ordinances that give community members the authority to assess new housing developments that use city resources to determine whether they would displace residents or reduce a neighborhood’s affordability.”
The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.
Revealingly, when the government does act swiftly, it frequently does so by suspending or ignoring its standard procedures. In January 2020, researchers in Seattle spent weeks trying and failing to get government permission to test the flu samples they had gathered for coronavirus, which was spreading rapidly elsewhere. Eventually, the researchers just ignored the rules and ran the tests, creating the first measure of the spread of COVID in the U.S. Similarly, Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s greatest and arguably only triumph, involved an end run around normal vaccine-development protocol. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro got an overpass on I-95 rebuilt quickly and safely, but only by suspending normal highway-construction bureaucratic requirements. The fact that the government has to ignore its rules if it wants to do something important ought to raise the question of why those rules have to be followed the rest of the time.
All of these policies sound so obvious and unobjectionable that one might understandably grow a bit suspicious. Who would favor keeping a bunch of pointless rules? Why would anybody oppose abundance?
You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century.
In the years after World War II, the New Deal seemed to have permanently triumphed, and the legitimacy and power of government were beyond contestation. Many liberals now believed they could direct their energies in new directions. The task was to prevent the government machine, powered by its unstoppable alliance of Big Business and Big Labor, from subordinating the needs of the citizens. A new vision took hold, shared by writers and activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader. In his 2021 book, Public Citizens, the historian Paul Sabin describes this citizen-activist movement as “a legal attack, led by liberals, on the post–World War II administrative state.”
Unlike the Roosevelt generation that had preceded them, these liberals saw their task as restraining the power of government, rather than establishing it. “The fundamental wrong,” Carson said in a 1963 speech, “is the authoritarian control that has been vested in the agricultural agencies.”
This new, anti-statist form of liberalism had two hallmarks. One was its reliance on lawyers and lawsuits. This reflected the influence of Nader, who rocketed to fame as a consumer advocate and became the most admired man in America by articulating a distrust of the system that defined public sentiment in the age of Vietnam and Watergate. “We are creating a new professional citizen role,” he boasted to Time magazine. Those citizens were lawyers, or were represented by lawyers, who would devote their power to prying open the works of the state and holding it accountable.
The second was its faith in groups of citizens outside of government who could serve as a check on its power. The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 New Left manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society, envisioned a huge network of citizen-activist groups: “Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues.”
These visionaries believed the future of activism would revolve around a collection of specialized citizen-activist groups. And they were correct. By 1971, The Washington Post reported that Nader had created a “bewildering network of organizations, all devoted to a staggering array of public issues” and bearing Nader’s imprint, many of which still operate today. They pushed for the passage of laws, then fought in court to expand their reach, creating tools to slow down or block government action.
They achieved some genuinely laudable results, including laws regulating pollution and consumer safety, and those protecting poor communities from being steamrolled by the likes of Robert Moses. But their emphasis on litigation and cumbersome legal requirements (what the law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish”), combined with the empowerment of interest groups, has over time inverted Roosevelt’s preference for results over legalism. The Naderites sought to prevent the government from doing harm, but in too many cases, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, provides the clearest example. Passed in 1969, at the zenith of the environmental movement’s influence, the law required the government to undertake environmental-impact studies before authorizing major projects and created elaborate legal hurdles to navigate.
Activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund saw NEPA as a potent tool to stop Washington (and, through state-level copycat laws, state and local governments) from building harmful projects. They pursued an energetic legal strategy to expand the law’s reach, turning it into a suffocating weapon against development. Over time, the environmental-impact statements required to start a project have ballooned from about 10 pages to hundreds; the process now takes more than four years on average to complete.
Most perversely, NEPA and similar laws have become a way to stop efforts to address climate change. The environmental movement was created during an era when activists saw their highest priority as preserving nature by stopping construction. In the era of global warming, however, preserving nature requires building new infrastructure: green-energy sources, pipelines to transmit the energy, and new housing and transportation in cities where density allows for a less carbon-intensive lifestyle. But environmental groups have not, for the most part, altered their desire to stop building, nor have they reconsidered their support for laws that freeze the built environment in place.
Joe Biden learned this the hard way.
After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, Democrats began to realize that, thanks to a maze of legal impediments, the hundreds of billions of dollars in green-energy infrastructure they had authorized would not materialize any time soon, if at all.
Democratic moderates, with support from the Biden administration, set out to negotiate a permitting-reform bill that would impose a two-year cap on environmental-review statements and allow the federal government to plan the transmission lines needed to connect the new green-energy sources. Many Republicans, suspicious of infringing on states’ rights, opposed it. More striking, so did hundreds of environmental groups. They objected to legislation that would, in the words of one letter to Democratic leadership, “truncate and hollow-out the environmental review process, weaken Tribal consultations, and make it far harder for frontline communities to have their voices heard.”
And because climate activists opposed the bill, many progressives did too. “This is a good day for the climate and the environment,” Senator Bernie Sanders said after the permitting-reform bill died in Congress. Two years later, in the waning days of the Biden administration, a second effort to pass permitting reform failed again, and while moderate Democrats expressed dismay, progressives celebrated. “Thanks to the hard-fought persistence and vocal opposition of environmental justice communities all across the country, the Dirty Deal has finally been laid to rest,” then–House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva boasted.
Last year, Biden prevailed upon Congress to suspend environmental review for new factories that would produce computer chips, under the bipartisan CHIPS Act. He did so by relying on a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats, over strident objections from environmental activists and progressive Democrats.
Progressives are not indifferent to building green-energy infrastructure or manufacturing computer chips, but they place greater value on defending the prerogatives of local activists. The New Left model of citizen-activist groups empowered by litigation remains the core of the progressive movement’s theory of change.
“Meaningful community engagement is the key to unlocking our clean-energy future,” Christy Goldfuss, the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said by way of explaining the group’s opposition to permitting reform. Some housing activists likewise oppose zoning reform because they see the key to housing justice as giving local activists the power to block new housing. The New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom has held up the tenant-union movement as a way to solve the housing crisis. “Its strongest political strategy at the moment,” she writes, “is pushing for local ordinances that give community members the authority to assess new housing developments that use city resources to determine whether they would displace residents or reduce a neighborhood’s affordability.”
The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.
