Abundance and Its Discontents

In May 2022, Ted Nordhaus and I participated in a workshop on “supply-side progressivism” organized by Ezra Klein and Steve Teles at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. As Klein and his coauthor Derek Thompson note in the acknowledgements to Abundance, that workshop took place early on the pair's journey towards the eventual publication of their important new book. Below, I’m publishing a short essay we contributed to that gathering.

Much has changed in the intervening three years. During the workshop, some participants still held out hope that the 117th Congress would pass the Build Back Better Act, which of course would go on to die in the Senate and was only fractionally resuscitated in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. Speaking of, inflation at the time was mounting but not yet the sharp focus of the public’s political attention, let alone the decisive issue in national elections. Some Democrats still talked about Joe Biden like a modern-day LBJ instead of a modern-day King Lear, and some Republicans still believed their party would nominate someone—anyone—other than Donald Trump in 2024.

Throughout it all, the “Abundance Movement” advanced. Essays were written, organizations were founded, conferences were launched, upzoning and nuclear licensing laws were passed, and divisions were cleaved. The movement has now hit a local maximum with the publication of Abundance. And while many overstate how “left-coded” abundance is, Klein and Thompson are clear that, at least for their purposes, abundance is a project for liberals.

Liberals could certainly use a project. In the wake of a nominally narrow but undeniably devastating defeat for progressives in November 2024, abundance is the watchword of the moment. To its adherents, abundance rises to the occasion of America’s broken institutions, and answers voters’ anxieties about the cost of living and governmental dysfunction. To its skeptics, abundance is little more than conspicuous consumption for the professional managerial class. These arguments are all for the better, in my view. Abundance is still in its natal crucible, where it belongs. Worse than controversy at this point would be consensus. We’ve seen in social-intellectual movements in general, and the climate movement in particular, just how much wasted time, effort, money, and anxiety can come from conformity and certainty. Now is the perfect time to contest, not to crystallize, the meaning and mission of abundance.

All that said, I think Ted and my 2022 warnings to supply-side progressives still hold. Despite the final humiliations of the Biden presidency, many of its graduates continue to insist that Bidenism was the abundance agenda, especially in the form of the Inflation Reduction Act. But the Biden team's fecklessness on regulatory reform, and their insistence on weaving climate justice and emissions targets into their “new green industrial policy,” neutered it in precisely the ways Ted and I anticipated. As we wrote three years ago,

Supply-side progressivism is, in this way, an agenda in search of an organized constituency and political institutions capable of realizing it. Without creating those institutions and directly and unapologetically challenging the institutional power of the environmental and public interest movements within the Democratic Party, supply-side progressivism will be stillborn.

Now, clearly, something remains alive and well in supply-side progressivism. Klein and Thompson, for their part, have mounted their own challenge, arguing, among other things, that abundance’s opposite is degrowth. But if that is the case—and it is—then the Bidenistas and other abundance progressives still need to more fully reckon with environmentalism’s foundational commitments to degrowth and limits-based policymaking. There are decades of evidence illustrating these commitments, but one need look no further than the last few years, in the avowed degrowth advocacy from Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, or the opposition to permitting and other regulatory reform by the institutional environmental movement.

How supply-side progressives ultimately untangle the cultural contradictions of abundance is, of course, yet to be seen. Ted and my writing is far from the last word on the subject (we promise). But if the environmentalist and Neo-Brandeisian reactions to abundance are any indication, those contradictions will not be swept under the rug.

You can read our full 2022 essay below.

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Progressivism Against Itself

By Alex Trembath and Ted Nordhaus

Ezra Klein’s “supply-side progressivism” captures the dilemma faced by the contemporary center left project. It invokes, intentionally, Reagan era conservatism, which, beyond its specific and dubious claim about tax policy, speaks to questions of ends as well as means, to the benefits of growing the economic pie, not just fighting over its distribution, to producing more socially beneficial goods, be they better health care, clean energy, or high paying jobs, rather than engaging in zero sum battles over how they are provided, and to the role of the public sector in unleashing productive forces versus restraining or regulating them.

For over a decade, we at the Breakthrough Institute have taken on these questions in our own little corner of the policy world, focused on both the role of government in supporting clean energy innovation and the limits of traditional environmental policies, particularly taxes and regulation, in addressing climate change and building a clean energy economy at the scales necessary to address global warming. More recently, we have further focused on the enormous obstacles to effective climate and clean energy policies presented by foundational environmental policies put in place at the state and federal level in the 1960s and 70s.

But underlying all of these issues are more fundamental questions about the Democratic Party and the progressive project. Contemporary progressivism has been, for a generation, at war with itself, at once promoting government and its capabilities both in theory and fiscally while seeking to constrain and undermine it in practice.

From its origins, culturally and politically, in the New Left revolt against post-war liberalism to its institutionalization in the new public interest movements of the 1970’s to its capture of the Democratic Party over recent decades, contemporary progressivism has simultaneously posited government as solution and problem, arguing that most social problems facing the nation required more government intervention while condemning the institutions and agents of government, excepting fully helping sectors such as education and social welfare agencies, as captured by corporate interests.

The result undermines not only progressive goals but broader public confidence in government and democratic processes. No sooner have voters duly elected representatives to do their will in Washington, and have those representatives duly deliberated and voted to authorize all manner of public projects and appropriate tax dollars toward their fulfillment, than other public institutions set about thwarting those objectives, followed on by all manner of private interests, empowered by law to intervene and litigate, that further set about undoing what Congress and other directly elected bodies have set about to do.

Recognizing that both the institutional conflicts within government and the deputization of parties from without it have statutory bases that were democratically established, it is nonetheless problematic to both the party of government and partisans of government that contemporary progressives are often no less cynical about the capture of government by corporate interests and rentiers than are libertarians and that progressives broadly continue to defend a range of policies that consistently thwart the will of democratically elected representatives and hobble state capacities to deliver necessary and broadly popular public goods.

Our point here is that this is not a policy problem that will be solved with more or better policy wonkery but that it is a political problem that raises deeper questions about what contemporary progressivism stands for, who it represents, and which institutions and constituencies have power within the Democratic coalition.

Educational polarization and the alienation of working class voters of all races from the Democratic agenda has been well ventilated in recent years. Much of that discussion has broadly focused on the disconnect between the social and cultural commitments of progressive elites and the values of the working class constituencies that Democrats still imagine themselves to represent. But no less significant has been the disconnection of progressive elites, heavily concentrated in the knowledge economy, from the material economy and the productivism upon which it depends.

For a generation, progressives and Democrats have largely outsourced land use, energy, resource, and water policy to an institutional environmental movement that was born of the effort to exclude working, non-white, and native people from landscapes that the leisure class wished to claim for itself, came of age in the post-war years standing athwart industrial modernity and technological society, and remains entirely bankrolled and largely staffed and managed by the post-industrial bourgeoisie.

Together with a broader progressive fealty to the Naderite public interest movements, those policies have, in deed if not in word, been regressive, raising costs of energy, transportation, housing, and a range of other essential goods and services that represent an outsized share of household expenditures for those at the bottom of the income distribution while contributing to deindustrialization and the loss of high wage employment accessible to less skilled and educated workers.

The complete incorporation of modern environmentalism into contemporary progressivism could only result, under the best of circumstances, in incoherence, producing a progressivism that sees itself as entirely adversarial toward the corporations and industries that both provide the vast majority of employment for American workers and produce affordable goods and services that working class households depend upon.

Supply-side progressivism is, in this way, an agenda in search of an organized constituency and political institutions capable of realizing it. Without creating those institutions and directly and unapologetically challenging the institutional power of the environmental and public interest movements within the Democratic Party, supply-side progressivism will be stillborn.