Liberals ‘abundance agenda’ takes time to absorb, but it’s worth it

A friend sent me a link to an episode of “Pod Save America” on Sunday with the short message, “This is worth your time.” The podcast is a favorite among the left, hosted by a small group of former Obama advisers who describe the show as being for people “who are not ready to give up or go insane.” I have occasionally listened to it, but frankly, I didn’t want to give it an entire, torturous hour of my precious weekend.

A few hours later, I find myself in the middle of a project: learning about the “abundance agenda.” Jon Favreau hosted the episode featuring authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and a discussion of their new book, “Abundance.” The blurb describes it as “a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.”

The challenge in that description is obvious. Liberals have to face up to their failures? Oh no, anything but that!

Commentary and polling data of late is showing a frustration toward what appears to be a void of leadership on the left. It’s a predictable cycle following an election like the one that happened five months ago. The other side won. Electoral minorities don’t get inaugurated. They don’t have black-tie galas to celebrate their defeat and anoint the poohbah of the resistance either. In the spring following an election like 2024, it is customary for the losing team to still be searching for its recovery plan.

However, this moment is clearly different than that typical spring-after. American institutions are being decimated by a Trump administration not because of some ideology or consensus-based ambition of the GOP, but simply for the joy of the decimation itself. Resisting, effective resisting is what the Democrat faithful seem to be demanding more than anything.

Democrats, and mathematically, the majority of Americans, can vividly see what it doesn’t like happening in Washington. What is less clear to both leaders and followers of progressive politics is what the proactive alternative should be. Abundance, as an agenda, could become that alternative.

Basically, the agenda is that blue cites and blue states need to govern better, but not just for the sake of governing. Klein explains on the podcast that abundance, as an agenda, attempts to answer this simple but important question: “what don’t we have enough of and how do we get it?”

America doesn’t have enough affordable housing. The book describes, in great detail, how liberal rules and regulations in politically blue areas over many decades have made that scarcity worse. Comparing the regulatory and political environments in San Francisco and New York to Houston, shows a lopsided difference in building opportunity. This difference leads directly to the differences in homelessness rates in those cities. San Francisco is ground zero of that national problem. Houston has the lowest rate of any major city in the country.

The book has five named chapters: Grow, Build, Govern, Invent, and Deploy. It sounds like the old Republican playbook, doesn’t it? It certainly doesn’t match the Republican agenda of today. But then, what does?

Early in the chapter titled Govern, Klein describes how liberals believe in a “strong, active government,” but regularly pass laws that hamstring its ability to function. He adds, “Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power.”  He quickly concludes that “both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions.” I agree.

Democrats should not just commit to governing better in a generic way but govern in a mission-driven manner. For example, one triumph of the Biden Administration was the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in November of 2021. A couple of specific components of that $1.2 trillion package were rollouts of rural broadband and a vast network of electric vehicle charging stations. Three and half years later, almost none of this exists, primarily because of a litany of obstacles that can collectively be described as bad governing.

These are things we need and government is the obvious source of satisfying that need. But how we govern matters. As a former bureaucrat, I took pride in getting…stuff…done. We all thought that doing it well mattered, and it has been frustrating to watch the public’s acceptance of bad governing become embedded. Klein and Thompson see flipping this as a difference maker for the left. I agree with that too.

There’s more to learn about how to reverse our “chosen scarcities.” And now is the moment to face the failings of our past. The future need to rebuild will be inevitable. Planning for how to do it should get started immediately.