Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's bestselling new book Abundance has kicked off a new political movement — and a vigorous internal debate on the future of the Democratic Party. Many of the policy ideas behind Abundance were developed at my employer, the Niskanen Center, recently described in The Atlantic as "the closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda." On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, I welcome Steve Teles, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow at Niskanen, to discuss the prehistory, present, and future of the abundance movement. We review the intellectual backstory of the movement, explain how abundance ideas transcend the traditional left-right divide, dig into the current infighting among Democrats, and look forward to possibilities for an abundance faction on the right.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody. For today's episode, I'm delighted to have with me as my guest my longtime colleague, co-author, and friend, Steve Teles. Steve is a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow with me at the Niskanen Center. He is the author of a whole bunch of excellent books, perhaps most prominently, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement and The Captured Economy, with yours truly. Steve, great to have you on the program today.
Steve Teles: Yeah, you should have also added that I'm an unindicted co-conspirator, along with being your friend so...
Lindsey: Okay, yeah.
Lindsey: So today, we're going to talk about all things abundance related, and that topic actually allows us to start off with talking about how we met and the history of our relationship, because I think that has something to do with the history of the abundance movement. So let's start off with how you and I met. I'll tell my version of it. I had written an article for the New Republic at the end of 2006 called “Liberaltarians.” This was in the second half of the Bush administration when libertarians were disgusted with the George W. Bush administration on a whole bunch of different fronts.
And so with that context, I was writing an article that said that libertarians have always seen themselves as beyond left and right, and yet in practical terms and sociologically, they've been part of the right. They have affiliated with the right. They've tended to emphasize their common positions and to figure out how to finesse their differences and work together. Maybe we could do that now with the left, given that the fusionism between libertarian economics and social and foreign policy conservatism seemed at that time to be unraveling. Maybe there's a possibility of a new fusionism between libertarianism and liberalism or progressivism.
And it turned out, the article, at least in the short term, was spectacularly ill timed because it came out right after the 2006 midterm elections and the Democrats had swept into power. So they weren't really looking to be told what to do or what kind of new compromises to make or new allies to seek out. They were feeling heady and chesty. So it didn't really go anywhere in politics terms, but it did plant some seeds. One of them sprouted. About a month after that, I got a phone call and voice said, "Hi, I'm Steve Teles." I think you were at Maryland back then. You said, "I'm a political scientist at Maryland and I think I may be a liberaltarian."
I don't know if you recall that the same way, but we started talking and we tried to figure out some liberaltarian thing to do. My first idea, I remember, was having a big liberaltarian conference at Cato, which is where I was working at the time, the Cato Institute. As I started to map it out, I thought, there's no way I can hold this at Cato and keep my job. It would cross too many red lines to address too many possible libertarian heresies to have a conference. So then we started thinking about, well, why don't we have a dinner series, an off the record dinner series where we could get liberals and libertarians together?
I think that was your idea. But we started it up back in 2008 and then over a dozen or more years between then and the time I moved to Thailand in 2021, we had over a hundred of those roundtable dinners, pulling together journalists and policy wonks and academics. Started expressly as the liberaltarian dinner series, but it eventually became sort of an ideologically diverse group of people across the political spectrum who could play nicely with others. And I look back on it very proudly. It still exists in altered form now under Johns Hopkins auspices, but that was our first attempt to build bridges across ideological lines.
Teles: Yeah, so the... Well, this to say a couple of things on that. One, you may have noticed a couple days ago, Jonathan Chait dropped a big article on abundance and its conflict with other factions in the Democratic Party. This connects into our conversation because one of the big attacks on your original liberaltarian essay came from Jonathan Chait, who I think, in that article famously told you to get the hell out of his party.
Lindsey: Yeah, so it was nice for The New Republic to run the piece by a Cato guy, but Chait insisted on having a rebuttal in the next issue. What he said, he quoted Michael Corleone from The Godfather so, you can have my offer now. My offer is nothing. We will give you nothing. We need nothing from you. We need to borrow nothing from you. We need to learn nothing from you.
Teles: I mean, Jon has evolved more on this than you have.
Lindsey: Yeah, life moves in mysterious ways. Jon has written a number of articles that have spoken more kindly about my ideas and about the places I've been affiliated with, Niskanen in particular, since then. And so here in this article he did for The Atlantic on abundance, he cites the Niskanen Center, where we both work, as close to an institutional home for the abundance movement as exists. So yeah, very good to see the liberaltarian moment showing up a couple decades later.
Teles: So what I've actually been thinking about this question of where does abundance come from for quite a while. And the more I think about it, the more I think that what abundance really is is a bunch of things that were already out there. There's nothing in abundance that if you think of the component parts that's actually new. What's new is sort of shoving them all together into one thing.
Lindsey: Yeah, putting housing and infrastructure and state capacity and paperwork reduction and transmission lines all as a thing. That's a new frame, that's a new idea.
Teles: If you think about it, I mean, one of the most important contributors to this is, Virginia Postrel's book on The Future and Its Enemies-
Lindsey: Came out in 1998. That's ancient prehistory. Right.
Teles: That's early and…
Lindsey: And there, she famously distinguishes not between left and right, but between… She says the big conflict in the 21st century is not going to be left and right or left and right as we have understood them, but between what she calls dynamism and stasism.
Teles: Right. Which is actually still a ... pretty good... is still actually a pretty good dividing line for some of our politics. So again, when I think about this, I think that's one of the early pieces that ends up sort of floating around. And I think, again, as you were saying, it's important. When I think about abundance, I think of it not just as one thing, but as a kind of alternative, what political scientists call a dimension, right? So when we talk about our politics, we think about a left-right dimension. A left-right is usually, it's the size of the state. It's about, I think importantly, it's about how much we want to empower professions and establishment and regulation. It's about personal autonomy and abortion, right? That's the left-right dimension.
Lindsey: Right.
Teles: And abundance I think is better off thought about just as an alternative dimension that cuts through the left-right dimension. And so, if you think of it that way, it isn't important that you think about everybody is all agreeing, right? It's the axis on which they're in some sense, having a disagreement. So there is a supply-side progressivism side of that dimension, which is where Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are. There are further left versions of abundance that imagine abundance as being more like France in the 1950s and '60s, right?
Lindsey: Right.
Teles: So we're going to get dirigisme and they're going to build lots of nuclear power plants and high-speed trains.
Lindsey: And we'll have an American Minitel.
Teles: Well, so less of that, right? But the idea is that if you really want abundance, you need planning. You need central planning. And I think that's a completely legible version of abundance too. And on the right, you have people like our old colleague, Sam Hammond, who's at the Foundation for American Innovation, who also kind of want something like the future we're talking about.
Lindsey: Sure. I mean, the whole…, the larger tech, right, Marc Andreessen's, It's Time to Build. There's the whole techno-optimism, effective accelerationism, all of that is expressing this same frustration that we're stuck in the mud and there's... in that material progress in terms of increasing power over the natural world in the world of atoms as opposed to the world of bits has ground to a halt in recent decades and we need to rev it back up again. So you have that impulse on both sides, but it expresses itself in different policy views.
Teles: Yeah. And so, I think that abundance is best thought of as an ongoing disagreement about how you actually get to a future of material plenty. And again, what's standing in the way, right? And I think both of them also again, have some idea that, and this is what makes it not sort of a standard left libertarian one, there's an agreement on the need for more state capacity, that we actually need in some important way to deregulate the state, right? The old left to right is about deregulating the market and a lot of the abundance thing is about deregulating the various constraints we've put on the state. And that, in some ways, is also draws on an older literature.
So if you look at the great paper by Nick Bagley that you commissioned called The Procedure Fetish, he himself draws on earlier work, especially in law schools by Kagan, by Shapiro, a bunch of those people who were saying that this procedural state that we were creating in the 1970s, would create a government that wasn't capable of doing anything that would end up in a kind of deliberative rot where nothing could ever get done.
And so that's another one of these pieces that was always out there and was pulled into the synthesis. And I think that's the area in which everybody in the abundance dimension agrees. Even the people on the far left who want America to be France in the 1950s, realize that you actually can't get full socialism with NEPA, right? All those things, the proceduralism is going to stop your big central government directed by elite civil servants from doing anything either.
Lindsey: Right. So the issue of whether to deregulate the state, that's an intra-left dispute right now. So the right doesn't especially care about it, at least not these days because the right doesn't care about state capacity. The right doesn't care about effective government these days. It still cares about cutting government, not about making it work better. Whereas clearly, the left wants activist government. But now, the Abundance book has surfaced fairly profound disagreement within the left basically on the legacy of a procedural interest group liberalism, which a whole lot of people are still very much committed to.
Teles: Yeah, I mean, I actually think that the right of the abundance spectrum, which is not particularly well represented in this current government, is actually, I think, interested in this question. We can get into some of the legal questions, but if you look at Tyler Cowen's stuff on state capacity libertarianism, which was a kind of theme here, which I think still very much influences the thing that I've called dark abundance. I think that has an idea that you have to, in some ways, empower the state to do big things. Now, again, there's an extreme version of that. The extreme DOGE version of that is that you need complete executive centralism because all of the professionalized parts of the modern state are rotten and stand in the way of progress. But that is also, again, a legible version of state capacity libertarianism, I think.
Lindsey: Yeah. So for sure, there are state capacity libertarian intellectual types. And on the conservative side, people like Jim Pethokoukis who wrote The Conservative Futurist and is very much of an abundance-pilled conservative. He's partial to the project of improving state capacity, but it isn't very popular. There's just a tiny group of folks right now on the right who are focused on this. In general, the energy on the right is still government can't do anything, so let's make it as small as possible.
Teles: Yeah, I mean, I think that's true, but again, it wasn't that long ago that the things we're talking about as abundance were not so popular. This was not a major theme in the Biden administration. Although I think the absence of this in the Biden administration is one of the reasons why abundance has gotten as popular as it has on the left of center, is that people are realizing that all of the things they wanted to do when they had this one big chance to do it, that they kind of blew it and that they actually saw what it's like to try and run a government when you have to go through all of these procedural hurdles.
And I think that's then causing people on the left to do this. It could be that you have a similar thing on the right and the aftermath of a Trump administration that will have wrecked economy through tariffs, that would've destroyed our scientific basis and universities, that then looking back at how they blew it, that something like dark abundance is going to look more attractive as a kind of logic for what the Republican Party ought to be in a kind of post-populist era.
Lindsey: Okay, yeah. So let's step back for a minute from your conception of abundance and from the possible post-Trump right conception of abundance to the actual abundance movement thing that's happening right now, okay? And that's a center-left phenomenon. It got launched by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. I want to talk about where its ideas came from, and that's why I think leading off with our liberaltarian story is important because as I see it, the center-left version of the abundance movement right now is basically a set of state capacity ideas, meeting up with a set of captured economy ideas.
So The Captured Economy is a book that you and I wrote, and it was our big liberaltarian project, and it's about government interventions that simultaneously worsen inequality and slow down economic growth. So the backstory of it was, I was, at the time, at Cato working on the kind of post Great Recession economic malaise and the recognition now that we had been in a slow growth phase for quite some time. And this is right when Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation came out and people were focusing on the lackluster 21st century growth rates.
And so, I wanted to write about policy barriers to growth but with my liberaltarian orientation. I wanted to write about policy ideas that could possibly get both left and right buy-in, in a very polarized politics. If we could find ideas that could appeal to conservatives for free market reasons and to progressive for progressive reasons, then maybe we could actually get something done. And so, I wrote this paper for Cato called Low-Hanging Fruit Guarded by Dragons. So it was policy ideas where it was clear that the intellectual consensus was that these were bad policies that were bad from both progressive and libertarian standards, that is they were inegalitarian, redistributing income upwards while making competition less robust and therefore, messing with economic growth.
At the same time, you wrote a piece for National Affairs, was it called The Scourge of Upward Redistribution? So you were looking, as a progressive, at the problem of inequality and looking for a progressive inequality agenda, but in a time of polarized politics, policies that could possibly get buy-in from the right as well as the left. And so, even though we were collaborating and talking a lot back then, we weren't talking... I didn't tell you about my paper, you didn't tell me about your article. But then they both came out and my libertarian paper about pro-growth policies and your progressive article about pro-equality policies had the same policy ideas.
And so, this was this, kind of a Reese's Cup — you got peanut butter in my chocolate, you got chocolate in my peanut butter — moment where we saw that we had hit upon a real convergence and we ought to write a book about it. And so, the conceit was a libertarian policy wonk and a liberal professor write a book together about liberaltarian policy. And one major element of that was housing and the zoning, and other restrictions that have made housing affordability a crisis all across the country. And that is clearly part of the DNA for Klein and Thompson's work.
Teles: Yeah. Well, let me say something one in retrospect, and then I want to talk about Klein and Thompson and disagree with your sociology. So one is, to be truthful I think we can only see this now. You were never much of a libertarian and I wasn't much of a progressive. In fact, I've never used that word for myself.
Lindsey: Yep.
Teles: I've always thought of myself as a liberal.
Lindsey: Liberal, yes, yeah.
Teles: Right. And I think in a way, one thing that writing that book did is, I think it made both of us realize maybe even more than we did, that we were just liberals.
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: Just liberals in, where you could call it sort of classical liberal or classical liberal with 20th century modifications. I think that was where we both, was our natural home.
Lindsey: I mean, I was in the process of… I had already become pretty heterodox, enough to get fired from Cato and then rehired. Still, at the time we wrote that book, there were a number of policy areas where I disagreed with you pretty sharply, where I have changed my mind over time. So I have drifted closer to you in the years since.
Teles: Yeah, and I think one of those was that I had always had a pretty strong belief that a more sort of let her rip economy required pretty extensive social insurance, and that was definitely crossing over into verboten territory with your previous employer.
Lindsey: Yeah. And I just did not think that way. I was a small government guy who favored a safety net for poor people, but did not like middle-class entitlements. So I...
Teles: Right. Yeah, so I would say one thing that brought that together and my understanding of abundance is, at its best, it is also just liberal, right? And just as liberalism has a right and a left, so will abundance. And abundance is in some ways, simply a branding around certain contemporary problems that focuses on those problems of what is basically just liberalism. And I think liberalism is good…
Lindsey: But still... I mean, there is a specific point, there's an intra-left cleavage that they have exposed, which is, I mean, this is a book written by center-left guys to a progressive audience, right? And they are telling them that we've gotten some things very badly wrong, that we tend to think of the New Deal and the Great Society as the sort of golden ages of government activism. And yet, there were very different kinds of periods, right? And now, in retrospect, we see that the New Deal was all about empowering public servants to do good things for people with as little oversight and second-guessing as possible. And that produced some very muscular government and produced lots of amazing infrastructural development from the TVA to the Hoover Dam, to the interstate highway system, et cetera. It also produced people like Robert Moses who bulldozed through neighborhoods and stepped on toes and did a lot of dislocation and a lot of unfairness and injustice.
So in the '60s, for a whole variety of reasons, there was the new left that emerged in the '60s, which had a big libertarian anti-statist streak to it, right? It saw the state power in the southern segregationist sheriffs, it saw state power in the threat of nuclear war and then a terrible war in Vietnam. It saw state power in colluding with polluting industries to allow them to befoul the environment. So there was a lot of suspicion of centralized state power that had been completely non-existent during the New Deal period. And for some very good reasons. But what emerged out of that was this new kind of idea that now, the goal isn't to get as much power in public servants’ hands as possible. Now, the goal is to make sure that when power is exercised, at every turn, there's capacity for second guessing of it to make sure that it's not violating progressive or liberal goals.
Teles: Yeah, so I want to go forward to Klein and Thompson for a second, directly on this point. So my interpretation of Klein and Thompson is that, again, a very good book, but just to be clear what it is, this is the owl of Minerva only arrives at dusk, right? Everything, they are describing a thing that is already happening as opposed to calling a thing into existence that doesn't happen, that hasn't already happened. And so, if you think about it, the thing that was a huge inspiration for this book, in some ways, actually even when we wrote Captured Economy, I think was in my back of my head, right, was the YIMBY movement. Right?
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: The idea that actually it was possible went against everything we had been told about political economy. And you and I, I think, had both have dog-eared copies of Mancur Olson somewhere telling us that exactly, that thing was impossible. It was impossible to organize people around diffuse costs. You can only organize people around concentrated benefits. And yet, here were people doing that, right, organizing to open up competition in the housing market. And I think, that was a big inspiration for me, and I think it was a big inspiration for them.
Lindsey: Really? I don't think YIMBY, when did YIMBY's... Did YIMBY score any victories of note before our book came out?
Teles: I mean, I think the biggest thing was just that people were doing, right? The victories were the fact that people had gotten over…
Lindsey: It had started. Right, and so-
Teles: Yeah. They'd gotten over the... let me finish that. So they had gotten over the collective action problem, right?
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: And for me, that's what made me think, something like this could be more than just me and you, and eight people we know, right?
Lindsey: Right.
Teles: That somebody can actually create a movement around it, which is bigger than people reading a book, right? And I think the other part of this, which starts actually further left, are all of the people who had, in the climate space, who had pivoted out of pricing, the idea that you had to solve climate through a carbon tax. And I'll just admit, I will go down as the last person who gave up on the carbon tax. So when they finally, I'll be there when everybody... But there've been a huge group of people on the left who'd said, we tried pricing, we tried regulation, and the only way to actually solve climate is to make clean energy so cheap and also sort of coalitionally work that you can actually get people to transition off of fossil fuels without just immiserating them. And that was a big thing in the aftermath of the failure of Waxman-Markey under the Obama administration. And I think that then, of course, that was an argument that Ted Nordhaus, we haven't talked about yet, who's another contributor to this.
Lindsey: Absolutely.
Teles: And the Breakthrough Institute had been making, actually for a long time, they had been saying, the politics of pricing are terrible. It'll never work. If you really want to do climate, you have to do it through industrial policy that then becomes green industrial policy, which was supposed to be a big thing of the Biden administration. And so, I think that's a contributor into the…
Lindsey: Can I add to that narrative? Because I don't think it's just for rethinking policy in the wake of Waxman-Markey's failure. It's reaction to the astonishing price decreases in solar and wind power over the 2010s. So the idea of making green energy cheap seemed like pie in the sky until it actually started happening. And so, the Breakthrough argument got a lot stronger, not only because of the failures of the price approach, the political problems that carbon pricing strategies had, but also because of the manifest success that going down the learning curve was producing and declining solar and wind costs. So you could see that this is successful, let's keep feeding this.
So yes, I think the growing awareness of the housing problem among people on the center-left — and Matt Yglesias with his The Rent is Too Damn High book back in 2012. He was a very early policy wonk hammering away on this topic and arguing for its significance, not just as a local issue, but as a national economic issue. And the recognition that blue states were where the housing problems were worst. And so that progressive governance was contributing to this problem. That was going on. Meanwhile, clean energy is getting cheaper and cheaper, but actually building it out, even when it's already economically feasible, was running into all kinds of roadblocks because of NIMBYism by any other name. And often, the suits to stop wind farms or new solar facilities were being backed by environmental groups.
Teles: Although, again, I would say I think that is something that in some ways, doesn't really... The idea that you had to actually solve this problem by new supply, that was in the mix in the Biden administration, it's in the IRA, it's in the infrastructure bill. The idea that the fundamental problem is that sort of institutional crust of obstruction – that never took hold in the Biden administration.
Lindsey: No, not at all.
Teles: In some ways, I think that's the thing that is leading at least some…
Lindsey: No, but it took hold in the minds of Ezra and Derek, right?
Teles: Yeah. My only point is that the reason for the receptivity, especially among elite Democrats, is that they saw they had this historic opportunity and then they compare that to how much they actually got done, right? And I think that's the thing that forced them to pay attention to this, right? I think that's the reason why so many elite Dems are sort of lifting this idea up, is they actually lived it, right? They had...
Lindsey: You know what? I'll quibble with that. I think that's why the Abundance book is a bestseller. If Harris had won, it would not have been, so they feel like they blew it. They look back and they see these huge bills that then have not produced any charging stations or any rural broadband, despite all the billions appropriated. But at the time when Ezra and Derek were first writing the articles that led to this book, the jury was out on whether the big Biden legislative initiatives were actually going to produce stuff or just spend a lot of money. They were worried about it already.
But I think just the recognition, I think even before 2020, it was dawning on people like Ezra and Derek, that the whole orientation of the environmental movement is going to have to shift because of climate change, that it arose recognizing that we're despoiling the environment and it wanted to stand athwart history and yell stop. Stop doing all this dirty stuff. And so the whole movement's focus was on how do we stop bad people from doing bad things. But when climate change becomes the premier environmental issue, the issue has to be, how do we get good people to do good things? And there's a whole lot of reflexes and habits of the progressive and environmental movements that just can't process that and that is what they're taking aim at.
Teles: Yeah. I mean, one other thing, we were talking about the '70s. The other thing that's happening in the '70s is the no nukes movement, right? That's one that's a little embarrassing in retrospect.
Lindsey: Were you, in your young days, were you an anti-nuke guy?
Teles: No, no, actually I was not, which we can go back to in a second. I actually was a... So I was definitely not anti-nuclear weapons and anti-nuclear weapons…
Lindsey: No, anti-nuclear power.
Teles: No, well, but I actually think, in reality, they were connected, right?
Lindsey: They were.
Teles: The people who were against nuclear power were usually against nuclear weapons, and for some of the same reasons. But again, if you think about how countries actually built nuclear power, right? They built it through these super insulated expert agencies, every country did. The United States, Japan, France, they all did it through the classic insulated model, that was state capacity. That was when we were still doing it.
And a lot of the backlash against nuclear power was also backlash against that form of elite insulated governance. And I think that's one of the reasons when you actually think about the various things that are floating around in the abundance space, as they used to say, strange new respect for nuclear power is one of them, is people are looking at, okay, where is all this carbon-free energy going to come from? And they just can't make the numbers work without nuclear. And I think that's also then pushing into this sort of techno or what Breakthrough calls ecomodernism, right?
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: That's kind of rethinking that turn against nuclear power in particular, but all kind of additional technologically driven energy sources. So I think that's another contributor to…
Lindsey: I mean, in general, nuclear is enjoying this new strange, new respect and people are interested in it again. And there's a lot of investment in new technologies, and there's breakthroughs in fusion as well. And there is some recognition on the progressive side that the anti-nuclear stance was a terrible own goal, and that our climate situation would be much, much better right now if we hadn't turned against nuclear power in the '70s. But still, the nuclear issue, I think, nuclear power issue is one of those ones that tends to divide the abundance left from the abundance right. There isn't a lot of talk about nuclear power in Ezra and Derek's book.
Teles: Oh, well, although actually if you look at this, again, I actually tend to look at abundance a little less through the things that people are writing and more of the things that people are doing. So for example, a lot of the people who were involved in YIMBY were also involved in the effort to keep Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant from being closed down.
Lindsey: Yep.
Teles: And I think that was both a very substantively important issue because they're like, well, how the hell are we going to meet our clean energy goals if we're simultaneously taking offline a whole bunch of energy? But I also think it's one of these battles that people were doing because it was a symbolic issue. It was an issue on which you could actually have a straight cleavage. And so I do think it divides the abundance left, but a lot more of real abundance people were actually involved in that fight against what are really the old left. So I do actually think that fits together both kind of at the vibe level and in terms of the politics of this.
Lindsey: No, that's fair. Okay. I want to talk about the politics of abundance, where we are right now. We've got this book that came out, it's a bestseller. It has generated much more controversy than I had expected. That is, a whole lot of people on the left hate it and have been taking aim at it and taking potshots at it, usually without having read it but they hate the whole idea of it. So that fairly deep cleavage inside the progressive ranks has revealed itself. Meanwhile though, amongst politicians, it seems like there's a fair amount of receptivity — an abundance-themed caucus has already formed in the House. I think maybe another one has started as well. The first one is bipartisan at least, but guided by Democrats.
So there are emerging attempts to convert this interest in the book into actual political coalitions. This, I think, connects up with an very important article you wrote, called The Future Is Faction. And you've written follow-up pieces as well about this, about how this set of ideas might fit in with the changing nature of American politics where traditionally, where there are two big omnibus parties, they've had lots of factions within them, but in recent years, they've been under much more centralized leadership control. You make the argument that that state of affairs isn't going to last for much longer, and we're heading into a new factional future that then creates opportunities for people with new ideas like abundance. So spell that out for me.
Teles: So again, this is another one where I tend to think of the ideas as being downstream from things people are actually doing. So I, again, back in this piece, The Future Is Faction, actually was ripped off of the conclusion for the book I wrote with Rob Saldin called Never Trump, where we were imagining a future in which the parties would be less cohesive. And the argument at least that I've made about polarization is that polarization is basically an unnatural state for American parties. American parties, because there are only two and have been for an extraordinarily long time, that things that in other political systems occur through multiple parties, right?
So the example I always give is in Holland, they have a center-right party and a center-left party and a left party and a populist party, all the way down to the party for animals, which actually has seats in the Dutch parliament. And so that's how they manage heterogeneity and what's a very small country, although albeit a country that's characterized by just constant disagreement on everything, which is why their soccer team always under performs in the World Cup. But in the United States, we've always had to do that within two parties. And so that heterogeneity has manifested as institutionalized disagreement within the parties, which I call factions, drawing on some of the work of Dan DiSalvo.
And I think that abundance is going to be part of that factional conflict. And this is something where I think I've evolved over time, particularly talking to Matt Yglesias and other people that I think you could imagine what some people think of as a moderate faction, but I actually think that's not going to emerge. We're not just going to have a DLC-style faction like we had in the '80s and '90s, which was really coming out of elected officials in places where the Democratic Party was becoming less effective, and then they were looking around for some way to get around the national brand. I think this is going to be, in some ways, a much more radical faction in terms of its actually governing agenda, so it won't be moderate in that sense, right?
We often are used to the idea that moderates are in favor of half measures and incrementalism, or I used to joke that, it was a few years ago that the moderates are the people who for whatever problem, they had a collateralized security that they could propose to actually address it. So we could... And I don't think that's what abundance is going to be. I think it's going to be a much more radical... On economics, right? If you think about all the agenda we've been talking about, science, housing, reconstruction of the American state, all of that is pretty radical stuff in terms of the scope of change. I actually think it's going to turn into a politically potent faction when it combines with what some people call common sense Democrats on cultural issues. And you see this, again, this is one where I think you have to look at what people are actually doing.
If you look in San Francisco, which is like the belly of the beast, that's where a lot of the abundance stuff and the YIMBY movement come from. That's also where there was a big backlash against a quite left radical prosecutor on criminal justice issues. It's where the school board significantly got, they got recalled. And I think that tells you something about what the future coalitions are going to look like, is they're going to look like abundance on housing and energy and building up the state, and they're going to look against the more lefty-academic-adjacent nonsense in crime and education. And I think that's when you start seeing what an actually politically potent faction looks like.
Lindsey: Yeah, when these ideas that now have been packaged by Ezra and Derek in their book, when I was working on them as just as a policy wonk, all I was thinking about is, I was not thinking about a political vision. I was thinking about a policy vision that there are important problems facing the United States and we need to surface and identify those. And I saw two of the big problems as pervasive regulatory capture and degraded state capacity. So these were policy problems in my mind. It did not seem obvious to me that they would be good politics, but it looks to me right now, like there's at least a possibility that the earnest, serious, well-thought-out policy wonkery behind abundance does fit in to filling an urgent political need right now. That is, it does fit in with the need of the Democratic Party to moderate on cultural issues.
It's fine to just bash the far left for being extreme, but I think the abundance agenda first gives you something to be for as opposed to being against. But it also, it's pragmatic. It's focused on problems in the real world that everybody deals with, housing and energy costs that are kitchen table issues. It's solving problems that will make everybody better off. So it's a completely different style of politics. It's oriented towards the real world and material interests, completely different from the zero-sum symbolic culture war fights that have monopolized or dominated the energy of the progressive movement over the previous decade. So it does seem to me that there is a nice connection between the abundance agenda and this, and the possibility of a kind DLC 2.0 to move away from “woke.”
Teles: Okay. Sorry, I think you know you were triggering me by mentioning the DLC. I think the DLC is a terrible analogy in all kind of ways. I don't think this is going to look like the DLC at all. But let me just give you two pathways by which abundance becomes politically viable, right? One, is what we're talking about is sort of the partisan pathway that there's going to be increasing internal factional conflict in the Democratic Party, and abundance versus economic populism or something will become that axis and abundance will pick up a bunch of these cultural issues as part of its overall package, just as the economic populists are mostly downstream from some of the kookier versions of cultural leftism. And I think it's important to decompose the cultural issues here, right? The ones that are really potent are mostly not the sexual ones except for the trans issue, right?
They're mostly social order, right? They're about border control, they're about crime. Even I think some of the schooling stuff is a little bit downstream from like, is anybody really in charge? And I think when you look at American politics, it's the social order issue that's the most potent. It's always the most potent, right? I mean, if you also think about campus protests. You go back to the '60s. I know you thought a lot about that. People just cannot overestimate how much that pissed people off, how much that was a central issue for Ronald Reagan when he was running for governor of California. And now, it's all back again, right? We're back into that thing with Columbia, with the protests over Gaza, all of that. People really dislike, especially the voters who are swing voters, hate disorder. And I think capturing that dislike of social order and combining it with abundance is what gives you a full spectrum agenda.
Okay, so that's one pathway. One pathway is, this gets in because it intrudes through party politics and then the party moves in this direction and governs that way. I also, again, as I said before, I think there's a Republican version of this where the Trump administration blows up even further on the launch pad and then people have to give an explanation of that and then they turn to something closer to a version of right-tinged abundance. The other form of this is a more on the down-low way of getting influence, which is also one of the pathways we use at Niskanen, which is lots of policymaking gets done in this more low salience, not highly politically charged way.
Lindsey: Yeah.
Teles: And the way it happens is, you have policymakers who are hearing from citizens that somebody needs to do something, right? And they don't know what that something is. And so, people who have legislative subsidy, who have ideas about what you do, say, oh, I got stuff. You want to do something about housing, you want to do something about energy, you want to do something about costs, here's something. Right? And then they do it and then people like it, and then they go and say, you got anything else? Right. I got other stuff that people are telling me about. And when that happens, when you get that sort of positive feedback mechanism, policymakers who may not have thought about the big overall framework, start getting abundance-pilled, not through the theory, but through the fact that this movement just seems to have ideas and alternatives that mostly respond to the problems that their citizens are concerned about.
And now, eventually, that can sort of meld together that people who got abundance-pilled because they saw the politics working and people who got abundance-pilled because they saw that it just worked and then wanted more, eventually start moving together in a way that a lot of the things that were associated with economic populism, seemed not to work, it seemed like the politics of it didn't work the way it was supposed to. And two, when policymakers did things that some of those people recommended, they didn't work. And in some sense, they actually embarrassed them. So they stopped going back to those people for additional assistance or advice.
Lindsey: So I'm going to defend my, tepidly defend my DLC analogy because I don't want to push it very far. But I do think that there is some kind of historical rhyme between what's going on right now and what was going on in the Democratic Party in the late '80s. So right now, we have a Democratic Party that is dominated by highly educated white progressives who are way to the left, especially on cultural issues, of everybody else in the country, and in a way that is profoundly off-putting to a whole bunch of the country. And so, in a similar way to the recognition in the late '80s that after having lost three successive presidential elections badly, that the legacy of '60s and '70s liberalism and particularly soft on crime policies, had contributed to the political hole that the Democrats were in.
The Democrats right now are in a deep political hole. They just lost an election that they said the future of the country rode on and they lost it. So they are in a deep identity crisis right now. And just as with the late '80s, there was the perception that the left had been overpowerful in its influence and had alienated key parts of the American electorate, and there are a lot of politicians responding in various ways. The DLC was the effective way, ultimately, to address that. So I see the problems is similar. I don't want to push the analogy to trying to copy the DLC or the DLC era’s issues. We're in a completely different issue environment, but the idea of getting the Democratic Party more in line with the median voter, culturally, is the same.
Teles:Yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly one part of this, which is, there's been a great new…
Lindsey: Let me go a little bit farther than that. And then beyond that, like I said, I had always thought of these kinds of abundance issues as just policy issues that weren't necessarily politically saleable. They're the kinds of things that you convince elite policymakers to do. They run on something else, but they do this because it's important. That's what the secret Congress does, the issues that are below the culture war screaming, things can actually get done. That's where I pictured a lot of the possibilities for progress on these issues.
But right now in this political environment, I think common sense politicians that can get stuff done in the real world and aren't swayed by all these kooky cultural ideas, all that fits together. So someone like Josh Shapiro who on the one hand is culturally moderate, also his great political coup was rebuilding that I-95 overpass in a couple of weeks, showing that he could get stuff done. And that ability to demonstrate the government can work is of existential importance to the party of government. And so, being able to have a positive agenda, we're going to make government work again and we're going to forsake all the cultural craziness, I think they cohere politically in a way that I had not expected them to.
Teles: Okay. Let me see if I can break this down a little bit. So one, I would say, there's a great survey that David Broockman and Josh Kalla and some other co-authors have just done that basically shows that the Democratic brand is just terrible, right? Again, it's... And the important point here is that even moderates who try and differentiate themselves, who say, oh, I'm a Michigan Democrat, I'm a whatever, right? They can't resist the underlying tide of that overall brand. The voters, they can do all the attempted differentiation they want and voters still hate the D brand and therefore, nobody can differentiate.
Lindsey: We're in a media environment now where it's very difficult to have local political brands.
Teles: Okay, but this is an important point. Back in the '80s, that was still a very powerful way to differentiate. You say, I'm Sam Nunn and I'm a Georgia Democrat. I'm not like the New York or San Francisco Democrats." Right?
Lindsey: Right.
Teles: That was a very powerful thing. And partially, the DLC was designed to help people make that move, to make that "I am a geographically specific Democrat" kind of move. My theory is, that will no longer work. Given this…
Lindsey: I agree there.
Teles: ... media environment, you need a national brand, right? And you also need to be seen as part of a movement that's fighting the people that people don't like. And this is where the discourse of what people call the groups comes in, right?
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: Is a huge amount of what people don't like isn't just something called cultural radicalism. They don't like the idea that the Democratic Party is controlled by a bunch of relatively small, seemingly kind of eccentric, but also kind of elite actors. And so, somebody needs some alternative, quite powerful national brand and being seen as being, if I send these people to Washington, they're going to fight against them, right? Them being the groups as well as fight against the Republicans, right?
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: And again, right now, nobody really has the ability to do that, but that's why you really need a faction. That's why you really need a strongly institutionally structured movement that allows you to make that claim to voters in a more plausible way.
Lindsey: Yeah, I think that “the groups” is a convenient term. First, it's a real thing. It really is amorphous, but they really do exert a whole lot of influence over the agenda of Democratic politicians. But also, they're a stand-in for the lopsided influence of highly educated professionals and their distinctive and unusual worldview and politics on what was supposed to be the party for ordinary people. So an abundance agenda lets you run against the groups. So it's a positive thing, but it picks the right enemies at the same time.
Teles: Right. And this is where, again, I think it's simultaneously cultural and economic together, right? Because again, if you think of the culture as people disliking the groups and disliking the stuff that's downstream from academic politics and college town politics and all of that stuff, right? When you're fighting people to be able to build stuff, to do all those things that are associated with the abundance agenda, you're simultaneously fighting against the groups, right? And again, when you're visibly seen as doing that, your ability to make a plausible claim that you're not like the Democrats they don't like, the ones whose brand is in the toilet, is more plausible. But I think, again, I think the way you do that is you get involved in big, high profile conflict. Conflict is what cements in people's minds, differentiation. That's why you can't just do it by saying, "Oh, well, I'm going to have a little bit of... I'm going to put up some guy with a drawl or like Tim Walz who has some sort of Midwestern shtick.
Lindsey: Doesn't work.
Teles: But I think a lot of Democrats are still stuck in that idea.
Lindsey: I agree.
Teles: That's why some of these Democrats who people are talking about as running, again, I can't believe that Tim Walz hasn't been pushed off on an ice floe yet. You had one job, man. But I think that idea that the Democrats’ problem is just having people who don't look like normal people, but without having to have any of those discussions of the underlying policy problems of the Democratic Party. I think we're going to have to get past that stage, that stage that we just have a branding problem or how do you talk to people.
Lindsey: We're coming towards the end of our time, but I want to at least mention the existing political realities, the backdrop against which this discussion is occurring, which is the second Trump administration. So we're in a period of just utter unhinged madness, corruption, cruelty, there's nothing good to say about it. And it's putting incredible stresses on our institutions. They are trying to govern lawlessly. They are taking a whole bunch of actions that would only be legal if the Supreme Court completely rewrites the Constitution to make the unitary executive model close to constitutionalizing plebiscitary dictatorship. So we have a deep, fundamental, profound challenge to our constitutional order going on right now. And I don't know how it's going to turn out.
Trump is still at 45% plus approval rating, which is absolutely astonishing to me, given what has happened. So your thoughts on... So my analogy for talking about abundance movement and talking about the future in which this politics might play out is that it's kind of like doing post-World War II planning, that you got to plan for the reconstruction of Europe even when the war isn't won yet. So there's other guys that got to go out there and win that war. So we have to save democracy. We have to not have a third Trump term. We have to keep the constitutional order more or less intact. But I think pretty much all of our conversation is premised on the hope that there is a post-Trump political future that we can pick up the pieces from.
Teles: Yeah, I mean one, I actually... I think the metaphor has some value, but I think one is, Democrats still control a lot of places and a lot of the stuff that abundance is looking at are actually things that are state and local level governance.
Lindsey: Yeah, absolutely. That's fair.
Teles: I think that's one of the attractions of the abundance agenda. One is, it is a profound critique of blue state governance. But it also suggests stuff you can do even while Trump is out there tearing apart the federal government. And I think it does… and again, this is something that Ezra certainly has talked a lot about…
Lindsey: But still, to be fair, the governors and mayors can do all they want. If the federal crisis is not resolved, we're doomed.
Teles: Yeah. Well, here I think the connection is that people have at least an inchoate sense that blue state governance sucks, right?
Lindsey: Yep.
Teles: And is bad. And then when people say, "Let's do that nationally," people are like, "What? What?"
Lindsey: Right.
Teles: We're going to have needles on the street or whatever, right? So part of this is, I do think if you're thinking about how is it that you're going to save democracy, I think one thing we have learned, and this is something that really does anger me is if you really, really cared about preserving democracy, you would not talk a lot about preserving democracy, right?
Lindsey: Yep.
Teles: You would do everything. And this is something Matt Yglesias certainly has emphasized. If that's what you cared about, you would not try and take any risks with exotic, cultural whatever. You would be like, we are in an emergency.
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: And everything that we have to do in order to win power, right? Winning power is the most important way that you preserve democracy, not…
Lindsey: No, whereas Democrats have screamed democracy, democracy, democracy, while not only not compromising on any of their policy preferences, but running to the left, running away from the center.
Teles: Right, you would be far more politically ruthless about this…
Lindsey: All during the first Trump term. Yep.
Teles: Yeah. And so, I think that is part of this lesson too, which is the way you preserve democracy is you win elections. You govern in a way that seems reasonable and sensible and not like you're being controlled by a bunch of exotic 23-year-old recent college graduates. So that, I think is part of that thing you can do while we're waiting for the war, for other people to win that battle. But again, I think the people who are going to win that eventually, the only way to do this, you're going to do some stuff through courts, but ultimately, the way you do this is, you win in 2028, right? And at least actually right now, you win in later this year in the governor's races, which are the ones that are often the ones that send the signal about where things are going. And that's what it's all about. It's not about going on MSNBC and saying, you’ve got to save democracy."
Lindsey: So what's your level of optimism or pessimism on the possibility of the Republican Party moving past being a MAGA entity?
Teles: Again, I think a lot of it's going to depend on whether these various things they're doing, I mean, I do think the tariffs are going to have enormously negative... We are already seeing it in the fact that interest rates are as high as they are, right? That if that happens, if they end up actually indirectly blowing up the deficit, both through their tax cuts and the fact that they're going to be driving economic growth down, so economic growth is going to go down, the deficit's going to go up even further.
Lindsey: Let's imagine that we have a pretty lousy economy, maybe a recession, maybe a bad recession, maybe a financial crisis, but at least a lousy economy and a much lousier economy than anybody thought we were supposed to have. And let's imagine that that results in the Dems winning in 2028 and the Republicans thinking, okay, Trump too was a failure. That plants the seeds, that sets the groundwork then for abundance-y things to happen on the right as well. Don't you think?
Teles: Yeah. I mean, that…
Lindsey: You become the anti-Trump, that instead of this crazy populism and destruction, you’re doing practical problem solving, doing normal things for normal people.
Teles: Right. So I think some of the people who are going to lead the Republican Party in that direction, when you end up having those recriminations after 2028, some of those will be people who were in lower levels in the Trump administration itself or were connected that people like our friends at the Foundation for American Innovation, who are, you can think of as at least a little bit Trump-adjacent or adjacent to what you might've imagined Trump as being, but not actually.
Lindsey: Yes.
Teles: And they're going to come out after this and say, we had our opportunity to do all this stuff and then you blew it.
Lindsey: Right.
Teles: Just, that's exactly the argument that abundance Dems have now, is we had our chance to win and to govern under Biden and we didn't do it. And this is why the people who did that, need to get pushed off on the ice floe and this is why we have to govern this way in the future. I think you could see a very similar dynamic after a big Trump, or a big Vance or whatever it is, loss in 2028.
Lindsey: Okay. There are not many opportunities these days to end on a hopeful, optimistic note, but we found one. So thanks a whole bunch for coming on the show and it was a great talk. Nice chatting with you.
Teles: Nice talking to you again, Brink.
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