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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/...The Coming Democratic Civil War
A seemingly wonky debate about the “abundance agenda” is really about power.
By Jonathan ChaitHeh.
The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.
In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been “progressive” and “progressive lite.” The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.Oooo. Some whitewashing here. The "groups" is Chait's term to avoid saying "victim groups" or some other form of identity politics moniker. Barack Obama rejected the FDR coalition (labor unions, blue-collar workers, big city political machines, minorities, white Southerners, and intellectuals) in favor of a new one based around "elites" and minorities. He did this on the belief in the Demographics Is Destiny theory. That coalition is now the dominant force in the democrat party. And guess what? It's at odds with itself.
Chait goes on to lament that Joe Biden passed 2 massive bills for infrastructure...yet didn't spend the rest of his Presidency cutting ribbons and being praised for Rebuilding America. There's a lesson in there that he of course, misses.
Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?
Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.LOL. Who knew the democrat party was full of Reaganites.
The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.How very...Trumpian...of them.
Chait then sets up some romanticism on his part about the history of the "Citizen activist", noting
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.”Of course the SDS devolved into a radical terrorist group (the Weathermen) and would go on to bomb things.
The left's problems are laid at the feet of Ralph Nader:
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.And now Chait gets to the core conflict, the divide between the "Abundance Agenda" (those who want to relive the New Deal) and the activists:
David Dayen, the editor of the progressive magazine The American Prospect, wrote an essay in 2023 critiquing the abundance agenda as an attack on basic democratic rights. Dayen, approvingly quoting the economist Marshall Steinbaum, argued that the effort to sideline community activists “boils down to the idea that people can’t be trusted.” A better policy, Dayen proposed, was “a liberalism that builds power,” which means “the government actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”
Whether or not this strategy has actually built power—the evidence from Biden’s presidency is discouraging—it remains foundational to the party’s activist superstructure. The progressive movement seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others.And therein lies the rub. There's no way to successfully pander to every single identity group because inevitably...some will run into another.
Since the Obama era, many of the component groups in the progressive coalition have drifted further left on their core demands. (Single-issue lobbies are naturally incentivized to grow more extreme over time—what organization is going to decide its pet cause is too unpopular or costly to merit a strident defense?)And we haven't seen evidence of this...except everywhere, have we? Teacher's unions successfully lobbied to stay at home. Many other examples.
Chait does stumble upon the dems' greatest weakness:
At the same time, they have grown more purposeful about their belief that each group must stand behind all the positions outlined by the others. That is why civil-rights groups will demand student-debt relief, abortion-rights groups endorse abolishing the police, or trans-rights groups insist that Palestine should be liberated. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune who became a full-time progressive organizer, and who has raised and donated millions to causes such as the Sunrise Movement, the Debt Collective, and Black Lives Matter, articulated the principle of cross-endorsements in her book, Solidarity. She argues for “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements,” and of resisting the opposition’s efforts “to weaponize a movement’s fault lines.”I'm amazed he writes this. This mentality of "everyone supports everything" while at the same time each identity group moves to the furthest left corners is
magnifying the cray-cray inside the democrat party: when enviro groups who have otherwise laudable goals like Save The Whales (Who doesn't want to save the whales?) start chanting "Defund the police"...normies tune them out.
Chait can't quite get there, though. He also fundamentally is arguing that all we need is...more of the stuff that hasn't worked in the past:
Perhaps most important, the abundance agenda supplies Democrats with a vision of the future that contrasts sharply and clearly with Donald Trump’s. The president has lectured the country about the need to make do with less in the service of his self-destructive tariff regime. He has attacked plans to build denser cities as an assault on suburbs, defunded scientific research, sought to shut down the green-energy transition, and paralyzed the bureaucracy with arbitrary restrictions. The abundance agenda creates a unified program to reverse all these retrograde ideas, along with a practical understanding of the impediments that must be overcome to do so.LOLOLOL.
The "Abundance Agenda" is yet another Great democrat Party Idea that is fundamentally at war with itself. Chait goes on at length about how bureaucracy chokes off action, yet tears into Trump...eliminating bureaucracy. He notes that we need to raise living standards while decrying tariffs designed to bring back middle class jobs. He mentions urban density (which no one wants) and talks of San Francisco, but forgets that its downtown core is entering a decades-long doom loop and people are fleeing it for the 'burbs.
He ends his piece with a coup d'grace of misunderstanding Trump's research goals (less money for English departments, more for actual research. None of you will know how universities actually spend the money from the government, and that's okay) and in a faith that yet more government is the answer.
This comment summed it up (featured on Ace)
This is a fascinating article. It illustrates both the "true socialism has never been tried and we must do more socialism" and the "our intentions are pure therefore we must impose our rule at any cost" fallacies which allow these people to completely ignore whether any of their underlying beliefs about governments ability to create prosperity and "equality" are actually valid. The commentary about the Whigs and the Democrats ignores the reality that the government was impeding the societal change behind the growing anti slavery movement and completely misrepresented the origin of the Republican Party as a result of the abolitionist movement.
Think about who are the slaves created and perpetuated by further implementation of the "Progressive" school of thought..
