Abundance: How Democrats Can Win by Building More of What America Needs

A deep dive into why the left must abandon bureaucratic caution and embrace supply-side progressivism to solve America's housing, energy, and governance crises.

Key Takeaways

• Democrats have shifted from a party of building to a party of blocking, creating manufactured scarcities in housing and energy
• The currency of modern politics is attention, not money, giving Trump and populists decisive communication advantages over process-obsessed liberals
• Supply-side progressivism can solve cost-of-living crises by making more housing, clean energy, and effective government services
• America needs "deregulation of government itself" to remove bureaucratic barriers that prevent achieving progressive goals
• The Democratic Party lacks clear leadership and must find candidates willing to challenge established liberal orthodoxies
• Government efficiency requires clear goals and outcomes-focused metrics, not just process compliance
• Cities are economic engines where wealth gets created, but housing costs have gated them off from working-class Americans
• DOGE represents ideological conquest disguised as efficiency reform, lacking articulated goals beyond centralizing power under Trump

Democratic Party Crisis and Communication Failures

The Democratic Party faces its deepest leadership vacuum in decades. Unlike the Trump-unified Republican Party, Democrats remain fractured between progressive and centrist wings with no presumptive 2028 nominee emerging. This fragmentation stems partly from their fundamental misunderstanding of modern political communication.

Democrats still operate under the outdated belief that money drives political success, while Republicans have mastered attention-based politics. Kamala Harris raised over a billion dollars yet lost decisively because she couldn't generate the sustained attention that drives agenda control. As the hosts explain, "attention works really differently" than traditional campaign spending.

• The party's bureaucratic culture prioritizes process over outcomes, making leaders risk-averse in unstructured conversations
• Unlike Trump's "live-wire authenticity," Democratic politicians perform careful coalitional calculations in every public appearance
• Democrats fear negative attention rather than understanding that "a volume of attention is itself good"
• The left's tendency to attack its own members more intensely than Republicans creates additional internal paralysis
• Biden's team revealed their lack of confidence by avoiding high-profile interviews like the Super Bowl, signaling fundamental weaknesses

This communication gap reflects deeper ideological differences. Conservatives fear cultural radicalism and tolerate injustice, while liberals fear injustice and sometimes tolerate overreach. These archetypal differences shape how each side approaches media strategy and public engagement.

The 2024 election results were "overdetermined" by multiple factors: global anti-incumbent sentiment due to inflation, America's polarized 48-48 electorate making every race a battle for small margins, and Trump's mastery of social media's "age of the vibe" where performing authenticity matters more than policy specifics.

The Abundance Agenda: Supply-Side Progressivism

Traditional liberal politics focuses heavily on demand-side solutions like tax credits and spending programs while ignoring supply constraints. This approach fails because you cannot effectively redistribute access to goods and services without first ensuring adequate supply of those goods and services.

Housing exemplifies this perfectly. Giving people rental vouchers in San Francisco's constrained housing market simply drives prices higher, creating what economists call "disease socialism" where subsidies increase demand for artificially scarce goods. The same dynamic affects higher education, where Pell grants and subsidies haven't increased college slots but have enabled institutions to raise prices.

• Supply-side progressivism means asking "how do we make more?" rather than just "how do we redistribute better?"
• The approach applies to housing, clean energy, healthcare capacity, scientific research, and public infrastructure
• Government often needs to "deregulate itself" by removing bureaucratic barriers to achieving its own stated goals
• Success requires measuring outcomes in the physical world, not just authorized spending or completed processes
• Liberal politics must shift from blocking change back to building the future, as it did during the New Deal era

The 21st century economy has been defined by manufactured scarcities rather than natural limits. America chose to make housing scarce in productive cities through zoning laws and historic preservation rules. Environmental activists made clean energy scarce by opposing solar farms, wind turbines, and nuclear power. The pandemic revealed scarcities in testing, vaccines, and PPE that persisted long after they should have been solved.

Housing represents the most critical supply constraint because it's the largest expense in family budgets and connects to everything else. When housing is expensive, child care becomes expensive (buildings cost more), innovation suffers (people can't afford to live near economic opportunities), and entire regions lose population to cheaper areas.

The Housing Crisis: America's Fundamental Challenge

Cities function as "engines of opportunity and economic dynamism" where ideas get produced through cooperation and competition among talented people. The Bay Area's concentration of frontier AI labs within 50 square miles demonstrates how geographic clustering drives innovation. Service workers earn dramatically more near productive industries—a barber near Google makes far more than one in rural Arkansas.

This geographic advantage historically drove American mobility and opportunity. About one-third of 20th-century economic mobility came from people moving to richer, more productive areas. But housing costs have reversed this trend, making cities accessible only to high earners while forcing out working-class families.

• Progressive-voting areas show a 30% decline in housing permits for every 10% increase in progressive vote share
• California authorized over $30 billion for high-speed rail that essentially doesn't exist
• San Francisco spent $1.7 million building a single public toilet due to regulatory compliance costs
• Los Angeles built affordable housing at $600,000-700,000 per unit, more expensive than buying homes in Denver

The housing shortage isn't driven by geography or technology—America knows how to build apartment buildings, and elevators were invented in the 1850s. Instead, deliberate policy choices since the 1960s created "manufactured scarcity" through zoning regulations, historic preservation rules, environmental review processes, and citizen lawsuit rights that empower neighborhood opposition.

Solving housing requires both legal reform and political courage. Mayors must represent the "circle of voters that we can't see" who would benefit from more housing, not just the visible homeowners who attend city council meetings to oppose new construction. Default policy should be saying yes to housing rather than finding reasons to say no.

Cities remain "the frontier" of the modern economy where ideas get produced, but gatekeeping through housing costs means "you've actually closed the American frontier" for working families. Children growing up around economic centers are more likely to become innovators in those fields, making housing access crucial for intergenerational mobility and continued American competitiveness.

Government Efficiency and the DOGE Debate

The Department of Government Efficiency represents both an opportunity and a danger for abundance advocates. The steelman case recognizes that government genuinely struggles to achieve its stated goals and wastes enormous resources on process compliance rather than real-world outcomes.

Biden's infrastructure bill allocated $42 billion for rural broadband, but practically none was built due to a 14-stage bureaucratic process. States had to navigate mapping challenges, 5-year action plans, workforce development requirements, and equity matrices before receiving funds. Only three of 56 jurisdictions completed all stages by the 2024 election.

• American government has selected for lawyers, consultants, and negotiators rather than builders and engineers
• Complex bargaining requirements make the US attractive to people skilled at navigating bureaucracy rather than creating value
• Environmental laws from the 1970s now prevent the clean energy construction needed to address climate change
• Affordable housing projects cost more than market-rate construction due to layered regulatory requirements

However, DOGE's actual implementation suggests "destruction for the sake of destruction" rather than efficiency improvements. The administration fired experienced FDA employees without articulating goals for drug approval acceleration. They eliminated PEPFAR, a highly effective HIV/AIDS program, without evaluation. Half the Department of Education workforce was cut without explaining desired education outcomes.

Elon Musk's approach worked at Twitter because he had clear goals and control over the final product. Government efficiency requires different methods because democratic institutions must serve multiple constituencies and maintain legitimacy through both process and outcomes. The current approach appears designed to centralize power under Trump rather than improve government function.

True abundance-minded reform would start with clear goals, identify specific bottlenecks, and design solutions that maintain democratic accountability while improving results. This might involve hiring more FDA reviewers to accelerate drug approvals rather than cutting staff, or streamlining environmental reviews without eliminating environmental protection.

Science Policy and Innovation Acceleration

American scientific leadership faces threats from both bureaucratic sclerosis and resource misallocation. NIH funding, while substantial, forces researchers to spend 40% of their time on grant applications and paperwork rather than actual research. This represents an enormous waste of scientific talent and slows critical breakthroughs.

The peer review process has become overly conservative, funding incremental research by established scientists rather than high-risk, high-reward projects by younger researchers. Real breakthroughs are typically not obvious in advance—if they were obvious, they wouldn't represent genuine discoveries.

• Operation Warp Speed demonstrated how government can accelerate innovation by removing regulatory barriers and providing clear goals
• mRNA vaccine technology required decades of public investment through DARPA and NIH before COVID made it commercially viable
• Current bureaucratic structures make it "tough to be a high-speed rail engineer in America" compared to working in digital technology
• Scientific progress requires both public investment and institutional reform to maximize researcher productivity

The abundance approach to science policy would streamline grant processes, increase funding for young researchers, and create more mechanisms for high-risk projects. AI might help synthesize knowledge across domains to accelerate discovery, but only if institutions can effectively deploy these tools.

Success stories like GLP-1 drugs, which evolved from lizard venom research into treatments for diabetes, obesity, and potentially Alzheimer's disease, demonstrate how "weird science" often produces the most valuable breakthroughs. This argues for continued investment in basic research that doesn't have obvious commercial applications.

Political Realignment and the Future of American Politics

America is experiencing a fundamental political realignment comparable to the transitions from the New Deal order to the neoliberal order. The neoliberal consensus, which emphasized markets and globalization from Reagan through Clinton, collapsed due to the financial crisis, climate change, and China's rise as an authoritarian competitor.

Neither party has successfully articulated a replacement governing philosophy. Trump represents right-wing populism that rejects neoliberal trade policies and foreign interventions, while Democrats remain internally divided between progressive and centrist factions. This creates opportunities for new political coalitions and approaches.

• The 2024 election reflected a narrow 1.5% popular vote margin, not a decisive mandate for dramatic change
• Thermostatic public opinion suggests Americans regularly punish incumbent parties regardless of ideology
• Political orders typically require a founding party, an opposition party that accepts key premises, and external validation
• Current political instability resembles the 1970s transition period that eventually produced the neoliberal order

The abundance agenda attempts to provide Democrats with a coherent governing philosophy that addresses cost-of-living concerns while maintaining progressive values. By focusing on supply-side solutions to housing, energy, and governance challenges, Democrats could appeal to voters frustrated with expensive cities and ineffective institutions.

This approach requires abandoning some liberal orthodoxies, particularly the reflexive defense of all existing institutions and processes. Democrats need "standard bearers who are willing to say we were wrong about some things" and commit to reforming rather than just defending government programs.

Energy Policy and Climate Solutions

Climate change requires building massive amounts of clean energy infrastructure, not just reducing consumption. Modern Americans will continue demanding modern lifestyles, so the solution involves providing clean electricity, nuclear power, solar, wind, and potentially fusion rather than asking people to use less energy.

Environmental activism has often opposed the construction necessary to address environmental problems. Historic preservation rules, wildlife protection laws, and permitting processes designed in the 1970s now prevent clean energy deployment. The same legal mechanisms that stopped pollution from industry now stop solar farms and wind turbines.

• Energy abundance through clean technology could enable mass desalination, indoor agriculture, and other resource-intensive solutions
• Nuclear power faces political opposition despite being a proven clean energy source
• Current environmental review processes can take longer than actually building clean energy projects
• Climate goals require reforming environmental protection to focus on outcomes rather than just stopping development

The abundance approach supports aggressive clean energy deployment while maintaining environmental protection. This might involve fast-tracking renewable energy projects, updating environmental review processes for climate impact, and embracing nuclear power as a bridge to full renewable deployment.

Energy policy connects directly to economic competitiveness and quality of life. Countries with cheap, abundant clean energy will have advantages in manufacturing, technology development, and living standards. America's energy choices will determine its global position in the coming decades.

The Path Forward: Institutional Reform and Political Courage

Creating an abundance agenda requires both policy changes and cultural shifts within the Democratic Party. Politicians must become more comfortable with unstructured conversations, outcomes-focused metrics, and challenging established interest groups that benefit from current dysfunction.

The party needs leaders who understand that "you cannot change American politics" without upsetting people. Trump reformed the Republican Party by attacking sacred cows like free trade and foreign interventions. Democrats must similarly question liberal orthodoxies around process, regulation, and institutional deference.

• Future Democratic leaders must master attention-based rather than money-based political communication
• The party should recruit candidates focused on building rather than blocking
• Policy proposals must include specific mechanisms for overcoming bureaucratic barriers
• Success requires measuring housing units built, energy capacity added, and infrastructure completed rather than dollars authorized

Abundance advocates face the challenge of appearing anti-establishment while proposing constructive rather than destructive changes. This means channeling voter anger at institutional failure toward specific reforms rather than wholesale demolition.

The stakes are enormous. America's economic dynamism, global competitiveness, and democratic legitimacy all depend on proving that government can effectively address major challenges. If liberals cannot make institutions work, voters will continue supporting populist outsiders promising to tear them down.

The abundance agenda offers a path between bureaucratic paralysis and authoritarian efficiency. By focusing relentlessly on outcomes in the physical world—more housing, more clean energy, more effective services—progressives can rebuild public trust while advancing their values. This requires abandoning process fetishism in favor of results-oriented governance that actually improves people's lives.

Democratic politicians who embrace this agenda early will have significant advantages in future primaries. Voters are hungry for leaders who can articulate clear goals and deliver concrete results rather than managing complex coalitions and defending existing institutions. The abundance framework provides exactly this kind of positive, forward-looking political identity.