Abundance Democrats and the DOGEing of America

Can Trump be resisted without empowering the forces of stagnation?

I am at least intrigued by—and in many cases supportive of—the so-called abundance agenda exemplified by books like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book (which I have not yet read; I’m currently reading another, even more topical tome). I strongly favor an “all of the above” strategy for energy, which has multiple essential deregulatory components, both for economic reasons and as the best way to combat climate change. I think the unaffordability of New York is stifling our economy and driving our most productive citizens entirely out of state, and an essential component of changing that is making it easier to build housing—particularly housing suitable for families—not only in the city itself but in the surrounding suburbs. And I think the politics on this question are overwhelmingly clear. Most people in any given locality don’t want “more” in their neighborhood (whether “more” is an apartment building or a nuclear plant), but just about everybody gets cranky when, in aggregate, there’s “less,” and votes for the party that credibly promises “more.”

Precisely because of that dichotomy between the local and the general interest, as well as a dichotomy between the particular and the general interest, the abundance folks are generally in favor of unshackling both private industry and government. They want fewer community meetings, fewer grounds for lawsuits and clearer lines of authority. They want to make it easier to hire and fire people and to be unencumbered by interest-group-imposed requirements. They want to make it easier to tear down and easier to build.

The American system of government seems, in many ways, designed to prevent this. Between bicameralism, the separation of powers, supermajority requirements for various legislative acts, federalism, a wide variety of different and often overlapping forms of local government, an inveterately litigious culture and a quasi-scriptural written constitution that has inspired a long history judicial activism on both the left and the right, Americans seem to manifest a veritable love for the veto. This reflects the fact that our government from the beginning was a kludgy compromise between various interests who wanted something more effective than the Articles of Confederation but still wanted to make sure they wouldn’t get steamrolled. So, like the original progressive reformers, the abundance folks want to make this kludgy system more effective if that means breaking with norms, traditional practices, legal precedent, etc.

What I want to know is: how does that play out in the era of DOGE, and, more generally, Trump 2.0?

By asking that, I don’t mean to suggest that Trump’s agenda matches that of the abundance Democrats by any means. He’s cracking down on immigration, whereas they would like an orderly expansion of legal immigration. He wants to repeal the CHIPS Act and put new roadblocks against solar and wind energy. He’s wantonly throwing up tariff barriers and menacing the independence of the Federal Reserve. He’s replaced woke coercion of the private and non-profit sectors with anti-woke coercion.

But he’s also definitely consolidating previously dispersed power into his own hands. He’s definitely making it easier to hire and fire members of the bureaucracy. He’s definitely going to war with a judiciary that is trying to stop him from taking executive actions he deems necessary. The results may be disastrous, whether because the policy goals are bad or because the people trying to implement them are incompetent or for other reasons. But from a structural perspective, isn’t this setting precedents that would be useful should the abundance Democrats ever come to power?

Like so many other people, I took the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of its publication to read The Power Broker last year, in my case for the first time. It’s a great biography and a great story and is filled with lessons about how power works, many of them I suspect unintentional on the part of the author. One of those lessons is that the same qualities and the same structural innovations that made Robert Moses effective were the ones that made him dangerous, and vice versa. Another is that corruption may be inherent to the process of any major public endeavor, and the only question is whether that corruption facilitates achieving that endeavor (as in the case of much of Moses’s highway building) or consumes it entirely (as in the case of Moses’s housing construction). The impression I got by the end of the book is that Moses did some very good things and some very bad things, that he was at his best when he was allied with or at least working with a politician with a very strong political base (first Alfred E. Smith and then Fiorello H. Laguardia) who understood him and was willing and able to check him when necessary, but that before and after him nobody was able to get anything of consequence done.

Moses’s agenda was an abundance agenda in that it was about helping the city and the metropolitan area grow and modernize. He came into a city that couldn’t get anything built and built many, many things that were necessary, and many that are beloved today. In addition to the bridges and highways and parks, he built the alliance of business and labor interest that got named the “growth machine” that the reformers of the late 1960s and 1970s determined to halt before it literally paved paradise to put up a parking lot, the machine that the abundance folks want to bring back in a new and better form.

This characterization of Moses as an abundance guy avant la lettre is correct, I think, even though the specifics of his agenda were sometimes radically at odds with what the abundance advocates stand for now. (He had no use for mass transit, for example, and his housing efforts focused on “slum-clearance” that actually reduced the housing stock and expanded slums.) Abundance-seeker Matt Yglesias’s take on Moses is that his ideas were bad, but hindsight is 20-20. I assure you, some of the ideas that Yglesias thinks make obvious sense today will turn out in retrospect to be really bad. That’s not a knock on Yglesias; it’s just the way it is being a time-bound person who advances ideas. If you empower someone to push their ideas through, some of those ideas will be bad—maybe even terrible. You can’t empower them only to push through the good ideas; that’s the mistake the progressive regulators have been making, after all, and results in getting nothing done at all. You can only empower them to a given degree, take the bad with the good, and, if the bad outweighs the good, throw the bums out. (Moses of course could not be thrown out, but for most of his tenure he was kept in office because of his popularity; if the people had demanded his head, any number of governors and mayors who badly wanted him cut down to size would have handed it to them.)

Which brings me back to Trump, Musk and our current moment. Some of what this administration is doing is diametrically opposed to what the abundance folks want. Some of it is reasonably well aligned with what they want. But a great deal of it is setting precedent that—in theory, with the right people in place with the right ideas—could make it more possible for the abundance folks to do what they want, whether it’s firing everyone at Amtrak and replacing them with Spaniards or whatever. This is even true of Trump’s assault on the courts; Moses frequently sent the bulldozers first, then presented the courts with a fait accompli. It’s even true of some aspects of Trump’s corruption, which also parallels the way Moses operated (though Moses, while willing to help others get rich unethically in order to win their support for his projects, was never interested in personal enrichment).

So are DOGE and Trump setting a useful precedent for a future abundance agenda? A unitary executive backed by a compliant legislature would certainly be able to get a lot done, and more quickly than a Madisonian structure would. Vigorous and successful resistance to Trump through the courts, meanwhile, would likely put up roadblocks to the 21st century Henry Clay administration that the abundance Democrats long for. Doesn’t that have implications for what kind of resistance abundance Democrats would actually support? Don’t they wish President Biden had broken more heads and norms in the service of an abundance agenda, rather than canceling student loans or declaring the Equal Rights Amendment part of the Constitution? Don’t they want DOGE to have some level of success? And don’t they worry that, if Chief Justice John Roberts stops Trump in his tracks, he’ll be even more successful at stopping a future president Mark Cuban?

I’m not trolling. I genuinely want to know.