3 groups offer competing visions for Democrats. First up: Abundance.

Democrats are still grasping for a vision that can attract voters, guide their strategy and win elections.  There are three key groups vying to take the lead on the vision thing: Abundance, New Democrats, and DSA, led by Zohran Mamdani.

Two of them are centrist, and the third is progressive.  There is some room for “yes, and” among them, and even room to bring in sane Republicans on a common sense agenda.  Building enough power to take the country back from Trump will require converting people across the spectrum.

Ultimately, the voters, not the party establishment, will decide who wins.  Grab some popcorn and let’s take a look. 

Abundance: What Is It?

Abundance is a book released in March 2025 by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, popular writers/podcasters with centrist politics. The book lays out something they call the “Abundance Agenda.”  Critic Matt Bruenig correctly describes the book's goal as becoming “part of a vanguardist movement that remakes the Democratic party and then the political order.” 

According to Andrew Yang, who is a fan, “in early May, more than a dozen [bipartisan] members of Congress launched the Build America Caucus, explicitly inspired by the ‘abundance movement.’ The new caucus is meant to focus on energy permitting and enabling housing and infrastructure to be built.”  An “Abundance Conference” was held recently, featuring moderate legislators, right wing think tanks and business interests.

What is the Abundance Agenda?

Klein and Thompson define “abundance” as a [future] “state in which there is enough of what we need, to create lives better than what we have had.”  Their main action item: get government out of the way with deregulation and simplifying legislation. Then invest in the private sector rather than in more government programs.  They lay out some ideas around key issues like housing and energy, as well as generally supporting “innovation.”

There’s a name for that: neoliberalism. Its track record isn’t good.  Amusingly, one of the events at their recent conference was called “Is Abundance Just Neoliberalism?”   Yes. It is.

Who does Abundance appeal to, and what’s good about it?

The main target audience is centrist Democrats who believe the problem is liberals, radicals and progressives who have “captured” the party. The authors blame this group for strangling development and innovation with too much regulation. They say these rules try to serve too many masters, creating complexity, distrust in government and scarcity, instead of abundance. 

Burdensome regulations and legislative requirements do cripple efforts to get things like affordable housing done. It’s real and it’s a pain point that people across the political spectrum experience.

I recently heard about Federal money allocated for sustainable home repairs and upgrades that will be sent back from states because it wasn’t spent, even over several years. This happened both because of burdensome rules and lack of capacity at local organizations tasked with outreach. It’s infuriating.

The fact that both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have already signed on to translate the Abundance ideas into legislation speaks to the appeal of this thought process.

The thesis that if we just got rid of or simplified these regulations, abundance would follow, is simple and easy to understand, with some grounding in lived experience. That makes Abundance a potentially powerful movement to change what’s happening on the ground and shift power in the political arena.

What’s wrong with Abundance?

Instead of policy prescriptions, they propose “a new set of questions,” like “What is difficult to build that should be easy?”  They note that effective solutions will differ from place to place, issue to issue.  Fair enough.

But their analysis is absurdly simplistic. It leaves out all the obstacles beyond over-regulation, for example, how the profit motive drives housing developers to build fancy housing for rich people rather than cheaper affordable housing.  It doesn’t acknowledge that some rules around environmental impact, for example, are there for good reason. Abundance doesn’t even attempt to grapple with how BETTER rules might be created.

The answers to What is difficult to build that should be easy,  or as I’d put it, How can we make it easier to build enough affordable housing, can be found in project management books like the excellent and highly readable How Big Things Get Done. They can be found in power analyses of the political and economic forces that shape decisions around housing.  They can be found in housing battles of the past and in other countries, such as Austria, where the city of Vienna has been very successful at affordable housing.

Over-regulation is more a symptom than a cause of scarcity, and Abundance offers no solutions other than getting rid of it.

Abundance may sound good on the surface. People who like it might make good advisors on how to streamline regulations and legislation.  But it doesn’t offer nearly enough to make government more effective, or to bring Democrats out of the wilderness.

Next up: New Dems.