Of late, as Democrats contemplate their existence on the political Tree of Woe that the public has banished them to, something apparently new (but not particularly so) is beginning to percolate among their policy wonks.
It’s called the Abundance Agenda, and it’s being heralded in a number of books and essays, most notably a book called Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. (RELATED: The Democrat-Media Codependency)
A modicum of research into this prospect yields much amusement, and not quite so much confidence that the Abundance Agenda will lead the Democrats back to power. (RELATED: Democrats Have No Roadmap for Their Journey Through the Wilderness … and James Carville Knows It)
What exactly is this idea?
Well, essentially, the abundance Democrats are recognizing is that their party can’t govern — and they blame the Hard Left for putting them in the position they’re in. The proposed correction is essentially to abandon all of the things the Left is built on and instead return the Democrat Party to what it was under Bill Clinton. (RELATED: The Left, Radical Left, and Democrats: Three Peas, One Pod)
Sort of.
It’s a policy framework emphasizing — get this — deregulation and increased production, particularly with respect to housing, energy, and infrastructure like roads and bridges. (RELATED: ‘Get Laid’ and ‘Have Fun’: The Democrats (Still) Don’t Get It)
Klein and Thompson, in their book, argue that progressive policies exacerbate scarcity — because those policies make it impossible to create, innovate, and develop anything — and thus make people’s lives miserable. The book gripes about excessive regulation, zoning laws, and bureaucratic delays, and it decries the effect of those things on the places where they exist.
Most obviously, blue cities, which are more and more dysfunctional by the day as creators — real estate developers, industrialists, manufacturers, tech tycoons, and such — have begun swearing them off in favor of red state locales and more business-friendly suburbs/exurbs not poisoned by the progressive model.
What comes from this? A stagnant and degrading supply of urban housing, for example, which is a problem made septic by the addition of some 20 million illegal aliens, most of whom have descended on blue “sanctuary” cities and who are using federal housing subsidies to compete with low-income Americans for what used to be affordable places to live.
A growing local economy and a motivated housing industry in those cities would have resulted in lots of new brick and mortar. But between housing regulations, Green New Deal idiocy, bad tax policy, awful crime, and lots of other symptoms of blue-city malaise, there isn’t much new supply of housing.
Or jobs. Or health care. Or parking spaces, road capacity, restaurants (amazing what a $20 minimum wage will do to the supply of affordable places to eat, isn’t it?), grocery stores, quality schools, or practically anything else.
And the abundance crowd is calling for something called “supply-side progressivism,” demanding that America build more.
More what?
Houses. Clean energy projects. Roads, pipelines, bridges, railways. All the same stuff they’ve been promising that the government would deliver for generations.
What’s funny about this is it’s exactly what the crowd in charge of the fake Joe Biden administration was supposedly for. Team Biden spent trillions of dollars supposedly refurbishing America’s infrastructure, only to find out that almost none of their efforts would bear fruit in this decade.
And what’s even funnier is that it’s the Left who stands in the way of the Left.
Here, I’ll harken back to my theory of Weaponized Governmental Failure (WGF) where urban America is concerned. Remember, the goal of WGF is to create cities with a small skim of rich people, most of whom fit the limousine-liberal mold, and a vast swath of government-dependent poor, with as little in between as possible. You do this by chasing away middle-class voters, and Democrats have discovered doing so is best accomplished by intentionally gacking it on things like law enforcement (Soros DAs, hug-a-thug consent decrees hamstringing local police forces, Black Lives Matter riots), public education (grooming children for bizarre sexual lifestyles instead of teaching them marketable skills or successful behavioral habits), infrastructure (Pete Buttigieg’s “racist” roads) and so on.
WGF worked so well that every blue state in America is essentially a large urban blue island or two in a sea of suburban and exurban red. Take away Portland, and Oregon is a pretty conservative state. Take away Denver, and that’s true of Colorado. Illinois (Chicago), Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Madison), Michigan (Detroit), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pittsburgh), and on and on — in all of those states where Democrats can win, it’s a monolithic urban vote that wins for them. (RELATED: Weaponized Governmental Failure: A Primer)
But they’re in the wilderness because that monolithic urban vote is a little less monolithic, and it’s a lot less enthusiastic than it used to be.
And what else is funny about the Abundance Agenda is that it’s the commie Soros groups dedicated to promoting WGF in the cities that control the Democrats’ votes there. Proposing to “the groups” that they get out of the way so a new natural gas power plant can be built, or a railway be laid through a slum area, or such an area be gentrified with new high-rise apartment buildings, is a dead letter. The environmental nuts, for example, are rabidly outspoken against “abundance” as a governing concept. In fact, their animating principle is that no economic progress be made at all. They want to redistribute what currently exists, not make new things.
And try to refurbish or redevelop a slum, and the Hard Left race-baiting crew will take to the streets to defend the unlivable garbage heaps which currently exist in those cities.
Before the Democrats discovered WGF, the abundance agenda was easily sellable. The political machines that ran the cities before “the groups” took over were happy to cooperate with real estate developers and other capitalists — all they wanted was to skim off the top of those projects. Everybody knew that greaseball urban politicians were on the take, and it was simply a cost of doing business that you’d pay them off to get permits, waivers, and whatever else. But once the more radical WGF/Soros-oriented groups replaced those old-school machines, the game changed.
And it isn’t changing back. Not without an ugly civil war in the Democrat Party, which isn’t going to resolve itself any time soon.
I keep saying that conservatives and Republicans are on the verge of a golden age, a Fourth Era of American politics in which everything can be re-examined and redefined for the next several generations. We’re already seeing evidence that this is in order with the massive changes this second Trump administration is bringing. (RELATED: The Revivalist Era Begins)
But the most notable manifestation of the Fourth Era is that the Democrats are utterly devoid of a viable plan for the future.
And the Abundance Agenda, which at best will tear apart their coalition and set their activists against their intelligentsia, is no such plan.
Try again, fellas. Take all the time you need.
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