Thoughts on Abundance Factionalism

Less/More vs Better/Worse

Today I had a nice surprise when Matthew Yglesias linked to my last post, “Seeking Abundance.” He also linked to “The rise of the abundance faction,” which I found inspiring, and on which I have some thoughts.

The rise of the abundance faction

I was thrilled to see a thoughtful expression of Abundance as a new agenda that has potential to change today’s political battle lines.

Rather than trying to address the challenge of polarization by finding some space between the intellectually exhausted agendas of the right and left, we should focus instead on injecting an alternative dimension into our political discussion — the “Abundance Agenda” that we see as the answer to “Cost Disease Socialism.”

This is distinct from, but rhymes with, the conversations we have at Strong Towns. We’ve intentionally kept our distance from the political parties, and don’t see ourselves as aligned to the left/right conflict, but rather as part of a conflict between top-down and bottom-up approaches to material problem solving.

The state that America built in the 1960s and 1970s was, at its heart, regulative. From civil rights to environmental protection, its animating obsessions were things that it wanted to prevent from happening…

The aggregate effect of that state has been a widely diffused expectation that more or less everything that operates in physical space will take an extraordinary and unpredictable amount of time and be disappointing and uninspiring in its results.

It’s worse than that: the system doesn’t just prevent change in physical space, it resists change to itself. Ie. mid-century approaches that have proven wasteful or destructive (1,2) are extremely difficult to reform.

While housing, energy, and infrastructure are already a very ambitious policy palette from which to work, there are many other areas where the abundance framing addresses our major governing challenge…

This suggests that a movement organized around generating quickly deployed, high-quality, and massively increased supply of a wide range of public services would have a lot of governing space to work with. Its intended constituency is not those who are “anti-government” but those who engage with government mainly as its consumers rather than its producers. It speaks mostly to those who need government to work, not those who wish to see it drowned in a bathtub. 

I often run into a problem where people focus on “less vs more” when they should be thinking about “worse vs better.” Less and more are relevant for things that are unambiguously good or bad. We want less crime. We want more happiness. But most things in life are complex, and what we really want is for things to get better.

As an example, in corporations there are many processes. Most people express some aversion to process, and express a desire for there to be less of it. The problem is, process is just a word that means “how work get done.” There isn’t really such thing as more or less process. If a company doesn’t have formal process then work is handled ad-hoc, then high-power people in the company can do whatever they want, but the low-power majority of the company can’t get much done. In that case less is worse.

I think an element of the Abundance Agenda that will rhyme with older generation conservatism is a bias towards less government. But focusing too much on less, and not enough on better can get us in trouble. What we want is for government to work effectively and serve us well.

It’s more useful to anchor ourselves on improvement. Improvement focuses us on outcomes. Improvement could come via addition, subtraction, or other means. It matters that we not confuse the ends and the means.

…the Abundance Agenda faces considerable short-term challenges. It is out of step with large segments of both political parties and has limited support across the full sweep of its ambitions from prominent elected officials. Its champions are a relatively small, scattered, and disparate band of intellectuals, activists, and donors. American history shows, however, that big changes in party alignments and coalitions do, in fact, frequently start from precisely these sources rather than bubbling up from mass movements.

I find this encouraging, and am excited to be part of the informal network of activists helping to promote Abundance as an objective.

Later the article speak of the challenge in bridging these ideas from the “elites” to the masses; I think it’s possible that Strong Towns could help build that bridge. We’ve always had a bottom-up theory of change, and have a broad audience composed largely of normal people outside the intelligentsia. We’ll need to see this agenda solidify into concrete ideas, and as a highly heterodox movement I doubt we’d align on every issue with another platform, but I can imagine us potentially belonging to the same big tent.

Lastly, revisiting an idea from the beginning of the article:

Because the American political system is heavily biased against third parties, the best path for pursuing this agenda lies with the kind of intra-party factions that have been common throughout U.S. history (of which the Progressives were one).

I align with Lee Drutman and hope to see us break out of the Two-Party Doom Loop in my lifetime, but I recognize this is no small feat. I would hope that, if we saw an Abundance Faction arise among both the Democrat and Republican parties, perhaps a crowning achievement could be the passage of bipartisan voting reform (in particular multi-member House districts with proportional representation).