It’s a bit ironic, given Ezra Klein’s critique of “everything bagel liberalism,” that the abundance agenda is now risks becoming something of an everything bagel itself. Frank DiStefano thinks it needs to transform into a “national ideology” about “how to restore a fading American dream.” In the National Interest, Kathleen Hicks and Wendy Anderson write that they want an “Abundance National Security Agenda.” And Matthew Yglesias thinks it’s “time for abundance Democrats to embrace cultural moderation,” specifically through a vehicle he calls, in the pages of the Niskanen Center’s online journal Hypertext, “Big Ass Truck Abundance.”
It’s a testament to both the success and mutability of the abundance framework that so many people are proposing their own elaborations on the basic premise. (I take that basic premise to be: YIMBY, but for other stuff in addition to housing.) But there’s such a thing as over-elaboration. “Abundant national security” is a slogan that only really makes sense if your main priority is public funding for weapons R&D; as it so happens, Wendy Anderson is a former Palantir executive. Similarly, the argument for linking “cultural moderation” with abundance has nothing to do with the innate properties of a YIMBYism+ policy agenda. The argument for Big Ass Truck Abundance appears to be that abundance Democrats should be centrists because all Democrats should be centrists.
It’s striking that Yglesias should be the one making the argument for what I’ll henceforth call BATA, because he’s a frequent critic of progressive advocacy blocs that stray outside their policy lanes. Even an earlier post of his about BATA takes a swipe at “progressive omnicause thinking.” And just three days after the publication of his Hypertext piece, Yglesias was again extolling “the power of a single-issue group.”
To his credit, Yglesias recognizes the contradiction. In his endorsement of single-issue advocacy, he writes:
At any rate, I’m well aware that this is an annoyingly ambiguous in which I am refusing to take my own side of the argument. I’ve often been frustrated by blue state YIMBYs who are excessively focused on bolstering their “we’re the true progressives” credentials rather than on building bridges with moderates. I want the kind of para-party that Elmendorf and Schleicher are talking about to exist.
But mostly, I think the whole space of land use is massively under-funded relative to its objective importance, and we should both have multi-issue moderate urbanism organizations and single-issue housing policy groups. Because I agree that in some sense, the non-housing problems of urban governance are a limiting factor to long-term YIMBY success. But I also think YIMBYs have put a lot more points on the board than almost any other contemporary movement, precisely because we’ve pursued a single-issue strategy in a polarized era.
To my mind, this is more interesting and nuanced than the prescriptivism of his Hypertext essay on BATA. And in general, I agree that YIMBYism wins when supported by a diverse ecosystem of groups, with a diverse set of ideological orientations and mission scopes. But his critique of “YIMBYs who are excessively focused on bolstering their ‘we’re the true progressives’ credentials rather than on building bridges with moderates” points to a telling blind spot in his analysis: he can’t bring himself to grant that there might be local contexts where establishing progressive bona fides is more strategic than uttering his preferred cultural shibboleths. The only two viable options, in his mind, appear to be single-issue advocacy and BATA. (Ask yourself whether groups like Open New York and Abundance New York should have rallied behind Cuomo instead of building bridges to the Mamdani camp and you start to understand the problem with this argument.)
One obvious reason for that gap in his analysis is ideological: he thinks more people should be centrist Democrats because he’s a centrist Democrat. But it’s also structural. Yglesias finds it difficult to resist centrist omnicausal thinking for the same reason that so many advocacy groups find themselves drawn to the progressive omnicause.
I’ve written before that I’m sympathetic to the criticism that Yglesias and others make of “the groups” that comprise much of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, albeit with some reservations on my part. One of those reservations has to do with the implication that “the groups” are a specifically progressive phenomenon. In fact, centrist Democratic groups often indulge in the very pathologies that they ascribe to the left wing of the party: motivated reasoning, insularity, political naiveté, and a tendency to claim they speak on behalf of communities that they rarely (if ever) interact with.
Those pathologies are not personal failings—or at least they’re not only personal failings. They’re what happens when party politics gets monopolized by lavishly funded nonprofits, staffed by highly educated and affluent ideological dead-enders. Those lavishly funded organizations are sometimes referred to as the nonprofit industrial complex, which is assumed to be an exclusively progressive phenomenon. But it’s a no less accurate description of the WelcomeFest coalition.
These sorts of coalitions are inexorably going to pull their constituent issue groups toward omnicausal thinking because they’re bound together by shared funding sources, cultural and ideological affinities, professional networks, and social ties. In-group solidarity has a way of burying official mission statements, whether the in-group in question is the progressive professional class or the centrist professional class.
It’s not hard to understand why. In both cases, members of these coalitions are primarily accountable to their funders and their peers. They may aspire to act on behalf of the common man, but they don’t represent the common man in any formal or official sense. If you work in the nonprofit sector, that isn’t who pays your salaries or rates your job performance. And even for Democratic politicians — who are paid by the public, and who can be hired or fired by them — the link between job performance and electoral performance is pretty tenuous, confounded as it is by any number of other variables.
To the extent that the national Democratic Party can be said to rule anything, it is ruling the void. That phrase comes from the title of a 2013 book by the late political scientist Peter Mair, who argued that Western political parties had become increasingly remote from the constituencies they ostensibly served. In his analysis, mass participation in party politics is a thing of the past; instead of being rooted in civil society, political parties have become cloistered institutions managed by an isolated governing class. "The groups” are not so much an American progressive failing as they are a symptom of a pan-Western pandemic.
Mair was writing specifically about European parliamentary democracy, but it’s not hard to see the relevance of his critique to the American context. It rhymes with the thesis of Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy, a book which I’ve probably cited in this newsletter dozens of times at this point. Skocpol’s book, as you might recall, concerns itself with the erosion of mass membership civic groups in the United States and the rise of the professionally managed advocacy organizations that imperfectly filled the ensuing vacuum.
If we understand the problem with “the groups” as an epiphenomenon of mass democracy’s erosion, then the BATA-versus-single-issue-advocacy debate starts to look like it’s beside the point. A political movement can be oriented around a single issue or around a set of centrist cultural signifiers, but without civil society roots it’s going to end up hovering in the same airless vacuum as every other well-intentioned but free-floating elite project.
This is a trap that the YIMBY movement has largely avoided up to now: it began as a grassroots, volunteer-led project, and grassroots membership still comprises the core of its coalition. “Abundance” as an extension of the YIMBY project will fail if it loses that connection with (and accountability to) a nonprofessional membership base. It will simply add several more groups to The Groups.
There’s still value in trying to articulate a larger vision. But that vision needs to have some organic basis in the ground-level work of YIMBY activists. They’re the ones who determine the movement’s overall ideological complexion. Any attempt to impose one from above is essentially Group-think.