The Abundance Debate Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It.
Populists and abundance proponents have retreated into factional warfare. But both sides need to realize that they need each other.
America’s working and middle classes face a dual crisis: declining trust that government can deliver for ordinary people, and accelerating concentration of wealth and power in a shrinking number of hands. Yet rather than train their fire outward, Democrats are trapped in an increasingly bitter internal fight organized around two competing frameworks — “populism” and “abundance.”
Populists, represented by figures like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, argue that America’s defining problem is inequality so extreme that three billionaires hold more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. The villains are clear: unchecked corporate power, entrenched oligarchy, a political economy rigged against ordinary people.
On the other side is the “abundance” framework popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and rapidly gaining ground among centrist Democrats. For abundance advocates, the primary obstacle isn’t inequality but government’s paralyzing inability to deliver tangible outcomes — affordable housing, renewable energy, public transit, infrastructure at scale — particularly in blue cities and states. The culprit isn’t corporate power so much as Democratic governance itself: bureaucratic layering, endless veto points accumulated by advocacy groups, entrenched NIMBYism.
Both diagnoses contain real insight. There is no inherent reason these frameworks can’t be synthesized. But it’s worth being precise about why they haven’t been: the intellectual case for synthesis is sound, and the political vehicle for abundance is currently not. Those are two different problems, and conflating them is part of what keeps this debate so unproductive.
The Power Imbalance
The friction between centrist and progressive Democrats gets framed as a clash of ideas or temperaments. Beneath the ideological debate is a durable structural imbalance: the populist wing — rooted in the Sanders campaigns — remains a junior partner with ideas, energy, and a sizable base but without institutional leverage. It controls no major governorships, no large cities, no legislative leadership. This leaves it in a familiar position: blamed for outcomes it didn’t control.
The 2024 loss is the clearest example. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden ran on a platform and strategy crafted by centrists. When they lost, progressives were — again — accused of undermining the effort. As David Dayen put it, David Shor had more money to implement his theory of politics than anyone in the history of American elections. He failed. And somehow the populist left is still being asked to step back.
What gets called “pragmatism” in Washington often means avoiding conflict with powerful interests. The progressive synthesis — economic populism paired with competent, expansive governance — stays aspirational precisely because it lacks the institutional weight to force it into practice. This matters for how we read the abundance debate. The left’s problem isn’t only that it has the wrong argument. It’s that it doesn’t have enough power to make the right one land. More on that at the end.
What a Genuine Synthesis Would Look Like
Abundance focuses on removing procedural obstacles that block the delivery of public goods — affordable housing, transit, clean energy — particularly where local resistance and institutional inertia have turned even modest reforms into decade-long projects. Social democracy goes further: it’s not just about fixing markets but taking essential goods like healthcare, education, and housing out of market logic altogether, ensuring universal provision. Anti-monopoly populism, as practiced by Warren and Lina Khan, targets concentrated corporate power directly, seeking to democratize economic decision-making and prevent elite capture of government.
These approaches reinforce each other more than they conflict. Abundance thinking streamlines the administrative capacity needed to implement social democracy’s guarantees. Populism prevents abundance from becoming technocratic subsidy to private industry. Social democracy grounds abundance reform in universalism rather than efficiency for its own sake.
The tensions are real but manageable. Abundance advocates worry that social democratic guarantees reintroduce bureaucratic sclerosis. Social democrats fear that abundance without redistribution is market fundamentalism with better branding. Populists argue that without confronting power, neither framework changes who benefits. These are tensions within a viable coalition, not contradictions that rule one framework out.
Consider a familiar scenario from city government: in pursuit of environmental justice, a city council mandates advisory boards, multiple rounds of plan revisions, and several layers of administrative review. Each step seems reasonable. Collectively, they become a maze that interest groups exploit to stall action, and that public servants spend more time navigating than governing. Abundance advocates are right to diagnose that failure. But streamlining alone doesn’t fix it. Procedural complexity isn’t only inefficient — it’s a tool powerful interests use to block redistribution. Cutting through bureaucratic fog while leaving intact the economic power that generates it produces reform that’s either toothless or captured.
Why the Current Vehicle Is Compromised
The intellectual case for synthesis is one thing. The politics of the abundance movement are another.
Jonathan Chait frames the tension within liberalism as a clarifying “civil war” over the party’s direction. His framing has the virtue of honesty about what’s happening. But it elides a crucial asymmetry: one side in this civil war has billionaires.
Aaron Regunberg has documented the donor network underwriting the abundance movement. Reid Hoffman, Michael Bloomberg, and heirs to corporate fortunes aren’t neutral observers of Democratic policy debates. They fund efforts that seek to marginalize antitrust reformers, labor advocates, and the redistributionist politics associated with Sanders and Khan. WelcomeFest — the so-called “Abundance Coachella” — was bankrolled by private equity titans and made this legible in ways the movement’s intellectuals typically avoid. At times the rhetoric there made it seem like the biggest obstacles to progressive governance weren’t landlords or developers but the few Democrats still talking about corporate power.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a structural fact about whose interests the movement serves and who it is willing to pick fights with. The intellectual project of abundance can be sound and the political vehicle can still be compromised. Both things are true right now. If the abundance movement is genuinely committed to state capacity and public goods delivery, it cannot be credibly indifferent to what its donors want. That’s not a gotcha — it’s a condition for being taken seriously.
The Atari Democrats of the 1980s offer the right comparison here, though not for the reasons progressives usually cite. Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and the neoliberal wing were not primarily neoliberal because of their policy preferences. They were neoliberal because of whose interests they were protecting and who they were willing to fight. Today’s abundance advocates do not uniformly argue for deregulation or corporate dominance; many invoke New Deal–era public investment and industrial policy, a different intellectual pedigree entirely. But when prominent abundance voices spend more time attacking organized labor, antitrust enforcement, and social justice organizations than confronting developer power or concentrated capital, the comparison to the Atari Democrats survives — not on policy but on politics.
The Proof of Concept
Mariana Mazzucato’s work offers a framework for synthesis that escapes this trap. Her core argument is that the state isn’t just a referee or a safety net — it’s a market-maker, a driver of innovation that private industry then builds on. From the internet to the vaccine supply chain, public institutions have made the foundational investments that private capital subsequently captures the returns from. The policy failure isn’t too much government; it’s a government that funds risk and privatizes reward.
Mazzucato argues for a mission-driven state: one that sets clear public goals — decarbonization, universal care, industrial transition — directs capital accordingly, and structures investments so that returns flow back to the public. This is democratic in its insistence that state investment serve public ends, not generate private windfalls. It confronts corporate power not through antitrust enforcement alone but by building the public alternative. This is the version of abundance the left can sign on to — because it doesn’t ask progressives to abandon their theory of power in exchange for a promise of better bus service.
California’s Transformative Climate Communities program is a working example. TCC puts historically marginalized communities in direct control of substantial public investments — affordable housing, renewable energy, urban greening. By coupling expanded governmental resources with democratic accountability and explicit equity mandates, it shows that efficient delivery of public goods and redistribution toward those most harmed are not competing priorities. Neither one constrains the other. Each makes the other more durable.
What History Actually Shows
The idea that confronting corporate power and building state capacity are incompatible is not a diagnosis of progressive politics. It’s an alibi for not attempting either. The moments of deepest progressive achievement in American history were precisely those when movements refused to choose.
James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory traces the founding tension of twentieth-century American progressivism. Louis Brandeis argued that corporate monopoly posed an existential threat to democracy itself and required direct antitrust confrontation. Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann envisioned professionalized, efficient government delivering public benefits without disturbing capitalist structures. These factions frequently argued past each other. When they found common ground, the results were durable: the Clayton Antitrust Act, the Federal Trade Commission — regulatory frameworks that fused democratic accountability with administrative capacity. Neither project succeeded without the other.
The New Deal deepened this fusion under pressure. Roosevelt and Frances Perkins built on mass populist mobilization — the labor movement, the farm movement, the unemployed councils — to justify and sustain an activist federal government. The administration’s intellectuals pulled in both directions: Rexford Tugwell pushed federal planning to correct economic imbalance; Adolf Berle proposed restructuring corporate governance to subject it to democratic oversight; Perkins delivered both through Social Security, unemployment insurance, and minimum wage law. The institutions they built — the NLRB, the SEC — didn’t choose between confronting concentrated power and building competent administration. They fused the two, precisely because neither was politically possible without the other. Labor militancy made the NLRB necessary. The NLRB made labor power durable. Walter Reuther’s UAW carried this forward into the postwar period, tying increased industrial productivity to workers’ democratic control over investment and production decisions — his argument being that you couldn’t have robust growth without robust democracy inside the firm, because one was the precondition for the other.
The civil rights movement made the same wager at national scale. A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr. understood racial equality and economic redistribution as inseparable — not rhetorically but strategically. Their “Freedom Budget” pushed beyond legal equality toward full employment, higher wages, and genuine wealth redistribution. They pressed this agenda not despite wanting effective governance but because they understood that effective governance required confronting the economic power that had captured government in the first place. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society enacted Medicare, Medicaid, education funding, and major housing investment alongside the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act — not as separate tracks but as a single theory of democratic governance. The lesson isn’t just that you can do both. It’s that historically, you can’t sustain either one alone.
The Order of Operations
In 1938, with fascism consolidating in Europe and oligarchy consolidating at home, Franklin Roosevelt named this dynamic directly:
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself… Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.
This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.
We believe in a way of living in which political democracy and free private enterprise for profit should serve and protect each other — to ensure a maximum of human liberty not for a few but for all.
Roosevelt didn’t see abundance and populism as a choice. He saw concentrated economic power as the specific threat to democracy’s capacity to deliver, and he understood that you couldn’t restore state capacity without taking on concentrated power first. The order of operations matters. Improving government’s machinery while leaving intact the interests that captured it is a way to improve the machinery of capture.
The poll showing 59 percent of Democratic voters preferring populist appeals over abundance-style messaging isn’t a methodology debate. It signals which diagnosis voters find credible. The abundance framework may be better suited to governing than to campaigning; populism may be stronger as a message than as a governing program. Both things are probably true. A party that wants to win and then govern well needs both. But you can’t govern toward the synthesis if you don’t have the power to implement it on terms that don’t just privatize the returns.
Which brings us back to where we started. The populist wing’s problem isn’t only that abundance is a compromised vehicle. It’s that without institutional power — in city halls, in statehouses, in party leadership — it cannot force a synthesis on its own terms. Building that power is not a distraction from the policy debate. It’s the precondition for winning it. The historical movements that made the synthesis real — the New Deal coalition, the civil rights movement, the industrial union movement — all understood that the argument and the power had to develop together. The Democrats who forget this don’t have a strategic problem. They have a historical one.
Steadily and increasingly over the last 7 years following Waleed’s thoughts, I wish he would run the Democratic Party. Grateful for your ability to represent what we need with brilliance and strategy and
nuance and heart.
Interesting but SO repetitive