Category: Coalitions and Strategy

Derek Thompson (The Atlantic), The Political Right of the Century: For the first time in decades, America has a chance to define its next political order. Trump offers fear, retribution, and scarcity. Liberals can stand for abundance.

Derek Thompson is the co-author, along with Ezra Klein, of the new book Abundance. I strongly recommend the whole article. If you don’t subscribe to The Atlantic, then you really should. 

Here are some highlights:

Donald Trump has promised a “golden age of America.” But for all his bluster about being the champion of an American century, Trump’s actual policies point to something different: not an expansive vision of the future, but a shrunken vision of the present.

Throughout the opening months of his administration, the Trump White House has consistently pointed to existing shortages to demand new sacrifices. The administration says America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. The administration says America doesn’t have a healthy economy, and therefore we have to accept economic “hardship.” The administration says America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, and so we must suffer the consequences of less trade. The administration says America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants. The administration says American scientists aren’t focused on the right research, and so we have to gut our federal science programs. Again and again, Americans are being fed the line that everything that we don’t have requires the elimination of something that we need.

The MAGA movement might try to justify its wrecking-ball style by arguing that its extreme approach is commensurate with the level of anger that voters feel about the status quo. But just because Trump is a product of American rage does not mean he is a solution to it.

In housing, for example, Americans have every right to be furious. Home construction has lagged behind our national needs for decades. Today, the median age of first-time homebuyers has surged to a record high of 38. Large declines in young homeownershiphave likely prevented many young people from dating, marrying, and starting a family. Although Trump was swept into office on a wave of economic frustration, his initial foray into economic policy has done little to help the situation. As the National Association of Home Builders pointed out in an alarmed March 7 memo, his persistent threat of tariffs on Mexico and Canada could drive up the cost of crucial materials, such as softwood lumber and drywall gypsum, which are “largely sourced from Canada and Mexico, respectively.” Meanwhile, Trump’s anti-immigrant policies foretell new labor shortages in the construction industry, where roughly 25 percent or more workers are foreign-born.

This is where Democrats should be able to stand up and show that they have a winning response to the less-is-less politics from the right. But in many places run by Democrats, the solution on offer is another variety of scarcity. Blue cities are laden with rules and litigation procedures that block new housing and transit construction. As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum has noted, in California cities where the share of progressives votes goes up by 10 points, the number of housing permits issued declines by 30 percent. Where the supply of homes is constricted, housing prices soar, and homelessness rises. As of 2023, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness were New York, Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington—all run by Democrats.

As the cost of living rises in blue states, tens of thousands of families are leaving them. But the left isn’t just losing people. It’s losing an argument. It has become a coalition of Kindness Is Everything signs in front yards zoned for single-family homes. Liberals say they want to save the planet from climate change, but in practice, many liberal areas have shut down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protested solar-power projects, leaving it to red states such as Texas to lead the nation in renewable-energy generation. Democrats cannot afford to become the party of language over outcomes, of ever more lawn signs and ever fewer working-class families.

If Trump’s opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to construct a new political movement, one that aims for abundance instead of scarcity. Such a movement would combine the progressive virtue of care for the working class and a traditionally conservative celebration of national greatness, while taking a page from the libertarian obsession with eliminating harmful regulations to make the most important markets work better. It would braid a negative critique of Trump’s attack on the government with a positive vision of actual good governance in America—while providing a rigorous focus on removing the bottlenecks that stand in the way.

Abundance begins with specific goals for America’s future. Imagine much more housing where it’s most in demand. An economy powered by plentiful clean energy. A revitalized national science policy prioritizing high-risk discoveries that extend lives and improve health. And a national invention agenda that seeks to pull forward technologies in transportation, medicine, energy, and beyond that would improve people’s lives. …

I can imagine somebody opposed to the MAGA movement reading all of this and thinking: Why, at a time when Trump presents such a clear threat to the American project, is it appropriate to focus such criticism on the Democratic side?

First, to make the argument for a liberal alternative to Trumpism, Democrats have to show Americans that voting for liberals actually works. … 

Second, Americans are furious about the status quo—the youngest voters are “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review—and liberals need a new style of politics for the age of anti-establishment anger. The right’s answer to rage is chaos in search of an agenda. MAGA acts like a drunk toddler with a chain saw, carelessly slashing through state programs with a high risk of self-harm. But Democrats should not allow the forces of negative polarization to turn them into the party that reflexively defends the status quo at every turn, even when it means refusing to reform institutions that have lost the public’s trust. Quite the opposite: Abundance should be a movement of proud, active, and even obsessive institutional renewal.

Consider U.S. science policy, an area that is under attack from the right at this moment. As the centerpiece of U.S. biomedical funding, the National Institutes of Health has accomplished extraordinary things; you will have a hard time finding many scientific breakthroughs in the past 50 years—in heart disease, genetics, epidemiology—that were not irrigated by its funding.

But many of the same factors that have infamously plagued our housing and energy markets—paperwork, bureaucratic drift, entrenched incumbent interests—have become fixtures in American science. It is practically a cliché among researchers that the NIH privileges incremental science over the sort of high-risk, high-reward investigations that would likely uncover the most important new truths. Surveys indicate that the typical U.S. researcher spends up to 40 percent of their time preparing grant proposals and filling out paperwork rather than actually conducting science. As John Doench, the director of research and development in functional genomics at the Broad Institute, told me: “Folks need to understand how broken the system is.” …

Today, we seem to be in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another. This crackup was decades in the making. It started with the Great Recession, which shattered a broad belief in free and unregulated markets. It continued throughout the 2010s, as slow economic recovery fueled public resentment of inequality, and an affordability crisis gathered steam. In 2020, the pandemic obliterated many Americans’ trust in government, or what was left of it. And from 2021 to 2024, inflation brought national attention to the interlocking crises of scarcity, supply, and unaffordability. For years, the boundaries of American politics had felt fixed, even settled. But now they are falling.

“For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life,” Gerstle told me. Today’s politics are suffused with pessimism about government because “a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable.” In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.

Political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past. Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched his expansive view of government as a sentinel for American freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Decades later, Ronald Reagan recast government as freedom’s nemesis rather than its protector. Abundance, too, is about redefining freedom for our own time. It is about the freedom to build in an age of blocking; the freedom to move and live where you want in an age of a stuck working class; the freedom from curable diseases that come from scientific breakthroughs. Trump has defined his second term by demolition and deprivation. America can instead choose abundance.