This war is being waged for the heart, soul, leadership, and electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. On one side are the “Abundance Democrats” and on the other side are “the Groups.”
Something similar happened with President Obama’s “shovel-ready” projects. Also blue state initiatives, such as California’s bullet train, which is $100 billion over budget and a decade behind schedule.
There was a time when the government–and Democrats, specifically–built such ambitious structures as the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge, not to mention countless WPA projects and Army Corps of Engineers waterways, were thrown up in record time and under budget.
Why can’t we do that today? Why can’t the government–why can’t Democrats–do that sort of thing anymore?
The answer is that today there are so many regulations–environmental rules, zoning requirements, union rules, permitting red tape–that stymies even the government from being able to accomplishing anything. To the point that when the government does need to do something quickly–he cites Trump’s Operation Warp Speed for developing the COVID vaccine as well as Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro’s need to rebuild an overpass on I-95–it has to first suspend its own rules.
The reason there are so many regulations, according to the Abundance Liberals, is “the Groups,” the progressive interest groups that have dominated the Democratic Party for decades. Environmentalists, unions, anti-capitalists, civil rights activists, feminists, and more have pushed through regulations and procedures advancing their cause (such as requiring that certain percentages of contractors be minority- or female-owned, and that the necessary environmental impact studies be performed at every stage), all of which slow everything down, invite lawsuits at every stage, and often prevent projects from ever coming to fruition.
The Groups also include LGBTQ activists, pro-immigration advocates, Black Lives Matter, pro-abortion radicals, anti-Israeli pro-Gaza protesters, and other interest groups that have set the Democrats’ cultural agenda. For all of their different emphases, the principle of woke intersectionality means that all such groups must support each other.
As a result, says Chait,
In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been “progressive” and “progressive lite.” The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.
Chait shows how the Groups gained their dominance in the Democratic party. He pays special attention to the role of Ralph Nader, the promotion of “citizen-activist” groups, and their tactic of lawsuits. “The New Left model of citizen-activist groups empowered by litigation,” he says, “remains the core of the progressive movement’s theory of change.”
In contrast, the Abundance Democrats’ agenda, according to Chait, “addresses the lack of faith in public services, which plunged after COVID. It promises to bring down consumer costs, which remain the public’s top concern. It provides a direct response to Elon Musk’s assault on state capacity. And it offers a plausible route to improving living standards at a time when high inflation and elevated interest rates and debt make promising big new social benefits harder.”
Meanwhile, says Chait, the Groups “decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by ‘corporate-aligned interests’; ‘a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors’; ‘an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right’; and the historical and moral equivalent of the ‘Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.’”
Conservatives, on the other hand, could see the Abundance Democrats as basically admitting the failures of big-government liberalism and their conflict with the Groups as an example of the internal contradictions of the progressive left. Abundance comes not from the government but from the private sector, while justice comes not from power-hungry interest groups but from a moral culture.
Illustration: Two Donkeys Fighting Each Other, Cyber Beast Generator via Deep AI by the author
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In