An "abundance" theory of power

Plus, how AI has changed my writing and a little historical linguistics

I was going to say that I enjoy factional infighting as much as the next guy, but the truth is that I enjoy it much more than the next guy.

In general, I think that Democrats have become too contentiousness-averse over the past decade and too reluctant to fight it out over genuine disagreements. There are people who I like and have known for years who are on the other side of this question about an “anti-monopoly” movement, but I still think it’s important to say that there is an actual disagreement here about how to think about competition policy, not just some kind of misunderstanding or disagreement of emphasis.

At the same time, I’m a little bit disheartened that these controversies have soaked up so much attention over the past four to five weeks, as we’ve seen a really rotten GOP budget reconciliation bill coming together.

Bharat Ramamurti on the left has great criticisms of this bill and so does Jared Golden, the most moderate Democrat in Congress.

The factional point I would make about our unity on this topic is that if you had six more Goldens in Congress defeating conservative Republicans in red-leaning House districts, then this terrible bill would not have passed.

But the non-factional point I want to make is that it’s too bad that the lack of infighting over this legislation means no one’s criticisms are getting much traction. We know that disengaged voters have swung dramatically to the right over the past couple of election cycles and so have economically downscale voters. These downscale voters are precisely the people who will suffer the most from cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and energy production — they will face higher health care costs and higher utility bills.

They were angry about the cost of living, and they are about to get screwed.

In theory, this should be politically potent and tanking Trump’s numbers. But while his polling isn’t great, it also isn’t tanking — I think because less engaged voters don’t even know that this is happening. And I don’t want to say that’s because less engaged voters are devouring factional tracts about abundance. But you can see at all levels of political engagement that there just isn’t much juice in discussing a multi-trillion dollar piece of legislation that has dramatic implications for the basic well-being of millions of people and the interest rates that drive the whole economy.

That’s an incredible shame, and we desperately all need to think about what we can do to drive more attention to it.

That said, here comes a question about factional infighting.

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Jeff: I keep reading that one progressive critique of “Abundance” is that Klein and Thompson “lack a theory of power.” You and others have pointed out that this seems like a non sequitur, but I wonder: what is the “theory of power” that progressives have in mind? How does it shape their policy agenda? Is it credible?

I wish that more people would challenge or question progressives on this point, because they often seem quite sure that their advanced and sophisticated understanding of power is a key selling point of left-populism, and it seems to me that they are totally full of shit about this.

YIMBYism started as a policy analysis without much of a political theory of action. Then early organizing pioneers came up with the idea of basically doing NIMBYism in reverse — that’s where the name YIMBY comes from, and it’s why the first pro-YIMBY organization was called the Bay Area Renters’ Federation. The initial idea was that you could organize pro-building renters to show up at meetings and counter the political voice of NIMBYs. This kind of work continues to happen and is an important acquisition funnel for building the movement, but over time, the people active in this space developed a theory of power. The theory is that localized decision-making leads decision-makers to put a lot of weight on the nuisance aspects of new development (traffic, parking, etc) and very little weight on the economic growth benefits, because those benefits are widely dispersed. So what we need to do is shift the conversation away from the level of the community meeting, the deference to the city council member, and the idea of local control to state legislatures, where weighing the exact same considerations will lead to a different outcome because you’re operating across larger units.

This has not magically solved all problems, but it has allowed real progress to be made on the issue. Just over the past couple of weeks we’ve seen significant wins in state legislatures in Texas and Connecticut.

By contrast, all consideration of the merits aside, left-populists keep circling the drain around a very banal problem of power: If you want to build a political coalition that is sharply antagonistic to rich people, you need a big tent on cultural issues or else you make it comically easy for the rich to deploy those cultural wedges against you and win. This point is sporadically acknowledged by the proponents of left-populism, but neither Chris Murphy nor Bernie Sanders (for whom Jeremy Slevin is a staffer) is remotely willing to make the kind of moves to the center on culture and energy issues that would make the big tent they’re talking about possible.

The problem is that while they sometimes offer this “be more like Dan Osborn” diagnosis of American politics, in practice, the whole reason left-populism’s star has risen since 2016 is that it’s been marketed as a way to avoid the need to nominate Democrats who’ll embrace mainstream cultural values. This is the New Politics of Evasion, and it doesn’t work.

Hilary: What on earth is Gavin Newsom up to? It kind of looks like he's attempting Yglesias-style popularism, but if so he's doing it in the most awkward and alienating way possible.

I think that anything anyone does to try to broaden the tent and shake things up a little is constructive, if only because it helps give everyone else a bit more room to maneuver. But fundamentally, I just don’t think that anyone who is skilled at climbing the ladder of Democratic Party politics in California is going to be skilled at appealing to swing voters nationally. Newsom seems to have broadly the right analysis of the situation, but as you say, his execution of it is awfully weird. I sympathize! I think that I have the right abstract analysis of what Democrats should do to be more appealing in Iowa, but I also think that if I personally tried to appeal to the voters of Iowa, it would be a huge disaster and seem really awkward.

Joshua Braver: How has AI changed your writing?

To clarify, I’m talking about the writing process, not the research. Do you use it at all? If so, do you use it just for checking basic grammar, or do you find it useful for writing whole paragraphs or something inbetween? Do you have any thoughts on how it should be used in for journalists, professors and other professionals for whom style, precision, and voice matter more than they might in a corporate setting?