Picture a Democratic strategist in the summer of 2026. He’s sitting in a coffee shop in a deep-blue city — one where the median home costs eleven times the median income, where a public restroom takes six years and $1.7 million to build, and where the high-speed rail project his party has championed for two decades still doesn’t connect anything to anything. He opens his laptop, sips his $9 oat milk latte, and begins typing a bold new manifesto for his party.
Its revolutionary thesis? Maybe — just maybe — it should be easier to build things.
Welcome to the “abundance agenda,” the hottest idea in Democratic politics. Popularized by a bestselling book from two liberal journalists, it has spawned think tank white papers, donor-funded initiatives, dueling Substack essays, and an escalating civil war between the party’s center and its left flank heading into the midterms. The premise is that blue cities and states have strangled themselves with regulations, environmental review, zoning restrictions, and procedural veto points — and that Democrats need to cut the red tape so America can actually build housing, energy, and infrastructure again.
If you’re experiencing déjà vu, you’re not imagining things. Conservatives have been making precisely this argument since roughly the Carter administration. We were told it was cruel. We were told it was a giveaway to corporations. We were told that every regulation, every review process, every community input meeting was sacred. And now the same people who called deregulation a dirty word for forty years have rebranded it with a friendlier name, put it in a book with a nice pastel cover, and declared themselves visionaries.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. We accept the compliment.
The Paradox Within the Paradox
Here’s where it gets genuinely entertaining. The abundance crowd can’t even enjoy their own awakening, because the rest of their coalition is furious about it.
The party’s progressive wing has decided that “abundance” is a corporate plot — a scheme by billionaire donors and the party’s business wing to head off the march toward economic populism. The unions want assurances that nothing gets built without them. The environmental groups want assurances that the environmental reviews stay. The nonprofit ecosystem wants assurances that the community input processes — the very processes the abundance folks correctly identify as the problem — remain untouchable.
In other words: the left has finally diagnosed the disease, and the patient is refusing treatment.
This is the deeper paradox. The abundance agenda isn’t failing because the ideas are wrong. Most of the ideas are fine — we know, because they were our ideas. It’s failing because the modern Democratic coalition is structurally incapable of acting on them. You cannot run a party on behalf of the people who administer the process and then campaign against the process. Every rule the abundance liberals want to cut has a constituency, and every one of those constituencies has a seat at the Democratic table. It’s like watching a man try to diet while employed as a professional cake taster.
What They Still Don’t Get
Give the abundance liberals credit for honesty: they’ve admitted that liberal governance failed in the places liberals govern. That took courage, and more than a few of them have been savaged by their own side for saying it.
But they’ve only made it halfway to the real insight. They still frame the problem as a technical glitch — as if the machine of government is fundamentally sound and just needs a software update. The conservative observation has always been more fundamental: the machine behaves this way because that’s what machines like this do. Give a bureaucracy a veto, and it will use the veto. Give an activist group legal standing to sue, and it will sue. Give a process the power to stop things, and stopping things becomes the point. This isn’t a bug introduced in a recent update. It’s the operating system.
That’s why “we’ll deregulate, but only the regulations we dislike, administered by the same people, answerable to the same groups” isn’t a governing philosophy. It’s a mood. And moods don’t pour concrete.
Our Prediction
So here is the Liberal8Ball’s forecast, no shaking required: the abundance agenda will win the argument and lose the war. The books will sell. The conference panels will be standing room only. A few blue-state governors will pass a permitting reform or two and hold triumphant press conferences in front of construction sites that break ground sometime around 2034.
And then the coalition will do what coalitions do. The groups will be consulted. The carve-outs will be added. The lawsuits will be filed. And in ten years, some fresh-faced liberal journalist will write a bestselling book marveling at the strange, unsolvable mystery of why nothing gets built in blue America.
When that book comes out, we’ll be here — happy, as always, to explain it again.
