teles, steven
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abundance?
IHS KOCHADEMIA
a squish?
attack nancy m
fedsoc apoligist book
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gl 6 26
[### The Controversy over Democracy in Chains
Society for US Intellectual History
https://s-usih.org › Ideas](https://s-usih.org/2017/07/the-controversy-over-democracy-in-chains/)
Jul 17, 2017 — My past affiliation with the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University is fully disclosed on my publicly available CV, and in ...Read more
AI Overview
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Political scientist Steven Teles is an expert on how conservative and libertarian ideas organize into institutions Scholars Strategy Network. While at Johns Hopkins University, his research frequently intersected with the George Mason University ecosystem funded by the Koch network.
Academic Connection
- The "Idea Pipeline": Teles was a former affiliate of the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) at George Mason University. The IHS is a long-standing organization that supports classical liberal and libertarian scholars, with heavy backing from organizations tied to the Koch brothers.
- Affiliation Disclosure: Teles has defended his past affiliation with IHS, confirming it is fully disclosed in his professional Curriculum Vitae.
Scholarly Commentary
- Conservative Infrastructure: Teles wrote The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, a definitive text detailing how foundational philanthropic investments—much like those from the Koch network—helped foster an ecosystem of alternative ideas.
- Critique on the Left: Teles’ work has often been cited by thinkers on both the left and right, notably in debates surrounding the intellectual history of libertarian political thought and organizations (such as the critiques of James Buchanan discussed in the Boston Review and Vox). He frequently analyzes how funders build organizational capacity to influence government policy Scholars Strategy Network.
The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control ...
Unlike accounts that depict the conservatives as fiendishly skilled, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement reveals the formi...
ResearchGate
When Politics Drives Scholarship - Boston Review
Aug 30, 2017 — MacLean argues that Buchanan discovered a political “technology” or “operational strategy” for undermining liberalism, and this te...
Boston Review
The Controversy over Democracy in Chains
Jul 17, 2017 — My past affiliation with the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University is fully disclosed on my publicly available C...
Society for US Intellectual History
Prof. Steven Teles - The Federalist Society
Mar 4, 2016 — https://fedsoc.org/bio/steven-teles. Steven Teles is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and fell...
The Federalist Society
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https://s-usih.org/2017/07/the-controversy-over-democracy-in-chains/#:~:text=My past affiliation with the,wrote during my time there.
VERY VERY LONG
...
Andy Seal
Here is a brief and non-exhaustive list of critiques of MacLean, along with one defense:
David Gordon, MacLean on James Buchanan: Fake History for an Age of Fake News
Michael Munger, On the Origins and Goals of Public Choice
Henry Farrell and Steven Teles, Even the intellectual left is drawn to conspiracy theories about the right. Resist them.
Philip Magness, Nancy MacLean’s Calhounite Imagination (plus two other posts on his blog)
Jonathan H. Adler, It turns out Nancy MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains’ is ‘a work of speculative historical fiction’ (plus other posts in the same place)
David Bernstein, Some dubious claims in Nancy MacLean’s ‘Democracy in Chains’ (plus other posts in the same place)
Russ Roberts, Nancy MacLean Owes Tyler Cowen an Apology
John Jackson, Was James Buchanan a Racist? Libertarians and Historical Research
...
- to David Bernstein
Last I checked, “think tank” wasn’t a technical term. Besides, it describes IHS’s origins and development very well.
It also describes the Cato Institute, which is, I believe, a source of funding/support for you. Was it your critiques at Washington Post that didn’t acknowledge that conflict of interest, or was that a different Koch client’s “objective scholarly opinion”? Hard to keep you guys straight!
- Reply
to L.D. Burnett
David Bernstein
No, IHS is nothing like a think tank, and nothing like Cato. For that matter, you seem to know little about Cato and its relationship with the Kochs. Let’s give you a quiz: what % of Cato’s $40 million or so budget do you think comes from Koch sources?
...
to L.D. Burnett
David Bernstein
You’ve established that I blog at a site hosted by the Washington Post, and I’ve established that you are making negative insinuations about people based on ties to organizations you know nothing about. You told Phil Magness that you try to avoid errors in what you write, and then you insist that IHS is a “think tank.” Sheesh.
MAGNESS
Phillip Magness
A note on L.D. Burnett’s critiques. My past affiliation with the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University is fully disclosed on my publicly available CV, and in numerous publications I wrote during my time there. In fact, Burnett herself confirmed this with me in a twitter exchange yesterday. That she now insinuates an effort being made to obscure it suggests a certain level of dishonesty on her own part. I’d also note that I haven’t written much of anything about the portions of MacLean’s book that pertain to Buchanan and IHS (which long preceded my time there), opting to focus instead upon her historical misrepresentations of Buchanan’s intellectual influences. It’s unfortunate to see Burnett go down the route of peddling scurrilous insinuations about her interlocutors, but given that this is also someone who apparently sees nothing wrong with MacLean’s outright fabrication of historical events, it is not particularly surprising.
Keeping Libertarianism Alive in the Academy: Organizations, Scholars, and the Idea Pipeline
- October 2024
- Socius Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 10(4)
Abstract
:{:{In this article, the authors draw on the literatures about academic career pipelines and the sociology of ideas to understand how an outside group of organizations provides resources to aspiring scholars as young as high schoolers and as senior as emeriti professors. One of the goals of these organizations is to promote libertarian ideas in the academy. The authors show how, in contrast to other academic pipeline building, libertarian-leaning organizations fear that their perspectives encounter resistance in the progressive field of higher education. }:
Therefore, to keep libertarian ideas alive, they pursue strategies to guarantee a supply of graduate students for eventual academic jobs and provide professors with relatively easy access to funding, granting them autonomy vis-à-vis their home institutions. This funding may be used in part for programs that specifically hire libertarian PhDs, which in turn provide young scholars with a step ladder into the academy. The authors call this set of strategies an “idea pipeline.” On the whole, these efforts are designed to make a career studying libertarian ideas more desirable and viable for those inclined toward these viewpoints and to ward off the demise of libertarian thought in the academy.}:
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fedsoc off bs
Steven Teles is associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and fellow at the New America Foundation.
He is the author, most recently, of the Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton University Press, 2008), and before that Whose Welfare: AFDC and Elite Politics (University Press of Kansas, 1996). He is the co-editor of two books: Conservatism and American Political Development (Oxford University Press, 2009, with Brian Glenn) and Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and UK (Cambridge University Press, 2005, with Glenn Loury and Tariq Modood). Professor Teles is also the editor of Oxford University Press' book series on Contemporary American Political Development. He is currently working on two co-authored books. The first, with Mark Kleiman of UCLA, tentatively calledThe Statesman's Discipline: The Art of Asking the Right Questions. His second project, with Peter Frumkin, is a developmental study of foundations over the past half-century.
Professor Teles has also published articles in the New Statesman, American Prospect, Public Interest, National Affairs, The American Interest, Prospect (UK) and Boston Reviews, appeared on bloggingheads.tv and blogs occasionally at samefacts.com.
He received his PhD in government and foreign affairs from the University of Virginia in 1995, and his BA in political science from George Washington University in 1989.
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irs 990 2004 irs
MARTY ZUPAN (A) Name and address 3301 NORTH FAIRFAX DRIVE, SUITE 450 ARLINGTON, VA 22201-4411 GARY D. LEFF 3301 NORTH FAIRFAX DRIVE, SUITE 450 ARLINGTON, VA 22201-4411 LEONARD LIGGIO 3301 NORTH FAIRFAX DRIVE, SUITE 450 ARLINGTON, VA 22201-4411
Charles G Koch Tyler Cowen Chairman Vice-Chairman Timothy Otis Browne Director John Blundell Director Richard H Fink Director Jerome M Fullinwider Director David C Humphreys Director Donald J Boudreaux Director Arthur V Neis Director Eric S O'Keefe Director James Arthur Pope Director Roger D Silk Director William O Sumner
hayek fund 250 teles
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ontributions | No Jargon Podcast | In the News | Publications
Contributions
How Unlikely Allies Can Roll Back America's Prison Boom
Key Findings Brief, February 2014
No Jargon Podcast
Episode 105: The Captured Economy
November 2017
In the News
Interviewed in "How Conservatives Won the Law," The Wall Street Journal, July 20, 2018.
Quoted by Peter Baker in "A Conservative Court Push Decades in the Making, With Effects for Decades to Come," The New York Times, July 9, 2018.
Research discussed by Alex Verkhivker, in "Housing Is The Real Culprit For America's Inequality," Forbes, June 4, 2018.
Interviewed in "The Power Line Show, Ep. 66: The Telos of Teles," Powerline Blog, April 16, 2018.
Quoted by Young Voices Advocates in "Free Market Cures for Wage Stagnation," Townhall, April 6, 2018.
Guest on NPR: Planet Money, March 9, 2018.
Quoted by Jonathan Band in "Captured Copyright Law," InfoJustice.org, January 18, 2018.
Research discussed by Steven Pearlstein, in "What’s to Blame for Slower Growth and Rising Inequality?," The Washington Post, November 22, 2017.
Opinion: "Trump Made the Swamp Worse. Here’s How to Drain It.," Steven M. Teles (with Brink Lindsey), New York Times, October 26, 2017.
Opinion: "Even the Intellectual Left is Drawn to Conspiracy Theories about the Right. Resist Them.," Steven M. Teles (with Henry Farrell), Vox, July 14, 2017.
Show all
Publications
"Locked In? Conservative Reform and the Future of Mass Incarceration" The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science651, no. 1 (2014): 266-276.
Argues that mass incarceration, long subject to self-entrenching effects, may be entering a cycle in which it undermines itself. Finds that, in order to seriously shrink the prison population, conservatives will have to accept the construction of alternative government structures; liberals will have to accept that these will remain more paternalistic than they might like.
"The Elusive Craft of Advocacy Evaluation" (with Mark Schmitt). Stanford Social Innovation Review (2011).
Examines the challenges of evaluating foundation investments in advocacy, questions the applicability of linear models of change, and proposes ways for philanthropists to assess long-term efforts at political and social change.
"Transformative Bureaucracy: Reagan’s Lawyers and the Dynamics of Political Investment" Studies in American Political Development23, no. 1 (2009): 61-83.
Offers an historical study of the Reagan Justice Department which shows the conditions under which political appointees can “invest” in the future success of an allied political movement.
Conservatism and American Political Development (edited with Brian Glenn). (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Explores how conservatism changed the course of American political development, but was in the process changed itself. Organized around cases of the environment, Social Security, and K-12 education.
The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (Princeton University Press, 2008).
Shows how the conservative legal movement arose in reaction to legal liberalism, and how through a long, slow process of puzzling and trial and error, developed an impressive network of organizations in the law. Built upon a completely original collection of conservative internal organizational papers and exclusive interviews.
nisk
By working within a party, the new supply-siders can boost their cause — and pull us away from left-right polarization.
{This essay is from the June 2024 edition of Hypertext, the Niskanen Center’s journal of liberalism, political economy, and policy. Every month we publish a series of essays – featuring thinkers with a wide variety of viewpoints – that defies the tired dichotomy of left and right while engaging with a vision of America where competitive markets, robust public goods, and an effective state reinforce one another.*}:
For nearly a decade now, political moderates have been on their heels, as right-wing populists have taken the reins of the Republican Party and democratic socialists have established a beachhead in the Democratic Party. In response, startled and flailing moderates, including the authors, have grasped for institutional footholds within the two parties. Some have latched on to the idea of creating a moderate faction inside the Democratic Party with its own distinctive ideology, institutions, and sources of funding and organization. Others have given up on the two major parties and flirted with the idea of a moderate third party.
We have, with some reluctance, concluded that moderation itself is a dead end. For one thing, the explicit pursuit of moderation can easily fall into the trap of simply splitting the difference between two moving goalposts rather than advancing a distinct, morally grounded policy agenda. Additionally, and just as a pragmatic matter of political organizing, it is hard to rally a group of intensely motivated and dedicated activists behind the milquetoast banner of moderation; it typically doesn’t inspire the kind of passion that fuels political movements.
Rather than trying to address the challenge of polarization by finding some space between the intellectually exhausted agendas of the right and left, we should focus instead on injecting an alternative dimension into our political discussion — the “Abundance Agenda” that we see as the answer to “Cost Disease Socialism.” Instead of positioning ourselves by watering down populist conservatism or progressivism, Abundance has its own quite sweeping package of reform that envisions a wholesale program of state-building–building housing, clean energy, and infrastructure by reforming our creaky, captured systems of governance at all levels, and building a simpler, more effective and democratically legitimate welfare and regulatory state. Like the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th century, the supporters of abundance seek to simultaneously dismantle an exhausted, maladapted, and frequently corrupt state structure with one built for the problems of today.
Rather than trying to fix polarization by finding space between the intellectually exhausted agendas of the right and left, we should inject an alternative dimension into our politics.*}:
Because the American political system is heavily biased against third parties, the best path for pursuing this agenda lies with the kind of intra-party factions that have been common throughout U.S. history (of which the Progressives were one). In the long term, we can hope that many of the politically homeless elements that used to be firmly ensconced in the Republican Party will reemerge as a political force around their own version of Abundance rather than under the exhausted banner of Reagan-era fusionism. In fact, members of Congress like Sen. Todd Young of Indiana have already been leaders on many abundance-related issues. However, given Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP, in the short term, it is hard to imagine such a political faction emerging around these issues anywhere other than the Democratic Party.
For now, then, the factional action on Abundance will be among the Democrats. The table is set for just such a faction to emerge. But it won’t appear out of thin air. It will require deliberate action in the form of organizing, mobilizing, and engaging at both the elite and mass levels. Advocates of Abundance will need to pursue their agenda with the same kind of concerted effort that the MAGA movement and the democratic socialists have been willing to undertake. To borrow a slogan from the left, Abundance advocates will need to educate, agitate, organize.
The potential payoff of organizing Abundance advocates into a coherent party faction is enormous. For Democrats, it would expand the party’s reach and allow it to win and maintain governing majorities. For supporters of an Abundance Agenda, it would address the new set of issues that, left unaddressed, will continue to be a drag on our economy and on our fellow citizens’ pursuit of happiness. And for the country, it would enable a more dynamic, pluralistic, and representative future for American democracy.
The return of factional parties
America’s political parties are cracking up. Since the 1990s, Americans have gotten used to relatively homogenous parties, one liberal and one conservative, with strong Congressional leadership that determines policy agendas and leaves relatively little play in the joints for creative coalition-building. However, there are clear signs that this era is coming to a close and that the parties are increasingly characterized by competition among intra-party factions. The Republicans’ “fusionist” conservative establishment has entirely lost its once-extraordinary levels of control, displaced by a populist MAGA faction that now constitutes the overwhelming majority of the party and has taken over the House Speakership and the presidential nomination process. The Democrats, meanwhile, have seen the stranglehold once possessed by mainstream, interest group liberalism weakened, facing left-wing challengers linked to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and other movements of the Left. The Democrats’ factional problems are smaller than the Republicans’, to be sure. But they are growing.
So far, the factional energy in both parties has come from the extremes, which in the short term has exacerbated polarization. New factions, however, may be emerging to complement those at the poles. In fact, the factions of the future may organize themselves on an entirely different axis from the politics of the past, activated by new issues as well as their alienation from their more radical co-partisans.
The Abundance Faction will enter the battle for the future of the Democratic Party by initially organizing three core groups:
- Intellectuals and activists motivated by a different set of issues than those that have animated our politics over the last 50 years;
- a segment of business alienated from a radicalized Republican Party and drawn into the Abundance Faction’s congenial policy agenda and;
- socially moderate and economically activist, growth-oriented voters.
Like the Progressives of the early 20th century, they will bring new issues to the forefront of our politics, in particular a focus on reforming the public sector at all levels of government. This faction will not be traditionally moderate or centrist. In fact, it will be radical, but in pursuit of issues that simply do not fit with the familiar left-right political spectrum.
Defensive moderation or radical reform?
The last 20 years have seen quite a bit of churn in the party’s coalitions, but without making either party more capable of achieving an electoral realignment. The Democrats have attracted more socially liberal and economically moderate-to-conservative middle-class suburban voters, but at the same time, they’ve been bleeding working-class voters to the Republicans. Neither party has been able to expand its coalition sufficiently to attain a durable governing majority. Both parties are effectively tapped out.
If Democrats are to have any hope of keeping an increasingly radicalized Republican Party away from the levers of power, it will be by pulling in social forces that are not currently organized and making them full partners in their project. Doing so would make the Democrats more fractious, but it would provide a reliable foundation for a successful and consistent electoral coalition capable of garnering national majorities that allow the party to govern.
Though that type of intra-party dynamic might seem strange today, over the course of American history, our political parties have usually been institutionally factional in structure. Because our electoral institutions so strongly encourage a two-party system, it is not surprising that the last time a durable third party emerged was when the Republicans displaced the Whigs way back in the 1850s. Yet our country’s large population, expansive geography, and demographic diversity make it hard for those two parties to be internally homogenous, especially in Congress. As a result, the ideological and coalitional groupings that organize themselves as distinct and separate parties in other countries have generally had to operate as institutionalized factions withinone of the two dominant parties in the U.S. Over the course of American history, this type of intra-party activity has been routine. In fact, from the Civil War through about 2000, there was at least one prominent faction in each of the two parties for all but about 20 years. It is the absence of intra-party factions in the last couple of decades that stands out as an anomaly. The kind of factional activity we have in mind, then, would be a return to the norm, not a bizarre departure from it.
Ideological and coalitional groupings that organize themselves as distinct and separate parties in other countries have generally had to operate as institutionalized factions within one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.*
There are no exact analogies for the dynamic that we think is coming to the Democratic Party, but the Progressive movement of the early 20th century is instructive. Rapid industrialization and modernization had created new social problems as well as a new class of managers, professionals, and intellectuals. This group was not defined primarily by its positions on the issues that had previously characterized party competition, such as the tariff and monetary policy, but by entirely new issues, like social insurance, economic regulation, and civil service reform, that it injected into the political agenda.
In addition to new policy issues, at the core of the Progressives’ obsessions was a desire to entirely reform America’s “state of courts and parties” to make it more fit for a country that had emerged as an economically dynamic, urbanizing, rising global power. They believed that whatever merits that state may have had in an earlier stage of American economic and technological development, its pathologies in the form of corruption and an inability to address new issues were coming to a head. For good or ill, they sought to chart a new course grounded in an administrative state guided by science and professional knowledge, and with a reduced role for patronage-oriented parties in government.
The Progressives were, in short, driven by very different issues and manned by a different class of people than those that had previously dominated American politics and characterized the parties that they both attacked and sought to find power in.
While no one has a crystal ball, this type of scenario is a more plausible outline for the conditions that will transform the American party system in the decade to come than the Democratic Leadership Council analogy typically bandied about. The DLC was a mostly defensive organization of Democratic officeholders made vulnerable by the geographic realignment of the parties and the Democrats’ increasingly toxic national brand. While there were small groups of quite impressive intellectuals and business interests involved with the DLC, it was founded by elected officials and their operatives and was fueled by their temperamental moderation and centrism. The Abundance Faction, if it emerges, will be oriented around the kind of radical reformism associated with the Progressives rather than the careful triangulation of the DLC. It will be driven in the first instance by intellectuals, engineers, and technologists rather than anxious officeholders. Elected officials will also be critical, but they will rally to a flag carried by an elite movement rather than the other way around.
The state of regulators and lawyers
Like the Progressives, what we call the “Abundance Faction” will be animated by the contradictions between rising social and economic challenges and the structure of the inherited American state. The Progressives concluded that the state of courts and patronage parties that emerged for a pre-industrial society could no longer generate governing coherence for a rapidly urbanizing, industrializing nation. Similarly, the Abundance Faction is coming into being as the contradictions and pathologies of the administrative state built in the 1960s and ‘70s are approaching a state of crisis.
The state that America built in the 1960s and 1970s was, at its heart, regulative. From civil rights to environmental protection, its animating obsessions were things that it wanted to preventfrom happening, such as racial and gender discrimination, nuclear disasters, highways through central cities, industrial accidents, dangerous toys, and environmental pollution. While much of this regulation was geared to private action, a great deal of it came to apply to the public sector as well. From the creation of compliance divisions inside of firms to the expansion of standing to sue to rules on public participation in government decision-making, the state that we created a half-century ago had the effect of displacing or slowing down the parts of organizations — public and private — focused on the delivery of goods and services. The aggregate effect of that state has been a widely diffused expectation that more or less everything that operates in physical space will take an extraordinary and unpredictable amount of time and be disappointing and uninspiring in its results.
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*Like the Progressives, the “Abundance Faction” will be animated by contradictions between rising social and economic challenges and the structure of the inherited American state.
That sense of disappointment in our ability to rapidly achieve progress in physical space is in sharp contrast with the cultureof the most cutting-edge organizations in cyberspace, which have deeply embedded expectations of rapid production cycles. Because they mostly have avoided operating in the physical spaces that define the regulatory environment of the modern administrative state, they have developed norms for organization and delivery sharply at odds with those in the “old economy.” But just as the rise of the large, integrated factory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries threw into contrast the corruption of patronage government, today our inherited culture of public sector delay is embarrassed by the speed that we’ve grown accustomed to in other parts of our economic life.
As during the Progressive Era, this contrast is not merely an aesthetic problem but a major liability as we face the urgent need to actually make big, important things happen at an unprecedented scale. The challenges of addressing America’s housing, infrastructure, health care, and energy crises are running headlong into the governance system that we have inherited from the last great state-building era of the 1960s and ‘70s. In the process, however, the frustrations created by our artificial scarcity are generating new ideas, interests, and organizations that are just starting to cohere as actors in elections and public policy.
An abundance agenda for the challenges of the 21st century
There is no place where our inherited governance regime has generated more profound social and economic pathology—and corresponding organization—than the crisis of housing in our biggest and most dynamic cities. Scholars have known for at least two decades that our housing production has been far too slow, especially in our wealthiest cities, leading to a crisis of affordability that has slowed down economic growth while also producing huge unearned gains for housing insiders. At the heart of this problem is our system of housing governance, which combines all of the worst features of localism and vetocracy.
The pathologies of our anti-growth machine at the local level created the raw materials for the YIMBY movement, which is the closest thing we have to collective action for greater supply. YIMBYs are not, on the whole, trying to get the existing systems of housing governance to agree to build more. Instead, they are increasingly focused on dislodging localized housing governance, moving power over zoning decisions up to the state level, and, in the process, stripping power from the opponents of building. They have created a network of organizations across multiple cities, put major policy wins on the board, and shown that it is possible to mobilize citizens around an agenda of abundance.
Abundance speaks mostly to those who need government to work, not those who wish to see it drowned in a bathtub.*}:
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The increasing recognition that addressing climate change will require huge, rapid construction of new energy supply and transmission, as well as the equally accelerated construction of new infrastructure of various kinds, is also leading to conflict with our inherited governance regime. There are increasing tensions between environmental activists and intellectuals who believe the lumbering, complex permitting and environmental review regime we have built in recent decades needs thoroughgoing reform so that we can build things cheaper and faster, and those who still view it as a vital tool for slowing the construction of fossil fuels or projects that cause localized harms. Whereas there was always an element of technology skepticism among the environmentalists of the 1960s and ‘70s (and continues to be today under the rubric of “degrowth”), a rising set of environmentalists recognize that there is no way to decarbonize in a politically or morally feasible way without massive technological breakthroughs. Wind and solar will need to be complemented by massive capacity from geothermal and nuclear power, along with enormous, integrated transmission capacity. Getting there will require fundamental rethinking of the capacity of government to do big things and of the forms of public participation and legal constraints on government that have been shown to be at the heart of our repeated and highly visible failures to build quickly and effectively.
While housing, energy, and infrastructure are already a very ambitious policy palette from which to work, there are many other areas where the abundance framing addresses our major governing challenge. Health care, for example, is full of supply constraints with patterns that look a lot like those in sectors that abundance intellectuals have already focused on: Everything from limits on the supply of doctors and the scope of practice of nurses to drug patents to controls on where (including internationally) Americans can access services. Just as in housing, those provider-induced constraints push up costs, generate political pressure for subsidy, and create zero-sum political dynamics. Primary, secondary, and higher education have similar challenges, as does public support for research in science and technology; even finance is amenable to an abundance framing that rejects incumbents whose privileges create zero-sum competition. This suggests that a movement organized around generating quickly deployed, high-quality, and massively increased supply of a wide range of public services would have a lot of governing space to work with. Its intended constituency is not those who are “anti-government” but those who engage with government mainly as its consumers rather than its producers. It speaks mostly to those who need government to work, not those who wish to see it drowned in a bathtub.
rather than reflexively calling for “deregulation” in a way that invites backlash, this agenda calls for unleashing both the private sector and government, to targeted ends.*}:
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Connecting all of these areas of public policy is a conviction that we need to focus more on supply rather than adopting an exclusive emphasis on distribution. Rather than reflexively calling for “deregulation” in a way that invites backlash, it calls for unleashing both the private sector andgovernment, to targeted ends. These are the combined agendas of “abundance” and “state capacity,” which converge on the conclusion that the scale and speed of building that is needed to address our challenges requires dramatic changes in our systems of governance that reduce veto points, increase the authority and competence of government, and make it possible to produce public value at much lower unit costs and with greater speed. This agenda also cuts across traditional ideological lines because it combines a desire to expand the scope of public action with a skeptical view of existing interest groups and producer interests in government.
An Abundance Faction will seek to liberate government to creatively act on well-established public goals rather than tying it down with multiple procedural checks. This will lead it into conflict with aspects of both left and right legal orthodoxy. On the left, conflicts exist wherever progressives pursue their goals through NIMBY-like mechanisms, such as with historic preservation, public employee unions, and organized interests claiming the mantle of environmental justice. There will also be challenges in finding partners on the right, especially with Republicans’ resistance to investing tax dollars in public goods and to upgrading the quality and legal authority of the civil service. As Nicholas Bagley has persuasively argued, the blame for the “procedure fetish” can be laid at the doorstep of both the traditional left and right. But there are likely to be partners across the political spectrum, especially as the problems of our inherited government institutions become even more difficult to ignore.
Forging a new elite network
That said, the Abundance Agenda faces considerable short-term challenges. It is out of step with large segments of both political parties and has limited support across the full sweep of its ambitions from prominent elected officials. Its champions are a relatively small, scattered, and disparate band of intellectuals, activists, and donors. American history shows, however, that big changes in party alignments and coalitions do, in fact, frequently start from precisely these sources rather than bubbling up from mass movements.
The work of political scientist Hans Noel is instructive on this point. Noel observes that at any one time, there are multiple ideological syntheses that are possible given a set of political and material interests. There was a time in which it seemed perfectly obvious that Southern segregationists, Northern union members, African-Americans, Catholics, and Western farmers belonged in the same party under the aegis of New Deal liberalism. Noel shows that it was intellectuals in small magazines who first envisioned a different alignment, one that eventually produced both contemporary liberalism and conservatism — ideological constructs that simply did not exist before they were forged in print by relatively obscure writers. Only after they had sketched out at the intellectual level what a world with different coalitional attachments would look like was it possible for structural shocks like civil rights, Vietnam, and stagflation to generate the modern liberal and conservative coalitions in mass and interest-group politics.
Big changes in party alignments and coalitions do, in fact, frequently start from intellectuals, activists, and donors rather than bubbling up from mass movements.*}:
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There are now signs everywhere that a new elite network of just this type, built around a new set of issues and social conflicts, is being formed. In sectors like journalism, law, and academia, we have already seen intellectual dissenters against the progressive movement beginning to form their own networks and organization, some of which are explicitly connected to the abundance agenda. What will turn these scattered thinkers and writers into an actual political faction will be linkages with actors from business and technology, who will provide material, technical, and organizational power to go along with a new governing philosophy and forms of expertise. This core cadre will be some ways ahead of voters and elected officials, but in keeping with the pattern Noel has identified, they will provide a fresh ideological synthesis that will offer a new way for this mass base to align itself both electorally and in public policy.
At the intellectual level, popular writers are publishing work laying out new ideological marriages that seem like contradictions from the perspective of the partisan categories of the last few decades, but that cohere nicely from the perspective of an Abundance Agenda. The supply-side progressivism associated with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and the state-capacity libertarianism of Tyler Cowen do not align on all issues, but what they have in common is an agreement that the constipation of our systems of governance, connected to capture by concentrated interests, is the central challenge of our time. Similarly, writers like Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic and James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute have somewhat different accounts of where growth is likely to come from, but both agree that we need to move aggressively against the bias toward inaction that pervades our political system. And all of these thinkers accept that we need to generate more state capacity — a more autonomous, skilled, and effective government capable of acting quickly and authoritatively — in order to address public problems.
There are signs of incipient organizing inspired by this intellectual work. TheCenter for New Liberalism (which began as an intellectual project focused on a podcast) has now grown into a network of chapters across the country. Organizations like the Niskanen Center, the Foundation for American Innovation, the Breakthrough Institute, the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, the Abundance Network, the Abundance Institute, and the Institute for Progress are growing into a coherent network, building out abundance-related ideas and working directly with politicians and organizers. While focused exclusively on housing, the YIMBY movement is now deeply organized in cities across the country and brings together activists in that space on an annual basis for its Yimbytown conference.
{Changes at the elite level will help shift the supply side of politics, where proposals for reform are generated. That altered policy agenda will lead to shifting political coalitions.*}:
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This formation at the intellectual and organizational level is beginning to be matched by a shift among funders. Arnold Ventures has launched an infrastructure program that sounds abundance themes (and supports the Niskanen Center), and the founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison, has shown great interest in a range of abundance-related work, especially in the area of support for science. The YIMBY movement has attracted a broad range of philanthropic support, with donors in that space in California also gravitating to other related issues (such as the fight over the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant).
The potential constituency for an Abundance Faction, however, goes well beyond the small handful of scribblers, ivory tower academics, and tech billionaires who are leading the charge. Work by David Broockman, Gregory Ferenstein, and Neil Malhotra can be interpreted as showing that technology entrepreneurs are much more aligned with a potential Abundance Faction than they are with the mainstream of the Democratic Party, since they support redistribution but are skeptical of regulation and public-sector provider interests. Eitan Hersh has demonstrated that a broad segment of business leaders believe their firms are no longer naturally situated in the Republican Party, and it is reasonable to think that an Abundance Faction would be a natural off-ramp into the Democratic fold. Sarah Anzia has shown that the activity of local Chambers of Commerce is generally conducive to more housing construction (including multifamily), which suggests that this part of business may be a strong component of Abundance factionalism at the local level.
Another major mobilizable constituency for an Abundance Faction is environmentalists who believe in the urgent need to build new sources of energy production and transmission, new, denser housing, and ambitious systems of public transportation. There is open conflict between environmentalists now in a way that there was not just a few years ago, especially between local groups that still fully support procedural obstructionism and national environmental groups that recognize the urgency of rapidly building a wide range of infrastructure and housing.
These shifts at the elite level may prefigure a more general realignment of our political system in the way that the stirrings of the Progressive movement, or the organizing of modern liberals and conservatives in the 1950s, pointed to an altered policy agenda and locus of political conflict. The changes at the elite level will help shift the supply side of politics, where proposals for reform are generated. That altered policy agenda will lead to shifting political coalitions as a range of social interests realign around the issues of today, as opposed to those — now generations old — that shaped what we think of as liberalism and conservatism. Standard liberals and conservatives will still be organized in the parties, but they will increasingly compete with an Abundance Faction in the Democratic Party (and perhaps with time among Republicans as well), with the latter increasingly providing the ideas that shape our politics and drive party competition.
From the elites to the masses
The rise of an Abundance Faction will require it to move beyond a detached, elite movement whose impact is confined to politically insulated, low-salience, technocratic circles inside the Beltway and the usual set of refined outposts. To develop into a proper faction, this batch of elites will have to effectively connect its issues to the concerns of broader publics.
Students of public opinion such as Ruy Teixeira and Patrick Ruffini have observed that a broad, multiracial group of working-class voters have grown increasingly misaligned with the legacy interests of both parties. They are skeptical of progressive social positions, especially on social order questions like crime and immigration. But they also are uncomfortable with economic globalization, supportive of social insurance, and longing for economic opportunity to be available beyond superstar coastal cities. They are skeptical of professionals and public sector unions, but they also need police, schools, universities, and infrastructure that work — they lack the resources that the wealthier can use to get around public sector dysfunction. The Romney-to-Biden voter — suburban, middle-class, and professional — may have durably realigned to the Democrats. But the multiracial working class— Obama-to-Trump voters — may not realign at all. They may simply remain as the floating voters in a more dynamic electoral politics.
The Romney-to-Biden voter — suburban, middle-class, and professional — may have durably realigned to the Democrats. But the multiracial working class— Obama-to-Trump voters — may not realign at all.*}:
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In a mass politics like that, the organized elite factions of each party will succeed in large part by adapting their policy packages to the interests of these durably floating voters. None of them will be able to do so effortlessly. Some elected officials and intellectuals associated with the MAGA faction of the Republican Party are moving in the direction of these voters economically, but while they are put off by the social radicalism of parts of the Democratic Party, the floating working-class voter is also more culturally moderate than conservative. By contrast, the populist tone of some of the economic proposals of the left wing of the Democrats is attractive to these voters. However, the Democrats’ left flank is in tension with them not only on cultural issues but also on redistribution (as opposed to economic opportunity). These voters are skeptical of teachers, professors, and civil servants, not because they do not want the services those professionals provide but because they do not want all of the cultural content that has become fashionable in their fields.
An Abundance Faction has some very interesting opportunities with these voters. A focus on addressing the cost of living by driving down the underlying cost of goods like housing, transportation, and energy is attractive to voters who are economically pinched but skeptical of redistribution. Such voters will also be attracted by the idea that the work of government is important but that actually getting it done requires a willingness to pick fights with public sector producer interests like unions and social service professionals (which they assume, with reason, control the Democratic Party).
The emerging Abundance Faction, by design, has been focused on economic problems rather than the cultural valence of their agenda. It’s likely that a critical mass of this emerging elite identifies with moderate Democrats culturally, but some of the linkages between policies to encourage economic growth, resist the power of public sector producer interests, and resist idiosyncratic cultural extremism are still to be built. Forging those linkages at the local level will help make it clear that the Abundance Agenda has implications for a wide range of issues and for cultural as well as narrowly economic concerns.
Our factional future — and what it will take to get there
The concerns of an Abundance Faction are unlikely to sweep away all that came before it and become the ideology of a unified Democratic Party. But if our analysis is correct, neither party is likely to be nearly as ideologically homogeneous as both parties were from the mid-90s to the mid-2010s. We will not be able to coherently speak about the ideology of the Democrats or Republicans as a whole. What we will do is talk about where the relative balance of power is in each party at any given time. In the Democratic Party, there will be periods when the legacy, mainstream faction of the party is closer to the left faction — which is what the Democrats looked like when it flirted with the idea of a “Green New Deal.” But there will be other times when the balance of power shifts, with the Squad relatively on the outs and the agenda of Abundance Democrats in the ascendant. The art of party leadership will be one of balance and brokering.
In a factional future, the real leaders of Congress or state legislatures will not necessarily be the Speaker or majority leader but the heads of the various factional tribes. The more heterogeneity there is among these intra-party factions, the more pressure there will be for the formal leaders to accede to open rules, allowing strange-bedfellow, cross-party coalitions rather than an insistence on intra-party unanimity. DSA Democrats will want to work with populist Republicans to advance trade protection and industrial policy, while Abundance Democrats will find legislative partners for science funding and attacks on zoning among business-oriented Republicans.
The tasks we associate with parties, from fundraising and candidate recruitment to idea development and putting together legislative packages, will mainly occur in factional organizations, not those of the parties as a whole. At an early stage in their careers, ambitious politicians will need to decide which factional tribe to join, and such attachments will follow them throughout their careers. Primary contests between factions will become much more common. Even more than in the recent past, parties will be coalitions of frenemies, alternating between cooperation and conflict.
A factional future will be one that, as in the America of a century ago, has relatively more constrained formal leaders. Factions will be hesitant to support potential presidential nominees who seem too attached to any one part of the party or who possess charisma that could allow them to overwhelm the balance of party power. Ambition, you might even say, will counteract ambition.
American politics in this factional future will be more chaotic at the legislative level, with coalitions shifting along with the public agenda. But it will also be more stable at a societal level, as voters, free to choose among the various factional tribes on offer, once again see themselves in their political leaders.
This scenario is not foreordained but will be the result of long, persistent organizing. The left wing of the Democratic Party and the MAGA faction of the Republicans are already doing this sort of politics. Those who, like the authors, align with the Abundance Agenda must realize that there is no easy fix or institutional reform that will save us from the necessity of organizing our fellow citizens and earning a seat at the political table. But we should recognize the enormous promise that this hard work could produce. In building a share of power for ourselves, we are also helping to reconstruct a better, more pluralist, less polarized future for America.
Rob Saldin is the Director of the Mansfield Center’s Ethics and Public Affairs Program and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Montana. Steve Teles is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. The Niskanen Center Senior Fellows are co-authors of Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites.*}:
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niskasen teles
Varieties of Abundance - Niskanen Center
the nomination of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York suddenly has people talking about “Left Abundance.” Where earlier this year it looked as though the movement to create a more effective, problem-solving state and unlock the supply of crucial goods might end up fitting best with political moderation, it suddenly seems to have an avatar cut from a different cloth, arguing that we need to clear away roadblocks obstructing housing and…publicly owned supermarkets. Mamdani’s election raises the question of whether abundance will actually become a project of “Red Plenty,” one in which we deregulate the public sector in the name of more effective central planning and state provision.
Not so fast. Supporters of “Dark Abundance” are arguing that an abundant future can only come from the right, because progress will require, as Manhattan Institute President Reihan Salam argues, “stand(ing) behind profit-seeking real-estate developers” and others driving progress by making a buck, while the left and its institutions are the main obstacle to progress. Meanwhile, centrists are advancing a synthesis of abundance and cultural moderation within the Democratic Party, arguing that both the left and right are too committed to populist, zero-sum politics to drive the housing expansion, energy overhaul, and other changes the country needs.
It would not be hard to conclude that the emergence of these various flavors of abundance betrays the inherent squishiness and incoherence of the concept. And it is true that abundance is not a systematic ideology attached to a specific political coalition, as are conservatism or democratic socialism. But that doesn’t mean that it is ideological vaporware. As someone who has been working on many of these ideas for a decade or more, I think it is time to nail down just what sort of idea abundance is.
Abundance stirs confusion in part because, unlike contemporary conservatism and progressivism, it is not an idea that emerged to justify a specific party-political, coalitional, material, or cultural project. Given that abundance has been embraced by post-colonial socialists, techno-futurist capitalists, and Democratic centrists, it is best conceptualized as an alternative dimension that cuts across existing ideologies without entirely superseding them, defined by a new set of problems and tools for addressing them.
Abundance is fundamentally “syncretic,” spreading by attaching itself to a variety of different cultural practices and political projects, rather than by preserving its doctrinal purity. It will not wipe out everything in its path, but insinuate its way into a variety of seemingly incompatible projects and values. The Catholic church, for example, has been impressively syncretic over time, incorporating various languages and cultural practices, and remaining “Catholic” even as it spans the range from liberation theology to Opus Dei. We will know that abundance has succeeded when there is a proliferation of “abundances,” different governing projects attached to previously existing ideologies, interests, and parties.
We can already see inklings of Abundance Syncretism, as the idea merges with a variety of other ideological currents. Some have already formed as well-organized projects, while in other cases, this is a preview of coming attractions. Some are movements that combine political action with ideology, like democratic socialism, while others are more specifically ideological and philosophical. But each of the varieties of abundance that I sketch out below will, I predict, become more defined as abundance becomes a larger part of our political discourse in the next few years. In the process, they will increasingly structure political identities that cut across our inherited ideological lines.
What Abundance(s) have in common
How can Abundance be one thing, but also many? At its base, Abundance is best understood as having one central aspiration that requires tackling two interlocking challenges. The aspiration is to escape from a political economy defined by artificial scarcity, to create a world in which we solve problems primarily by unlocking supply. This vision is not inherently hostile to redistribution—my version certainly is not, and in fact, I think a strong system of social insurance is essential to an abundant future. But what makes it Abundance is an obsession with reducing zero-sum conflicts by creating more—more energy, more housing, more high-quality schools, more scientific discovery, more world-leading firms, and more, cheaper healthcare. Abundance seeks to create a surplus rather than divvy up a shrinking pie.
How do you get that bigger pie? All varieties of Abundance believe the path goes through two chief obstacles. The first is the problem of asymmetric power between concentrated incumbent interests and diffuse challengers. Yesterday’s winners, whether they are homeownersseeking to block new housing or doctors using licensing to prevent competition, have a strong incentive to organize to obstruct new entrants by gaming the rules to their advantage. When enough of these interests have captured the laws that govern the economy, the consequence is the seeming paradox of slowing growth and increasing inequality.
Abundance advocates seek to intervene in this toxic cycle of economic decline by changing the rules to favor market entrants over incumbents, to empower builders, whether public or private, over blockers. They also try to create new forms of participation that mobilize those who would benefit from a societal surplus. In doing so, they take inspiration from the YIMBY movement, which cracked what seemed like an impossible collective action problem by organizing those in favor of new housing over the NIMBY interests that social scientists were certain would always dominate politics.
The second challenge Abundance advocates agree on is helping the government regain its ability to manage complex tasks competently and decisively. This problem of diminished “state capacity” is both a cause and an effect of the power asymmetries identified above. Government tends to be captured by concentrated interests that weaken its ability to act in the public interest, and a feckless government encourages the accumulation of such interests. Critically, capture can occur from the outside as well as the inside: Bureaucrats can act as a concentrated interest obstructing the common weal. Abundance thus views government from the point of view of the consumers of its services, rather than through the interests of its producers. It is not anti-statist, but it draws its emotional energy from the various ways government fails to deliver for precisely those citizens who most need high-quality public services, and who most benefit from an economy that is constantly delivering more innovation and opportunity.
State capacity may mean more civil servants with higher status and pay. It might mean fewer, complemented more effectively by technology and increased authority. But it always means a state that has developed the routines, reputations, and organizational culture that allow it to do complex things, to coordinate challenging tasks quickly and effectively. All versions of abundance recognize the need to “deregulate government,” by giving agencies the discretion to use expert judgment rather than trying to control them through procedural constraints.
The counterintuitive insight that unites Abundants is that to achieve big goals, bureaucracy requires fewer procedural constraints. An effective state requires a certain level of bureaucratic autonomy, which is the space that state actors have to create capacities and organizational culture, and perpetuate them over time to generate performance-based authority. Rather than constraining states through a morass of procedure, abundance advocates typically seek to authorize it through the regular, predictable achievement of results. Rather than being captured by government’s own labor force, state capacity requires an ability to create a high level of esprit de corps and a ruthless focus on effectiveness. This model still leaves bureaucracy vulnerable to capture by internal or external forces—but a needlessly procedural approach virtually guarantees it.
To a greater or lesser degree, all forms of abundance aspire to attenuating zero-sum conflict by fighting rent-seeking and building state capacity, creating a state that responds creatively and effectively to broad public goals rather than concentrated interests. But that leaves an enormous scope for conflict, as the idea becomes syncretic with other pre-existing ideologies and conceptions of what society hopes to get more of.
The categories below do not always track specific individuals or organizations, especially some whose ideas substantially predated the rise of contemporary Abundance. For example, there is no question that a thinker like Michael Lind belongs in the abundance conversation. But his influence appears in very disparate parts of the spectrum—both in Red Plenty (through his advocacy for public enterprise and emphasis on the role of labor) and in Dark Abundance (in his focus on the need to deconstruct the nonprofit sector and his skepticism of climate regulation). The Breakthrough Institute’s “Ecomodernism”is unquestionably part of Abundance, but it appears through its influence at almost every place along the Abundance spectrum, from Cascadian industrial policy advocates to Dark Abundance supporters of energy super-abundance.
These categories are ideal types, created mostly as an exercise in imagining what the varieties of abundance will be in the future, rather than as a faithful description of which ideologies have already emerged. While I have more sympathy with some of these categories than others, my aspiration here is to describe each in the most compelling and coherent way possible, letting the reader decide for herself which is most attractive.
Red plenty
The Democrats’ nomination of Zohran Mamdani, and his centering of cost-of-living issues, has rapidly changed the conversation around Abundance. We should not be surprised, however, that Abundance has appeal on the Left. The DSA wing of the Democratic Party is certainly not motivated by unlocking dynamic capitalist markets. But they do want to accomplish a lot in and through the public sector, and when they try, they too find that the inherited structures of government stand in their way. Housing, which Mamdani made his signature issue, has always attracted a strong left contingent to the movement because of the regressive class and racial consequences of zoning. But the appeal to the far left of Abundance goes well beyond getting the rent down.
Consider, for example, the two signature issues for American democratic socialists: Medicare for All (single-payer health care) and tuition-free higher education. Both are effectively demand-side policies, designed to intervene in high-cost sectors by socializing payment. But unless the cost curve of both sectors is sharply bent downward, they will be too expensive to swallow into the public sector. Even worse, if we did try to socialize them, the sudden surge of demand would cause costs to rise sharply, putting government in a subsidy-inflation cycle. Socialism doesn’t eliminate the problems of rampant cost inflation in these areas. If anything, it makes them more pressing, because taxes alone will not rescue the state’s balance sheet.
A similar story could be told about public investment. Many on the Left are nostalgic for the New Deal’s grand projects of major public works that drove economic development. Saikat Chakrabati, who is running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat against YIMBY-hero State Senator Scott Weiner, has celebrated France’s postwar planning state, with its centrally directed building of nuclear power, high-speed rail, and housing. But Abundance advocates have demonstrated convincingly that this is precisely the kind of public enterprise that is nearly impossible to pull off, given the legal and regulatory constraints and the lack of sophisticated state capacity that characterizes the post-1970s governments. To put it bluntly, the Tennessee Valley Authority couldn’t have been built under NEPA requirements, and neither will those of latter-day New Dealers.
The distinctive feature of Red Plenty is its synthesis of ambitious public investment and strong support for organized labor. But rather than merely giving unions their favored topping on the everything bagel through project labor requirements, Red Plenty proposes to generate union jobs through aggressive support for public investment whose path is cleared by a strong, organized constituency to counter NIMBYism. Pushing for building scores of nuclear power plantswith union labor, for instance, is a characteristic Red Plenty move. Another would be to provide guaranteed public demand for union-built modular housing, even if it replaces existing union jobs in construction trades.
Red Plenty may find a surprising role for AI as the solution for at least some of the coordination and information problems that market economists identified with earlier versions of Left economics. “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” in one author’s phrase, requires replacing the coordinating role of prices with some other way to manage the huge informational challenges of a planned economy. AI holds out the hope that technology can substitute both for markets and “public input” as a way to discover what citizens want—and how to connect that to what the state can provide.
Red Plenty is Abundance for those who dream of state-led economic development aimed at publicly determined goals. Mamdani’s NYC mayorship, if it comes to pass, could be the tip of the spear of Left Abundance.
Cascadian Abundance
One step in from the far left in the Abundance spectrum is what I am calling “Cascadian Abundance,” after the region where it is likely to have the greatest appeal. This version of Abundance combines deep environmental commitments, especially around the need for rapid decarbonization, a commitment to urbanism, and a faith in technological solutions to environmental problems. The connection to Abundance is strongest in its critique of NIMBYism and the legacy procedural approaches to environmentalism. Cascadian Abundants reject these positions because they sense great urgency to build out all the things they associate with the energy transition—solar, wind, nuclear, electricity transmission, public transit, and dense urban housing.
Cascadian Abundants believe that large parts of the built environment need to be entirely reconstructed at a breakneck pace. They do not believe it is feasible or desirable to reverse human impacts on the climate by reducing energy use, as de-growthers do. They are not pastoralists or ruralists. Their philosophy is fundamentally urban and techno-futurist; they imagine the planet being healed by the expansion of urban living in highly dense, transit-rich, completely electrified neighborhoods connected to zero-carbon energy sources.
More than any of the abundance variations other than possibly Dark Abundance, Cascadian Abundance has an acute sense of urgency. While all forms of abundance share a scorn for NIMBYism, it is particularly acute for Cascadians who believe that the United States (and the world) has very little time left to make a radical energy transition. This leads them to be uncompromising YIMBYson housing, and anti-procedural centralizers where building linear infrastructure is concerned. It also explains Cascadian Abundance’s focus on green industrial policy, both at the national and global levels. Unlike many abundance advocates further to their right, however, Cascadian Abundants want to keep carbon-based energy in the ground, less by pure obstructionism and more by making clean energy so cheap that it outcompetes the alternatives. Their techno-optimism also manifests in a distinctive focus on causes like artificialproteins or vertical farming. As with green energy, Cascadian Abundance proposes to use industrial policy to make such enterprises competitive with what it takes to be unsustainable forms of industrial activity.
Like Red Plenty and Liberal Abundance, Cascadian Abundance is optimized politically for places with little or no interparty competition and is grounded in the cultural instincts of deeply left and green cities like Seattle and Portland on issues it takes to be outside the core Abundance package. Unlike Red Plenty, however, it is not fundamentally socialist in its economics. In fact, it is enthusiastic about supporting the green entrepreneurial ecosystem of firms, envisioning a network of public-private partnerships rather than a fundamentally centralized bureaucracy driving the green transition.
Liberal Abundance
Klein and Thompson’s Abundance has been taken by some readers to be a statement of Abundance Orthodoxy, whereas I take it to reflect a very particular place on the Abundance spectrum. It is rooted in a response to the particular pathologies of contemporary California, but also the romance and aspiration of the state’s past. It is obsessed with the seeming paradox of one-party Democratic governance leading to comprehensive policy failure and the critique of government that comes out of it. It is center-left, but comfortable with a mixed economy that combines markets with an ambitious, problem-solving government.
Liberal Abundance is, as the name suggests, fundamentally liberal, rather than left. Because it is broadly liberal, it comfortably combines egalitarian ambitions with insights from liberal traditions further to its right, especially libertarianism. While it supports public goods and social insurance, it is much more influenced by mainstream market economics and public-choice critiques of government than Red Plenty and Cascadian Abundance. Liberal abundance is generally optimistic about the ability of well-governed markets to solve problems like housing scarcity. And while it accepts the power of libertarian analyses of government failure, it rejects their despair of a state that does better. It aspires to fundamentally reform government structures and create new forms of collective action to overcome NIMBYism.
While YIMBYism is a common denominator of all species of Abundance, the movement is the fundamental experience that grounds Liberal Abundance. The YIMBY movement was born in the Bay Area, and it continues to be the strongest organizational manifestation of Liberal Abundance. As UC-Davis law professor Chris Elmendorf has argued, the YIMBY movement began with a recognition of the collective action problem in urban housing. But while many of the libertarians who influenced Liberal Abundance gloomily argue that capture by concentrated interests is inevitable in democratic politics, YIMBYism shows that highly organized, public-spirited liberals in blue cities and states can defeat coalitions of NIMBYs, particularly if they can move decisions to more centralized venues.
Unlike versions of abundance to its right, Liberal Abundance is fairly relaxed about the role of culture in abundance and state capacity. It sees the toppings on everything bagelism as minoritarian, procedural, and bureaucratic extravagances to be disciplined rather than symptoms of an irredeemably corrupt cultural liberalism. Liberal Abundance thinks that liberal institutions of expertise, science, and professionalism are fundamental motors of progress, but are suffering diseases of old age (literally in the case of science) and need reformist energy. Released from regulatory and other shackles, these institutions could regain public trust and recapture their role as engines of economic and cultural growth.
Far from rejecting the left’s emphasis on social justice, Liberal Abundance frequently draws on such concepts to put constraints on building housing in the context of historical segregation and frame YIMBYism as a contribution to racial equity. Liberal abundance is also distinctively cosmopolitan in its vision of the link between abundance and the economy’s capacityto absorb higher immigration levels, which it understands as the ultimate non-zero-sum public policy.
Liberal Abundance sees the problems of California, and by extension the country, not as a function of liberalism, which it takes to be a perfectly fine moral foundation for policy, but of minoritarianism. It holds that the capture of the Democratic Party and the institutions of government by narrow interests is an abscess and not an appendage in the broader philosophy of liberalism. It is enamored with the idea of building state capacity—most vividly in the ideas of the Californian Jen Pahlka—because it is frustrated by how the state’s ambitious progressive goals are fumbled by its creaky government. It charges that a mulish state, accustomed to following the interests of its producers, negates liberalism’s higher ambitions. Liberal Abundance wants government to do big, ambitious things (just as the varieties to its left do) but thinks that this is a project of restoration through idealistic reform, rather than revolution.
Moderate-Abundance synthesis
At what I consider roughly the center-point of the Abundance spectrum, but generally within the Democratic Party umbrella, is the synthesis of Abundance with political moderation. More than most of the other Abundance ideologies here, the Moderate-Abundance Synthesis (MAS) is an attempt to graft Abundance thought onto an explicitly political, partisan project. The goal is to contribute a substantive, ambitious governing vision to a moderate Democratic persuasion that often tends toward incrementalism or electioneering through posturing rather than policy. On the other hand, MAS critiques the Abundances to its left by arguing that sustained victories for unlocking supply will only come by aligning with cultural moderation, especially around issues of social order. Only then, MAS contends, can a coalition be built broad enough to keep the right out of power nationally and the left out of power locally. It argues that while many Abundance victories may be gained by technocratic, “Secret Congress” style politics, larger victories require defeating “the groups” in the Democratic Party, both to deliver on Abundance policy goals and to avoid thermostatic electoral backlash.
MAS is primarily a political rather than a policy vision. It is aggressively YIMBY on housing policy, but because it is attuned to expanding the Democratic coalition, it is less hostile than some Abundants are to sprawl and more focused on homes for families. It is generally supportive of industrial policy to encourage energy super-abundance but skeptical about the politics (and feasibility) of crash efforts to transition to zero-carbon energy. It is very comfortable with the conceptual apparatus of contemporary “neoliberal” economics and less concerned than many on the left about corporate power. It is much more enthusiastic than the Abundances to its left about criticizing the power of government-producer groups and liberal NGOs, who it believes are the organizational foundations of proceduralism. It sees initiatives like environmentaljustice as driven by Democratic coalitional politics that prioritize extending the constituency of NIMBYism over meeting communities’ actual needs, as Abundance would.
The politics of MAS are much more explicitly partisan than single-issue. The most distinctive example of MAS at the urban level is GrowSF, which seeks to build political power through a fusion of traditional Abundance priorities like housing and transportation with “moderate” priorities like crime prevention, back-to-basics education and school choice, and a more assertive policy toward the homeless in public spaces. The failures of urban Democrats are becoming harder to deny, but the nationalization of politics means that Republicans can’t take advantage of them. Abundance, state capacity, and moderation provide a genuinely ambitious governing agenda for Democrats in blue places, and a coalition of wealthy donors and moderate voters makes them electorally potent. In the single-party Democratic politics of big cities, MAS has a fairly obvious lane to pitch itself as the alternative to the governance of the party’s left.
In national politics, MAS confronts a harder challenge: rallying the existing moderate Democrats around its banner. Those Democrats mostly hold or seek office in politically competitive places, or have ambitions to do so. They have typically been quite timid where policy is concerned, differentiating themselves from the rest of their party by having less policy ambition, supporting relatively incremental proposals, and opposing their party’s left more based on vibes than comprehensive governing strategies.. These moderates have traditionally been individualists, trying to win in hard places by standing out as geographically idiosyncratic and pragmatic. The problem with this strategy is that the nationalization of politics has made geographic idiosyncracy harder to pull off. But moderates find themselves ill-equipped to compete with the left for intellectual control of the party’s message, and unable to build the power to control the personnel of Democratic administrations.
MAS seeks to solve these problems by effectively nationalizing moderation to make it simultaneously more aggressive on cultural issues (like crime and border security) and more committed to the governing project of Abundance. It seeks to address the spoiled identity of the Democratic brand by creating an MAS “sub-brand” that those running in politically competitive places can proudly associate themselves with. And it tries to solve the problem of how the party governs by creating cadres of MAS affiliates to staff Democratic administrations. MAS supporters think that the path to Abundance is unavoidably through hard-edged battles for power, both at the urban and national levels. They hope to stiffen the spine of Democratic donors and office-seekers to realize that cultural moderation and Abundance are two great tastes that taste great together.
Abundance dynamism
Possibly the oldest variant of Abundance, Dynamism is fundamentally syncretic with libertarianism. Much of Abundance thought on the center-to-left end of the spectrum is motivated by the things it seeks to build—housing, public transit, clean energy—and is focused on removing obstacles to building them. Abundance dynamism, by contrast, is fundamentally Hayekian, and is interested in spurring mostly decentralized, privately managed, and financed innovation. Abundance Dynamists are distinguished from more traditional libertarians by their emphasis on learning and progress rather than individual rights, and their more pragmatic, politically opportunistic approach to what will unlock them.
Virginia Postrel could make a good case to be called the originator of the concept of Abundance, because her concept of “dynamism” suggested a dimension of political economy that cut across left and right with a focus on embracing technology as a force in enhancing human flourishing. While libertarian-oriented dynamists are much more enthusiastic than statist dynamists about relying on prices (including the information embedded in profits) as guides for investment, growth, and innovation, Postrel recognized the latter as somewhat mistaken friends of human progress, rather than enemies.
When Abundance Dynamism thinks about what has slowed the “natural progress of opulence,” it sees regulation as the primary cause. FDA caution slows down drug development. Rules on noise have killed transcontinental supersonic flight. The accumulation of regulation in the wake of Three Mile Island halted progress on nuclear power. Even where Abundance Dynamism grants that the state must be a key funder, it sees the growth of proceduralism as leading to the bureaucratization of science and the dominance of large, increasingly sluggish universities over new, creative places for science to flourish. As a result, Abundance Dynamists generally prefer creating as many spaces for “permissionlessinnovation” as possible, arguing that this mode would work for economic growth in the physical world just as it has for digital technology.
So far, so libertarian. What makes Abundance Dynamism syncretic with Abundance is its marriage of an emphasis on progress with an interest in state capacity—what Tyler Cowen has called “state capacity libertarianism.” Abundance Dynamism is more attentive than many versions of libertarianism to the affinity between strong, competent, effective, well-resourced state structures and dynamic markets. While, like other libertarians, it wants the scope of state action to be much more constricted than left Abundants do, it is strongly opposed to starving the state itself of resources and authority. It finds models in Singapore and Denmark, countries with high-status, autonomous, and low-corruption bureaucracies, rather than abstract minarchist utopias. Abundance Dynamists are alsomore ambitious than many to their left about AI’s potential to boost the productivity of public servants, and more willing to imagine a future with a much smaller civil service, albeit with higher salaries and status.
Abundance Dynamists also tend to be “market urbanists,” highly attentive to the importance of cities as drivers of agglomeration economies. Sam Bowman, for instance, has argued that the productivity of cities—especially mega-cities like London—is extremely high, and that high housing costs are a price signal of demand that policymakers should heed, rather than fight against. Abundance requires clearing space for the highest productivity cities to expand by making it easier and cheaper to build housing and accompanying infrastructure, leading new firms to form around that demand-driven density.
Abundance Dynamists recognize that government has an important role in establishing a legal context for innovation and supporting basic science, and even a role in creating public infrastructure that supports the extension of markets and the reduction of transaction costs. But they worry—as few to their left do—that redistribution is in tension with the investment functions of the state. They are therefore more open to constitutional constraints on state action to act as a shield against the capture of government by distributive coalitions. But Abundance Dynamists are so impressed by the long-term benefits of economic growth that they are more open to policies like Universal Basic Income that increase the political buy-in for pro-market reform, and serve as an alternative to growth-destroying distortions of markets.
While Abundance Dynamists appreciate decentralized innovation and public-choice critiques of government more than their left counterparts, they see them as partners in a project of progress, rather than enemies. They recognize the role that left-liberalism has played in breaking down identitarian constraints on free markets and see a free culture as a natural partner to an open economy. This allies them to Abundants who want to reform liberal institutions, and makes them somewhat more skeptical of those to their right who want to use the state to destroy their autonomy (even as they bemoan the capture of these institutions by the left).
Dark Abundance
Near the end of the abundance spectrum—but perhaps not all the way to its right—is “Dark Abundance.” Dark Abundance occupies a place on the Abundance spectrum that is syncretic with the more tech-adjacent parts of the Trump coalition. It is less libertarian, more culturally conservative and institutionally critical, and more security-minded—both foreign and domestic—than most of the rest of the abundance spectrum. Dark Abundance sees itself as the tip of the intellectual spear of the contemporary conservative project, weaving the National Conservative and projects into a new synthesis that combines a cultural-conservative-inspired assault on left institutions with a futuristic, Silicon Valley-inspired “Founder Mode.” More Milei than Orban, Dark Abundance seeks to wield national power to disrupt deep-seated institutions in American life to spur economic growth and revive American hegemony.
Central to the Dark Abundance project is its impatience (in which it resembles Cascadian Abundance) and its much greater taste for (creative) destruction. The first factor driving Dark Abundance’s impatience is its belief that the United States is at risk of falling far behind China both economically and militarily, and the time for it to make up that growing gap is very short. America’s industrial base, especially its ability to innovate in developing new weapons systems and energy, has declined precipitously. The imperative of recovering it makes Dark Abundance adherents much more open to industrial policy than Abundance Dynamists.
To rapidly rearm the country and rebuild civilian and military defense bases, the government needs to change root and branch. The spirit, if not the reality, of DOGE, and the practices of rising defense tech firms like Palantir, SpaceX, and Anduril, are the inspiration for what Dark Abundance thinks it can do with the state. Rather than the slow boring of hard boards, it envisions moving fast and breaking stuff —creative destruction in the public sector. That is not because Dark Abundance is fundamentally libertarian. Rather, it wants to use the state to perform critical, time-sensitive tasks, and it thinks there is no way to repurpose or retrain the our existing government to do them.
Unlike some of those even further to its right, Dark Abundance is democratic, but in a mode that might be called democratic centralism. Dark Abundance adherents contrast their patriotic, disruptive innovation with the decadence and regressive character of modern liberalism as it operates through government, nonprofits, and universities. Dark Abundance wants to use democratic majorities to deconstruct rather than reform the modern liberal state’s intermediary institutions, which it diagnoses as bloated, pathological and fundamentally broken. It sees those institutions not as embodiments of expertise and knowledge production, but as power centers for a liberalism that has become an instrument of woke groupthink. In its place, it hopes to create new institutions to create knowledge and develop practices entirely separate from existing institutions—think of the University of Austin rather than the more mainstream conservative-inspired UT School of Civic Leadership. In a world in which, in Alana Newhouse’s gripping formulation, “Everything is Broken,” it makes more sense to start over than reform from within.
Dark Abundance is also distinguished by what it wants an abundance of. While it shares the YIMBYness that all abundants have in common, it is less excited by urban, infill housing and much more excited by the prospect of large, family-size houses that could facilitate much higher rates of fertility. It is very relaxed about the prospect of climate change, and interested in alternatives to fossil fuels mainly for their contribution to the goal of energy super-abundance, which it sees as central to powering transformational AI and other economic breakthroughs. In fact, Dark Abundance puts much greater emphasis than other schools on the centrality of AI preeminence as a tool of foreign policy, which provides the security motivation for its focus on technological accelerationism achieved primarily by private capital. While it wants to improve the speed and lower the cost of building things through the public sector, the things it wants to build include much more effective prisons and systems for policing immigration policy.
Dark Abundance is not entirely comfortable with the overall drift of the American right, and in particular the Trump administration, which it views as somewhat clownish and lacking a coherent governing project. It shares with Abundance Dynamism a deep attachment to open trade, less because of a respect for the price system and more as a conscious element of industrial strategy. As Samuel Hammond has argued, protectionism will make American firms soft and uncompetitive by cutting them off from the discipline of foreign capital and the need to meet the standards of globally leading firms. The industrial policy Dark Abundance envisions aims to drive progress through new firm formation rather than (as Nationalist Conservatives aspire to) creating an entente cordiale between labor and capital.
Advocates of Dark Abundance believe deeply in technologically-driven progress, both as an engine for human flourishing and as the tip of the spear of American global supremacy. But Dark Abundance believes that getting to that future at the speed the United States and its allies need to, will require grappling fundamentally with the failure of liberal institutions. It is not hard to imagine that the degree of this belief in the need for wholesale institutional replacement could be what makes it hard for those in the Dark Abundance world to continue collaborating with others on the Abundance spectrum.
Frontiers of Abundance syncretism
As Rob Saldin and I have argued, the closest analogue to Abundance is the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. Like Abundance, Progressivism covered a very wide range of ideological terrain. Herbert Hoover was a Progressive, but so was Jane Addams. Some Progressives supported breaking up monopolies, while others advocated regulating them in the public interest. Progressives were organized into factions within the Democratic and Republican parties, but they also built institutions and professions that transcended the parties, helping them work together to transform American government.
Continued diversity rather than convergence, facilitated by a combination of shared and separate institutions, is the most likely future of Abundance. Where the purpose of institution-making is primarily intellectual, shared institutions make the most sense. For example, a number of student Abundance chapters are popping up in universities and professional schools across the country. It makes sense that these should be very broad-tent organizations, since they are designed to bring in young people whose political identities are still in flux, and for whom vigorous argument and discussion make more sense than being presented a party line. More broadly, Abundance benefits from being open-minded, problem-solving, and empirical in a time when many public-spirited people are looking for an alternative to rigid, narrowly partisan teams. Abundance should be a place where people like that can find a political home. It’s likely to flourish in places like professions, where the idea can provide an umbrella for institutional reform, and where differences between species of Abundance may be less important than what they have in common.
That said, these various forms of Abundance are likely to persist because there are deep philosophical, factional, and partisan differences between them. Abundance advocates disagree deeply on how much to prioritize decarbonization and whether existing governmental and civil society institutions can be reformed, versus needing to be replaced wholesale. They disagree about the role of markets and prices, and how much to emphasize building public infrastructure versus private enterprise. I suspect that we will see considerable conflict in the near future between those keen to encourage further technological innovation in the digital space (AI and crypto in particular) and those who think that the future is in hard tech (and that getting there will require actively repressing even existing digital technologies in areas like online gambling, social media, and pornography).
The varieties of Abundance described earlier may not exhaust those that we will see in future years. National Conservatism has some significant differences with those on the Abundance spectrum, especially around its tepid response to YIMBYism, and much greater enthusiasm for immigration restriction. But National Conservatism is also unquestionably productivist and excited to use an engaged state to open up new technological frontiers. It’s unromantic about protecting small business, and its pro-natalism opens it to the argument for liberalizing the housing market to create more living space for larger families. The line between Dark Abundance and National Conservatism, for example, is real—especially on trade and labor—but the overlaps on industrial policy to counter China and the desire to comprehensively replace liberal institutions are also quite large.
Something similar might be said about those in the “progressive antitrust” or “post-neoliberal” camp. There has been a lot of fire coming from these groups, leading to equally feisty counter-attacks. But there have also been many olive branches from the less online parts of liberal populism, and these have even included hiring key Abundance advocates. Messaging and coalitional politics aside, supporters of Abundance and critics of corporate power both agree that an absence of effective economic competition is at the root of constricted supply and increased inequality. Many parts of the Abundance spectrum could benefit from the less technocratic, more moralistic spirit of liberal populism, even as we disagree on how central traditional antitrust remedies are likely to be in the portfolio of pro-growth policies.
Political conflict is also on the horizon. 2026 will witness a straight-up fight between Liberal Abundance (Scott Weiner) and Red Plenty (Saikat Chakrabati) in the Democratic Party primary to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress. Advocates of a Moderate-Abundance Synthesis are already actively organizing within the Democratic Party, preparing for races where they may face the heirs of Mamdani, as well as standard-issue interest-group Democrats. Dark and Dynamist Abundance will be part of the argument over the future of a post-Trump Republican party, but also a challenge to more liberal variants of Abundance in wooing the minds of Silicon Valley.
Balancing projects of cooperation and mutual learning, and those of competition and conflict, will require considerable arts of political and intellectual skill. But I am convinced that the basic ideas that all Abundance advocates share are powerful and will only be stronger for the scope of conflict and intellectual openness the movement continues to include.
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OMG JANE M CHE
By 1986, Bruce Ackerman, then a professor at Columbia Law School, called Law and Economics "the most important thing in legal education since the birth of Harvard Law School." Teles, in his 2008 book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, described Law and Economics as "the most successful intellectual movement in the law of the past 30 years, having rapidly moved from insurgency to hegemony."
As Law and Economics spread, underwritten at each step by the Olin foundation and other conservative backers including the Kochs and Scaife, liberal critics grew alarmed.The Alliance for Justice, a liberal nonprofit in Washington, published a critical report in 1993 warning that "a small wealthy group" was trying to "fundamentally alter the way that justice is dispensed in our society." It revealed that the Olin foundation was paying students thousands of dollars to take classes in Law and Economics at Georgetown Law School and to attend workshops on the subject at Columbia Law School.
Despite this ethically dubious situation, only one law school, at the University of California at Los Angeles, turned the Olin funds away, arguing that by plying students with grant money, the foundation was "taking advantage of students' financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology."
More controversial still were Law and Economics seminars that the Olin foundation funded for judges. The seminars were initiated by Henry Manne, who had become dean of the George Mason University School of Law, which he was trying to transform into a hub of libertarian jurisprudence. The seminars treated judges to two-week-long, all-expenses-paid immersion training in Law and Economics, usually in luxurious settings like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla.
They soon became popular free vacations for the judges, a cross between Maoist cultural re-education camps and Club Med. After a few hours of learning why environmental and labor laws were anathema, or why, as Manne argued, insider-trading laws did more harm than good, the judges broke for golf, swimming, and delightful dinners with their hosts. Within a few years, 660 judges had gone on these junkets, some, like the U.S. Court of Appeals judge and unconfirmed Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, many times. By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary had participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas.
A variety of major corporations eagerly joined Olin and other conservative foundations in footing the bills. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that between 2008 and 2012 close to 185 federal judges attended judicial seminars sponsored by conservative interests, several of which had cases before the courts. The lead underwriters were the Charles Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and State Farm, the insurance company. Topics ranged from "The Moral Foundations of Capitalism" to "Terrorism, Climate, and Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty and the Rule of Law."
Simultaneously, the Olin foundation provided crucial start-up funds for the Federalist Society, an organization for conservative law students founded in 1982. With $5.5 million from the Olin foundation, as well as large donations from foundations tied to Scaife, the Kochs, and other conservative legacies, the Federalist Society grew from a pipe dream shared by three ragtag law students into a powerful professional network of 42,000 right-leaning lawyers, with 150 law-school campus chapters and about 75 lawyers' groups nationally. All of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are members, as are former vice president Dick Cheney, the former attorneys general Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, and numerous members of the federal bench. Its president, Eugene B. Meyer, son of a founding editor of National Review, acknowledged that without Olin funding "it possibly wouldn't exist at all." Looking back, the Olin foundation's staff described it as "one of the best investments" the foundation ever made.
The Olin foundation also backed what came to be known as the Collegiate Network, privately financing a string of right-wing newspapers on America's college campuses. Among them was The Dartmouth Review, which infamously published an editorial in Ebonics proclaiming, "Now we be cornin' to Dartmut' and be up over our 'fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin' Phi Beta Kappa."...
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zelzier
As Democrats await to hear whom President Donald Trump will pick on Monday to fill the vacancy left by Supreme
Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, many have a feeling of pure dread.
While activists are mobilizing in the states of so-called moderate Republicans like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, hoping to sway their vote against a potentially ultraconservative replacement, there is a widespread feeling in liberal circles that the effort will fail. Even if Democrats can figure out some kind of Hail Mary move to prevent the most extreme pick from being seated, Trump will certainly be able to solidify a conservative majority on the high Court one way or another. The only real question is just how far right the court will move. The ghosts of the liberal Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren will officially be vanquished.On a number of crucial issues—abortion rights, voting rights, gay rights, partisan gerrymandering, civil liberties—a conservative majority will have immense influence on American policy for decades to come.
How did conservatives finally win the battle to shape the character of the Supreme Court to have a rock-solid ideological majority that has not been seen since the days of Warren? The answers go far beyond the luck that Trump has experienced with vacancies.
As described by the political scientist Steven M. Teles in his book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, the strategy began in the 1980s, when conservatives realized that they would have to play the long game. Focusing on each individual judicial nomination from Democratic administrations was a fool’s errand—even after Republicans finally gained control of the Senate in the 1980 election. Conservatives invested heavily in organizations that would nurture and support lawyers and justices who stuck to an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, which means that their understanding is theoretically derived from the original meaning of the Constitution at the time it was written.
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A consortium of students and professors based at Yale Law School founded the Federalist Society in 1982, which would prove to be the most influential originalist organization. The society helped recruit the brightest legal minds and supported them as their careers unfolded. The Federalist Society was careful to find people who could be counted on as solid conservative picks for the courts. It offered a social-professional network to connect young law students with influential senior mentors, such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Attorney General Edwin Meeseprovided support from within Ronald Reagan’s administration, encouraging the group’s efforts. Meese headed much of the administration’s selection of 400 federal judges, introducing a type of ideological profiling of potential nominees that made conservative criteria a determining factor. Meese’s insistence on the “jurisprudence of original intention” influenced many important figures, including Chief Justice John Roberts.
As Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor,told *The New York Times* in 2005, “Meese was successful in making it look like he and his disciples were carrying out the intentions of the great founders, where the liberals were making it up as they went along.” The marriage of Federalist Society ideas and Republican Party politics would continue. Lee Liberman Otis, a co-founder of the Federalist Society, gained a key role in George H. W. Bush’s White House Counsel’s Office and influenced judicial picks.The Federalist Society was not alone. Other organizations, such as the Institute for Justice and theCenter for Individual Rights, joined this effort. Rightward philanthropists and organizations (Joseph Coors, Charles and David Koch, the Olin Foundation) poured money into certain law schools, such as George Mason University, whose faculty members were supportive of conservative ideas in their research and would train their students accordingly.
But President George W. Bush was the first Republican president to really elevate the Federalist Society to being the prime source of advice in his judicial selections. Although Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive director, who was deeply influenced by Meese, supported Bush’s 2005 nomination of his personal attorney Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, most members of the society attacked the selection and successfully pushed for the nomination to be withdrawn. Her successor was Judge Samuel Alito, a favorite of the Federalist Society. “The Federalist Society was, when it got started, a wonderful idea,” Steven Calabresi, a law professor who worked forPresidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, recounted to *The New York Times* in 2005. The organization achieved its goal in making “a lot of conservative thought seem as respectable and attractive as it is.” Trump’s famous list of potential candidates from the 2016 campaign, which he is also using to make his choice for Kennedy’s replacement, was formed in consultation with the Federalist Society.
Conservatives did not rely on networking alone. The right realized that outside the presidential power to appoint, the Senate’s control over the confirmation process is essential. They learned this lesson the hard way in 1987, when Reagan’s pick for the Court, Robert Bork, a Yale Law School professor who had worked with the Federalist Society, was defeated, as Senate Democrats, who held the majority, portrayed him as an extremist.
Because 60 votes were needed at the time to confirm an appointee, Bork had no chance, and Reagan was forced to go with his second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, who withdrew after admitting to smoking marijuana, and then finally with Anthony Kennedy. Republicans never forgot this lesson, and ever since, they have been willing to ruthlessly use their legislative power to influence the confirmation process.
During President Barack Obama’s tenure, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and his caucus delayed and obstructed a historically unprecedented number of judicial appointments. The obstruction became so great that Democratic Senator Harry Reid took the historic step in 2013, when his party controlled the chamber, of jettisoning the filibuster against non–Supreme Court appointments as well as Cabinet officials. But Republicans regained control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, allowing them to block Obama’s judicial picks entirely. According to Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, “GOP foot dragging on Obama nominees for both appellate and district court vacancies has far outstripped Democrats’ slowdown of Bush nominees between 2003 and 2008 (under both unified and divided party control).” Neither record, she added, was as great as the Republican delays on nominations by Bill Clinton’s administration.
In the 114th Congress, Senate Republicans confirmed the lowest number of judicial nominations since the final year of Harry Truman’s presidency, filling only 22 of Obama’s nominations from January 2015 through December 2016. “There was an almost total breakdown of confirmations once the Republicans took control of the Senate,” argues Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution expert on the U.S. judicial system. After Scalia’s death in 2016, McConnell revealed how far Republicans would go to influence the Court when his party refused to even meet with Merrick Garland, Obama’s selection to fill Scalia’s seat. The pick received no hearings, no vote, nothing. McConnell’s office announced that the majority leader would noteven hold a “perfunctory meeting” with Garland, but wished him well. “It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent,”McConnell boldly stated in face of criticism.
[NUCLEAR OPTION]
Republicans would simply wait until a Republican president was in office. Then in 2017, when Democrats filibustered President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch, Reid’s party paid the price for his decision. Despite the Republicans’ age-old talk about the importance of protecting minority rights in the Senate, McConnell eliminated the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations to push Gorsuch’s nomination through. “This will be the first, and last, partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court justice,” the Kentuckyconservative said on the floor. The Republican Senate has also approved the president’s appellate nominees at a faster rate than all other recent presidents. Under Trump, there has been much more consent from the Republican Senate than advise.
Republicans realized that conservative organizations and hardball legislative politics were not enough on their own. Certain landmark decisions would be extremely difficult to overturn given stare decisis, the doctrine that means, generally, that prior decisions by the Court should be adhered to. Regarding abortion, for example, Republican legislators have been much more focused on slowly gutting the ability to get an abortion than on attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade altogether. Republican Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois was one of the architects of this strategy. In 1976, he successfully added an amendment to legislation that prohibited the use of Medicaid funds to pay for an abortion, except when the life of the mother was in danger or in cases of incest and rape. This strategy has been replicated numerous times as Congress has expanded the reach of the Hyde amendment beyond Medicaid, while Republican legislatures have enacted similar restrictions on government funding for abortion on the state level.
The strategic move by conservatives away from overturning Roe v. Wade and toward death by a thousand cuts has allowed conservative justices to uphold legislation that undercuts the right to get an abortion without restrictions.Most recently, Justice Gorsuch was one member of the five-person majority that voted to uphold a California law stipulating that pregnancy crisis centers that do not provide abortions don’t have to tell patients they can obtain the procedure elsewhere and that the centers don’t have to disclose whether they have a medical license. When Republicans like Senator Collins or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina promise that they won’t vote for a nominee who would overturn Roe, their statement is somewhat meaningless, because the real action has been on legislation that gradually erodes the meaning of the right to get an abortion rather than on simply overturning the decision itself.
To reach the point where conservatives are today, they also had to swallow some of their principles. One of the most important and influential decisions that conservative organizations and Republican politicians have made along the way to Monday’s pick has been supporting a president who will follow through on their judicial agenda. Evangelicalorganizations, which have historically been politically pragmatic when deciding which politicians to support, and their Republican allies took the most strikingly hypocritical stand by working for the candidacy and presidency of a person whose personal behavior contradicts so much of what they claim to stand for. As candidate, Trump made a very clear promise that he would appoint nominees they supported, and he followed through on his promise with Gorsuch.
Evangelical activists are not the only conservatives to live by this whatever-it-takes principle. Republican Senators have been doing the same since 2016. The #NeverTrump movement within the GOP has turned out to be one of the greatest fantasies of American politics. Congressional Republicans have been willing to stand by and support Trump, aside from few verbal reprimands, as long as he does what they want. Appointing conservative justices has been a central goal for the GOP. Trump is delivering, so they, too, are willing to withstand controversy and instability.
Reshaping the Supreme Court, one of the most consequential accomplishments that a president and his or her party can achieve, is a massive political undertaking. Conservatives have demonstrated that winning this kind of institutional battle takes years, even decades, and requires a ruthless disposition.
Frustrated with their inability to maintain solid control over Congress, and convinced that liberals influence most key institutions, including universities, conservatives set out to do what was necessary to build a court system that would protect the constitutional values of the right. Assuming that President Trump follows through on his promises to them on Monday, and that Democrats can’t block the nomination, they are about to enjoy the fruits of their efforts.
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vol conspir bs
The coverage of George Mason University Law School was fascinating in part because I knew little of the school's unusual history. Teles explains that the new George Mason University in Virginia had started a law school (in 1979) by picking up a low-ranked local law school in DC. In an effort to create a stronger law school, the University later hired law and economics scholar Henry Manne to be the new Dean of the school and gave him unusual powers to create the law school he wanted. As Teles tells it, the law school became Henry Manne's project to build a law school entirely around a libertarian vision based heavily on law and economics:
Henry Manne's project of building George Mason University law School (GMUSL) represented a very different approach to influencing the legal academy — building an alternative institution from the bottom up rather than influencing the legal academy from the top down. While the Olin programs [of law and economics at elite schools] represented a "Fabian" strategy of slowly burrowing into mainstream institutions, GMUSL followed a "Gramscian" approach of creating a parallel institution where more libertarian professors could hone their ideas without the compromises associated with elite institutions. [p.207]
Teles contends that this experiment is moderately successful so far, although to some extent the jury is still out. On one hand, the law school has stayed largely true to its original vision, and it has made "impressive achievements" with its faculty and the U.S. News Rankings. On the the other hand, Teles contends that it's too early to say if Mason will establish itself fully as a counter to liberal institutions (and especially, more elite ones). I gather three of my co-bloggers will have some thoughts on that.
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review
174
Book Review
Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: the Battle for the Control of
the Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 339, $38.50 (cloth),
$24.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn
In the past several decades, conservatism has gone from being a fringe
movement to a potent force in American political and intellectual life. The
demise of the Rockefeller Republicans who hailed from the East Coast and the
simultaneous rise of a rock-ribbed “movement” conservatism has meant that
the Republican party has steadily moved to the right, a development that has
been abundantly chronicled in a number of scholarly and popular books. One
of the tactics that conservatives embraced in the 1970s to counter what they saw
as liberal dominance in institutions such as the universities and newspapers
was to form their own counter-establishment.
Conservatives in general—and
neoconservatives in particular—believed that what Irving Kristol termed a
parasitic “new class” of professors, journalists, and government bureaucrats
had emerged that was hostile to the free enterprise system and controlled the
commanding heights of society. And so it was up to conservatives to perform
the lonely work of creating their own network of journals, newspapers, thinktanks,
and other organizations to challenge the putative supremacy of liberal
thinking. In essence, conservatives were aping what they believed were the
accomplishments of liberals in using foundations and other such institutions
to establish hegemony over elite and popular political discourse.
One such organization is the Federalist Society. It was established in 1982
at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and Yale law schools. Its intent was
ostensibly conservative, but it aim was revolutionary—to return to the so-called
“original intent” of the Founding Fathers and to decry “judicial activism” that
contravened the spirit of the Constitution. Divining that intent—or whether it
even existed—is a perennial source of controversy. Judicial activism, more often
than not, may be in the eye of the beholder, as the Supreme Court wrestles
with the principle of stare decisis.
But the establishment of the society, which served as a seedbed for both
the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, was a significant step in the
formation of the modern conservative movement. Conservatives targeted the
[Journal of Legal Education, Volume 60, Number 1 (August 2010)
Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at the National Interest and author of They Knew They Were
Right: The Rise of the Neocons.]
175
Supreme Court as fertile territory. Their efforts seem to have been rewarded.
Last year, the New York Times reported that a new study published in The Vanderbilt
Law Review indicates that the politicization of the court has now reached down
to the court’s law clerks: “Until about 1990, the study shows, there was no
particular correlation between a justice’s ideological leanings and what his or
her clerks did with their lives. Clerks from conservative chambers are now
less likely to teach. If they do, they are more likely to join the faculties of
conservative and religious law schools. Republican administrations are now
much more likely to hire clerks from conservative chambers, and Democratic
administrations from liberal ones. Even law firm hiring splits along ideological
lines.”1
Perhaps the foremost members of the Federalist Society are Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John Roberts. The question hovering
over them—and, by extension, the Federalist Society itself—is whether they
really are adopting a parsimonious approach to the Constitution or whether
they are simply using the term “original intent” as, in fact, pious humbug—
nothing more than a convenient smokescreen for dressing up their own
political predilections as representing original intent in order to advance their
own radical doctrines.
In The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, Steven M. Teles offers a valuable
and searching study of the conservative legal movement. Teles is an associate
professor of public policy at the University of Maryland and a visiting
lecturer at Yale Law School. He has interviewed many leading members of
the Federalist Society and a variety of other groups and foundations. He has
performed a good deal of archival research as well. His scholarly insights and
impartial tone ensure that his account will form an essential part of the growing
literature on the rise of the right. His argument is that those on the left who
detect a grand conspiracy on the part of the right to seize power misconstrue
its successes. Instead of following a master plan, conservatives have proceeded
more fitfully, advancing here, retreating there, but always with the ultimate
hope of supplanting their liberal adversaries.
To explain the rise of the conservatives, Teles begins by charting the
emergence of what he calls the liberal legal network which he notes first took
hold with the New Deal, “whose revised constitutional orthodoxy paved the
way for an expansion and centralization of government” (22). By the 1960s,
liberalism had become synonymous, in the eyes of many, with good government
and worthy, progressive causes. The Ford Foundation, the American Bar
Association, and other important institutions, Teles writes, were supporting
an effort to “liberalize the legal profession” (23). The Ford Foundation, under
the leadership of McGeorge Bundy, who had been John F. Kennedy’s national
security adviser and an unflinching supporter of the Vietnam War (until he
left government service in 1966 and denounced the conflict), supported the
- Adam Liptak, Sidebar: In Supreme Court Clerks’ Careers, Signs of Polarization, N.Y.
Times, Dec. 21, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/us/22bar.html?r=1.
Book Review: The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement
176 Journal of Legal Education
development of legal clinics for the poor. The notion that the law had become
divorced from reality had taken hold and the clinics were seen as a way for
fledgling lawyers to gain practical experience.
The Warren Court also left an imprint on the legal profession. Law schools
began to promulgate a heroic conception of lawyers that “went hand in hand
with a heroic role for the courts, and not incidentally an elevated status for law
professors” (45). Teles attributes many successes to the liberal legal network. He
believes that it had a marked effect in increasing welfare eligibility, reforming
prisons, promoting school busing for racial balance in urban schools, and
legalizing abortion as the law of the land (54).
Teles points to several halting attempts by conservative figures and
organizations in the early 1970s to stymie and reverse liberal advances.
He chronicles, among other things, the creation of a conservative public
interest law firm called the Pacific Legal Foundation, partly supported by
the California Chamber of Commerce, which had become alarmed by the
ability of the Wilderness Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental
Defense Fund to slow the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline (61).
At the same time, former American Bar Association presidentLewis Powell
wrote a memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that has become
famous for its warning to businessmen about legal liberalism, warning them
that they had “responded—if at all—by appeasement, ineptitude, and ignoring
the problem.” But Teles maintains that it was not until conservatives focused
on building their movement around intellectuals and academics—as opposed
to businessmen—that they would be able to alter the tenor of the courts.
Conservatives, in other words, pursued an activist course that emphasized
individual rights. To accomplish that, Teles writes, “Conservatives would have
to change the ideas of legal elites before they could effectively change the
behavior of courts” (89).
Perhaps Teles’s most interesting case study is of the Federalist Society, which
focused on cultivating intellectual entrepreneurs.While acknowledging the
sway of the society, he attempts to demarcate its influence by arguing that the
activities of the organization are too often conflated with those of its members.
Whether this distinction can be maintained as finely as Teles contends is
questionable. But Teles offers a very perceptive account of the founding of the
society, stressing the importance of the individuals who were at its core.
As Teles notes, the society viewed itself as an alien, even subversive, force
embedded in a hostile institution. It viewed law schools as having been
captured by the left. He describes the society in almost Bolshevik terms: “This
founding organizational mission has been sustained by a leadership cadre that
has, with only small adjustments, controlled the Society for its first quartercentury
and will, in all likelihood, do so for another two decades” (138).
Antonin Scalia, then a professor, played a decisive role in connecting groups
at Yale and Chicago as well as hosting the Harvard Law Federalist Society
members at his home in Chicago. The Reagan administration was receptive
177
as well. Membership may have carried a stigma in the academy, but it was a
badge of honor on the right. It was also something of an employment card.
According to Teles, “by hiring the Society’s entire founding cadre theReagan
administration and its judicial appointees sent a very powerful message that
the terms of advancement associated with political ambition were being set
on their head: clear ideological positioning, not cautiousness, was now an
affirmative qualification for appointed office” (142).
After the abortive nomination of Robert Bork, a founding member, to the
Supreme Court in 1986, the Society’s membership went up dramatically. It has
substantial in-kind contributions and membership dues. And its importance
on the right has only increased. The George W. Bush administration relied
heavily on the Society to staff its ranks. One former official explained to
Teles, “Precisely because the law schools and legal establishment are so
liberal, membership and especially leadership in the Federalist Society is a
costly signal of commitment to legal conservatism, and so as a result it is also
a valuable signal…. We would not only look for whether someone was in the
Federalist Society but whether he or she actually attended monthly Federalist
Society lunches or were at Ted Olson’s annual barbecue, signs that they were
willing to bear a cost for the signal” (158–88).
The retribution that would be exacted for attending Ted Olson’s “annual
barbecue” is never specified but it is consistent with the right’s belief that
anyone defying liberalism, or the left, will pay a heavy price in the form of
ostracism and contempt. Self-pity has never been in short supply among a rightwing
movement that otherwise touts the virtues of self-reliance. Nevertheless,
Teles suggests that the Society is not wholly beholden to the Republican Party,
indicating that it objected to Bush’s nomination of the abysmal Harriet Miers
to the Supreme Court (161).
But does the Society practice a form ofindoctrination? Or, to put it another
way, does it subtly enforce a conservative mode of intellectual thought that
can itself be as stifling as the left-wing orthodoxy it purports to combat?
Teles puts it in a rather genteel fashion: “Through repeated contact with
other conservatives, the Society’s networks reinforce ideological commitment,
transform general attitudes into well-formed philosophical commitments, and
as a consequence make members more willing to defend their views publicly.”
Part and parcel of ventilating those views publicly, Teles writes, is
attempting to damage the legitimacy of the ABA. Upon the failure of the Bork
nomination, which had been opposed by the ABA, the Society decided, Teles
says, to “get revenge on the liberal legal elites who were seen as responsible
for Bork’s defeat” (169). Teles does not seem to believe that this goal has really
been achieved. Instead, a kind of permanent civil war has erupted in which
“the law has become wracked by seemingly unending ideological conflict,
making it even harder to move toward the Society’s understanding of the rule
of law as something that transcends the ideological conflicts of the day. The
Society’s activities have injected competition into the legal professions, but
not, at least for now, a new establishment” (180).
Book Review: The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement
178 Journal of Legal Education
As skillfully as Teles dissects the structures of the conservative legal
movement, he does not really grapple with the actual ideas they represent.
Coolly analytical, he refrains even from interpreting and evaluating them. This
has its advantages, conferring upon his study an impartial tone. But his failure
to tackle the ideas represented by the Federalist Society and other conservative
organizations is ultimately somewhat unsatisfying.
He takes at face value, for example, the proposition that the Society’s
understanding of the rule of law “transcends” ideological conflicts, at least in
theory. But this may not be quite right. The Society, from the outset, has been
an ideological weapon devoted to advancing an extremely narrow conception
of the public interest. It is also the case that it is hard to square the Society’s
espousal of original intent with the kind of radical interventions that the
Supreme Court has been staging under the aegis of Justice John Roberts,
such as toppling limits on campaign financing by corporations. This is not
conservatism. It is radicalism.
Still, even as numerous works appear about conservatism, Teles’s is surely
a pioneering one in the legal field. The lifespan of the movement he has
chronicled is not over. If the Supreme Court is any guide, it may have just
begun.
---
Steven Teles - Senior Fellow - Niskanen Center | LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/steventeles
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Steven M. Teles | Cato Unbound
https://www.cato-unbound.org/contributors/steven-teles
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Steven Teles | The Federalist Society
https://fedsoc.org/contributors/steven-teles
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Steve Teles and Brink Lindsey on *The Captured Economy* (BONUS)
https://medium.com/.../steve-teles-brink-lindsey-captured-economy-tyler-cowen-3290...
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