"American political culture goes through phases. Between 1933 and 1963 that culture went through a Hamiltonian phase. Leaders believed in centralizing power to build big things. Franklin Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority and the rest of the New Deal. Dwight Eisenhower built the national highways system and founded NASA.
A lot of the stuff the centralizers did was great, like the New York infrastructure czar Robert Moses’ building Lincoln Center. Some of the stuff they did was horrific, like Robert Moses’ destroying Bronx neighborhoods to put in a highway.
Somewhere around the late ’60s the culture shifted in a decentralizing, Jeffersonian direction. A new generation of conservatives and progressives emerged who were suspicious of centralized authority and instinctively against the establishment, and who railed against “the system.” People with less power were automatically the good guys, and people with more power were automatically the bad guys.
On the right, Republicans from Ronald Reagan to the Tea Party crusaded against elites and the swamp in Washington. On the left, progressive activists like Ralph Nader and the environmentalists sued the government to halt development projects. Progressive community activists empowered neighborhoods to take on and stymie City Hall. Federal workers passed masses of regulations to micromanage everyday life on a work site. Republicans and Democrats joined forces to pass the National Environmental Policy Act, the California Environmental Quality Act and the Endangered Species Act, all of which could be used by activists to slow down and halt housing and transportation projects.
The decentralizing Jeffersonians overshot the mark. A group of activists who came of age during the New Deal era concentrated power to get things done. Then, a new generation of activists who came of age during the 1960s rebelled against concentrated power and made it nearly impossible to get anything done. This became the pattern.
In 2008 California set out to build high-speed rail between Los Angeles and San Francisco, promising that it would be finished in 2020. The project was blocked by a thousand little barriers, and now a scaled-down line between Merced and Bakersfield may open in 2033 at a cost, so far, of $35 billion.
In the United States it costs roughly $609 million to build a kilometer of rail. In Canada it costs only $295 million and in Portugal, $96 million. Because of regulations and the lack of cost-effective production, a basic elevator in New York City costs about four times as much as that same elevator in Switzerland.
Progressives proved especially effective at blocking new home construction. A study in California found that as the share of liberal votes rises by 10 points in a given city, the number of housing permits issued declines by 30 percent. In San Francisco, according to one 2023 state report, it took 523 days on average to get clearance to construct new housing and then 605 days to get building permits, if your project wasn’t killed in the meantime by lawsuits and citizen action.
One result has been scarcity and higher prices for the things that get regulated, like housing. Another is that highly educated people found they could game the permitting system and prevent poorer and less educated people from sullying their neighborhoods. Another is that when government tries to do big things, like build clean energy or rail lines, it finds it can’t act. The irony is this: Progressives, who believe in using government to do good things, have built a system that renders government incompetent.
But now the culture may be shifting again. Over the past several years, various versions of something called the abundance movement have been growing at libertarian-leaning think tanks like the Niskanen Center, at right-leaning tech hubs like Andreessen Horowitz and at a wide array of left-leaning think tanks. The core argument is the need to get rid of regulations that make it impossible to build things, and we need to invest money in order to achieve great things.
This winter the abundance movement is having its coming-out party in the form of three spectacular books by some of its more prominent champions.
Next month, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s book “Abundance” will be published, offering a comprehensive indictment of the current problems and a clear path forward. This month brought us Yoni Appelbaum’s “Stuck,” a historical account of the forces that have produced the current housing crisis and its social and cultural effects. Marc J. Dunkelman’s new book, “Why Nothing Works,” is an intellectual history that describes the ideas and values that first drove people like Moses to act the way they did and the values that drove the next generation of activists to oppose them. These three books have significantly altered the way I see our current political morass. (Klein, Thompson and Appelbaum are colleagues of mine at The Times and The Atlantic.)
Dunkelman summarizes the history perfectly: “In ways big and small, Jeffersonian protections have prevented the movement from expanding the nation’s housing supply, delivering high-speed rail and replacing carbon-emitting power with clean energy. We’ve become so terrified of Hamiltonian figures making bad decisions that we’ve curtailed government’s ability to make tough calls.”
Appelbaum describes the way all this stasis has enervated American life. He points out that our housing crisis is not just a cost crisis; it’s a mobility crisis. In the 1940s and 1950s, about a fifth of Americans moved. Then came the zoning and other regulations that progressives championed. Today, only one in 12 Americans moves every year.
People can’t afford housing in the places where opportunity is plentiful. That means fewer Americans are moving to improve their lives and fewer are climbing the social ladder. When people move to new places, they join churches and civic organizations to meet new people. When mobility slows, social and civic life, paradoxically, deteriorates. More Americans are, as Appelbaum puts it, stuck.
In their book, Klein and Thompson usher in a mood shift. They inspire hope and enlarge the imagination by describing the good things that are actually within our grasp: abundant energy, cheaper housing, affordable cities, shorter workweeks, lab-grown meat so that we no longer have to use 25 percent of global land to raise livestock.
“What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation,” they write.
Will the abundance movement take flight? There are some obstacles. A lot of people, especially rich Democrats, like having the NIMBY power to block development around them. Public sector unions tend to instinctively defend bureaucracies and the regulations promulgated within them. The abundance folks call for both deregulation and more spending. Many progressives hate the former and many conservatives hate the latter.
The more troubling obstacles may be cultural. If anything, Americans have grown more cynical and more distrustful of authority than they were even in the 1970s. In an essay in The New Atlantis, the American Enterprise Institute scholar Yuval Levin points to a “willful paralysis that oddly passes for sophistication in our elite culture now.” Americans now have trouble thinking about the future in the way previous generations did.
Levin continues: “It often bespeaks a kind of vanity unable to imagine the world without ourselves in it, and to take pleasure in benefiting our successors. The future, after all, is the home of other people — people who will follow us when we are gone. To build durable infrastructure for future prosperity is to build for those other people. And the inability to value those other people and judge them worthy of our work and sacrifice is a characteristic failing of a decadent society.”
Yet I strongly believe the abundance movement will form an important faction within the Democratic Party and maybe in the Republican one too. Democratic politicians like Kamala Harris and Representative Jake Auchincloss have seized some of its ideas. There is a natural tendency in our country to move in a Hamiltonian direction after a period of Jeffersonian ascent, and such a shift is overdue. Most important, the arguments these authors make are utterly compelling.
It’s interesting to read these books during the Trump Anschluss. In some ways President Trump can be seen as an extreme response to a government that can’t get anything done.
If we still have a country when he is done, we’re going to need a better establishment. So I’d close with some questions for educators. Every society on earth has a leadership class of one sort or another, so are you educating your students so that they can build a better establishment? Are you arming them with sensible views about authority so that they don’t childishly dismiss all forms of it? Are you training them to be in touch with their fellow citizens, so that they don’t rule imperiously from above? Are you training them to embrace the obligations that fall on them as leaders, to serve the country and not their own kind? Are you trying to inculcate in them both the humility to know what they don’t know and the audacity to reach for abundance?" [1]
1. We Can Achieve Great Things: David Brooks. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Feb 27, 2025.
