Neither Trump Nor Democrats Care About American Prosperity

Otherwise, they'd embrace an 'abundance' agenda and systemically dismantle policies creating an artificial scarcity of housing and other basic goods

(Doers, Shutterstock)

“Abundance” is quickly becoming a buzzword for a new kind of politics in America. The idea, put in the simplest possible terms, is that the United States is beset by a self-imposed commitment to scarcity, and the only way out of this mess is to embrace a politics of plenty. That means building more goods and services—more housing, more infrastructure, more clean energy, more transit systems, more research and innovation, more of everything that is constitutive of social flourishing. Standing in the way of this abundance agenda is a series of formidable obstacles: opposition from the NIMBY movement, regulatory barriers, and a preoccupation with culture war politics. As a result of these anti-growth forces, neither Republicans nor Democrats have shown sufficient interest in building an abundant future for America. Until that changes and at least one of them—whether in power or out of it—takes the imperative for abundance seriously, American society will be plagued by scarcity and stagnation—and, inevitably, political polarization, as more people and causes compete for fewer goods and services.

What Is the Abundance Agenda?

In early 2022, The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson coined the term “the abundance agenda” to describe a policy posture, a governing and legislative ethos, animated by idea that the U.S. needs to build more—and better—essential goods and services. The ultimate aim, Thompson said, is “abundance of comfort, abundance of power, and abundance of time.” Meaning: “more comfortable lives, with more power to do what we want, with more time devoted to what we love.”

Thompson landed on the abundance idea during the height of the pandemic after reflecting on an experience he had waiting in a long line, outside in the cold, just to get a rapid Covid test. Most of the time, scarcity is the product of policy choices; it is, as Thompson calls it, a manufactured scarcity. He pointed to three factors that were responsible for the scarcity of Covid tests: the Food and Drug Administration’s excessively burdensome approval process; the Trump administration’s singular focus on the vaccines and complete disinterest in other key aspects of Covid policy; and the Biden administration being caught flat-footed by Omicron and only bulk-ordering tests after it had already started wreaking havoc on society. But the lack of Covid tests was only an example of a farther-reaching problem. As Thompson noted, “Manufactured scarcity isn’t just the story of Covid tests, or the pandemic, or the economy: It’s the story of America today.”

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Right-Wing Populists Are Just as Bad for Business as Left-Wing Ones

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A year and a half before Thompson’s column, the New York Times’s Ezra Klein (Thompson and Klein are co-authors of a forthcoming book titled Abundance) had taken progressives to task for being insufficiently interested in producing and creating the goods and services they want Americans to have:

The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit.

Klein developed this idea further in a 2022 column calling for a “liberalism that builds.” He argued that one of the most formidable obstacles to unleashing an energetic and productive liberalism is a governing sclerosis affecting Democratic governance at the federal, state, and local level. “Do we have a government capable of building?” Klein asked. “The answer, too often, is no. What we have is a government that is extremely good at making building difficult.” The center-right Niskanen Center makes a similar point, calling out the spiral of increasing funding for a bureaucratically-constrained supply of goods as Cost Disease Socialism.

Klein’s exhortation is pitched at his fellow liberals. Thompson, by contrast, explicitly frames the abundance agenda as a cross-ideological project:

This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.

But the flipside of the abundance agenda’s reliance on these traditions is its relatively small pull within each of them. It often can’t count on any major intellectual figure on the left or the neo-right. That’s precisely the abundance agenda’s greatest shortcoming: despite the buzz it is receiving from some quarters, it is a social vision and policy posture that a mere fraction of either side currently supports.

Today’s GOP: The Anti-Abundance Party

Consider the Republican Party. Presidents are always the de facto leaders of their parties, but Donald Trump commands an unusual amount of direct loyalty. Overwhelmingly in the GOP, what Trump says is what goes. And Trump’s record on abundance issues is mixed at best, awful at worst.

To start with the obvious, Trump’s unprecedented hostility to immigration is not only morally abhorrent but also terrible for the abundance agenda. Economists overwhelmingly agree that immigration of all kinds is beneficial, but Trump’s past record and current actions prove he wants fewer immigrants in America. Tech leaders especially emphasize the importance of high skilled immigration for growth and innovation. And while Trump recently made some encouraging statements about H-1B visas for high-skilled immirgrants—despite confusing them with H-2B visas—he’s also criticized them sharply and took actions to limit them during his first term. Economists are also in near-universal agreement that Trump’s pro-tariff, anti-trade views will harm economic growth, a sine qua non of the abundance agenda.

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Tariffs Are Trump's Tool to Consolidate His Hold on Power

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Beyond his signature anti-immigration and anti-trade policies, much of the rest of Trump’s track record simply does not inspire confidence. Over the years, Trump has routinely aligned himself with NIMBYs, alleging that Democrats want to destroy the suburbs. Trump’s DOGE initiative has declared that any federal scientific research spending that sounds funny is a waste and should be cut. RFK Jr. is likely to oversee a medically regressive regime at the FDA, given his disparagement of vaccines, new drugs, and anything that isn’t “natural” like raw milk.

There are a few potential bright spots. Much of the new tech right is aligned with cutting red tape and building things faster, and Trump has gestured in the direction of permitting reform. Some of Trump’s cabinet picks—like Doug Burgum, Trump’s choice to lead the Department of the Interior—have expressed pro-YIMBY sentiment. And Trump is likely to promote energy abundance in fossil fuel extraction.

But even Trump’s potential bright spots have dark shadows. Trump’s enthusiasm for abundance in oil is offset by his animus towards wind and solar power—he’s not only stopped funding for solar and EV projects, but halted leases for offshore wind projects through executive action. Trump is often against the spirit of progress in a generalized sense—for instance, he’s come out directly against the automation of ports, preferring that our ports use manual labor rather than more efficient machines. It’s a clear cut example of how Trump’s economic nationalism leads him away from embracing technologies that can facilitate abundance.

Democratic Leaders Have Ignored the Abundance Agenda

Unfortunately, Democrats haven’t given abundance advocates much to be optimistic about, either. There’s a wing of the party that embraces abundance policies, like Rep. Scott Peters of California and other founders of the YIMBY Caucus. But the Democrats occupying positions of influence in the last four years simply haven’t done what is needed. The Biden administration was very good at passing large bills with impressive spending numbers, but dreadful at implementing those bills and actually getting things built. The Biden team embraced the “everything-bagel” theory of politics, throwing in dozens of policies into each spending bill; trying to “accomplish so much within a single project or policy that it ends up failing to accomplish anything at all,” as Klein put it. Biden’s Build Back Better policy package was subject to rules around child care provision, union labor requirements, community engagement, gender and racial contracting quotas, environmental reviews that could stretch years, and much more. The end result is dead-end programs like Biden’s $42 billion initiative to build out high-speed broadband in rural areas, which was passed in 2021 and as of January 2025 has connected exactly zero rural Americans to the internet.

This problem on the Democratic side can be most vividly seen when it comes to the party’s administration of local governments. Democrats have a near-monopoly on government in our nation’s biggest cities, and most of those cities are struggling. Deep blue cities like New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles all have severe housing crises because for decades they failed to build enough housing. While there are a few encouraging signs like Minnesota’s land use reforms, on the whole, city- and state-level Democrats simply are not serious about building enough housing. Localized NIMBY politics are too strong and Democrats are too beholden to anti-housing interest groups.

Local Democrats are often so afraid of building housing that it’s comical. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently issued bizarre executive actions that suspended regulations so that homes could be rebuilt faster in the wake of the California wildfires, but only if you built the exact same homes with no expansions. God forbid anyone build four homes on a lot where there used to be three! Newsom has been taking advice from Hawaii Gov. Josh Green about his experience recovering from Maui’s devastating fires in August 2023. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the problem with Democratic governance, because 18 months after the Maui fires only three out of 2,000 homes have been rebuilt.

Can Abundance Work?

The most potent critiques of the abundance agenda are not policy-oriented but political. Some believe that the abundance cause isn’t a winner at the polls, while others worry that in practice abundance is just a cover for politics as usual. In the New Atlantis journal, Thomas Hochman writes:

An increasing number of Republicans and Democrats may agree that we should build more things in America, but scratch beneath the surface and the same old political divisions appear, as each side interprets and pursues abundance through the lens of existing ideological priorities. While the agenda emphasizes deregulation and government spending as key strategies for beating scarcity, proponents on the left have embraced spending without deregulation, and proponents on the right have embraced deregulation without spending.

In some cases, Hochman is correct. There are plenty of Democrats and Republicans who would use abundance politics as just another framing for pursuing partisan-inflected goals. But that ignores the many Democrats who really do see the benefits of deregulation—like Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who has supported housing deregulation, fought occupational licensing, and recently rescinded hundreds of executive orders to cut red tape. And it ignores the many Republicans supportive of funding for new science and tech research­—16 Republican senators voted for the CHIPS Act in 2022, which spends hundreds of billions of dollars to boost the research and manufacturing of semiconductors.

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America Can’t Do Without Immigrants

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The abundance agenda is powerful because its core ideas are non-partisan. As the Niskanen Center’s Steven Teles has said: “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.” This is correct—there’s a real opportunity for a politics of abundance to gain ground. And that’s because polarization is to some degree a choice. Although the partisan pressures drawing us toward zero-sum culture war battles are real and formidable, Thompson’s insight that a politics of scarcity often results from actual, contingent choices we make is a good one. That means reorienting our politics around common sense objectives that can materially improve our lives is possible, though certainly not easy.

After all, it’s not a partisan project to want people to be better off, to have more and improved goods, and richer lives. Everyone wants high economic growth. Everyone wants cheaper housing. Everyone wants better infrastructure. Saying that federal money should be spent efficiently isn’t inherently partisan coded, it’s common sense—if we’re going to fund programs, we want to get our money’s worth. But today, neither party is picking up the mantle to make an abundant future happen. Until they do, we’re stuck with ineffective spending bills, high housing costs, and a future that we can see but not realize.

© The UnPopulist, 2025

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