The trouble with supply-side progressivism

A better left is no substitute for broader political renewal in America

Ezra Klein has an essay at the Times this weekend which returns to a favorite theme of his: “supply-side progressivism”. The left, he has argued in a number of pieces over the past year or so, needs to embrace what Derek Thompson, of the Atlantic, has called an “abundance agenda”, which focuses on expanding the nation’s productive capacity and not simply on questions of distribution, sustainability and the like. I am very sympathetic to these arguments. I share Ezra’s deep frustration at American sclerosis, at our inability to dream big and take practical steps to push ourselves toward a much better world. It feels like a solvable problem, and it is intensely frustrating to watch as year after year it remains unsolved—the more so as America’s fading ambitions seem in some important way bound up with the broader crises of American society and politics.

And yet at the same time I have misgivings about Ezra’s push to make this a liberal priority, and to achieve that goal by working to persuade Democratic elites. Don’t get me wrong, I think it would be a very good thing if left-leaning Americans embraced a national-greatness agenda which included things like making it easier to build housing and infrastructure, increasing support for research and education, and an overall focus on boosting state capacity. But it seems to me that the context in which the American left gets behind these things matters a lot, in terms of what that shift in the liberal agenda means for American politics and how it translates into actual policy change.

America’s descent into its present state does not have any single cause, but it seems owed at least in part to shifts in habits of mind and practice on both the right and the left. The problem on the right is something like a broad mistrust of or distaste for federal government capacity per se (rooted, sometimes, in racist or otherwise troubling beliefs; I don’t mean to imply that the moral failings of the two parties are equally grave, if that’s the caveat you’re waiting to see before deciding it’s ok to read on).

The issue with the left is more amorphous, but Ezra reckons that it is associated with an obsessive focus on proceduralism among lefty elites. Democratic politicians, in other words, often see procedural fairness and aggressive use of the legal system as effective ways to advance the left’s policy goals. So they work to protect the environment by establishing environmental-review procedures and blessing legal challenges to projects which run afoul of them, for instance. That approach may yield some benefits, in terms of protecting ecosystems and controlling pollution, but in aggregate it yields really undesirable outcomes: in terms of both overall American well-being and environmental goals—when this approach inhibits construction of walkable neighborhoods, transit and green energy sources, say.  

I don’t think this diagnosis is wrong, exactly. But I think Ezra may be mistaken in his assessment of what follows from it, in two important ways. First, I don’t know that this is a problem which can be addressed through tweaks to elite preferences. The conclusion to Ezra’s essay is a revealing one. He writes:

I’ve spent most of my adult life trawling think tank reports to better understand how to solve problems. When I go looking for ideas on how to build state capacity on the left, I don’t find much. There’s nothing like the depth of research, thought and energy that goes into imagining health and climate and education policy. But those health, climate and education plans depend, crucially, on a state capable of designing and executing policy effectively. This is true at the federal level, and it is even truer, and harder, at the state and local level.

So this is what I have become certain of: Democrats spend too much time and energy imagining the policies that a capable government could execute and not nearly enough time imagining how to make a government capable of executing them. It is not only markets that have failed.

I mean no disrespect to Ezra when I say that it is not surprising, given his wonk bona fides, that he would seek an answer to our troubles in reports produced by think tanks. But it seems to me a mistake to think that what we have here is a technical problem, for which we’re likely to find the solution in wonk-produced white papers. Similarly, treating a “state-capacity-building agenda” as an issue category which simply needs to be bumped up Democratic elites’ priority list does not feel like a productive route forward. That strikes me as a proceduralist way of visualizing the problem, actually.

But more broadly, I am uncomfortable with the idea that we can get to a better American future by making this a liberal crusade: that “what America needs is a liberalism that builds”, as the title of the essay has it. I understand it: Democrats are persuadable, a liberalism that builds would be a good thing, thus we should seek to persuade Democrats to embrace a liberalism that builds. But transforming the Democratic party into an institution which champions supply-side progressivism would bind the supply-side progressivism agenda to the electoral fortunes of the Democratic party—which are not good—while also conjuring up a passionate opposition to supply-side progressivism, dedicated to preventing its realization and indeed to making sure that much of America sees the “abundance agenda” as Satanic Communism, or possibly Communist Satanism.

A very big problem that we have right now (one which Ezra has written about) is that there are virtually no political values or identities which are able to transcend the partisan divide. This is an extraordinarily bad thing, because it means that even extremely basic, obviously good things which ought to command widespread support—like vaccination against a deadly virus, or participatory democracy—get processed by our political habits into stuff that a meaningful share of Americans comes to see as bad. Now if you are an elected Democrat or a party operative, there is only so much you can do about this; you’re there to try to win elections and get good things done, and you can’t swear off good policies because of the risk that they become identified with the party and thus activate the polarization reflex.

But if the country is going to survive, we need to find a way to disentangle certain broad political beliefs from questions of party identification. America should be a place in which people who oppose the notion that “democracy is good and we should respect the outcome of elections” are a tiny minority of party-less cranks, not a major wing of one of two parties which ever govern. And “America should set ambitious national goals and meet them, because that’s who we are and that’s what we do” ought to command a similar sort of mass support. Parties will disagree about the specifics and that matters. But an America in which we are able to build and maintain a broad national consensus around certain sacred principles—that democracy is good, that the country is a can-do place—should also be one with a more functional day-to-day politics.

You may not like that idea. You may think it reeks of the mushy op-ed centrism which imagines that we could all just get along if only we stopped caring which party wins elections. But it seems implausible to me that an abundance agenda will be the magic talisman that allows Democrats to win commanding majorities, which they will then use to make everyone’s policy dreams come true. And it seems implausible to me that an abundance agenda can be passed on a bipartisan basis without first building national political identities and values which transcend the partisan divide.

You may think that “building national political identities and values which transcend party” does not seem all that much more plausible than those other things. And you may be right. I don’t want to suggest that this would be an easy thing to do, or that there is some clear set of steps which need to be followed to get it done. I’m not arguing that it will be easy; I’m only arguing that it is necessary. 

Do we have any idea how to maybe make some progress toward those goals? One potentially productive strategy, it seems to me, would be to begin cultivating a demand for political institutions which incubate and proselytize on behalf of those values and identities, which could then be met by increased supply of those institutions. In other words, we—meaning Americans broadly, but also some of us scribblers—need to begin encouraging each other to want these transcendent values and identities, and then if and as we have some success, we need to start imagining and creating some institutions. By institutions I mean publications, community groups, national organizations, festivals, awards, and whatever else you care to come up with: collective enterprises which help create cognitive space in which transcendent identities and values can thrive. Places in which Americans relish the experience of associating with people who vote the other way, in which they feel inspired to express love for and solidarity with those others.

The biggest initial obstacle is a mental one. It is so very difficult to step outside the cognitive framework of zero-sum partisan combat, in which nothing good is possible except through the bolstering of one party’s electoral fortunes. I know, I know, I sense your objections, I’m an American living in America. I am intimately familiar with the manic thought that democracy is at risk and it is critical that my party win so that it can be preserved.

But look, that thought is not taking us anywhere good. After January 6th, it was possible to indulge in two sorts of hope about the future of democracy. One, quickly dashed, was that the Republican party would be so shaken that it would come to its senses, and repudiate anybody who had shown themselves to be coup-curious. The other was that Democrats would enact a bunch of bold policies, despite the narrowness of their Congressional margin, that would strengthen the electoral system, and which might also be popular enough to carry Democrats to bigger electoral victories and force the GOP to reinvent itself in a less anti-democratic form. That hope, too, has now been dashed. Barring some miracle, Republicans are going to win big this November. And while a lot can happen between now and 2024, a Democratic landslide seems vanishingly unlikely.

Those of us who treasure liberal democracy therefore need a Plan C. Those of us who generally share progressive policy goals need a Plan C, because putting all our eggs in the “Democrats win sizable political majorities” basket seems like a failed strategy. We have to do the hard work of building up those party-transcending political identities and values. An abundance agenda seems like something which really should enjoy large cross-party support, and which might, for that reason, become a kernel around which broader, transcendent identities and values could be constructed. “What’s my party? Like any sensible American I’m disdainful of rabid partisans. I just consider myself a [political identity which captures an abiding belief in the goodness of democracy and a productive American economy].” And I have the powerful sinking feeling that we will not get an abundance agenda and we will not get democratic renewal in this country if we insist on making it a Democratic initiative. It is all too easy to imagine “supply-side progressivism” becoming a thing Nancy Pelosi talks about, which gets absolutely roasted across right-wing media, another victim of the brutal polarization machine that Ezra, in his other writing, has described so well.

It seems to me, then, that conscientious, progressive-minded people whose employment is not directly associated with efforts to get Democrats elected need to refocus their efforts along these lines. That may feel like unilateral disarmament, in a world in which lots of Republicans are not necessarily prepared to do the same thing. But if we actually prize democracy over the psychic benefits of feeling superior to the other side, then I’m not sure I see a better route forward. And at the end of the day it would be madness for us to observe that a zero-sum competition between these two rival identities is tearing the country apart, then just…keep on inhabiting one of those two identities, waiting for a miracle to spare us either disaster or the need to make some really uncomfortable decisions.

We need to let go of the illusion that we will address climate change by electing Democrats with overwhelming majorities. We need to let go of the illusion that we will get a social safety net worthy of a rich country by electing Democrats with overwhelming majorities. We need to let go of the illusion that we will build things again in this country by electing Democrats with overwhelming majorities. We can make progress toward those things after we have restored some measure of repair to the social fabric of this country. Or we can continue on our current path toward ruin.