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The Realignment
594 | Steve Teles: Hard Lessons for Centrists Trying to Overcome the Mediocrity Challenge + Last Call for Niskanen Summer Institute Applications
01:01:10
Steve Teles, Niskanen Center Senior Fellow, returns to The Realignment. Marshall and Steve discuss how moderates, centrists, and the Abundance movement can navigate the anti-status quo/economic populist moment, why the modern center naturally trends towards milquetoast, aesthetic moderation, instead of boldly picking fights, and how the fights over school reform in the 2000s and 2010s (regardless of one's opinion of charter schools and unions) offer a better model. Plus, Marshall reminds undergraduates in the class of 2026 and later that Niskanen Summer Institute applications are due February 27th.
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- [00:00]
A
Marshall here. Welcome back to the Realignment. Before we jump into my latest conversation with my Niskanian center colleague Steve Tallis, I want to shout out the Niskanin Summer Institute, our week long academic program for undergrads interested in the intersection of politics, policy and all of the issues and themes covered on the Realignment. The program is fully funded, so we'll cover your lodging travel and offer a $250 stipend to participants. Students in the class of 2026 or later are eligible. Applications are due on February 27th. You can find the link to the application in the show Notes onto Today's Episode Steve and I cover a lot of ground, but the main focus is the challenge raised by last week's episode how moderates, centrists and technocratically coded movements like Abundance can meet an increasingly populist, anti status quo electorate. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Steve, welcome back to the Realignment.
- [01:03]
B
Happy to be here, Marshall.
- [01:04]
A
The cost of lots of travel in January and the fact that I have actual day to day responsibilities at our think tank, the Niskanon center, means that we have not been able to hop on a recording yet this year. So I'm very excited to do that. Here's the overall theme for the episode 2025 was a big year. A lot of theses were put out there, a lot of takes were had, and a bunch of things were either validated or invalidated. So I wanted to do a broad facing episode where you and I could go over a lot of our takeaways and sort of notes for the future for folks in this audience who are interested in that style of thinking that folks could really take into the not only rest of the year, but really the fact that a lot of these conversations are going to reset after the midterms this November, I wanted to kick off with something you and I both really wanted to discuss which is sort of the cleanest hit that I have taken from the not just like economic populists on the left side, but also just sort of like right wing people who are populist. Which is just that in an anti status quo moment there is a real difficulty when it comes to moderate and center coded movements and ideas like Abundance in attacking and being aggressive against that status quo. I would love to hear your kind of thoughts on that. We can get into it.
- [02:20]
B
Yeah, so I thought about this a lot. So back in 2017 I wrote a book with also Niskin and Center fellow Brent Glindzi called the Captured Economy, which made the argument that in fact lots of our economy as it's in the title, right. Was in fact captured by entrenched incumbent interests. And that there was a political economy to that. That there was actually ways that whether it was in finance or medicine or intellectual property or housing, you could go down the, down the down the list. Our economy over, you know, over the decades had become more and more brittle that the creative destruction that's supposed to be kind of the argument for capitalism had ground will halt. And so you, you could see this in lots of different, different areas and that people should be met that. Right. That that was an actual breakdown of our politics and that we, and that people had rightly kind of could sense that a lot of our inequality was downstream from politics. And so the first thing I'll say is I was there already before some of these guys got there. And that, you know, any kind of abundance movement worth its salt should also incorporate that kind of what I would say these fancy terms call sort of anti status entrenchment. You know, the same time that we wrote that book, Richard Reeves had a book out that made dream hoarders made similar points about different kind of areas around schools and housing and all kinds of other areas. So I do think that there is a class story that people ought to be able to tell. Now the thing I would say and the thing that differentiates me from economic populists is that to say that you also need a plausible economics. And so when we were looking at status entrenchment in the book, we were mostly focused on economists call rent seeking right areas where people are getting super normal profits because they can prevent market entry. In some ways our book was the cleanest, simplest pure classical economic story. There was no like anti neoliberal thing there. Although it depends what you mean by neoliberalism, which is like an endless pit that I don't want to fall into. I just mean, you know, when you actually sit down and read the economics textbook, it's incredibly radical, right? And when you, if you actually take it seriously, it, you know, implies enormous change all over the place. Now often when we teach this, people sort of ignore actually how radical the implications of it are. But you know, if you say that we should have a non distortionary tax cut sounds very kind of technocratic, right. What it really means is enormous ways that we redistribute upward should be taken away, right? The argument is not that the, you know, somehow the political system is all neutral, all our policy is somehow neutral and all the inequality is coming out of the market. Our argument was a huge amount of that inequality was being generated by politics itself. The politics not just where we weren't regulating things, but it was how we were regulating that was redistributing upward. So the basic argument, I think that comes out of all this is that we should be worried about the reproduction of status. We should be worried about the way that the wealthy insulate themselves from change. But in order to actually have a freer kind of market, right, to actually have more competition. Because one of the values of competition is it forces those who already have status to actually compete for it. Right? Actually compete for customers to compete against other workers, other kinds of things. Right. And it was the breakdown of that competition that's ultimately led to a lot of that upward redistribution. But again, you need to have an actual plausible theory of the economy that isn't just a theory of politics and takes. And that's where I think there's a real difference between what I think of as the abundance adjacent criticism of class and status and the one that I think is. Is often thinks of itself as a rival to normal economic reasoning and evidence and stuff like that.
- [07:16]
A
I'm curious, how do you think. And the reason why I was thinking a lot about this in the context of you and I chatting about this was I was at a dinner that I put on with my collaborator, Danielle Lee Thompson. She comes on the podcast a lot. And there were two. It was Chatham, Mass. Rules, so I'm not going to name names here obviously, but there were two people who were sort of prominent and hold responsible positions within the abundance industrial complex. And because Danielle is more culture and vibes and media theory focused, she's not a public policy person. She just turned to them and in a polite but decently aggressive way was basically like, look, study vibes. Abundance just seems kind of lame to me. Why is it that you two are so into this? You're clearly smart, what's your deal? And. Or she didn't even say what's your deal? She said, what was it that led to you choosing this to be the thing you're going to focus on? And what was so interesting in their responses were they both personally very quickly got to anti status quo language. So they're talking about how climate change is my number one issue and for my entire life we've been trying to make this thing happen. It isn't happening. I study the thing and clearly what I've come to the conclusion around is we're just not building things we need to build. And abundance is just literally the only way to get there. And then another person is talking about homelessness and a lack of housing and how that's unacceptable and how we have to live in a society that could actually provide things for people and abundance is the path to that. Those two answers, which were much more dynamic if I had the actual quotes, were just so much clearer and obvious and answered her question about what are you doing here? In a way that speaks better than the typical I'm here because I care about human flourishing or I'm here because America needs a state that's up to the task of the 21st century. So I just think there's a performative mode that we need to get our. And not performative in a superficial sense, but I just think that there's a technocratic seriousness that matters. To your point, when it comes to an actual plausible theory that unfortunately has infected the marketing materials, the framing, and the way we talk about these ideas in public, that I just think if you have your framework in mind, or even the answer that Danielle was asking for people in mind, you would understand how to actually deliver properly.
- [09:42]
B
Well, let me just give a couple of examples. So one, I do think the GIMBY people had this. There is, I mean, when I talk to the people who were really there at the beginning, people like Andy Freman and others, right. A lot of what they were doing was tapping into actual anger, right. That, that there were actual enemies, right. People who were showing up at, you know, planning meetings and being the only ones there in order to, you know, to stop people building more housing. And the aggregation of all those people who were, you know, who were disproportionately participating was the reason why they were having to, like, you know, triple up in a single studio apartment, right. That they were. There were actual people who were responsible for that. I also think, and I think we've disagreed on this before, that the ed reform movement at its best had a lot of that. Right. That there were people who were parents, who were working class people who knew that they needed to have their kids get a decent education in order to have any chance of social mobility, and all of these systems that were leading to bad teachers not being taken out of the classroom. Right. You think about the frustration that would have, that you've, you know, worked often you, you came from somewhere else and there's nothing you can do about the fact that you, you have to send your kid to the public school and nobody seems to care that the teacher can't keep order, can't keep the, you know, the students Actually learning on grade level. Right. So what has both of those common, and we could go through a bunch of other examples, is I do think of abundance fundamentally as a consumerist movement. Right? But it's a consumerist movement of government. It's on the people who are not anti government. Right. That's where I think a lot of the energy on the conservative side is, right? Is that whole sort of we want to drown governments in a bathtub kind of stuff. Right. This is people who need police, they need schools, they need housing, they need public transportation, often they can't afford their own car or whatever. Right. And the fact that the government is tying itself up in knots, can't get its act together, often is captured by its own workforce, is a source of genuine anger and frustration, and abundance ought to be able to tap into that. And this is where again, I think of it as both going at the entrenchment in the economy that somebody is running away with all the gains because they're cheating, right? They're. They're manipulating the rules in order to, to redistribute upward. Right. And that we have all these government systems that I need to work, you know, for my project of actually moving up and having my kids move up that aren't working and I don't have a private option. Right. That's the thing, I think is often the conservative side are the people who, who've got the private option and they want to squeeze that private option up as. As much as they can. Right. I think abundance is going at people who need government. Right. They have no other alternative but a government that works. Right. And it's to channel that frustration into actual programmatic change as opposed to just slogans that seem like superficial, you know, getting in fights, but they don't actually add up to actual change in the schools and cops and everything else that people depend upon.
- [13:16]
A
This is jumping ahead in the script a bit, but I'm curious how your articulation of the abundance really has something to offer a politician, a movement and set of institutions who are trying to serve consumers of government with the way you articulated the right, which is in many ways defined by its hostility to government. How does that work when it comes to abundance as a bipartisan movement and those different dynamics?
- [13:44]
B
Well, you know, abundance is. You're reminding me to say, I wrote a piece called Varieties of Abundance, which is, I'm actually now turning into a book, and I think it's, you know, the basic abundance sort of set of ideas interact with other kinds of parts, other IDEOLOGIES across a pretty wide spectrum, right. So there are libertarian people who are into abundance. You know, some of that's because they're really into AI, some of that's because they're into supersonic planes. And in many cases the thing that differentiates them is they know they need a government that actually works to get all those things right. So they're, they, they've sort of transitioned past pure libertarianism to thinking about the general ecosystem that produces that kind of mostly private sector innovation. Right. Now again, I think that's a little different than when you think of, you know, what in the, in the paper I refer to as abundance liberalism, which is, you know, originally I called that like cal abundance, right? Because it really was about people who've got a very kind of coastal project, right, where they, you know, there's no Republican party to speak of in where they are. And so they're like fighting against some weird coalition of government producer interests and the more radical left, right. And you know, and so their project is about how do you get rid of a lot of those sort of entrenched systems inside of coastal government in order to make it, to make it work. So in some ways what makes it abundance is that some of those same reforms are necessary in order to unlock a lot of very different projects, some of which are in contradiction with one another. Right. Almost everybody across abundance realizes that there's something fundamentally broken in the way that we've structured government, the way that we've tied the knots, the way that we, we've, you know, wrapped it up in procedure. Now the thing they want to do, having unwrapped it from procedure and got it to, you know, get more internal capacity, is often pretty different. Right. And so that to me is not a surprise given the kind of movement abundance is and the fact that it, it's sort of interacting with a bunch of different projects, whether it's environmentalism or democratic socialism or you know, kind of a somewhat, you know, tech right adjacent social conservative kind of project further out on the right.
- [16:32]
A
Here's another thing I'm curious about then. So I, you know, you've got your book project, I have my events producing side of my career, which is increasingly the thing I'm most obsessed with and just enjoying the most. So I'm co producing the abundance conference for 2026 more from that here from this space in the next few months. But something I was thinking about, when it comes to your point about this big broad coalition of people who are interested in the topic of abundance, is I think what's happened though is in recognizing that that dynamic exists. So the ability to build a cross partisan coalition of people. I think we run into something that I'm calling Everything Bagel Abundance as a problem that we need to solve over the next six months. So you and I are going to hopefully do a little bit of thinking out loud here that could drive our programming for the conference. And my Everything Bagel abundance phrasing is in reference to a famous Ezra Klein New York Times column that he mentions in the Abundance book, which is called Everything Bagel Liberalism. And the central argument I talked about this on the past episode was that liberalism or any sort of center left project in the Democratic Party, when it tries to accomplish something, it tries to accomplish too many things at once. So it's not just like in 2022 that you want to build chip factories via chip fabs, via the CHIPS Act. But you say this chip fab is also going to have daycare and it's also going to union protections. It's also going to exceed environmental regulations. Stack, stack, stack, stack, stack. You've added all these different toppings to the bagel to the point that you actually make the project itself less feasible when it comes to its original goals and how this operationalizes itself at a metaphorical level within Abundance is Everything Bagel Abundance is basically saying, so we want to have this big cross partisan conference. We're going to have all these different people, we're going to add as many different topics to the abundance frame so that we can build that coalition. So we're going to do AI programming and we're going to do programming around immigration and we're going to do things around New York City and the left. It's all these, all these, all these, all these different topics to the point where I talked to a bunch of journalists who were at the Abundance conference, friendly journalists, right? These are center left people who like want to write the piece saying this is a big idea to follow. They were just sort of saying, whoa, drawing so many different directions. We've kind of confused here. And my last bit on this is I specifically bring up AI because I was at a Abundance happy hour that an inclusive Abundance put on, where I was interviewing and discussing things with Representative Jake Auchincloss. And afterwards someone came up saying, hey, like AI didn't come up in your conversation. I think Abundance really has to make AI part of its project. And my just response was, and this is where Everything Bagel came up. That's just too much. You're not Only getting into the political debate around data centers, you're getting into job loss and all these like huge political economic topics, especially when huge parts of the right part of abundance are accelerationist with AI. So they're very much in the David Sachs wings of things, where I would not say there is agreement on the center and center, left and left when it comes to those topics. So I would say AI is incredibly consequential. But abundance cannot just keep adding every single one of these different topics to the frame. And in a way that actually makes it make sense. And the way I think of abundance in AI is I think of abundance in AI within the category of energy, which is why I think energy is very clearly within the abundance framework. So if you are living in a state like Oregon, where I grew up, where you have incredible data center driven pressures when it comes to the actual cost of electricity, abundance is good because abundance is a means by which someone who actually wants there to be data centers or is concerned about this cost increase, this is how you get more power. It's Oregon, so it's going to have to be clean power to reduce the overall cost for consumers. Abundance is like once again saying that's how you think about it rather than making the case for AI is going to fix everything. I'm curious what you think about this overall frame.
- [20:42]
B
Yeah. So I think one of the questions, and I'm dealing with this in the book a little bit is, you know, how we think fundamentally about what holds most of the people in this thing together in terms of what it is they want an abundance of. I think part of it. And maybe this is just me actually doing autobiography. Think about how to describe this compared to, you know, what the, you know, me describing what a larger movement has. Right. Is that, you know, the old Peter Thiel line about, you know, you know, getting, you know, change in the world of atoms.
- [21:23]
A
We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters, we built in the world of bits, not the world of atoms.
- [21:29]
B
Yeah. I still think, you know, Peter Thiel is what he is, but that's right to me, right. That one thing that abundance points to is that the disproportionate innovation in the sort of virtual space, as opposed to the physical space space. And that at least my opinion is we've pretty much run out of the things where innovation in virtual space is going to make a really big tangible difference to ordinary people in their lives. Now AI, I think, has this very specific thing where it plays in, which is, you know, everybody who's in Abundance cares about state capacity, about making in a way to increase in the productivity of the public sector. That's the way I would put it, right? Is that we've had, you know, substantially no real improvement in the productivity of the public sector, whether it's schools or police or whatever. And that's what we all care about. Right. You know, there's a very plausible story that done right, AI could substantially increase the productivity of the public sector. Now there's a lot of like, stuff that has to happen for that to happen. And I think people tend to underestimate that, which is why I think people under underestimate, you know, how much it's going to take for AI to change lots of things because it's all embedded in organizations. Right? And you can imagine putting AI into things where it then turns out that, you know, you had a human there for a reason that AI can't replicate. But for me, the real energy, the fundamental energy in abundance is let's go back into the physical world. Let's go back and actually stop being afraid of doing things to the physical world about, you know, improving the speed. Things like, you know, I'm actually excited about supersonic transport, but other people are excited about, you know, the fact that we've had no improvement really in things like transit, you know, in like public, you know, transit speeds, all that. Right. People look around and you know, so many things are actually no different than they were 50 years ago. Right. The, the, the, the plane one is the best example. Right. We've really had no meaningful improvement in airplane speeds for like half a century. We haven't had substantial improvement. So I think that. Right. You know, I'm really, I have a paper coming out with Arpit Gupta next month about factory built housing. That's another area where we've had absolute decline in productivity. Right. Not the rate of productivity, but absolute. Right. It's more expensive to build houses now than it was 50 years ago. And that's because we need really basic changes in how we produce things. AI may help with some of that. Right. But that for me is, I think also politically we need to be able to have a language to say those are the things that really matter. Those are things that would really make a difference in your, in your lives. Right. If we were able to build housing really fast to the example I was given, like Springfield, Ohio, when everybody was like upset about migrants coming in and one of the reasons was like house prices went up because suddenly they were all bidding for the same houses. Well, if we actually had you know, houses built in factories quickly. Right. You wouldn't have to depend on just the workers who live in Springfield, Ohio, who could actually build that. Right. You could just turn, you know, the, the trucks that were coming out of the factory over in Cleveland or Akron or somewhere and just send them all to Springfield. Right. But as a consequence of not having that a problem actually in the physical world, you know, we've got this artificial scarcity which creates political conflict. So for me, the really generative politics is a physical, embodied, non virtual politics that also responds to the fact that people do have a sense that virtual space is not a culturally kind of attractive space. Right. It isn't. The things that they think actually produce meaningful lives, they're all terrified of. The gambling online, you know, pornography, all of that. Right. Also gets you some of that, that cultural story that goes along with a kind of return to matter. Right. And also a fear that like, you know, we, we see like performance in schools going down partially as a result of devices and everything. I think this should be a materialist movement. I think thinking that as a materialist movement does also help you think about where the edges are. Right. Where do you go off into something and not let everything good has to be abundance. But I think of abundance as fundamentally a movement about fixing systems to allow the basic material things in our world to work better for normal people. Yeah.
- [26:32]
A
And I think relating to all of this, I very excited for the Varieties of Abundance book piece. But here's where you can do a little bit of work on your book, hopefully. So once again, as I said, I'm working on the Abundance conference and we've discussed the Varieties of Abundance on this podcast a decent amount. So folks will find that in the show notes if they haven't heard all of that. But the TLDR here is. We were looking back through the conference feedback and there was a gap in understanding of why Varieties of Abundance matters when it came to a certain set of participants, especially those who were coming from outside of D.C. and my answer to why that is true and why I was just sort of like, this piece is so great, it's so useful. But there is these set of attendees, no matter who didn't find it useful is I actually think Varieties of Abundance has to be understood within your framework that we originally first met and spoke over, which was the rise of factional politics in America. Because. And I'll just give you the feedback, which isn't personal, it's not about your performance. It was just sort of like, I'm here To learn how to make things happen. Why are we talking about all this ideological stuff? I'm here to learn how we can make American government work. And we're going into this degree of libertarian and that degree of lefty and Washington versus and by Washington I mean Washington state versus California versus Texas. I just want to learn how policy works. And my response to that, that I want to make much clearer in the program next year, is that abundance is coming into this moment where as you describe it, like increasingly American politics is, is defined not just by Democrat versus Republican, but actually by different factions within these parties where that's actually someone's identity layer. So obviously Zoran Mamdani ran as a Democrat, but you should understand him as a Democratic socialist. The sort of most election focused and least nihilistic version of a democratic socialist. That is a, that is a faction. And my advice to people who are navigating politics in this moment, whether at the state or local or national level, even if you're not focusing on abundance, if you understand that you are navigating in an environment where there are people who like the number one thing you need to learn about them is not their literal partisan affiliation, but the fact that they actually operate within a specific ideology that has specific geographic and sectional and class and educational dynamics to it. You actually have a better POV on what's actually going on there. And then you're also going to have a better ability to actually make things actually happen because you understand this isn't a traditional partisan thing from the 1990s. There's actually a world where you could say, hey, I'm trying to get this energy thing done. I'm a Cascadian abundance person. I want more clean power in my state. I could actually work with certain people on the right because they want more power to power their data centers. And that's an argument that you could make that's a little different than just the traditional. I'm a Republican, I don't really like energy, I don't like climate friendly clean tech. That's the way that I sort of operational. I'm curious what you think about this.
- [29:38]
B
Well, and again, just to use the example of Manami, right, You know, he was clearly a democratic socialist, but he was also, and this is again the point about varieties of abundance is that they're all syncretic, right? By syncretic I mean they're like mixing abundance with some other pre existing ideological category, right? So in his care, you know, when you combine abundance and democratic socialism, that's when you get the category I call Red Plenty, right? Which is saying, right, that the objective is to actually, you know, increase the amount of material things, right. In some ways, you know, if you look at the picture that's in that, it gives these images of, you know, you know, abundant housing for people. Right? That kind of, you know, image of like workers and scientists and bureaucrats working together in order to create more. Right. That, that sort of energy is different than people ordinarily associated with democratic socialism, right? Which is a pure kind of redistributive politics as opposed to a politics that's creating more, more housing, more energy, more everything. Now it's trying to do it through public enterprise. But that to me is a pretty different project. So I think the way to think about the variety of abundance is the abundance layer is a thing that mixes with a bunch of other projects. You gave the example of cascading abundance. That project is very different than we might think of as legacy environmentalism or the idea that like, you know, what environmentalism is are the people who are just trying to stop everything, right? Stop everything from going actually, you know, it's tech, it's technologically optimistic, right. That we could actually create new forms of energy that would allow, you know, allow us to actually, you know, win this battle over climate change while also making growth available to people all over the world. Right. All, all that kind of thing that synthesis is what abundance adds, right. And I think it adds a bunch of tools for how you think about achieving any of those things. Right? So again, and this. And I think that the tool layer is the one that's the most sort of encompassing layer of abundance. It's the one where in some cases it allows you to imagine lots of other kind of strange bedfellow coalitions across some of these ordinary ideological things. Because these people are both, whatever their, their underlying subterranean ideological thing is, and their abundance. Right? And the abundance thing implies a certain set of projects that are bigger than any of these one ideological layers. And again, I think a lot of the state capacity stuff is some of that tool level layer where you can imagine kind of secret Congress on the DL kind of reforms. And I do think abundance, one of the things that's attractive about it is it doesn't just propose bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake, which is the thing I dislike so much about ordinary boring moderation, right. It's saying, no, actually we're going to do this because actually we've all got different ambitious projects for government, many of which we don't agree about. But we agree that people ought to be able to actually try stuff in the real world anyway. So that's my way thinking about this. And the final thing I'll say is, you know, people do have your, your identity layer thing I think is very useful. Right. People want a name for the thing that they believe. Right. When they go around, they want to call themselves a conservative or they would call themselves a socialist. But I think there's actually a lot of people I meet students like this all the time and say those you just don't fit the way I think about the world. Right. There's a kind of way that I think about how we're going to solve problems that none of that and also the things that I think are most important. So this also gets at like the salience level, right. One thing that these kind of ideologies like abundance ideologies. So I'm going to, I'm calling it, I'm using the plural as a calling of one thing. What abundance ideologies allow people to do is to actually say, you know, here's who I am, here's what I. How I want to pursue things. Right. Here's who I pay attention to, here's who my heroes are, here's who I like take advice from, but also a little bit of what my theory of politics is going to be. Right. You know, how do I think I'm actually going to produce change in the real world? And so in that sense I do think that these things are important.
- [34:25]
A
Yeah. And I think the other response to folks and once again we're going to balance the programming really well. It was just helpful to hear what's known from people that it's really great that we have people, especially state and local, who want to actually learn how government works, actually make things happen and are pragmatic and are just sort of in this game to hear florid speeches about here is what government is and here are these different ideologies. I think pragmatism is really, really important. I'm not asking people to get rid of it, but something that was said in a recent episode I had Shoikat Trakrabati Speaking of Rabanti, AOC's former chief of staff running for office in San Francisco for Pelosi's old seat, he said, quote, abundance has to be about more than making the DMV work better. And I think that is a very well articulated sort of response to folks who want this just to be. We're going to go to the abundance conference and we're going to just learn how you literally make the DMV work better, how you literally make the HHS be more effective, and it's an application of Medicaid policies. I think there's just a danger of abundance getting stuck in a technocratic trap. And you're going to need to think bigger than that. And I think at its best, the sort of theoretical thinking that you are doing and that Niskanin does and that I hope to do in a certain sense, I hope. But it doesn't seem just as inside baseball what actually is trying to basically get people to expand their perspectives around how to think about politics in this moment.
- [35:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, well, part of my theory about abundance is it only works if we actually have a big toolkit of things that actually solve problems. Right. So again, if you know, the purpose of the ideology is to explain why these tools. Right. In a way, it's an aggregation of the fact that we've got a bunch of tools we think that are really important for actually solving problems. And when you aggregate those all up, Right. What do they all have in common? Well, again, one of them is this idea of having a government consumer centric view of the world. If that's what you think you're here for, right. You're here to serve people who need government to work. Right. Then you're going to have a very different way of looking at the government's own workforce, for example. Right. I think Democrats typically tend to think of the government's own workforce as their constituency. Right. As opposed to the instrument through which they serve what ought to be their constituency, which are like mostly working class and middle class people who need government to work for them. Right. That just, you know, that's a, a slightly abstract idea. Right. But again, I think especially in the case of things like school reform, it really does cut. Right. You really do start thinking about things very differently once you have that consumerist point of view. Right. And sometimes that means, you know, paying people in government more, right? Sometimes it means paying more and having fewer of them. Right. Or substituting technology or whatever. Right. But once you start thinking about that end user as your political constituency, I think lots of other things start, like, coming into view. Right. And I think one of the reasons why often abundance is attractive for state and local people is it does present you a palette of things to actually do. Right. So again, just think even things we people sometimes think are boring, like parking. Right. You know, I mean, one of the things that abundance did is it put, you know, this incredibly Long boring book by this guy Donald Shoup, on the, on their radar, the High Cost of Free Parking, which is an amazing book, but that seems technical until you start looking around and you realize how much free parking we have. Right. How much of our entire, you know, neighborhoods, everything is all dominated by that. Right. And the fact that we don't have to do that, we could charge, we could do lots of other things. Right. Actually gives you lots of opportunities to think about how to solve real problems and make people's lives actually better.
- [38:46]
A
Yeah. And speaking of Democrats, this has been something I've been thinking a lot about, especially in the context of Shoika and also frankly, Mayor Mamdani, which is like the original piece you wrote was the Rise of the abundance faction. And a lot of that piece was focused on how abundance could play a role in a Democratic party and a left liberalism that's in many ways trying to figure out its path forward. And I've just noticed a real lack of a tier Democratic, center left, centrist people who've been receptive to abundance. No, it's not that they're not receptive. It's just that they will not publicly associate themselves with abundance. I won't say which office this was, whether it's House or Senate, but I had a congressional office say that quote, no one in our office has read that book. And by that book I mean abundance. And we're proud of it. The case here being that we're not as reclined people. So people who kind of guessed why they were sort of bragging about that and why that was a dynamic. But I think that's been like a real problem. And in many ways, like Mom Donnie says the word abundance says the word state capacity more than Josh Shapiro or Wes Mordu, which is, I think, not something that I think a lot of people who like our abundance backers would have expected. What's kind of gone on to sort of make that dynamic a thing.
- [40:08]
B
Yeah. I mean, I don't particularly think that people are going to use abundance as the language they talk to their constituents with. Right. I think they're going to talk about the, you know, again, I think the thing about like, you know, I'm here to serve you, not to serve the people who work for the government. Right. Again, I think that's very powerful language for Democrats. Right. And this, this is maybe one of my biggest differences with the economic populist people. Right. Is, you know, you know, not that long ago in living memory of not very old people. Right. Being an ed reformed Democrat was A very standard way that people would show that their moderation had teeth, right. That it really meant something. It wasn't just like, oh, here's some vibes and look at my boots and whatever. Right. But like I'm willing to go there, right. Because teachers unions are such a central part of the Democratic Party, right? What being willing to actually, you know, go after them about pay or removal or management or choice or any of those things, right. That really was a very costly signal, right. That showed you were different. And I think that's what's missing among people who call themselves moderate now. Right? Yeah. And I think that's why that moderation actually is not as effective politically as it could be. Right. They're all looking for ways because it did two things, right? One, it was a costly signal, right. From voters point of view, they knew that a person who was doing that was taking a risk. And again, I think that also gets into that, that part where, you know, in a, we're sort of an anti status quo thing, right? Parties are part of that status quo, right. So people want to show that, you know, I'm not just a pure, you know, automaton of my party, right. When I think that it doesn't serve my constituencies, I'm willing to take the heat. Right. And the second thing it did is it didn't put you together in a collective. Right. The other problem with a lot of what I think of as cheap moderation is it's all about individual differentiation. Yeah. Here's me, I'm totally different. I'm not part of anything else. Right. I, you know, I've made this argument for a long time that, you know, part of the nationalization of politics is that means that that individual differentiation is less and less valuable. And there's good political science evidence behind this. Right. And that doesn't mean to me that you can't differentiate, but you have to differentiate as part of a collective, right? As part of a team, you could even say as part of a squad, right? To say, look, here's a, you know, we're collaborating on a nationally recognizable brand that will cause people to differentiate us from what they take to be just the generic brand, right. And again, in a period when the generic brand has all kinds of problems, you need something that's that recognizable, right? Where you can say, look, if we get into office, we are going to come in and not only are we going to be fighting the Republicans, we're going to be fighting these people with like weird ideas, right? For real, serious, actual reforms that matter to you. Right. And so the problem with the moderation we have now is it's too atomized as opposed to collective. And again, though, I think that's the way that people feel. Like the most obvious way to signal moderation is with individual differentiation, but there's just not that much that they can do. I mean, it's hard to even think of examples of people who've really effectively done that. I mean, obviously we had a congressman from Maine like that, he's no longer there. Part of this is it's hard to do that just as an individual because it's also easier for you to get picked off in the way that effectively golden got picked on.
- [44:10]
A
Yeah. And what I like about how you just frame that and especially. And we've obviously argued about the ED reform example, but I think what I'm.
- [44:18]
B
Totally right about the ED reform, without.
- [44:20]
A
Belaboring the point too much, what I, what I actually like about at a framework level, what you just offered is it's offering a model of differentiation, substantive moderation that isn't just sort of like sista soldier, culture war retread stuff. Like, so, for example. And I think this is what you kind of fall into when you focus on moderation purely via. And not just in the sense of like, hey, like, I'm in Texas, I shouldn't say that we're going to take your guns or hey, I'm in Texas, I should believe in a border. I believe in policing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's just like obvious. That should be like a default thing that you shouldn't have to perform. I mean, by contrast, for example, okay, so I'm going to run for office and I need to make very clear of it. Like, I am not a radical on trans rights. I saw this after the 2024 election. A lot of people tried to make that move. I just don't think it matters. But it sort of leads you to, especially on the sociocultural issues, fight the last war. It's almost as if you're a Republican in 2007 who's gonna run for president and you try to make your whole thing. I am pro stem cell research because as I'm entering into my 30s, I'm starting to reach the point where my political metaphors do not make sense to the younger part of audience. But the reason why I bring that one up is in 2006, swing state Republicans, when Democrats did really, really well in Congress during the elections in the midterms that year, made stem cell research. There was a devastating ad that Michael J. Fox did kind of the whole thing. No one was talking about stem cell research from 2007 onwards. So just sort of I just like what you're describing. You are offering a framework for finding differentiation issues that are going to be longstanding, are substantive and actually speak to some sort of structural dynamic where voters are going to be thinking about that in four or five or six years.
- [46:08]
B
Yeah. And again, I think, I mean, so I'm going to insist on coming back to ed reform as an example and here's why, right. Republicans right now cannot wait to start hanging the decline in educational performance in blue states around Democrats necks and they can't wait to actually run on Mississippi and Louisiana and their improvement in their schools over the last few years. And so one thing I think is that issues salience is going up, right. And Democrats have, you know, again, starting with really with with Biden, right. Completely ceded that territory to Republicans. Right. They went back to the most easy coalitional kind of politics around that issue. And as a result, right. That you took this whole issue that was the most plausible way for Democrats to prove that they were different kinds of Democrats and they lost it. Right? Now, again, I think one thing abundance does is it allows you to tell that story even bigger, right. To say the story we tell about ed reform and why we're in favor of it. Right. It should be the same story we tell about lots of other areas of government and I think tell the story we should be telling out about police. Right. So I'm one of the few people who thinks, you know, we should think about police unions and teachers unions in very similar way. Right. They're both there to serve us, not to serve themselves. Right. But they have all kinds of ways to insulate themselves from accountability. Right. That's all part of one general abundance way of thinking about how to relate to government and how to criticize what you also want to work. Right. And I think that's a really differentiable kind of language for politics. That also again, is not just it's not just politics, it's also a governing program. Right. So that's again what Edward form people had is every year they would just keep coming back to the state legislature with another reform, another reform. Right. Based on what they've learned in the same way I think the housing people now are doing that. Right. That's what's so exciting about what they're doing is it's not just they're going to get one big thing, but people know those people are going to come back. They're going to be pushing it into new areas, they're going to be expanding it. And I think that's what makes it a real movement that draws people in and really builds political energy.
- [48:33]
A
And I just want to be clear about this, especially when you're framing the. It's been a while since we've talked about ed reform. What I like about the Mississippi example though, I think we need to not oversell. My sort of default, especially in education topics, is like assume 80% accuracy of the take. So let's do the 80% take version, which is that there's a way that Mississippi structured its schools and structured grade advancement and structured even the way you learn it, right? Phonics, like those different things that resulted in better outcomes. I'm not going to just say it's 100%, just like go for it. I'm going to say 80% uncertainty. I like that example because what happened with Democratic party politics of education was it sort of reached a dead end with like, I think charter schools were oversold as like the answer at a rhetorical level. And I think certain styles of anti teacher union, anti status quo performance and test results. Michelle Rhee in D.C. for example, were also like oversold. And once again, I mean this in the like 80% sense. So it sort of reached a dead end, especially when the Trump administration turned so anti public school, you know, during, you know, the 2017 period. Now they're limiting the Department of Education. So what I like about the way you're teaching the Mississippi conversation is in a Democratic Party primary or in a general election in a swing, sort of in a blue state, the rhetoric you basically say there is like, hey, it's crazy that our kids can't read anymore. You've got all these digital things, you're having a phone addiction and all these different things. Remember those Hooked on Phonics ads back in the 90s when we were kids growing up? We need to actually start doing it. Just offers a new thing to say. So I just like this issue. And I know this wasn't literally what you were saying when you were saying when you learned from the charter movement. I just was always pushing back because I feared there'd be a listener who heard that and is like, okay, I'm moderate. I'm going to say charters are the answer because that just felt stale and wouldn't accomplish what you were trying to do there.
- [50:43]
B
Well, I mean, we should have a whole other podcast about the school stuff. I mean, a, you know, if you look at the performance of D.C. schools, right. Period. When everybody else is going down, D.C. is still doing quite well. Right. And I think that's partially because they, you know, I mean, you know, Michelle Rhee had, was a complicated character, but, you know, she pushed really difficult stuff, right. On a really hard place to change. And, you know, when people think about, you know, again, I listened to your last podcast and the economic populace, they can't, you know, they can't stop talking about, oh, we need like big attention giving moments. Like, Michelle Rhee was incredible at doing that. Right. And she was a kind of avatar of a kind of model of reform. And it turned out the, you know, institutionalizing that worked. Right? You know, the basic changes in how we pay and promote and remove teachers in D.C. you know, turns out to actually just be good governing practice.
- [51:48]
A
And I want to be clear. I want to be very, very clear. I'm actually a huge Michelle Rhee fan. And I think. And to your point about like the critiques of moderation, my critique of moderation is that it doesn't produce Michelle Rhee types. It produces instead generic moderates who aren't interesting. Michelle Rhee could go on Joe Rogan, right? Imagine Michelle Rhee at her peak. She could have got on Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan would have loved her. I think the fact that moderates have not been in the moderate project has not produced her in whatever category. Dynamic, charismatic, interesting. To your point, like taking aggressive stands in ways that like, are tangible but also like resonate with the base of the party and base of people. That's a real tough question at the moderate sort of industrial complex needs to push itself on.
- [52:38]
B
Yeah. And I think, I mean, one thing to say, I know we probably need to wrap up soon, is that, you know, I mean, one example of that is smaller is Randy Clark, who runs the, the Metro system in D.C. who, you know, has actually gotten for a role like that, which is not like a super. It doesn't seem like it'd be a super salience. Right. He's got an enormous attention inside the dmv, Right. As the guy who actually.
- [53:06]
A
You mean dc, Maryland, Virginia.
- [53:08]
B
Dc, Maryland, Virginia. Right. You know, who's managed to actually take this system that seems like it was like falling apart and creaking and actually like by force of will and resources and management actually made it work. And I know you love early 20th century parallels, right. I mean, that's what a lot of the great sort of progressive leaders did. It's hard to remember, Right. Teddy Roosevelt came out as a Police commissioner in New York City, right. And he got a lot of that attention, again, this attention that everyone seems to be talking about, right. By actually going into the government itself and saying, I'm pull this thing and modernize this thing by grabbing it by the scruff of its neck, right. And actually making it serve the people rather than these narrow producer interests. Right. And that to me is that's the really super powered kind of energy. And in his own way, Scott Wiener in San Francisco did that, right? By making himself sort of the head of these, you know, legislative wing of yimby. And then, you know, being the guy who's like, associated with like, I'm just going to keep coming back year after year after year to do this, you know, no matter how much opposition I get, right. That's. That to me is the really powerful, abundant energy, right. It's going to come from people who get stuff done.
- [54:27]
A
Now I'll ask you one final closing question after this statement. And I think what you just described, though, in the examples that you gave, right? So Randy Clark, Theodore Roosevelt police commissioner, who's also coming out of Theodore Roosevelt as the civil service reformer. The point is what I like the takeaway is you can make desperately unsexy issues if you have substance and you have the ability to perform a real, real, real, real thing that people feel and see in their lives. And I think the other thing that like ties together these examples, Scott Wieners also included, is there's just like a real substance here. And this is where my last critique of the moderation center is. I just see a real disinterest in public policy. I see a real sort of like, I basically just. And this is why I'm like pushing on like moderation defined as like, I'm pro border policing and I'm not crazy on insert lib social issue that serves as like an easy way out of actually finding a substantive real, real, real thing. Say what you want about Michelle Rhee. The critique of Michelle Rhee was not that Michelle Rhee didn't stand for anything or didn't have serious beliefs on things, which is what I think the very accurate critique of a centrist. And think of like, you know, this is, this is the Kamala Harris problem where like in 2019, she's, you know, pro trans X, Y and Z thing in prisons with migrants. And then she's not that in 2024 and she's moderating, quote, unquote. But part of why that doesn't work is it just wasn't substantive. So I Focus there. So here's my last question for you.
- [56:06]
B
Just on that. Just on that real quick. I mean, I mean, I think the thing that you notice is all those people had a project, right? A project is something that lasts, right? That you keep at, right? That people look at you and say, oh, that's like, he's back again. Right? He's back again. Whatever. And right. And if you lose, right. At least you lose doing something important. So the person I think of as Adrian Fenty, who is the mayor when Michelle Reed, right, who nobody, like, hears from anymore. I used to see him over at the pool over in Northwest Washington. And, you know, this is a guy who did it, right? He took all these risks, right. He then eventually ended up losing. But he can drive around D.C. right, right. To block and a half from me, right? And he can see pools and libraries and, you know, and rebuilt schools all over. That was because of him, because he really took some risks. And even if he lost, and that's what I think, I point to the other moderates, right, Is even if you keep getting elected on the basis of kind of doing nothing, well, what do you have to show for it, right? I can't imagine wanting to have that kind of career where you're like, I managed to do 25 years without anybody noticing that I wasn't getting anything done, see?
- [57:18]
A
And Steve, we're gonna have to do a part two of this because there's a bunch of topics we didn't get to. But I want to close on a strong point you just made. That is another way that abundance people could have anti status quo politics. The way that really makes sense, which is that because think of. I'm really obsessed with. If you listen to Joe Rogan and you listen to what he's really interested. When you talk about politics, there's a lot of common sense, folk wisdom. So the idea that DC full of all these people who are just career politicians and they're always just there forever. I think what you just gave was a great critique. It's in a status quo that resonate with people, which is that, like, hey, for some reason there's always people in D.C. who like, aren't there to do anything except they like how they have a nice little title and they get to wear the pin and they get their flights covered and they get to go on Kodals to foreign countries. Super cool, super fun, but what are you actually doing? And if you're not one of those people in a moment like this, get the hell out of here. Like what are you doing here? So I think that's. And your whole point is that abundance is a project and you're there. Like if I were an abundance, like member of Congress, like the thing that I would actually be there to do is I actually want America to be able to build things in the real world. Like I actually want to re industrialize. I actually want there to be like tangible real gains in people's work and people's lives in a way that doesn't feel insubstantive. And if you're just like in Congress and you're in my district and you're just sort of there showing up as a moderate to median Democrat, like screw you, you're not helpful, you're not making anything better. And that is language that we could really just appropriate that isn't about wonkery, it's not about Ezra Klein, it's offering people language like that. So I want us to have much more of that energy.
- [58:57]
B
Okay, Hey, I know now everybody like, you know, wants to treat Ezra as like boring and mid. But you know, he wrote, you know, he wrote a book that got a lot of people's attention and like, you know, and, and summed up a lot of stuff. And it's a thing you can argue with and it's anything you can try to differentiate from. But you know, that's also, I think part of this is like putting stuff out there, right? Saying, you know, here, here's some big, a big synthesis. This is a real thing that you can either agree with or disagree with. But I think when you were talking about that, you know, the real thing that voters, I do think want is an idea that you are not just in it for status for yourself, right. I think that's the really powerful move. Right. And to do that you do need proof points. You don't just need, I tested like this message or whatever. Right. But if people see that like year after year you seem to be getting in these arguments with people who are standing in the way of like important significant reforms, right. That eventually, you know, filters down, people notice that. Right. And that for me again, I think also if you do that as a team, it's even more power, right? If you're seen as like we're the people together fighting against these sort of status quo interests, whether it's in the economy or in the government itself. Right? That's the thing, right. That's really what to me a faction is about. Right. Faction is about collective action in the interest of a large multi year governing kind of reform. And that's what I really hope that, you know, the people who think of themselves as moderates will start finally getting out of all the lame mid versions of moderation and try to go to this sort of more ambitious reform form.
- [60:49]
A
Of moderation and abundance. Has a very helpful framework and set of ideas to get you there if you do not quite know what to do with that vibe that you're probably feeling if you're a candidate who's listening to this episode. Steve, this has been great. We're going to have to do part two visp. I think that was really great. Thank you for joining me on the realignment.
- [61:08]
B
Thanks Marshall.