Abundance is coming for the Right

Their ideological conflicts run even deeper than the Left’s

JD Vance celebrates public power without naming it (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

When Politico’s Jonathan Martin traveled to North Dakota over the Fourth of July weekend for the opening of the new Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library, he sat down with three prominent local Republicans—Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Gov. Kelly Armstrong, and Sen. Kevin Cramer. Together, they worked to place Roosevelt’s big government politics in the framework of today’s GOP.

The conversation was very revealing.

Roosevelt, Martin noted, had subscribed to a brand of populism that was, at its core, incredibly bullish on robust government action. The Colonel spent his nearly two terms combating the power of robber barons, fighting to strengthen the military, erecting dams throughout the West, laying the groundwork for the National Parks System, and building the Panama Canal—all of which suggests that Roosevelt’s populism extolled the role of the public sector.

President Trump, of course, is also known as a populist. So Martin asked his subjects to square the circle: Doesn’t populism sorta point towards growing the government?

Cramer wasn’t having it: “Roosevelt,” the senator explained, “looked at government as a solution, whereas the president looks at government as a problem,” at which point Governor Armstrong interjected with a laugh: “And we have 140 years of proving President Trump right.” In essence, the three modern-day Republicans retreated into the old Reagan vernacular. As the Gipper famously argued: “The nine scariest words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

At the same time, however, in New York Harbor 1,500 miles to the east, Vice President JD Vance was delivering a very different July Fourth message. Far from painting a picture of oppressive government gone bad, he was ruminating on the long story of James Buchanan Eads, a self-trained civil engineer who worked with the federal government to build the Ironclad gunboats the Union commissioned during the Civil War to erect the Mississippi River jetty system commissioned by Congress, and to construct the first major bridge to cross the Mississippi at St. Louis.

Vance went on to regale listeners with a second story—this one centering on the son of German immigrants named Henry Kaiser. A high-school dropout, Kaiser abandoned a stockroom job in Utica, New York, to eventually find his way to Spokane, Washington where he founded a business that helped build the Hoover Dam, vast stretches of highway across the Western United States, and the shipyards required to replace the Navy vessels lost at Pearl Harbor during the Second World War—projects, we should note, that were financed by the federal government.

Vance was focused on James Buchanan Eads and Henry Kaiser because their stories highlight individual ingenuity. In the spirit of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, they harkened to a notion that, as the vice president put it, “our history is one of people carving a great civilization out of the wilderness.” That, he argued, is what makes America great—the reality that “everything that we have done, everything that we have done as a country, we have done together, not as citizens divided against each other, but as a common people working towards a common future.”

That said, hanging over Vance’s argument, but never addressed directly, was the element that tied all the projects he celebrated together: the presence of public authority.

Eads and Kaiser weren’t ensconced in cabins off Walden Pond. Their work was done hand-in-hand with a government that sometimes funded the work, and at other times explicitly made it possible. Government was contracting for the projects, or providing necessary permits, or financing the various endeavors. However much he tried to avoid saying so explicitly, Vance was nakedly making an argument for big government.

Which just begs the question: Which of these two conflicting visions represents the true and only conservatism? If bureaucrats and bureaucracy are forever standing in the way of America’s wellbeing, as so many Reagan-style conservatives continue to argue, how can Vance’s litany of examples of our national greatness be suffused with examples of government action?

Much as Republicans might want to elide past these distinctions, the reality is that the two narratives are fundamentally incompatible. You can’t make the Mississippi navigable, or build the Hoover Dam, or construct the nation’s expressways, or build up our Navy if, as the North Dakotans clearly articulated, government is a scourge, any more than you can make a ham and cheese sandwich without having bread, ham and cheese.

Some on the right have argued that “abundance” represents a nose under the tent for conservatism within progressive circles—that the popularity of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, among other literature pointing in the same direction, reflects a realization among Democrats that government is too often a hindrance. But as Klein recently argued, “abundance” is bigger than cutting superfluous red tape—it’s about green-lighting the sorts of projects and initiatives that would serve the public interest.

As Vance’s chosen examples reveal, those projects and initiatives, far from being the exclusive province of the private sector, often begin with, or depend on, public authority. And conservatives are at a loss when trying to metabolize the competing impulses that were expressed by the North Dakotans and the vice president.

This dissonance is playing out in real-time with how the right is handling the opportunities available through renewable energy resources. We on the left are so convinced they’re in the bag for Big Oil—and, to be sure, those accusations bear out in some instances—that we’ve failed to notice they don’t know which side of the debate over domestic energy production they want to be on.

Just look at what’s happening in Ohio and Texas, two places in which public authority controlled by the GOP has been used both to propel and to block the clean energy transition.

Texas leverages its state authority to explicitly prohibit counties from imposing regulations on unincorporated land. That is, even if a community objects to how someone who owns land wants to use it—leasing their land to, say, utility-scale solar—the local government is precluded from imposing land-use restrictions that might get in the way.

Ohio, taking a very different tack, passed legislation to empower local government to upend new development. Incensed that solar and wind developers were leasing land from local farmers on which they would place turbines or solar panels, conservatives in Columbus passed a law, Senate Bill 52, which explicitly licenses counties to weigh in. Unsurprisingly, dozens of counties had enacted bans on either solar or wind farms, or both.

Now, any given conservative can be forgiven for taking either view to a point—but no one should be given license to argue that they are ideologically coherent.

Those of us on the left are conflicted too, in as much as we both envision government stepping in where the market fails, and we worry about coercive government officials, a la Robert Moses.

But as the debate over “a liberalism that builds” illustrates, we’re trying to strike the right balance. From the progressive movement’s founding in the late 19th century, those wanting to use government for good have struggled to centralize power so public authority is more effective, or to diffuse it so it’s less coercive.

In my book, I distill this debate to our Hamiltonian instinct to build power up into institutions that can resolve “tragedies of the commons” and our Jeffersonian fear that those same institutions will bulldoze powerless communities.

This tension serves as a backdrop for one of the central debates inside the Democratic Party and was explored in books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Yoni Appelbaum and Jennifer Pahlka, as well as forthcoming titles from Adam Jentleson, Diego Zambrano, and Nick Bagley.

Needless to say, these debates are not happening inside the Republican Party.

There are certainly examples of Republicans advancing legislation that aligns with the Abundance movement. The recent bipartisan federal housing law is one piece of evidence, and of course, Texas’ state preemption counts as another. But Vance’s speech hardly makes the GOP the party of abundance. Trump’s executive branch is too busy cutting funding for critical research and coercing states and localities to adopt policies they abhor (for example, on wind farms) to have any credibility in the abundance movement. Go even further into GOP history and you find Reagan’s fear-mongering that the government is wholly and entirely evil.

It’s not our job to point the GOP out of its jam. Nevertheless, all of us underneath the big tent need to offer a more compelling answer of our own. We can all agree that we don’t need another Robert Moses. We do, however, need a public sector capable of harnessing American ingenuity to build vast new transmission systems for clean energy, much more housing, and the sort of modern infrastructure befitting a nation as prosperous and promising as our own.