Donald Trump, Abundance Democrat

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Is Donald Trump an Abundance Democrat?

Now, you may not know what an “Abundance Democrat” is. So here’s a basic primer (if you want a much deeper dive, I highly recommend Brink Lindsey’s survey). 

A bunch of progressive eggheads have rightly recognized—and some would say, finally realized—that government red tape is a huge problem. Government planners have gotten bogged down in what Nicholas Bagley calls the “procedure fetish.” Rather than do the stuff people (mostly) want government to do, policymakers focus on checklists. They elevate process—environmental impact statements, diversity requirements, comment periods, and trying to satisfy every constituency and stakeholder in and out of government—over building stuff. The idea that this is bad has been kicking around on the technocratic left for a few years, but broke through to broader popular discussion with the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance.

I have my disagreements with some of this stuff (though not at a Kevin Williamson level), but directionally I think they are correct in their diagnosis, less so in their ambitions and promises.

Indeed, it would be weird for me to reject the diagnosis wholesale, given how, like a great many conservatives and libertarians, I’ve been saying as much for a very long time. 

I should note, though, that the conservative argument has always put a much greater emphasis on the government red tape that hinders and hampers the private sector. Klein and Thompson and other leaders of the abundance agenda are very clear that the priority is to unshackle the government so it can deliver All the Things, including high-speed rail and other neo-New Dealish big projects. 

My disagreement with this is that I remain quite skeptical of the ability of state planners to achieve glorious things if only they are given more freedom and power. Indeed, the Hayekian and public-choice critique of economic planning was never, “Sure, it can work great. But you just need to make sure the planners have as much power and free rein to use it as possible.” The Soviets had that. The ROI on state planning hit the point of diminishing returns shortly after they forced farmers to switch from plows to tractors. I mean, Tom Friedman’s whole “China for a Day” spiel was essentially a proto-Abundance Dem argument. As he wrote 15 years ago, “I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people.” 

Welcome to the party.

Now, I’m going to detour a bit to explain how these ideas are not nearly so new as some Abundance Dems—and the reporters who love them—suggest. If you’re not interested in this intellectual score-settling, feel free skip to the next section.

What the Johnny-come-lately Abundance Dems have discovered is the problem of governmental, or institutional, sclerosis, a concept most associated with the brilliant economist Mancur Olson. (indeed, at the behest of Alex Tabarrok, Klein read Olson only a couple years ago.) Olson was a pioneer, but I feel obliged to note that he was building on ideas from folks like Hayek, but also Joseph Schumpeter, Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan or, if you want to get really whacky, Vilfredo Pareto. In his books, The Logic of Collective Action and The Rise and Decline of Nations, Olson argued that the gears of modern democratic welfare states get gunked-up over time. Bureaucrats and politicians respond to incentives and pressures and the incentives and pressures tend to come from special interests with, well, special interests. Olson popularized the concept of “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.” James Q. Wilson, one of the greatest political scientists of the 20^th century (and with the possible exception of Seymour Martin Lipset, Robert Nisbet, and Charles Murray, the most influential right of center social scientist of the 20^th century), preferred the term “client politics.” In his book Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It, Wilson explained that client politics “occurs when most or all of the benefits of a program go to some single, reasonably small interest (and industry, profession, or locality) but most or all of the costs will be borne by a large number of people (for example, all taxpayers).”

To give a simple example, think of sweet, sweet, sugar. Most people don’t much care about the price of sugar, given how cheap it is. But Big Sugar cares. As I wrote in my first book:

Big sugar growers in the Midwest and Florida have spent millions to protect their industry from foreign—and domestic—competition precisely because they are so uncompetitive. And the return on their investment has been huge. In 1992 a handful of sugar refiners gave then–New York Senator Al D’Amato a mere $8,500 in campaign contributions. In return D’Amato successfully supported a tariff rebate to the sugar industry worth $365 million—a return of about 4 million percent. The sugar industry accounts for 17 percent of all agricultural lobbying in the United States.

I’m not trying to make a point about “money in politics,” because a similar dynamic applies to bureaucrats who don’t take campaign donations. But they do respond to incentives all the same. Outside groups—environmentalists, civil rights organizations, and interests—lobby and pressure the government on their narrow priorities. Regulators, unavoidably, deal with the interests they regulate. Many come from those industries, and many seek to one day be hired by them. This mix of socialization and self-interest can lead to “regulatory capture.” But that doesn’t mean the players have evil intentions. I’ve met a lot of lobbyists. Almost without exception the best ones believe in the cause they are lobbying for.

This is a point my friend Jonathan Rauch, a brilliant popularizer of Olson’s work, made in a couple books, including his 1994 Demosclerosis. Rauch defined “demosclerosis” as the “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt.” This process, is found in every advanced democratic nation. Favor seekers—or special interests, clients, call them what you like—“are acting not out of greed or depravity,” Rauch writes, “but out of the impulse to survive in the world as they find it. Good intentions, or at least honest intentions, breed collective ruin.”

Marc Dunkelman, an abundance Democrat (who was recently on The Remnant) has written a wonderful book, Why Nothing Works, which argues in part that we can’t build important things—from train stations to affordable houses—because well-intentioned progressives wanted to prevent anyone from riding roughshod over architecture, green spaces, and communities the way Robert Moses did in New York. 

Now, on to Donald Trump. Say what you will about Trump, he has always agreed with a lot of this stuff. He has a complete and total blind spot about how tariffs are a classic generator of corrupting concentrated benefits, and he obviously doesn’t have the foggiest clue who any of the people I mentioned above are. But from the get-go, one of the things that a lot of people liked about him was his contempt for red tape. (I can give you plenty of quotes along these lines, but I’m running long and late.) One need only look at DOGE and all of the stuff he and his minions are doing right now.  That’s what Project 2025 claimed it was all about: Tear down the administrative state, etc, etc. Now, yes, the DOGE machine leans more on the right-wing arguments about freeing up the private sector than the Abundance Dems would. But Trump’s admittedly failed effort to build a border wall without much concern for regulations and NIMBYism is a public works project all the same. His industrial policy depends more on tariffs than subsidies (for now), but it is industrial policy all the same. He thinks—as do his supporters—that the central government can direct and organize the economy to create a Golden Age, if only the legalistic Lilliputians and sophisters get out of his way. 

Obviously, there are other extremely important differences. Such as, Trump likes the idea of making himself more powerful, but the arguments made in pursuit of that desire require arguing for making the executive branch more powerful. But his vision of an all-powerful executive is not nearly as different from Wilson and FDR’s visions as many would like to admit (for the record: I don’t like any of these visions). And, if we had a president Kamala Harris or Ocasio-Cortez doing similar things from the left, I have every confidence that many of the people currently  gnashing their teeth and rending their garments would be cheering and many of the people cheering would be screaming about lawless tyranny. 

One of the things that is difficult for partisans to accept is that a lot of the fights between the parties, or the left and the right, have less to do with fundamental political or economic philosophies and more to do with who is going to be in power. A lot of the illiberals and ideologues on the right are doing precisely what the ideologues and illiberals on the left would be doing if they were in power, they just have different constituencies they want to reward and different groups they want to punish.

One last point. There is an argument for Trump being the best friend the Abundance Dems could ever have. And the reason brings us back to Mancur Olson. He argued that history really provided only one reliable way to get over the problem of institutional sclerosis: war. The devastation of World War II cleared away the sludge in the arteries of the German and Japanese economies. They got a fresh start.  

I think the destructiveness of the Trump administration is regrettable and boneheaded in profound ways. In April 2025, Trump in effect declared war on the American economy. I mean that literally in one sense. As Henry George said, “What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” But DOGE, with its slash first, measure later—if at all—approach, has bequeathed to the next Democratic administration a vast vista of opportunities to put the Abundance agenda into action. I don’t just mean that Trump has legitimated tactics that were once considered unimaginable. I also mean he has fundamentally reset the operations of countless agencies that would normally only be possible during war. They are clearing away rules and regulations, shuttering government functions, and resetting political expectations for what the government can get away with. 

Trump wants—and has claimed—wartime powers in much the way FDR did at the dawn of the New Deal. I don’t like that because we are not at war and because wartime powers are necessarily illiberal. But the crisis he’s created will also generate opportunities for precisely the kind of government power the Abundance Dems want. For some good, maybe. But also for a lot of ill.