Abundant vs. Moderate

Similar intuitions, different prescriptions.

Note 1: This piece is part of an emerging dialogue about the Abundance Movement. Our friends Steve Teles and Rob Saladin at the Niskanen Center just published an important essay, “The Rise of the Abundance Faction.” You should read it!

Note 2: “Moderate” means different things to different people.¹ If you self-describe as a Moderate but don’t see yourself in our description of you, then it’s a semantic difference and we’re all working on the same project! 

Abundance is a nascent ideology, identity, and political movement that aims to improve the culture, structure, and incentives of our politics and government, such that they can better create the conditions for Americans to flourish regardless of zip code. 

As a new entrant to the political landscape, comparing and contrasting Abundance with other players can be useful. Previously we wrote about the relationship between Abundance & Movement Progressivism (8 min). In this post we’ll compare and contrast the worldview of an “Abundant” with a “Moderate.”

What Abundants and Moderates Share

Abundants and Moderates share a fundamental intuition that our current hyper-partisan political set up of “us vs. them” isn’t how most people think about most problems.² We believe there are many “commonsense” policy outcomes if only our political system could reach them.

“Commonsense” is a word we hear a lot in politics—it’s popular with voters—but it is viewed skeptically among political practitioners, who think the concept elides substantive differences in values and preferences in society.  How would we define “commonsense” in practice? 

Imagine we took a representative group of 150 people from your community—city, state, country—and gave them time with each other and with experts to explore tradeoffs and solutions around a certain policy area. At the end of 10, 20, 30 hours together, do we think they’d be deadlocked 50/50 and left with the status quo as the best option, or would better solutions emerge with supermajority support?³ 

Abundants and Moderates both believe such solutions would emerge. Things like: 

• We should have a standard set of rules that all new buildings must adhere to, and as long as they do, they should be approved quickly (known as by-right zoning).

• We should use modular housing to drive down the cost of new construction.

• We should give renewable energy projects at least equal status with fossil fuel projects in terms of certain categorical exemptions from environmental laws. 

• We should increase the number of spots at medical schools to increase the supply of doctors.

• We should ensure occupational licensing regimes don’t unnecessarily block new entrants if they can safely do the work. 

• We should close the carried interest loophole. 

For each of these solutions, there are material tradeoffs to adjudicate—somebody is doing some losing: 

Abundants and Moderates are confident that well-informed citizens could reach a supermajority consensus on solutions that make things better on each of these issues and many others. But somehow our political system can’t. 

Why not? This is where Abundants and Moderates diverge. 

Abundant vs. Moderate Diagnoses

Reminder caveat: If you consider yourself Moderate but share our Abundant perspective, then we’re all working on the same project regardless of names!

Abundants believe our problems are deep, structural, and cultural. We're beginning a multi-decade journey to reform our civic and political institutions so they are up to the challenges of the 21st century. We see this as a somewhat “radical” project, both in the etymological sense of working on root problems, and in the vernacular sense of being open to big vs. incremental reforms to achieve better outcomes for more Americans. In our experience, Moderates seem to think we can arrive at common sense solutions without big changes to our system. 

Below are three ways that Abundants and Moderates might view a problem differently. 

People vs. System Incentives

A hallmark Moderate idea is to elect “better people.” We need more people with business experience. More people with leadership experience. Less craven leaders. More common sense. Less ideology. The corollary to electing “good people” is recalling “bad people,” which has been a trend in liberal cities over the past few years.

Abundants think the quality of elected officials is important, but that power is diffuse and that individual electeds sit within a broader system full of misaligned incentives.⁴ We think about things like: 

• How can we drive better collaboration between the legislative and executive branches? 

• How can legislators get credit for reducing rather than adding complexity to the system? 

• How can we make the public sector a more attractive career path, where great people can do their best work? 

• How can we better enable public sector leaders to make tradeoffs?  

More broadly, we’re asking ourselves: How can we build public will for big structural changes to our system?

Technocratic System Design vs. Culture 

To the extent Moderates are looking at systems, they tend to look at reforms to improve first-order incentives. This might look like open primaries + ranked choice voting for federal elections. For public administration at the municipal level, this might look like charter reform, which essentially re-organizes the reporting lines of various departments and agencies into the Mayor’s office.

Abundants think these specific interventions are fine as parts of a much larger program of reform and renovation. But hard problems are hard! If there were easy fixes, someone would have made them already.⁵

In a private sector context, you often hear of new leaders coming into flagging organizations and starting the change management process with a reorganization. Some reasonably short period of time later, the organization is still not performing at the desired level, and another reorg is instituted. Culture can’t be transformed via an org chart.

The Abundant playbook for culture change within government bureaucracies is still nascent. At the tactical level, we’re thinking about things like:

• Building cohort programs of entrepreneurial public servants to connect them with one another.

• Rewarding excellence in public service, building off programs like the Partnership for Public Service’s Sammies and SPUR’s Good Government awards. 

• Building political language to communicate with voters about enabling a culture of appropriate risk-taking in government, moving beyond the language of “waste, fraud, and abuse.”  

• Inter-branch exchange programs like the one POPVOX Foundation runs to help the legislative and executive branches understand each other.  

• Legislative branch education programs and technical assistance to help them write implementable laws and practices according to a "first do not harm" principle.

• Effective oversight bodies in both the executive and legislative branches, as well as the press, to call out what good looks like instead of just searching for mistakes.

• Building an organized movement of public servants committed to changing the culture towards outcomes.

More broadly, change-management tactics must connect to a more significant political movement to reimagine the administrative state. Per James Q. Wilson, we need the political will of the legislative branch and the broader public to sustain change within the administrative branch. This was a critical lesson from the Reinventing Government movement (15 min) of the 1990s:  

But as time went on, it became clear that the reinvention effort had neglected to pay sufficient attention to an important actor -- the legislature. 

“One thing that I believe we did not do well was engage legislators and the public in what we were doing,” says Eisenhauer. That led to some fights that might well have been avoidable. One was over executive branch efforts to improve the child welfare system. When the state sought to base payments to nonprofit agencies on outcomes (such as child safety) instead of processes (such as the number of children served), the nonprofit managers went to their legislators to protest. Legislators took their complaints to the governor’s office. The problem was that the legislature had not really been included in the reinventing government process. 

“Reinventing government was relatively blind to the role of legislatures in general,” says University of Maryland public policy professor and Governing columnist Donald F. Kettl. “There was this sense that the real problem was that good people were trapped in a bad system and that freeing administrators to do what they knew how to do best would yield vast improvements. What was not part of the debate was the role that legislatures might have played in creating those constraints to begin with.” 

To change the relationship between branches, we need more than good government for good government’s sake; we need something that ties to a broader political reform movement.

Marketing vs. Product 

In federal elections, left-of-center Moderates seem to think of the challenge as mainly electoral—in a two-party system, the job is to fight for the median voter. That means going back to the Democratic Leadership Council playbook⁶ of moving to the center on social order, government effectiveness, and the right-sized regulation of markets.

These ideas, on their own, seem reasonable and largely Abundance-aligned. But Abundants believe the problem is fundamentally about product, not marketing. Our problem is not how we talk about issues. It’s how we don’t deliver on them.

In the Abundant theory of the case, extremism is downstream of broken institutions that fail to deliver for regular people. In our estimation, moderation is a reaction to extremism, but extremism is a reaction to brokenness, not moderation. For moderation to succeed, it needs to tackle brokenness. 

Our institutions are broken because of (1) narrow interest capture and (2) institutional sclerosis. Reforming institutions takes an injection of new energy and resources, but moderation as a voter-facing strategy doesn’t bring in those resources. Some of the same narrow interests that have captured the system are funding Moderate candidates. Will these Moderates, for example, lead the charge to close the carried interest loophole? Per Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

As Sam Hammond put it in a great piece (3 min): 

Ideally, “moderate” denotes an even temperament, a pluralistic conception of the good, and a pragmatism directed at solving problems and building consensus. Who could be against that? On the other hand, the more a politician is captured by special interests the more it pays to feign moderation, avoid unnecessary controversy, and to embody the Current Thing. The resulting adverse selection of Manchurian candidates into the moderate camp thus sullies the broader brand — an ideological version of the classic market for lemons.

There’s nothing extremist about a belief in dynamic government. But so long as self-described moderates show more concern for restoring the SALT deduction than reversing institutional decay, the establishment can’t be counted on to “reform thyself.” It’s a kind of innovator’s dilemma: Political incumbents struggle to coordinate on institutional rejuvenation even when the internal contradictions are staring them in the face.

Abundants believe we need a sweeping reform movement rather than a marketing push to win elections. Because in the Abundant worldview, our problems are deeper than partisanship (8 min). 

The Psychology of Moderation

The prevailing pattern among all of these examples is that Moderates envision a shorter path to address shallower problems. In contrast, Abundants view the journey as longer and the problems as deeper. 

At some level we suspect that’s downstream of psychology. 

Many Moderates we meet—especially those getting newly politically activated—tend to be “reluctant warriors.” They did not choose to get involved because they were natively political or tribal; they just looked around and felt responsible for doing something, given the problems they saw in society.

As a result, they tend to resonate with the notion that "This shouldn't be so complicated, so we won't allow it to be." This leads to a certain susceptibility to silver-bulletism. The specifics of the silver bullets can vary widely, but the commonality is the solutions tend to be reasonably clear, actionable, ~quick, and ~easy. 

The Abundant response is: "People have tried the thesis of quick fixes for the last thirty years, and the fact that we don't have nearly enough to show for it suggests the problems are of a different nature."⁷

Conclusion

Abundants and Moderates share the belief that common sense solutions to a range of political issues exist. What holds our body politic back from achieving these solutions is not the lack of a shared sense of the common good but a dysfunctional political system. 

Where Abundants and some Moderates diverge is on the depth of the problem and thus the types of solutions needed. Moderates tend to focus more on elections (vs. the functioning of administrative agencies and the courts) and on technocratic fixes. Abundants think those elements are important, but also believe power is diffuse, change is hard, risk-averse culture and narrow interests are entrenched, and we’ll need a broad, multi-decade power-building effort to achieve our aims. 

To attract the human, financial, and social capital necessary to power a multi-decade reform movement, Abundants believe we need a political identity with moral energy and “fighting faith.”  The legacy Moderate mindset tends to lack this. Still, as these "reluctant warriors" bump up against the limits of silver bullet-ism to achieve their aims of a better, more just society, we believe more and more will join the ranks of the Abundants. We need you!

The Progressives of one hundred years ago had this reformist spirit. Their job was a bit easier than ours—they were building new institutions from scratch vs. reforming sclerotic ones—but the concept was similar. They felt trapped between “organized capital” and “organized labor” and needed to organize citizens as a counterbalance. 

The country seems to hunger for something deeper than moderation:

We should build the movement they want to believe in.  

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Thanks to all the folks who shaped this piece, from inspiration to line editing: Aston Motes, David Dagan, Jen Pahlka, Jesse Wolfson, Louisa Tavlas, Mike Greenfield, Rachel Pritzker, Ross Chanin, Sam Hammond, Steve Teles, and Zack Rosen. 

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1. Our friend David Slifka wrote a whole post on this. (3 min)

2. One study among many supporting this intuition is here.

3. This is literally the set up for a Citizens’ Assembly, an intriguing new small-d democratic process that is gaining traction in Europe.

4. Another Abundant vs. Moderate framework here is Alana Newhouse’s “Brokenism.” She writes: “The real debate today isn’t between the left and right. It’s between those invested in our current institutions, and those who want to build anew.” Brokenists are: “people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out.” Per Alana’s framing, Abundants are “Brokenists” and Moderates are not. H/t to Sam Hammond for surfacing this concept to us.

5. In all likelihood, someone already has made them, and they half-worked and were eventually chipped away at and forgotten, as is the case with charter reform in San Francisco.

6. Note the DLC playbook also came from a different context—Democrats had lost 5 of the past 6 Presidential elections and Al From, the architect of the DLC, wanted a path back to winning.

7. Another difference between Abundants and Moderates per Steve Teles: “Abundants think like organizers, or evangelists. We explicitly draw on the package of tools associated with movement-building and even religious metaphors. Moderates do not have this set of tools and way of thinking accessible to them. Moderates are not, as we should be, ‘shepherds of men.’”