The Democratic Civil War is Here
Process vs outcomes, not progressives vs moderates. Observations from the trenches of a local Democratic Party activist.
Last week, sociologist Jonathan Chait wrote in The Atlantic about The Coming Democratic Civil War. In fact, the civil war is already here—and the political narratives we’ve created don’t capture the story.
Chait depicts a classic conflict between “progressives” and “moderate” factions of the Democratic Party. By Chait’s telling, the “moderates” have embraced a new-ish governing philosophy, the so-called “abundance agenda.” Abundance ideas focus on making “it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work,” removing barriers to building prosperity. On the other hand, Chait describes a “progressive” faction led by “The Groups,” nonprofit social justice organizations obsessed with “procedural fetishism,” caring more about process than outcomes.
Under the hood, abundance ideas present a sort of third rail outside the recent tradition of intraparty infighting.1 Chait is right about the waning influence of “The Groups.” But his binary narrative distracts from the actual party realignment underway and the opportunities it creates for stronger unity long run.
Join me for a journey into the true nature of the Democratic civil war, a fractured dispute that defies simplistic political labels. While these ideological tensions are often abstract at the national level, they play out vividly in the search for solutions to California’s ongoing housing crisis.
Why housing matters (housing nerds skip ahead)
In California and increasingly across the country, housing costs have become a sort of omni-issue. (For my fellow housing nerd readers: You can skip to the next section)
Frustration over inflation, largely driven by increasing housing costs, helped push voters toward Trump. High rates of homelessness in California has been a bludgeon against the Democrats nationally, and homelessness is largely caused by housing unaffordability. Public health, sustainability, transportation, job security, and many other issues all tie into the cost of housing. Housing has huge political implications for the future of Democrats.
Big picture, housing is expensive in California because we don’t build enough housing. We don’t build enough housing in large part because a web of regulations accrued over decades has made building housing very very difficult. Those regulations include exclusionary local zoning rules, slow permitting processes, expensive fees, and restrictive building codes that raise building costs, limiting the financial feasibility for new homes. Outdated environmental laws also pose a barrier, forcing even the most sustainable proposals to undergo costly environmental review that increases risk of expensive lawsuits.
Yet while most Democratic leaders recognize the various crises created by housing unaffordability, they remain divided over how to address the issue and what tradeoffs to accept.
Labor vs Labor, Capital vs Capital
The housing debate scrambles classical political alliances, pitting labor unions against other labor unions and capitalists against capitalists in ways that can drive a Marxist mad. The clash underscores how abundance thinking forces interest groups to evaluate tradeoffs differently.
For example, the state’s largest construction union, the Carpenters, has allied with pro-housing advocates and developers to pass legislation streamlining environmental review and increasing zoned densities for housing near transit. The coalition wants to promote development in urban areas where it would be most sustainable to build, rather than the status quo in which the majority of new development in CA is single-family sprawl on undeveloped open space.
In contrast, the Building Trades, a coalition of other construction unions, has entered an uneasy alliance with anti-housing homeowners to oppose those laws.2 The Trades have historically used California’s environmental laws to strengthen their hand in negotiations with developers for union labor contracts, so they see any change to environmental laws that do not include union-only labor requirements as a threat. They also want any legislation increasing zoned density near transit to have union-first requirements.
The Carpenters are more focused on total job creation, the Trades more focused on getting a bigger share of whatever jobs exist. Pro-housing advocates and developers want to build, homeowner organizations don’t want their neighborhoods to change. The difference isn’t between “capital and labor,” “progressive or moderate”—labor and capital are on both sides of the debate, as are progressives and moderates.
Instead, the dispute between construction unions involves a substantive disagreement over how to maximize union jobs. The Carpenters embrace looser labor standards in the hope they will maximize development, leading to more jobs overall and some growth for their members. Whereas the Trades seek to secure stronger union-first labor requirements, maximizing the union share of whatever jobs are available. Both sides earnestly believe they are the most pro labor. They have very different estimations of the tradeoffs.
Other factions grapple with the implications of policies to promote housing abundance as well. Nonprofit housing and social justice orgs, representatives of what Chait calls “The Groups,” are also split over legislation to streamline environmental laws and reform zoning, but they are just one of many players here. Nor does any particular group have a monopoly on progressivism; rather, different housing advocates support different policy approaches to making housing affordable, reducing displacement, and creating economic opportunity.
All of this reflects unusual bedfellows, with lefty social justice groups, Trades unions, and anti-housing homeowner groups all opposing major housing bills for completely different reasons. These fights reveal a party less divided by broad ideology than by openness to tradeoffs, tradeoffs that influence whether or not housing is feasible to build.
Local party politicking
At the local level, the debate over abundance politics plays out in resolutions and obscure policy jargon that reveal deep philosophical divides.3
A chapter of the California Democratic Party in the Bay Area, one of the most progressive-coded parties in the country, recently passed a resolution in support of “building more housing at all income levels.” The resolution’s main opposition? Nancy Pelosi’s daughter, Christine Pelosi.
Pelosi argued the resolution needed language limiting support to projects that meet “affordable housing” requirements. (“Affordable” in this case is a technical term referring to government subsidized housing for people making below a certain income.)
This seemingly semantic disagreement reflected a broader tension over whether the party should endorse building broadly or narrowly.
These affordability requirements sound good in theory. In practice, they can backfire by making housing financially infeasible to build. The resolution doesn’t oppose low-income housing requirements, it is simply expansive enough to include all types of affordability. Ultimately, a supermajority of delegates from this region voted to focus on making more housing possible to build rather than mandating every project meet specific criteria.
Meanwhile, in another part of the Bay Area, a Democratic resolution intended to support streamlining California’s environmental regulations for specifically low-income housing only passed after some delegates added strings. Though initially written in favor of streamlining environmental review for all low-income housing, delegate amended the resolution to only support projects that “meet prevailing wage requirements [expensive union level wage standards], are aligned with sustainability goals, and include meaningful community and labor input and anti-displacement protections.”
The debate revolves around yet more conflicting ideas about tradeoffs that don’t align clearly with binary framing. The initial draft resolution intended to support equitable, sustainable development by preventing years of community meeting and potentially thousands of pages of studies. The final version of the resolution reflects a more process-driven approach.
Some opposition to development and support for community-driven processes stems from legitimate concerns about displacement or environmental harm. Too often, though, opponents of development leverage legal requirements to stall or kill even the most equitable and sustainable projects. NIMBY homeowner groups have greater resources to use legal proceduralism for blocking helpful development than well-intended nonprofits have for preventing harm.
Tension lies in different beliefs about unintended consequences, some fearing primarily the consequences of development and others fearing the consequences of processes that prevent development in the places it makes sense.
Elected officials contain multitudes
California’s greatest champion for abundant housing defies political labels.
State Senator Scott Wiener, a legislator from San Francisco, has led efforts to allow apartments in all single-family neighborhoods; increase legal penalties for local governments that block housing; and eliminate counterproductive environmental review for housing within existing cities. He is a reliable reformer of land use practices, hated and feared by “not in my backyard” NIMBY anti-housing advocates.
The idea that Scott Wiener is somehow a “moderate” because he wants to create abundant housing calls the entire meaning of the word into question. Outside of housing, he has attempted to pass legislation that would let fire victims sue oil companies for climate change, provide refuge to trans kids fleeing persecution in conservative states, and legalize the use of psychedelic drugs.4
Rather than fitting neatly into conventional labels, Wiener embodies a newer Democratic archetype, one who centers outcomes over process.
Political labels don’t accurately predict whether elected leaders in California embrace pro-housing policies. For example, self-described Democratic Socialist Alex Lee, a California State Assembly Member, consistently votes for pro-housing legislation. Lee simultaneously advances protections for tenants and efforts to create a publicly owned and operated social housing developer, essentially a government-run housing builder. Republican Joe Patterson, Vice Chair of the California Assembly Housing Committee, also supports pro-housing bills, though he cares more about protecting property rights than socializing development.5
Abundance ideas cut not just across Democratic Party politics but, in some ways, across party politics altogether.
Conclusion
The Democratic Party’s internal conflicts won’t be resolved by abundance politics alone. Debates over longtime “progressive versus moderate” disputes like welfare, tax policy, corporate power, and social justice will continue. Abundance only tangentially addresses social issues. Moreover, the coalitions that coalesce around reforms for energy, transportation, healthcare, and other parts of the abundance spectrum of issues may look different than those for housing.
Still, the rise of abundance thinking presents a rare opportunity, a shared agenda transcending standard ideological lines. Legislators identifying as progressive and moderate alike can find reasons to support policies that make it easier to build the things people need.
Abundance thinking allows for unique agnosticism about the methods for achieving outcomes. It advances policies that increase the ability of government to deliver essential public services and simultaneously optimize the productivity of private markets. Widespread zoning changes to spur more private housing development? Creation of a social housing developer to invest in government owned-and-operated housing? Why not all of the above?
In California, coalitions of labor unions, developers, volunteer housing advocates, tenant organizers, and even some environmentalists are coming together, not because they agree on everything but because they know we need to build to achieve shared goals. Poll after poll illustrates voters support new housing by 2-1 margins or more.
In a time of division, abundance thinking offers a unifying framework, a program that could transform not just the built environment in which we all live but the political coalitions within the Democratic Party itself.6
Recent books propounding abundance thinking include Stuck by Atlantic Editor Yoni Applebaum, Why Nothing Works by Brown professor Marc Dunkelman, and the eponymously titled Abundance by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Other notable entries in the catalogue include Recording America by former Obama administration official Jennifer Pahlka and On The Housing Crisis by journalist Jerusalem Demsas (my personal favorite).
Some left-leaning thinkers have indeed vocally criticized recent books championing pro-abundance ideas, while others have praised them. Outside of online punditry, the conversation is equally messy!
To their credit, the Trades unions would be fine with broad upzoning and reforms to environmental laws as long as accessing those reforms to build required using union labor. They are objectively not NIMBYs, and they actively disavow the outright NIMBY organizations that oppose upzoning and environmental streamlining laws no matter what. The challenge: Most cost savings from the reforms would be erased by union-only labor standards because they are expensive, increasing project costs by as much as 20% according to a report by the nonpartisan RAND Institute. Sometimes these costs are feasible for a project to bear, other times not. They involve a tradeoff, either way.
These discussions are playing out in different ways all over the state; my two anecdotes represent my Bay Area bias, since that's where I follow advocacy on the ground most closely
The bill increasing potential legal penalties for oil companies was blocked by … California labor unions, of all groups.
Progressive Democrats and Republicans also both oppose major housing legislation. For example, for very different reasons, progressive-coded Democrat Elena Durazo voted alongside stalwart Republicans like Kelly Seyarto to oppose SB 79, this year’s major housing bill to allow denser homes near transit.
After a long history of non-intervention in the legislative process, Gavin Newsom recently endorsed AB 609 and SB 607, two bills that would streamline environmental review for housing within existing cities (AB 609) as well as most energy and major infrastructure development (SB 607). He has yet to endorse major no-strings-attached zoning reform bills, but the legislative session may yet contain more pro-abundance surprises.
Great post! I think the outcome vs process split is a very accurate description, but also allows for other policies to aid in fixing the problems that are focused on by the Abundance movement. As some other comments mentioned, there may be issues with hard costs from construction supplier monopolies, this means that there is room to include anti-monopolists in an outcome-focused policy framework. If the goal is to lower housing costs, we can both reduce process hurdles and target upstream monopoly power. The groups that should still be excluded are ones pushing for policies hampering healthy (intervention needed for unhealthy ones) market dynamics and benefitting specific groups over the average constituent.
It's less a civil war than a rout. I've listened to lots of purported dialogue between Klein/Thompson and their self-professed critics. The critics have uniformly embarrassed themselves. I don't think Zephyr Teachout read the book (or, if she did, it casts doubt on her ability to comprehend a pretty basic argument). Sam Seder repeated "big money" like a malfunctioning chatbot who couldn't grasp that perhaps you can't build a coherent policy agenda by measuring up where the "big money" goes and taking the opposite side.
The next smart critique of Abundance that I read will be the first. I'm more than open to them, but what they've done with spectacular success is convinced me that the self-proclaimed progressives are not serious people who have thoughtful policy ideas, but rather an internet comment section come to life.