I’ll have to flesh this out some at a later date, but Brian Beutler gets at a very important point in a review of the ‘abundance agenda’* (boldface mine):

This is, at best, only hinted at in Abundance. The book details many kinds of governing failures, and identifies important sources of those failures. It is much quieter on how partisan politics will have to change for Democrats to be able to do anything quickly. Not just build nuclear power plants, but depose fascists and rebuild federal agencies and create a public health-insurance option.

If past is prologue it will not happen. Twenty years after the filibuster abolition movement came together the leadership of the Democratic party is largely unchanged. The candidates it recruits are allergic to taking hard votes. We have roughly two years to change that, if an incoming trifecta in 2029 will be willing to do whatever’s necessary “to put a motor in it and take off.”

That is, to do things most of today’s Democrats run scared from even talking about.

And then we need to replicate that philosophy of action at every level of government in as many states as possible. We need to transform a party of timid overanalyzers into a party of fearless actors and reactors in an incredibly short span of time. Ezra and Derek have written a good book, but this is the graveyard they whistle past. And so I’d invite them to lend their voices to the cause of building a Democratic Party that fights: for abundance, sure, but more proximately to defeat the authoritarian right and lock it out of power indefinitely, so that their vision, or any similar vision of progress, stands a chance.

Any progressive agenda needs more than ideas. It needs power and the will to use it. There’s no abundance, let alone old-fashioned safety-net liberalism, without something like Project 2029 as a predicate.

There are people in the Democratic Party, and not just on the left, who I can imagine being this aggressive and active. But Democrats have too many elected officials who won’t even take their own side in a fight (here’s a recent example). Worse, there are still too many rank-and-file Democratic voters who let them get away with this.

Maybe it’s naive of me, but I still think Democrats can take back power in 2028. That said, I’m not convinced they will do what is necessary, including imposing consequences on those who deserve it (which is a whole different topic), to do anything other than having another four years of norms-based center-leftism**, followed by a Republican return to power.

*I’m not very keen on the abundance agenda, in part because I don’t trust its two major proponents, and in part because we shouldn’t use vague phrases: if you want more housing, then call for that; if you want more mass transit, then call for that. Don’t muddy things up with a vague phrase that the right will demonize.

**Which was still better than what we had at any other time in the last forty years.