In January of 2022, The Atlantic published staff writer Derek Thompson’s manifesto calling for a fundamental reform of progressive governance. “We need an abundance agenda… focused on solving our national problem of scarcity,” he asserted.

Fleshed out by New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and a small nucleus of like-minded, mostly Bay Area-based thinkers, including Misha David Chellam, the co-founder of The Abundance Network, that new progressive policy agenda – centered on how to unleash the power of government, particularly in blue cities, to build more housing and infrastructure and deliver better quality-of-life results – soon followed.

Since then, Abundance has gone national. Earlier this year Klein and Thompson published their New York Times #1 bestseller on the topic, sparking an enormous (and ongoing) new wave of discussion – and in some corners sharp push back – among left-of-center elites about what Klein had previously dubbed “supply side progressivism.”

So what exactly is the Abundance agenda? Is it the technocratic answer to what ails blue cities? Or is it the same old, failed neoliberalism with a cosmetic, progressive-sounding makeover, as some of its critics within the movement left claim? To explore these questions, and to discuss where the still nascent Abundance movement is heading, we invited Misha David Chellam, who writes on Abundance topics at the Modern Power Substack page, onto Blue City Blues.

Chellam described Abundance to us as a “non-ideological, truth-seeking exercise to improve governance,” and added, “We should pursue a model of governance that holds liberal values and pro-government values, but also holds a high bar for institutions to deliver and solve problems.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

About Blue City Blues:

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.
America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming.
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

Public safety policy reformer Lisa Daugaard won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2019 for her work creating the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which has become a much touted national model for progressive criminal justice reform. The idea is to help low-level homeless offenders arrested for crimes like shoplifting by connecting them with shelter and mental health and addiction services, as opposed to just jailing them before releasing them back onto the streets.

But Daugaard is no police or prison abolitionist. In fact, she argues that the politics of abolition that emerged before 2020 helped provoke a backlash, which slowed some of the progress blue cities had been making to improve how police and the courts operate.

So what does she think of Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom's controversial call for local governments to clear more homeless encampments? Tune in and find out!

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Seattle venture capitalist and Democratic megadonor Nick Hanauer doesn’t fit neatly into pre-fab boxes. He’s a wildly successful tech investor who denounces tech moguls as “narcissistic sociopaths.” He’s a billionaire “class-traitor” (his term) who’s been sounding the alarm about what he sees as the dangerous obliviousness of the ultrarich to the resentment their class privilege engenders. He’s a proud capitalist who rails against neoliberalism and who developed and popularized the concept of “middle out” economics.

In short, Hanauer, a host of the popular Pitchfork Economics podcast (President Joe Biden was a recent guest), has strong opinions on lots of topics, including what ails blue cities, and why. In our wide ranging conversation with Nick for the latest BCB episode, Nick voices his frustrations with the seemingly intractable problems evident on the streets of blue cites: unsheltered homelessness, untreated mental illness, unchecked street disorder.

While he blames ideologically misguided governance in blue cities for not appropriately tackling these problems, he says the blame for their existence, and their daunting scale, lies elsewhere: with 50 years of neoliberal policies that have led to disinvestment in public priorities like institutions for the mentally ill or affordable housing. Policies he says Democratic elites – and in particular Barack Obama – and the party’s donor class have been complicit in. “That was Obama-ism to me: we’re going to put a good face on how much we care about the little people, but we’re really not going to do anything about it,” Nick tells us. “A kinder, gentler form of trickle down economics.”