In the Atlantic, Jonathan Chait recently framed the “abundance agenda” as the latest battleground in a coming Democratic civil war—a fight not over ideas, but over power. According to Chait, the real tension is whether abundance will serve the liberal coalition or be hijacked by “corporate-aligned interests” and “libertarian donors.”
But this misses the point entirely. The most important political question about abundance isn’t who gets to claim it; it’s who actually built it. And the answer is clear: Abundance is not a progressive discovery. It’s a conservative achievement.
At the Abundance Institute, we’ve spent the past year mapping real-world policies that expand capacity across energy, infrastructure, housing, and beyond. Again and again, the pattern is clear: The builders and the branders operate in different worlds. One side clears paths. The other drafts blueprints for terrain someone else has already conquered.
Progressive abundance is a retrofit, conservative machinery dressed up in progressive aesthetics. It’s a glossy interface running on an operating system built by the right. They want to claim credit for the user interface while ignoring who built the backend. Without conservative deregulation, permitting reform, and market mechanisms that actually create supply, progressive software is just pretty wireframes with no server.
Let’s stop arguing about who owns the term and focus on who actually did the work. While progressives debated theory, Republican governors delivered results.
Spencer Cox didn’t just talk about Utah’s housing crisis—he addressed it directly. His 2022 housing legislation required cities to allow greater housing density, streamlined local approval processes, and tied compliance to transportation funding. Utah now builds new housing at one of the highest per-capita rates in the nation. I live in Utah. I’ve seen these reforms play out on the ground for years, not just in headlines, but in building permits and project approvals, and families like mine finding places to live. It’s not a vibe; it’s execution.
Montana enacted bold housing reforms known as the “Montana Miracle,” led by the unapologetically right-wing Frontier Institute. These changes legalized duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in most cities, allowed accessory dwelling units statewide, and replaced vague local rules with clear, objective standards. It’s a national model for how red states can embrace housing abundance—and beat the blue states to it.
Gov. Ron DeSantis transformed Florida into America’s growth engine through systematic deregulation. His Live Local Act preempted local zoning restrictions, his Complete Communities program fast-tracked infrastructure, and his regulatory reform initiative cut compliance costs by $1.6 billion annually. Florida’s population grew by 1.9 percent in 2023, six times the national average, because DeSantis created conditions where people can actually build things instead of navigating bureaucratic mazes.
Doug Burgum’s North Dakota offers the purest abundance success story. His gubernatorial administration streamlined oil and gas permitting from months to weeks, clarified property rights for mineral extraction, and eliminated redundant environmental reviews. The result? North Dakota became America’s second-largest oil producer, unemployment dropped to two percent, and the state runs budget surpluses while most others struggle with deficits.
Conservative governance provides the hardware—the foundational market infrastructure that makes abundance possible. This has become central to our work at the Abundance Institute: without institutional reform, there’s no capacity to scale. You can’t achieve digital abundance if environmental reviews block the data center. You can’t build energy abundance when transmission lines take a decade to permit.
Progressive approaches offer software—overlay programs focused on managing outcomes rather than expanding inputs. They want affordable housing but resist zoning reform that would create housing abundance. They demand clean energy while blocking the transmission infrastructure necessary to deliver it. They speak eloquently about access and equity, while maintaining regulatory thickets that ensure only well-connected developers can navigate the system.
The distinction matters because software without hardware is useless. Progressive abundance advocates can design beautiful equity frameworks, but without conservative deregulation creating actual supply in the physical world, they’re managing scarcity rather than creating abundance.
The fundamental conservative insight is that markets, not mandates, create abundance. Every abundance success story follows the same pattern: remove barriers, clarify property rights, and let producers produce. North Dakota’s energy boom, Texas’s manufacturing renaissance, and Florida’s construction surge all emerged from market-enabling reforms, not government programs.
Progressive cities like San Francisco and Seattle have some of the most sophisticated affordable housing policies in the nation, yet they also face some of the worst housing shortages. Their distribution systems are exemplary, but their production systems are completely broken. Conservative states with simpler regulatory frameworks consistently outbuild them per capita because they focus on the hardware problem: removing barriers to construction.
Many of today’s abundance evangelists championed degrowth policies a decade ago. They celebrated carbon constraints, applauded development moratoria, and argued Americans needed to consume less. When California passes SB 9 to allow duplexes statewide, progressive voices celebrate this as innovative policy leadership. But they ignore that this merely begins to undo sixty years of exclusionary zoning that progressive institutions helped construct and defend.
Conservative governors understood the value of abundance long before it became fashionable, and their states are reaping the benefits. But conservatives face a strategic risk: if the right doesn’t aggressively reclaim and expand the abundance narrative, progressives will successfully retrofit conservative achievements with their own branding.
If the abundance agenda is the site of an intra-left civil war, it’s only because the left showed up late to a party hosted and catered by the right. The future doesn’t belong to the ones who talk. It belongs to the ones who build.
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