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An “Abundance Agenda” for Government Is the Anti-DOGE | The New Republic

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Since the 2024 election, Democrats have struggled to figure out why their agenda seems to have lost its hold on so many working-class American families. This kind of political introspection has a deep intellectual history, even at the high point for American liberalism. Back at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, a cohort of talented scholars asked why Democrats were unable do more to deal with economic insecurity and inequality. Writers such as the political theorist Louis Hartz and historian Richard Hofstadter decried the ideological straitjacket on American political debate, a liberal consensus over values such as individualism and private property that left little room for the social-democratic ideas that informed European thought. As Hartz wrote, despite the intense debates in U.S. politics, “there is about it all, as compared with the European pattern, a vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” By the twenty-first century, the left and center left had shifted t

Since the 2024 election, Democrats have struggled to figure out why their agenda seems to have lost its hold on so many working-class American families. This kind of political introspection has a deep intellectual history, even at the high point for American liberalism. Back at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, a cohort of talented scholars asked why Democrats were unable do more to deal with economic insecurity and inequality. Writers such as the political theorist Louis Hartz and historian Richard Hofstadter decried the ideological straitjacket on American political debate,

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