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What if we invented a technology to save the planet—and the world refused to use it?

This haunting hypothetical first popped into my head when I was reading about Paxlovid, the antiviral drug developed by Pfizer. If taken within a few days of infection with COVID-19, Paxlovid reduces a vulnerable adult’s chance of death or hospitalization by 90 percent. Two months ago, the White House promised to make it widely available to Americans. But today, the pills are still hard to find, and many doctors don’t know to prescribe them.

The pandemic offers more examples of life-saving inventions going largely unused. Unlike Paxlovid, COVID vaccines are known to every doctor; they are entirely free and easily available. But here, too, invention alone hasn’t been enough. COVID is the leading cause of death for middle-aged Americans, and the mRNA vaccines reduce the risk of death by about 90 percent. And yet approximately one-third of Americans ages 35 to 49 say they’ll never take it.

My hypothetical concern applies even more literally to energy. What if I told you that scientists had figured out a way to produce affordable electricity that was 99 percent safer and cleaner than coal or oil, and that this breakthrough produced even fewer emissions per gigawatt-hour than solar or wind? That’s incredible, you might say. We have to build this thing everywhere! The breakthrough I’m talking about is 70 years old: It’s nuclear power. But in the past few decades, the U.S. has actually closed old nuclear plants faster than we’ve opened new ones. This problem is endemic to clean energy. Even many Americans who support decarbonization in the abstract protest the construction of renewable-energy projects in their neighborhood.

I see two lessons here. The first is about America, specifically. In the pandemic, we (at first) didn’t have enough masks or tests, then we didn’t have enough vaccines or pills. We don’t have enough homes, immigrants, doctors, or microchips. We’re not lacking in scientific breakthroughs. The U.S. is languishing because many of our policies are designed for scarcity. What we need is the opposite: an abundance agenda.

The second lesson is about progress, generally: Invention is easily overrated, and implementation is often underrated.

Many books about innovation and scientific and technological progress are just about people inventing stuff. The takeaway for most readers is that human progress is one damn breakthrough after another. In the 19th century, we invented the telegraph, then the telephone, then the light bulb, then the modern car, then the plane, and so on. But this approach—call it the eureka theory of progress—misses most of the story. In the 1870s, Thomas Edison invented the usable light bulb. But by 1900, less than 5 percent of factory power was coming from electric motors. The building blocks of the personal computer were invented in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. But for decades, computers made so little measurable difference to the economy that the economist Robert Solow said, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

In a cover story for this magazine several years ago, I insisted that America suffered primarily from an invention recession—a serious deficit of new ideas about hardware. Now I think that I, like others, probably got this wrong. The U.S. could absolutely use a better “science of science” to produce more breakthroughs—in biotech, artificial intelligence, and clean energy. But the insistence on invention often overlooks the fact that we’re running low on the capacity to deploy the tech we already have.

Progress is a puzzle whose answer requires science and technology. But believing that material progress is only a question of science and technology is a profound mistake.

In confronting some challenges—for example, curing complex diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia—we don’t know enough to solve the problem. In these cases, what we need is more science. In other challenges—for example, building carbon-removal plants that vacuum emissions out of the sky—we have the basic science, but we need a revolution in cost efficiency. We need more technology. In yet other challenges—for example, nuclear power—we have the technology, but we don’t have the political will to deploy it. We need better politics. Finally, in certain challenges—for example, COVID—we’ve solved most of the science, technology, and policy problems. We need a cultural shift.

Today, I’m launching a new project at The Atlantic called “Progress.” It will comprise my newsletter; monthly office hours, when I’ll take questions about my writing; and some larger forthcoming initiatives and events. I see this project as spanning all of the subjects I just listed: science, technology, politics, and culture. But at bottom, this project is about attention. I’m frustrated by the state of political discourse, and I want to help shift the way we think about progress—in particular, the way we think about abundance. I want to make people see that stasis can lead to more pain than change.

Here’s an example. One important value for conservationists is being against waste. That’s why they push recycling and renewable energy. But many of these environmentalists and conservationists also oppose specific clean-energy projects on the basis that human construction can disrupt the local environment. This isn’t a totally unreasonable concern. At scale, though, it’s keeping us from decarbonizing the grid. We need to reframe the problem: Imagine a world where we invented a technology to save the planet and simply refused to use it. Wouldn’t that be wasteful? If it is a sin to waste one ounce of plastic, it is a calamity to waste a decade of clean-energy construction.

If we focus on the worst consequences of creating abundance, we’ll come away with a cavalcade of scarcity: too little wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal energy; too few doctors, psychologists, nurses. That’s the world we have. We need to invent a better world. We need to build what we’ve already invented.

President Joe Biden arrived in office with a throwback theory of how to expand his party’s support. He sought to focus his presidency on delivering kitchen-table benefits to low- and middle-income families—for example, with stimulus checks and an expansive child tax credit—while downplaying his involvement in high-profile cultural disputes and emphasizing bipartisanship. Harry Truman or Hubert Humphrey would have recognized this approach: It was an updated version of the economics-first political formula that allowed the New Deal–era Democrats of Biden’s youth to dominate blue-collar communities, like his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, from the Depression through the 1960s.

But nearly 16 months into his presidency, Biden’s plan has been battered on both ends. Republicans in Washington, D.C., have dashed his hopes of cooperation (apart from a deal on a bipartisan infrastructure package), and his desire to de-emphasize the culture wars has been undermined by a red-state blitzkrieg on social issues and the draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade that exploded into public view last week. Simultaneously, opposition from Democratic Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—combined with moments of intransigence from the party’s left—have blocked Biden from delivering the full suite of material benefits he hoped would move more working-class families, of all races, back toward the Democrats.

[From the April 2022 issue: What Joe Biden can learn from Harry Truman]

It’s not unusual for presidents and their political strategists to find that events confound their initial theory of how to expand and solidify their coalition. Bill Clinton wanted to win back working-class white people and independents with his “third way” centrism, but he ultimately revived his presidency by staring down the Newt Gingrich–era Republican Congress over the federal budget (before shifting course again to make some high-profile deals). George W. Bush initially hoped to woo moderate voters and Hispanics as a “compassionate conservative” before becoming a wartime leader focused on maximizing turnout among the Republican base. Barack Obama aspired to be a unifying figure of generational change and racial reconciliation, but he found himself struggling to lead the nation out of its worst economic downturn since the Depression, against fierce Republican resistance that culminated in the emergence of the racially resentful Tea Party.

Events forced each of these presidents to make significant course corrections that in turn helped each win a second term. The challenge for Biden is that he is still searching for the course correction that will enable him to recover—with six months to go until the midterm elections and at a time when his approval rating is stuck at about 40 percent.

The resulting vacuum has plunged Democrats into a cacophonous argument. Centrist party strategists are insisting, more loudly than at any point since Clinton’s presidency, that the president must explicitly renounce the Democrats’ liberal vanguard, especially on cultural flashpoints such as crime and immigration. Progressives, meanwhile, believe that Biden must do more to fulfill his 2020 campaign promises through unilateral executive action, such as canceling more student debt. They also want him to call out Republicans more forcefully, for their hard-right turn on social issues as well as their embrace of state-level voting restrictions and candidates backing former President Donald Trump’s discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Condemning Republicans might be one area of consensus for Democrats. In recent weeks, Biden has appeared more willing to describe the GOP—or at least its MAGA faction—as “the most extreme political organization that’s existed … in recent American history,” as he put it in a May 4 speech. Democrats across the party’s ideological spectrum also believe that the threat to abortion rights from the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority and state-level Republicans will help them energize their base voters in the midterms and narrow the enthusiasm advantage that polls have documented for the GOP.

A unifying message about Republicans is a relatively easy puzzle for Democrats, though. Their bigger challenge is defining their own priorities and direction—for this year and beyond. The party right now “is a little stuck, and it’s a little mired,” says Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, the vice president and chief strategist for Way to Win, which helps fund organizations and campaigns focusing on voters of color. “But we don’t have time to keep fighting about it.”

Both parties generally agree on the two main reasons for Biden’s low approval ratings. First, with the country facing its highest inflation levels in four decades, Americans are expressing in polls towering levels of economic dissatisfaction and assigning a big share of the blame to Biden’s policies. Second, the persistence of COVID disruptions with the emergence of the Delta and Omicron variants, as well as the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, severely dented Biden’s attempt to project competence, one of his core campaign promises.

[Annie Lowrey: Why everyone is so mad about the economy]

“People voted for competency and normalcy,” says Doug Sosnik, who served as a senior political adviser in the Clinton White House. “Well, we don’t have normalcy—a lot of that’s not his fault. And there have certainly been some areas where you could accuse the Biden administration of being less than competent.”

Less agreement exists over how much Biden’s own legislative strategy and broader positioning have contributed to his distress. To Republicans, and some centrist Democrats, the main reason for the president’s decline in approval is that he “ran as a center-left politician, and he has governed as a politician from the left,” as the longtime GOP pollster Whit Ayres puts it. Ayres cites an observation from Democratic Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, who said of Biden, “Nobody elected him to be FDR.” She “had it right,” Ayres told me. On issues including immigration, crime, taxes, and government spending, he said, Biden “has persisted in making liberal choices over moderate choices.”

Ruy Teixeira, a veteran Democratic electoral and demographic analyst who has become one of the most ardent critics of the party’s left wing, largely agrees. Teixeira says that Biden’s initial strategy for expanding the Democrats’ base, by emphasizing economic issues and bipartisanship, remains “a perfectly good theory about how to build a broad majority coalition.” But he complains that Biden allowed progressives in the House of Representatives to demand a much more sweeping economic agenda in the Build Back Better legislation than could realistically pass a closely divided Senate. “He may have wanted to be ‘Scranton Joe,’” Teixeira says. “But he got elected as a president in a party and a political context that won’t let him do that.”

To those on the Democratic left, that analysis might as well have originated in the Upside Down. The problem, they argue, is not that the left is foisting unpopular policies on Biden; it’s that Manchin and Sinema, from the party’s center-right, are preventing Biden from passing popular ideas. “The evidence is much more credible about this being driven by economic perceptions”—primarily about inflation—“rather than the idea that Biden is too left-wing,” says Sean McElwee, a progressive pollster.

If anything, McElwee argues, the failure to pass the BBB legislation’s major climate provisions has contributed to the fact that Biden’s approval rating, compared with his 2020 vote share, has fallen most sharply among young people. Bryan Bennett, the senior director of polling and analytics at the Hub Project, a progressive organization, points out that a survey conducted by the group’s Navigator poll recently found that two-thirds of adults said they support a package that would lower drug prices, confront climate change, and expand Medicare benefits to services such as hearing aids, all of which essentially describes the pared-back version of Build Back Better that has received the most discussion on Capitol Hill.

Sosnik sees some merit in both arguments. He agrees that Biden and Democrats would improve their position for 2024 if they could pass some of the tangible economic assistance in the BBB plan, though he doubts that those programs would be felt in time to boost the party’s prospects this coming fall. But he also believes that Biden mismatched the scale of his ambitions and the size of his legislative majority, and misread the signals swing voters sent when they reduced the Democratic House majority even while electing him to replace Trump in 2020. “Biden got elected mostly as an anti-Trump vote,” Sosnik says, adding, “The signs were there in the 2020 election about the limits of the activism” his voting coalition would accept.

The coalition that elected Biden—primarily people of color, young adults, and college-educated, socially liberal white Americans—very much reflected the Democratic Party’s evolution over his lifetime. But Biden has always seemed eager to reconstruct the Democratic coalition of his youth, which relied on more support from working-class white voters. One White House official, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told me that Biden is intent on framing his economic agenda “in a very blue-collar-oriented way.” The president often stresses his plans’ benefits for workers without four-year college degrees—a clear departure from both Clinton and Obama, who emphasized the importance of moving workers up the education ladder. Biden also has rejected calls from even some Democrats to roll back international tariffs or his tougher “Buy American” procurement provisions in order to combat inflation. He’s much more likely than either Clinton or Obama to praise labor unions and less inhibited about criticizing China. Biden rarely seems happier than when appearing at a manufacturing plant.

Yet in the 2020 election, according to most data sources, he improved only slightly on Hillary Clinton’s anemic 2016 showing among white voters without college degrees. As president, Biden’s approval rating among those white blue-collar workers has fallen into the mid-20s in some polls.

[Bill de Blasio: Joe Biden can learn from my mistakes]

Biden still clearly sees his economic plan as his best chance to reverse those numbers: In his State of the Union address and again in his May 4 speech, he reframed key elements of the stalled BBB package—including bigger child-care and health-care subsidies and measures to reduce drug prices and utility bills—as a means to help financially strapped families. But calling attention to any provisions in the plan always risks reminding voters that Democrats so far have failed to pass it—and that Manchin might not accept any remnant of the economic package Biden once hoped would restore the Democrats’ New Deal–era identity as the party delivering for average families.

If anything, the gap between the competing Democratic factions is even greater on cultural issues. And the dispute is as fundamental as where Biden should aim his fire.

Some centrists—including Teixeira and Will Marshall, of the Progressive Policy Institute—have told me they believe that Biden should focus more on what they see as cultural extremism from the left. They want the president to forcefully and consistently condemn the progressive voices who have backed defunding the police or decriminalizing illegal border crossings.

Biden has edged in this direction by underscoring his support for reforming but “funding”—not defunding—the police, most visibly in his State of the Union address. But Teixeira said “it defies logic” to think that will be enough to persuade voters drawn to Republicans’ claim that Democrats are soft on crime. “It would take a sustained campaign in and outside the party to really convince voters that Democrats are tough on criminals,” he said. “To simply say that to defund the police is not a good idea—I don’t think works.”

Teixeira also is skeptical that Democrats should push back harder against the GOP’s cultural agenda. He argues that in many instances—such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law or the restrictions on classroom discussion of race—Republican politicians are responding to justifiable parental concerns and that Democrats can’t condemn the initiatives “as sheer bigotry.” “I know people who say the Republicans are so far out of their skis on this that all we have to do is oppose them, and people will come to their senses,” Teixeira said. “And I believe that is not the case.”

For progressives, this counsel once again springs from the Upside Down. “There is an old tendency” among party centrists “to call out the left and do the Sister Souljah thing,” says Ancona, of Way to Win, referring to Clinton’s denunciation of a young hip-hop star who called for violence against white Americans during the 1992 campaign. “That’s an old playbook that needs to be thrown out.”

Ancona argues that Biden should target what she and other progressives see as cultural extremism from the right: the potential overturn of Roe and the wave of red-state laws to restrict abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights; ban books; and censor how teachers can talk about race, gender, and sexual orientation. The advice that Biden should reassure swing voters by picking a fight with the left, she says, ignores the reality of a Democratic coalition that now relies on people of color for about two-fifths of its votes, and also depends on the white voters who “want to be part of a multiracial society [and] in coalition with Black people who are fighting for justice.”

Instead of targeting the cultural left, progressives I spoke with said Democrats should employ the “race-class narrative”—which argues that Republicans are emphasizing cultural and racial issues to distract voters from their real priority of tilting economic policy toward the rich. Ancona says candidates should take their cues from the way Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock integrated economic and racial equity in their messaging during their stunning victories in Georgia. “If I were going to look at who to emulate,” she argues, “I would not look back to Clinton in the 1990s; it would be to look to Warnock and Ossoff in Georgia in 2021.”

The Justice Department has filed federal lawsuits in almost all the policy areas Republicans are targeting. And Biden has criticized elements of that cultural agenda, particularly Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But he has not mounted any sustained effort to call attention to these policies or paint them as extremist. Multiple outlets last week reported that Biden’s criticism of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion overturning Roe was the first time he had uttered the word abortion as president.

A 79-year-old practicing Catholic who once criticized Roe before shifting his view, Biden has always been an unlikely figure to rally the forces of cultural change. But his choice not to engage more forcefully has dispirited some Democrats—particularly as Republican-led Senate filibusters have blocked House-passed legislation attempting to counteract red-state moves. The enormous show of support for Michigan Democratic State Senator Mallory McMorrow’s impassioned response to a Republican who accused her of wanting to “groom and sexualize” young children shows how hungry Democrats are for a stronger rebuttal to the right’s escalating cultural offensive, Ancona argues. At a fiery press conference last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom also articulated that impatience, describing the Republican cultural agenda as “extremism at a scale I’ve never experienced in my lifetime” and then pointedly asking: “Where the hell’s my party? … Why aren’t we standing up more firmly, more resolutely?”

[Read: America’s blue-red divide is about to get starker]

The draft opinion overturning Roe seems certain, at least for a while, to sublimate this intraparty dispute: Democrats of every stripe were quick to condemn it, Biden included. Teixeira told me in an email that “this issue is different since Democrats fairly unambiguously are on the center ground and don’t (yet) have any crazy they really need to disassociate themselves from.” But party divisions over cultural issues are bound to resurface as Biden confronts questions such as how to balance criminal-justice reform and public safety and whether to revoke Trump’s Title 42 restrictions turning away migrants at the southern border on public-health grounds.

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, a big backlash against it could reconfigure the midterm landscape. But it remains more likely that whatever message Democrats choose, the combination of high inflation, Biden’s sagging approval rating, and the historical pattern of first-term midterm losses for the president’s party will generate significant Republican gains in November.

The 2022 elections, like all midterms, might turn mostly on voters’ assessments of immediate conditions in the country. But that probably won’t stop both sides in the Democrats’ internal debate from arguing that the results show why Biden should move in their direction. After November, the struggle over the party’s identity is guaranteed to grow even more urgent and intense—especially because so many Democrats are afraid that if they don’t get it right, the consequence will be a Trump restoration. “That’s one thing for certain,” Sosnik says. “If Democrats have a bad election, we will have a full-throated, public, six-month debate about why we lost.”

Five headlines to bring you up to date on the coronavirus pandemic this Wednesday morning.

A new study found that the level of immunity induced by China’s March vaccination campaign would be "insufficient” to prevent an omicron wave that would ...

Economists warn of negative economic growth in certain sectors and regions if 'zero COVID' policy continues.

The Omicron variant overwhelmed the city's healthcare system resulting in many deaths.