The Democratic Party is in the midst of an important debate about the future of American political economy. Even as mainstream progressives campaign for further increasing public subsidies for medical care, housing, and higher education, a rising chorus of “supply-side progressives” is urging the left to focus instead on using the power of government to loosen the bottlenecks that make these goods so expensive and inaccessible in the first place. In a number of domains, supply-side progressives embrace prescriptions drawn from market liberalism, most notably in their calls for reforming stringent land-use restrictions that drive up the underlying cost of housing and liberalizing skilled immigration. But what separates supply-side progressives from supply-side conservatives is their enthusiasm for activist government. The movement is united by a belief in the need for a more venturesome and efficient administrative state, one capable of driving down the cost of building complex infrastructure projects and making visionary investments in clean energy, among many other things.

As much as I might disagree with the supply-side progressives on the limits of government power, their openness to market-oriented policies and willingness to at least acknowledge the mismanagement and sclerosis plaguing much of the public sector makes for a favorable contrast with their opponents in the progressive mainstream. Yet supply-side progressivism suffers from a serious weakness, particularly when compared with the mainstream progressivism it is hoping to dislodge as the Democratic Party’s unifying ideological thread. Judging by the visibility and prestige of its intellectual champions, the movement has gone from strength to strength, having captured the imagination of a number of key philanthropists, academic social scientists, opinion journalists, and, perhaps most importantly, Biden-administration officials. But it’s not clear that supply-side progressivism, as a political project, has a way forward.

[Annie Lowrey: The economy’s fundamental problem has changed]

Consider Ezra Klein’s recent critique of “everything-bagel liberalism” in The New York Times, which perfectly captures mainstream progressivism’s fundamental flaw. Drawing on the case of Tahanan, an innovative supportive-housing complex in San Francisco, he laments the accretion of local and state regulations that inflates the cost of public projects in communities throughout the country, and that therefore greatly limits the horizons of progressive governance. Klein, one of the most prominent supply-side progressives, details the various regulatory hurdles facing Tahanan, and offers a larger argument about why so many ambitious progressive initiatives run aground. “Government needs to be able to solve big problems,” writes Klein. “But the inability or the unwillingness to choose among competing priorities—to pile too much on the bagel—is itself a choice.” He sees that same failure to choose in many other domains as well, including the Biden administration’s push to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry.

The problem with mainstream progressivism, Klein argues, is that it is “much better at seeing where the government could spend more than at determining how it could make that spending go farther and faster,” and this lack of focus risks discrediting progressive governance. This is, of course, a line of argument that will resonate with conservative partisans of limited government, who object to the unlimited welfarism that has come to define mainstream progressivism. But it is also a challenge to supply-side progressives who want to change the Democratic Party’s policy direction. If mainstream progressivism’s failure to make hard choices is doing so much damage, why has it been so politically durable—and why is supply-side progressivism, for all its virtues, proving such an uphill climb?

Rather than evaluate mainstream progressivism as a policy program designed to achieve some well-defined ideological objective, it is instructive to see it more as a political formula, a set of commitments aimed at binding together a diverse Democratic coalition. By that standard, mainstream progressivism has proven incredibly potent. The Democratic Party represents tens of millions of American voters, but voters organized into cohesive interest groups are more powerful than those who happen to show up at the ballot box every now and again. Within the coalition, interest groups wield disproportionate influence, and all the more if they’re capable of bringing significant financial and organizational resources to bear. When elected Democrats strike legislative bargains, they’re keenly aware of the need to incorporate the priorities of these groups, even if that means undermining the efficiency or coherence of their policy initiatives. Contra Klein, the problem is not that progressives aren’t being sufficiently disciplined in their approach to policy design. It’s that the political imperative of holding together the coalition will always win out over high-minded idealism.  

Everything-bagel liberalism reflects the priorities and nonnegotiable demands of the Democratic Party’s most efficacious constituencies, unionized public employees and affluent metropolitan liberals, groups that to some extent overlap. Though members of both of these groups might have idealistic reasons to embrace supply-side progressivism, their material self-interest is well-served by the progressive mainstream.

First, let’s look to the core interests of public-sector labor. Supply-side progressivism envisions a more effective, efficient, and accountable government. At a minimum, achieving that goal will require extracting concessions from public-employee unions, if not limiting collective-bargaining rights in the public sector altogether, as many supply-side progressives will privately concede. But if elected Democrats even inch in this direction, they can expect intense backlash.

As Klein suggests in his essay, regulations that inflate costs, such as buy-American provisions and prevailing-wage requirements, often do so to create employment opportunities and raise wages above the market-clearing rate. Measures designed to lower costs in public projects—to ensure that taxpayer dollars purchase more and higher-quality public goods and services—often involve making the terms of public or subsidized employment less generous, for example by lowering the overall level of compensation, or demanding increased work effort, or substituting capital for labor outright. From the perspective of a union that relies on membership dues, doing more with less labor is profoundly unattractive. This is particularly true for public-employee unions, as their members are unlikely to be anxious about driving their employer out of business by pressing their demands too aggressively. Like all unions, public-employee unions are obliged to defend the interests of their members, regardless of their productivity, and they do so in part by devoting significant financial resources to electing Democratic candidates. Campaign contributions aside, unionized public employees play a crucial role in voter-contact efforts and as influential advocates for union interests in their families and communities. Any policy initiative that risks sapping the enthusiasm of this constituency would be profoundly damaging to the Democratic Party’s political prospects.

[Morgan Ome: What the labor movement can learn from its past]

Second, consider the implications of the Democratic Party’s growing reliance on affluent residents of large metropolitan areas, both as voters and as small-dollar donors. According to the political scientist Sam Zacher, a necessary precondition of Democratic gains among affluent voters is that President Joe Biden and other Democratic leaders have embraced a less redistributive economic agenda, grounded more in support for “relatively economically costless forms of extensions of civil rights to more subgroups of Americans” than in deeply held egalitarian convictions. And though there is some evidence to suggest that affluent Democrats support economic redistribution in the abstract, Zacher points to surveys that find that these voters are far less supportive of concrete progressive-taxation policies that affect them directly. One predictable result of the Democratic Party’s rising dependence on the affluent is that elected Democrats are growing reluctant to raise taxes on upper-middle- and high-income voters, as evidenced by President Biden’s commitment to shielding households earning as much as $400,000 from tax increases.

What does the rise of these ActBlue Democrats mean for supply-side progressivism? At first glance, the emergence of a more tax-averse Democratic Party might not seem detrimental to that movement’s prospects. For one, it could be an impetus for an increased emphasis on public-sector efficiency. More difficult to overcome is the fact that affluent Democrats tend to support exclusionary zoning policies in their neighborhoods, a stance that puts them directly at odds with supply-side progressives for whom YIMBYism is a core commitment. Assuming supply-side progressives don’t intend to reinvent themselves as anti-tax NIMBYs dedicated to breaking the power of organized labor, they’re likely to encounter resistance from affluent Democratic voters.

And so the political prospects for supply-side progressivism aren’t especially bright. The Democratic Party has made a deal—for votes, for man power, and for money—with public-sector labor and affluent metropolitan liberals. While leading Democrats may celebrate the merits of supply-side progressivism in the abstract, they will generally choose protecting the material interests of their most powerful allies over effective policy design. This dynamic isn’t an accident. It’s a necessary consequence not just of who the Democrats’ supporters are, but the party’s need to hold together a fissiparous majority coalition.

To change the Democratic Party’s political trajectory, supply-side progressives will have to make its core interest groups a better offer, and how they’d do that without vitiating the substance of their policy vision is not obvious. Or they can mobilize new constituencies capable of changing the balance of power within the Democratic coalition, which is easier said than done. Until the supply-side progressives find new friends, and figure out how to say no to their old ones, they will remain thought leaders without thought followers.

Last Tuesday’s Wisconsin election might have been overshadowed by the news of Donald Trump’s arraignment, but Trump and his party were likely paying close attention to the race—and the dangers it portends for the GOP in 2024.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Cover story: American madness The real hero of Ted Lasso Please don’t ask me to play your board game.

An Iron Grip

Last Tuesday, the liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz won an election that gave Wisconsin liberals a 4–3 majority on the state’s supreme court after 15 years of conservative control. The results of the state’s judicial race are a likely barometer—and a possible determinant—of the GOP’s prospects in 2024.

As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted in the days leading up to the Wisconsin election, the contest would prove “a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.” A Protasiewicz win, he wrote, would also affirm that support for legal abortion has hastened college-educated suburban voters’ collective “recoil” from the Trump GOP. “Such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections,” Ron explained.

In an Atlantic article last week, the former Milwaukee talk-radio host and The Bulwark editor at large Charlie Sykes doubled down on Brownstein’s assertion. “‘As long as abortion is an issue,’ one Republican legislator told me, ‘we won’t ever win another statewide election,’” Sykes wrote.

With Protasiewicz’s victory, Wisconsin Republicans may have even more to worry about than voters’ attachment to reproductive rights. That’s because, as my colleague Adam Serwer noted last weekend, Wisconsin is a notoriously fickle swing state that Republicans have gerrymandered “with scientific precision” since 2010—driven, in no small part, by its conservative-majority supreme court.

Adam writes:

Thanks to their precise drawing of legislative districts, Republicans have maintained something close to a two-thirds majority whether they won more votes or not … And year after year, the right-wing majority on the state supreme court would ensure that gerrymandered maps kept their political allies in power and safely protected from voter backlash. Some mismatch between the popular vote and legislative districts is not inherently nefarious—it just happens to be both deliberate and extreme in Wisconsin’s case.

“Extreme” is no overstatement. Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a faculty co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, told me by email that although Democrats have won more of Wisconsin’s statewide elections in recent years than their Republican opponents have, “under the maps that the Republican-controlled legislature drew in 2011, Republicans maintained an iron grip on the legislature throughout the last decade—even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes statewide.”

Following the 2020 census, the Wisconsin Supreme Court went on to uphold revised electoral maps that further solidified Republicans’ advantage in the state. Although Wisconsin Democrats saw the reelection of Governor Tony Evers last November, Republicans claimed a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate following a special election to fill a suburban Milwaukee seat last Tuesday. Republicans are just short of a supermajority in the state assembly and hold six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats.

But Democrats still hope to turn the Badger State around. Last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released its House Democrats’ Districts in Play plan for the 2024 election cycle, outlining which congressional districts the party will target in its efforts to retake control of the House. The DCCC’s plan listed Wisconsin’s first and third districts among the 31 Republican-held House seats Democrats deem particularly flippable next fall—an outlook that appears to hinge (at least in part) on the prospect of electoral redistricting. If Protasiewicz were to make good on a remark from earlier this year, in which she hinted at plans to review challenges to the state’s current electoral maps, the court could approve new maps that would improve Democrats’ odds of clawing back power in those districts.

“Having more balanced electoral maps could certainly make a difference in 2024,” Yablon told me. “There’s no guarantee that such maps would enable Democrats to win a legislative majority, but they could create meaningful competition for legislative control for the first time in more than a decade. At a minimum, Republicans would likely see their current legislative majorities shrink.”

Whether or not new electoral maps could make a difference in 2024 will, of course, depend on their being redrawn and approved in the first place—and fast.

Related:

Make Wisconsin a democracy again. The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment

Today’s News

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sued Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in a move to block interference by congressional Republicans in the criminal case against Donald Trump. In a dramatic effort to conserve supplies from the drought-stricken Colorado River, the Biden administration proposed a plan that would reduce the amount of water allotted to California, Arizona, and Nevada. The shooter who killed five of his colleagues at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, yesterday morning legally bought the AR-15-style rifle used in the attack, the interim Louisville Metro Police chief said today.

Evening Read

Bettmann / Getty

The Moms Who Breastfeed Without Being Pregnant

By Sarah Zhang

While her wife was pregnant with their son, Aimee MacDonald took an unusual step of preparing her own body for the baby’s arrival. First she began taking hormones, and then for six weeks straight, she pumped her breasts day and night every two to three hours. This process tricked her body into a pregnant and then postpartum state so she could make breast milk. By the time the couple’s son arrived, she was pumping 27 ounces a day—enough to feed a baby—all without actually getting pregnant or giving birth.

And so, after a 38-hour labor and emergency C-section, MacDonald’s wife could do what many mothers who just gave birth might desperately want to but cannot: rest, sleep, and recover from surgery. Meanwhile, MacDonald tried nursing their baby. She held him to her breast, and he latched right away. Over the next 15 months, the two mothers co-nursed their son, switching back and forth, trading feedings in the middle of the night. MacDonald had breastfed her older daughter the usual way—as in, by herself—a decade earlier, and she remembered the bone-deep exhaustion. She did not want that for her wife. Inducing lactation meant they could share in the ups and the downs of breastfeeding together.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why California can’t catch a break Five people died in the Kentucky shooting. The full toll is much higher. Pleather’s new name

Culture Break

Gilles Mingasson / ABC

Read. Birnam Wood, Eleanor Catton’s new novel, a biting satire about the idealistic left.

Watch. Abbott Elementary (and pay special attention to Mr. Johnson, the janitor on the ABC comedy).

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I suppose this is where I out myself as a native Wisconsinite—a cheesehead, if you will—who has followed the electoral goings-on of my home state with varying degrees of attentiveness (and mounting bafflement) in the years since my departure. But if there’s any single resource that’s helped fill in the blanks of my political literacy, it’s The Fall of Wisconsin. The 2018 book by the journalist Dan Kaufman, also from Wisconsin, traces the “conservative conquest” of a state that was, until relatively recently, taken for granted as a progressive stronghold. In case the book’s title doesn’t make it incredibly obvious, Kaufman is not exactly an ideologically impartial observer. But his deep research provides useful background for understanding the past 15 years of Badger State politics and, by extension, broader rifts in the American electorate.

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.