Welcome To Welcome Fest

Here There Be Moderates

An ongoing fight on Twitter/X as well as in the backrooms of the Democratic Party is over “Abundance”, a term that isn’t unique to the book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (which like 20 people in America have read, including me) that was released in March. The “Abundance Agenda” has come to colloquially refer not just to the platform laid out in the book, but also the platform people have decided the book is a Trojan Horse for.

The book is focused on arguing that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities, while well intentioned, stymies development of housing, infrastructure, and general development. Due to population losses in blue states, after the 2030 census, Democrats will no longer be able to win the presidency with just the Blue Wall (Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania), they need to win at least one Sunbelt state (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina), and since Kamala Harris did markedly better in the Midwest than in the Sunbelt, this topic is dire.

But, the Abundance Agenda has become synonymous with the moderate faction of the Democratic Party, focused on “popularism”, as propagated by several moderate pundit types, including Matthew Yglesias and David Shor. Since Klein and Thompson’s book was published, there have been endless intraparty skirmishes about what the Democratic Party should do next, and who, if anybody, has to be thrown under the bus. The popularists, most commonly Yglesias¹, endorse moderating on policy across the board, and not just dog-whistling about it. They support giving up the trans sports issue, sticking to an Obama-era position on immigration, and stop prattling on about banning fossil fuels, and naturally, progressives push back against that methodology of doing politics.

WelcomeFest, which took place in Washington DC on June 4, is put on by the Welcome PAC, whose mission statement reads, “We share a commitment to protecting our democracy and building a big-tent Democratic Party that wins.” Despite the fact Klein and Thompson’s Abundance isn’t solely about winning elections, this conference is considered by many, especially in the progressive faction of the Democratic Party, to be an arm of it. I’ve been career pivoting lately, and I can’t provide details publicly, but I was flown out to WelcomeFest and while there’s a lot of commentary on this conference floating around, I thought I’d offer my opinions on some of it, not least because my perspective is not exactly what you might expect.

• In his piece for the New York Times titled “The Abundance Agenda Has Its Own Theory of Power”, Ezra Klein writes “A lot is lost when you collapse the complex interests of politics into a simple morality play.” I agree with Klein that a liberalism built on building is threatening to the anti-monopolist left but I wonder if he realizes the scope of what he’s asking, to get the morality plays out of politics, when at the end of the day, that’s what politics is all about. I’ve talked about how much I hate moralizers and people insist I do the same, and maybe I do, but I’ll be the first to admit that people’s subjective conceptions of right and wrong drive our political views far more than our objective understanding of how best to deal with the housing crisis (duh, it’s building more housing, but how do we decide when and where it gets built and who pays for it?). Putting things up to public opinion often does more harm than good, but uh, not putting things up to public opinion leads to the French Revolution.

• Something that I’ll give progressives for is having a coherent and consistent theory of politics² that quite frankly, I think moderate/centrist Democrats sometimes lack and are in pursuit of simply winning elections. The thing is, negative polarization works up to a point but is not an enduring vision of politics because eventually the source of your negativity will either change or be neutralized and this definitely applies to the fragile anti-Trump coalition of 2020 that barely won, and was shattered in 2024 as Hispanic and Asian voters hurtled right. In other words, bashing progressives is not a sustainable vision of doing politics, and I say that as someone who the online Left is NOT a fan of, on a material and rhetorical level³. Moderates need a coherent thesis that is consistent and articulable across all factions of their part of the party. I have ideas but I’m not sure if the powers that may be are amenable to hearing them.

• That said, one notable exception to the “moderate/centrist Democrats lack a thesis” is liberal Zionists, whose emotional center is being pro-Israel and whether or not you agree with their ethos⁴, one reason they have so much enduring power in the Democratic Party is that they vote in lockstep on this issue, even if they’re otherwise closer on policy to Elizabeth Warren on policy than they are to Joe Manchin.

• Say what you will about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her lack of electability nationally or even in New York statewide⁵, she understands how to parlay her personal appeal into boosting her political agenda. AOC has grown out of protesting Nancy Pelosi in front of her office with the Sunrise Movement (derogatory), but if you actually look at the communications her office puts out and her social media, she is still just as liberal as she was in 2019, I do not believe she has moderated at all, but she has learned to be quieter about it. My point is though, AOC has rizz, the real kind; it’s not solely her physical looks, it’s also her genuine likability and charm and humor (her looks help a lot though). And, moderates simply don’t have an individual who can compete in that space, even if their policy positions are way more popular with *Democratic* voters as well as the general electorate⁶. I like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez⁷ (we’re both millennial PNW icons!!), but she’s too personally awkward and her district isn’t replicable enough to all swing districts to truly embrace that role, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. These tweets summarize my thinking on this topic.

  

• In terms of the actual event, I did enjoy myself at WelcomeFest; it was nice to see good friends and hang out with some people I’ve been wanting to meet for a long time. That said, I wish they’d provided a formal dress code (for one thing, I was the only one wearing color in the entire room), and the format of the event left something to be desired. I also think that there should have been formal breaks instead of going for 4 hours straight since I don’t think anybody caught all of the panels. That said, I understand that there were too many speakers on the docket so they had to go quickly.

• My friend actually described the attendees of WelcomeFest not as the theater kids that usually rule Democratic Politics with an iron (okay, maybe more of a glitter) fist, but as “shiny faced, pragmatic good boys and girls who were involved in student government and wore suits and jackets without a formal dress code dictum.” I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but like my colleague Justin Slaughter said to my now deleted joke about how Democrats need to hire more people who had fake IDs, “We’re not the people who can navigate a politics cleaved by trust,” and I don’t know if these are those people.

Holistically speaking, I think a lot of people who work in politics and care a lot about politics have a sort of arrested development to them, and this includes progressives and moderates and even conservatives. Politics appeals most to idealists, not cold-hearted pragmatists, and it’s hard not to moralize when your work is so meaningful to you, but to riff on President Trump, “Are you still a believer in the moral high ground? At 30 it’s marginal right?”

Politics isn’t about rewarding people for standing out in a raging thunderstorm and screaming, “This is real, this is me (I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be), and I’m superior to everybody who disagrees with me”, long after they ought to have grown out of it. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re beautiful and incomparable and Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper will write a big beautiful book venerating them, but that conviction doesn’t pay the bills or feed our kids or save the planet, it doesn’t prove anything to anybody who counts.

At the end of the day, politics isn’t a playground for moralizers, but it might actually be about love. This isn’t a love about who you are behind closed doors, it’s about what you do, for your family, your friends, your community, your country, people you don’t know, people you do know (which is arguably harder), and even the people who think you’re not worthy of licking the sole of their boots. There are the times and places you can breathe and the times and places where you can't, and being an adult (instead of a tall child⁸, holding an IPA, having a conversation you don’t understand), means keeping close all of the convictions and faith that defined you as a child without losing your mind and crashing out when they fall short.

You have to breathe in and breathe out, square your shoulders, walk back inside, dry your hair, and leave your self-indulgence out in the rain.

Suck it up and start all over.

1. Unlike Yglesias, Shor has sort of moved away from getting into fights on social issues online, and is laser focused on how messaging on economic populism and cost-of-living is most effective at getting people to support Democrats.

2. This theory is debatable but in the previously linked Klein piece, he writes, “What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored”, and I think that’s the ethos of the Left, to redistribute power and capital from the upper to lower classes (although of course, left and right wing populism have different groups that are favored).

3. Given that some of these people have literally posted publicly about how much they hate my husband and me, this isn’t an exaggeration.

4. I don’t love talking about my position on Israel publicly because I’m not super informed on the Middle East and don’t have any emotional ties to the region whatsoever, but since people have asked me, my stance on Israel is very close to Bernie Sanders’ position. I think October 7 was horrifying and unforgivable on a moral and political level for Israel, but no matter how much I mentally realpolitik from an Israeli and American national security perspective (Israel is our longstanding military and political ally in the Middle East and altering the status quo in that relationship will have major domestic and global political ramifications), I can’t justify the collateral damage and loss of civilian life in Gaza since October 13, 2023. If I believed in God, I’d wonder how on the day that they meet their maker, the so-called devout will explain away little boys and their little cats (my baby Esther is sleeping on my lap as I type this) being bombed to oblivion. I know it makes me wishy-washy to capitulate like that and not even rhetorically take a side, but like I said, I have zero emotional ties to this issue beyond our collective shared humanity, so I can be politically neutral.

5. As I said with liberal Zionists, they vote in lockstep against anybody they see as a threat to their emotional center.

6. I personally tend to take the stance that moderation is two-fold, 1. Policy and 2. Tone. I don’t think Yglesias is entirely wrong that Democrats likely have to alter their platform to be competitive in R+10 states that they need to win the Senate but I also think so much of politics is tone and presence and yeah, rizz, which so many moderates utterly lack although to be fair, most progressives do too. Just be more fun!

7. MGP and I met at WelcomeFest too!

8. My bio on dating apps used to be “Tall in 5th grade classrooms” but it backfired since people thought I was a teacher and not just making fun of my height.