594 | Steve Teles: Hard Lessons for Centrists Trying to Overcome the Mediocrity Challenge + Last Call for Niskanen Summer Institute Applications

What It Covers

Steve Teles and Marshall Kosloff examine how moderate and centrist movements like abundance can succeed in an anti-status quo political environment. They explore the challenge of technocratic politics meeting populist demands, discuss varieties of abundance ideology across the political spectrum, and critique ineffective moderation that lacks substantive policy projects.

Key Questions Answered

• •Anti-Entrenchment Economics: The Captured Economy framework identifies rent-seeking across finance, medicine, intellectual property, and housing as sources of upward redistribution. This approach combines classical economics with anti-status quo politics, arguing that competition forces wealthy incumbents to compete rather than extract super-normal profits through market entry barriers. The analysis differs from economic populism by maintaining plausible economic theory rather than pure political critique.
• •Government Consumerism Framework: Abundance functions as a consumerist movement focused on government services for people without private alternatives. This perspective treats working-class constituents who depend on public schools, police, and transit as the primary constituency rather than government employees. The framework enables Democrats to differentiate themselves by prioritizing service delivery over producer interests, similar to how education reform once signaled costly moderation.
• •Materialist Movement Strategy: Abundance should focus on physical world improvements rather than virtual innovation, addressing stagnant productivity in housing, transit, and infrastructure. Factory-built housing could solve local crises like Springfield, Ohio's migrant housing shortage by enabling rapid construction independent of local labor constraints. This materialist focus resonates culturally by addressing concerns about online gambling, pornography, and declining school performance from device usage.
• •Varieties of Abundance Synthesis: Abundance operates as a syncretic ideology mixing with democratic socialism (red plenty), environmentalism (Cascadian abundance), and libertarianism. The shared toolkit includes state capacity reforms and anti-procedural approaches that enable strange bedfellow coalitions across traditional ideological lines. This synthesis provides identity and theory of change for people who reject conventional conservative or socialist labels while pursuing ambitious government reform projects.
• •Collective Differentiation Model: Effective political moderation requires collective action through recognizable brands rather than individual differentiation. Education reform Democrats once formed a squad that took costly signals by challenging teacher unions, creating both voter trust and legislative momentum through repeated reform attempts. Atomized moderation fails because nationalized politics reduces individual differentiation value, requiring teams with multi-year governing programs to overcome generic party brand problems.
• •Project-Based Politics: Successful abundance leaders like Randy Clark (DC Metro), Scott Wiener (California YIMBY), and Michelle Rhee (DC schools) built careers around sustained reform projects rather than status maintenance. Adrian Fenty lost reelection but left visible infrastructure improvements across DC through risk-taking governance. This approach contrasts with career politicians who accumulate tenure without accomplishments, offering anti-status quo messaging that resonates with voters seeking proof of substantive commitment beyond tested messages.