At some point this summer, many of us will have an old, familiar thought: it would really be nice to be in a pool right now. If you don’t have one, you might start considering your options. Buy? Join? While on the face of it these choices may solve for the same outcome, they represent radically different ways of engaging with society. You can order an inflatable swimming pool to your door by tomorrow. You cannot order a public pool. The first is a product. The second is a small piece of civilization.

A public pool requires land, money, builders, engineers, lifeguards, public officials, and a community willing to sponsor it and maintain it. Once it exists, it becomes more than a basin of water. Teenagers take their first summer jobs there. Children learn to swim. Parents meet neighbors they would otherwise never know. Older residents exercise beside young families. For a few months each year, people of different ages and incomes occupy the same place and participate in the same institution.

When the public pool closes, these functions do not simply disappear. Families begin purchasing private substitutes. They buy backyard pools, gym memberships, summer camps, organized lessons, larger homes, and longer car journeys. Those with enough money reconstruct fragments of the lost commons behind private walls. Middle-class households strain to repurchase what was once provided collectively. Poorer households simply lose access.

This is modern America in miniature: extraordinary consumer plenty alongside growing scarcities of affordability, collective agency, and belonging. The country does not suffer from only one form of scarcity, and it will not be renewed through only one form of abundance.

In our Fourth of July essay, we argued that America enters its 250th year in a “moment between moments.” The neoliberal consensus that organized much of American politics for the past half century is fading, but no successor has yet fully taken its place. At the same time, a generational transition, artificial intelligence, geopolitical competition, and collapsing trust are remaking the world faster than our political institutions can respond. Americans feel untethered because the old political story no longer adequately explains the country we inhabit, while the next one remains unwritten.

The emerging abundance movement offers one of the most promising answers to this vacuum. It has correctly identified a central failure of contemporary America: we have become too slow, expensive, and procedurally encumbered to build many of the things a prosperous society requires. We need more housing, energy, infrastructure, scientific innovation, and public institutions capable of translating resources into results. A politics concerned only with regulating or redistributing what already exists will eventually become a politics of permanent conflict over scarcity.

Abundance, at its core, is a rejection of scarcity politics; the notion that our world and what is possible is bound by constraint, thereby fostering tribal attitudes bent towards fighting for our share rather than imagining a world where those constraints might no longer exist. Abundance flips that frame, asking us to imagine what we might do, and what might be possible, if we could have enough?

But abundance, as it is commonly discussed, remains more of a policy correction than a holistic political philosophy. It tells us that America must build again. It is less clear about what all this building is ultimately for, who should help shape the world being built, and what kinds of people and communities that world should cultivate. Economic and technocratic solutions can increase supply, accelerate permitting, and improve government delivery. They cannot by themselves answer the deeper questions now pressing upon the country:

What makes prosperity meaningful? How do people recover a sense of agency over the institutions governing their lives? What binds a pluralistic society together once economic growth and private choice no longer provide a sufficient common purpose?

These questions matter because the crisis America faces is not only a shortage of housing, infrastructure, and energy. It is also a shortage of trust, citizenship, belonging, and confidence in our ability to accomplish anything together. We are a country struggling to translate its immense wealth into broad prosperity and fulfillment, while procedural paralysis, social isolation, and weakened habits of self-government erode faith in the American project.

America must recover its capacity to produce, but production alone cannot supply a governing purpose for the next political era. A nation is not simply an economy, and citizens are not merely consumers waiting for public and private institutions to deliver more efficiently. What we need is a more complete account of abundance, one that treats material prosperity as indispensable, but places it within a larger vision of human flourishing and democratic life. That vision rests on three mutually reinforcing pillars:

Economic abundance: the capacity to build, produce, and broadly provide the material foundations of a good life.

Civic abundance: the capacity of citizens and public institutions to make legitimate decisions, carry them through, and remain accountable for the results.

Social abundance: the presence of durable relationships, associations, shared places, and forms of belonging through which people become responsible for one another.

Our work at Abundant America is organized around the belief that America cannot answer any one of these questions successfully for long without answering the other two. Economic abundance becomes brittle when trust and common institutions collapse. Civic life becomes hollow when government can neither deliver tangible results nor give citizens a sense of consequential participation in how decisions are made to shape those results. Social solidarity becomes nostalgic or exclusionary when it is not supported by material security, individual freedom, and competent institutions.

The challenge of our moment between moments is therefore larger than permitting reform and government efficiency. It is learning to build a society in which prosperity, citizenship, and belonging reinforce one another. That is the gap the three pillars of abundance are intended to fill. The example of the public pool contains the whole framework. Economic abundance determines whether a community can build and operate it. Civic abundance determines whether residents can choose it as a priority, carry that decision through, and hold someone accountable for the result. Social abundance determines whether the finished facility becomes more than a municipal asset, whether it becomes a place where relationships form, responsibilities are assumed, and a community begins to recognize itself.

This essay is the beginning of a series. Over the next several weeks, we will publish separate essays examining economic, civic, and social abundance in greater depth, what has eroded, why it matters, and what rebuilding might require. Together, these pillars may help name experiences many Americans already feel but struggle to describe: why life can seem unaffordable despite material plenty, why politics grows more consuming as citizenship grows thinner, and why unprecedented connectivity has coincided with loneliness and distrust.

We invite you to explore these questions with us as we develop a fuller vision of what an abundant America could become.

We wanted to share a lightly edited version of a speech that Pier LaFarge, one of Abundant America’s co-founders, gave recently to an audience of state legislators, mostly chairs of their respective state’s energy, commerce and technology committees from states across the country.

These are local leaders doing the hard, slow patient work of civic leadership, trying to deliver much needed results for their states and districts. They are often working pragmatically, and across the aisle, far from the partisan shouting match of national politics. They work at ground level, with what I call “grocery store accountability.” These are people who get stopped in grocery aisles, at diners, or walking to and from work by constituents who want to talk to them about a recent or upcoming decision they will make.

As we’ve said many times at Abundant America, one of our simplest and deepest beliefs is that local leaders with place-based accountability make better decisions, more fit to place.

The theme is how we restore trust in the civic processes that decide major projects and how abundance can anchor a politics around American growth that people can see and feel. The speech is about bringing local communities along with that investment and growth, creating pathways for community participation in the wealth of infrastructure build-out.

It also lays out a playbook for local abundance, where starting with outcomes and being more transparent about how proposals deliver those outcomes –- and what trade-offs they represent – can help local leaders, well, lead again, by increasing the trust of their constituents in their process.

My take-away from the evening was that local leaders all over the country feel like they are out there, exposed and on their own. They are taking hard votes that can deliver value for their states, but without much outside support, facing a lot of understandable skepticism and frustration, and above all without a process or a politics that helps them lead their communities through these decisions. Our work at Abundant America is all about making a small start to show up to support local leaders in this work, deliver tangible results at ground level, and restore trust in our politics to build for an abundant American future.

*****

Let me start with a story about a project that is struggling to get built. Not long ago in Minnesota, Xcel Energy and Google announced a deal a lot of us in the industry see as the gold standard for how to get digital infrastructure done. It delivers more than $1 billion in savings for everyone who pays for power in the state.

The deal builds 1 gigawatt of new clean energy and it covers the full cost of the grid upgrades to deliver it. In this deal, Google is paying off-site, front-of-the-meter power to support the grid. They’re building the largest battery in the world by kilowatt-hour, 300MW at 100-hour duration, iron air chemistry, and deploying 200MW of distributed, front of the meter 4hr storage to support the grid’s capacity for the data center.

By the way, the data center uses less water than the local small town golf course. By almost any measure, it is a good deal for the state.

But right now this deal in Minnesota is being delayed by one group’s objection, a group with every right to weigh in, but whose single voice, under the process we’ve built in many states, is enough to stop progress on its own.

One group is empowered to say no through delay and procedure. Each rule that enables that delay may have been written down with good intentions, but with layer after layer we now have a process that sometimes feels like it can result only in paralysis.

I know every one of you has seen some version of this story. In your committees. In your districts. You cast the hard vote, the right vote for your state, and then watch as a handful of angry people turn it into the reason you might lose your next primary.

So tonight, I don’t want to just talk about this one project in Minnesota. I want to talk about why this keeps happening and tell you about the people and organizations who are starting to show up to stand behind you in your states.

Help is on the way. And I want you to walk out of here tonight able to know who to reach out to, and where to find the information and the playbook to help make it easier the next time you’re facing down a tough vote around a big proposed infrastructure decision, whether it’s housing, a mine, grid infrastructure, or digital infrastructure.

First, a little bit about who I am. I’m the CEO and Founder of Sparkfund, a grid services company that deploys batteries and gas gensets to help grow the grid, increase the utilization of the grid we have, and make power cheaper for everyone. I started the company in 2013 when I was 24, and since then have built more than 3,200 energy infrastructure projects around the United States, in 28 states and more than a dozen utility territories.

We’ve put hundreds of megawatts of new grid assets into service, with hundreds more in development.

I’m also the co-founder of Abundant America, started where my wife and I live in Alabama to build a politics of local abundance, help America build again and start with the trust in local leaders who do hard, slow patient work to make those decisions, who know their places and what their community needs, and who have what I call “grocery store accountability” around the decisions they make.

I’m with you tonight to see if I can offer a few ideas and strategies for you to respond to this moment of real challenge and enormous opportunity.

Here’s my diagnosis of why this moment feels so hard politically — and I’ll be quick, because I know you live it every day.

We are in a political moment between moments. The neoliberal order that ran the last half-century is ending; the old consensus no longer holds, and the new one hasn’t been built yet.

A political order is really best defined as a framework of shared agreement — on direction, if not on the details. For nearly half a century, neoliberalism supplied much of the governing logic of American politics. It emerged for good reasons, and was driven largely by conservative principles.

It defended private enterprise against centralized government. It restrained the growth of bureaucracy. It challenged monopolies, protected entrepreneurship, encouraged competition, and restored the legitimacy of markets after an era in which socialism and bureaucratic management appeared to be on an unstoppable advance across the world.

In a real sense, neoliberalism protected the market from ideological barbarians at the gates. That was a historic achievement, one that Democrats and Republicans alike should be able to claim credit for. Competitive capitalism remains the greatest engine of innovation, productivity, wealth creation, and material improvement humanity has discovered. Under that framework, for most of our lifetimes, American politics ran on the shared belief that growth was good. Simple as that.

A new development, a new factory, a new pipeline or transmission line on the map means more jobs, more affordable housing, more tax base, more money for schools and hospitals — a better place to raise your kids. When people believe that intuitively, you can lead with the proposal and then explain the benefits later. Today, in an era of lower trust, that approach needs to change.

Today, according to Gallup’s 2025 survey, only 54 percent of Americans expressed a positive view of capitalism, down from 60 percent in 2021. Thirty-nine percent expressed a positive view of socialism. Among Democrats, support for capitalism fell to 42 percent — the first time Gallup found that fewer than half of Democrats viewed it positively.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe about this moment: the real divide in our politics isn’t just left versus right anymore. It’s between people who want to build things and people who want nothing built.

That dividing line runs through both parties now, but the people who still want to build are the ones sitting in this room. You are the local leaders who take the time to listen, to speak plainly, and see more agreement than meets the eye even in a moment of loud debate.

Let’s be clear: people aren’t loudly opposing projects because they are studying the details and finding them wanting. By the time the opposition forms, the facts barely matter.

So what eroded the trust that growth was always good?

In my view, it’s about Americans’ intuitive sense that despite historic spending, we just aren’t seeing results at the ground level. Because we’ve made it so hard to build anything, with too much procedure and process, we’ve lost trust in our shared institutions.

The local resistance you’re seeing — whether it’s over housing, mining, the grid, a data center — is downstream of that. It’s never really about the project. It’s about the trust that went missing long before the project was ever proposed.

So the question I came to help answer is this: what can you do to restore that trust and navigate this moment of anger and frustration?

Let me offer one idea about a different way to approach the moment we’re in.

When trust is high, you can lead with the proposal and sort out the benefits as you go. That’s the shared agreement on direction that carried us through the last fifty years.

When trust is low — like where we are now — one possible strategy is to flip the process and start with the outcomes, gathering real input in advance from your constituents on what they actually want to see happen. If Americans lack trust in the process because it failed to deliver outcomes, starting with agreement on what outcomes you as a leader think are achievable and building agreement around those may be able to lower the temperature.

Under an outcomes-first approach, you would start by holding meetings with your constituents. You would ask: what results can we achieve together here? Not “here’s what’s coming, please line up at the microphone and hold your objections to two minutes.” Instead ask: what would make this place unmistakably better? What would make the town a nicer place to live? A better place to raise a family? How can we capture economic, civic and social abundance for our places?

You already know what you’ll hear, because you hear it in your districts every day. People want lower property taxes. They want cheaper electricity, cheaper groceries, more jobs, and more investment where they live.

Everyone agrees on the wants in the abstract. But the moment a want becomes a real project, with a name and an address and a site plan, people find their reasons to oppose it. That’s the gap starting with outcomes helps close: connecting what people want with what it actually takes to get it. Lower property taxes require a new tax base.

Cheaper power and utility bills require people to buy more electricity, delivered through investments in new generation, transmission and storage capacity. The key is to start with the outcomes, start with what people want, and then commit to measure proposals by how well they deliver them.

And in a moment of enormous potential investment in new infrastructure, with huge amounts of capital looking to come home to your districts, make the goals audacious.

How much new development would it take to offset the property-tax bill of every family in the county? How much new tax base would it take to double the budget of the local school? Or build a new county athletic center?

You take input, hold meetings, curate the results and write those outcomes down. You publish them. And then you measure every proposal against them — with the tradeoffs and the downsides spelled out, right in the open. Use AI to build a simple tool so your constituents can see for themselves what each proposal delivers against those goals. What’s in it for them?

And timing is everything. “We can lower you and your neighbors’ taxes by $400 a year” is a promise to work toward if you say it before the project has a name — and it’s spin if you say it after the fight has started. So say it first. Make the case for what growth delivers before there’s a boogeyman to attach it to, and lay out those benefits in clear, achievable goals you commit to work towards on their behalf.

The surest way to rebuild trust is to let the community share in the wealth that infrastructure creates — in a way they can see, and touch, and count on.

That’s the whole idea behind what a lot of us are building now: to measure our shared politics by the quality of the results we deliver for people — and to be able to reject the politics of scarcity and decline. To have the language to call out scarcity politics when we see it.

You could think about this as a playbook for local abundance.

That movement is all about working to help America build for their communities again, bring our communities along as we grow, and rebuild trust in the civic process. Groups like Abundant America that are organizing to show up in your states, in your rate cases, your town halls, your committee hearings, on your side of the argument.

So the next time you cast the hard vote, you are not the only voice in the room defending it.

You haven’t been out on that limb because you were wrong. You’ve been out there because, until recently, nobody was taking the time to build the balancing voice that shows up at the town hall and stands behind you. We’re starting to build it now.

Let me leave you with what this all looks like when it works. I opened with a project that’s struggling to get built. I want to close with something that is getting built — approved through a robust civic process and a historic 5-0 vote at the Minnesota Public Utility Commission. Sparkfund is deploying 200 megawatts of new battery storage capacity in Minnesota through our Distributed Capacity Procurement model.

We work as a partner to utilities and work alongside unions to deploy batteries and gas gensets. We build competitive ecosystems of contractors, civil, mechanical, and electrical to bid into the construction work, creating local jobs.

In Minnesota, we’re competitively bidding 80% of the procurement, ensuring that each deployment constantly benefits from market competitive price discovery, lowering costs to customers, activating the local economy, and increasing the value to the grid. We site the batteries in parking lots and unused land, paying the owner to host them.

Our first host is a Baptist church that sits in an opportunity zone. We are working directly with the church pastor and its community to build real grid infrastructure that they will see and feel the benefits of.

We’re putting a 3-megawatt battery on that church’s property. This is a small piece of exactly the kind of infrastructure the grid needs to serve all that new demand we know is coming but keep fighting about.

Here’s what that battery means for the congregation: a predictable annuity of thousands of dollars a month. Every month. For the next twenty years.

That’s money that doesn’t come from a collection plate or a grant application or a government program — it comes from a piece of American infrastructure sitting right there in the neighborhood, sharing wealth with the people who live where it’s getting built.

The local pastor didn’t bring it to the church board because of the battery or the needs of the grid. They said yes because it funds two decades of community work — Sunday school, after-school programs, meals on the table, whatever the mission calls for, whatever their church board and church community decides.

That’s what it looks like when the wealth of what we build comes home, in a way people can see and trust. Not a lecture about growth. Not a fact sheet. A battery, a church, a pastor, and a check that shows up every month for twenty years.

Simple, intuitive stories we can tell and people will understand.

We are in a moment between political moments. It’s chaotic, tumultuous, and often frustrating. Whatever new framework of shared agreement that will define the next chapter hasn’t been built yet, and there are rough seas ahead.

But that’s the work — and you are already doing it, with too few resources, and lately at real political cost. I came to tell you that people are noticing.

We are stepping up to help. A movement is starting to show up in those town halls, to give you cover and support, and thanks for the work. If we do it right, you won’t be out on a limb alone.

Starting with outcomes and measuring proposals against it can start the hard, slow, patient work of restoring trust in the institutions and civic process that weigh trade offs and make decisions to move communities forward.

It’s time to build again here in America — and to make sure our communities understand that they’ll be better for it.

Thank you.

America’s milestone birthday arrives at a tense moment in our nation’s history. We have endured as a nation for 250 years, and during that time transformed from a colonial backwater, to scrappy upstart, to a dominant hegemon shaping the world around us.

Yet as we stand to celebrate our nation’s first quarter millennium, we find ourselves at a political crossroads: a political “moment between moments.” The neoliberal consensus that guided American politics for the past half century is fading, and we are understandably divided as a nation about what should come next; which path to take, what defines us, and how to understand the problems and opportunities we face across so many arenas of our national life.

Neoliberalism was not merely an economic program, it became a theory of citizenship, a way to understand the direction and limits of our obligation to the nation and to each other. It did not simply change economic policy; it changed the American self.

Against this backdrop, today we are also navigating the largest generational transition in our nation’s history, as the Boomer generation begins to depart from the workforce. In parallel, a series of technological upheavals dominated by social media and artificial intelligence are already changing how we live and work. The formation of a new multi-polar world order and a changing climate further exacerbate risk and unknowns.

Americans feel untethered, and with reason. Sharpened partisan politics and too few tangible results — despite historic spending — have left many of us questioning the institutions that have held our nation together for a quarter millenium, searching for new political stories and ideas to fill the vacuum.

How we understand and face this moment will determine everything about the 250 years to come.

—

“The great advantage of the Americans consists in their being able to commit faults which they may afterwards repair.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

—

The United States has been, by many measures, the most successful nation in modern history. Our constitution has endured through cycles of the nation’s turmoil and self-repair, watched as other nations have been made and unmade, and provided the foundation for the Western liberal order. We crafted our own brand of liberalism rooted in radical Enlightenment principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and buttressed by a hard won skepticism of centralized power and distant control.

As a nation of dynamic, sometimes brutal pioneers, we have learned how to turn multi-cultural diversity and competition into innovation and wealth, and through that American alchemy invented much of the modern world, from the telegraph to the telephone, airplanes, the electric grid, the radio, the assembly line, plastics, the electric motor (partial credit), television, the micro-chip, mobile telecommunication, GPS, personal computers, smart phones, and the internet.

We live on an abundant continent settled by determined and innovative pioneers who walked here, sailed here, or were carried here and survived, bringing with them the hunger, ambition, and creative exuberance rooted in the many histories that propelled them outward in the first place.

Perhaps most importantly, we have learned to strive together; to self-renovate, to question and update and expand the boundaries of Americanism. We have worked to expand the franchise of citizenship to include the full breadth of the teeming masses who found their way to our shores, and to incorporate them, searchingly, haltingly, and imperfectly, into an ever more perfect union. We are a place where people can practice, live, speak how they want with far more freedom than nearly any place on the planet; where it’s easy to start a business, where almost anyone can make it rich.

We are far from perfect, but acknowledging our flaws requires also acknowledging that as a nation we have strived to confront our imperfections and in that shared purpose managed to progress ever closer toward a more perfect union, guided by the aspirations set down in our constitution.

—

“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life… in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.”

— Ronald Reagan

—

Still our current moment reflects a sense of dislocation; at times it feels we are failing to serve the ideals of our nation’s founding and struggling to create a country in which our unquestioned wealth translates into prosperity and fulfillment for all Americans.

Building was once our great strength. Today, centralized bureaucracy, process and well-intentioned rules increasingly take priority over a government that delivers outcomes. We’ve layered rules until many processes can result only in paralysis, and despite historic levels of Federal spending we have what often feel like historically disappointing results at ground level.

We’ve learned to start legal battles to stall building nearly anything, putting lawyers at the heart of our national ambition instead of engineers, entrepreneurs and civic leaders. As a result, we struggle to construct the infrastructure we desperately need to meet the needs of our citizens and compete in a newly multi-polar world, from housing, to transmission lines, data centers, factories, mines, and supply chains. This despite widespread, bipartisan recognition of the problem, the need and the opportunity,

Under the neoliberal order, we cultivated an economy, culture, and politics that put wealth creation above everything else, elevating markets and financialization as the sole mechanism to determine the good. In doing so, we hollowed out regions, disregarded where things were made, and put all our focus and status celebration on the skillsets of centralization, financialization, legalism, and bureaucracy.

Our perspective of what matters to ensure our prosperity and power as a nation flattened, overlooking the dignity and contribution of those who contribute in other ways, through the trades, through working the land, through building and manufacturing and producing the physical goods that make our nation run.

—

Most critically however, is how we’ve come to understand our role as citizens. As a people, we have forgotten that citizenship demands sacrifice met with a sense of rooted obligation to community and place. Moreover, we have forgotten that disagreement is a natural and necessary part of the democratic process.

Our Constitution emerged not from calm philosophical consensus, but from a country struggling to govern citizens who were angry about taxes, debt, currency, courts, and distant authority. The founders were not designing institutions for angels. They were trying to contain democratic turbulence without extinguishing democratic energy. Democracy is messy and imperfect, it requires frameworks for civic debate and the ability to make hard decisions that not everyone agrees with.

Democracy depends not just on laws and procedures, but on habits of association, responsibility, self-command, family of all kinds, and civic participation. A republic cannot be sustained by consumers alone. A broad, holistic and durable politics of abundance answers this in three ways:

Economic abundance reduces the desperation that makes civic life untenable. When individuals and families cannot afford homes, childcare, healthcare, transportation, or stable communities, they become trapped in a race for private survival. Scarcity makes people anxious, competitive, transient, tribal and zero-sum. Abundance creates the material room for rootedness, generosity, and public participation.

Civic abundance gives people agency instead of spectatorship. Early liberal thinkers, like Tocqueville, admired American local government because it taught citizens how to govern by making them do it. A renewed culture of civic abundance should revive that habit: local leaders, mayors, churches, nonprofits, schools, neighborhood groups, business owners, and citizens defining needed outcomes and working to deliver tangible results together. People learn citizenship not by being lectured about democracy or presented with facts, but by practicing responsibility in common projects and delivering tangible results to improve their communities.

Social abundance seeks to rebuild the institutions that form citizens and give connection and purpose to our lives. Families, churches and faith institutions, schools, unions, clubs, civic associations, sports leagues, libraries, public squares, and local newspapers are not decorative. They are where people learn duty, trust, awe, humility, compromise, and belonging. Holistic abundance should include concern for increasing the supply of these formative settings, not only increasing GDP.

America needs a politics that keeps liberalism’s commitment to freedom, growth, and innovation but restores the preconditions of that freedom.

—

“America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, imagination, and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.”

— Harry S Truman

—

The fruits of the neoliberal world order we inherit leave us much to be thankful for. That order produced real wealth, groundbreaking technology, and sustained dynamism; it lifted billions out of poverty globally, and no serious account of our era should deny its material achievements.

But the politics and culture of neoliberalism thinned our idea of citizenship; it left us richer in private optionality and material goods but poorer in public capacity and community connection.

The crisis of American life today is therefore not simply that government cannot deliver or that politics has become ugly. It is that the moral ecology beneath self-government has been depleted.

What comes next must be more than a policy agenda. It must be a new account of American freedom: freedom not as escape from responsibility, but as the capacity to build, belong, govern, steward, and transmit to the future through shared purpose. It must be rooted in the conviction that our best days are ahead of us, and that the wealth of that possibility will be available to all those who strive for it.

At the core of the American story, individual accountability and responsibility have been the drivers of prosperity, and when individuals drive productivity and innovation, engage in civic affairs, and ensure their communities are healthy, Americans have proven time and again that we can build an abundant nation from the ground up.

There are local leaders in every American place who know what their communities need, who see more agreement than meets the eye in a moment of loud debate and deep partisan disagreement, who can listen well and speak plainly, and who have the trust and “grocery store” accountability to move their communities forward. That’s where we must begin.

On the eve of our 250th birthday, we must restore faith that America can build again and deliver for its people, on the ground level where we are best positioned to act. This means rebalancing where we spend resources and make decisions downwards toward the local level.

Building trust and context at the local level is a critical end unto itself, but it is also a means; when American see tangible results at the ground level we will begin to restore trust in our institutions, rebuild the muscle memory of shared purpose, and perhaps even unlock our ability to do great things together to confront the multi-generational challenges of our day. To be successful, we must fall back in love with civic engagement, and build a politics that insists on delivering those results.

In doing so we must focus our work and our resources on the concerns of economic abundance, but also across the social and civic arenas with equal vigor to combat isolation and build strong communities that understand and care for each other. We must reclaim our citizenship and understand its meaning and purpose.

Our work at Abundant America is one small step in that direction, one part of a broader and growing movement. We hope to contribute to a future politics rooted in abundance, a politics that rejects scarcity and decline, and measures our shared politics by the quality of the results we create for our citizens.

The first draft plan for local abundance, focused on Alabama, hopes to create a framework to talk about where we can deliver needed, broadly agreed upon but undelivered outcomes. It provides the beginning of a framework to spend our resources more effectively, by spending them closer to home.

It is offered as a reminder of the many things that are going well, the progress we’ve made together over 250 creative, difficult, and tumultuous years of our history, and a resource for decision makers to remind us that our shared politics can once again deliver for Americans on the ground level.

If neoliberalism made Americans placeless consumers, then a holistic, locally anchored politics of abundance may have a chance to rebuild the places in which people practice citizenship. A broad shouldered politics of American abundance would treat markets as tools, not masters; institutions as formative, not merely administrative; technology as subordinate to human flourishing; and citizens as builders of a common world rather than consumers of private optionality alone.

80 years ago today, a dying President wanted us to find the answer to living better together.

Franklin Roosevelt’s message to the American people was prepared on the morning of April 12, 1945, which happened to be the day of his death. It was to be delivered by radio the following evening. In it, FDR underscored the challenge facing a world on the cusp of transformation:

“Today, science has brought all the different quarters of the globe so close together that it is impossible to isolate them one from another.

Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.”

With the end of World War II in sight, and progress towards the atomic bomb in the corner of his eye, Roosevelt recognized the lopsided trajectory of human progress. Advances in the hard sciences had soared, while the social sciences and humanities remained comparatively underdeveloped, ill-equipped to foster the unity required for a peaceful postwar world.

Yet, despite this prescient warning, eight decades later, America’s divisions are as deep as they have been since the Civil War. Trust in institutions and in each other have reached historic lows, with similar trends visible across Western democracies. The ability to “live together and work together,” both locally and globally, has eroded. Political polarization is ever intensifying while loneliness, hopelessness, and mental health challenges are on the rise.

The timing to address these challenges is pressing. As the era of neoliberalism as a dominant political story winds down, the Western world finds itself in a chaotic transition between political projects. At the same time, we are becoming increasingly atomized, with declining shared experiences, values, and goals. The urgency is clear: we are losing our sense of a common reality at a time when we face an increasingly multi-polar and interconnected world. Something will inevitably fill the void left by neoliberalism—the question is what? We cannot afford a resurrection of disproven philosophies, least of all the old demons of authoritarianism. As our technological capacities expand, we must ensure our moral and ethical frameworks evolve alongside them in support of a just, empathetic, curious, and irrevocably pluralistic world.

Thankfully, we are not helpless. Unlike in the 1940s, we now possess a vast but fragmented body of research spanning evolutionary biology, sociology, cognitive science, behavioral economics and more. This knowledge gives us the tools to advance the science of human relationships. However, it also reveals a paradox: access to ample truthful information alone rarely changes minds or inspires action.

It is in our nature. Humans are highly social and emotional creatures, with the rational part of the mind often working to justify and excuse the larger emotive portion of the brain. This is compounded by our innate cognitive biases (e.g. negativity bias, instant gratification bias, etc.) , which distort our perception of reality and impede clear thinking. Perhaps the most consequential is in-group bias: our tendency to form tribes and defend them, often at the expense of truth or even self-interest. This bias, while crucial to human survival in early history, now fuels polarization and makes it difficult to bridge divides in modern, high-velocity and interconnected pluralistic societies.

Why is all this important? To make progress on the science of human relationships we need to know ourselves and how we function in and as a group. Take for example the famous “Robbers Cave” study. Two randomly assigned groups of boys, the Rattlers and the Eagles, devolved from friendly rivalry into open hostility over the course of the study. This polarization, born of arbitrary labels, is a concise example that reveals the power of group loyalty and the difficulty of reversing it once entrenched. Psychologists call this identity-protective cognition: we align our beliefs with our group to avoid social alienation, often at the expense of objective evidence. Once formed, those strong group aligned beliefs “lock in”, and individuals use their intelligence to defend those entrenched, group supported beliefs at significant costs.

In these in-groups, our individual needs for belonging, recognition, and status find expression—yet the specific “markers” for these needs vary from one social context to the next. Beyond such social perks, there’s also a deeper drive at play: the longing for a lasting external legacy. Our awareness of mortality compels us to seek forms of symbolic immortality—hence why some individuals continue collecting wealth, status and achievements long after amassing several lifetimes worth of resources. (Becker, 1997)

Yet recognition, status, and how we confront the fear of our finite time are not mere end goals. When aligned with purpose, it anchors us in a network of meaning further fueling us to strive, lead, or innovate. Time and again, research has shown that a robust sense of meaning and purpose is central to our well-being, our decision making, boosting life satisfaction and resilience. Meaning also shapes how we see ourselves and our relationships with others. Crucially, though, the drive for meaning and purpose can manifest in either constructive or destructive ways: it can foster positive feedback loops that enrich the wider community or fuel divisive in-group rivalries. Which path we take largely depends on the broader public culture in which these motivations unfold.

Public culture encompasses the shared attitudes, values, goals, practices, and narratives that bind a society—shaping and channeling our biases, motivators, and psychosomatic drives. Public culture impacts institutions and information flows, which as Yuval Noah Harari points out in his recent book Nexus, influence how order inducing myths often seem set against potentially fractious truth telling. Or as Bertrand Russell put it, “Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers; ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible.”

In practical terms, public culture determines a group’s ability to solve problems, forcing a perpetual negotiation between I and we. Historically, much of this has happened through trial and error. Today, we do not have to rely solely on superstition or blind chance when refining our cultural practices. Instead, we can adopt and elevate inclusive, non-coercive, and evidence-based approaches to maximize collective well-being. Choosing not to intervene is itself a decision: the socioeconomic dynamics around us continually shape cultural evolution, whether we do so consciously or let random forces take the helm.

The last major “cultural update” in American society occurred during the late 1960s, a period of seismic change that brought both progress and setbacks. On the positive side, this era made American society more just and equitable, broadening the in-group to include previously marginalized communities. But this update ended with considerable baggage as it formed through a series of chaotic and disorienting events that shook the nation both individually and collectively: the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, Watergate, high-profile assassinations, stagflation, oil crises, and the onset of deindustrialization all converged in a short span.

During this period, labor trends and new technologies like television eroded associational life, isolating individuals from the community networks that once fostered social trust. Meanwhile, academic trends such as poststructuralism, free market orthodoxy, and critical theory gained influence. GDP growth alone has failed to deliver widespread happiness or social harmony; instead, the nation grapples with rising populist movements, deepening resentments, escalating polarization, and alarming "deaths of despair" linked to substance abuse and suicide.

The price of astonishing economic growth driven by globalization and financialization has been paid in the currency of rootlessness, with weakened local identities and hollowed-out communities, particularly in regions impacted by deindustrialization. American economic dignity, once anchored in meaningful, productive work and a sense of belonging, has eroded as stable local employment gives way to precarious jobs, hypermobility, social isolation, and a sense of cultural displacement. Even families objectively wealthier than previous generations frequently feel poorer, measuring their well-being not in absolute terms but through comparison to half remembered conditions and unmet expectations of betterment. The loss of status, community cohesion, and personal purpose is becoming painfully apparent, fueling resentment, alienation, and mistrust. Millions are left grappling with the unsettling sense that they have been overlooked, discarded, or betrayed by the very system that promised them prosperity.

The result over the following decades was a sharp decline in social capital and institutional trust, spreading pessimism and cynicism as the public increasingly lost faith in government, media, and other key pillars of civic life. This erosion of trust laid the groundwork for today’s fractured and tension-filled public culture in America. Despite ongoing efforts to adapt or progress, we remain trapped in the fallout from that tumultuous era, deepening our divisions if left unresolved. Consider, for example, the problematic poles of our current political economy: we are torn between unbounded market forces and an overly centralized professional-services state. Left unchecked, market logic commodifies all aspects of life—reshaping everything from news to sports according to its values. Conversely, top down state interventions erode local autonomy and civic capacity while diminishing individual virtue. These twin forces feed off each other jointly shaping the culture that surrounds us.

Today, our shared public culture is best characterized by a sort of nascent nihilism. As sociologist James Davison Hunter points out, while outright nihilism is rare on a personal level, it has come to dominate our public political culture. This nihilism thrives on resentment and fragmentation, where competing narratives and ideologies dominate, leaving little room for consensus or collective purpose. Ethical coherence has given way to relativism. Media and technological evolution have exacerbated this dynamic, amplifying misinformation and algorithmically streaming countless opportunistic voices across every ideological niche, often in self reinforcing and self selecting echo chambers, magnifying their negative effects. Discourse is often reduced to performative outrage and zero-sum struggles, fostering alienation and tribally anchored outrage more often than meaningful engagement or constructive civic discourse.

This cultural nihilism reflects a deeper despair—a collective loss of hope for a shared future. Politics and public life no longer function as honorable and status conferring vehicles for solving shared challenges; instead, they serve as battlegrounds for entrenched divisions. Many institutions today are no longer constructively formative; they have become stages for performative individualism. Tangible policy failures compound despair. Tasks that once symbolized American ingenuity—building housing, renewing infrastructure, or executing mega-projects—now seem insurmountably complex. These systemic failures feed cynicism, reinforcing the very nihilism that stymies collective action. According to Gallup, only 28% of Americans are satisfied with the way democracy is working in the U.S. Similarly, Pew Research Center reports that only 57% of Americans view capitalism favorably, with just 40% of those aged 18 to 29 holding a positive view of the system.To steer away from this collision course, we must take seriously the science of human relationships and update our socio-cultural code. We must build new stories, and restore our belief in the ability to work together to better our society and our nation.

Where do we start? Breaking through the pervasive cynicism and restoring a positive, constructive public culture begins with the need for clear, accessible framing—something authentic to our time. Beginning with an “abundance mindset” offers a way forward. Unlike a scarcity mindset, which is rooted in fear and zero-sum thinking, an abundance mindset emphasizes possibility, collaboration, and growth. By framing challenges in terms of potential and cooperation, we can encourage people to shed fatalistic excuses and victimhood narratives, avoid zero sum thinking and politics based in fear and scarcity, and instead open the door to collective action. Emerging policy critiques and early seeds of a cohesive political story around abundance are already gaining traction across diverse ideological groups and across multiple regions with unique local conditions.

However, framing alone will not suffice. Beneath any “big tent” vision must lie a robust framework capable of earning widespread support. Fortunately, we do not have to start from scratch. Civic Republicanism—the philosophy that shaped America’s founding—offers a natural starting point. This deep philosophical tradition emphasizes active citizenship, collective freedom, and the pursuit of the common good through engaged public life. At its heart lies a commitment to human flourishing, the belief that individuals and communities thrive best when they work together toward shared goals.

The insights of modern thinkers such as Charles Taylor, Iseult Honohan, Michael Sandel, Hannah Arendt, Philip Pettit, and Cass Sunstein have been instrumental in revitalizing and reinterpreting the philosophy. This framework updated for modern times emphasizes collaboration, local civic engagement, economic growth, shared purpose, founded in the belief that we have everything we need to succeed.

Building on the core principles of civic republicanism towards a broader politics of abundance shows promise. It calls for a politics that is not only materially generative but morally grounded and socially cohesive—a society rich not merely in single-use goods, but in communal trust, shared purpose, and enduring prosperity.

Unlike today's fragmented public discourse, which often appears amoral, materialistic, secularizing, non-teleological, and reductive (all corrosive to solidarity), an abundance framing undergirded with the philosophical tenets of civic republicanism presents an alternative that is holistic and stabilizing. Most importantly, it builds on humans’ social and psychological drives: belonging to groups, seeking recognition and status, and working toward a lasting legacy by doing great things together, infused by a sense of possibility. By channeling these drives into civic participation and leadership, individuals gain respect through their contributions to the common good while finding a deeper sense of purpose. Abundance, understood in this deeper sense, transcends mere material concerns, encompassing the whole person—nurturing inner fulfillment as much as outward prosperity.

The abundance approach, when fused with modern civic republicanism, may offer parts of what is needed for a revitalized, meaningful politics. This Abundance Politics begins with an invitation to reimagine the future as one in which we can all thrive and a “civic ownership conversation,” encouraging citizens to act as co-authors of the world they live in. It emphasizes that societal transformation will not happen overnight, and instead advocates for “practicing democracy by doing.” It is not enough to passively follow national politics through news feeds. True citizenship requires active engagement, starting with local communities and radiating outward.

Civic republicanism offers several core tenets relevant to a future politics of abundance:

• First, it seeks freedom from domination by safeguarding citizens' autonomy against economic, military, and political coercion, ensuring they remain free from arbitrary interference and have a genuine voice in decisions that shape their lives. This is particularly relevant in the face of economic consolidation and the predatory arrangements concentration enables.

• Second, it aims to rebalance the roles of citizen and consumer. Deindustrialization has devastated many American communities, leaving behind economic instability and broken social networks. It seeks to rebuild these foundations by ensuring the market serves as a means to human flourishing, rather than an end in itself. Strong families and communities are essential for a healthy republic which is needed for a durable economy.

• Third, decentralization and subsidiarity empower communities to address challenges at the most capable immediate level, restoring faith in our ability to do great things together, create dignity and agency in shaping our communities, and foster an antifragile system capable of resisting institutional corruption through local accountability in context.

• Fourth, it calls for multi-generational projects across areas like energy, infrastructure, basic science, associational life, health and well-being, seeking not only to solve pressing problems but also to inspire enduring solidarity and collaboration among successive generations.

The good life under contemporary civic republicanism is being free to co-create collective flourishing, grounded in the recognition that fulfillment arises in the relational spaces between individuals—in community, shared purpose, and mutual commitment. It integrates self-governance, virtue ethics, and the pursuit of the common good through democratic institution-building, emphasizing the cultivated practice of balancing individual autonomy with shared obligations, all within the sustaining moral ecology of a just and participatory republic. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, democracy “trickles up” rather than “trickles down.” In his study of New England’s local governments, he found that frequent elections and numerous offices at the town level functioned as laboratories for democratic practice. Citizens developed democratic habits by participating in governance and witnessing tangible results in their communities. Tocqueville worried that centralization would erode these laboratories, leaving citizens disconnected from political life and vulnerable to feelings of powerlessness.

This erosion is evident today. A cultural landscape unmoored from historical continuity or future vision has left many people feeling alienated. Some retreat into narrow tribal associations, while others disengage altogether. How many of us can name just one of our city or county representatives? We have lost our civic muscle and sense of agency.

To help address this, modern civic republicanism advocates for participatory initiatives that encourage active civic engagement. These could include community-based decision-making platforms; increased financial support for local governance; and policies that encourage civic and cultural participation. By actively involving citizens in decision-making and giving them stakes in the community outcomes, Abundance Politics aims to restore a sense of agency, dignity, and belonging among individuals, allowing democracy and civic engagement to “trickle up.” The benefits of this approach are manifold. When citizens engage at the local level, they can build broader, more stable definitions of “we” thus hacking the in-group bias in a positive way. Additionally, genuine interactions at the local level can counteract the high-velocity, siloed information streams prevalent today by providing personal experiences that challenge conspiracy theories and outrage generators.

Modern civic republicanism framed by abundance is not a nostalgic return to the past but a forward-looking blueprint for revitalizing democratic life and recasting the role of government. Encouraging people to engage and rebuild civic muscle does not require heavy-handed or coercive policies. Abundance Politics envisions “seedbeds” for civic renewal in governance, education, social policy, and media. For example, schools could incorporate interdisciplinary civic education emphasizing practical project based learning in the community, while local governments could experiment with new models of convening citizens and offering participatory budgeting to give residents a direct say in how public funds are used.

These ideas are not abstractions; they echo the foundational civic spirit that once animated American public life. In the decades since Franklin Roosevelt’s unspoken speech, America has drifted from the civic character that once made it a beacon of hope: a society of citizens grounded in practical wisdom, guided by virtue, and actively engaged in the betterment of their communities. As we confront this moment between moments, we must pull back from the urge to see ourselves as victims. It is in our DNA to chart our own destinies, propelled by the freedoms secured through the hard work of each generation.

Once a society achieves general material prosperity, it has even more opportunity to focus on what makes life meaningful—rich relationships and the fulfillment that comes from improving the common good. Yet it also risks that we begin to take the institutions - and the work it takes to uphold them - for granted. With our success as a nation we became fixated on blind consumerism and shallow, identity-based divisions. We outsourced the maintenance of our republic to others who, shaped by the same shallow cultural well, lacked the moral compass to sustain our institutions. We have in turn watched as these institutions have begun to fail, becoming predatory in the process.

Charting a new path is possible. The United States is uniquely positioned to pioneer a new political project that can rise to the local, national and global challenges of our present day. There are ample resources, talent, connections, and opportunities on this great continent. To regain our footing in the modern era, we need a unified purpose that can be arrived at according to the dictates of each individual - to make America the model country for human flourishing. Solidarity must come from an updated socio-cultural code that embraces pluralism but provides constructive cultural outlooks and channels. This cannot be top down. We have to rebuild our local communities side to side and from the ground upwards. We must look our shared humanity in the eyes and learn to be citizens again, both for ourselves and for each other.

References

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