September 22, 2025

BREAKING THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE IS PROGRESS:

Abundance Liberalism versus Adversarial Legalism (Thomas F. Burke & Jeb Barnes, Fall 2025, National Affairs)

For decades, liberals embraced lawsuits, legal rights, and judicial policymaking as means of driving social change and holding powerful interests to account. But recent years have seen second thoughts proliferate, especially among proponents of abundance liberalism, the movement to unleash the power of both government and the private sector to supply essential goods and services. Abundance liberals from Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to Jennifer Pahlka have embraced law professor Nicholas Bagley’s argument from a 2019 article, “The Procedural Fetish,” that liberal-backed rules intended to make executive-branch policymaking more open, transparent, and accountable have become a major barrier to progressive change.

Bagley’s widely cited article showed how liberals’ unexamined dedication to “proceduralism” has handicapped state capacity. His examples come mostly from his specialty, administrative law, where major new initiatives must run a gauntlet of procedural hurdles, many of them erected by the left, before they can take effect. As Bagley noted, a long tradition of research in law and political science has examined and critiqued the effects of those hurdles, but this work is “absent entirely from the political conversation and relegated to the sidelines of the academic debate.”

We are all Gorsuchian now.