The 2028 Progressive Agenda:
Abundance + Equity

This is a problem. And it's solvable. But solving it requires the progressive movement to do something uncomfortable: fully embrace artificial intelligence as the most powerful engine of abundance in the history of humankind, while simultaneously demanding — with real teeth — that the abundance it creates is equitably shared.

Picture a simple framework. The vertical axis is commitment to an abundance agenda — the willingness to build aggressively, to invest in infrastructure, energy, technology, and the systems that generate prosperity. The horizontal axis is commitment to equity — the insistence that prosperity is distributed fairly, that healthcare is universal, that rights are protected, that taxation is progressive, that the economy works for everyone.

Now place the major political factions.

Top left — the Republican right. In theory, this is the party of free markets and deregulation, the party that believes unleashing private enterprise generates abundance for all. It's a coherent argument, and in certain eras it's produced real results. But the current Republican Party has largely abandoned it in practice. MAGA-era conservatism is protectionist, hostile to immigration that fuels labor markets, indifferent to infrastructure, and willing to impose tariffs that are literally policies of chosen scarcity — the average effective tariff rate hit 7.7% in 2025, the highest since 1947, amounting to roughly $1,500 in additional costs per American household.¹ The free market rhetoric remains, but the execution has devolved into protecting incumbent interests and consolidating existing power. And on equity, there is no pretense — redistribution is a dirty word, healthcare is a market commodity, and human rights are negotiable when politically convenient. This is the natural evolution of free market ideology without a commitment to equity — the pursuit of abundance, untethered from any obligation to share it, doesn't generate broad prosperity. It concentrates power among those who already have it, with increasing isolationism.

Bottom right — the progressive left, today. This is where the moral clarity lives. Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, Talarico — these are leaders willing to take genuine stands on wealth inequality, healthcare, labor rights, LGBTQ+ protections, and the structural injustices that define American life. The progressive movement's commitment to equity is real and it matters. But here's the problem: on abundance, the progressive left is increasingly positioning itself as an obstacle. When leaders call for pausing all data center construction until environmental impact studies are complete — as Sanders and AOC did with the AI Data Center Moratorium Act in March 2026² — they aren't protecting the future — they're ceding it. When the instinct toward new technology is suspicion first and engagement second, the movement undermines its own goals. You cannot redistribute prosperity you refuse to generate. Equity rhetoric without a credible engine of abundance isn't just strategically weak. It's a form of theater — morally serious in tone, practically incapable of delivering the world it promises. This is the natural evolution of moral courage without levers of action. Without a commitment to abundance, the fight for equity becomes a fight over a shrinking pie.

Bottom left — the soft center of the Democratic Party. This is the Newsom, Shapiro, Schumer, Ken Martin wing. They poll-test their way to positions that offend no one and inspire no one. They are not building an abundance agenda — they have no serious theory of how to generate transformative prosperity. And they are not fighting for equity with any real conviction — they triangulate on healthcare, means-test their way out of universal programs, and treat progressive taxation as something to gesture toward in campaigns and quietly shelve in governance. Their function in the party is management, not leadership. They manage decline politely.

Top right — the empty quadrant. High commitment to abundance. High commitment to equity. The willingness to build aggressively and the insistence that what gets built serves everyone. This quadrant is empty. Nobody in American politics is credibly occupying it. And it is exactly where the progressive movement should plant its flag.

The argument is not that equity matters and AI can help achieve it. That framing subordinates technology to politics and misses the point.

The argument is that progressives need two co-equal commitments:

A technology that doesn't just accelerate how we do things but fundamentally reimagines what is possible. Within one to two years, we should be building across every layer of infrastructure — energy, housing, transportation, healthcare, digital systems — at ten times our current scale. In software, drug discovery, materials science, and logistics, this kind of acceleration is already happening — the first drug with both target and molecule designed entirely by AI completed Phase IIa trials in 2025,³ and AI-driven materials discovery is compressing timelines from decades to months.⁴ In energy, housing, healthcare, and public infrastructure, it is becoming possible fast. Pair political will with a technology whose capabilities compound on themselves, and scarcity becomes a choice. Accepting that choice is a moral failure.

Ezra Klein made this case powerfully — that America has forgotten how to build, that progressives in particular have become associated with restriction and process rather than creation and results.¹¹ He's right. But Klein was writing as a journalist describing a framework. The political question is: who owns it?

Progressives should. The right talks about building but delivers protectionism. The soft center talks about pragmatism but delivers stagnation. Progressives have the moral architecture to ensure abundance actually serves people. But they will forfeit that opportunity entirely if they continue to treat AI as something to be feared, paused, and regulated into irrelevance.

People are born into vastly different circumstances. Some barriers are natural — disability, geography, the accident of being born into poverty. Others are constructed — laws and systems that limit access for people of color, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and countless other communities. These barriers produce a world of profoundly unequal access to resources, wealth, healthcare, education, and opportunity. That inequality is not an abstraction. It is people dying of treatable diseases. It is children whose potential is wasted before they turn ten. It is entire populations locked out of prosperity that others take for granted.

Equity is the moral imperative to change that — not by redistributing wealth after it concentrates, but by designing the systems that determine where prosperity flows in the first place. Tax policy, healthcare access, education funding, labor protections, civil rights law — these aren't afterthoughts or handouts. They are the architecture that determines whether an abundance agenda lifts everyone or just the people already at the top.

Each of these is a structural choice about how prosperity moves through a society — and without them, it doesn't move far.

The libertarian says: generate abundance, and the market will sort it out. History says otherwise. Without deliberate design, abundance flows to those who already have the most. The progressive commitment is to build the channels that ensure it doesn't — not by restraining capitalism, but by directing its generative power toward a broader set of beneficiaries. And that commitment must be relentless — balancing investment between those with the least access and those most immediately impacted, making meaningful progress rather than waiting for some perfect policy to solve everything at once.

These two commitments have different mechanisms. Different policy toolkits. But they share a foundation: the belief that a radically better world is possible, and that it must be more fairly distributed.

Artificial intelligence is not a policy topic to have opinions about. It is a transformation already underway — one that will reshape labor markets, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and governance itself within the next decade. The political question is not whether this transformation will happen. It is who will shape it, and toward what ends.

Consider the data center debate. Sanders and AOC have called for halting all data center construction until environmental impact can be studied. The concerns are legitimate. But the response is wrong. The United States is in an arms race for AI capability. China's top firms are investing over $70 billion annually in AI infrastructure.⁵ Saudi Arabia has committed over $100 billion through its sovereign wealth fund.⁶ The UAE is building a 5-gigawatt supercomputing cluster in Abu Dhabi.⁷ A unilateral pause doesn't protect the environment — it cedes strategic ground while the problems persist globally. It is the energy policy equivalent of unilateral disarmament.

The progressive response should look different:

The pattern: set the moral standard, then build the bridge to meeting it. Don't just regulate. Co-create the conditions for compliance.

This same principle applies to AI regulation broadly — and here progressives need to be honest about what AI-specific regulation actually produces. As of March 2026, lawmakers in 45 states have introduced 1,561 AI-related bills — on top of 1,208 in 2025 — covering everything from hiring rules to lending to criminal justice.⁸ Who writes those rules? Who can afford the compliance infrastructure? Who has the lobbying apparatus to shape the language? The largest companies in any domain.

Development moratoria and capability restrictions don't protect people — they slow the engine of abundance while the companies large enough to absorb compliance costs keep building. Everyone else gets locked out.

Klein and Thompson diagnosed the core disease: progressives have become obsessed with process at the expense of outcomes. Nowhere is that more dangerous than in AI. The question is not whether we reviewed the right forms or filed the right impact assessments. The question is whether more people have access to better healthcare, cheaper housing, more economic opportunity, and a fairer share of prosperity than they did before. If the answer is yes, the regulation is working. If the answer is no — no matter how many boxes were checked — it isn't. Build the regulatory infrastructure around that test, and everything else follows.

This is where progressives have the most important — and most difficult — contribution to make.

AI will eliminate jobs. Lots of them. This is not speculation. Over 100,000 employees were impacted by AI-driven layoffs in 2025, with another 61,000 in the first months of 2026 alone — across tech, finance, logistics, consulting, media, and manufacturing.⁹ Goldman Sachs estimates that 25% of global work hours could be automated by AI, with administration and customer service facing the steepest losses.¹⁰ Within five years, advances in robotics will extend this disruption into physical labor at a scale that makes the current wave look modest.

The progressive movement's natural constituency includes the workers most affected by this transition. And the instinct to protect them is right. But the method matters enormously.

Jobs have been evolving for the entire history of the labor movement. Unions have been fighting job displacement for over a century — through mechanization, globalization, digitization, and now automation. The pattern is consistent: the jobs change, and the task is adaptation, not prevention. The workers who built carriages did not stop the automobile. The question was always how to ensure the transition didn't destroy lives.

AI is the same dynamic at a larger scale and a faster pace. The answer is not to slow AI development — that ship sailed years ago, and attempting it now is not solidarity with workers, it's denial of reality. The answer is to build the collaborative infrastructure that makes the transition work for everyone.

None of this works if the parties are fighting each other. Tech companies treating labor as an obstacle, unions treating technology as an enemy, and government standing on the sidelines taking donations from both — that's the current dynamic, and it is failing everyone.

The progressive position should be clear: we are going to navigate this transition together, and we are going to do it in a way that increases equity, not erodes it. That's not anti-technology. That's not anti-labor. It's the only position that takes both abundance and equity seriously.

The displacement is already happening. The robotics wave is next. Every month without a collaborative infrastructure in place is a month where workers bear the cost of a transition they had no voice in shaping. Progressives are the only faction with the moral credibility to demand equity from tech companies, the trust to engage labor as partners rather than obstacles, and the political will to build the public safety nets that hold it all together. If we don't do this — urgently, imperfectly, starting today — no one will.

The 2028 Democratic primary will define the party's direction for a generation. And the candidates who enter it will largely fall into the existing quadrants — the safe centrists who offend no one, the progressive champions who have the moral clarity but may lack a credible abundance agenda, and perhaps a few techno-moderates who talk about innovation without any real commitment to equity.

What the moment demands is a new archetype. A candidate with Sanders-level moral clarity and a fundamentally different relationship with technology and markets.

Imagine a primary where the serious contenders include figures like AOC, Ro Khanna, or a candidate with the kind of pragmatic progressivism Talarico represents — leaders who share a moral foundation but bring different approaches, different backgrounds, different theories of change. A primary where the debate isn't whether equity matters (it does) or whether AI is dangerous (it can be), but how to build an abundance agenda and ensure it's equitably distributed. That's a healthy primary. That's a primary that produces a nominee capable of winning a general election and governing effectively.

This is not about any single candidate. It's about the framework they run on. And it's about the willingness to evolve.

A leader who staked out a cautious, skeptical stance on AI in 2024 should not feel obligated to defend it in 2026. The world changed. The responsible thing is to change with it — not to abandon principles, but to update the strategies that serve those principles.

What we cannot afford is another cycle dominated by candidates from the soft center — leaders whose primary skill is avoiding controversy, whose policy instincts are poll-tested into meaninglessness, and who lack the moral clarity to take real positions on either abundance or equity. The Newsoms, the Shapiros, the Schumers — they had their moment. That moment produced neither the prosperity nor the justice the country needs.

Find moral clarity. Find strategic courage on technology. Or step aside for those who have both.

Any serious progressive candidate for 2028 should be prepared to commit to the following:

The progressive movement has the moral architecture to ensure that the most powerful technological transformation in modern history serves everyone — not just the wealthy, not just the technologically literate, not just the lucky. That architecture is real, it is tested, and it is the single greatest political asset the progressive left possesses.

But moral architecture without an engine is a blueprint for a building that never gets built. AI is the engine. Abundance is the project. And equitable distribution is the commitment that makes the whole thing worth doing.

The right won't do this. They don't care about equity. The soft center won't do this. They don't have the courage for either commitment. And if the progressive left won't do this — if they choose to be Luddites in the most consequential technological moment of the century — then nobody will.

That's not acceptable. There are too many people counting on a better world for the people with the best values to be the ones standing in its way.

Fill the quadrant.