First of all, re: Charlie Kirk, his murder unnerved me, but I don’t see a point to saying anything more on the subject beyond freedom of speech is good, and gunning down a young man in front of his children is unequivocally wrong.
This piece isn’t about Charlie Kirk though, it’s about Abundance™.1
As I wrote before, the colloquial moniker, “Abundance” comes from the the March 2025 book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson of the same name, which like 20 people in America have read in full, including me. However, since the book’s release, Abundance™ has come to colloquially refer not just to the thesis laid out in the book, that the regulatory environment in many liberal cities stymies development of housing, infrastructure, and general development and needs to change and pronto, but also the (socially and economically and environmentally) moderate platform people, most of whom haven’t read the book, have decided the book is advocating for.
There has been a fair amount of criticism from progressives directed at the Abundance movement as well as at prominent figures who’ve embraced it, including Klein and Thompson,
, , and David Shor2. Examples include:Zephyr Teachout’s confusion at how Klein and Thompson’s work fit into her preconceived framework of politics (big vs. small government).
Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg’s insistence that “Abundance liberals are almost completely silent on the alliance between corporate behemoths and anti-government politicians that is the biggest threat to the world of plenty they envision, not to mention the republic.”
Sandeep Vaheesanan’s (overtly long) review where he accuses Abundance of being papered over “neoliberalism” and characterized by an obsequious deference to private capital
Full disclosure: I’ve never been good at economics. I’m great with numbers, and I enjoy statistics and calculus etc., but I got a 2 on the AP Macroeconomics exam3 in high school and my understanding of the subject isn’t much better now. That said, I do know enough about economics to understand the ideas expressed within these pieces miss the mark, and fundamentally misunderstand the arguments within Abundance (the book), as well as the problems it’s trying to diagnose.
On a holistic level, Abundance (the concept) is fundamentally about “MORE,” building more, doing more, achieving more, and a lot of progressive populist economics is rooted in scarcity mindset. A lot of progressive populists would rather everybody be equally poor than have a prosperous society with some people holding extreme wealth, and that’s evident in how they push back against Abundance. They insist that Abundance is recycled libertarianism and bankrolled by tech bros4, and falsely allege that Klein and Thompson are against redistribution, to the extent of insisting that Klein is guilty of holding beliefs espoused by his wife, Annie Lowrey5, beliefs that neither of them actually hold.
This may be my capitalist bias coming out, but I don’t really understand the left-populist brain on an emotional level. To me at least, it seems like the same mindset underpinning the worst and most inane Medicare For All defenses. I can’t find the link to this exchange, but back in 2021, a Bernie Sanders supporting progressive said the quiet part out loud, that she didn’t support any sort of universal healthcare that didn’t abolish private health insurance because she thought it was fundamentally unfair that some people had better health insurance than others even if everybody else was covered. She openly said that it’s better for everybody have equally terrible insurance (everybody knows that government health insurance is terrible6) than for some people to have better coverage.
However, while I think many progressive critics of Abundance aren’t approaching the subject with good faith and condemning Klein and Thompson as guilty by association to people like Matt Yglesias, I think that there are valid critiques to be made of the platform and its proponents.
Last week, Mike Solana wrote a piece titled “Abundant Delusion.” In it, he writes,
Can center-left liberals, who claim they want to introspect and reform and actually build a lot of housing and infrastructure, and generate new resources rather than punitively redistribute us all into stagnation, open their tent in such a way that there is room for committed, eat-the-rich communism and sensible housing policy alike?
[…]
Provided that the purpose of the Abundance movement is earnestly to galvanize the left under the banner of Abundance, which it will then produce, the project is obviously doomed to fail. Partly this is because of structural issues innate to our political system, and partly this is because large swaths of the left, which Abundance Dems need to win elections, are actively and often publicly fantasizing about sending Abundance Dems to the guillotine.
Firstly, I agree with the people that pointed out that there are very few people who support Abundance and also support Luigi Mangione, who shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, and it was unfair to characterize the Abundance movement as such. However, I think it’s worth unpacking the guilt by association element that Solano emphasizes.
Regarding Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, is the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, Solana skeptically asks, “Was the man [Mamdani] ready to cut regulations impeding manufacturing, energy, and housing?” Solana maintains that Abundance requires authority to be successful, to overrule gripes from a few for the good of the many, and to internalize and accept potentially distasteful tradeoffs, and he maintains that this project is “very much at odds with the socialist project, or at least as that project is currently imagined by American socialists.” However, the “Abundance Bros” (as they’re derisively referred to in certain spaces) were perfectly amenable to welcoming Mamdani into the fold, that is, after he said the right buzzwords.
Solana believes that by embracing him, Abundance will be yoked to all of Mamdani’s positions on crime, immigration, foreign policy, and whatever else he said during the fever dream that was 20207. Personally, I think that Zohran Mamdani ran an excellent campaign and he’s very likely to be the next mayor of NYC, but of course, even if his campaign was laser-focused on affordability, it’s unlikely that someone with his progressive bonafides could win races in more Republican jurisdictions, and it’s possible he could feature in national attack ads like Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have. However, I think that using Mamdani as an avatar to criticize Abundance8 doesn’t get to the crux of the actual problem with Abundance, as a term it’s colloquially come to represent.
On September 59, I had an X-change with Jerusalem Damas of
about immigration. I deleted my original post on the topic because I genuinely don’t want to cause any tension with my friends and colleagues (and given I’m being called evil on Bluesky, my offhand comments struck a negative note with people, which I’m sorry for) but since it’s relevant to this particular topic, I’ll explain.Jerusalem wrote a piece called “Liberals Don’t Have to Lose on Immigration,” and my initial response was something along the lines of “Liberals just don’t know how to respond to any cultural critiques on immigration,” and I’ll admit my quote-tweet came across as sharper than I intended it to be. Jerusalem and I then had an exchange where she maintained that she did address the cultural critiques in the piece, and I disagreed, but I let it go because I’m not interested in being derided as a Nazi collaborator unless I’m being paid to deal with it. That and also, I don’t like arguing very much, especially on Main, and prefer to just say my piece and walk away.
However, I stand by everything I said. I think that a lot of Liberals (in this context, I mean people who do not identify as Progressives or Leftists but wouldn’t ever vote Republican) just don’t know how to argue with right-wingers on culture. It’s not a moral failing, but I think that when it comes to Abundance, like with immigration, neglecting to address the cultural elephants in the room is how the entire left-of-center coalition loses big.
With regards to immigration, the primary economic opposition against it is that it reduces job opportunities and incomes for citizens, and that particular argument has been debunked many times over. But, despite well-intentioned liberals and libertarians patiently explaining these rebuttals, the United States still reelected the mass deportations guy.
The major reason that Democrats lost so much ground on the immigration issue is because quite simply, there were more immigrants entering the country during the Biden administration than there had been ever before. While Barack Obama was known as the “deporter in chief,” it was only in 2024 that the Bipartisan Immigration Bill was introduced (and then failed) and Joe Biden took executive action curtailing asylum.
Moreover, despite some back-and-forth in the judicial system, the Biden admin ended the Remain in Mexico policy10, which mandated that asylum seekers had to remain in a third country while waiting for their asylum hearings, so the asylum seekers were released into the US. Moreover, Republican governors, especially Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started bussing immigrants to northern cities, particularly New York City, which has a right-to-shelter law, and began housing asylum seekers in hotels and school gyms and everywhere there was room available. Long story short, urban precincts in all major cities (except Seattle and Portland which are >60% non-Hispanic white compared to NYC and Los Angeles which are <30% non-Hispanic white) went hard right.
Moreover, Biden admin attempted to circumvent a deadlocked Congress which had no chance of immigration reform by expanding Temporary Protective Service status for more people than ever before. Despite the immigrants who entered the US with TPS being legal immigrants, it didn’t stop major backlash against them to the extent Haitian migrants in Ohio were accused of eating cats and dogs. As I said at the time, it didn’t matter whether or not the immigrants were legal or if they helped the local economy, people just wanted them gone.
And, liberals/Democrats didn’t and still don’t know what to say to that, or how to reconcile that stance with the progressive stance that it’s the responsibility of wealthy countries to support people from poorer countries, which incidentally, is the same problem we run into with Abundance.
In my mind, the biggest problem with Abundance is that it’s comprised of multiple groups with fundamentally incompatible ideologies and antithetical end goals. Gun to head, what does and what should the movement value most? Does it care more about equity and redistribution or growth and power? Those entities aren’t mutually exclusive, and can absolutely occur in tandem, but there needs to be explicit prioritization and a defined decision tree, because a permanent state of internal loggerheads will result in nothing but wasted time. I understand not publicly acknowledging the inherent tensions within the movement, but I sometimes feel like the talking heads are hearkening back to the Harris campaign’s approach to the “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you” campaign ad last year, aka ignoring it and hoping it goes away.
For instance, even though urban progressives and carceral urbanists both support building more housing, there is little else they agree on with regards to how to run a city. Progressives are not “tough on crime”and carceral urbanists generally are; progressives pursue equal material outcomes, and prioritize them over generalized material progress, while carceral urbanists generally don’t.
The example Solano provides in his piece is free buses, a policy that Mamdani is currently running on, and encouraging use of public transit is a tenet of Abundance as applied to urban settings. Progressives believe that it’s unfair that there are barriers to entry of what they believe should be a public good, so it would be better for everybody if people didn’t have to pay to take transit. Here’s the thing: Aside from the fact collecting a small fare pays for improvements to the entire system and policing of routes, even with the fees in place, I don’t feel nearly as safe on transit in NYC as I did a decade ago. I still take the subway but I don’t take the bus anymore, and getting rid of fares will only increase disorder11 and prevent people like me, young(ish) women who generally travel alone, in addition to families with young kids and older adults from taking public transit altogether. This in turn sequesters us to private vehicles, and eventually, exposure to disorder will get people to leave the city altogether12, which defeats the purpose of Abundance in the first place.
In short, even though Mamdani says all the right phrases and might genuinely support the central tenets of Abundance, one of his major policies, and moreover, his ideology at large, is arguably in permanent opposition to the goals of the movement.
Look at the issue of housing: A common occurrence in places like New York and California is that progressive lawmakers won’t accept building apartment buildings without Section 8 (low-income) units. However, residents of a neighborhood, one veto point in construction, may be amenable to market-rate housing being built, but don’t want Section 8 housing included because they associate low-income people with greater disorder. And, when given the option of building an apartment with Section 8 housing or building nothing, they’ll just block construction of any apartments altogether, so the powers that be have to make a choice: Would they rather build an apartment with market-rate units with no Section 8 or would they rather build nothing? Unfortunately, in many progressive jurisdictions, the answer ends up being nothing, but the thesis of Abundance dictates they pick the former. So now what?
In any case, I wrote this all out for my own purposes, because having it typed out helps me organize the many, many thoughts in the filing cabinet that is my brain, but hopefully my stream of consciousness is beneficial to other people’s understanding as well.
Look, there is a nonzero chance Trump administration ends up hurtling us into World War III and sending our boys to fight narcotraffickers in Venezuela (or whatever), and Democrats win a 2008 level victory in 2028 even with Democrats being in an embarrassing state of public disarray. But who knows at this point?13
Anyways, I digress.
There was a conference in Washington DC surrounding the topic a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t able to attend so I won’t be talking about it.
I’m not exactly sure what David did to attract online liberals’ vitriol other than post some colorful charts that say depressing things, but he’s still an arch-nemesis.
I did get a 4 on AP Microecon but like, pretty much the only thing you needed to know on that exam was “Demand goes up as Supply goes down.” And besides, I got 5s on the AP tests for Calculus AB, Calculus BC, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, English Lit, English Lang, World History, US History, Spanish, and Computer Science, so as per my #beloved husband, I’m more of a ditzy genius than a genius ditz.
So are vaccines btw.
In June, Annie Lowrey wrote a piece for the Atlantic titled, "New York Is Not a Democracy," and a bunch of left-populists melted down over it because they viewed it as criticism of Zohran Mamdani, ignoring that Ezra Klein had previously endorsed Mamdani, and isn’t against economic redistribution whatsoever, and that Lowrey herself is one of the foremost advocates of Universal Basic Income (UBI). In other words, this is all bullshit.
I’m on Tricare (my husband’s in the Air Force) and it’s impossible to get an appointment with my primary care doctor within the month. When I had a Cigna plan through my old employer, I could get a PCP appointment within the hour! Call me a doomer, but I really don’t think having 340 million people on the same bad plan will improve national health outcomes because in reality, a lot of people will just fall through the cracks and not receive care in a timely manner.
2020 was a nightmare for everybody, and I spent a lot of it being broken with by means of ghosting. Election Week 2020 might be one of the worst weeks of my life.
I consider the Abundance Movement to be more about policy and procedure than politics, but I don’t know if it’s really possible to extricate the politics from the policy.
Aka the Launch Day for The Argument, which wasn’t intentional!
This includes mentally ill homeless men following us around even if they don’t actually attack us and our children.
I was willing to tolerate a nonzero amount of disorder and harassment and random homeless guys trying to grab me when I was single and in my 20s, but I’m 30 and married now, and I’m not willing to subject myself to this treatment anymore, especially since I plan on having children.
Contrary to popular belief, I’m not actually psychic and can’t predict the future. I just spent an inordinate amount of time observing other people when I was a weird little girl, so I generally understand how normal people approach the world so can predict their behavior.
It’s been, what…6 months and we are still workshopping Abundance takedowns because we haven’t found any real talking points that land?
The funny thing to me is it seems pretty clear to me that Klein nor Thompson ever expected “Abundance” to be seen as this big national project (quite frankly, all the examples in the book focus on State and Local reforms for a reason, with the exception of Energy & Permitting reform for Transmission / Nuclear), but a handful of Hipster Antitrust folks came out swinging and caused a Streisand Effect for what would have been a small wonky movement of likeminded policy nerds at State and Local levels who would eventually rise through the ranks.
It seems pretty clear that the “Abundance Movement” (whatever that is) doesn’t make much sense because it was never really the point of the book. And so yes, it feels sort of slapdash-y….but hey, probably shouldn’t waste the energy I guess and there are plenty of worse things that Democrats could be talking about, I guess. I am not sure if “Abundance Movement” ever really needs to *make* sense since it’s at it’s most basic a localized effort …but i guess we will see what, if anything, can be done with all this energy / attention. Kind of a miracle so far it hasn’t already backfired at the State level in Red states if you ask me…
Conversations about Abundance aren't really about the book (which has pretty misguided ideas about how construction works) but are actually about the role Ezra and people like Ezra play in the Democratic Party. To be blunt, there really isn't an electoral coalition for the type of milquetoast, technocratic political solutions people like him seem to love or the restrained, meek cadence they seem to deliver them in.
You've mentioned this before, but it's really bad that moderate Democrats can't seem to come up with a compelling vision for the future. The Biden Administration attempted to focus on the unglamorous parts of governance, assuming that voters would respond to Democrats being the "responsible adults" in the room, only for that approach to fail. While the focus on solving housing problems in blue states is good, I don't think it actually solves the messaging problems Democrats need to address. And if they're too passive to counteract the constant stream of social media slop swing voters are receiving, all that money going into messaging is more or less wasted.
Oftentimes, I feel like the Ezras of the world don't have a strong understanding of how the right goes about amassing political power. There's such a focus on process and reasoned argument from liberals like him that they end up sacrificing whatever persuading power they have to their opponents, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum.
Part of how Charlie Kirk, someone Ezra deeply admires, built up the institution that is the Turning Point was by understanding that winning the argument is more important than having a fair argument. Beyond that, Kirk was a compelling media figure in his own right, which made people want to listen to him. But Democrats are so averse and incapable of promoting moderate commentators with that type of charisma that they end up putting out whatever fires the left causes. I think that has something to do with how impartial those commentators seem to liberalism as an ideology.
Something I appreciate about you as a political commentator is that you never seem to withhold your opinions to make other people happy. You have a clear set of beliefs that you will not compromise on even if those beliefs make other people mad. Honestly, they should just pay you to work on social media outreach, you'd probably be better at it than whoever they currently have running it.