An Abundance of ...¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reading "Abundance" after Zohran Mamdani's victory.

I’m always complaining about a lack of positive vision in our politics. So it stands to reason that I should have been more excited about Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s [no longer] new book, which aims to set itself up as the platform of a next-gen left-liberal movement.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find much to get excited about.

“This book is dedicated to a simple idea,” reads the introduction. “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.” Expansion on the subject was similarly simple: “We imagine a future not of less but of more.”

Sounds nice!

Of course, there is more detail as the book goes on, and a few policy details do emerge when you begin talk to its proponents in-depth. America is stuck, they say, and we need to embrace dynamism to start moving forward again. Instead of being Left or Right, Abundance-as-worldview cuts across our old political divides. Abundance is anti-scarcity, anti-door shutting, anti-red tape. It’s pro- housing, pro-transit, pro-energy, and pro-health. It thinks too much environmental protection legislation produces sluggishness and that some identity politics may have gone a bit too far.

These are all good points, but considering the book’s title, I thought there would be … more?

In many ways, the usefulness of abundance talk seems to be its relative emptiness, its ability to subtly critique the Left status quo without stepping too far away from it. To be an “Abundance Democrat”¹ is to say, “Of course I’m progressive, but I think most of current Democratic policy is bad. Also, I want more good things for everyone.”

Hard to argue with that! Which suggests that it’s not saying much at all.

I don’t mind a rallying cry, and “we can still build things needed for a good life and, with a few tweaks, government can help us deliver” isn’t a terrible theme. But the problem with Abundance is that it doesn’t go much deeper. It also presupposes a certain level of consensus, when one of the main bottlenecks for our policymaking is that a unified vision of what a good politics would solve for is one of the major things we, as a country, now lack.

What is a good life, exactly? Does it go further than cheaper housing and more new tech? And what are the tradeoffs that will have to be made to get there? Who do we prioritize? Who will you need to offend?

Klein, Thompson, and the rest of the Abundance-pilled are explicitly trying to pitch a policy vision and platform for the Democratic party that has been consistently out of touch and ineffective (dare we say, “in disarray”?). But it’s not hitting, at least for me, because it is, if anything, too big picture. The ideas are capacious enough to avoid addressing core concerns.

“When the spell of a political order breaks, ideas once regarded as implausible and unacceptable become possible and even inevitable,” Klein and Thompson write in the book’s conclusion.

Meanwhile, the New York City Board of Elections released its ranked-choice ballot tabulations, and Zohran Mamdani has officially won the Democratic primary for New York’s mayoral race by a clean 12 points. And what were Mamdani’s ideas? Government grocery stores! Rent freezes! Democratic socialism! Specific, often divisive ideas and a focus on day-to-day material concerns led to shockingly high voter registration numbers and insane youth energy. (They are less likely to attract millions of dollars in elite funding though, as they purposefully alienate the wealthy.)

Implausible, unacceptable new ideas? They do exist. But perhaps not in … Abundance.²

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1. There is an emergent twist on this movement: “Dark Abundance” is described by some of its promoters as Abundance decoupled from social desirability bias — that instinct to try and please one’s audience for which Abundance, the book, has been widely criticized. Really, it’s just abundance from the Right.

Dark Abundance also skeptical of proceduralism and pro-dynamism, but unashamedly so — it’s eager to embrace billionaires, markets, and dramatic change over the incremental. It takes strong values stances: an emphasis on law and order will be needed to help “urbanism” thrive, so policing and incarceration should rise; people matter more than the ‘environment,’ so if an endangered bird species stands in the way of new housing, RIP birds.

I can’t say I’m sold on this one, either, but at least it’s not hiding the ball.

2. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself.