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At the Abundance movement’s largest-ever gathering, with its manifesto still on the best-seller lists, its biggest champions wrestled openly with its status as a dirty word in US politics.
Wherever the emerging Abundance coalition of yes-in-my-backyard liberals and deregulatory libertarians organized — slow-growing blue states, small booming cities in Utah and Montana — they would win. Yet when they talked out loud about “abundance,” protesters denounced them, and ordinary voters were left confused.
“I never use the word ‘abundance’ in the South Bronx,” said New York Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres.
“I don’t use the word ‘abundance,’ either,” said Republican Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy.
Instead, Torres talked about a “build-housing” agenda and she talked about a “liberty” agenda.
Over two days in a DC hotel last week, hundreds of think-tankers, philanthropists, and local elected officials debated pro-growth ideas that did not fit entirely within one political party. A gift desk offered plush nuclear power reactors and stickers for the six sci-fi “abundance” brands dreamed up by the libertarian Niskanen Center.
Most of their champions were liberals, and the attendees who spoke most about politics wanted to save the Democratic Party. Their enemies were more diverse. On the left were environmentalists who wanted to leave carbon in the ground; on the right, MAGA nationalists who were dismantling wind farms and carrying out mass deportations.
“We now have a federal administration that appears to be very much pro-scarcity,” said California state Sen. Scott Weiner, a Democratic leader in the movement to roll back parts of his state’s Environmental Quality Act, which had hobbled new housing development.
To win, Abundance thinkers said they needed to be realistic about what voters wanted, and how the perception of too much growth — especially in immigration — could backfire. They needed to figure that out, because the idea of building more housing to make life cheaper has been a winner for whoever’s run on it. The biggest evidence of that remains Zohran Mamdani in New York — and he is not part of this team.
“This is someone I disagree with in all sorts of profound, deep ways,” said Reihan Salam, the president of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who addressed the conference on Thursday. “But he had a slogan: Afford to live, afford to dream.” That thrilled young and immigrant New Yorkers, but it was not going to get where the movement wanted.
“What you see on both sides is a punitive egalitarianism,” said Salam. “It’s not a hopeful, constructive egalitarianism. It is an egalitarianism that is coming from a place of fear, and it’s about punishment, rather than lifting everyone up.”
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The success of Abundance, the book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that built on their policy reporting, popularized a shorter name for the supply-side progressive movement. “One problem liberals are facing at every level where they govern is that they often add too much,” Klein wrote in one of the 2023 essays that the book grew out of.
Many progressives were invested in the “too much” part, which included regulations environmental activists and civil rights groups had fought for. Some identified with the “degrowth” movement, which wants humanity to build less to survive longer.
All of them could see the funders behind the Abundance groups; the progressive Revolving Door Project warned that the movement was corrupted by “big tech figures, oil barons, and committed Trump supporters.”
Libertarians who would not be let into many progressive tents were welcome inside the Abundance conference. Funders and guests came from the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation, which battled progressives to end affirmative action; Arnold Ventures, which has supported charter schools and pension reform; and Stand Together, the Koch network’s philanthropy foundation (which is an investor in Semafor).
“At a time when the most fundamental question confronting the Democratic Party, and everyone in the center-left coalition more broadly, is how to stand up to Trumpism, it seems like a particularly bad moment to decide that the Kochs make better allies than the AFL-CIO,” wrote Dylan Gyauch-Lewis of the Revolving Door Project.
Abundance advocates really did seem to want to work with potential allies on the right, instead of reading them out. They should be, said Klein, “reimagining what it means to participate in politics with a liberal temperament.”
Progressives have funded at least two polls to prove that “populism” is a winning message and “abundance” is a weaker, compromised one. Abundance campaigners rejected the binary choice, but didn’t dispute some of the political analysis.
A presentation about election messaging showed that cost of living, the economy, and inflation are the most important issues for voters, and that Republicans had been more trusted on all three last year. Abundance liberals want to compete for that electorate.
But they have to focus on immediate cost relief, and find a hero vs. villain, people vs. powerful framing. Ceding that to the left or right or would mean defeat. One slide showed an image of Mamdani and his “afford to live, afford to dream” sign, and one of Donald Trump doing a short shift at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. Both had moved voters on the cost issue. Neither was an abundance liberal. Thompson saw hope in Mamdani’s love of “sewer socialism,” focused less on ideology and culture than on better public infrastructure.
“I think there’s a way in which the ideas of Abundance can sort of cut horizontally, through many different types of politics and many different types of people,” said Thompson.
David’s view
The progressive fear that the Abundance movement wants to take over the Democratic Party isn’t baseless at all — its adherents have plenty of influence in it now.
The yes-in-my-backyard mindset is popular with younger elected Democrats in cities, who have been living with higher costs than their parents. Klein, Thompson, and other believers have advised congressional Democrats. Ambitious Democrats who talk about building things quickly, without more studies, are immediately written into the movement.
Their short-term disadvantage, just in the fight for the party, is that it’s Mamdani, and not one of their own, who has found a way to campaign on cheap housing. Would he support everything else they think is needed — the permitting reforms, the fast-tracking past environmental studies? If not, the worry is that Democrats will miss a chance to run as a credible low-cost, pro-growth party at a time when Republicans might be vulnerable to that message.
“The aversion to harming any one person or place has diffusely harmed everyone, because we just can’t get sh*t done anymore,” said Derek Kaufman, the founder of Inclusive Abundance, a two-year old think tank.
“If you’re worried about climate, the way to solve climate is to build wind and solar and nuclear and geothermal and battery as fast as possible,” he added. “So, a proceduralism that makes that hard to do runs counter to the actual progressive goal.”
Every Democrat is going to run on affordability, and the abundance movement wants quick action when those Democrats win. To persuade them, they recruit like-minded electeds, mostly in cities, and advertise their successes when they break local resistance to housing reform or more energy infrastructure.
The conference wasn’t visited by any 2028 hopefuls, but the conversation is clearly about getting the non-MAGA party in line behind this.
Room for Disagreement
Abundance, the book, got a critical read from left-wing historian Trevor Jackson in the NYRB. He doesn’t see much hope for the project of melding abundance with more populist politics, because a defense of capitalism is so deep inside its DNA.
“Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics,” he writes.
“Their faith in markets is axiomatic.”
Notable
- In his Very Serious newsletter, Josh Barro celebrates the bipartisan nature of the cause. “Because abundance, the policy project, aims to alleviate scarcities that matter to conservatives and liberals — like our insufficient production of housing and energy — it presents a great opportunity for conservatives and liberals to work together.”
- In Politico, Elena Schneider talks with the progressive activists who briefed Democrats on their Abundance-skeptical polling.