If asked to describe the leadership of the US Democratic Party over the last 35 years in one word, a good choice would be “feckless”. Except for a now forgotten moment at the beginning of the Biden presidency against the backdrop of a global pandemic, the same basic economic playbook as Ronald Reagan without the dog whistles has been the status quo from Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris.
Unsurprisingly, most Americans have learned not to expect much of anything from their government, regardless of the party in power. Still, the Republican opposition was so much worse on social issues alone that it’s understandable that Democrats succeeded as the lesser evil for so long. That this consensus collapsed in 2015 and their party has only become less popular in the years since either doesn’t matter to or hasn’t gotten through to the party’s leadership.
In what seems like an attempt to remedy this situation and build enthusiasm among those watching long cherished norms and freedoms shredded by Trump 47, a number of prominent public intellectuals associated with institutions from the New York Times to lesser known think tanks like the Niskanen Center have proposed what they claim is something entirely new. It’s called ‘the abundance agenda’ and they’ve been hard selling it in what’s left of print media, online and even in person at forums like the oddly named WelcomeFest.
So, what’s this brain trust bringing to the table? Well, as Ezra Klein and his co-author Derek Thompson explain in their book “Abundance”, a kind of outline for this ‘movement’, “we need to build and invent more of what we need”.
This kind of obviousness is hard to argue against, but when the authors go on to claim that Americans live in a society built around “chosen scarcities” forced on governments and a mostly altruistic private sector through excessive regulation, one can’t help but shudder at the feeling of deja vu.
Most of those pushing ‘abundance’, including at least one prominent Silicon Valley oligarch, don’t really talk about the human cost of America’s privatized healthcare system. To their credit, Klein and Thomas do spend some time on this pressing issue. In doing so, they make a familiar, albeit true, argument about how such a free market system leads to people paying ridiculous prices for prescription drugs. We might expect them to note that in every rich country and many poorer ones, governments regulate and negotiate drug prices, ensuring those of lesser means won’t suffer or die from lack of access to the medicines they need.
Instead, they go out of their way to compare the clear result of a failure to regulate this market in the United States to liberal objections to the inclusion of profit driven developers in public housing at the local level. It’s not just a poorly thought out comparison; it’s a lazy, both sides argument in a book full of them.
Housing is an important part of the version of abundance offered by Klein and Thompson in their book and in many podcast appearances. They argue that regulations around zoning and environmental restrictions at the local level play the biggest role in the lack of affordable housing in blue cities like New York, especially in comparison to red ones like Houston.
While it’s undeniably good to try and meet the need for cheap housing quickly, in Harris County, which includes Houston, thousands of homes were built on a flood plain despite the known risks due to a lax regulatory environment. Inevitably, government buyouts were necessary after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, which led to 100 deaths. This was a years-long process with no guarantee of compensation for many people whose dwellings and possessions were lost to the storm.
Despite this previous disaster, numerous companies, calculating that it’s worth the risk despite the likely human cost, are busily constructing more housing in these same areas, making further tragedies inevitable.
An important point the authors do make in discussing this is how many people are kept from reaching their potential due to the prohibitive cost of living in most major American cities. Never mentioned is the fact that the cities they are most critical of, New York and San Francisco, have plenty of housing that sits empty, either unsold or acting as an investment vehicle for private equity firms.
To bolster their critique of regulations, Klein and Thompson often bring up the collapse of an overpass on the I-95 in Pennsylvania in 2023, lionizing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a politician who is practically the living embodiment of their politics, for using emergency powers to speed up its reconstruction.
This example actually offers unintended proof of something they overlook: governments get around regulations all the time. In this particular case, millions of commuters rely on that highway and the longer it was closed the greater the disaster in social and economic terms. There wasn’t the opposition that a public housing initiative might face in a middle class neighborhood because the disaster impacted just about everyone using that vital infrastructure.
Klein often talks about how he’s creating a Yimby (“yes in my backyard”) movement even though its older “Nimby” opposite is much more compelling to property owners regardless of income level. This isn’t likely to change even if the abundance agenda were to be enacted in the future.
In purely political terms, the fact that abundance was truly having its moment just prior to the astonishing victory of Zohran Mamdani in the NYC Democratic mayoral primary in July says a lot about why moderate Democrats keep failing. Despite the right demonizing the candidate for his religion and most media and many in his own party dismissing his embrace of social democracy in histrionic terms, voters clearly liked the fact that Mamdani was speaking to their everyday concerns like transportation, the cost of food and yes, access to housing in the city.
That the candidate’s solutions are better thought out and less reliant on ‘pubic-private partnerships’ than those presented by Klein or other abundance influencers like Niskanen Center fellow Matt Ysglesias offers a compelling explanation for why their rebranding of neoliberalism is being eclipsed in the real world by the message of the progressive left.
On top of this, a little more research reveals how unfriendly some of those advocating the abundance agenda are to organized labor, one of Mamdani’s bases of support and the main driver of worker’s rights in the modern era.
The True, Libertarian Heart of ‘Abundance’
In an attempt to offer a positive vision of the near future, “Abundance” opens with a bird’s eye view of an unnamed American city where life proceeds in a less stressful, even leisurely, way. Delivery drones regularly descend from the skies to bring people the consumer goods they need and emission free electric vehicles of all kinds silently roam the streets. These conveniences are products of a ‘renewable energy revolution’ that, considering the stance of the Trump Administration on such things, won’t be happening any time soon.
While it’s admirable for someone with as large a public profile as Klein to advocate a focus on renewables, the inclusion of nuclear power in “Abundance” near the top of the list is troubling. Such energy may not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, but even leaving the most obvious dangers aside, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1103676 there are many examples of the long term impact that uranium mining has had on the rural, mainly Indigenous communities in the U.S. that are still suffering as a result of it.
Another important aspect of Klein and Thompson’s imagined future is that ‘AI’ has liberated most people from the bonds of near constant labor. No real explanation is given for why less work results in more pay, especially in a country where the federal minimum wage hasn’t increased in 16 years.
The techno-utopianism of “Abundance” also ignores any negative consequences such enthusiastic promotion of the large language learning models dubbed ‘Artificial Intelligence’, might entail. Beyond already producing greenhouse gas emissions that rival some small cities, the water needed to cool these systems is staggering, which doesn’t seem to bother self proclaimed environmentalists like Klein and Thompson at all.
Further, AI in its most basic chatbot form can be sold to everyone from governments to nefarious actors as a revolutionary surveillance tool. It’s able to build what seems like a genuine relationship with some users and collects intimate information in ways that a search engine or browsing history, as revealing as they can be, can’t.
The technology is already being weaponized and has been unleashed on Gaza under such charming names as Lavender, Where’s Daddy and The Gospel, taking human qualms out of the decision making process during conflict. Like drone technology before it, the possible consequences of ‘AI’ on the battlefield won’t be clear for a number of years.
Militarization aside, we’re already in a dangerous moment when the entire political class are set on overselling and ballooning investment in this technology that many experts are warning will end in financial and environmental disaster. These are more likely results than any real abundance for all.
Marc Andreessen, who, like his frenemy Peter Thiel, tries to present himself as a deep thinker and promotes ideas associated with neo-Reactionary internet ‘philosopher’ Curtis Yarvin, is not a liberal but seems wise enough to hedge his political bets, promoting another strain of abundance through his venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
This version is focused on the masses as ‘consumers’ reducing every person to nothing more than this role in society. Although everything about this more libertarian abundance is weird and feels like a throwback to a more conformist era, promoting the idea that imitative machine learning will eliminate both talent and work from the creative process may be the most laughable.
With Trump and so many of those in his orbit in their pocket, the biggest threat to the techno feudalists like Andreessen is the enthusiasm around people like Bernie Sanders, whose Fighting Oligarchy tour draws huge crowds in the reddest of red states, and Mamdani. What better vehicle to prevent the growing influence of progressive populism than a more ‘popularist’ movement like abundance within the Democratic Party?
Central to both strains of abundance discussed here is that the Keynesian notion of governments creating programs that subsidize things like healthcare or hunger in the name of equality are impractical and that solutions can only come from collaboration with the so-called free market.
Liberal proponents like Klein and Thompson only seem concerned for people who live lives like theirs. This may describe many of their readers but shows a similar cluelessness to the strategy of the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign, which, instead of speaking to the struggles of their multi-racial working class base, focused on trying to win over suburban Republican leaning voters while the newly minted billionaire occupant of the White House presented himself as a tribune of working people.
The problem for those pushing the abundance agenda as a reinvention of the Democratic Party is that those struggling under neo-liberal austerity measures don’t believe in promises of future abundance. To break the hold of MAGA, you have to offer real solutions to the widespread despair that led so many to fall under the sway of such an authoritarian movement in the first place.
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