How To Forge A Progressive-Abundance Truce
Abundance, Inc. is a dead end, but there are still shared ideas worth salvaging.
Ned Resnikoff’s observations about the recent “Abundance” conference in Washington, DC, put a finger on an important distinction: between “abundance” as a framework for policy implementation, and “abundance” as wrapping paper for noxious ideas.
The former is the kind that has attracted interest from left-of-center actors of all kinds, including moderates and Zohran Mamdani. The latter has quickly congealed into an astroturf-style pseudomovement. Abundance vs Abundance, Inc.
As a left-abundist, Resnikoff is a good fact witness1, and his observations validate a couple concerns I’ve aired about “abundance” as an organizing principle. One is that abundance would drift into incoherence, and eventually become co-opted in full by rightists and corporatists, if it weren’t advanced as a liberal or overwhelmingly liberal project. The other is that building a bigger tent for the Democratic Party, which moderate abundists claim as an ancillary benefit of their ideas, entails setting boundaries.
What Building A “Big Tent” Means In Practice
Three months ago, Hakeem Jeffries drew a template for candidate recruitment. Democratic office-seekers should fit comfortably “within the mainstream of the big tent of the Democratic Party,” he told Paul Kane, but also represent the “gorgeous mosaic of what the American people represent.”
As Abundance has been coopted by Abundance, Inc., its worthy ideas have been tarred by association with genuinely unsavory characters—people who argue for nauseating things like “deportation abundance.” And with the distinction between the two concepts now badly blurred (particularly in the eyes of critics) people like Resnikoff are looking for the exits.
They will thus need new ways to talk about the same, unobjectionable concepts that drew them to abundance in the first place. In the contexts of housing and clean energy, the word “abundance” fits, because the challenge is to create more stuff.
But the concepts outlined in the Abundance books, and the day-to-day objectives of the YIMBY movement, have little to do with quantities per se. They have to do with internal procedural obstacles to policymaking. The goal is more houses (or energy, or health care) but the method for achieving it is to remove the obstacles.
In this sense Abundance is firmly of a piece with increasing progressive frustration with the slowness and tepidness of Democratic policy makers. If we could harness agreement over this underlying concept of unshackling, while hiving off Abundance, Inc., progressives and liberal-abundists would have much less to fight over.
SHAKE SHACKLE
I have progressive friends, and I have abundist friends, and by and large they hate each other.