The Future of Abundance and the Left

Left-wing commentators say abundance is their opposition. Left-wing politicians say it’s a credit to the Democratic Party. What if they're both right?

In the last three months, I’ve watched the reaction to Abundance play out in two arenas.

The first venue is the war zone of online discourse, where critics have amassed in impressive numbers. The Nation said abundance could "sink the Democratic Party." The Bad Faith podcast told the left to "reject" abundance as a dangerous “conspiracy." The left-wing journal Current Affairs called it a “disaster.” The typical social media criticism has made this language seem tame, and almost polite, by comparison. The book has generated enough critiques, defenses, and counter-critiques that New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix, a grid of the cultural zeitgeist, placed “The Over-abundance of Abundance Discourse” in its Highbrow/Despicable quadrant last week.

One should never mistake online discourse for reality. A Yiddish proverb comes to mind: “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.” To a person who over-marinates in social media, social media feels like the whole world. But if one manages to slither one’s way out of this digital sludge, a different picture comes into focus: abundance as a unifying principle rather than a dividing line.

The second arena that I’ve been watching is the commentary of elected officials and politicians seeking elected office. Many have endorsed or name-checked the book and its ideas, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York has called it “the best framework that I've heard for reimagining Democratic governance.” Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts has quoted the book to promote government acting as a “bottleneck detective.”

Some on the left might write off the above paragraph as a tepid parade of centrists. But this is where it gets interesting: In many cases, the politicians endorsing abundance represent the most progressive wings of the party:

• Bernie Sanders devotees have bashed abundance in numerous settings. But Rep. Ro Khanna, an outspoken advocate of Bernie’s signature policy proposal Medicare For All, has announced his support for abundance on many occasions.

• Left-wing populists, who often regard corporate greed as America’s most important problem, have assailed the book online, while some have marshaled polling evidence to prove abundance is a political loser. But Sen. Chris Murphy, a self-described economic populist, publicly disagreed with this line of attack. He pointed out that the virtues of reducing “concentrated corporate power” and fixing “bottlenecks [to] build more stuff” aren’t incompatible at all, but rather two tastes that go great together.

• Several people have accused the book of throwing welfare to the side. But Wes Moore, the progressive Maryland governor who spent much of his private-sector career fighting poverty, delivered a rousing May speech, in which he said Democrats have to change from being the party of “no and slow” to the party of “yes and now.”

How do we make sense of this poster-politician divide: the animosity of online progressive commentary contrasted with the embrace of many progressive electeds? The conveniently simple explanation would be that the critics are all wrong and the book’s defenders are all right. But the truth is more complicated—and more interesting. The posters and the politicians are both right, in their own way. These two groups, the factional posters and the coalition-builders in office, are doing different jobs. Together, their criticism and their support say something profound about the abundance project and its highest potential.

The Divided Soul of “Left Abundance”

What the critics understand is that abundance represents a form of liberalism that differs in key aspects from socialism and left-wing populism. Unlike socialism, it seeks to regulate and guide the market rather than replace it with public ownership or forever expand the state at its expense. Unlike left-wing populism, which regards corporate power as a chief nemesis, liberalism believes that the enemies of progress are diverse and situational. As Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times, the abuse of power can emerge wherever power accumulates. When a corporate monopoly uses its leverage to raise prices and crush competition, that is power. When a homeowners group acts as a cartel by organizing to block new housing construction, that is power. When one city’s public sector union negotiates obscene staffing levels¹ that raise the cost of building public goods, that is power. To see these abuses clearly requires a particular way of looking at the world. It demands an ideological flexibility that does not pre-determine that certain groups are intrinsically innocent or guilty. A Democratic Party that embraces the ideas in Abundance—about NIMBYism, and zoning, and permitting reform, and strategies to de-risk private investment in clean energy, science, and biotech—will be different than a party that rejects them. If we’re fighting over these ideas, it might be, in part, because these are ideas worth fighting over.

But the politicians understand another thing that is core to abundance. They know that if Democrats are to be the party of government, they have to become the party of making government work; and too often, it simply doesn’t. In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with several progressive state and local politicians across the country about what they got out of the book. Many of these chats were off the record, so that they could speak freely, and the conversations sometimes took on the character of talk therapy. Idealistic reformers were shocked to discover, upon their arrival in office, how progressive rules undermined the outcomes they were designed to achieve. Rather than build houses, fix roads, or open childcare centers, they told me, the Democratic fetish for legalistic procedure has in so many places made it impossible to get stuff done. These politicians have seen the face of government up close. They know its wrinkles and its warts. When they read our descriptions of well-meaning policies gone awry, they feel the shock of recognition.

One especially interesting conversation was not off the record. This past weekend, I spoke with Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic Socialist candidate for mayor of New York City and a rising star on the far left. Several of Mamdani’s supporters, like the anti-monopoly advocate Zephyr Teachout, are fierce critics of ours. But Mamdani told Pod Save America that despite the “simplified and caricatured” conversation around the book, “Abundance is really interesting.” In a recent speech, he hailed an “agenda of abundance.”

Mamdani and I do not agree about many things, including but not limited to: housing policy, education policy, the role of public sector unions in raising the cost of urban-transit construction, and the need for significantly higher levels of local and state spending in New York. But we agree that politicians who seek to create more government functions had damn well better prove that the government can function, in the first place. “As someone who is very passionate about public goods, about public service, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence,” Mamdani told me. “One of the most compelling things that I think abundance has brought into the larger conversation is how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about.” As we spoke about his plans to prove government excellence, the words that kept coming up were outcomes, efficiency, and an openness to government innovation—all themes of the book. “I clearly have ideas and politics, but ultimately beyond all of those things, I care most about outcomes,” he said. “The way that I would approach running the city is to be wedded to outcomes, not wedded to the means by which we get to those outcomes.”

I can judge Mamdani only by the words he said to me. I cannot judge the degree to which he means them, or his ability to translate words into policies, or policies into outcomes, such as accelerated housing construction or reduced per-mile building costs for the subway.² I’m well aware that if political leaders master the marketing-speak of abundance—outcomes over process! public goods demand public excellence!—without committing to the hard tradeoffs necessary to actually improve outcomes and public excellence, it could lead to a false consensus around abundance, which would be even more unproductive than honest disagreement.

Nevertheless, my conversation with Mamdani made me optimistic. It showed how some ideas from Abundance that are currently coded as “centrist, and thus anti-left” don’t have to be so ghettoized. A left-populist leader who removes barriers to physical-world construction to make it easier to build public goods doesn’t transform into a nefarious neoliberal. They just become a better populist leader. A Democratic Socialist mayor who takes a page from Jersey City and makes it easier and faster for private developers to add housing units won’t be a traitor to the middle class. They’ll simply be a better mayor.

In sum, the confrontational posters and the coalition-building politicians have clearly identified two distinct truths. The liberalism offered by abundance challenges some of the traditional assumptions and comfortable narratives of the left. But many of our themes, especially in the realm of making government work, ought to be seen as a binding agent that bridges political factions rather than divides them.

---

This newsletter will be a project of both confrontation and coalition-building.

Some of the most important work here will be about defining how I disagree with critics of the book. I’ll explain why corporate power isn’t a big factor in many industries where the anti-monopoly folks are most fixated; how I think science and tech policy needs to evolve; and why paying for the welfare state in an age of high debts and high interest rates requires an aggressive pro-growth strategy that might strike some leftists as too corporate-friendly.

But I also want to make the case that something bigger and better is possible in our politics. I believe that abundance can help create a new, larger liberal coalition that can govern effectively at the local level and defeat the forces of anti-growth kleptocracy at the national level. I want our critics to see that there is room for them in this tent. I want anti-monopolists to recognize how organized homeowners can capture housing markets the same way that oligopolistic cartels do. I want leftists to see how a combination of pro-developer policies and affordability regulations can help people live where they want to live and even moderate housing inflation for the middle class. I want Democratic Socialists, who believe in expanding government bureaucracy, to see how the government can encumber itself with inefficient bureaucracy. I even want moderate conservatives to see that the virtues of science and technology and growth can have a real political home in this country, and it’s not going to be the tent pitched upon the shoulders of Donald Trump.

Abundance was written to start a bit of a fight. But the goal is what comes after the fight: a party that wins power by showing what it can do with power; a coalition that binds urban progressives and national moderates; a more popular “popular front.” The aim of the book was never to carve the Democratic coalition into ever finer slices. Rather, you might say the politics of abundance are hiding right there inside the meaning of the word itself. The goal is to build something bigger.

1. From the 2017 New York Times article "The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth": “Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.”

2. When I asked Mamdani whether he was prepared to confront the role of public sector unions in raising the cost of transit construction, he told me, “I will have to work with public sector unions [but] I think I come to a different conclusion than you” on their centrality to higher construction costs. As you might guess from the first footnote above, I disagree with this interpretation. While I didn’t expect a NYC mayoral candidate to throw unions under the bus just hours before election day, I think it’s fair to say this sort of answer does not indicate a deep interest in confronting Democratic allies who can use their power to extract goods from the public. However, I think that sort of courage is something abundance politics will often require.