Back in May a bipartisan(!) group of lawmakers led by Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.) started a roughly 30-member bloc that’s claiming inspiration from the “abundance movement.”
“Abundance” was penned by the liberal duo of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and in this time of genocide, accelerating climate catastrophe, and Trump shock therapy, it zeroes in on zoning laws and environmental regulations as central problems to our society today. Less red tape, they argue, will mean that private capital will finally be free to deliver everything you need and want—housing, climate-friendly infrastructure, and loads of other stuff.
The book has become the guiding light for the Democrat establishment and the Build America Caucus, which is working hand in glove with the Trump wrecking ball. From E&E News:
And in a notable shift from past attempts, multiple Democrats are eyeing the nation’s so-called bedrock environmental law [the National Environmental Policy Act] as a potential target…The group has also drawn attention on Capitol Hill and among lobbyists for its association with the “abundance” movement, the pro-growth agenda championed by some high-profile liberal advocates and politicians. But caucus members on both sides of the aisle say they’re all simply focused on reducing regulatory obstacles to build more of what Americans need and to do it more efficiently….The Trump administration’s moves to upend the federal regulatory process and weaken environmental protections have created the perfect opening for a group like the Build America Caucus to flex its young muscles, said Eric Beightel, who led the federal permitting council during the Biden administration.
“This is a moment that has been building for a while,” Harder told Politico. “I think there’s been a lot of simmering interest in permitting reform and making sure that things are built faster, better, cheaper.”
The central premise behind Abundance is that what voters need isn’t a government that ensures they have a living wage, healthcare, shelter, and a liveable planet, but that the market will provide those necessities as long as enough red tape is cut. If that sounds a lot like what Democrats have long offered—and what Trump and DOGE have been selling—well, that’s because that’s what it is.
It comes with the usual shiny visions of technological utopia Democrats are so fond of, like solar panels on every roof and delivery drones buzzing into yards to keep smart fridges overflowing with organic food. And it promises that less regulation will magically make all distributional and power conflicts disappear as the Peter Thiels, Elon Musks, and Marc Andreessens will abandon their dark hierarchical visions for society and make sure that all the lowly service sector workers, disabled, and other disposables can enjoy these luxuries. How do we like those odds?
Does Abundance Economics Actually Make Any Sense?
Isabella M Weber, in her review at Foreign Policy, shows just how unserious the Abundance authors and its Democrat adherents are:
A key case study to illustrate this regulatory paradox—where environmental reviews and multilayered regulatory frameworks slow building environmentally friendly means of transportation—is the failed attempt to build high-speed rail in California. It opens the possibility for organized groups to intervene at every stage and block progress, Klein and Thompson argue. In their view, it is the thing that sets China and California apart: “This is why China can build tens of thousands of miles of high-speed rail in the time it takes California to fail to build hundreds of miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to high-speed rail.”
But here’s the reality:
…Having researched China’s market reforms for many years, I can say that it’s baffling to argue China’s success in building out critical infrastructure is simply a result of a combination of power abuses and the absence of regulations and “debating with judges.” There are many countries in the world that have authoritarian governments and loose environmental and building regulations. None of them has managed to build high-speed rail at breakneck speed.
In fact, a quick search on the internet is enough to find a detailed study by the World Bank on how China managed to build its high-speed rail so quickly and efficiently. Among the key factors are: a 15-year plan that lays out long-term goals and was followed up with five-year plans to specify construction projects and revise goals based on past progress (these have all been upward revisions); special-purpose construction and management companies that are joint ventures between central and provincial governments; coordination among rail manufacturers, research institutions, and engineering centers; managers with clear responsibility and significant performance-based compensation that incentivizes them to stay for whole projects; a high degree of standardization in design and procedures; and a steady stream of projects to enable the creation of a “capable, competitive supply industry.”
If one tried to translate the Chinese experience into the American institutional context, one arrives at something closer to the “multi-solving, whole of government approach to planning and coordination” recommended for solar development in a recent study from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Institute. It argues that what is needed is “multi-scalar land-use and site planning”; “coordinating between federal, state, Tribal, and local governments”; and the creation of “public and nonprofit solar deployment companies.”
Backing up Weber’s argument is a recent paper from Vanderbilt Law School, “Post-Neoliberal Housing Policy,” which points out that the Abundance argument is nothing more than a recycling the same tired neoliberal ideas:
Yes, zoning in some places is a meaningful impediment to development. But the obsession with zoning is conceptually flawed, descriptively problematic in that it ignores or obscures the many other causes of the affordability crisis, and potentially perverse by promoting solutions that, in some cases, may be ineffective and even harmful. Indeed, at the extreme, those who are laser-focused on zoning are falling back into a neoliberal paradigm that makes overly simplistic assumptions about markets.
And the alternative path is obvious:
…Increasing the supply of housing and ensuring housing affordability therefore requires market-crafting and market-shaping, not abdicating responsibility for–and regulatory control over–land use decisions.
A post-neoliberal approach would therefore expand the housing policy toolkit and take an all-of-the-above, comprehensive approach. An industrial policy for the housing sector, including public investment, procurement, and regulatory standard-setting interventions, could mean cheaper and faster homebuilding. Letting go of the neoliberal obsession with privatization could unlock the public’s role in housing provision, so governments can increase housing supply directly and efficiently. Rather than embrace trickle down policies for the rich, Pigouvian-inspired taxes that target undesirable behaviors can help prevent constraints on supply. Finally, because regulations are market-shaping, policymakers can adopt antimonopoly and consumer regulations, supply-side zoning rules, and macro-level regulations to disperse economic growth.
It is as obvious for housing as it is for every life necessity and societal good, as Malcolm Harris writes:
The only way to guarantee real housing abundance is deep and concerted public support, by adding the necessary state capacity to build and maintain a home for everyone who needs one. Something analogous goes for health care and food—not to mention clean air and water, parks, schools, transportation, news reporting, universities, scientific research, museums, and worthwhile artistic production in general.
Yet a more democratic allocation of capital, which is key to any way out of our current polycrisis, is precisely what is to be prevented by the bipartisan abundance movement bankrolled by money from the crypto, oil, and tech industries.
Abundance promoters promise not just more stuff, but stuff that will help us begin to finally face the true scale of the climate crisis.
That sounds great. It’s about time, one might be tempted to say, as degrowth is going to be imposed on us one way or another. The European Central Bank just announced, it’s completely plausible that extreme climate events could cause euro area GDP to fall by up to 5% by 2030(!). That’s another global financial crisis, and this time it wouldn’t just be the EU technocrats obsession with austerity preventing a recovery.
Will it be done in chaos with the tech overlords taking advantage of the breakdown to push eugenics and slave labor or will it be met by some semblance of organized retreat and solidarity?
Abundance is an argument for the former. It is, at heart, an argument to accelerate the breakdown.
Adherents not only blame excessive government regulation for the US’ inability to meet citizens’ needs, but also labor unions for standing in the way of abundance. And the authors also argue for, and Democrats are now working on gutting environmental protections in order to unleash the builders.
The counterargument to “abundance” is that it’s not necessarily less that’s needed, but less of certain items. Think less bombs and fighter and private jets, more—or any—high speed rail, solar panels, regional self-sufficient production. With public guidance of housing policy perhaps we could begin to seriously prepare for the ravages of global warming, which are already knocking down the door, but less red tape is more likely to mean more developers building in flood and fire zones and a hollowed out state abandoning people when disaster inevitably strikes.
Cutting red tape is meaningless if power rests solely in the hands of the financial planners on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley who prefer to invest in high-return self-licking ice cream cones like the military-industrial complex rather than the most simple infrastructure that would reduce emissions and improve Americans’ quality of life.
While some communities here and there are already banding together in the face of the growing threat and a ghost government, there are limits to how much can be done at the local level.
If you’re looking for similar action on a larger scale, it’s best to look elsewhere than our two political parties who want to accelerate the breakdown and accumulation of wealth and power to those who caused it in the first place.
That’s because the dividing line is not, as Klein and Thompson tell it, between parties and those who care about the climate and those who don’t. It is between those whose goal is to make money for capitalists and hope and pray that economic forces magically lead us out of the planetary crisis (naganna happen) or more democratic control of capital in order to pay for the emergency preparations for the global warming that is here and accelerating with increasingly devastating effects. It can’t be both. And it is abundantly clear which side both political parties are on.
Political Realignment – Three Into One?
If Abundance creates the illusion of freedom, it is similar to our political terrain.
This latest attempt to keep the Democrats just as they are—a corrupt anti-working class party that’s always fighting for nothing and losing on everything but raking in money—is based on the assumption that the party can simply sit back, let Trump screw up, and wait for the “good billionaires” and the voters to come back into the big tent where nothing will fundamentally change. Well, almost nothing will change…
As Silicon Valley’s darker visions have emerged helping drive our social policy ever rightwards, the Democrats are finally having to openly move there to meet them. From The Verge:
In a few months, Klein and Thompson will headline an Abundance conference organized in part by the Foundation for American Innovation, a conservative think tank that helped co-author Project 2025. Abundance means more of everything, including more of the tired Democratic strategy of forging a coalition by making overtures to repentant conservatives — including unrepentant racists who see entire swaths of the population as inherently and biologically inferior.
Basically, the Democrats are trying to bring back into the big tent the Silicon Valley big money which wants to rely on skilled immigrant labor and is threatened by the MAGA nativist tone, if not actual deed (Trump sided with tech over MAGA in the H1-B visa debate), and so what if you’ve got to get onboard with some eugenics to do it.
“’Abundance is monomaniacally concerned with regulatory bottlenecks,’ Musharbash said. ‘Price fixing between independent firms creates a bottleneck on supply. It is a restraint in the private market that should be squarely at the intersection of Abundance thinking and… https://t.co/EW7UpmVnNs
— Basel Musharbash (@musharbash_b) July 12, 2025
The Democrats’ response to the planetary crisis is more power to the oligarchs. The Abundance agenda sounds a lot like the “freedom cities”—jusridictions under tech billionaire control where they will theoretically drive abundance to the moon (along with all their other technofascist pet projects). These cities are of course supported by the Trump administration, as are the underlying ideas buttressing them.
So while there might be differences (the GOP rejects climate science while the Dems accept it), the parties still arrive at the same place: groveling before the billionaires. It’s just the Dems pretend their benefactors are going to be “good billionaires” who care and provide for you. In the end, both embrace Silicon Valley eugenics and are eager to turn over social policy to these blood-thirsty weasels.
Despite that, we also have one of those hierarchical madmen who also happens to be the world’s richest individual, planning to start his own party because neither of the two parties goes far enough, fast enough in dismantling the state.
He certainly has the money to overcome the hurdles third parties face, but where will it land on the political spectrum? According to the New York Times, Musk recently met with “right-wing thinker” Curtis Yarvin for guidance.
Here’s Quinn Slobodian, writing at the New York Review, with a useful summary of Yarvin’s “thinking”:
Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet. Yarvin expressed the essence of the worldview recently when he enthused over Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and rebuild it as a US-backed colony securitized as an asset and sold to investors—as he called it, “the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”
Lo and behold, that sounds a lot like what the GOP and Team Blue are offering! So Musk would offer essentially a continuation of the DOGE mission, but more dedication to it than Trump’s GOP?
Meanwhile the Democrat leadership, according to Jonathan Chait, is intent on making the party into a libertarian one.
Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic saying the quiet part out loud — just stating explicitly that yes, abundance is about defeating progressives and remaking the Democratic Party as a libertarian, Never Trump Republican Party. Great, can we stop pretending it’s anything but that? pic.twitter.com/FuIs39Hxj3
— Aaron Regunberg (@AaronRegunberg) May 25, 2025
If I buy what the Dems are selling —that government is a nuisance that must be rolled back in order to unleash abundance— then what is the need of the Democrats at all?
A party led by Musk (an abundance provider, according to the Dems) can surely do the job without the presence of the Democrat middle man. It’s no surprise that Musk praised Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Klein:
This shows why a regulatory overhaul is necessary.
The burden of mountains of regulations is why the high speed rail can’t get down in California and the bridge that the ship hit still hasn’t been fixed. https://t.co/IPDgbUI6zY
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 28, 2025
So what is one potential outcome of Musk entering the ring while Democrats make the argument the government is the problem?
If Musk successfully builds his new fascist party, the Democratic Party will likely cease to exist as neoliberals will be motivated to merge into the Republican Party. This new duopoly would more accurately reflect the political landscape, leaving an even bigger chasm to the left
— Hampton Institute (@HamptonThink) July 5, 2025
How fitting it would be for the Democrats to argue themselves right out of existence. Liberals do have a certain knack for elevating their supposed opponents. There is of course the Donald. And his VP:
what’s rich about this is how central NPR was to selling JD Vance’s warmed over Charles Murray schtick. They helped build his media career because he told rich liberals what they wanted to hear, namely that Trump voters were lazy, irredeemable toothless hicks. https://t.co/XHpBNpEfcM pic.twitter.com/s02r3cO6ML
— Adam Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) July 17, 2025
The party has long existed only to further the ends of the oligarchy and keep the left in check, and now with total victory in sight, they can be kicked to the curb. Regardless, the options provided by the “greatest democracy in the history of the world” are becoming increasingly narrow and seemingly all led by the likes of Curtis Yarvin and his right-wing accelerationism.
Thanks for this piece, Conor. Good takedown of the shit sandwich offered by Klein, et al.
Re: Curtis Yarvin, a/k/a Mencius Moldbug, he can’t decide if his favorite future is Soylent Green or The Matrix. Sometime journalist and sometime Dem politician consultant Gil Duran explains.
Conor has admirably filled Lambert’s yellow waders on this piece! Thank you.
I’m sure I wasn’t the first person to say this, but we have the best government money can buy.
In no way does that mean we bought a competent government or one that cares about planning for a country where the 99% are meaningfully taken care of. I’d bet if you asked the 99% what the priorities of the government should be, regulatory overhaul or demolition is probably not even on the list or at best is in the bottom 10 out of 100.
They have been taught with great effectiveness since Ronald Reagan that government is the great evil in the world that must be destroyed in order for society to grow and prosper. That’s what I believed long ago, until I figured out that is a gigantic lie.
Right. Thatcher said her greatest accomplishment was Tony Blair and Ronald Reagan’s was Bill Clinton or, for that matter, all of the Democrats who followed. They learned to love the voodoo.
And of course voter complacency plays a role and by turning post WW2 US from a working class to a middle class country (or aspirational middle class) we’ve become the traditional middle class ally of the rich in the rich versus poor battle. Having something to lose makes people more conservative.
Thus the Vietnam era counter culture of environmentalism and deliberately living poor was shoved aside without too much trouble. And for working class labor it’s easier for the middle class to turn to immigrants from countries where poverty is still a thing. The remnants of our own previous working class become something for the wine club set to worry about but not too much as long as they continue to pull all the strings. Subverting the democracy safety valve is therefore necessary.
Ultimately it’s “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone. Where will they go? Hell, maybe.
So the abundance agenda is nothing more than the rebranding of neoliberalism in a manner suitable to the oligarchs, so that the campaign contributions, bribes and payoffs keep rolling in, while at the same time ridding them of the MAGA yokels who brought Trump and Project 2025 to power. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the dems come riding to the rescue and make it worse.
The way I’m seeing it.
Dems = wing of the uni-party that flies a blue flag.
Neoliberalism = late stage predatory capitalism.
Abundance = tool to further us along the transition from democracy to feudalism via privatization of public goods and services.
This abundance shtick sure sounds like a play out of the private equity playbook. PE, where the only abundance to be found is in the form of “other compensation”.
We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder gentler machine gun hand.
Neil Young
I’m from construction and I’m here to help…
making sure that things are built faster, better, cheaper.”
You can only have two.
Everyone knows this.
A friend in advertising looked at the “Good – Fast – Cheap: Choose Any Two” triangle diagram I drew and said, “Choose any ONE.”
He might be right.
Best…H
These are the kinds of ideas that promulgate when perpetual adolescence is marketed 24/7. “I need to do whatever I want to right now.”
Thousands of mini countries sounds like a set up for warlords and warring states. Of course after the nukes go off, it will be with sticks and stones if at all.
You can find the (not much) kinder, gentler version in Neal Stephenson”s Snow Crash.
Thanks for saving us all the tedium of reading source material on the “Abundance” “movement”. Another trickle-up racket disguised as “progress”. Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right. And all hell bent on making things worse for all but the puppeteers at the top.
What got me thinking the abundance agenda was a joke was singling out San Francisco and LA ( I presume they meant the whole of the La basin) for their lack of housing etc.
first off having grown up in SF, like where are you going to build more housing? Where is that land they speak of? Or the greater Bay Area? It’s why people built and commute from essentially the Central Valley because that’s where there was land to build.
They compared to other places, Texas for example. Where there are cities surrounded by hundreds of miles of buildable land.
These are not regulation issues per se, but of one location basically being 100% built out vs others with lots of room to expand.
Over regulation is very real but a separate issue they conflate together.
Your article does a good job ( as others not reported by MSM) about the true agenda they are pushing and it’s not good.
That Jon Stewart clip is amazing. This is why America can’t have nice things. Some $42 billion spent over four years and not a single home was connected to any broadband. The whole bill was just an employment plan for lawyers and bureaucrats using an absolutely convoluted planning mechanism designed to deliver nothing in the end. Maybe that was the real intent. To spend tens of billions of dollars for the right PMCs so long as no ordinary Americans didn’t get any benefit from it. There was a similar Biden program to bring in recharge stations for EV cars that delivered virtually nothing too. If DOGE had been targeting this then they would be seen as heroes instead of being the wrecking ball to government services that they are.
You’re better than I am. I can’t even bring myself to watch, from someone who was previously a huge fan of Stewart (my lib days a lifetime ago).
So many years talking to pathological liars and the figure is accepted as is? Assuming that this wasn’t the plan from the start, and or because neoliberal decay is deeply set, being hit with a figure like that should immediately elicit a fusillade of questions and probing –
As in, does the US have people who will roll this broadband to the home? Physically install it, if needed? I’m guessing no, so how have they done this sort of thing in the past? Oh, they contracted this expansion to those companies that stand to lose pricing power if everything is completed quickly and efficiently? The companies that have previously taken similar money and done jack shit with it (or stolen it)? Huh. Weird. And are any of those companies furiously lobbying or suing to slow this down?
And that’s what I could think of in 3 minutes while typing up something else. Someone slightly less distracted could probably poke bigger holes. Hell, looking at the community broadband articles on Ars Technica (one dropped recently – https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/two-guys-hated-using-comcast-so-they-built-their-own-fiber-isp/ ) shows that while it’s a bit complicated to run fiber from scratch, it’s not rocket science either.
If you want to get a window onto the thinking of people like Yarvin, Musk, et al., check out “More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity” by Adam Becker.
Thanks for this Conor. I’d only been paying cursory attention to this “abundance” nonsense and assumed it was more Democrat substance free sloganeering, but didn’t realize it was just painted over midwit libertarianism. FFS.
If anyone wants to see where lack of regulation and zoning gets you, take a little tour of Houston. But don’t walk – you’ll probably be run down by some gargantuan juggernaut with an internal combustion engine due to a lack of sidewalks anywhere. Houston is pretty awful according to my buddy who reluctantly moved there a few years ago, but that’s what you get when you put several million people on top of a swamp and tell them it’s a free for all..
As a former regulator who had to issue and enforce permits, I can describe that 95% of the job is telling rich people and richer corporations no. During my time as a regulator for a US State, some of that 95% was informing local governments that the permits they were about to issue violated their own laws. We even sued a city and issued a citation to a county for following through with their permits (that only benefited rich people, of course).
The minute “red tape” regulations are weakened, and I mean minute as in 60 seconds, the squillionaire class and their class-adjacent 1%-ers will embark on building sprees of ridiculous vanity that will utterly trash entire regions. For example, a water pipeline from the Great Lakes to the US southwest (or wherever). “Red Tape” is currently the only thing preventing this, not the $5B price tag, as that’s bus money for someone like Elon.
The “Abundance” people are trickle-down morons.
Usually I would add that Canada would have to OK any plan to divert water from the Great Lakes, but with how things have been going recently up there in relation to down here, I’m not sure they would or could meaningfully prevent that from happening if DC gives the OK. I’m sure the states bordering the Great Lakes would sue in a minute, but again, looking at the Supreme Court these days and I still am not sure it would be stopped.
My personal favorite is the idea to bore under the desert to the Pacific Ocean and let Death Valley and all the low lands surrounding be filled with the Pacific and not worry about a Salton Sea redux because the underground connection to the Pacific would keep the valleys full. Imagine all the new oceanfront property that would be open for development!! BONUS – would lower the ocean levels a few inches too! With these jokers that might be a real outcome.
This might cheer you up. Lucy Kellaway was a great columnist at the Financial Times. From the archives, quoting her: