Before I give you today’s little takes, I just wanted to quickly address the situation with n+1 and Richard Beck’s review of my book. The magazine has now issued two corrections to the piece: one that dealt with the opening sentence about when I started my writing career and one that dealt with Beck’s repeated insistence that I “said nothing whatsoever” and “completely ignored America’s decisive role in making Israel’s genocide possible.” I appreciate that n+1’s editors took my concerns seriously and were patient and professional during some difficult conversations. But, these factual corrections aside, it remains my strong belief that, beyond honest differences of opinion and interpretation, the piece still substantially misinforms readers about my writing and opinions.
First, Musk is done—for now. He seems to have gotten frustrated and bored. Even more than the much-anticipated blow-up with Trump, this perhaps was to be expected. Musk struck me as “Ross Perot on Crack,” and I have to say the recent news confirms this judgment:
Elon Musk took a swipe at President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, saying it would add to the national deficit. He complained to administration officials about a lucrative deal that went to a rival company to build an artificial-intelligence data center in the Middle East. And he has yet to make good on a $100 million pledge to Trump’s political operation.
It’s all there: The deficit obsession; trying to wrangle government contracts; making huge pledges to the Republican president and then not coming through. Of course, much of DOGE’s damage is already done, and Musk’s people remain ensconced in Washington.
Axios reports that a recent poll shows voters prefer “populism” to the “abundance agenda,” made prominent (if not quite popular) by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book Abundance. Here’s how the poll questions were framed:
Driving the news: The survey of 1,200 registered voters by Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy organization, was designed to supply some hard data for the debate.
It defined the abundance argument by starting off with this sentence: "The big problem is 'bottlenecks' that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges."
The populist argument was described as "The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government."
By the numbers: 55.6% of all voters preferred the populist argument, compared to 43.5% who said they would be more likely to vote for a candidate who offered the abundance argument.
Now, I’m sure the Abundists are gonna complain about the wording of the question, but that’s kinda the whole problem. Politics is not a debating society or a seminar room where you get to quibble over the wording. People like a little negativity: you need to have a bad guy. No one, except a select few, gets excited about zoning regulations. Now, to be fair, I have not read Abundance, but if I may judge a book from its cover, I think that the whole problem is in the green utopia it pictures. Its utopianism is too rationalistic: it lacks brio, spark, a little pizazz, which is sort of the same thing as it lacks enough negativity. It exists in the “good things are good” tautology world. To me, the word “abundance” itself sounds a little effete and college-boy. Wouldn’t you know it, this reminds me of an obscure 19th-century French socialist. That’s right: Georges Sorel, one of my favorite guys. Namely, his contrast between “utopia” and “myth.”
For Sorel, a utopia is a rationally articulated vision of the future that directs, “men’s minds towards reforms which can be brought about by patching up the system.” Sorel writes, “liberal political economy is one of the best examples of a utopia that could be given. A society was imagined where everything could be reduced to types produced by commerce and operating under the law of the fullest competition…”
A utopia is..an intellectual product; it is the work of theorists who, after observing and discussing the facts, seek to establish a model to which they can compare existing societies in order to estimate the amount of good and evil they contain;38 it is a combination of imaginary institutions having sufficient analogies to real institutions for the jurist to be able to reason about them; it is a construction which can be broken into parts and of which certain pieces have been shaped in such a way that they can (with a few alterations) be fitted into future legislation.
In the Sorelian sense, it’s pretty clear Abundance is a utopia. But a myth is something else: it’s a representation in images of a political movement’s inner convictions, “they are not descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act.” They embody a struggle. Very often, they are pessimistic rather than optimistic, and this pessimism is bracing; It communicates a whole worldview in a compelling story. Trumpism contains many myths, including the idea of the stolen election, which I contend is less a statement of fact than an imaginative projection of a shared sense of dispossession. Populism is mythic: it creates a world of heroic people and villainous elites, and a vision of a cataclysmic showdown between the two. People want a little more myth, struggles, enemies, battles, triumphs, etc. Not zoning restrictions. Now, to be fair to the Abundists, they will say it’s more a policy idea than a conception of politics. Politics is poetry, and governing is prose, as the old saw goes. No one has written the Democratic poetry of our era yet.
I think the analogy would be to the conservative movement, which is rich in myth and pessimism and enemy-hating as presented to the public, but which *also* contains an unspoken commitment to the dry, boring work of curtailing taxes and regulation on incumbent power and wealth. The message flows with the news cycle, but the whole team always knows What Is To Be Done when the levers of power are in hand, it goes without saying (Trumpian fissures at the margin notwithstanding).
Abundance is intended (or should be, at least) to be the Austrian economics hiding behind the Reagan "Kill the Bastards" meme.
And like, sure, it will do for that purpose. But the high-education, high-engagement, pro-social half of the electorate is always going to struggle to draw that distinction between utopian programs and mythic narratives and therein lies the problem.
I’ll never stop believing that Trump learned more from Vince McMahon than Roy Cohn. Sorel would have gone, “yeah, something like that.” Wonkery also, by definition, overlooks the importance of vagueness. “Fuck the Man!” works because everybody’s got their own Man, they fill in the blanks themselves. So — zoning reform + The Undertaker.