At the national level, they're totally compatible. And I think the abundance people typically say this when asked. It's mostly just that some of the writers in each camp hate each other.
At local level, especially in very blue cities (+ CA as a whole), yeah there is a lot more direct opposition.
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.
Good points. Democrats need a myth (and Big Corporations Suck- Tax the Rich might be a start - except getting elected requires their donations). Once Dems had a good myth and got power, they could roll out sensible policies that would barely show up in the news.
the contrast between the claremont review of books review and richard beck's is funny. from Andrew Busch's review: "Although Ganz allows that social liberalism contributed to feelings of dislocation, he clearly sees the locus of responsibility falling on the “neoliberalism” of the 1980s."
Never read Sorel, but I like that contrast between utopia and myth. I will have to track that down (Reflections on Violence?). A number of writers on Fascism (e.g Griffin) include mythic as a characteristic, but often without a clear definition, as if the meaning should be obvious or is already well-established (it really isn't, imo). So Sorel would be a good source.
Also, am I the only one seeing the a-Bundist gag? Or maybe that's just me?
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.
I finally bit the bullet and read abundance because it was getting more annoying to insist on not reading it. There's even less there than one would think, but the funny part is I do suspect they imagine they're providing the poetry. The writing tries pretty hard and ends up being a deeply sophomoric call to arms.
It's almost hard to have a substantive critique because the book is lacking any substantive thesis. Do good things, don't do bad things? It's technocratic neoliberalism with a "but government's not always bad" caveat.
I haven't (yet) read the book, but have read many of the articles by the authors that appear to have been whipped up into the book-length souffle. I'm looking forward to reading it (currently #231 in line for the 95 copies at my public library). But what strikes me in the articles and in the arguments and reviews (pro and con) is that there is less there than meets the eye. One example of government being able to "move fast and build things" that gets recycled in most reviews is Josh Shapiro's rebuilding of I-95. Thing is: that (and other examples) involved a bona fide emergency — and not a diffuse and complicated problem with a complex history and multiple causes like affordable housing. As a former civil servant who has been responsible for developing requlations and implementing policy (something I don't believe most of the 'abundantists" have experience with) I do believe that government can and should be more effective. But the devil and god are in the details—and thus far I've seen precious few of those in this discussion.
Which brings me to the distinction between "myth" and "utopia". While I appreciate the distinction, I think that "abundance" is more an example of "myth" than "utopia" (despite the cover of Abundance reminding me of imagery from The Jetsons). The "myth" that underlies Abundance is the neoliberal myth of "the magic of the market", the "pursuit of self-interest" (enlightened or not) being the best way of achieving the public interest, the "rising tide that lifts all boats", and "unshackling the creativity of free enterprise". All of these can be good things until they aren't — it's the failures of these "myths" that need to be addressed if the myths are to become a blueprint for a utopia (however odd the concept of a blueprint for utopia might be).
You've long expressed a desire for "a little more myth" and "democratic poetry", and that seems like the main reason for commenting on this otherwise unremarkable, pretty dumb (imo) poll.
I don't think you've written much on the Obama presidency? I'd love to see you write about it, contrasting his skill as a political communicator with the widespread disappointment with his presidency on the Left (I recall you making comments about this before on Unclear and Present Danger, but could be wrong). I think Obama did a great job spinning a political myth & speaking in the kind of poetry you say you're looking for. Are we really missing the poetry to communicate an existing clear & concise policy platform and governing philosophy for the broad liberal/left (or however you want to frame it)? Or is the political poetry impossible because the the platform & plan for policy doesn't actually exist beyond populist platitudes and vague ideas? IMO it's clearly the later, and I see "Abundance" as trying to help define that a little more, not as an attempt at political poetry.
Disclaimer: I haven't read "Abundance", but I've heard a few interviews and have been reading/listening to Derek & Ezra long enough to feel fairly confident they are trying to build a consensus around policy, not messaging. But I'm not on social media so I may be missing context as to that specific meta-discourse, which I gather has been heated.
You didn't read it, don't engage with the ideas, but don't like the people you associate with the book. You liked a tweet yesterday that mischaracterized what the abundance people are aiming for, ran with that, then caveat at the end that really you do understand that it's supposed to be a governing agenda/philosophy broadly, especially for blue state and local governments, not the campaign strategy.
This is all a bit of a shame too, because I think you have more in common with some of them than you realize. This was especially clear last fall (?) when you wrote your post about the rise of zero-sum thinking in American politics. If you are even vaguely interested in how abundance person might tie their pet issues to the rise of Trumpism, you should read some of Jerusalem Demsas's work, especially "Blue States Gave Trump and Vance an Opening" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-vance-malthusian-housing-views/680384/
This post is also an annoying reminder of how you use "vox" as shorthand for ~4 guys who write about politics and with whom you disagree about some issues. It comes across like you are defining an intra-party opposition as entirely composed of alternate-universe John Ganzes so that you don't feel bad not really engaging. And clearly you also just don't find housing scarcity, public transit use, energy production, etc., to be interesting. Which is fine, but maybe you can talk to your friend J. Bouie about housing, my impression is he hates the abundance guys but is a big yimby nonetheless.
Also there is a difference between Klein’s style (admittedly fairly non-confrontational, intellectual, trying to cross the aisles so not pissing in many cornflakes) and the activity and storytelling of living, IRL YIMBYism. That actual activity (not the book) is a lot closer to your vision of lefty politics, John: people showing up for town meetings, not just tweeting; and messaging that is very heavy on the confrontational style: renters-v-entrenched-homeowners, young v. the wealthy elderly, not afraid to call out racists and racist systems, vigorously anti-car, etc. My group’s nearly-official motto is “we sue the suburbs”—we’re proud to help get housing built for everyone, not just the wealthy; and we’re proud of being pugnacious about it.
IDK if it would constitute a "myth", but I do have a very strong personal attachment to the yimby movement and a visceral dislike of its villains. I recognize that I am not the median voter, but it's not like it's a totally bloodless movement. One of the main knocks on yimbs is that they're too in-your-face, which you wouldn't get if there was no enthusiasm.
Also like, yuppy PMCs are a lefty group now (Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right, etc., etc.). This includes economic issues, even if they’re being redistributed from. The hard left may not love this, but I’m sorry, we’re the ones with good opinions these days.
Where there are cracks between this group and lib/left parties, it’s likely to show up in housing, as it did in the Canadian election. I would never vote conservative, but it is fucking annoying that, as a professional couple, my wife and I pay so much rent and are nowhere near buying a house. As much as I support public approaches, I am highly skeptical that they will do much for someone in my position. By liberalizing zoning, you throw this part of your coalition a bone in a way that also helps the economy and other people.
I think it makes sense to look at Abundance less as a general political platform than as a campaign targeted at Democratic Party electeds. The negative, mythic narrative emerges very clearly in that context: all those ‘groups’ who have been constantly threatening to primary you and accusing you of corruption? They are the descendants of a movement whose self-dealing antics are responsible for all the frustration and gridlock you’ve experienced in your political life, without which you would undoubtedly have lived up to your aspirations of effecting real change.
I think there’s actually a lot of truth to the utopian side of the narrative, but the mythic element emerges in linking the whole thing to an intra Democratic Party fight (which Thompson is clearly much more committed to than Klein)
Regardless of political strategy, it is true that huge corporations and rich individuals now have amassed, through globalization and corporate concentration, an obscene amount of money and power. They have the means to escape the states' regulations and taxes, as well as influence their politics and policies.
As long as this problem is not addressed, it will keep skewing the media landscape as well as the political process and agenda as it is currently doing everywhere. It's a global civic crisis.
In these conditions, making abundance the center of an electoral discourse makes it look like you're discussing zoning restrictions around the elephant in the room.
PS : since this is a civic crisis, I suppose that on the local level some parts of the abundance project can help grassroot engagement and give people a sense of reappropriation. But this can't work if there are no national policies to reform electoral donations or concentration in media & social media control.
The problem with both "abundance" and "populism" as political prescriptions to counter Trumpism is that neither seems particularly rooted in values or ideals, and they are instead overly focused on material conditions. The Biden presidency was in large part an exercise in addressing those material conditions which supposedly laid the groundwork for Trump. Historic investments from ARP, infrastructure, chips act, IRA, all over the country. All to no political benefit--none. It's not that these things aren't objectively good or worth pursuing, but the fact that they seemed to have borne no political fruit should give some pause to the materialist approach. Trumpism does make certain materialist appeals but fundamentally it is rooted in something deeper, and if we're going to offer an alternative, it too needs to reach past the materialist surface.
Biden’s legislation might have registered more if he could have communicated its benefits with some vigor. He needed to surround the prose with some poetry but simply couldn’t—probably lacked the strength to do so.
I think that’s probably true. On the other hand I think it’s startling that generational investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, etc, yielded absolutely no political benefit, whether the messaging was poor or not. Makes me question whether material conditions are the ground on which this battle is actually being fought.
It’s still one part of the ground, to be mixed in with a dose of Carl Schmitt and a touch of vaudeville. The more the materialist moves are well communicated and produce visible benefits, the more you can dial back the Schmittian darkness.
Another interesting news item is the federal court reached the insanely obvious legal conclusion of blocking some Trump tariffs (see here: https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-trade-court-0392dbd59f548e49ad4f64254ae3f94a). This is one of the areas (along with DOGE and immigration contempt-of-court) where they were really stepping into a different type of government. IMO if there’s a bona fide constitutional crisis, there’s a good chance it gets fought on the terrain that falls out from this decision.
Re “abundance”, perhaps it’s too wonk-brained. On the flip side, it feels like people are worked up about stuff other than “corporate power”. Maybe that pitch lets you cut across other fights. Who knows, I’m not a pollster. But I think beyond the platform, or specific quantum of myth and populism, Dems would do much better just by picking a competent messenger. Having skipped that for three cycles, it’s harder to appraise the best message and/or the extent to which you want to choose policy based on that message.
If you stipulate that the “abundance agenda” is the best way to govern, perhaps someone charismatic could figure out a way to package it (pitches based on more money, cheaper goods, and/or opening up more “frontier” have worked). Or maybe it’s a bad idea, or a mixed bag. But it gets frustrating when people who purport to be policy people (ie, not this blog) are already talking about messaging. There was just an election, guys, it’s OK to talk about substantive proposals without falling back on cliquey beefs or imaginary swing voters. A lot of Left abundance discussion is sneering about message, when IMO a lot of left priorities are going to faceplant if you don’t simplify processes and remove veto points (e.g., Biden’s rural broadband failure; clean energy/social housing permitting).
Have to admit I haven't' read the book either but I've been exposed to some of the same thinkers and arguments it invokes.
"Abundance" recognizes a lot of the arguments folks like Jennifer Pahlka and Stephen Teles have been making. They are not utopian thinkers. What I understand Klein and they are saying is that we are engaging in a lot of administrative and bureaucratic self-sabotage delivering the products that the electorate voted for, i.e., no one wants to wait six months for permits to put up a garden shed; it shouldn't take four years to begin a Build Back Better infrastructure project; affordable housing shouldn't be so scarce; probably shouldn't need a state permit or license to drive a fork truck, etc.
Government is being strangled by an abundance of caution. Bureaucrats shouldn't be in the throes of analysis paralysis and frightened that any action they take risks breaking a law in delivering these goods. As Klein has pointed out, this ability to move - to get things done -to bulldoze obstructions is a good deal of the wide appeal Trump has despite the fact that much of what he is doing is horrifying.
The folks opposed to that vision tend to be the interest groups(left and right) and corporations that lobby for and invoke the regulatory and legal minutiae to gum up the process and sustain a vetocracy. But Democrats, as the party of government, tend to be identified with this paralysis.
I'm sure I'm missing something and there's significantly more to it but I'll have to read the book to find out.
I have all kinds of mixed feelings about the abundance project. To start with, especially as far as the housing story is concerned, I don't mind that--with a few tweaks, isn't it just dialetical materialism? To blunt the revolutionary energies of the thirties the government exerted itself to create a whole class of property owners, who, once they owned property--a very specific kind of asset that eats up all your capital and is very vulnerable to all kinds of "blight"--they sought themselves to protect its value with all kinds of restrictions?
That, to me, points to an obvious contradiction in the abundance project, that I saw Matt Yglesias acknowledge in passing. On the one hand, housing is extremely expensive, and "people" want the price to go down. Undoubtedly the sharp jump in cost of living post-COVID was a big driver of the Democratic losses among black and Latino voters in NYC and CA. Yes, the perception that the economy is growing, that there's an enough for all, and that in a way that you can actually see, would probably turn the heat down on our politics somewhat.
On the other hand, are people going to vote to bring down the value of their own homes? That seems like a structural impasse--the interests of people who own property are directly opposed to those of people who don't. The temptation is that we can somehow go around politics by making enough for everybody, and I agree that lots more housing needs to be built. But, I don't know, there is a Schmittian side to democratic politics, and this does not strike me as a winning message exactly.
As a side note, French literature academic Yves Citton wrote, a few years back, a book called Mythocracy on how myths and stories can help the left. He wrote it in the context of France discovering the American PR storytelling technics in the wake of the Obama presidency & a book by Christian Salmon. This was usually framed as a bad, manipulative tactic, Citton argued on the contrary that the left should tap into the power of strong, emancipatory narratives. One of his (non directly political) examples was how Sun Ra reinvented his origins a Saturnian and created stories around this. A powerful mythic & cosmic identity reinvention that, to Citton, erased the humiliation of slavery.
(To be specific, Sun Ra coined the word "mythocracy")
It was originally published in by the éditions Amsterdam, a very interesting French publisher of left wing texts & essays, and was translated to english.
Right off the bat, why choose? Can't both the abundist and populist arguments share the stage?
Or is the problem with the abundist argument that the villains may include the same people making the populist argument and vice versa?
At the national level, they're totally compatible. And I think the abundance people typically say this when asked. It's mostly just that some of the writers in each camp hate each other.
At local level, especially in very blue cities (+ CA as a whole), yeah there is a lot more direct opposition.
That was my impression.
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.
This is a terrific set of points.
I personally would be very in for a politics blending abundance, redistribution & "kill the bastards" (that is, anti-conservative identity politics)
Good points. Democrats need a myth (and Big Corporations Suck- Tax the Rich might be a start - except getting elected requires their donations). Once Dems had a good myth and got power, they could roll out sensible policies that would barely show up in the news.
the contrast between the claremont review of books review and richard beck's is funny. from Andrew Busch's review: "Although Ganz allows that social liberalism contributed to feelings of dislocation, he clearly sees the locus of responsibility falling on the “neoliberalism” of the 1980s."
Never read Sorel, but I like that contrast between utopia and myth. I will have to track that down (Reflections on Violence?). A number of writers on Fascism (e.g Griffin) include mythic as a characteristic, but often without a clear definition, as if the meaning should be obvious or is already well-established (it really isn't, imo). So Sorel would be a good source.
Also, am I the only one seeing the a-Bundist gag? Or maybe that's just me?
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.
I finally bit the bullet and read abundance because it was getting more annoying to insist on not reading it. There's even less there than one would think, but the funny part is I do suspect they imagine they're providing the poetry. The writing tries pretty hard and ends up being a deeply sophomoric call to arms.
It's almost hard to have a substantive critique because the book is lacking any substantive thesis. Do good things, don't do bad things? It's technocratic neoliberalism with a "but government's not always bad" caveat.
I haven't (yet) read the book, but have read many of the articles by the authors that appear to have been whipped up into the book-length souffle. I'm looking forward to reading it (currently #231 in line for the 95 copies at my public library). But what strikes me in the articles and in the arguments and reviews (pro and con) is that there is less there than meets the eye. One example of government being able to "move fast and build things" that gets recycled in most reviews is Josh Shapiro's rebuilding of I-95. Thing is: that (and other examples) involved a bona fide emergency — and not a diffuse and complicated problem with a complex history and multiple causes like affordable housing. As a former civil servant who has been responsible for developing requlations and implementing policy (something I don't believe most of the 'abundantists" have experience with) I do believe that government can and should be more effective. But the devil and god are in the details—and thus far I've seen precious few of those in this discussion.
Which brings me to the distinction between "myth" and "utopia". While I appreciate the distinction, I think that "abundance" is more an example of "myth" than "utopia" (despite the cover of Abundance reminding me of imagery from The Jetsons). The "myth" that underlies Abundance is the neoliberal myth of "the magic of the market", the "pursuit of self-interest" (enlightened or not) being the best way of achieving the public interest, the "rising tide that lifts all boats", and "unshackling the creativity of free enterprise". All of these can be good things until they aren't — it's the failures of these "myths" that need to be addressed if the myths are to become a blueprint for a utopia (however odd the concept of a blueprint for utopia might be).
You've long expressed a desire for "a little more myth" and "democratic poetry", and that seems like the main reason for commenting on this otherwise unremarkable, pretty dumb (imo) poll.
I don't think you've written much on the Obama presidency? I'd love to see you write about it, contrasting his skill as a political communicator with the widespread disappointment with his presidency on the Left (I recall you making comments about this before on Unclear and Present Danger, but could be wrong). I think Obama did a great job spinning a political myth & speaking in the kind of poetry you say you're looking for. Are we really missing the poetry to communicate an existing clear & concise policy platform and governing philosophy for the broad liberal/left (or however you want to frame it)? Or is the political poetry impossible because the the platform & plan for policy doesn't actually exist beyond populist platitudes and vague ideas? IMO it's clearly the later, and I see "Abundance" as trying to help define that a little more, not as an attempt at political poetry.
Disclaimer: I haven't read "Abundance", but I've heard a few interviews and have been reading/listening to Derek & Ezra long enough to feel fairly confident they are trying to build a consensus around policy, not messaging. But I'm not on social media so I may be missing context as to that specific meta-discourse, which I gather has been heated.
You didn't read it, don't engage with the ideas, but don't like the people you associate with the book. You liked a tweet yesterday that mischaracterized what the abundance people are aiming for, ran with that, then caveat at the end that really you do understand that it's supposed to be a governing agenda/philosophy broadly, especially for blue state and local governments, not the campaign strategy.
This is all a bit of a shame too, because I think you have more in common with some of them than you realize. This was especially clear last fall (?) when you wrote your post about the rise of zero-sum thinking in American politics. If you are even vaguely interested in how abundance person might tie their pet issues to the rise of Trumpism, you should read some of Jerusalem Demsas's work, especially "Blue States Gave Trump and Vance an Opening" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-vance-malthusian-housing-views/680384/
This post is also an annoying reminder of how you use "vox" as shorthand for ~4 guys who write about politics and with whom you disagree about some issues. It comes across like you are defining an intra-party opposition as entirely composed of alternate-universe John Ganzes so that you don't feel bad not really engaging. And clearly you also just don't find housing scarcity, public transit use, energy production, etc., to be interesting. Which is fine, but maybe you can talk to your friend J. Bouie about housing, my impression is he hates the abundance guys but is a big yimby nonetheless.
Also there is a difference between Klein’s style (admittedly fairly non-confrontational, intellectual, trying to cross the aisles so not pissing in many cornflakes) and the activity and storytelling of living, IRL YIMBYism. That actual activity (not the book) is a lot closer to your vision of lefty politics, John: people showing up for town meetings, not just tweeting; and messaging that is very heavy on the confrontational style: renters-v-entrenched-homeowners, young v. the wealthy elderly, not afraid to call out racists and racist systems, vigorously anti-car, etc. My group’s nearly-official motto is “we sue the suburbs”—we’re proud to help get housing built for everyone, not just the wealthy; and we’re proud of being pugnacious about it.
IDK if it would constitute a "myth", but I do have a very strong personal attachment to the yimby movement and a visceral dislike of its villains. I recognize that I am not the median voter, but it's not like it's a totally bloodless movement. One of the main knocks on yimbs is that they're too in-your-face, which you wouldn't get if there was no enthusiasm.
Also like, yuppy PMCs are a lefty group now (Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right, etc., etc.). This includes economic issues, even if they’re being redistributed from. The hard left may not love this, but I’m sorry, we’re the ones with good opinions these days.
Where there are cracks between this group and lib/left parties, it’s likely to show up in housing, as it did in the Canadian election. I would never vote conservative, but it is fucking annoying that, as a professional couple, my wife and I pay so much rent and are nowhere near buying a house. As much as I support public approaches, I am highly skeptical that they will do much for someone in my position. By liberalizing zoning, you throw this part of your coalition a bone in a way that also helps the economy and other people.
I think it makes sense to look at Abundance less as a general political platform than as a campaign targeted at Democratic Party electeds. The negative, mythic narrative emerges very clearly in that context: all those ‘groups’ who have been constantly threatening to primary you and accusing you of corruption? They are the descendants of a movement whose self-dealing antics are responsible for all the frustration and gridlock you’ve experienced in your political life, without which you would undoubtedly have lived up to your aspirations of effecting real change.
I think there’s actually a lot of truth to the utopian side of the narrative, but the mythic element emerges in linking the whole thing to an intra Democratic Party fight (which Thompson is clearly much more committed to than Klein)
Regardless of political strategy, it is true that huge corporations and rich individuals now have amassed, through globalization and corporate concentration, an obscene amount of money and power. They have the means to escape the states' regulations and taxes, as well as influence their politics and policies.
As long as this problem is not addressed, it will keep skewing the media landscape as well as the political process and agenda as it is currently doing everywhere. It's a global civic crisis.
In these conditions, making abundance the center of an electoral discourse makes it look like you're discussing zoning restrictions around the elephant in the room.
PS : since this is a civic crisis, I suppose that on the local level some parts of the abundance project can help grassroot engagement and give people a sense of reappropriation. But this can't work if there are no national policies to reform electoral donations or concentration in media & social media control.
The problem with both "abundance" and "populism" as political prescriptions to counter Trumpism is that neither seems particularly rooted in values or ideals, and they are instead overly focused on material conditions. The Biden presidency was in large part an exercise in addressing those material conditions which supposedly laid the groundwork for Trump. Historic investments from ARP, infrastructure, chips act, IRA, all over the country. All to no political benefit--none. It's not that these things aren't objectively good or worth pursuing, but the fact that they seemed to have borne no political fruit should give some pause to the materialist approach. Trumpism does make certain materialist appeals but fundamentally it is rooted in something deeper, and if we're going to offer an alternative, it too needs to reach past the materialist surface.
Biden’s legislation might have registered more if he could have communicated its benefits with some vigor. He needed to surround the prose with some poetry but simply couldn’t—probably lacked the strength to do so.
I think that’s probably true. On the other hand I think it’s startling that generational investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, etc, yielded absolutely no political benefit, whether the messaging was poor or not. Makes me question whether material conditions are the ground on which this battle is actually being fought.
It’s still one part of the ground, to be mixed in with a dose of Carl Schmitt and a touch of vaudeville. The more the materialist moves are well communicated and produce visible benefits, the more you can dial back the Schmittian darkness.
Another interesting news item is the federal court reached the insanely obvious legal conclusion of blocking some Trump tariffs (see here: https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-trade-court-0392dbd59f548e49ad4f64254ae3f94a). This is one of the areas (along with DOGE and immigration contempt-of-court) where they were really stepping into a different type of government. IMO if there’s a bona fide constitutional crisis, there’s a good chance it gets fought on the terrain that falls out from this decision.
Re “abundance”, perhaps it’s too wonk-brained. On the flip side, it feels like people are worked up about stuff other than “corporate power”. Maybe that pitch lets you cut across other fights. Who knows, I’m not a pollster. But I think beyond the platform, or specific quantum of myth and populism, Dems would do much better just by picking a competent messenger. Having skipped that for three cycles, it’s harder to appraise the best message and/or the extent to which you want to choose policy based on that message.
If you stipulate that the “abundance agenda” is the best way to govern, perhaps someone charismatic could figure out a way to package it (pitches based on more money, cheaper goods, and/or opening up more “frontier” have worked). Or maybe it’s a bad idea, or a mixed bag. But it gets frustrating when people who purport to be policy people (ie, not this blog) are already talking about messaging. There was just an election, guys, it’s OK to talk about substantive proposals without falling back on cliquey beefs or imaginary swing voters. A lot of Left abundance discussion is sneering about message, when IMO a lot of left priorities are going to faceplant if you don’t simplify processes and remove veto points (e.g., Biden’s rural broadband failure; clean energy/social housing permitting).
Have to admit I haven't' read the book either but I've been exposed to some of the same thinkers and arguments it invokes.
"Abundance" recognizes a lot of the arguments folks like Jennifer Pahlka and Stephen Teles have been making. They are not utopian thinkers. What I understand Klein and they are saying is that we are engaging in a lot of administrative and bureaucratic self-sabotage delivering the products that the electorate voted for, i.e., no one wants to wait six months for permits to put up a garden shed; it shouldn't take four years to begin a Build Back Better infrastructure project; affordable housing shouldn't be so scarce; probably shouldn't need a state permit or license to drive a fork truck, etc.
Government is being strangled by an abundance of caution. Bureaucrats shouldn't be in the throes of analysis paralysis and frightened that any action they take risks breaking a law in delivering these goods. As Klein has pointed out, this ability to move - to get things done -to bulldoze obstructions is a good deal of the wide appeal Trump has despite the fact that much of what he is doing is horrifying.
The folks opposed to that vision tend to be the interest groups(left and right) and corporations that lobby for and invoke the regulatory and legal minutiae to gum up the process and sustain a vetocracy. But Democrats, as the party of government, tend to be identified with this paralysis.
I'm sure I'm missing something and there's significantly more to it but I'll have to read the book to find out.
I have all kinds of mixed feelings about the abundance project. To start with, especially as far as the housing story is concerned, I don't mind that--with a few tweaks, isn't it just dialetical materialism? To blunt the revolutionary energies of the thirties the government exerted itself to create a whole class of property owners, who, once they owned property--a very specific kind of asset that eats up all your capital and is very vulnerable to all kinds of "blight"--they sought themselves to protect its value with all kinds of restrictions?
That, to me, points to an obvious contradiction in the abundance project, that I saw Matt Yglesias acknowledge in passing. On the one hand, housing is extremely expensive, and "people" want the price to go down. Undoubtedly the sharp jump in cost of living post-COVID was a big driver of the Democratic losses among black and Latino voters in NYC and CA. Yes, the perception that the economy is growing, that there's an enough for all, and that in a way that you can actually see, would probably turn the heat down on our politics somewhat.
On the other hand, are people going to vote to bring down the value of their own homes? That seems like a structural impasse--the interests of people who own property are directly opposed to those of people who don't. The temptation is that we can somehow go around politics by making enough for everybody, and I agree that lots more housing needs to be built. But, I don't know, there is a Schmittian side to democratic politics, and this does not strike me as a winning message exactly.
As a side note, French literature academic Yves Citton wrote, a few years back, a book called Mythocracy on how myths and stories can help the left. He wrote it in the context of France discovering the American PR storytelling technics in the wake of the Obama presidency & a book by Christian Salmon. This was usually framed as a bad, manipulative tactic, Citton argued on the contrary that the left should tap into the power of strong, emancipatory narratives. One of his (non directly political) examples was how Sun Ra reinvented his origins a Saturnian and created stories around this. A powerful mythic & cosmic identity reinvention that, to Citton, erased the humiliation of slavery.
(To be specific, Sun Ra coined the word "mythocracy")
It was originally published in by the éditions Amsterdam, a very interesting French publisher of left wing texts & essays, and was translated to english.
https://books.google.fr/books/about/Mythocracy.html?id=xqojEQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
"No one has written the Democratic poetry of our era yet." Go, ahead, we're waiting. Why do you think we keep hanging around?