This article first appeared in our (no longer weekly) Hackwatch newsletter on media accountability. Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every week, and check out our Hackwatch website.
Howdy folks and welcome back to Hackwatch! It’s been too long; I’ve had a bit of a rollercoaster ride with recovering from cancer (I wrote a bit about it in this piece if you’re interested) and this administration has been keeping us pretty busy. For those of you who don’t know, we’ve been maintaining a number of trackers on everything from aviation mishaps to the way the administration has been undermining federal data to fumbled disaster response efforts resulting in tragic consequences. You can see our full portfolio of trackers here.
Unfortunately, we still won’t be able to go back to running these Hackwatch columns at regular intervals, but hopefully you won’t have to go without our keen, cutting, quippy coverage of the commentariat for months on end again! Anywho, let’s talk about the middle-of-the-road political sensation that’s sweeping the nation: abundance.
Today is the start of the flagship Abundance 2025 conference, the second annual gathering devoted to building a political faction centered on permitting reform, reducing barriers to building, and greenwashing Joe Manchin’s legacy!
[Ed. note: If you want a musical accompaniment while you read, I’d recommend “The Wrong Direction” by Passenger, “Crossroads” by Tracy Chapman, “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty, “Waking Up The Giants” by Grizfolk, or “Only a Pawn in their Game” by Bob Dylan]
For those of you joining us blessed enough to not follow politics closely or tuning in from under a rock, the abundance movement is a cross-partisan initiative that ostensibly emphasizes identifying and clearing bottlenecks in the building process to clear the path for material abundance. Towards this end, abundists frequently advocate for relaxing regulatory requirements, though many of its Democratic-aligned champions bristle at accusations of being “deregulatory.”
We’ve been critiquing this approach for years now, since before it had crystallized into the “abundance agenda.” In the last few months we’ve written a lot about the movement’s ideas and policies and why we think it’s a losing political paradigm. In particular, last week my colleagues Hannah, Kenny, and Henry wrote a report jointly with our friends at the Open Markets Institute tackling a number of the biggest problems with the abundance narrative. And this morning, Henry has followed that up with another new report on the people and groups comprising the abundance ecosystem.
Check out Henry’s report The Abundance Ecosystem here!
The trouble with talking about the abundance movement is that it’s quite hard to pin down what exactly it is. There’s Paul Williams who basically says that abundance is just an amalgamation of local YIMBY movements, which leads to the counterintuitive position (made at roughly the 1 hour 52 minute mark) that people like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson aren’t really part of the movement, despite being the most prominent public representatives of the faction’s brand. Amusingly, when I was searching for where Williams said that, Google’s AI told me “No, Paul Williams is not in the abundance movement, but Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are two of its most prominent proponents.” (For what it’s worth, I truly wish that we lived in a world where we had an abundance movement that matches what people like Williams and Ned Resnikoff mean, rather than a bundling of YIMBYism with clearing a path for AI data centers—which is explicitly cited as an objective by the Inclusive Abundance Initiative—and abetting fossil fuel expansion. Oh well.)
A degree of this ambiguity is deliberate, as the movement’s main organizing arm Inclusive Abundance acknowledged that:
“Thus far, the ecosystem has intentionally taken a big-tent approach by maintaining a broad appeal. That said, as momentum moves towards policy action, some in the ecosystem have called for more clearly defining policy priorities, which has the potential to surface policy disagreements among the organizations in the space.”
That abundance is a big tent doesn’t quite do the canopy’s capaciousness justice. The movement includes groups like Greater Greater Washington, which explicitly centers “racial, economic, and environmental justice,” which seems directly opposed to the thesis of “everything bagel liberalism.” But it also includes groups like Stand Together, a philanthropic organization funded by Charles Koch (and run by the head of the Charles Koch Foundation) which funds the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ hate group that, among other things, has sought to keep laws criminalizing sodomy on the books and in 2015 argued to the European Court of Human Rights that transgender people should face mandatory sterilization. You’ve got Americans for Prosperity, the primary Koch political arm that has waged an intense campaign to block climate action, alongside the Federation of American Scientists.
There becomes a point where expansiveness begets incoherence. As a political faction, I think abundance is past that point. Our dear friend Matt has also said this explicitly:
When people talk about “abundance,” they mean a lot of different things. For nearly a century before Derek Thompson coined the term “abundance agenda,” the word was used to describe a political economic paradigm that emphasized equitable distribution over increasing growth and production, pretty much diametrically in opposition to the modern abundance movement. I wrote about the abundance faction of 1935 that toyed with founding a party to FDR’s left for The New Republic. It’s a good word that socialists and social justice folks had been using for a long time (and probably would like to have it back). There’s even a forthcoming communist degrowth treatise called Radical Abundance.
But in the very contemporary, last few months sense, people broadly mean some subset of three things when they say “abundance.” There’s the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, there’s abundance as an umbrella policy category encompassing how to invigorate the physical economy, and there’s the political abundance faction.
There are a ton of book reviews, ranging from near infatuation to even-handed to negative fusilades. I maintain that my colleague Hannah’s early review for The American Prospect is criminally underrated in that department. It usefully contrasts the book with Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works, which makes an extremely similar case but with some more nuance and historical context. If you want a quick guide to criticism of Klein and Thompson’s book, we have a compilation on this page.
Sometimes Abundance is called an airport book, and other times it’s “a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.” I honestly expected it to be better; I liked Klein’s previous book Why We’re Polarized a lot more and I often enjoy Thompson’s articles.
It is, though, frequently wrong and/or incomplete. It discusses housing without mentioning the collapse of a housing bubble in the Great Recession. It laments that we can’t build another transcontinental railroad without discussing any of the historical tragedy around that construction, which I wrote about here. And the book takes issue with a Los Angeles air filter regulation that is actually extraordinarily reasonable and not cost-intensive, which I wrote about here. It also leans heavily on a questionable understanding of the New Left, including an unusual reading of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and arguing that Ralph Nader’s litigation to compel the government to actually enforce the law is actually the ur-example of making the government less able to act decisively. My paradigm, alas, remains unshifted.
The part of abundance that’s most compelling (in my humble opinion) is its role as an umbrella category for an array of supply-side policies. (And no, I do not consider climate denialist “all of the above” energy policies within that category; we already have an abundance of pollution.) There’s a lot of good work being done on housing policy by a variety of YIMBY groups. There are a number of organizations like the Volcker Alliance and Partnership for Public Service that do great work to develop a corps of dedicated civil servants, and there are a number of very good policy shops that I’m a big fan of, including the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. At the same time, you also have conservative culture warrior organizations like the Manhattan Institute and the Cato Institute and a literal landlord lobbying group in the National Multifamily Housing Council who pitch their policy preferences as abundance agenda items.
And then there’s abundance as a political program. My biggest problem with abundance is that it is specifically envisioned as means to disempower progressives, organized labor, and environmentalists. To be clear, that’s not me drawing spurious conclusions. Here’s some statements that say it quite explicitly:
- Niskanen: “On the left, conflicts exist wherever progressives pursue their goals through NIMBY-like mechanisms, such as with historic preservation, public employee unions, and organized interests claiming the mantle of environmental justice.”
- Derek Thompson, on the Lex Fridman podcast: “On the Democratic side, there is a fight and it’s happening right now and our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party. So, I’m not of the left. I’m certainly not of the far left. I have center left politics and maybe even a center left personality style if we can even call it that, but I do not begrudge the left for fighting because there’s a fight to be had.”
- Jonathan Chait: “[P]rogressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.”
- Josh Barro: “Sometimes the conflict between abundance and the labor movement gets downplayed. If you look up “unions” in the index to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it takes you to their discussion on pages 126-7 of how the use of union labor did not prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro from using regulatory relief to speed the reconstruction of a destroyed interstate underpass. It does not take you to their discussion on page 104 of how local construction trade unions in San Francisco have sought to block the use of cost-saving modular construction in affordable housing projects.”
As I’ve written, it isn’t universal, but there is a major undercurrent of anti-labor sentiment in the abundance movement. As my colleagues and their OMI co-authors discuss at some length in their report on the abundance policy agenda, environmentalists are perhaps an even greater scapegoat.
It’s worth noting that this faction is seeking to disempower organized labor and environmentalists arm-in-arm with:
- Charles Koch’s personal political machine, Americans for Prosperity
- Multiple organizations with contributors to Project 2025 like the American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the Mercatus Center
- Oren Cass, a speaker at Abundance 2025 who was also a contributor to Project 2025 and who just yesterday wrote in The New York Times about how the Trump administration’s destructive first 8 months set the stage for an economy that, as the article’s image claims emblazoned on a hard hat, “Make[s] America Build Again”
- The Future of Life Institute, which once sent a letter of intent for a $100,000 grant to a Swedish Neo-Nazi publication
As Henry details in the report released this morning, all of those groups are either included in Inclusive Abundance’s “Abundance Landscape” or are participating at today’s abundance conference.
At a time when the most fundamental question confronting the Democratic Party, and everyone in the center-left coalition more broadly, is how to stand up to Trumpism, it seems like a particularly bad moment to decide that the Kochs make better allies than the AFL-CIO. And abundance very much is the pitch from establishment Democrats right now.
The champions of abundance liberalism are also hell-bent on bringing tech moguls, many of whom have become openly fascistic (e.g. Musk, Marc Andreesen), back into the fold even while advocating to discard entire constituencies including labor, environmentalists, and racial justice advocates, along with immigrants and queer people. At WelcomeFest, a centrist confab that was very abundance-pilled, there were talks about why Democrats needed to stop talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia and why it was a bad idea to contest Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
As Substacker and labor organizer JoeWrote explained, this myopia is downstream of the top-down vision of politics that has become a defining feature of Democrats, and is part of why the party is so distrusted even by its base. As Joe wrote:
“While most parties try to build support by turning their constituents’ wishes into policy, the Democrats take the opposite approach. The political objective is determined by wealthy party and media insiders, who then try to convince their constituents that the elite-decreed platform is in their best interest. This was best illustrated in the concluding chapter of Abundance, which outlined a top-down political theory: the policies are decided by the donor class, and the job of Democrat-aligned media and politicians is to sell those policies to American voters.”
And:
“As Abundance articulated, the Democratic establishment believes think tanks and donors should determine the party’s direction, not voters. Those forces are ideologically committed to Israel, neoliberalism, and the existing social order, so they see their primary goal as stopping anti-Zionists, socialists, and progressives from having a seat at the table.”
This frame, I think, helps to explicate why centrist liberals would proactively seek to weaken organized labor with the help of well-monied benefactors from the oil, crypto, and tech industries. As a factional movement, abundance is being wielded to preserve the type of top-down anti-democratic politics that has led us to this juncture.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Who is Behind the Growing Abundance Movement?
Trump’s Homicidal Hurricane Policy
In Trump’s D.C., the Swamp Runneth Over
Battle Over Independence Arrives at Fed’s `Doorstep’
Detailed Report Exposes Serious Threat of the Neoliberal, Trump-Lite ‘Abundance’ Agenda
Goon School Begins Bright and Early
The “Mini-Trump” Attacking Lisa Cook Had Paperwork Problems of His Own
Polymarket Authorized for U.S. Return Just Days After Donald Trump Jr. Joins as Adviser
Clarification: A previous version of this Hackwatch said that the Future of Life Institute “granted $100,000 to Swedish Neo-Nazis,” based on reporting that a grant in that amount had been approved. FLI has denied that funds were disbursed and has disputed the reporting that the grant was approved, though they have acknowledged sending a letter of intent to the pro-Nazi publication Nya Dagbladet. The wording has been updated to clarify the stage in the grant process reached.