Abundance
Power Math is Simple
The strategic genius of wokeness was that they were able to make their 20 side of the 80-20 issue seem like an overwhelming majority, using civil rights law and social media mobs. Abundance Democrats are a movement that somehow manages to make their own 80 side look like the 20 side.
Many of my readers have asked me to review Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thomson. I don’t know why. If you are reading this newsletter, you already know more than enough of what I think about the politics of abundance. I think Abundance Democrats will be a whole new generation of beautiful losers.
In an interview with
, Derek recently described himself as “pathologically agreeable”. He’s not the only one. I attended several Abundance Democrat-coded conferences last year. Almost all of them made conscious efforts to bring in boomer environmentalists, AI Doomers, NIMBYs, and other assorted enemies. Why?Political economy rewards carving out clear domains in narrow areas and defending them to the death. That is how unions, incumbent banks, and boomer environmentalists have succeeded, at the expense of Abundance Democrats. No amount of agreeable debate will drive these special interests out of the good graces of politicians, funding streams and regulators.
“Klein and Thompson never spare the opportunity to pull a punch. I suspect this is because of the personalities of the authors,”
writes. “But part of it has got to be class resentment. There are a number of elite progressives who simply don’t like the idea that in an America of growth and abundance, a few techbros would be very rich.”That’s all true, and a good start. But underlying this unbalanced political economy is the fact that only one side is willing to make the moral accusations necessary to break existing footholds.
There’s a positive relationship between disagreebleness and having a higher share in political economy. It’s no coincidence that unions, boomer environmentalists, and other special interests have so much control over the left. Speaking from experience at an operational, descriptive level, this is obviously true.
It’s not inevitable that Abundance advocates are agreeable. Some of my most important work was mobilizing Abundance-minded people in AI to agitate for clear red lines. Of course, it helps that AI Doomers who are over-the-top fraudsters, totalitarians, and two-faced liars even by the standards of modern politics. But believe it or not, the Abundance crowd struggles to condemn even them. The day Abundance Democrats are able to tell Gen Z and Gen Alpha that Ralph Nader has stolen their future for the luxury and virtue signalling of boomers is the day I’ll believe they have a chance at changing the Democratic party. I don’t expect that day to come soon.
The worst part of this is that boomer environmentalists are veritably some of the most vile, destructive, and selfish people alive. They have literally stolen my future and the future of those I love. They deserve all the insults I have to give and more. Boomer environmentalists deserve to be exiled from polite society. They have done more harm to this country than any number of twitter anons tweeting racial slurs.
Near the end of their interview, Richard asks Derek whether the agreeable personality of Abundance Democrats make them politically weaker. The worst thing Abundance-minded people on both sides of the aisle have done to themselves is to convince themselves of the marketplace of ideas. This is the fundamental contradiction of the Abundance Democrat movement — they’re already on the side of the 80%, yet they act like they have a problem with persuasion. They don’t. They have a power problem — a problem entirely located in their own hearts.
It's a side point, but you are blaming baby boomers for the follies of their elders, including Ralph Nader, just as they too often get credit for the accomplishments of the so-called Silent Generation (https://vpostrel.substack.com/p/the-most-misnamed-generation). The people who pushed no-growth housing measures in California were significantly older than the boomers at the time. Insofar as boomers caused these problems they did it by triggering the anti-growth backlash among their elders (https://www.vpostrel.com/articles/how-i-caused-californias-housing-crisis-2). Sam Hall Kaplan, the LAT architecture critic who served as a cheerleader for the anti-growth movement, is 90 years old. That's the age of boomers' parents.
The book is explicitly addressed to Democrats who like to read, and the point is to convince them that Democrats should move a bit in a a supply-side direction on energy and housing. From that specific standpoint, the book is fine. In fact, one could argue Abundance is to MAGA as Adlai Stevenson was to McCarthyism. Not in favor of it, but not attacking it the way the small and frustrated left-wing would prefer.