Episode 223: The Empire Strikes First Part II — ‘Abundance’ Pablum as Counter to Left Populism
Citations Needed | June 11, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
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Nima: “Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?,” wonders Samuel Moyn in the New York Times. “The Democrats Are Finally Landing on a New Buzzword. It’s Actually Compelling,” argues Slate staff writer Henry Grabar. “Do Democrats Need to Learn How to Build?,” asks Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker magazine.
Adam: For the past few months, news and editorial rooms have been abuzz with talk of a grand new vision for the Democratic Party: Abundance. Abundance, according to its media promoters, chiefly The New York Times’s Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is a political agenda that espouses the creation of more of everything we need, allegedly, housing, education, jobs, energy, just to name some examples. To accomplish this, we are told we must aim to eliminate bureaucratic red tape that has for too long bogged down production, innovation, and capital’s innate capacity and desire to promote a better, more abundant life.
Nima: It’s an alluring promise, if suspiciously vague and devoid of class politics. Obviously, doing more good things for people is better than doing fewer good things. Right? Who can argue with this general premise? Who wouldn’t want to support an agenda that’s effectively the Do Good Things Agenda?
Adam: Scratch the surface, however, and what one finds isn’t just a folksy, common sense treatise against gratuitous red tape, but something more sinister and dishonest, something more slick and shallow. What one gets is a standard-entryist strategy that begins with a so-vague-it’s-incontestable hook, illogical or corrupt regulations are bad, then quickly pivots into a Silicon Valley-flattering and often Silicon Valley-funded political agenda, a narrative designed to blame inequality and our objectively broken political system on too much regulation and bureaucracy, rather than there being too much power in the hands of an elite few.
Nima: What one gets, in other words, is a counter to left populism. What one gets is the latest attempt to reheat neoliberalism as something fresh, innovative and able to excite the voting base, all funded by wealthy donors.
Adam: Last week, in part I of our two-part series we’re calling The Empire Strikes First, we discuss the Democrats’ post-2024 apologia, propped up by typical scapegoats, ranging from trans people to so-called economic headwinds to Kamala Harris actually being too far leftwing. On today’s show, part II of the series, we’ll explore what comes next: the 2028 Democratic strategy and the so-called Abundance agenda that is increasingly shaping it. We’ll examine how democratic media influencers and policy makers use lofty, seemingly progressive rhetoric to rehabilitate and resell the same old neoliberal, deregulation, privatization, and austerity narrative that got us in this mess in the first place, and ensure that no leftwing movement that could, God forbid, require a meaningful change in the orientation of the party get in their way.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by two guests, Kenny Stancil and Henry Burke, both senior researchers at the Revolving Door Project.
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Kenny Stancil: Today’s Abundance agenda, the one that we see being promoted by Klein, Thompson, and many others, is an attempt to provide a corporate-friendly answer to the electorate’s growing anger at worsening inequality and climate chaos. It’s corporate-friendly because it’s premised on the idea that if we simply freed them from the burdens of the modern regulatory state, benevolent corporations would provide everyone with the necessities of a good life.
Henry Burke: And I will jump in here. I think what Abundance ultimately is, and I think the authors of the book Abundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, very much tried to hedge this in their piece. But what the broader Abundance agenda is trying to offer is an alternative to the idea of redistribution.
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Adam: In the first episode of the series The Empire Strikes First, we discussed the rush before the election was even called for those in charge of the election and the broader political media that brought us to this point of two Trump terms in 12 years, to sort of absolve themselves of responsibility, to sort of poo-poo away or dismiss the shift in working-class support from Democratic Party traditionally, to the Republican Party, and wanting to contain the conversation in a very specific, quote-unquote, “cultural context,” which is to say the changing of language, the changing of verbs, the changing of how politicians give speech, rather than examining whether or not there was something fundamentally broken and wrong with the Democratic Party, which again, is supposed to ostensibly be the party of the working class, the party of the Left, as it were.
And then what we’re discussing today is, is that that in and of itself, is not sufficient. So increasingly, there’s a movement towards both organic and inorganic, towards this idea of Abundance. We see Pete Buttigieg talking about this among other kind of centrist liberals, as a kind of vision for what Democrats can do to counter the more dreary, dark vision of MAGA, which invariably will live on and God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, JD Vance, the vice president, JD Vance, and that they need to offer something. It can’t just be the same retreaded policies that got us here. But what they’re doing, of course, is they are largely retreading the policies, but calling them something else and framing it differently. And we’re going to discuss that framing and its libertarian origins, and why we disagree on both ideological and practical terms.
Nima: Now, before we kind of dig into the history of this, we should also note that Abundance as a narrative framework has been used by those on the Left, activists and advocates for racial justice, for economic justice, for gender and reproductive justice, for years now, effectively arguing that more rights for some who have been historically marginalized, kept from having a full suite of, say, human and civil rights, that broadening the rights quota to reach more communities, more people, does not inherently take rights away from other people. Read here white people who are scared about, say, trans people or Black people having more rights or being seen as fuller human beings. This has been a long trend in leftwing narrative work and leftwing organizing and community-building for years.
But what we see now is the co-option of this Abundance narrative into mainstream Democratic Party politics pushed by, as, Adam, you said earlier, the New York Times’s Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson. They have published a book about this now, which we’re going to get into. But I just want to make that distinction clear that talking about Abundance, talking about a shared world of resources that need to be more evenly distributed is different than what the Abundance agenda that is taking hold of the Democratic Party is now pushing.
Adam: Because, to be clear, the Abundance agenda is, at its core, fundamentally an austerity agenda. That is why you have to call it the Abundance agenda, the good things agenda. What, don’t you like good things, Nima? What’s wrong? You don’t like good things? Good things are good. We should do more good things. Oh, more good things. What good things? What context? Don’t ask that. Who pays more taxes? Definitely don’t ask that. And this critique will exist on a spectrum, and I want people to kind of indulge the spectrum here, which is that what we would argue at the very, very least, and I think that we can build a broad consensus around this, but even if you’re not convinced by the sort of more sinister aspects or the libertarian elements, what we’re arguing is that, at the very least, it avoids meaningful engagement with class politics. There is no sense from any conversation, and they’ve avoided discussing this like it’s syphilis.
But the important point here is that, and because, again, they’ve been asked this, right? They’ve done a media tour, both Klein and Thompson, about that which can upset rich people and what they do, and this is very clever. They kind of do this, Well, I don’t have, and you see this a lot from Matt Yglesias and others. I don’t really have a problem with single-payer healthcare. You know, maybe it’s but they never, of course, talk about it. They never lobby for it. It’s not central to anything in their program. They’ll sort of gesture towards progressive policies, progressive policy spending. Klein especially is very good at doing this. But the fundamental logic, the fundamental underlying logic, is that we need more handouts and less regulation for capital to provide us things ultimately.
Nima: Right, that Abundance is top-down.
Adam: And that’s the thing. So what I want people who are maybe skeptical of our critique to at least engage with is that, at the very least, there’s a reason why so many billionaires and billionaire think tanks are funding and supporting this agenda, why it does have buy-in from elite media quarters like the Atlantic and the New York Times, is because it is fundamentally a non-class-based form of politics. Now you can say, Oh, what about like the NIMBY house owner in San Francisco who doesn’t like things being built in his home? He’s rich. Yeah, that’s an internal civil war between new rich developers, primarily funded by people like Dustin Moskovitz and Wall Street and Silicon Valley and others who want to sort of disrupt the real-estate space versus the incumbents in real estate. That’s not a poor-versus-rich. That’s an argument or a conflict between petty bourgeois and bourgeois and it’s not particularly interesting as a political orientation.
This is why the YIMBY/NIMBY framing, which we’ll get into, is so clever, because it sort of creates this class conflict by flattening class entirely, and the debate becomes between incumbents. Again, it doesn’t matter if they’re a genuinely noxious rich San Francisco fucking homeowner who wants to not build low-income housing, right? That’s the kind of image they want to create. It doesn’t matter if it’s that or just a poor, second-generation Black homeowner who doesn’t want to have, you know, see his neighborhood go to shit with a bunch of fucking Sweetgreens, right? These are kind of lumped into the same ideological formation in a way that is, I think most people would recognize as at best useless, but in reality, kind of sinister or kind of slick, right? It’s a sales job. And this flattening of class dynamics is going to be central to our critique here.
And then the other end of the spectrum is that it’s actually is quite sinister, and that it actually is designed to pit working-class constituencies against each other and to prevent us from realizing that the author of these inequities and the lack of affordable housing and the lack of good jobs and the lack of energy is, in fact, due to a high concentration of wealth and the political power that that implies.
Nima: So let’s get into how we got here. To understand the insidiousness of this Abundance agenda as it’s called now, let’s look back at some of its antecedents throughout the decades. There’s long been an effort to strip the nominally liberal or left-leaning party of class politics and focus on an agenda that can, at least in theory, serve both the worker and the wealthy.
So let’s turn back the clock to the 1980s. 40 years ago, in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council, or DLC, was founded by Al From in response to Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale’s loss to Ronald Reagan, a historic thumping. The mission of the DLC, which was chaired by Bill Clinton prior to his 1992 presidential victory, was to push the Democratic Party further to the right by repackaging standard conservatism as a new, innovative type of politics that would render the Democratic Party more appealing and electorally competitive. As Robert Dreyfus wrote for The American Prospect nearly a quarter century ago, in 2001, quote,
At its founding, the DLC’s chief emphasis was on reconnecting the Democratic Party to white working- and middle-class class voters, who, the DLCers feared, had been increasingly attracted by the Republican Party’s social conservatism, especially among northern ethnics and southern Protestants. To the DLC of the 1980s, that meant a message that was less tilted toward minorities and welfare, less radical on social issues like abortion and gays, more pro-defense, and more conservative on economic issues — in other words, less liberal generally. The DLC thundered against the “liberal fundamentalism” of the party’s base — unionists, blacks, feminists, Greens, and cause groups generally.
End quote. Now, the DLC softened somewhat on its social positions, but not on its economic ones in years since. By 1990, just five years into its founding, the DLC had developed a roster of corporate donors, including AT&T and Philip Morris. Over the years, that roster would grow significantly, with the following among its top donors: companies like American Airlines, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft and Koch Industries.
Adam: Now, DLC chair Bill Clinton would popularize the DLC ethos during his campaign and presidency throughout the 1990s via his so-called Third Way ideology. Third Way is a centrist neoliberal ideology. I’m sure most of our listeners probably know this by now. But just to recap, that, claims to reject the extremes of the Left, anything between social democracy and communism and the Right, i.e. trade protectionism.
Now, while Third Way claims to reject the hard-right policies, it has historically borrowed extensively from them, specifically libertarians, especially in its embrace of welfare reform in the 1990s. In 2005, a few years after the conclusion of Clinton’s second term. Former Clinton staffers, John Cowan, Jim Kessler, Matt Bennett, and Nancy Hale founded a think tank, aptly named Third Way. On its own website, Third Way boasts that the Washington Post dubbed the think tank, quote, “The best source of new ideas in public policy,” and that Reuters labeled it, quote, “The future of think tanks,” unquote.
Third Way does not disclose its funders, but we do have some information about where its money comes from. One such source is the Koch brothers. According to an investigative report by Christopher Leonard, author of the 2019 book Kochland, Koch Industries financed their report in 2007 two years after the launch of the think tank, and one year after Democrats had taken control of Congress during the second Bush term. The report was designed to promote free-trade policies to liberals, warning that, quote, “A new and powerful populist strain has emerged on both the left and the right of American politics that threatens to turn the nation fearful and inward,” unquote. The report was entitled “Why Lou Dobbs Is Winning,” unquote, referring to the cable-news demagogue Lou Dobbs, who at that time was on CNN. The report called Dobbs a quote, “neopopulist alarmist,” who had, quote, “won growing numbers of followers with their calls to seal off the borders to both trade and immigration,” unquote. Of course, the report wasn’t really concerned with Dobbs’s racism and xenophobia, but his stance on trade, because obviously that informs the bottom line.
Nima: In late 2013, co-founder of Third Way Matt Bennett was confronted at a demonstration outside of Third Way’s offices in Washington, DC by Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Adam Green. When confronted, Bennett himself conceded that, quote, “the majority,” end quote, of Third Way’s funding came from its own board of trustees, most of whom were finance industry executives. The demonstration outside of Third Way’s offices itself was sparked by Third Way’s public attacks on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposals for expanding Social Security by taxing rich people, notably attacking her in an op-ed written by Bennett’s Third Way colleagues John Cowan and Jim Kessler, which was published in the Wall Street Journal on December 2nd, 2013. The piece was headlined, quote, “Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats,” end quote. In the op-ed, Cowan and Kessler argued that, in order for Democrats to remain electorally viable, they’d need to maintain a corporate-friendly tax code and cut Social Security and Medicare. Here is an excerpt. Quote,
The political problems of liberal populism are bad enough. Worse are the actual policies proposed by left-wing populists. The movement relies on a potent “we can have it all” fantasy that goes something like this: If we force the wealthy to pay higher taxes (there are 300,000 tax filers who earn more than $1 million), close a few corporate tax loopholes, and break up some big banks then — presto! — we can pay for, and even expand, existing entitlements. Meanwhile, we can invest more deeply in K-12 education, infrastructure, health research, clean energy and more.
End quote. They said this, of course, disparagingly. Now flash forward to March of this year, 2025. Donald Shaw of the news site Sludge examined Third Way’s tax filings and found that its donors now include the following Breakthrough Energy, which is a green-tech company and incubator founded by Bill Gates, the Business Roundtable, a lobbyist group that represents CEOs like JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Apple’s Tim Cook, companies like Amazon, CVS, Johnson & Johnson, Meta, and Verizon.
Adam: So the general logic and approach and rhetoric of the Abundance movement emerges heavily from a movement called YIMBYism, for want of a better term, which is self-identified as, Yes, In My Backyard. It’s supposed to counter a term that’s been around for decades called NIMBYism, which is Not In My Backyard, generally refers to homeowners who oppose new development, everything from bad and good, right? Some NIMBYism is like, I don’t want a toxic-waste dump in my neighborhood. Some NIMBYism is, I don’t want a homeless shelter or a halfway house or whatever. So sort of good and bad. Typically, NIMBYs are associated with racist, reactionary homeowners who oppose new people coming into their cities.
Nima: Affordable housing that decreases your property value is kind of the NIMBYist ur-example, uber-example.
Adam: Yeah. So it runs the spectrum of a political cohort, an alleged political cohort, from second-generation Black homeowners who don’t want a bunch of yuppies coming into their neighborhood and undermining its character, or whatever, versus shithead rich people in the Bay Area or New York City, who don’t want things that benefit the public in general because it decreases their home values. Or in the kind of traditional sense, the NIMBYs oppose some of the anti-redlining measures in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s to integrate certain cities.
So right off the bat, this framing kind of frames it as a dichotomy, right? You’re sort of either a YIMBY or a NIMBY. And then there’s even so-called left YIMBYs, which make the argument, I think correctly, empirically, that generally you should build more homes, because obviously that’s just good in general. But the problem is, is that then that becomes a kind of libertarian one weird trick. And in fact, many of the arguments made by this crew, again, there’s, it’s a big, diverse coalition. I don’t want to be too reductionist, but we’re going to paint with a broad brush here, because of how it’s perceived in popular media, specifically high-profile pundits like Matt Yglesias, who’ve been promoting this for years, is that it really reminds me of when someone’s 17 years old and discovers libertarianism. It’s like, government’s bad. It’s sort of okay, well, some government’s bad, right? If they’re bombing a wedding in Yemen, that government’s bad, or if they’re arresting people for marijuana, like that’s bad, but obviously writing a Social Security check to Grandma or regulating the toxins we put in our foods, and that would be good government.
So it’s like, is government bad? Well, that depends on the context. And so in a similar vein, you say, well, pro-growth, pro-housing, building is good. Well sometimes and sometimes it’s not. It’s very context-dependent. That, unfortunately, is sort of not a very sexy approach, because we, again, as a leftwing podcast, as people who have a sort of broadly leftwing ideology, we think that it very much depends. And the way of viewing the world is based more on class politics versus this kind of abstract building or not building, growth or not growth. That these terms, absent context and absent class analysis, are not very useful. They sort of don’t actually tell you much, and they’re fairly superficial. And as we’ll discuss, they’re also kind of suspiciously entryist in their framing. Because again, I think people who are turned off by class politics, or rather, maybe see it as being too bad for their bottom line, or too bad for their careers, or too kind of messy, or even, to put it generously, something that’s kind of this far-off, abstract, far-left, dormroom thing that doesn’t really pertain to the realities of capitalism.
This kind of ideology, I think, can be attractive because it seems so simple, like, don’t we want to build more? It’s like, well, sure, yeah, in certain contexts, especially, and obviously things like parking requirements, right, are obviously objectively insane. Building our cities around how convenient things are for 18-wheelers is obviously not a very healthy way to build society. But then it kind of metastasized into this, into this kind of super politics that really crescendoed with this Abundance logic and the Abundance agenda, because it did provide a kind of coherent way of viewing the world that seemed logical to a certain set of people and also does absolutely nothing to really confront capital or confront power concentration in the hands of a few people.
And so it becomes, I think, for a certain set of people looking for answers in this kind of, again, I mean, even some people on the Left, which I think a lot of them are in good faith. It kind of seems like a way you can have an intervention, especially at a local level, where there really is a lot of incumbent interests who do stand in the way of social development. It becomes a kind of way, Oh, this is an easy way to build a coalition, because, you know, they’re being funded by Dustin Moskovitz and by Stripe and by Facebook and Meta and the Zuckerberg-Chan foundation and Nate Friedman of Microsoft, all the Silicon Valley money is suddenly starting to fund these groups that say, Well, we need to build more.
And again, if you’re someone who wants more social housing, that would seem like a necessary step, but much of this is really obscuring the broader class dynamics at work, which truly are, in many ways, incumbent versus non-incumbent real-estate interests. It is about people who currently are rich and live in places, and people who are more rich and want to develop in those places. And that is not a particularly interesting class conflict. That is kind of a petty bourgeois versus bourgeois civil war, which really, I think it really leads the central issue of class and class conflict with respect to housing itself, which is fundamentally about, pretty much all poverty, is about the misallocation of resources. It is fundamentally a political problem, not one of, Are we overregulating Daddy Capital? Are we being nice enough to Daddy Capital, or is he going to come home and be mean to us after he drinks all night at the bar?
Nima: That’s right, that we need to cut more red tape to allow for more development, which, yeah, really leans into this Econ 101, sensibility of supply and demand, right? That, like, more housing will inevitably make the cost of housing go down. And people in the United States are indeed in desperate need of reductions in housing costs. According to the Census Bureau, in 2023, over 21 million renter households spent more than 30% of their income on housing costs. This is nearly half of the 42.5 million renter households in the country for whom rent burden is calculated.
But the reality isn’t quite the Econ 101 model. Housing markets don’t really work that way. There’s ample evidence, for instance, that when landlords have empty housing units, in other words, when supply has already outpaced demand, those landlords prefer to leave those units empty rather than lowering costs to bring in new renters, lest their properties, quote-unquote, “lose value.” And we discussed this in Episode 217 of Citations Needed, A.I. Mysticism as Responsibility-Evasion PR Tactic. So you can check that out. The way that this actually happens in reality, which is not the economics model on paper. And of course, this is also not to mention the fact that not everyone wants to or can live in a cheaply-made five-over-one with a Sweetgreen or a Chipotle on the ground floor, right? That may not be everyone’s preferred way to live.
Adam: So cut to 2022. The emerging Abundance logic and framework popularized by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein took this YIMBY, we-need-more-stuff logic, right? It’s kind of this baby-brain, We need more stuff, and then it becomes what is effectively the Good Stuff Plan. So you either oppose or support the good stuff plan, right? It’s sort of very, very, very generic, like all good interest tactics. It’s extremely vague and seems unimpeachable.
Nima: Because We need more stuff means building or creating more stuff, rather than an activist Abundance agenda, which has been around, as I said at the top of the episode, for decades, this idea that we already have a lot of good stuff. It’s just about redistribution or allocation. Who has what already? So if we just get more and more more more more, which is the current Klein and Thompson Abundance agenda, you get into this, you know, deregulation, rather than redistribution.
Adam: And Klein and Thompson are very careful to sort of preempt this criticism of redistribution by saying they don’t necessarily oppose certain redistributive measures. Of course, they never really advocate them, either, suspiciously, and nor do they think they’re central to their agenda itself. It’s kind of incidental. And broadly speaking, the prescriptions they do offer are about deregulating capital, so capital can kind of fulfill its natural, organic, and benign purpose in life, which is to provide things for people.
So it is fundamentally, and they get really pissed when you say this, but it is, at its core, a trickle-down logic. It is a logic of, If we unleash the power of capital, we’ll all benefit, okay? And the reality is that even in the subject of housing, study after study shows that that is kind of true, but it’s not very significant. It certainly doesn’t remotely outpace the rise in rents. And so they’re taking this logic and applying it to everything from healthcare to transportation to, and this is going to be important, energy, because a lot of this, and we’ll get into that, is about powering the so-called AI revolution, which is a very, very energy-intensive process. That’s a lot of the reason why Silicon Valley supports this movement and is funding many of these organizations.
So cut to January of 2022, and of course, where else do these great ideas come from? Whether it’s broken windows or what have you, it comes from the Atlantic. So Derek Thompson of the Atlantic, who previously wrote a marketing book called Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction, which won the American Marketing Association’s Best Book Award for 2018, he mainly focused on the intersection of media and politics in this pretty facile, typical centrist way. He really latched onto this Abundance agenda as a vision for what Democrats could do. It’s kind of how it’s broadly framed. He makes the argument that, basically, it’s too cumbersome and too difficult to build stuff.
Now, if you’ve heard this argument before, it is popularized by John Stossel, the Reason Foundation, the Koch brothers, other libertarian think tanks, have been effectively making this argument for decades, and so he sort of re-adopts this in a more liberal-friendly palette. In 2022, he wrote an article, “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” with the subheadline, “The U.S. doesn’t have enough COVID tests — or houses, immigrants, physicians, or solar panels. We need an Abundance agenda,” unquote.
Now, again, some of this sounds unassailable. The US, for example, did need more Covid tests and does need more physicians, as pretty much all societies do, especially one that’s increasingly aging. Yet what’s insidious about his pleas for Abundance is that they’re calling for things that people and societies do, in fact need, but making the dangerous libertarian market-based prescriptions for how to get those things. Thompson’s arguments in his article, again, were just echoing Reason Foundation logic. He says housing was unaffordable not because of a lack of tenant protections or rent control or because capital had grown too powerful in the housing sector, but because, quote, “regulations that prevent the construction of taller apartment buildings that can hold more units,” unquote.
Nima: Yes, regulations are the problem. Do away with their rights.
Adam: No progress was being made on transportation infrastructure, not because of a lack of political will or because of the airline industry’s lobbying groups, but because, quote, “new laws and regulations,” unquote, like the National Environmental Policy Act, quote, “have stymied new building projects just about everywhere.” The National Environmental Protection Act, which was signed into law in 1970, requires the federal agencies to assess environmental impacts of projects before issuing permits and making other land management decisions. But according to Thompson, it’s not necessary. It’s superfluous.
Nima: [Chuckles] That’s right, it’s stifling development. It’s stifling Abundance. Thompson also addressed this in terms of climate change. Why aren’t we forging ahead like a modern society, accepting reality when it comes to taking action on climate chaos? Here is what he writes in that Atlantic article back in January 2022, quote,
Solar, wind, and geothermal progress has been impeded by regulations that benefit the fossil-fuel industry, by antigrowth attitudes among Americans who don’t want new energy projects in their neighborhood, and by questionable cost-benefit analyses by environmentalists. (To pick one example: The proposal to build the biggest solar plant in the U.S. hit a snag when environmentalist groups objected to the possible impact on Nevada’s desert-tortoise population.)
End quote. So again, you get this idea that even our allies, when it comes to taking action on climate change, are stifling progress because they care too much about the desert tortoise, right? It connects to this idea of silly research, the silly scientists, the silly bleeding hearts, they all care about this one thing, and they’re not seeing the bigger picture, and that Thompson and the Abundance agenda is seeing the bigger picture. Not only can a solar plant solve so many of our problems, but we also need to make sure that the lefties get out of our way in doing so.
Now, of course, you know, protecting vulnerable species is an indispensable part of addressing climate change, right? Thompson kind of hand-waves this away, that is unimportant, and the perspective and the approach and the kind of holistic methods of environmental-justice groups really don’t factor in, right? They just become one more fussy liberal are getting in the way.
Now, Thompson was sure to preserve his liberal bona fides by lightly criticizing fossil-fuel companies, as you just heard, but many of his Abundance bedfellows have been doing the fossil-fuel industry’s bidding in their own advocacy of this. In October of 2022, Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the heavily corporate-funded American Enterprise Institute, which we’ve talked a lot about on Citations Needed, he’s a contributor to Bari Weiss’s outlet the Free Press, took to his Substack the Liberal Patriot, to urge Democrats to quote, “promote an Abundance agenda,” end quote. In this post, Texeira defined Abundance as, quote, “more stuff, more growth, more opportunity, cheaper prices, nicer, more comfortable lives,” end quote.
And how could Democrats achieve this? By using fossil fuels, for one. Texeira wrote, for instance, that the issue of climate change was of quote-unquote “low salience,” quote-unquote, for ordinary voters. By the way, his think tank, AEI, has extensive ties to the oil industry and has reportedly received a cumulative $4.4 million from Exxon Mobil alone. Nevertheless, Texeira elaborated on this point in his post, name-checking, actually, David Shor’s own research firm. He writes this, quote,
Testing by Blue Rose Research for Data For Progress found this message on a Green New Deal ranking in the bottom third of possible Democratic messages to voters:
“The Green New Deal decarbonizes our economy while ensuring we leave no community behind, including job transitions for miners, labor rights, healthcare and wages. We are running out of time to act on climate. We need a Green New Deal now.”
Texeira then adds:
Maybe the median voter isn’t terribly interested in a Green New Deal, which is predicated on getting rid of fossil fuels entirely and fast and replacing them with renewables.
End quote.
Adam: Now, Texeira overtly pitted Abundance against the Green New Deal and urged regulatory quote-unquote “streamlining,” which is another term for deregulation, in order to achieve, quote, “abundant clean energy future,” unquote. Now, there’s additional indicators that the Abundance agenda as a framework, again, I know some of this is, you know, more of a rhetorical alignment than necessarily them all working in some dark room, smoking cigars and drinking scotch and plotting the death of left populism, but it’s certainly emerging as a kind of theme of a certain subset of corporate-friendly so-called liberals. There’s additional indications that the Abundance agenda is explicitly opposed to any political movements from the Left and is an anti-left, explicitly anti-left agenda.
In 2024, the libertarian think tank Niskanen Center published a blog post framing Abundance as a centrist alternative to the, quote-unquote, “extremes” of the Left and the Right, using much of the same rhetoric as Third Way. Here’s an excerpt, quote,
So far, the factional energy in both parties has come from the extremes, which in the short term has exacerbated polarization. New factions, however, may be emerging to complement those at the poles. In fact, the factions of the future may organize themselves on an entirely different axis from the politics of the past, activated by new issues as well as their alienation from their more radical co-partisans.
The Abundance Faction will enter the battle for the future of the Democratic Party by initially organizing three core groups:
Intellectuals and activists motivated by a different set of issues than those that have animated our politics over the last 50 years;
a segment of business alienated from a radicalized Republican Party and drawn into the Abundance Faction’s congenial policy agenda and;
socially moderate and economically activist, growth-oriented voters.
Unquote. Now, if you’re wondering what “economic activist” is, which is really interesting, economically activist.
Nima: “Growth-oriented.”
Adam: It means someone who’s worked pro-corporate policies. This is all pro-corporate schlock. The Niskanen Center is funded by a who’s-who of Abundance funders, namely corporations like Google, energy groups like the Energy Foundation, and, more importantly, Arnold Ventures of John Arnold, who was a former Enron guy, he’s a huge funder of a lot of these groups. You’ll sort of see his name in all of them.
Now they are specifically, I mean, again, they frame themselves as business-friendly, which is to say solutions, policy solutions, political movements that are not antithetical or adversarial to corporate interests, but in fact, can build a political coalition and a narrative that would fit well in a Walmart board meeting. Now we’ll go to the Abundance book, which is a New York Times bestseller. Doesn’t help that it’s promoted constantly in the New York Times and the Atlantic and has media hits on every major media outlet, including a rather credulous interview with Jon Stewart.
Nima: Co-authored by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Adam: Right. So Ezra Klein is the most prominent, I would say, the most popular, Abundance agenda evangelist. He began writing about it around the same time as Texeira and Derek Thompson, namely his May 2022 New York Times opinion piece, quote, “What America Needs Is a Liberalism That Builds,” unquote.
Nima: Now, super conveniently, and I’m sure, shockingly, a lot of the country’s wealthiest people agree with this agenda. As former Citations Needed guest Dylan Gyauch-Lewis reported for the American Prospect, in 2024, there was an entire conference devoted to quote-unquote “Abundance” with funding from the usual suspects: Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Stand Together. Now, each of these sponsors has ties that may now sound familiar. Arnold Ventures is a funder of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. Open Philanthropy was co-created by YIMBY bankroller Dustin Moskovitz. Renaissance Philanthropy was founded in part with money from former Google chair Eric Schmidt. And Stand Together was created by Charles Koch, of the Koch brothers, and is also a funder of Reason. This is only scratching the surface. Of course, you really should read Dylan’s piece, which goes into much greater detail.
But let’s get to what’s largely viewed as the signature piece of literature about Abundance liberalism: the book entitled Abundance, as we’ve noted, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Now, this book, which functions as a sort of Abundance manifesto, has received so much media fanfare lately and catapulted Abundance into the mainstream discourse, garnering headlines across media like these: From the New Yorker magazine on March 3, 2025, quote, “Do Democrats Need to Learn How to Build?” end quote. A week later in Slate, March 10, 2025, quote, “The Democrats Are Finally Landing on a New Buzzword. It’s Actually Compelling,” end quote. And a month later in the New York Times, April 10, 2025, quote, “Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?,” end quote.
Now, during Klein and Thompson’s press tour for their book Abundance, they made an appearance on The Daily Show where they urged deregulation as a Democratic Party strategy to a wholly uncritical and quite supportive Jordan Klepper, who is conducting the interview. It’s a press tour, after all, of course. Now let’s listen to a clip from this interview. The first voice you’ll hear is Daily Show host, Jordan Klepper, the second is Derek Thompson.
[Begin clip]
Jordan Klepper: You speak about this, you talk a lot about the regulations in places like California and places like New York, is the answer to make California look more like Texas? Is that what we’re talking about?
Derek Thompson: Sometimes, I think absolutely the answer is to make California look more like Texas. I mean, sometimes, if the problem is that a city has too many regulations and too much zoning and too many rules that get in the way of accessing the most basic technology, of putting up sticks and adding an elevator then yet you take away the bad rules that are getting in the way of adding housing supply, where you have to just add more damn houses. It doesn’t mean, though, that we’re Texas Republicans.
And I think it’s important to say that neither is Donald Trump in a weird way, like Trump was elected because of an affordability crisis in this country. He was elected because of inflation. And the biggest part of inflation, the biggest part of anybody’s budget, is housing. Trump could have been elected and said, I’m a Texas Republican, and my first order of business is going to be to make it easier to build houses in America. What does he do instead? He slaps a tariff on lumber from Canada and drywall material from Mexico. Guess what’s really, really hard to build if you have no wood and you also have no drywall material? It turns out to be houses. So the first thing he does is make it harder to build the thing we need to solve the affordability crisis.
Donald Trump does not understand how to fix the problems that, ironically led to his election. That’s where Democrats need to stand up and say, we’re going to build an opposition movement that fixes people’s problems by understanding people’s problems.
[End clip]
Adam: Again, if all this sounds familiar, this idea of unleashing capital, getting rid of onerous regulation that will trickle down and help people, there’s a reason why this sounds familiar, is it’s literally just the exact same argument of neoliberalism of the ’90s. Neoliberalism became a pejorative. It became something that people ran away from because of the fact that it didn’t it never trickled down. People just got poor. Inequality got greater. NAFTA, TPP, these things caused, or would have caused, tremendous degradation to our environment, to worker protections. So it was a bit of a shame. It was a bit of a sham. It was a bit of a scam. It was kind of an agreement made between elites. Again, we traced it back to the DLC and Clinton, the New York Times opinion page, the Atlantic, all pushed these agendas. And there was an agreement that we were going to do this, that the Left, such as it was, was going to sit back and let the corporate wing take over, because the pie was going to increase such that the standards of living would increase and people would be better off. That turned out to be total horseshit.
There is an existential crisis, began during Occupy, 2015 Bernie Sanders, 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. It manifests in these kind of populist uprisings. Obviously, you have the warped, perverse rightwing version with respect to Donald Trump, okay. And again, Donald Trump’s tariffs notwithstanding, Derek Thompson’s agenda is funded and supported by rightwing groups like Reason, American Enterprise Institute, right, we could go on. This is not something the Right opposes, really. Again, Trump’s a little eccentric about a lot of things, and that confuses people, but the Manhattan Institute is a big supporter of this agenda as well.
So they need to polish the turd basically. They need to repackage a discredited ideology of deregulation as a way of improving people’s current crises, the primary one being housing. That is true. Infrastructure. The fact that it takes nine years to take a train from Miami to New York or what have you, right, especially with this constant imperial neurosis with respect to China’s huge growth and infrastructure and surpassing on things like AI and education. They just need to repackage it. And they took something like the logic and the argumentations of the YIMBY movement, which, again, I think was part organic and part astroturfed, because it sounded kind of compelling. It sounded compelling to a specifically professional media class that was in the weeds of this stuff.
And they knew they could have a lot of top-down, credulous coverage from people like The Daily Show, the New York Times, the New Yorker, or Slate, because it sounded fresh. It kind of sounded new. But what we’re arguing here, and what we’ll talk about with our guests, is that it’s not really new. It’s the same argument of deregulation and sort of giving more power to capital to liberate us and to help solve problems that capital itself created. So the issue is not more democracy, it’s not more redistributive policies. It’s, We need to get rid of these fussy regulations, and to promote that agenda, we’re going to start with like two or three extreme examples, and then extrapolate an entire meta-politics and an entire superstructure from that.
Nima: To discuss this more. We’ll now be joined by two guests, Kenny Stancil and Henry Burke, both senior researchers at the Revolving Door Project. Kenny and Henry will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
We are joined now by Kenny Stancil and Henry Burke. Kenny and Henry, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Kenny Stancil: Thank you for having us. It’s great to be here.
Henry Burke: Yeah, happy to be here.
Adam: So let us begin by recapping, I guess, the main thrust to be able to criticism of the Abundance neoliberalism rebrand as we’re calling it, and I believe, as you’ve called it as well. Now we spent the better part of 30 minutes leveling our criticism, namely that it’s both a repackaging of a decades-long deregulation dogma, but also very much, we’re positioning it as part of this two-parter, as the alternative to like, for want of a better term, the AOC/Bernie Sanders wing of the party, or the kind of more democratic socialist or social democrat wing of the party, as a coherent vision that people can kind of get excited about, versus the baseline neoliberal vision, at least that it’s been for the last 20 years, of pro-status-quo, pro-establishment, constant scolding, front-row-kid-ism.
Now, obviously this is a narrative and a framework that’s very amenable, for want of a better term, to put it generously, to big donors, to the very wealthy, Silicon Valley in particular, which is a major pillar of Democratic funding, despite some of the big faces going full MAGA. And more importantly, the sort of permanent consulting class, this kind of fits neatly in there, because it erases class politics almost entirely and frames it in this weird dichotomy of pro-growth and anti-growth, that there’s just a bunch of liberal, pinko busybodies who hate growth. They’re haterz, right, with a z. If you could sort of begin this conversation by laying out the basic, because a lot of good-faith people have fallen for this, or kind of buy into it, or at least parts of it, talk about why y’all are skeptical, and why it’s important to be skeptical of this dichotomy in this framework, even if, again, the occasional recommendation here or there may make sense.
Kenny Stancil: Sure. I think I’ll talk about the substance of the agenda, and then its suspicious timing and the players involved. So first, the main villain in the story told by proponents of the so-called Abundance agenda is the government, particularly the environmental and labor standards that regulators require infrastructure developers to follow. The Abundance crowd is far too trusting of private, profit-maximizing corporations, imagining that if only they were unfettered, they would deliver technological fixes to political problems. Abundance advocates tend to punch left, gloss over negative externalities, and neglect questions about how society would prevent and redress injustices if existing guardrails and protections were removed. The agenda launders conservative ideas, and it tries to make Reagan’s lie that government is the problem palatable to liberals. It’s plainly compatible with neoliberalism, hence why we characterize it as a rebranding exercise with a couple of exceptions, including its call to eliminate exclusionary zoning laws, which are an indefensible mechanism of housing discrimination that nobody I know of on the Left supports. The agenda is full of half-baked and potentially harmful ideas. Abundance advocates, they usually suggest that cutting regulatory red tape will unleash, that is one of their favorite words, by the way, “unleash” a greater supply.
[Laughter]
Adam: Yeah, they’re being restrained by a leash, by liberal busybodies.
Kenny Stancil: Exactly. Then they say, if they’re unleashed, you know, if private developers are unleashed, then we’ll see a greater supply of housing, energy, transit, and healthcare. But their warmed over neoliberal approach misdiagnosis the causes of scarcity, maldistribution and stagnation, and it’s incapable of solving the crises it purports to address. I think it’s really telling that the agenda’s deregulatory rhetoric has been invoked by the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk and members of the Trump administration while they carry out a dangerous and ultimately deadly assault on the administrative state. Frankly, that should be damning to the credibility of centrist Abundance proponents.
Nima: You’d think. [Laughs]
Kenny Stancil: You would think, right? And yet, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book remains a number-one New York Times bestseller. And so I’m afraid we’ve still got a long way to go to convince the public that this agenda is detrimental.
Adam: Well, they are framing it as anti-MAGA, though. So I want to sort of try to be fair to them. They are saying that this is the alternative to MAGA. Still plays to the MAGA strengths, which is this idea of a growing economy and combating China, that kind of rhetoric. So if they were here now, it’s that they would say, like, This is not MAGA, and they would even maybe give some reference to, like, early Trump administration objections to YIMBY dogma, which they later totally renounced. And now they’re all pro, all in on it, just like the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation are. What would you say to that?
Henry Burke: If I could jump in here, Adam. I think that this is something that vehemently denied, you know, they very much do not want to be associated with MAGA Republicanism, and I think that’s because, right now, the Democratic Party is very open there. A lot of lawmakers are searching for a path forward, and it’s hard to sell. If you’re like, Hey, my path forward is MAGA. So they’re vehemently denying it. But when Abundance came out, the book, not the Abundance agenda, we’ll have to explain how those are two separate but intertwined things. But when it came out, a fellow from the American Enterprise Institute wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post saying, like, MAGA bros should be excited that Abundance is here. There was a writer from the Foundation for American Innovation who came out with a piece that actually basically said, Hey, the Abundance agenda is stealing Republicans’ homework, and a lot of libertarian groups have been very vocal about how the Abundance agenda is kind of a repackaged version of the work that they’ve been doing for decades.
And so it may come in a different costume, and it has slightly different policies on the edges, very much ones that might appeal more to Democratic lawmakers. But the core of the agenda, and a lot of the agenda’s allies, are these individuals who have been pushing the Republican agenda, not just under Trump, but going back to, you know, Mitt Romney’s campaign and the George W. Bush era,
Nima: Yeah, so I kind of want to do this unpacking, if you don’t mind, between the kind of agenda and then what is in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book. But also, if you wouldn’t mind, can we talk about the distinction between what is now kind of like a repackaged same-old sam-old, right, using the language that a lot of organizers and abolitionists and folks in movements for justice have actually been using for years, the idea of Abundance versus scarcity, the idea that human rights are not a zero-sum game, the idea that there can be enough for everyone, but the scarcity is being driven by, say, corporate profit or corporate control. That has been a narrative, a messaging strategy in kind of movement spaces for a while now, and I think it has then gotten co-opted by funderspeak and philanthro-jargon. And from there, moved into this, Oh, let’s meet MAGA, or Let’s meet the conservative folks where they are messaging-wise, right, and kind of use the language of economics and growth and innovation and deregulation and call that an Abundance agenda, therefore really appropriating language from a bit further left and kind of moving it to this neoliberal center right? Can you kind of talk about that shift and then unpack the difference between the agenda and what we’re seeing from the Abundance crowd now?
Kenny Stancil: Yeah. I think you’re spot on, and this is why the timing of this agenda is so suspicious. We’re living through the ugly consequences of 50 years of neoliberalization and financialization. For the better part of five decades, lawmakers have, on a mostly bipartisan basis, supported capital and its war on labor, and unsurprisingly, amid the wreckage of that, the vast majority of the population is demoralized, alienated, and anxious for economic security. And so in recent years, we’ve seen these left-populist attempts to address people’s concerns about skyrocketing inequality, mounting climate destruction and the billionaire class coup that predates Musk and goes beyond him. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 primary campaigns come to mind. In between those campaigns, AOC and others started promoting the vision of a Green New Deal that would be capable of reducing inequality and planet-heating pollution at the same time through the public provision of low carbon public goods like green social housing, mass transit, and renewably-powered grid. So I think it’s worth stressing that the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and other demands for universal social welfare constitute what would be an emancipatory and immensely popular version of Abundance. If that word is off-limits, we could use something else, like public affluence,
Adam: Increased standards of living for the working class and the poor.
Nima: Yeah. Material benefits to people’s lives.
Kenny Stancil: Right. But of course, the ruling class found that vision threatening, and was hellbent on defeating the Democratic Party’s nascent insurgency, even though that insurgency was really just an attempt to return the party to its Rooseveltian roots and break with its decade-long accommodation of Reaganomics. And so today’s Abundance agenda, the one that we see being promoted by Klein, Thompson, and many others, is an attempt to provide a corporate-friendly answer to the electorate’s growing anger at worsening inequality and climate chaos. It’s corporate-friendly because it’s premised on the idea that, if we simply freed them from the burdens of the modern regulatory state, benevolent corporations would provide everyone with the necessities of a good life.
Nima: Yes, because that’s always been the problem. [Laughs]
Kenny Stancil: Exactly.
Nima: Too much regulation.
Henry Burke: And I will jump in here. I think what Abundance ultimately is, and I think the authors of the book Abundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, very much tried to hedge this in their piece. But what the broader Abundance agenda is trying to offer is an alternative to the idea of redistribution. So in the book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson talk about, like, the Democratic Party has been too focused on trying to replicate the Nordic-style socialism in recent years, which I must have missed that. I’ve been paying attention fairly closely for a while, and I don’t remember that actually taking place.
[Laughter]
Nima: That doesn’t quite seem to be their agenda or the reality.
Adam: Yeah, they made some rhetorical gesture towards the BBB bill then, like, post-Covid, which would have actually pretty meaningfully expanded the welfare state. And then Biden spent exactly 37 minutes campaigning for it.
[Laughter]
And then everybody moved on to the IRA and the handouts to Silicon Valley. You know, as fine as those are, and certainly they’re a better alternative to the MAGA nihilism. But yeah, of course, there was never a real effort to, like, meaningfully expand the welfare state.
Henry Burke: And we never really established anything. I think there’s a fair argument that it definitely gained popularity with Bernie Sanders’s his first presidential campaign and then his second one, and with the Squad being very prominent in Congress, there’s definitely an argument that that kind of messaging has gained popularity within the Democratic Party, but it’s never taken hold at a policy level. We haven’t established a glorious Nordic welfare state, and so I think leaving it behind is kind of a ridiculous push to be making. But their whole point is that, Hey, look, if you look at the wealthiest person in the year 1800, they still lived an impoverished life compared to a poor person in America today. So what we should be doing is focusing less on redistribution and more on economic growth, because in the long term, that will secure greater prosperity for all. And I think that that’s a really compelling vision if you’re a Silicon Valley billionaire.
Adam: It’s also the same argument that Thomas Friedman made 25 years ago, and that was made by Bill Clinton, I mean, we’ve done this before. This is what makes this whole thing so bizarre. It’s just neoliberalism. It’s literally the same argument, which is, like, fine, but neoliberalism became a pejorative, so now we have to rebrand it.
Henry Burke: 100%. And Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are very careful to say that they don’t oppose redistribution. They just want to focus on innovation. Others involved in the Abundance movement are much more libertarian and just come out and say it, but it very much confuses a couple of things. I think that an economy where income inequality is lessened is oftentimes, you know, a very innovative economy. If you look at when America was innovating, it wasn’t during the Gilded Age. It was, the peak of American innovation, seems to me, and seems to some of the authors, to come about after the Roosevelt administration. There’s very high marginal tax rates at that time, the middle class helps spur innovation. But I think it’s a really compelling vision to the Silicon Valley billionaires who not only get to frame themselves as the innovators of tomorrow, but also get to do that while being like, Taxing my wealth is counterproductive.
Nima: Right. Is stifling the future.
Henry Burke: Exactly. So they get to be the heroes and keep their wealth at the same time. And I think that’s what’s really driving this forward.
Kenny Stancil: The big tell is that if they were really about promoting shared Abundance, they have a model to look back on in our own political history, the New Deal. And they could be advocating for those public programs, but they don’t do that at all. And recently, Thompson has started defending oligarchs, just as people are starting to get angry at oligarchy and saying, No, no, we need them. And that just kind of underscores this nefarious cast of characters that’s behind the broader agenda.
Adam: Yeah, I do like the throwing out that. Oh, yeah, yeah, we’re okay with social redistribution. Anyway, moving on. And it’s like, Oh, well, I guess you’ve covered your ass. Then clearly this is even though it’s not central at all to your basic logic. And I want to talk about that basic logic because I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and obviously the first episode we ever did on the show was about charter schools and Waiting for Superman and the like, libertarian logic, the way that that was successfully astroturfed among liberals.
I mean, probably the most successful libertarian astroturf job ever was charter schools in like the late, mid- to late 2000s that’s since fallen out of favor. But they basically convinced the entire liberal intelligentsia that the reason why Black people were poor was because of teachers’ unions, which is quite an impressive feat. I mean that to pull that off over several decades takes a lot of slick propaganda and liberal buy-in. But the basic framework and the basic astroturfing is very, very, very similar, which is, you take something that is objectively true. In this case, the case of charter schools, that public schools are failing people. And in the case of Abundance, you could say, like, Yeah, some rich NIMBY asshole in San Francisco sucks. Like, everyone can agree on that. Everyone can agree that there’s such a thing as regulatory capture. Of course, the regulatory capture comes from corporate forces and corporate lobbyists, as I’m sure we’ll discuss, not busybody, GreenPeace types, but we’ll talk about that little sleight of hand they managed to pull off. But there’s a fundamental libertarian logic.
It reminds me very, very much of the obsession with neoliberals and their attendant libertarian sort of economics, propagandists Reason.com, Cato Institute, they were obsessed with the Vietnamese nail-salon trope, like, the idea of, Oh, you need a license for these immigrants to open nail salons in, you know, various cities. And they would cite these examples. And Reason.com has over a dozen articles about this. And it’s really great, because it’s this great entryist tactic, because, objectively, yeah, that’s kind of insane that you would need, like, clearly, that’s a barrier-to-entry thing, but from incumbent parties. We can sort of all kind of intuitively make sense.
And then you realize, why would the Koch brothers spend millions of dollars getting people to care about Vietnamese nail-salon licensing? Obviously, it’s a Trojan horse for them to deregulate their endangered-species chemical plants in the domestic interior of the United States. Like, there’s obviously a broader agenda there of deregulation. And I want to talk about this switcheroo that’s done by the Abundance guys, where they take something that’s kind of on its face sensible, and then they kind of subtly pivot to this broad metapolitics about deregulation as this one weird trick. Talk about that, because I think it’s very effective. I think it actually convinces a lot of people who may not have seen this game before, with charter schools or with the Koch brothers. It’s on the fourth or fifth iteration now. Talk about that trick and how effective you think it is.
Henry Burke: Yeah. I think it’s very compelling, especially because the Abundance pundits, their influencers tend to focus on issues in high cost of living, blue municipalities, which I think that there are, like, obvious issues with the way that cities are run in America, particularly wealthy ones. We see that every day. And I think that that’s what’s also making it more compelling to a special elite cadre of American politics. But if you walk around any major US city, you’re immediately confronted with really dire issues with homelessness, people just living in the streets, that is a real issue that people are confronted with. And the Abundance agenda is able to posit a few legitimate critiques of the way that permits are issued. It’s too slow, or there is exclusionary zoning, or other factors that could be, to some extent, slowing the development of new housing, and by making these simple fixes, where it seems like nobody really has to give up anything except for your annoying neighbor down the street has to give up their ability to show up at city council meetings and complain, they could solve homelessness. I think they’re really doing a good job of making this message heard. You know, it’s these permitting issues that get in the way.
It’s a lot more complicated when you have to look at municipal governance and go, Oh, hey, over the last few decades, we haven’t really expanded the number of civil servants that are working in this city, but we’ve extended the population and we’ve implemented new regulations, and these regulations might make this city a better place to live, but we don’t have the people to enforce them in a timely manner. And so I think that that’s a much more challenging pitch to make, going up to people and saying, Hey, we should invest more in hiring competent civil servants, ensuring they’re well paid and that they’re able to do their jobs well. And I think it’s a lot easier to just say, Hey, there’s this one simple rule that could solve everything. And I think that that’s a lot of what happens here.
Nima: Well, because there’s the assumption, at the most basic level, that, well, government is going to be slow and incompetent and inefficient, and so therefore, starting with that premise, what do we do? And the answer always seems to be deregulation, cutting the red tape. Make sure that entrepreneurs and capital have whatever unfettered access to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because the idea of making government more efficient, as you said, better staffed, better trained, having so many more resources to actually do the things that it should do more effectively and more efficiently. That is a premise that is never entertained at all. And so therefore the solutions, right, are only going to go one way.
Henry Burke: Exactly. I think that another one of their critiques that’s very solid, is that these municipalities are too reliant on nonprofits to kind of do the work of government for them. And to some extent, I agree.
Adam: That’s because of neoliberalism!
[Laughter]
Henry Burke: Yeah. So this is the result of the hollowing out of state capacity. Socialists aren’t invading government with the hopes of selling government processes to these nonprofits that are funded by wealthy people. That’s not really a lefty goal. And some Abundance proponents talk about the need to build state capacity, though they usually do so fairly vaguely, but others are just not interested in it at all. And so there is this split, and you have to kind of look into who’s behind these groups and what have they said in the past? And like you said, a lot of times, it’s the charter school prescription, but for government writ large.
Kenny Stancil: Yeah, I would just add, and this is really reminiscent of the lies that were told about public schools in order to sort of get buy-in for charter schools. You know, it’s infuriating how these powerful anecdotes and sometimes outright falsehoods can be in shaping the political Zeitgeist. We actually have an example of this recently that shows, I think one of the techniques is to get stuff wrong and just kind of play loose with the facts and then talk about it on their huge megaphones, and then maybe say, Oops, if someone calls them on it.
The example I’m thinking of, which I’m sure you saw, is Elon Musk retweeted that viral clip of Ezra Klein blaming Democrats for these convoluted procedures in Biden’s program to expand rural broadband access, and it’s been viewed something like 30 million times. Klein was talking to Jon Stewart, I believe, so another sort of mega-platform. But the only problem is that that was completely wrong. And in fact, Biden’s former NEC deputy director actually had to correct the record on Twitter and say, No, what actually happened was that Republicans, at the behest of their corporate donors, insisted that we insert these onerous requirements at the last minute because it would benefit corporations and because it would reduce the likelihood of the program’s success.
And that’s kind of long been in the neoliberal playbook. Before you can justify privatization, you have to convince people that the government is ineffective, that it doesn’t work. And so they loaded up the program with these requirements, and it wasn’t Democrats who did that and like, that is such a key part of the story that they completely got wrong. I think Thompson was called on it recently and admitted, like, Oh, we might have gotten part of that story wrong. And it’s like, that mea culpa after the book.
Adam: It’s a pretty big part of the story.
Kenny Stancil: Huge part of the story. The book has already sold millions of copies. Although I don’t think they got it wrong in the book, but when they were talking about it, they did.
Adam: I want to talk about this tactic, because I think this is really, really key here, and I want to focus in on this. And it’s something that I’ve been thinking a lot about. It’s something that the Left has criticized. So you see this a lot with California. I wrote an article when I was a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle about this idea that California was this, like, socialist utopia. It always has to be. And that’s why San Francisco is a punchline. It’s supposed to represent this Nordic model. And then, therefore, when these systems are gutted out by rightwing forces within those cities or states or countries, they can then point to that and say, Look, socialism or government don’t work, just like you described.
And this is a very, very very popular tactic, because it kind of seems superficially true. And all the interviews I’ve seen with Klein and Thompson, they routinely rely on this idea that the reason why government’s inefficient or corrupt is only because, and they even say it’s the Left. I mean, they use the word ‘the Left’ in context where it’s clearly corporate lobbyists who, like you said, muddied it up or made it convoluted or made it difficult to use, or made it ineffective. This is how, you know, rightwing forces in Britain got the National Health Service, right? You sort of defund it, you privatize it. And then when it doesn’t work as well, you say, Look, government doesn’t work.
It’s the oldest rightwing trick in the book. It’s been going on for decades. In fact, we actually read a quote from Episode 219 from Thomas Robert Malthus, who’s the famous let’s-kill-all-the-poor guy, whose 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, he wrote, quote,
the fact that nearly three millions are collected annually for the poor and yet that their distresses are not removed is the subject of continual astonishment.
And he was arguing for the elimination of that three million.
Nima: Right. [Laughs] It wasn’t so we should do more. It was, So therefore, that’s such a waste.
Adam: Right, and this goes back to, like, the 18th century. It’s, you sort of say, Look, we have this socialist thing. You know, again, you hear all the time, We spend 8 billion on homeless, and they’re still homeless, right? Sort of the classic trope. Talk about how this is effective, and what is the reality of many of these government inefficiencies in terms of why they’re so pronounced? Now, not to say that the Left is fully not responsible, but talk about that if you could.
Kenny Stancil: It’s really frustrating how Klein and Thompson let the Right off the hook. And they justify it, I believe, in the introduction, when they say, This is a book aimed towards liberal audiences, we’re writing to the Left because we think of ourselves as being all. It, and the Right won’t listen to us because they’re climate-change deniers, etc. But they just don’t do enough to explain the context. Like, sometimes some of the things that they’re complaining about, excessive procedures and processes, sometimes that was due to, you know, liberals having to operate in the context of rightwing hostility to good government. And so when you had Reaganite courts and a total antagonism towards government for the public good, and you have people like Grover Norquist trying to talk about drowning the government in a bathtub, sometimes the responses that came out of that context maybe created some layers of process that Klein and Thompson don’t like, but sometimes it was necessary in this really negative, hostile environment.
Nima: Yeah, I want to talk about how this ideology and kind of agenda magically dovetails with something you mentioned earlier, which is this kind of Nick Kristof notion of, You know, when we really look at it, everyone is better off now than ever before. This is the greatest time to live ever. And therefore, if we just start there, we can now make things, you know, even more better-er for everyone. But let’s all agree that this is the best time to be alive regardless, so therefore, basically, poor people should stop complaining.
Adam: Yeah, there’s always an implied So shut the fuck up, right?
Nima: So shut the fuck up. So can you kind of talk about the merging of this pseudo-intellectual, let’s look at the data, now is the best time to be alive, we need to do more growth, more innovation, how these all wind up being exactly the same argument, and yet we get books like Abundance getting published and being viewed by some, not all, but being kind of pushed as a revelation, right? Like, Oh, finally, something that folks who listen to The Daily and sometimes read The New Yorker, or at least get updates on their phone, they can really sink their teeth into, and they can have something smart to say the next time they’re at dinner with someone who maybe works in organizing, and they can really put them in their place. How does this serve that project of like, having something smart to say that effectively is the same thing that they’ve already been saying?
Kenny Stancil: Yeah. One thing that comes to mind is, as I was reading Klein and Thompson’s book in particular, is I was wondering if we’ve been living on the same planet in the past few decades. Because I think they get the recent political history, like, completely wrong. Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen, thanks to neoliberal policies like austerity, privatization, deregulation, union-busting, corporate-friendly trade deals, we’ve seen a massive transfer, a massive upward transfer of wealth. And they claim that, kind of going back to Henry’s point about, it’s the time to look towards growth, not redistribution. They say, We need to ensure greater supply. And so for the longest time, Democrats have been focused on putting money in people’s pockets. And I was thinking, No, a lot of money has been taken out of people’s pockets. Billions of dollars have been taken out of the working class’s pockets, and there’s a lot of talk about vouchers, tax credits, and all this money that’s supposedly being showered on workers, and it’s like, that right there, I thought was just a really glaring inaccuracy.
And it made me think they’ve completely sort of jettisoned the need to flip one of their terms, like demand-side progressivism. We actually need to focus on putting more money in people’s pockets, which would mean supporting unionization. And they make gestures to, like, We like unions, but then two sentences later, they’ll complain about some kind of how, you know, prevailing wages increase the cost of construction and things like that. And so it’s very incoherent, and they want to make these gestures to indicate that they’re good guys, but that lack of attention to, Why is there not enough effective demand? is important. ANd I don’t want to downplay the need to build more things, life-sustaining goods like affordable housing and clean energy, etc. We support that, but I don’t want to rely on enticing profit-seeking developers to do it when there are better public alternatives.
Adam: Yeah. I mean, it was the oppressive logic of NAFTA and later, like the TPP, the idea that anything that unleashes the capital markets, is somehow itself anti-poverty. So it becomes this warped, I mean, people will say this. They say, If you oppose this sort of deregulatory framework, if you have too onerous of environmental or labor standards on construction, you’re somehow pro-homeless. This is how they take this moral high ground in a very warped way. Because, again, it’s like two, three, four steps removed. If you sort of oppose capital and unleashing the sort of promise of capital, you are anti-poor. This is the argument Matt Yglesias made explicitly, opposing Bernie Sanders in 2015 and 2016 when he talked about having environmental and regulatory standards for these trade deals, that this was anti-poor. This is the same argument Nicholas Kristof made when he explicitly defended sweatshops before that became unpopular, so he stopped doing it.
So I want to end by positioning this as the soul of the Democratic Party, because I really think that’s why this is being branded this way, this logic, this kind of YIMBY logic on steroids. Again, it’s all based on these goofy dichotomies, right? If you sort of oppose the Abundance or yimby agenda, you’re somehow pro some rich asshole blocking construction of a school. It’s this constant, like extortion. It’s great. I want to talk about its position as this kind of ascendant alternative. And I think very, very much, and we argue, I think correctly, because his echoing of this language predates the book itself is Pete Buttigieg. He’s invariably going to run for president 2028, or something like him, some other kind of neoliberal avatar, and will use this Abundance language, and already is doing this, as an alternative to this kind of anti-oligarchy message that’s resonating with voters in the AOC crowd. I also think AOC is very obviously going to run.
So let’s talk about this in that context, in terms of like, the soul of the party or the vision of the party. We haven’t seen many big, 30, 40,000-people rallies coming out for getting rid of environmental deregulation. That isn’t necessarily, I don’t want to demagogue here, that doesn’t necessarily make it good or bad, but it doesn’t seem to have that sexy traction. But certainly elite media likes it. Talk about it as this populist alternative, and whether, to put on your pundit hat, whether you think it’ll be effective.
Henry Burke: Sure. I mean, the good news about ‘abundance’ is it’s kind of a weird word that people don’t use in ordinary conversation. So you know, if a politician says the word ‘abundance,’ they’re directly referencing this movement, because nobody tends to bring it up in everyday parlance. I think that right now, actually, their most prominent figure is the governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, and who knows what he’s planning? 2028? I know that they have planned outreach to other figures. Ritchie Torres is probably their most prominent supporter in Congress.
And I think that there’s actually the most overlap, typically from what I’ve seen, between people who previously supported crypto, and who were very interested in cryptocurrency, and the Abundance agenda. So I think that a lot of people, like Ritchie Torres, who had very close connections with the cryptocurrency Effective Altruists, have moved towards Abundance. And I think we’ve also seen that in the media. A lot of the people who write for Vox’s Future Perfect vertical, which was an explicitly Effective Altruist publication that was partially funded for Sam Bankman-Fried for a time, until he lost all of his money and went to jail. They have also been very defensive of Abundance, and I think it’s because that tends to reflect, to some extent, an Effective Altruist-type mindset.
What you were discussing is kind of the Friedman-type thought process of, We are better now than we ever were before, is also something that a lot of the Longtermist Effective Altruists tend to think. And so who knows about Pete Buttigieg in particular? But I do think that there will be somebody trying to take up this mantle, because there are so many big donors who are really interested in it, both on the traditional left side of Silicon Valley and those who have shifted more right, and it kind of offers a vision of how Democrats may be able to win back Silicon Valley from Trump’s clutches.
Kenny Stancil: Another thing that’s important to point out is that Harris and her 2024 campaign jettisoned what was initially a somewhat economic populist campaign and then pivoted to a Matt Yglesias- and therefore Abundance-approved campaign message and lost. And so it wasn’t inspiring to voters who, as we mentioned before, you know, in this context of the wreckage of 50 years of neoliberalism, people are looking for more far-reaching alternatives. And one reason why we think it’s really important to combat all of this discourse is because it is so amorphous, and it’s being picked up by people across the political spectrum. It could have staying power, because it kind of is a Trojan horse that allows whoever’s using it to push their preferred agenda. There’s a really glaring lack of specificity in some of the proposals. Like, We need to update our laws for a new age to make them streamlined. But then you ask for specifics, and you don’t really get a clear answer, and it’s like, Oh, well, this makes sense, and this is why Big Oil really likes this, because they’re going to use this rhetoric to expedite fossil-fuel permitting, which is what’s happened.
And another thing that contextually is really important is that all of this is occurring in the context of this so-called AI revolution, and we cannot divorce this push for deregulating energy permitting from the simultaneous things that we hear every day about how AI is this life-saving technology, we’re going to need to massively expand energy consumption, and that’s why we need energy of all kinds. You can’t slow it down. If you slow it down, then you’re against progress. You could be preventing life-saving tech, even though AI at this point is mostly just garbage, and it’s really weird that we’re not having a conversation about tradeoffs in terms of what is worth, you know, you’re accusing AI critics of being against potentially life-saving technology, but if you get your way, and we just approve every form of energy, including additional fossil-fuel combustion, then we’re not going to have, like, the conditions–
Nima: For survival.
Kenny Stancil: Exactly. So, they take this weird moral high ground, as you said, and it’s bizarre, and that just more broadly, they have these Manichaean framings that I find baffling and frustrating. For instance, this is part of a quote from the book, they say,
“It’s tempting to say that, with these essentials already in existence, it is time for society to focus, at last, only on the fair distribution of existing resources rather than the creation of new ideas.”
And I’m just thinking to myself, why are you setting up this dichotomy?
Nima: What an amazing binary. [Laughs]
Adam: I don’t I’ve heard a better example of the YIMBY-Abundance extortion rhetorical regime than Manichaean. It is entirely Manichaean. It is, like, constant. There’s these mysterious forces of good and evil, and you have to choose a side. It’s like, wait, what?
Kenny Stancil: Totally and, you know, I’m thinking to myself, Why can’t we do both at the same time? And one of the stories that they tell is the story, really remarkable story, of how, through foresight, government scientists created the mRNA technology that ended up saving tens of millions of lives during the Covid pandemic. And one thing that they don’t mention at all in the book, because they just take for granted that, Oh, we made this vaccine and everyone in the world got it. That’s not true, as I know that your listeners are already familiar with this, but we could have produced billions of more doses, and we could have made sure that everyone on the planet had access to multiple doses, booster doses. Why didn’t we? Because of IP monopolies.
Peter Maybarduk and Zain Rizvi did great work on this at Public Citizen at the time, and it’s kind of like an example of, Oh, this is that sort of, like left form of Abundance that was never realized. They were basically saying, you know, first of all, it’s a misnomer to call it the Moderna vaccine. It’s the NIH Moderna vaccine, like, this is the people’s vaccine. It’s public. What they wanted the government to do was invest $25 billion to create public factories that would make billions of doses of the vaccine, distribute it to low-income countries that had been abandoned by Big Pharma. There was that whole fight over the TRIPS agreement at the WTO. And anyway, I just think it’s a good example of, you think that supply is the panacea, but distribution is a really important question. And yeah, just because we’re making something doesn’t mean people will get it. We live in a country where tes of millions of people don’t have access to health care. So what, are we literally just going to create life-saving drugs and then tell people, Nope, you can’t have that?
Nima: Hey, that’s what Abundance means.
[Laughter]
You know, we need an Abundance of things. We don’t care who gets what, as long as the rich get everything.
Henry Burke: The only one thing I wanted to add is that, any discussion of Abundance, it is crucial to differentiate the fact that they want you talking just about the Klein and Thompson book, but there are a vast number of groups that have identified themselves with the concept of Abundance before this book came out. They had a conference last year. They’re having a conference this year. There’s groups named after Abundance, and they have organizing groups as well where they’re all working together on what Abundance means. So even if somebody is discussing Abundance as a concept presented by Klein and Thompson, that doesn’t mean that that is the Abundance that will necessarily get in the hands of lawmakers. There’s a lot of libertarian groups, the Mercatus Center.
Adam: Is there a Council of Nicaea upcoming? Are they gonna get together?
Henry Burke: [Laughs] I think that’s what their plan is. They have a conference here in DC in September, and it’s sponsored by, you know, one of the Koch Foundation organizations, along with some other more squishy Democrat ones, and they are all hoping to influence lawmakers through the cover of Abundance. So just because something is repudiated in the book Abundance doesn’t mean that the Abundance agenda as a whole repudiates that idea.
Adam: Are you suggesting that an agenda that’s basically the Good Stuff Agenda is vague and easily manipulable?
[Laughter]
Henry Burke: Exactly.
Kenny Stancil: It’s got the support of the Koch network, Silicon Valley’s increasingly fascist AI executives, and the Trump administration, like Burgum and Wright have been using Abundance rhetoric to basically further their misanthropic goals.
Nima: I think that’s such an important flag, and we’re going to stay on this and maybe have you guys back, maybe around that conference in September, so we can see how the definition of Abundance has been weaponized, and then kind of how it influences policy. So just want to thank you both so much for joining us today. We’ve been speaking with Kenny Stancil and Henry Burke, senior researchers at the Revolving Door Project. Thank you both so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Kenny Stancil: Thank you so much for having us.
Henry Burke: Thank you for having us.
[Music]
Adam: Yeah, I mean, look, fundamentally, it’s the politics of disempowerment. It is a scarcity agenda. It’s not an Abundance agenda. Because we’re not allowed to do anything redistributive. We’re not allowed to give power to people, to unions, to workers. It is about creating a system that is the ideal system. You know, they’ll sort of concede mild regulations here and there, right? That kind of do the typical neoliberal, fundamental, basic, far-right, libertarian logic, but with a little sprinkling of like, Well, we’re not extremists, right? We’re not the wackos at the Cato Institute. But the basic logic is the same, which is unfettered capitalism, unfettered development, unfettered money-making opportunities for the investor class will therefore trickle down and lead to better outcomes for us.
Nima: Yeah, it’s more stuff, rather than shifting power.
Adam: Right, which is, again, why billionaires fund these conferences and organizations and think tanks. It is capital-friendly, and everybody knows that there’s a serious risk of an organized left-populist alternative, either, you know, obviously on a local level, you have the New York mayoral election, for example, just one kind of small example. You have various congressional races that, people are attracted, and polls will show you that they’re attracted to redistributive talking points and redistributive policies. And there’s an entire infrastructure, and there has been for decades, around saying, No, you can’t have nice things. The way you do this is you go to Daddy Capital and you say, Please, Daddy, can I have some crumbs? Because you’re in charge, right? You’re ascendant. You have primacy. And if we treat you nice enough, right? If we placate you enough, if we’re polite enough, you will bestow upon us a better standard of living. It’s not something so there’s no sense that you’re taking something from someone. There’s no sense of mutual exclusivity. There’s no sense of reducing the power of concentrated corporate power or of the wealthy, it’s begging for more porridge, and then maybe, if you get lucky, it’ll trickle down in a few years.
Nima: Yeah, that’s effectively the Abundance agenda. So it’s no surprise that this seems to be the new future of the Democratic Party, which the new future is really just the old past.
Adam: It’s the same shit.
Nima: Right. [Laughs]
Adam: Same shit, different toilet. That is all it is.
Nima: Yeah, yeah. Meet the new boss, right? So it is, this seems to be the way forward. This is what has been learned from the Trump era, and told to the Democratic Party officials from up on high by the voices of reason that say we can have everything, including not ever touching anything that would upset our donor base, and that is what the Abundance agenda is currently doing. So we’ll be tracking this as it continues to take hold over the Democratic Party, and we’ll see where this goes, what it kind of does when we get to midterms, when we get to more local elections, and obviously as we look toward the next presidential election, because we can see where this is going, which really is same-old, same-old.
But that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all for listening. This has been part II of our two-part series called The Empire Strikes First. We’ll be back very soon with more full-length episodes of Citations Needed. So stay tuned for that. Of course, there are News Briefs in between, and you can get access to everything that we do by becoming a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
I’m Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again for listening, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.
