I mean, he's not wrong in that "we need to just double down on kitchen table issues" is a poor impulse and Dems need to actually learn how to play political games better
it can be a good agenda to try to implement but it won't win elections
Your latter tweets in this thread are more sensible than your opening shot, but as others have pointed out before me, it’s not an exclusive approach. I think the biggest weakness of your (largely deserved) jeremiads against elected Democrats is assuming that it is.
This is like the third reference I've seen to "abundance" today and I still have no idea what it's referring to. Did I miss something? Did Celeste Pizza all of a sudden get really big? Abbondanza!
It's no panacea for our information ecosystem problem, and it's a little obtuse from a political history point of view.
But it seems like good branding to me going forward. "Liberals support abundance and prosperity; reactionaries support violence and chaos" seems like a good framing device.
Also worth noting that Stancil ran for office on a "vibes" platform in a blue state and lost. So, take his current ranting for what it's worth. If he knew how to win, he'd have won.
Agree. I also think it's two different things. I don't think Ezra is arguing that we *only* push the abundance agenda. Clearly that's not the immediate answer for creeping authoritarianism, but there needs to be a "what's next?" answer should we get out of this, and he's aiming to answer that.
There were a bunch of people who supported Trump because they thought they were getting abundance even if they were stupid for thinking that (see bank/finance CEOs)
I LOVE it as policy (when the kinds of criticisms @mtkonczal.bsky.social raises are addressed) and would be a little surprised if you vehemently disagreed, but would be interested in why.
We are talking about how 2024 dems were only “not trump” and we need a vision for an alternative, the single word “abundance” has a lot that could be tied to it and is powerful, people want to own a home, they want trains, etc, and the idea that bad policy limits our ability to build is true 1
Yeah it’s not everything but it is a good start, we have to prove to people that we can do good things. Austin is talked about as a model because they built a bunch of housing and it worked, sometimes the solution IS that easy
It doesn’t solve every problem but we have to start somewhere
We have everything we need in this country to solve problems that get in the way of kids succeeding, yet we haven’t learned to work together to solve the problems for everyone because of racism, homophobia etc. A focus on solving problems using our existing resources is net positive IMO.
You misunderstand; abundance is possible in an economy where people are incentivized to do useful labor (sanitation, construction, food service) instead of cushy soft useless jobs like whatever you do
Yeah the fact that it pays trash (punny!) isn't at all a factor. People move across the country for grueling jobs that pay well like working oil rigs but we diss the noble sanitation worker because he makes $40k a year (please don't @ me if I'm inexact you get my point)
The division has already been born. Labor is already divided like this, because one category of labor has a chance at a truly comfortable life and the other doesn't. One category has a surplus of workers due to the competitive market and a lack of accountability on productivity.
There's a whole book on how a lot of jobs don't really *do* anything, or do it duplicatively; yet somehow, there seems to be a consistent shortage of the sorts of workers that literally keep things moving, the type that *couldn't* just stay home five years ago.
The whole yimby nonsense is funded by tech barons and property developers. They just yell “housing scarcity” every time you bring up real issues like the environment, gentrification, or low income vs market housing.
Cornucopian fantasists that are ideological elon musk clones but don’t know it yet.
Yeah, the post I responded to's simplistic view of trying to treat visible side effects of the issue instead of the issue is very similar to what causes climate change to remain unaddressed.
I have no idea what that word salad meant. I am very specifically talking about the yimby movement - a set of narratives manufactured by property developers and tech barons to undermine environmental regulations and community concerns around gentrification.
Really? It's extremely straight forward and someone with even remedial reading comprehension should be able to understand it. What part of it was over your head, maybe I can put it into pictures intead so it's at your reading level.
It's good "light side" framing that isn't going to work without an equally strong "And that's why we have to F---ING DESTROY THESE ENEMIES!!!" framing of a nemesis they refuse to identify.
In real life "We're just going to fight FOR the good, not AGAINST anything" doesn't work because people are still people and they want to to fight/win against something, usually other people. You gotta give them a war to win.
Tell 'Blue Team' that "We gotta wipe 'Red Team' off the f---ing planet."
my brother in christ, i love you man
you fight many good battles against very evil people
please look at a map
the abundance people may not be entirely correct, but directionally they are - and housing is a matter of scale that simply being directionally correct makes you texas
If people are really that good at knowing what is politically DOA the more it implies that they should be good at crafting a median voter minimum winning coalition.
The fact that this discourse is occurring in the context of failure should make us more humble about what people claim to want.
Theres an abundance of evidence that monied interests in democrats only pushed for social progression as long as it didnt cost them money. Housing, education, healthcare, retirement, you know giving people what they need to live, would have prevented the poor from saying Trump the system
I think the armchair prognostication model of journalist is going to become swiftly outdated when folks realize that we’re in a Civil War level crisis, not some sort of down cycle wherein we need to “examine our priors” and tinker with policy visions.
It’s the same type of thinking that gives folks comfort in reading the news in abstract on NYT or the Atlantic - it’s all filtered into a quotidian politics where we just have to worry about reaching voters, rather than keeping the system itself from collapsing
My counter is always why they are not prioritizing an abundance of healthcare, education, child care, etc., which have way more societal AND political gain then…zoning reforms.
Derek/Ezra support all of those things. They were huge proponents of the expanded child tax credit. But it turns out when you have a massive shortage of housing, it gets really expensive, and then you have to pay teachers and childcare workers a lot more in order to be able to afford housing
Not to mention that the rent a childcare place would pay on a lease is also based on the supply of commercial space, so it's another area where more abundant construction would help
They have accurately identified a giant lever not only to unlocking a lot of other downstream societal benefits but also engaging people in the most material decision of their lives basically. If you can deliver on a huge pain point for any median voter under ~55, that’s probably a good thing.
And the key point is focusing on outcomes and delivering on this policy, not just cutting a big check that may never materialize. It shouldn’t cost 5x or whatever for us to build same thing as Europe. Think that gets lost in a lot of the Bluesky commentary
The outcomes of healthcare and education reform would create the most aggregate benefit to citizens this country hasn’t seen since FDR. And politically, it will sway voters way more.
The whole Abundance Agenda thing is (probably) no cure for Dem's political woes.
However, it correctly identifies & diagnoses a bunch of problems, prescribes mostly solid policy solutions, and paints a desirable vision of the future. Worthy effort!
Nobody knows what it means, and the people trying to market it are the worst communicators in human history. They apparently think that just saying the word over and over again explains what it means. It's being pushed by the people who think Kamala just didn't have a good enough message.
I don't see what's vague about it, frankly. Pretty specific policy prescriptions re: easing up on zoning/permitting/licensing regs describes a significant chunk of the abundance platform, no?
not if we ignore that voters are captured by absolute nonsense, and hugely motivated by it. They think DEI is evil. And are more apt to vote on that than they are government policies helping you afford in-home care for the elderly or giving you money to buy a house (both were on the ballot in 2025)
Thompson & Shor are right to paint it as *the* policy issue, but Will & others are correct to point out it's likely not the *political* issue of the moment.
But that gripe seems marginal. Core of the abundance stuff is policy. Don't see the downside of highlighting & integrating that policy.
I am in support of the agenda but you don't run national elections about making more of the US having the density of Queens. I mean thank God we blocked Manchin's land-use reform bill; Trump would have used it to encourage fossil fuel development but not renewable energy....
I was confused by this new buzzword, then saw Krystal Ball interview the author. So it's basically Third Way neoliberalism + yimby. I'm not anti-yimby but as a political strategy for Dems, this is a total joke. Another ruling class attempt to distract from obvious solutions with rube goldberg bs.
Check it out if you have time: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vZlXkg6BkUs
About halfway through Krystal asks him about healthcare and he exposes his neoliberal core. No one should pay any attention to this clown.
I think you're right that it doesn't change votes right now, otherwise Biden would have been the most popular POTUS since FDR regardless of age. I think the point of the discussion right now though is collaborating on how to message it so it does. I don't see how dismissing it helps.
THIS is why this is being framed as a political project, and why it's not necessarily a simple rehash of liberal/democrat policies messaging from the last 40 years. This sort of view highlights a key difference underlying MAGA philosophy with liberalism--resources and economics are not a 0-sum game.
Treating resources and economic prospects as finite and scarce are the basis for Trump's entire economic and social outlook, and it represents the key turning point between his MAGA movement and the conservative movement of eras past.
And something the conservative movement of eras past shared in common (in hope/outlook, though not by the same means) with its counterparts in the liberal/progressive movement.
This is the argument against Klein’s Abundance Book which posits all that is stopping things is regulations. Which is just arguing what we need is Reaganism again. You want housing and a lot of it? Guess what we figured that out a century ago: build social housing and keep doing it.
Texas has oil and military contracts it is flooded with money. It also has very little housing regulations or proper infrastructure. Which is why so many people are constantly flooded out their homes, or without power. Also the meme of gun store, school, liquor store, gun store.
California is massively more “flooded with money” than Texas, we just legally mandated housing shortages in order to force our poor people out so boomers wouldn’t have to see any change in their built environment compared to 1975.
Texas is much friendlier to working people than California.
Yeah, at it's heart it is a case for "We need to get our house in order if we want to make the case for it nationally." If moving to blue states is made more materially attractive by solving local problems, then there's that much greater political power for their pols and those who want to copy.
Is there any demographic info on who is moving? Calif. losing people and Texas gaining people sounds like R's moving to a state more to their liking. Though that doesn't explain why D's aren't moving in similar numbers out of Texas to one of the other blue states.
As a D who moved from a blue state to Texas, it’s not just Rs moving to Texas. IMO more practical folks who want to have a low cost of living while still enjoying a city - in my experience they aren’t ideologically right or left
We shouldn't assume that state partisan alignment is static, though. A lot of the population loss in rust belt states is older rural people dying or moving to retirement homes in the Sunbelt.
Housing abundance is just good on the merits and is basic delivering for constituents.
1/2 a million California refugees can make Idaho a swing state. (Obviously the most liberal refugees aren't probably moving to Idaho, but any big city economic refugee is going to be left of the median Idahoan.)
yeah but in practice, what's happening is that CA and NY are surrendering congressional districts and electoral votes to the likes of TX and FL, and a lot of people here are being pushed to the right over the many deleterious externalities of there not being enough housing
like you can try and convince me that arizona and nevada would now have four GOP senators were it not for californians colonizing them after 2010 or so but overall i'd have been more ambivalent about this when it looked like TX and FL could be swing states, compared to any point past 2020
I believe in Blexas in my lifetime. Florida, idk. I think there will be a decent return back to the Dems among a lot of Latinos once they realize Trump was actually talking about deporting them and their families, not just "the bad ones".
I think people being in more conservative areas does tend to make them more conservative and it doesn't matter if they can just be gerrymandered away. I think it's hard to game out, though. Instead, I think we should just be abhorred that we're creating economic refugees in our richest metros.
yeah we are in agreement there, we need to be able to keep people here, provide affordable refuge to people fleeing red state policies, and stop listening to people searching for excuses to not build housing
Will is over indexing on the “nothing matters” vibecession meme. It matters how many seats blue states have, actually. My otherwise apolitical friends and family that were forced out of California by high housing costs do not have warm feelings about the Democratic supermajority here, actually.
And 10 or fine maybe 9 years ago, there was someone running on what might be said to be in some ways an "abundance" agenda (at least with regard to social benefits), and his name was Bernie Sanders, but definitely that gets memory by the centrists being discussed.
Was he? Medicare for All fits the rubric ok, but from my experience a lot of leftists are skeptical of, eg, a deregulatory approach to housing and will only accept public housing. Did Bernie have a position?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m 100% team YIMBY, but “build more” won’t do anything to bring rents down OR undermine the fascists in the next few years. Yes, we should fight for this after we win the civil war!
Most of the policy changes we need are at the state level, rather than federal, and we only need a small number of states to change. And honestly, not even through the entirety of each state: Massachusetts could significantly increase building just within 5-10 miles of Boston to great effect.
Do not accept a bait and switch between zoning reform, which Will and I and (most lefties since way back in 20th Century) support, and a broader "Abundance" critique on things like workplace safety and facilitating pipelines and fracking for more AI data centers.
Harris proposed giving people money to help them buy houses. She proposed helping people take care of elderly and infirm family. People preferred the convicted felon with classified docs in his bathroom. I know why, and it isn't about material conditions (I wish it was!)
Ezra Klein has become too much of a hippie. Hippie in the back-to-the-land, recreate a mythical frontier lifestyle that also replicates the retrograde social conditions of that period.
"These ideas are good, they're just not being communicated on Bluesky in the exact way that I, the world's foremost political communicator, think they should be."
I get the sense that it's meant to collect a bunch of online ideas around YIMBYism and get them out there in print.
But it's missing the tactical aspect of achieving abundance. Maybe the intention is that folks will tailor tactics for their states but that's not coming through.
It’s that it’s all set in a fictional political universe that I don’t recognize at all. A universe where things like race or the inner psychology of voters don’t exist. If the world worked like these people wished, Trump would be impossible in the first place
The problem is that there is abundance already. It’s just all in the pockets of a few. How billionaires could easily erase hunger from the earth, but they don’t wanna. Cause it’s theirs… but the earth has produced these riches not them. They steal value, they cut trees, and they sell the paper
But the trees produce oxygen for everything. The environmental systems are all connected. But who cares. they pay others to have a property and then they extract all the ressources. They sell it for high prices. But we all suffer from their destructions when the air has less oxygen.
Just yesterday, I was thinking that this abundance stuff, Yglesias’ right turn, and so forth, is all a midlife crisis for the wonks who came of age in the blogging era and were praised to high Elysium in the Obama era.
The way abundance might work on political psychology is by creating a sense of winning and optimism with enough force and momentum that it has bandwagon effects…
“There can be more than enough for all and we can make it” directly challenges the psychology of scarcity that underpins right wing anti-immigrant, anti-other people sentiment. don’t trust these authors but as an idea and ethos combined with other ideas and messengers there’s juice there.
No it doesn't. "There is enough for all, period. Anyone saying otherwise is a thief & liar." That's the only slogan that's gonna work and that I'll stand beside.
Thompson was on Bill Simmons yesterday. And yes, an abundance politics sounds good, but no sense of how the anti-institutional moment of politics is the culmination of decades of reactionary politics, feeding on racism and xenophobia.
It’s not good campaigning, but it’s good politics. If you can sneak housing reform through once in office you *can* actually change the electoral field in your favor
It probably won’t sway a die hard racist trump voter but it might motivate a disillusioned progressive to actually go to the polls on Election Day. And at least it puts off vibes of we want to do things and move forward rather than we can’t do anything different
Under Trump we saw p conclusively that unmasking bigots doesn't work great.
You have to give people a vision of the future where bigotry is not useful. In the midst of covid? A return to normalcy. In 2008? Hope & change instead of more war & recession. We need a simple, positive vision for 2028.
It’s politics for the universe that exists in the head of a bunch of wonks who want politics to be about their favorite wonk stuff. As a political project it’s DOA. It won’t move a single soul. It’s the basic case of Joe Biden and countless other Dems restated under a new buzzword
I mean have you read a single story on cost of living since the election? How often after 2016 did read about dying factory towns. Abundance is great but it's not going to solve any political problems.
I think the strongest political argument for focusing on it is that New York and California will lose electoral votes after 2030 if they keep losing population
Its the politics of someone who, no matter what, wants exactly zero restrictions on capital or to seek to harm, let alone eliminate, capitalism at all.
It can "move souls" in a very literal sense! When urban living becomes more affordable, more people travel to cosmopoles that necessarily liberalize them by making diversity less threatening
It pains me that Biden’s policy agenda didn’t win people over, but I’m in full agreement here I think. People want to be endlessly entertained, they don’t actually sense their material conditions. It should be blisteringly clear at this point wonk stuff doesn’t speak for itself.
Is it for voters, or is it for party committee members and like, Select Boards? I think it's easier to see it as a public face on an internal struggle over policy agendas in blue-controlled areas.
“Oh, voters don’t realize we want to help improve their material standard of living. I know the solution! We will launch a new agenda based around our efforts to improve their material standard of living” - wash, rinse, repeat forever.
Having actual successes would help at least somewhat with messaging. Imagine if CAHSR finished 2014 around budget, it would help voter's support more HSR and transit budgets.
I agree with your emphasis on messaging/media but the real world affects the ability to message somewhat.
Everyone thought the economy sucked under Biden because of biased media and poor Democratic messaging. But if the economy had really sucked and everyone was unemployed, no amount of messaging could have counteracted that.
I think it helps if blue states are cheaper mostly because it will attract people to blue cities, giving us more electoral representation. I mostly think will move politically to match the local consensus.
Similarly, I think it also reduces zero-sum competition and rabid protection of special rents, which is an intrinsically right wing goal. This isn’t really deliverism, it’s more “economic conditions can incentivize or disincentivize the formation of certain political views.”
You are right federally, but on the state level I would think the right interpretation is "Be Walz, not Newsom or Hochul", and that's good. CA/NY dems largely *do not* want to improve the material standard of living, and that's a problem.
In an ideal world it wouldn't be this way, but effective politics *right now* is much more about helping people emotionally than helping them materially. In a bifurcated society, people care more about feeling like they're on a path to beating the other side than feeling materially comfortable now.
And that makes a certain amount of sense when you know that any policy gains can be stripped away by your opponents if your own side doesn't have a viable strategy to stay in power.
It worked in the 1930s for FDR. I guess we’ll have to go through another depression to get it to work again. The Democrats are the victim of their own success.
You are too online. And so is almost every Gen Z! But for people who have real life beyond social media, it totally makes sense. For online men in particular, D should search for another answer.
I’ve met many many marginal voters who don’t believe Democrats want to improve their material standard of living. So yes, we need a motto that more clearly says this. Otherwise we get blue collar workers voting for the “tax cut” party
Cant have this discussion without reckoning with Biden's child tax cut, which reduced child poverty more than any act in 40 decades, and how parents were happy to let it expire. The left didn't celebrate it, nobody wanted it, but it improved material conditions! Something else is happening to voters
Wash, rinse, repeat forever is your bsky feed. Can't you at least use quotation marks to quote rather than to caricature? The abundance ppl seem to agree with you in many areas. The inner psychology of voters is the crux of the movement! Zero-sum thinking and negativity bias are very powerful.
It is so perfectly made for to be co-opted that it seems more like a negotiation offering than opposition - letting the malarch know what will win the opposition's support. "Achieve this and we'll love you, too!" It's a dismissal of all real harms caused and to be caused.
I think a lot of people voted for Trump because they expected him to increase their standard of living. It’s not a fictional world, local politicians just value the boardroom members of “the coalition” more than the groups they actually represent.
A rare disagreement with Stancil, but my take as a progressive is that it's operationalizing "all politics is local" by educating people about the levers of local government & how to identify ways to improve function so it can do the good things we believe are government's purpose
We're seeing a real breakdown of leadership at the Federal level, so I do think that demonstrating effective governance moves needles locally. CA is about to lose 4 congressional seats due to housing, so I am interested in trying to arrest that in any way possible - which is a political project
The reason we don’t have big projects isn’t bc of bureaucracy which is always something that can be improved or made more efficient - see space race. It’s bc the right successfully demonized government for 50 years making it very hard to build popular support so that we can build state capacity.
I heard a version of this from Chris Murphy on the Daily Show. Again bending over backwards to win back a voter that is long gone. Not everything he said was wrong but missing some key ingredients on what has happened to these voters.
This is not an accurate reading of the Abundance movement. They are saying that if you want to improve the material standard of living there are a bunch of regulations, roadblocks, and process steps that need to be removed. Listen to Derek Thompson explain it, he’s less condescending than Ezra Klein
Even if the voters supported all of the goals, there are real challenges in manufacturing, trade, materials, etc that are hand-waved away but absolutely would & do complicate anything big we try to do.
I think Abundance as Deliverism 2.0 has its limits, but as Jamelle says here I think Abundance as a propaganda vehicle--our "Make America Great Again", I suppose--has a lot of appeal https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lknvyirwas2b
So you like the goal, don’t like the presentation because it doesn’t account for the BADLY SKEWED vibes based information system? Is that fair? What about combining Chris Hays “attention economy” with “abundant physical economy” approaches?
The thing I hate about it too is that it's a strawman. Left-wing people aren't against changing zoning laws to build more apartments or whatever. And the idea that somewhere like San Francisco - the tech corporation capital of the world - is a socialist paradise is nonsense
My current favorite for Stupidest Idea of All Time is that Democrats need to "moderate" in order to win over more Republican'ts. Sure, it's the same stupid idea that's been preached since the day after Reagan was elected. But since that time, the Overton Window has moved so far to the right...
...that what was "moderating" in 1982 is now considered left of Mao by the geniuses in our corporate-owned media punditocracy. Look to what Tim Walz did in Minnesota. Take things that materially help people and make them universal, instead of creating Rube Goldbergesque means-testing around it.
Comments
it can be a good agenda to try to implement but it won't win elections
In any event there’s no need to turn the anger dial up to 10 every time someone has a disagreement with a fellow Dem
I get superficially annoyed by it for the exact reason Stancil describes but I don’t dismiss it. I think it’s of value, they have a valid point.
But it seems like good branding to me going forward. "Liberals support abundance and prosperity; reactionaries support violence and chaos" seems like a good framing device.
But this might one of those cases where he lets his personal feelings about Klein et al cloud his assessment.
Obviously beyond our current politics but also not as far as some socialist utopia.
I LOVE it as policy (when the kinds of criticisms @mtkonczal.bsky.social raises are addressed) and would be a little surprised if you vehemently disagreed, but would be interested in why.
As politics, yeah no, it’s crap.
It doesn’t solve every problem but we have to start somewhere
Which means we have to align their personal incentives with society's incentives.
Currently we do this by forcing people who don't want to starve to death to do it.
But that's certainly not the only way to align incentives.
How do we determine who does them and who doesn't?
Because the current system coerces the poorest and most desperate into them.
Seems Bad.
Cornucopian fantasists that are ideological elon musk clones but don’t know it yet.
Tell 'Blue Team' that "We gotta wipe 'Red Team' off the f---ing planet."
you fight many good battles against very evil people
please look at a map
the abundance people may not be entirely correct, but directionally they are - and housing is a matter of scale that simply being directionally correct makes you texas
The fact that this discourse is occurring in the context of failure should make us more humble about what people claim to want.
Housing should be more affordable; it is not the root evil of everything else sucking and thinking that is just idiocy.
The whole Abundance Agenda thing is (probably) no cure for Dem's political woes.
However, it correctly identifies & diagnoses a bunch of problems, prescribes mostly solid policy solutions, and paints a desirable vision of the future. Worthy effort!
Abundance isn't panacea; just good policy that ought to be integrated.
Plenty D platforms ignore or run counter to abundance reccs, so it's worth calling out.
But there's other, unrelated policy, too. And Ds can message on whatever works, abundance or not.
But that gripe seems marginal. Core of the abundance stuff is policy. Don't see the downside of highlighting & integrating that policy.
About halfway through Krystal asks him about healthcare and he exposes his neoliberal core. No one should pay any attention to this clown.
What is not to like about having a healthy social floor?
Texas is much friendlier to working people than California.
Housing abundance is just good on the merits and is basic delivering for constituents.
I think it's pro because I think that's where your politics lay but I'm not 100% sure.
That's supposed to say "having trouble telling".
Is "Not-in-anyone's-back-yard" a thing?
But it's missing the tactical aspect of achieving abundance. Maybe the intention is that folks will tailor tactics for their states but that's not coming through.
“Is someone like me allowed to exist in this world?”
Are kids allowed to get vaccines? Or are fries drenched in molten beef lard supposed to suffice?
He subconsciously set the goals, and that guided people’s thinking for decisions in the moment.
I think the abundance stuff is like that, people need something to believe in.
“Don’t talk about divisive cultural issues! Talk about zoning and trains!”
You have to give people a vision of the future where bigotry is not useful. In the midst of covid? A return to normalcy. In 2008? Hope & change instead of more war & recession. We need a simple, positive vision for 2028.
It short, it addresses nothing at all
I agree with your emphasis on messaging/media but the real world affects the ability to message somewhat.
It is, however, a hugely necessary *policy* platform regardless of whether it grabs the electoral attention or just happens in " secret congress."
It’s good policy, do it for that reason alone. Also it does offer a coherent message.
But no it won’t fix the Democratic Party and DEFINITELY won’t save our republic in the short or medium term.
Now pair deregulation with direct investment in public housing, limits on investor acquisition, etc. and now we're talking.
But if it's just dereg, you know whose gonna benefit.
No one cares about policy. This is good in the sense that Dems can push a lot of stuff through if they are popular enough.
How does Trump come in?
I get the frustration, though
https://www.fox9.com/news/universal-free-meals-eyed-lawmakers-session