Back in July, following an eight-month fetishization of Luigi Mangione on the far left, another gunman in New York City killed several people, including a mother of two school-age kids who happened to work at—uh-oh—Blackstone. It was, unambiguously, a horrifying tragedy. But on the Luigi Left, reaction to the gruesome murders was not only neutral, or ambivalent, but celebratory, and explicitly supportive of the killer. (One prototypical post featured the woman’s image with the word LUIGI’D stamped over her face, along with the caption “Death is not always tragic.”) This was no small group of crazies, either. Some version of the reaction was shared thousands of times across X, Threads, and Bluesky on the grounds that cartoonish caricatures of “the rich” were, in a sense, physically harming the poor. Therefore, killing the rich was an act of self-defense.
Question: Is this Abundance?
Potentially, I mean. Can this be Abundance? Can center-left liberals, who claim they want to introspect and reform and actually build a lot of housing and infrastructure, and generate new resources rather than punitively redistribute us all into stagnation, open their tent in such a way that there is room for committed, eat-the-rich communism and sensible housing policy alike? Can they not only wrench the youth of their party from Hasan Piker’s armpits, but actually get Hasan, a real authentic bad-boy socialist, to join them? What do you say, fellow kids, mass murder but make it YIMBY?
Yeah, man, sorry, I don’t see it. Provided that the purpose of the Abundance movement is earnestly to galvanize the left under the banner of Abundance, which it will then produce, the project is obviously doomed to fail. Partly this is because of structural issues innate to our political system, and partly this is because large swaths of the left, which Abundance Dems need to win elections, are actively and often publicly fantasizing about sending Abundance Dems to the guillotine.
Nonetheless, from what I can tell, such an alliance does seem to be the hope of the center-left, as Democrats set out to defeat the great orange menace in Washington, D.C. It’s a desperate move, courting people who compulsively call for your death as often as they call for the death of Republicans, though after this summer, I understand the desperation to just get something working. I mean, at this point, what even is a Democrat?
Let’s review: Following a string of Tesla firebombings and Cory Booker’s 25-hour speech in Congress that nobody remembers, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson released their great book, Original Sin, and we were finally all permitted to say out loud that Joe Biden has dementia. Down in sunny Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass expressed a great deal of understanding for her city’s rioters (before quickly clarifying that violence, amidst all of the violence she was doing nothing about, was never the answer), a bunch of vandals torched a bunch of Waymos, and Katy Perry informed the world that L.A. was actually, when you really think about it, if you understand history, Mexican territory. Viva!
In one incredible July report from Axios, Democratic politicians seemed to admit that they were frightened of their own base, as their voters attended town halls and openly requested political violence. This in turn triggered a season of Democratic politicians performatively getting themselves arrested while fighting with ICE agents. And in terms of America’s increasing hunger for political violence, we’re no longer in the realm of anecdote.
Polling before the 2024 election indicated a growing trend of Americans expressing support for political violence, with the right wing in the lead. But after Trump’s reelection, and two attempted assassinations, a stunning survey from City Journal found that “38 percent of respondents, and 55 percent of those left of center, said assassinating President Trump would be at least somewhat justified; 31 percent of respondents, and 48 percent of those left of center, said the same about” Elon Musk. Another recent survey shows that even more Americans—including one in three attendees at a handful of anti-Trump protests—believe we “may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”
Finally, right after Jim Acosta interviewed an AI-generated dead victim of a mass shooting and the leftists who live on Threads and Bluesky went to culture war over Sydney Sweeney’s “good genes,” Gavin Newsom out-Newsomed even himself in his never-ending quest for attention. Months into his debate me, bro podcast journey, California’s budding tough guy who calls it like he sees it and doesn’t care what the MAGAtards think waded into controversy following yet another mass shooting after he, or whoever is running his social media, posted something on X that seemed to indicate the prayers of children in a Minneapolis church had clearly gone unanswered … as they had been shot.
Okay.
The left is in an interesting place right now.
As America’s political right embraces economic populism, appealing to voters who care about issues like the affordability of groceries and housing, along with crime and immigration, it’s not yet clear what the Democratic Party of 2028 will look like, or who will be its leader. What is clear, however, is that centrists and elitists in the party will need to tap into the left’s own growing populist wing to win, and everyone seems to understand that a game like that, with a group of people who genuinely want violence, requires … delicacy, let’s say.
Democrats need a unifying vision that encompasses everything the far left says it wants, while still maintaining the post–World War II liberal order. This is how the left wound up with “abundance,” essentially a rebrand of the word “progress,” which has been co-opted by people generally opposed to the concept.
This is all great news for me, as I am myself an abundance enjoyer. A progressive, I think. But, just to be sure, let’s share some quick definitions and make certain we’re all on the same page.
Here is what I’m talking about when I use the word progress: affordable housing; affordable groceries; affordable high-quality health care; incredible—actually, inspiring—public infrastructure; amazing public education; safe, clean streets; and enormous economic opportunity with plenty of class mobility. But I also want grand projects, okay?
I want a bullet train that rips across the country from San Francisco to New York in half a day. I want to take that ride in a first-class cabin, with a little bar car somewhere onboard where I can talk shit with strangers over martinis as we travel through the Rockies. Fuck it, let’s throw in a robot bartender. I want genetically modified hydroponic gardens. I want special economic zones for manufacturing, for rare-earth-metals mining and processing, for rocketry and electric vehicles, and every other high-tech project you can think of, a reality in which Americans are liberated from local regulations that kneecap our industrial output—a reality in which our capacity is limited only by our imagination. I want gene drives, which means the eradication of invasive Burmese pythons in the Florida wetlands, the screwworm, and pretty much all mosquitoes. I want weather modification. I want geoengineering. I want to terraform Mars into a habitable world. I want a giant “Justice” statue, to complement the East Coast’s “Liberty,” on Alcatraz Island. I want this statue to depict an objectively hot person. Finally, Moon should be a state, and no I won’t be taking any further questions.
In most of this, I think I’m basically aligned with Abundance Democrats, or at least their stated goals, and I’ve written as much repeatedly for Pirate Wires.
The “Abundance agenda” was coined in this magazine by Atlantic contributing writer Derek Thompson, who went on to co-write a book on the topic with Ezra Klein called Abundance. Housing, infrastructure, energy: How do we make these things safe, clean, and abundant? More important, how do we get politicians who say they want these things to reverse their own policies that have made these things impossible? At its most optimistic, in the opening pages of Thompson and Klein’s book, the Abundance movement extends well beyond the basics and paints a vivid portrait of a whizzing, whirling futuristic landscape of automation and innovation, one that includes self-driving cars and modular nuclear power. It is an attractive vision. It is also a familiar vision.
I moved to San Francisco in 2011, and discussions of our world “post-scarcity,” or in “superabundance,” were standard among “techno-utopians,” a common media pejorative. Such ideas were shared throughout the Bay Area by optimistic young men and women of every political affiliation. This was the language of AI enthusiasts, of Burning Man libertarians, of effective altruists.
Now the most recent incarnation of “techno-utopianism” as imagined by Abundance libs is explicitly a Democratic project. The notion of Thompson and Klein is something like, Well, we believe the government is broken, but it could and should be used for great things, while Republicans don’t seem to believe in the concept of government at all. So we’re appealing to libs rather than right-wingers. Fair enough. Or, it would be fair enough if we pretended Donald Trump did not exist, and these past eight years of right-wing evolution were just an especially embarrassing daydream. But what I’m saying is, I hear you. I get it. We’re banking on the openly violent left over MAGA moms who voted for Trump because their preschool teacher told little Sally she might be a man. Also, the eggs were really expensive.
My question is only … if this is your strategy, how on earth do you plan on surviving?
Earlier this summer, with much of the far left comically furious over the slight bit of criticism leveled at them by Abundance libs, I was at first surprised by the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s embrace of the Abundance agenda in his primary run, as he set out to become the next mayor of New York, and on Thompson’s podcast, Plain English. Was the man really ready to cut regulations impeding manufacturing, energy, and housing? The libs got together to discuss this question, and there was a great conversation all about it, from podcast to podcast. The consensus seemed to be: Maybe!
Unfortunately, I know too much about the Democratic Socialists of America to entertain such staggering naivety.
Mamdami is a Karl Marx–quoting nepo baby who (after failing to find success as a rapper) just defeated Andrew Cuomo on a platform of government-run grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and rent freezes. Yes, The New York Times would like you to know that democratic socialists aren’t really socialists because they believe in democracy (truly, they argued this). But I was still living in the Haight when our local chapter was holding literal Mao Zedong reading groups as the city hemorrhaged jobs and businesses during the pandemic. Mamdami’s own housing adviser believes private property—and especially housing—is “a weapon of white supremacy” and should all be seized. Oh right, and he has referred to himself as a socialist.
Mamdani has been an outspoken advocate of defunding the police, a policy he only recently, and clumsily, attempted to walk back, which we are for some reason not supposed to mention. He believes that the ongoing existence of rich people is a policy failure. But he is also young, which means he understands, correctly, that the cost of housing is sort of the main ball in play among issues across the country. This is where, I guess, he has enough overlap with our favorite Abundance Dems for them to all “lib out” together.
Housing is a major issue for the DSA, and has been for many years. But the DSA’s focus is, as one would expect from an openly socialist party, radical: the elimination of all misdemeanor offenses and the closure of all jails; opposition to homeless shelters in favor of government banks to finance government housing (also known as free one-bedroom apartments), which the public will fund forever, for anyone who wants it, including every drug addict in every city in the country; tenant rights to the point that eviction is functionally impossible; and opposition to market-rate housing construction on the grounds that it leads to gentrification. In other words, these people are the actual reason we can’t have nice things.
There is certainly a chance Mamdani is lying about his DSA affiliation, or doesn’t believe in the DSA platform. I guess his eight-year membership in the organization, including a successful run as a DSA-affiliated candidate for New York State Assembly and then as the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, might have been an elaborate ploy to attract young Millennials. Or, who knows, maybe the Abundance Dems truly did convert him. But my sense is that he’s just looking for rhetorical cover from the center left to make his actual Marxism more palatable to people who aren’t insane, and the center left is beginning to accept him because their only other choices are a loser criminal and a loser pervert. That means, yet again, the crazy local Democrats are playing the thoughtful wonkish local Democrats, not the other way around. The thing is, I’ve already seen this movie, back in San Francisco, and I can tell you with some confidence: The socialists are lying.
In 2014, Kim-Mai Cutler, then a writer for TechCrunch, published the article “How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained).” At a time when blaming tech-industry gentrification for our growing housing crisis was very much in vogue, Kim-Mai identified the cause of our rocketing cost. The problem wasn’t an influx of tech workers but a refusal to build more housing supply to meet demand. She cast blame on regulators, almost all of whom were Democrats, and framed the entire argument in moral language. Blocking housing was not just stupid; it was wrong. The modern YIMBY movement was born.
From that point on, almost no politician running for office in the Bay Area—be they a center-left Democrat, a communist, or a self-proclaimed centrist (translated from Californian: “Republican”)—could publicly oppose the idea of new construction. The significance of this movement is difficult to overstate. To this day, everyone in San Francisco claims to support “affordable housing.” Nobody wants the label of “NIMBY,” and not even the far left wants to leave the impression that it stands in the way of new construction. It’s just that the far left defines affordable housing as 100-percent-government-subsidized housing for poor people, and they will dutifully stand in the way of everything else.
The best-case scenario here, as far as I can tell, is that virulent leftists will embrace their new Abundance brand to champion the same policies they’ve always championed, but they will maybe be slightly more open to building things once they’re in power, and this will lead to incremental progress. We can call this, maybe, the power of a good think piece. But there is no incremental path to solving the housing crisis. If you want more housing, if you want abundant housing, building housing has to be your goal—not giving everyone a voice, not averting gentrification, not even focusing on some nebulous “equity.” You need policies that make building easier. You need to kill policies that make building more expensive. And then you have to build.
Fortunately, we do have examples of American men who prioritized building.
Robert Moses was born in 1888, and came into power in the 1920s. Though, not exactly democratically. He did once run for governor as a Republican, but he moved on from that loss in a manner fairly apolitical, and dominated New York City politics from the bureaucratic shadows until the late 1960s. At the end of his career, he had overseen construction of 416 miles of highways, seven major bridges, dozens of public parks, more than 600 playgrounds, 11 public pools, and major civic works like Lincoln Center and the United Nations Headquarters. This one man completely reshaped New York City, and he is the last American who ever effected this degree of material change in our country. Probably, there should be a holiday in his honor. But, as we are living in the clown world, he’s incredibly controversial—especially on the left.
As it turns out, meaningful change requires power, and not of the symbolic sort so popular today. Moses navigated New York City’s snakepit politics for years, quietly accumulating allies and influence—he held 12 government posts simultaneously at his peak, as he wrote new laws and created various agencies as needed—which allowed him to bypass elected officials and fund projects through tolls and bonds. Committees were meant to be conquered, and there was no “community review.” He bulldozed entire neighborhoods when necessary, and he built.
But as successful as he was, he was not nearly so successful as Franklin D. Roosevelt.
FDR is a hero of the Democratic Party and is often regarded as the greatest “liberal” of the 20th century. He also served four terms as president, built basically our entire deep state, and was the closest thing this country ever had to a dictator. But! The man was effective. Not even a Republican can take that away from him, and they tried.
From the Great Depression into the war years, FDR presided over what must have felt to most Americans like the End Times. He faced numerous existential crises. To overcome them, he dramatically expanded the power of the executive branch, building out an entire shadow state of federal agencies—the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Rural Electrification Administration. One of the most illustrative examples of FDR’s power is probably the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned utility that seized land, displaced residents, and was set up to operate beyond accountability from any local election, yet electrified and modernized a seven-state region. (The federal utility is run by presidential appointees to this day.)
These unelected nodes of power bypassed governors, mayors, and every local NIMBY council in the country (before we called them that), running nationwide infrastructural development straight from the Oval Office.
FDR’s new government distributed contracts, hired workers, and selected projects based on federal priorities. “Community input” was not a thing, or at least it was not a thing the president cared about. Democracy meant that FDR was democratically elected … to do basically whatever he wanted. This entailed a dramatic increase to the national debt, which jumped from $22 billion to nearly $260 billion under his leadership. But much of what the nation bought for that money is still being used today.
In the end, despite endless Republican crying, Roosevelt’s administration built more than 70 percent of all public schools constructed in the 1930s, along with libraries, post offices, courthouses, and roads—often steering resources to politically useful allies while freezing out his opposition (yikes, but a library’s a library, I guess). He also, in his spare time, defeated the Nazis.
Liberal values might be reduced to something like democracy, equality, and progress. But the far left’s definition of progress is primarily social—in that democracy, or the performance of democracy, along with material equality, by which the far left means a flattening of outcomes, are more greatly prized than material change. And progress defined as something more like material change—meaningful change that improves the lives of everyone, permanently—is impossible without hierarchy, vision, and power. This means, first, that the left’s values are fundamentally in conflict, which is how we so often wind up having conversations about, for example, the cost of a bus ride in New York, which Mamdani believes should be free.
Wonks who value the existence of the subway understand that more revenue—like, say, the millions of dollars annually that come from rider fares—means more resources for ride improvement and policing, which increases ridership, which in turn keeps the entire system alive. More honest wonks will even admit that a slight barrier of entry improves the ride dramatically for most people. But the far left fundamentally does not care about this. Ideologically, its adherents do not believe that an amazing transit system that only an overwhelming majority of people can afford is preferable to a grossly degraded system that everyone, technically, can access. This belief extends to roads, housing, schools, everything.
Abundance is not a democratic project. Abundance inherently requires authority, and accepting trade-offs that are very much at odds with the socialist project, or at least as that project is currently imagined by American socialists. In the U.S.S.R., they did—you really have to give it to them—have infrastructure. They just also had the Holodomor. But Democrats will need to pick a lane here, the endless performance of “democracy” in every aspect of our lives, or building shit that works.
Then, although a properly executed Abundance agenda would certainly produce jobs, another thing progress isn’t is a jobs program.
A century ago, it took Americans 410 days to build the Empire State Building. In San Francisco, officials took more than 540 days to build a $1.7 million public toilet. This is the same city, unbelievably, that took just four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge, completed in 1937. Back in 2021, Biden passed his now-infamous Trillion Dollar Paint Job. He promised Americans infrastructure as part of a $1.2 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan—what seemed to me like quite a lot of money for a couple new bridges. But the biggest problem here was not the price. It was that we didn’t get the bridges. It’s 2025. Where’s the infrastructure?
People often wonder how such failures happen. Have we simply forgotten how to build? The answer is simple and depressing. Biden’s bill did not result in meaningful large-scale infrastructure because, as I wrote at the time, the bill did not outline, or even indicate the existence of, a plan to build infrastructure. This was not an oversight.
Just as the primary interest of a teacher’s union is not to ensure the best possible education for young people, but to secure better pay and more time off for teachers, the primary interest of our bloated state and local workforce on any given project is not to ensure that project’s swift and magnificent completion. Its purpose is to secure money—as much of it as possible, for steady work that takes as long as possible. What was California’s high-speed-rail fiasco but a jobs program? What is to this day the chief purpose of every homeless NGO in San Francisco but the employment of NGO staff? Because it’s sure as hell not solving homelessness.
The center left can have its thoughtful debate about housing policy. Pete Buttigieg can appear on every podcast in the echo chamber to ask questions about how hard it should be for me to build something new on property I own, as if this were some kind of very advanced puzzle. But the reality is that the Democratic base isn’t actually voting for abundance. The voters who make up the backbone of the party, representing everything from government and private-sector unions to NGOs, are voting for steady work paid at a bloated premium (and in perpetuity for those lucky enough to score a pension), not to fix any of the problems their jobs ostensibly exist to solve. We have the country we have today because this is what the voters requested. This is democracy.
This means that even if Abundance libs are somehow able to survive an alliance with the Luigi Left, which will never, I’m really very sorry—ever—take orders from Ezra Klein, they will still have to contend with the fact that nobody in any position of power, be they Democrat or Republican, is structurally incentivized by our political system to build. Our problem is that solving most of our problems in infrastructure, in housing, in manufacturing means crossing labor, which is to say the roughly 14 million American union workers. There is a reason Trump just very publicly came out against automated labor at our ports to keep the longshoreman union happy. And that reason is: He had to.
Abundance Democrats can have abundance or they can be popular in Brooklyn, but they can’t have both, which is why my sense today is that the movement is made up entirely of well-meaning but hopelessly naive optimists, and very clever propagandists who understand that the project is hopeless, but communists need better branding.
And look, “Abundance!” is a good brand. Or, it’s better than cheering for murder. But the brand alone can’t build a bullet train, and if the socialists win, there won’t be any bullet train fast enough to save us.
The post The Abundance Delusion appeared first on The Atlantic.
