The World Is Burning and Upzoning Won't Fix It

The emptiness of Abundance

Democrat lawmakers are getting arrested by ICE left and right, two were just shot by a right wing mercenary in their homes, we are on the brink of a war with Iran, record homelessness is sweeping the country, everything is unaffordable, people are getting snatched off the street by masked thugs, climate catastrophes are happening at a breakneck pace, and thats just the headlines. Amidst all of this was a little book that represents the Democratic Party’s billionaire donors and consultants attempts to rebrand neoliberalism for the nth time after record low party approval ratings and an embarrassing presidential loss. Yes, I’m talking about Abundance, the Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson book that has also come with some of the most obvious astroturf of all time. I’m not hear to review or excoriate that book, as many, many people have already done this and done it well. What I want to talk about is how the entire political structure that isn’t fully captivated by Trumpism is so committed to dead-end incrementalism and small tweaks that they have scarcely noticed that the whole world is collapsing before our eyes. While people are out in the streets by the millions demanding action, accountability, and leadership, the party that brought us here through their sheer incompetence and cravenness is doing book tours and political circle jerks around the idea that changing municipal zoning laws is somehow going to transform the world from the hellscape we see before us into something livable. Oh to be so comfortable that you can be unaffected by the sheer barbarism we are witnessing everywhere!

Whatever this “movement” is, it certainly is not about confronting the root causes of our suffering; namely militarism, capitalism, imperialism. It is almost perfectly crafted to obscure the fact that the billionaires and their lackeys, the politicians and the bosses, the corporations and the defense contractors, are the ones making these messes, and we certainly can’t rely on them to fix it. While we descend into a further hell each day, the gravest insult to our injuries is that we are being constantly barraged with thinkpiece after thinkpiece from a gainfully unemployed band of villainous bloggers like Matt Yglesias and Noah Smith pondering mysteries of the universe such as “why would you ever care about someone who isn’t you?”, “are Bangladeshis even human?”, and “is it antisemitic to not want to be nuked by Israel?”.

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Make no mistake, this “Abundance” movement isn’t about making the world a better place, solving problems, or even winning elections really. It’s about making sure nothing ever changes and that the entrenched neoliberal majority that has brought us to the brink of collapse stays there. This was perfectly illustrated in the sad, sorry event recently held in a DC basement that called itself “WelcomeFest”. Billed like a flyer for the world’s most depressing concert, all the most putrescent pundits, tech bros, and Democratic politicians gathered together in one room to marvel at each other’s brilliance and convince themselves that doing good things is, in fact, bad.

Throughout my lifetime I’ve seen multiple poor attempts at rebranding neoliberal incrementalism, but none so obvious and ham-handed as this one. When the neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party happened in the 80s with the DLC, it was a lot easier to obscure its nefarious backers (I cover this in a piece linked below), but today one needs only an internet connection to realize this is just another astroturf operation disguising itself as a new and novel way to win back voters.

From Aida Chavez for The Nation:

“campaign finance records reveal that the conference and the organizers of WelcomeFest are backed by several billionaires and other corporate interests, including the Walton family, Michael Bloomberg, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, the Revolving Door Project noted. The conference was also sponsored by the dark-money group Americans Together, which was founded by Joe Manchin’s daughter, Heather Manchin Bresch—better known as the former CEO of Mylan who infamously defended the company’s price gouging of lifesaving EpiPens.”

Unsurprisingly, this “radical centrism” fan club is not an authentic reflection of the desperate cries of voters for less free stuff, but rather a poorly disguised Trojan Horse for further hijacking of the Democratic process in favor of corporations and billionaires. While the world is being crushed under the weight of the consequences of five decades of austerity and privatization that has radicalized millions of downwardly mobile people rightward, the clown brigade that has brought us to this point is desperate to not be left in the dust. Lest you think that the “thought leaders” at this conference had anything new to say, their absurd PowerPoint slides which mostly were about “winning and not losing” and “getting rid of the groups”, would quickly dispel that notion. Matt Yglesias even went so far as to proclaim that Senator Chris Van Hollen going to El Salvador to advocate on behalf of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a “bad incentive” created by “bad groups”, despite the fact that this act was widely celebrated by voters and was successful in freeing the wrongfully imprisoned man.

Matt Yglesias boldly asks “why believe in anything ever?”

The Groups

The newest boogeyman for this faction is Democrat-aligned advocacy organizations like those for immigrant rights or unions, which they’ve pejoratively labeled “the groups” and have decided should shoulder all the blame for the problems within the Democratic Party. Needless to say, the groups with actual power and influence such as Future Forward, a dark money PAC that is closely aligned with the speakers and politicians at WelcomeFest and exists to push Democrats to adopt more austere and corporate friendly policies, or AIPAC which spends heavily in primaries to oust anyone even mildly progressive on Israel, is not in the crosshairs of the moral titans that make up this movement.

These are the people who have had the ear of the last president, much of Congress, Congressional staff, and all the major media outlets - and whose advice the Democratic Party has dutifully taken for at least a decade. Now, in a desperate effort to absolve themselves of any responsibility for the party’s record low approval ratings, they’ve decided that none of that matters. It’s the ACLU and the Sunrise Movement that are the problem.

h/t @jameeliscool for this edit

The ideological poverty of Abundance™ is self-evident. Instead of a genuine attempt to ride the wave of populism voters are gravitating towards and refocus Democratic energy into redistributive economic policies that will ease the pain of the working class, a highly connected, highly influential group of privileged elite who have never even talked to a worker have decided that the way forward is to lean into the idea that some municipal zoning reform magic can solve all of societies ills. Just like the book with the same name, Abundance is really about obscuring the class dynamics that are responsible for mass suffering. It is about maintaining abundance for the few and defeating and removing the left by any means.

The truth is that when it comes to improving the lives of average people there is nothing new under the sun. It will always go back to the need for workplace democracy, redistribution, and economic equality. A world with billionaires and a world where workers are thriving are mutually exclusive propositions. There is no need for a new “hack” to make the world a better place. There was never a need for Abundance™. There is certainly no need for the overpaid consultants and pundits that have steered the Democratic Party (and the American public writ large) into a ditch over and over again. The solutions are simple and evergreen: give people money, house them, feed them, give them some measure of control over their lives. The attempt by the Abundists to split the baby and snow average people into thinking a few tweaks that convince developers to build more housing will fix the myriad catastrophes we are dealing with is less about what solves our concrete problems and more about institutional self-justification - a kind of bureaucratic sinecure.

Abundance™ might be the least subtle hard launch of opinion laundering of all time, but our real, substantive problems remain and this so-called movement proffers no solutions. The very people whose ear the Abundists have, the leaders of the ostensible opposition party, are missing in action while Trump’s gestapo beats up Democratic lawmakers and disappears our neighbors. And the saddest fact of it all is that while the voters are clamoring for economic populism, for an end to the status quo, the institutional mouthpieces will most likely win again. The power of the loyalty-over-competence faction is far too entrenched to be moved. The only real way to defeat them is to offer the people a program of real abundance. Of true equality. Of socialism. And to do this outside the confines of the people and the parties who landed us here. Fighting them online offers a temporary balm, but the true battle happens in the streets, person by person, as we build a movement that doesn’t rely on Chuck Schumer, or the Substack mafia, or MSNBC, or the New York Times. We must build our own institutions and our own movements. We must put our faith in the polar opposite of where they place theirs — not in institutions, not in the educated elites, but in the people. Winning is a righteous moral duty because the future of the world is at stake, and, more importantly, because Matt Yglesias should have to get a real job someday.

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