Abundance Should Not Erase the Traditional Republican
Description
Last Thursday and Friday, I was at the Salamander Hotel for the Abundant DC conference. I had never been to a left-wing political conference before, and was interested not only in the exploration of the ideas, but also the coalitions that were taking shape, how I would be received by others, and the general atmosphere.
The first thing I noticed was the bipartisan nature of the guest list. The first panel included three members of Congress, two Democrats (Ritchie Torres, Josh Harder) and a Republican (Celeste Malloy). A man sat next to me at the event, and he turned out to be the mayor of Chattanooga. Utah governor Spencer Cox (R) was there. Among intellectuals, the headliners were Thompson, Yglesias, and Klein, yet there was also Reihan Salam, among others, on behalf of conservatism, and even former Trump administration officials or MAGA-adjacent figures like Oren Cass and Dean Ball, though Cass took an adversarial role in his discussion with Yglesias (more on that soon).
Abundance is usually framed as an intra-coalitional fight under the Democratic umbrella. But it clearly seeks to be something much larger. Truly victorious movements do not become identified with one side of the political aisle. Mothers Against Drunk Driving spearheaded a social movement that made operating a vehicle while intoxicated into a serious crime everywhere while stigmatizing the practice. Deregulation in the late 1970s and 1980s spanned both the Carter and Reagan administrations. Part of the reason the Epstein hysteria is so out of control is that the entire political spectrum is into panics over pedophilia and human trafficking.
The diverse political turnout at Abundance indicates that it is winning. By random chance, while there I learned that Oak Lawn, the small town I grew up in outside of Chicago, was about to eliminate parking requirements. I was surprised, as this was one of the least sophisticated places one could imagine, full of lower class immigrants and white ethnics. Yet the message of abundance had reached one member of the village board and nobody was bothering to resist.
Abundance has been so successful that people are now talking about subtypes of abundance that span the political spectrum. During the conference, I read Steven Teles’ recent piece on the topic. He breaks abundance down into six categories
Red Abundance: Socialist inclined leftists who want to get things done
Cascadian Abundance: Environmentalists who understand that city living is better for the planet
Liberal Abundance: Derek and Ezra, pretty much
Moderate-Abundance Synthesis: Abundance as a tool of the Democratic Party to make it more electable and responsive to the needs of voters
Abundance Dynamism: Tech-bro futurism
Dark Abundance: Right-wingers, leaning towards the Republican Party and MAGA, worried about bureaucrats and China
I appreciate this schema, but as someone closer to the right end of this spectrum, I found the discussion of the last two incomplete. Teles puts national security concerns at the center of Dark Abundance, with the abundance framework serving as a way to cut through sclerosis and red tape, adopt a geopolitically-focused industrial policy, and meet threats from abroad. This can be seen as a combination of a smarter version of DOGE plus hawkishness on China.
The last two categories do capture distinct tendencies on the right, but I think that there’s another version of right-wing abundance with real world influence that is getting shortchanged. It is somewhat implicit in the last two, but deserving of its own category, and also apparent in the Moderate-Abundance Synthesis (#4):
The politics of MAS are much more explicitly partisan than single-issue. The most distinctive example of MAS at the urban level is GrowSF, which seeks to build political power through a fusion of traditional Abundance priorities like housing and transportation with “moderate” priorities like crime prevention, back-to-basics education and school choice, and a more assertive policy toward the homeless in public spaces. The failures of urban Democrats are becoming harder to deny, but the nationalization of politics means that Republicans can’t take advantage of them. Abundance, state capacity, and moderation provide a genuinely ambitious governing agenda for Democrats in blue places, and a coalition of wealthy donors and moderate voters makes them electorally potent. In the single-party Democratic politics of big cities, MAS has a fairly obvious lane to pitch itself as the alternative to the governance of the party’s left.
There is a symbiosis here between YIMBYism, school choice, and crime prevention. There are many social and economic benefits to living in a large city. People are often prevented from doing so by high housing costs, crime, and bad schools. Some cities, like Milwaukee, Detroit, and Baltimore, have dirt cheap housing, but still nobody wants to move there. In Detroit, the government at one point was having trouble selling abandoned homes for $1. The reasons are obvious enough, with many Midwestern cities having murder rates that rival those of some of the most violent Latin American countries. Moreover, if you’re going to have kids, the public schools that you support with your taxes are practically unusable.
A central lesson of abundance is you want housing to be affordable because supply can rise to meet demand, not because demand has crashed. If city living has benefits in terms of making people more social and productive, then one cannot ignore the fundamental importance of public safety and the schools question.
Teles presents this set of issues as representing the moderate Democrat position, but they have traditionally been Republican priorities. The Trump administration at least talks tough on crime, even if its methods for tackling the issue have yet to show real effect. Across the country, red states have one after another been adopting universal school choice or education savings accounts. And Klein and Thompson discuss how Republican areas of the country have gotten the housing issue correct, which explains why they have been gaining residents at the expense of liberal locales.
Public safety, markets, and individual liberty. This sounds like standard Reaganism! And although at the national level, the MAGA movement has gotten away from the latter two, they remain strong at the state level. Abundance clearly sees this kind of Republican as an ally, as seen in the fact that the keynote discussion on the first night of the conference was an interview with Utah Governor Spencer Cox. See also the speech of Chris Barnard.
Another place Reaganism can potentially contribute is on the issue of entitlements. The US is headed towards a fiscal crisis in the 2030s, as a result of Social Security and Medicare paying out more money than they are taking in. Older people are wealthier than younger Americans, and I don’t know of any value system that implies government should bankrupt future generations by redistributing money from a poorer dem
United States
