Three Big Problems with the Politics of Abundance

Time for a reality check.

I was at the Abundance 2025 conference last week and overall I think it was a big success. There was a wide range of interesting speakers and panels and a pleasing sense of intellectual ferment. It seems likely that the discourse around abundance will continue to evolve in the future and play an important role in policy discussions. That’s a good thing.

But the politics? Ah, there’s the rub. For abundance to succeed as policy it also has to succeed as politics. And here there are some very big problems that will not go away easily and put limits on how far abundance policy can get.

1. Abundance is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for the Democrats. A key reason abundance has caught on in sectors of the Democratic Party is that they are desperate for something—anything—they can “stand for” besides opposing Trump. They are aware the party is at a low point in voter esteem and widely viewed, especially by working-class voters, as out of touch and ineffective. Abundance is something they can glom on to and say “see—we are turning over a new leaf and will be different in the future.”

A Washington Post article described what Democrats are embracing as “cutting back on the environmental reviews, strict zoning, labor rules and other obstacles that prevent government from efficiently building, fixing and fostering the things people want, from housing to energy.” An Axios article summarized the new approach as “respond[ing to governing failures in blue cities and states] by cutting excess regulations to build more housing, energy projects and more.”

This is fine as far as it goes and is undoubtedly needed. But notice what’s missing. There is no hint here of moving to the center on the wide variety of culturally-inflected issues—crime, immigration, affirmative action, DEI, trans, etc., etc.—that have come to define the image of the contemporary Democratic Party and are tanking the Democrats’ performance among working-class voters. Some Democratic abundance boosters recognize this problem but they are very much a minority voice.

Indeed, it is clear that for most, this is a way of eliding those uncomfortable issues. If we talk about this, we don’t have to talk about that. In this, they are not so different from their great rivals, the “fighting the oligarchy”/populist economics crowd, who also believe their economic approach will dispense with the need to confront and resolve Democrats’ profound cultural distance from normie working-class voters.

That hasn’t worked and won’t work. To believe otherwise is to disregard the clear message of the 2024 election, not to mention the Democrats’ Senate problem and population shifts that will make it ever more necessary to compete in culturally conservative red states. Abundance, in short, is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for today’s Democrats. Not even close.

2. Abundance for whom? So this abundance thing—who is it actually for? There is a distinct whiff of professional class coastal liberal preferences in the animating goals of, especially, Democratic adherents to abundance. They are heavy on infill urban housing, urban infrastructure, and building out renewable energy to stave off climate catastrophe. Indeed, in the seminal text of these advocates, Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the book’s introduction waxes rhapsodic on their vision of a 2050 socially liberal ecotopia, where, to paraphrase President Trump (“everything’s computer!”), everything’s electric! Fossil fuels are but a distant memory; it's all clean energy that is dirt cheap with towering skyscraper farms for food and drones that seamlessly deliver everything your heart desires.

This is catnip for the book’s (apparent) target audience of liberal Democratic-leaning professionals but for the rest of the population—not so much. Liberal abundance advocates are obsessed with the need for a rapid transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy (chiefly wind and solar with a few nukes thrown in). They center “net zero” by 2050 as an urgent priority despite its profound impracticality. And they simply refuse to take seriously the major, undeniable trade-offs between overall energy abundance and a forced march to decarbonization.

That’s a big problem. Cheap, reliable, plentiful energy must necessarily underpin any abundance worthy of the name. Cheap energy enabled the rise of industrial society and remains essential for today’s standard of living. Without it, these advocates’ vision of overall abundance is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Such abundance cannot be achieved by wind and solar solely or even mostly. It means way more nuclear and, yes, more drilling for America’s massive endowment of fossil fuels, especially natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel.

Liberal abundance advocates struggle to accept this fact, instead choosing to market their agenda as the way that Democrats’ dream of a rapid renewables–based transition can actually be attained. But working-class voters have little interest in this rapid clean energy transition. These voters—exactly the voters the party needs to win back—do not share the zeal of Democrats’ educated voter base for restructuring the economy around “green” industries and the clean energy agenda that underpinned much of Biden administration economic policy. The last election should have made that, well, abundantly clear.

Too few liberal abundance advocates are willing to grapple with the ways in which their preferred agenda is incompatible with the views and priorities of normie voters, as opposed to people like them. Geoff Shullenberger has noted correctly that the abundance envisioned by advocates “already exists, at least in some form, for those who can afford it,” which just happens to include a huge chunk of the Democrats’ educated professional base. Josh Barro has chided Democratic abundance advocates for their support of “decarbonization policies that would make energy, and the aspirational suburban lifestyle, more expensive.” And that lifestyle, he points out, is what “abundance” means for most ordinary Americans. They want that nice house in the ‘burbs with all the gadgets and vehicles! Especially vehicles—as Arizona Democratic senator Ruben Gallego has memorably remarked: “Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck.” The contrast between what most liberal Democrats, including abundance advocates, want such voters to want and what they actually do want is a fundamental problem.

Abundance for whom is an obvious, glaring question that cannot be elided. And right now, way too many abundance advocates have answers that cannot generate the public support they need.

3. Abundance is under-powered as a political project. We live in a populist era where a politician like Trump has succeeded by pushing a bold, uncompromising vision to sweep away a broken, elite-dominated system. His crusade is emotional and visceral in a way that liberals loathe but engages tens of millions of working-class voters.

Against this, the technocratic-flavored abundance argument seems weak by comparison. Tweaking the current system to get better outputs assumes more faith in the current system than plausibly exists among most voters. They are more likely to see it as a well-intentioned but likely ineffective reform attempt than a crusade they want to sign up to. An emotional, morally-charged, and nationalistic drive to radically transform our failing system, promote a new era of national development and grand accomplishments and leave the Chinese in the dust is more like a crusade. But at this point such a crusade seems very far from the center of gravity of the abundance discourse.

Frankly, I don’t see how abundance gets very far until and unless advocates recognize its weakness as a political project and embed it in a broader project that can move tens of millions. Only then are their ambitions likely to be realized.