(2025-09-13) Solana The Abundance Delusion

Mike Solana: The Abundance Delusion. 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

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.

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.

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... 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.

It is also a familiar vision.

Zohran Mamdani 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.

In 2014, Kim-Mai Cutler, then a writer for TechCrunch, wrote the piece “How Burrowing Owls Lead to Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained).” At a time when blaming tech industry gentrification on 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 YIMBY movement was born.

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.

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.

Fortunately, we do have examples of American men who prioritized building.

Robert Moses

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 snake-pit 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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 city 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

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. egalitarian

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.

Back in 2021, Joe Biden passed his now-infamous Trillion Dollar Paint Job. He promised Americans infrastructure as part of a $1.2 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan

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?

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.

Abundance Democrats can have abundance or they can be popular in Brooklyn, but they can’t have both

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.