Progressives Against Abundance?

No Representation Without Differentiation

By Alex Trembath

Last month, the Roosevelt Institute’s Rhiana Gunn-Wright asked, rhetorically, “what base does the abundance movement represent?” Many of us within the movement responded, arguing that abundance represents, variously, scientists and engineers working to advance the scientific frontier, labor unions and construction workers who want to build infrastructure, ecomodernists bringing technology and growth to the fight for ecological sustainability, renters and homeowners concerned about the tightening supply of housing, civil servants constrained by the accretion of sclerotic regulatory procedure, and consumers everywhere affected by inflationary supply chain shortages and cost-of-living stresses.

After my own reply to this effect, Gunn-Wright blocked me.

Gary Winslett called this rhetorical incuriosity a “blind spot” for progressives. I would go further. By making this accusation and then ignoring the answers, Gunn-Wright and her abundance-skeptical compatriots are engaging in something more like projection than ignorance. Their ostensible critique is that abundance lacks a genuine constituency, providing window dressing for powerful vested interests. But that’s precisely the gist of an increasingly widespread critique of “The Groups,” the network of progressive advocacy outfits which are, arguably, laundering elite ideological projects through the rhetoric of social justice (or criminal justice, or climate justice, or whatever).

The Groups are, after all, mostly just the beneficiaries of large progressive philanthropies, not representative or broad membership-based organizations. Instead of grappling with this, for instance by acknowledging the widening gap between progressive nonprofits and actual organized labor, The Groups have redirected the criticism at the emerging abundance coalition.

To wit, a couple weeks ago, Dylan Gyauch-Lewis of the Revolving Door Project (RDP) wrote an ersatz exposé for The American Prospect accusing nonprofit abundance groups of…taking money from large philanthropies.

Gyauch-Lewis argued that abundance is merely the latest version of progressives’ perennial bogeyman: neoliberalism. Her case for this is basically a listicle of the foundations and partnerships of the organizations that hosted Abundance 2024 (the Breakthrough Institute, the Inclusive Abundance Initiative, the Institute for Progress, the Foundation for American Innovation, the Niskanen Center, and the Federation of American Scientists) and the philanthropic sponsors of the event (Open Philanthropy, Renaissance Philanthropy, the Stand Together Trust, and Arnold Ventures).

The article is full of suggestive phrases like “Open Philanthropy was co-created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz” and “Renaissance Philanthropy was founded by Tom Kalil with money from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.” There is a lot of innuendo throughout, purportedly supportive of the opening accusation that the “Abundance is neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world.”

Honestly the allegedly nefarious web of abundance connections came across to most of us like a list of accomplishments and recommendations. And the more general accusations, again, would be much better directed at RDP and The American Prospect than at the Abundance conference. Gyauch-Lewis claims the abundance movement “fails to recognize the role of powerful incumbents who seek to limit abundance for their own purposes.” I could scarcely think of a better way to describe the powerful incumbent progressive and environmental groups who weaponize procedural laws to limit technological and infrastructure abundance.

But Gyauch-Lewis also omits work at abundance-related organizations that is inconvenient to her argument. Much of her ire is directed at cryptocurrency and effective altruism, two things I, for instance, have been somewhat critical of. And, to be clear, my word is not the last on these subjects. It’s a big tent. The abundance coalition includes right-leaning groups like FAI as well as left-leaning groups like Employ America, liberals like Jennifer Pahlka and libertarians like Marian Tupy. The movement is host to a number of internal disputes, including over EA and crypto but also over compatibility with environmentalism, whether rent control and upzoning are complements or substitutes, and if abundance is a politically viable project or merely a technocratic one. Articles like Gyauch-Lewis’s are intended to flatten this diversity of thought, casting a new set of ideas and institutions as old neoliberal wine in new bottles.

And I think the shallowness of the Prospect article, ultimately, reflects the increasingly panicky ways in which progressives are working through their feelings on abundance. Gyauch-Lewis and Gunn-Wright are certainly not alone in their antagonism. The Prospect’s David Dayen has been regularly critical lately. Climate activist and frequent failer of fact-checks Genevieve Guenther charged that “the abundance movement represents the fossil-fuel industry.” RDP was in fact the second Group to take issue with our conference, after Climate Defiance showed up in person to protest it.

Now this backlash to abundance, it should be said, was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. As David Roberts wrote recently, “the climate movement could have owned abundance” if it had not remained “overwhelmingly focused on bashing fossil fuels.” Instead, he laments, “the growing ‘abundance’ movement on the left is completely owned by people who smuggle in…a bunch of shitty cultural politics & a lack of urgency about climate change.” But The Groups’ latent panic over abundance makes me think Roberts doth protest too much. The climate movement could never have owned abundance because, at least so far, abundance offers something the climate movement never could. What Roberts calls “shitty cultural politics” are mostly a refusal to remain ensconced within the elitist progressive bubble, and what he calls “a lack of urgency about climate change” is just abundance advocates’ rejection of degrowth and catastrophist protest tactics.

And if anything, this all makes me optimistic about a specific dispute within the movement, surfaced most recently by Derek Thompson and Matt Yglesias on stage at Abundance 2024. Thompson argued that the causes of abundance—accelerated economic growth and technological progress, expanded material supply, improved government capacity and execution—require a movement. Reforming decades of regulations, disciplining government agencies, and revivifying American scientific institutions are all massive endeavors. Perhaps more to the point, they are massively political endeavors, butting up against entrenched special interests and institutional inertia. Achieving abundance, in this understanding, will require not only elite executors and movement leaders but broad political buy-in and mass cultural appeal.

Yglesias urged caution on this point. At the event and elsewhere, he has warned that building a broad cultural and political abundance movement could serve to undercut what’s made abundance effective to date: narrow strategic policy objectives pursued pragmatically by discrete evidence-informed experts and advocates. If Yglesias is right, then rallying the masses to the Abundance Movement may dilute what made the nascent community so special in the first place.

The risks, in other words, of too much or too fast growth of the abundance project is that it ceases to mean anything, to be differentiated from other ideas, policy propositions, or constituencies. One could imagine, cynically, an abundance of community input councils, internal review boards, regulatory hurdles, and technocratic precision—all things that, on balance, the abundance community has militated against to date. It seems at least plausible that abundance could get sucked into the progressive omnicause.

So it’s conspicuous that progressives are increasingly naming abundance as their ideological and factional enemy. That should make the disputed claims between the two camps over representativeness easier to adjudicate, and it should mitigate the risks that abundance gets captured or diluted.