I’m mostly using the abundance agenda as a jumping off point here. I actually overall agree with the agenda, even though I do have some gripes with it, but that’s a discussion for another day, and has already been discussed here quite a bit.
What’s bothering me is how the ideas in the abundance agenda have become accepted by mainstream democrats.
I hang out in a lot of leftist spaces and climate-related spaces, and many of the proposals laid out by the agenda are things that we have been talking about and asking for for years. Stuff like reworking zoning regulations, reducing the power of NIMBYs, so on and so forth. Any by and large, these ideas haven’t been taken all that seriously by mainstream democrats.
But all of a sudden, Ezra Klein puts it in a book, and it’s hailed as the path forward for the Democratic Party. I’m glad that some of these ideas are starting to be accepted- that’s not the issue. Any progress is good progress.
What I’m wondering is, should the Democratic Party take more seriously ideas that come from outside the establishment? Is it an example of the perceived elitism of the Democratic Party that new ideas aren’t adopted until they are endorsed by a democratic elite? Is the Democratic Party too cautious to adopt new ideas? Or is my perception of this skewed?
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I’m mostly using the abundance agenda as a jumping off point here. I actually overall agree with the agenda, even though I do have some gripes with it, but that’s a discussion for another day, and has already been discussed here quite a bit.
What’s bothering me is how the ideas in the abundance agenda have become accepted by mainstream democrats.
I hang out in a lot of leftist spaces and climate-related spaces, and many of the proposals laid out by the agenda are things that we have been talking about and asking for for years. Stuff like reworking zoning regulations, reducing the power of NIMBYs, so on and so forth. Any by and large, these ideas haven’t been taken all that seriously by mainstream democrats.
But all of a sudden, Ezra Klein puts it in a book, and it’s hailed as the path forward for the Democratic Party. I’m glad that some of these ideas are starting to be accepted- that’s not the issue. Any progress is good progress.
What I’m wondering is, should the Democratic Party take more seriously ideas that come from outside the establishment? Is it an example of the perceived elitism of the Democratic Party that new ideas aren’t adopted until they are endorsed by a democratic elite? Or is my perception of this skewed?
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>Is the abundance agenda an example of Democratic elitism?
No.
>I’m mostly using the abundance agenda as a jumping off point here.
You shouldn’t.
Intelligent, considerate, caring people put that agenda together to show the path forward and to make real, positive, necessary policy changes.
You shouldn’t shit on it just to make an unrelated point.
>I actually overall agree with the agenda…
That just makes this worse.
So when a book like this comes out whether or not I’m going to read it I usually seek out a couple of interviews with the author or authors, get a sense of the arguments are making and then deliberately don’t listen to the other parts of the book tour because they tend to be repetitive.
I was very excited about this book and it arrived the day it came out. But my plan remained the same. I was going to listen to two interviews and then move on. Instead because of the size of the discourse, I have listened to at least half a dozen if not more. I have also been following the discourse about the book, including the discourse happening in this sub, but also some YouTube videos and reviews of the book.
Virtually all the pushback I see is coming from the progressive left and the furthest left portions of the progressive left.
I have seen discourse about the general subjects of this book being made for years. Ezra does acknowledge in the interviews that a lot of what’s in this book comes from the fact that he’s married to Annie Lowery. Her previous book is very much in the same genre. The people who have been discussing these subjects are not the progressive left. They are mainstream Democrats were generally not liked by the progressive left. The kind of people they call “neoliberal”.
> …many of the proposals laid out by the agenda are things that we have been talking about and asking for for years…
>…
>But all of a sudden, Ezra Klein puts it in a book, and it’s hailed as the path forward for the Democratic Party…
>…should the Democratic Party take more seriously ideas that come from outside the establishment?
Those ideas did “come from outside the establishment”.
Then, those ideas persuaded people like Ezra Klein who wrote about them. Klein writing about them makes them more likely to reach the highest echelons of the Democratic establishment and persuades normie Dem voters to back them.
This is just how ideas become mainstream.
There’s a clip of Ezra Klein on Stewart’s podcast that popped off where Klein was talking about the challenges of why the billions allocated by the Biden admin to rural broadband has struggled to materialize results. And there was this implicit assumption that it was Dems and progressive groups that put up this regulatory hurdles.
Turns out it was Republicans who added those unnecessary provisions, trying to protect the rent seeking interests of existing internet service providers.
NIMBYism and supply side restrictions come in many forms. Many of the very policies Ezra advocated for in the past added supply side restrictions.
I’m glad he’s starting understand how scarcity is compounding a lot of the problems in America but he still has quite a bit to go before he realizes capitalism thrives on artificial scarcity. That the endgame of any capitalist enterprise is to control nearly all supply and restrict it to drive up prices as they wish. NIMBYism comes in many forms. Rentseeking comes in many different forms. And it’s not always misguided progressives groups like the Sierra Club that are the primary drivers.
>Any earnest purveyor of the abundance paradigm simply must contend with this sequence of comments/posts by @ezraklein @elonmusk @BharatRamamurti and what it betrays about the movement 1/n
oc
> For @ProSyn, I draw on the New Deal’s successes and sketch out a real abundance agenda for the public link
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“Fringe” ideas are always fringe until they’re accepted by the mainstream.
How is this “elite” or in any way any different from how it’s been for the last 250 years?
Everything I’ve heard about the abundance agenda has come across as very coastal YIMBY-ish and pretty technocratic. So, it could certainly be seen as elitist.
I like the idea of over-promising if that’s what they mean. I still expect we’ll get drowned in the weeds if we try to give a detailed explanation of abundance. Democrats work too hard to make their solutions sound realistic rather than making them sound awesome.
Absolutely.
Anger is the operative emotion for everybody nowadays.
On the ground? The only way you can do that is as a backdoor agenda that’s pushed through via making rich people the enemy.
There is no path forward politically, for anybody, without anger, hatred, and enemies.
The kumbayah nature of an “abundance agenda” is not, fundamentally, an approach that anybody wants.
They want somebody to hate.
It’s either vulnerable people or billionaires.