Abundance Cultists Don't Get How Infrastructure Can Screw Black People

[Celerity]

And the Trump administration, which has been on a spree killing off vital transportation projects, doesn’t care.

https://newrepublic.com/article/199473/abundance-trump-infrastructure-racial-discrimination

https://archive.ph/1Pzlg


U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy

Let’s discuss a problem the Abundance movement is ill suited to address: the Trump administration’s elimination of programs that reduce burdens to low-income minority neighborhoods when the government builds highways and bridges.

Abundance-ism started out last fall as three treatises against the Not in My Back Yard, or NIMBY, liberal mindset. The books (which I reviewed here and here) were Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling Abundance, Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck, and Mark Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works. These took a small reformist point (local zoning can be abused by the wealthy to shore up privilege) and enlarged it into a supply-side liberal ideology that proved irresistible to conservatives. The newly libertarian Washington Post editorial page, for instance, weighed in that “progress, not redistribution, is the main determinant of living standards,” a conclusion that I doubt the authors of these books would endorse—but that, by setting aside questions of distribution, they didn’t exactly discourage.

In the blink of an eye, Abundance-ism became an industry. Tickets quickly sold out for Abundance 2025, a September 4–5 conference in Washington, D.C., that will feature, alongside the three books’ authors, David Brooks; Republican Representative Brett Guthrie of Kentucky; Republican Governor Spencer Cox of Utah; and Dean Ball, who until recently was a senior policy adviser on artificial intelligence in the Trump White House. There’s also a new “mission-driven” Abundance-ist online magazine called The Argument featuring columns by Thompson, Matthew Yglesias, and Matt Bruenig (who gave Abundance an only mildly contemptuous review and will presumably play the role of sparring partner).

The inadequacy of the Abundance-ist outlook became clearer to me after I read another book published this fall that received much less attention: Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality, by Deborah N. Archer, president of the American Civil Liberties Union. (I interviewed Archer in April for the Washington, D.C., bookstore Politics & Prose.) Archer’s book explains that the 1956 Interstate Highway Act, which was enacted one month after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, proved a godsend for conservative Deep South politicians then frantic to find new ways to preserve racial segregation.

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