https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abundance-agenda-democrats/
Groups like Third Way, which are largely funded by billionaires and corporations, have been major boosters of the abundance framework, as have other key pillars of US oligarchy, including crypto, Big Tech, and Big Oil. These interests have a clear vested interest in derailing the growing Democratic turn toward economic populism. And they have found in abundance advocates—like Abundance coauthor Derek Thompson, who recently argued that oligarchy “does a terrible job of describing today’s problems”—a valuable tool for redirecting the anti-establishment rage building within the Democratic base away from themselves and toward a new set of scapegoats: bureaucracy, leftists, and what Thompson and his coauthor Ezra Klein call “everything bagel liberalism.”
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I find this quote chilling. Here’s one of the leading advocates of abundance saying in plain English that he (1) self-consciously sees their project as battling with the left for the future of the Democratic Party, (2) understands that we’re in a moment of intense anger at the establishment status quo, and (3) believes that the abundance agenda can “channel the anger that people have at the establishment, but toward our own ends,” i.e., redirect the public’s rage away from the parasitism of economic elites and toward the regulatory regimes of state and local Democrats.
This is what anyone who’s been confused by the strength of the abundance backlash needs to understand. Our concern is not that the framework is “a dry, technocratic exercise with no political core,” as Resnikoff put it. Our fear is that this billionaire-backed project is being explicitly used to undermine the kind of populist rebrand necessary to shed Democrats’ reputation as feckless cowards who can’t be trusted to fight for working people—to swap out a villainization of corporate elites that evokes FDR with a demonization of bureaucracy, regulation, and red tape that lends credibility to Elon Musk, who, it’s worth noting, reposted a clip of Klein pitching abundance with the message, “This shows why regulatory overhaul is necessary.”
This isn’t an idle fear. Abundance proponents are extremely influential within the Democratic Party; just this week a group of centrist Democrats launched an Abundance Caucus and Klein briefed Senate Democrats at their annual retreat. That’s particularly concerning given that taking on oligarchy-aligned Democratic elites was already a herculean task. Abundance, and the permission structure it offers Democrats who’d rather not alienate their Big Tech/Big Oil/Big Money donors, could be the margin that pushes a populist renaissance for our party out of reach.
Get informed before you get brainwashed by a flood of clickbait misinformation that insists the Abundance Agenda is the only way Dems can win elections - Mamdani has thoroughly refuted that nonsense.
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