Looking south across the Potomac and out toward the Jefferson Memorial from the grand lawn of the Salamander Washington D.C. Hotel, you can see the whole history of American infrastructure if you squint. To the left, the river, dotted with marinas, is opening up wider and wider, out to the great Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean: Our cross-continental nation-to-be was once but a set of seafaring colonies, crammed up against the coast, and it lived and died by its ports. But technology progressed, didn’t it? In the extreme right corner of your view is one of D.C.’s most under-appreciated monuments, the First Air Mail marker. “The world’s first airplane mail to be operated as a continuously scheduled public service started from this field,” the inscription reads. Nothing new became possible that day in 1918, not least because the plane crashed. But, crucially, something already possible became faster and would begin to get inexorably cheaper. The inscription continues: “The route connected Washington, Philadelphia and New York. Curtiss JN 4-H airplanes with a capacity of 150 pounds of mail flew the 230 miles in about three hours.” Jeff Bezos, eat your heart out.
Some 650 people, including a meaningful portion of my Twitter feed, converged on this hotel for two days at the beginning of September to discuss not the past, but the future of American… stuff. It is widely agreed here that for our nation to thrive we are going to need more stuff, and not just tchotchkes, but big stuff. What will it take to build the next century’s bridges? What, if anything, will the trains and cars that cross them belch? Will AI help? What kinds of power plants will we need to build to make it all happen? What laws will allow, or not allow, this to take place? What combination of government and private industry will execute the plan? And, my god, what will it all cost?
Here in America we have a problem, namely that it seems that no matter what we spend, we cannot build things anymore. The Moynihan Train Hall in Manhattan, an expansion of Penn Station, cost roughly the same amount to build as Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. California’s high-speed rail project has an estimated cost greater than what we spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe from the destruction of World War II (adjusted for inflation!). And no track has been laid yet.
The problem is not specific to train-related infrastructure. Just look at the dollars allocated for rural broadband ($42.5 billion), or our nationwide network of fast electric vehicle chargers ($7.5 billion), and then look at what we got—or, rather, whether we got anything at all. Look at how much more expensive it has become to build a nuclear power plant. Perhaps more importantly, look at how the same dynamic is at work in the housing market, making it almost insurmountably difficult to build enough stock to allow ordinary American families to purchase homes. Scarcity. Zero sum. There’s not enough stuff.
An outside observer might think that this movement was born from the March 2025 publication of the book Abundance by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson, previously of the Atlantic, now writing at his own Substack. In fact, to the degree this movement and bit of rhetorical framing are having a moment in politics, it is as a result of years of organizing work by a set of political groups and think tanks such as the Niskanen Center, YIMBY Action, the Breakthrough Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, and a handful more who co-hosted this conference. They are joined now by explicitly Abundance-branded groups such as the Abundance Network.
To its critics, this means the Abundance movement is a corporate, neoliberal psyop. “Are Abundance Bros Just a Psyop?” asks leftist YouTuber Sam Seder in the title of one video. (Answer, after much discussion of various book tour appearances by Derek Thompson: Yes, of course.) Or take this representative tweet from journalist John Teufel: “Think for a second about how weird this all is. A book comes out called Abundance. It *immediately* becomes a ‘movement.’ W/in 6 months there are Abundance conferences, campus groups, think tanks. All from one book. It is so obviously not organic lol. It’s funded. It’s capital.”
As it happens, the movement took off much more slowly than accused, suggesting exactly the kind of boring, “organic” political and intellectual work that might flower into a movement, especially at a moment progressives give every impression of not believing in the possibility of progress and defeated Democrats are hungry for any kind of positive vision. In the 2008 book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger wrote that “What prosperity and abundance bring is a demand for greater control, autonomy, flexibility, and choice.” The term would appear periodically over the next decade in the Breakthrough Institute’s materials as a framing device meant to express the idea that policies taking climate change seriously are compatible with, and even complementary to, policies that give consumers lots of what they want quickly, cheaply, and without the kinds of politically suicidal handwringing that comes along with things like plastic straw bans or Europe’s high electricity costs. By 2021, Matt Yglesias was writing about “the politics of abundance,” and the Breakthrough Institute’s 2022 conference, a predecessor to the Abundance conference, was themed “Deregulating Abundance.” (Derek Thompson spoke.)
The morning of the first day of the September Abundance conference at the Salamander Hotel, all the talk was about a new report by left-wing research group the Revolving Door Project, which had accused the Abundance group of being, as Breakthrough Institute Deputy Director Alex Trembath later joked onstage, “some sort of astroturf conspiracy.” But of course it’s an astroturf conspiracy, in the sense that donors spending money to effect policy or messaging outcomes by definition is, and politicians and writers and donors knowing one another is. That is just how these things work. The Revolving Door Project is, the Abundance movement is, the Brookings Institution is, the Tides Foundation is, the Bernie and Obama and Trump campaigns were.
Abundance is not a populist movement and is not trying to be one. Looking around the blazers and backpacks filling the rooms of the conference, it is easy to see why. There’s Richard Hanania, the onetime white nationalist turned repentant centrist blogger and troll, gadflying about and posting obnoxious criticisms of the whole show. Here’s Ruy Teixeira of The Liberal Patriot. Over there by the silver urns of coffee is Matt Yglesias. Under a shock of boyish brown hair is Democratic pollster David Shor, who I will later see giving a talk about how to sell these ideas to a voting bloc that may be on board or may not be; it simply doesn’t like change of any kind. After his talk, I listen as a small group of Democratic partisans crowd around him, begging for him to affirm their opinions that the most cathartic things to do—trolling Trumpists and focusing on the issues intellectuals find salient—would be politically strategic. He is very elegant as he explains they would not be.
Then there is the admirably bipartisan set of politicians in attendance, among them Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York, Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, and others. Each is versed in Abundance-friendly ideas, persuasive about how they will help constituents, and, it is easy to forget, an idiosyncratic example of his respective party. More interestingly, there are local politicians representing places like Annapolis, Maryland; Adams County, Colorado; Fairfax, Virginia; and really all over. Most of these people tell me they came to Abundance by way of the YIMBY movement for relaxing zoning restrictions to make housing development easier, or else through reading Klein and Thompson’s book.
Programming is refreshingly focused and specific, as well as self-critical. This is a movement working itself out. There are big speeches and panels in a main ballroom, such as from Jerusalem Demsas of the new magazine The Argument on “A Liberalism that Builds,” and, from the conservative Manhattan Institute, Reihan Salam on why “Abundance Needs Austerity.” Somebody next to me remarks after Salam’s speech that it was “[t]he most Ayn Randian thing [he] had ever heard,” suggesting that perhaps the audience is not as open to thoughtful right-wing ideas as the programmers. In the afternoon, there are breakout sessions on things such as a “permitting war room,” a rather bitchy debate between Matt Yglesias and Oren Cass about whether “Abundance Is Just Neoliberalism,” and some smaller rooms with generally more interesting subjects on things like science funding—where Ph.Ds discuss with bafflement but seriousness the fact that the other parts of the academy have broken their bargain with their patron, the public—and on how the Abundance framing should apply to family policy.
Nonetheless, the air here is thick with euphemism: “supply-side progressivism,” “state capacity libertarianism,” all kinds of confounding political terminologies. This speaks to the sourest note at the entire conference, which happened to be the keynote. Closing the second day was an interview of both Thompson and Klein by David Brooks of the New York Times, during which Thompson was characteristically clever and Klein was characteristically unable to keep his analytic rigor free from what is, plainly put, an extreme level of Democratic partisanship that is unpopular outside of the New York Times subscriber base. (As a recent Axios piece revealingly laid out, Klein is not just a Democratic-leaning journalist in a traditional sense, but a “power broker” and operative in the Party.) When Brooks asked how the two men have grown since they were younger writers, Klein replied that he now understands better that the conflict between left and right is a “fundamental” one, repeating that word several times. More than one top official from the host organizations that threw the event told me they thought it’s regrettable that Klein is, by the default of the book’s title and success, now the face of the Abundance movement, and that the chapters of the book he wrote are much worse than Thompson’s in, for example, citing apocalyptic, scientifically unjustifiable claims about climate change from writers such as Bill McKibben. But, like it or not, Ezra Klein and Abundance are no longer separable.
A much more interesting question than whether an organized political movement is organic or artificial is whether it is primed to be successful or unsuccessful. And that will come down less to whether the ideas of the Abundance movement are well conceived and more to who actually makes up the movement. While it is officially bipartisan, Abundance is ultimately a project of and for the center left. “Given Donald Trump’s hold on the GOP, in the short term, it is hard to imagine such a political faction emerging around these issues anywhere other than the Democratic Party,” wrote the Niskanen Center’s Robert Saldin and Steve Teles, the latter a speaker at the conference, in 2024, in sketching out how “the Abundance Faction will enter the battle for the future of the Democratic Party.”
In two days, I did not hear it mentioned one time that one mile away the Trump administration, despite the president’s occasional flirtations with rhetoric that sounds like climate change denial and his quixotic loathing for wind power, was currently carrying out an Abundance agenda in a way that his 2024 opponent would not have and probably a more palatable Republican alternative would not have. At the Idaho National Laboratory, for example, the Department of Energy is hosting a slate of different experimental next-gen nuclear reactors due to a Trump executive order that describes nuclear power as “safe and abundant energy,” a name-check that does not seem coincidental. As recently as mid-November, the Trump administration continued to support Abundance-friendly policies on energy that represent a dramatic break from the recent political past, Republican and Democrat, such as a loan to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Outside of energy policy, Trump ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to allow for supersonic air travel over land, a very Abundance-coded idea. An official in the Trump administration working on energy reform later told me that, inside the White House, they are tracking Abundance ideas approvingly.
At the conference, the Abundance crew was crafting ideas for a theoretical politics, and you could almost forget that beyond the walls of the hotel, very few people are interested in, much less excited about, such issues as permitting reform, interstate transmission lines, the right to build accessory dwelling units, or the fact that without nuclear power there is simply no way to create enough emissions-free power, not even if everyone is maximally shamed about their “carbon footprint.” (A phrase, by the way, that was invented by marketing firm Ogilvy & Mather for its client British Petroleum.) No, outside of the hotel, people are up in arms about Israel, transgender issues, and the Cracker Barrel logo.
The most ascendant movements in this country are right-wing populism and left-wing populism. And that left this reporter and abundance bro feeling like this conference and the movement it has gathered behind it is, overall, somehow fundamentally delusional. Despite representing perhaps the greatest concentration of people with correct, nuanced political ideas I have ever been around, it is impossible to avoid that this may all be hopeless political wishful thinking.
The night I got back from the conference, I talked to my sister in Seattle on the phone for the first time in a while. She told me about a frustrating local law that was keeping her from converting her unused garage into a bedroom. She hadn’t heard of “abundance.”
