Wonderful opening: "The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause."
We are stuck in a hegemonic plutocracy that defines abundance in a way that many scientists believe is threatening to ecologically bankrupt the earth. Unfortunately, the biggest socialist experiments of the 20th c, intended to overthrow this ideology of the rich, resulted in police state dictatorships and mass murder. And the beacon of Red Plenty today seems to be doing well on the plenty part, adapting to a possibility of future abundance, but remains a police state dictatorship that is now producing billionaires. Or, as it turns out, just another form of militarized plutocracy. We need a third way, or other paths, to abundance, as you say. Ways that expand state capacity while resisting economic class tyranny; ways that promote commercial abundance while resisting environmental destruction and the brutal extremes of monopolistic/oligopolistic inequality. We still need a Green New Deal, damnit, one that elevates the status of environmental sustainability and workers (living wages) and the caring economy, while bringing to heel and domesticating the greed fixation of private wealth. I know, I'm just "winnowing down" again; thanks for the food for thought. I'll get to reading Abundance eventually but my fear has been that it's just another supply-side shell game that refuses to challenge the plutocratic definition of abundance in which we are stuck. I'm not against wealth, abundance, or people getting rich, but rule by the rich or rich rule is killing us.
One of the points made in the book is that even if we have a Green New Deal, we still need to build this infrastructure. It will mean building new factories to make new wind turbines and solar cells. It means laying down railroad tracks and the government acquiring and managing land to ensure high speed rail. It means densifying housing to reduce reliance on cars. These are all things that we can do now without a Green New Deal, but we aren't able to do so with the current political willpower of our system (and people getting rich making it). Opposition to new housing and new infrastructure as it stands now (600 days to permit housing in San Francisco and will take 20 years to build a single new commuter rail station in Boston) make opposition to changing anything untenable. These problems won't be magically fixed with a Green New Deal -- and we will need a lot more of both.
Henry Farrell: It appears that Kamala Harris was an ideal candidate; ran two-years of Presidential campaign in 170 days; and simply did not have enough time to win.
That having been said, Kamala Harris was the best qualified Presidential Candidate since LBJ and articulated a message of inclusiveness, Constitutional values, and overall brightness for the economic future.
Against that message, the People elected a group that ELEVATES the AfD in Germany -- a NEO-NAZI group that Germany's Constitutional Authorities deem undemocratic and dangerous, and that yearn for the values of the Third Reich.
This Group -- Musk/Tramp/Vance/Attorney General Pam Bondage -- these break down the rule of law and they give NAZI-Like terms to immigrants -- "They poison our blood!" -- "They steal little ones and eat them in blood rituals" (a crude adaptation against Haitians that originated in Anti-Semitic hatred during the Mediaeval Times, when the slogan enflamed village-destroying pogroms).
When the choice was THAT STARK, I on the Left GLADLY support AOC/Bernie-Sanders/Elizabeth-Warren.
So, Americans turn against the left because of gays and transgender -- Oh, my! (like in Oz: Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh, My!) -- and turn to what?!
A reincarnation of Ross Barnett, George Wallace, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox!
I don't buy it.
I am all for the Democrats enlarging a substantial vision for America before 2026.
We have enough Think Tanks.
We are smart enough to design a winning team and message.
We DESTROYED the Republicans in the 1930s.
The Republicans are turning to a totalitarian model.
This is NOT about adjusting the tuning on your radio or TV a little to the left or right for more bandwidth.
This is about a SICK, SICK society that puts Neo-Fascism in power.
I am bilingual in German.
In 1932, the Weimar Republik had good, good people.
The Germans were recovering from hyperinflation caused by reactions to the cruel reparations of the Versailles Treaty imposed by Georges Clemenceau.
Why?
Why?
How many people know this:
The Prussians marched through Paris in 1871, as the then 30-year-old Georges Clemenceau sorrowed with his countrymen.
After the Kaiser's Army marched through Paris again, Georges Clemenceau in 1919 was steeled as a Patriot for the French Republic.
Georges Clemenceau was a leading cause of overwhelming reparations imposed upon postwar Germany.
The German Republic faced nationwide strikes and crises in 1919, including some short-lived Communist takeover in Munich, and Nationalist (later NAZI) Putsch in the same city.
As in America, Germans were unemployed and desperate.
Hyperinflation -- caused by Berlin's printing press of Deutsche Marken to make cheap the Versailles Reparations caused financial crises that likely disrupted commerce in other parts of the world.
Already in 1919, John Maynard Keynes argued STRENUOUSLY against unrealistically high reparations against the defeated power.
Despite great and good voices, the Nazis won large shares of representation in the Parliament in 1932 and the Takeover resulted in bookburnings and the rest became history.
The middle name of the Nazi party was "WORKER" -- The "nationale sozialistische deutsche Arbeiter Partei" (National Socialist WORKERS Party).
And the rhetoric was to hire the worker.
To rebuild industry.
To rearm.
To concentrate on industrial might.
To build freeways.
Down with the banks -- this was the cry -- down with bankers.
The Nazi image for the banks and bankers: The Jew.
The infamous Joseph Goebbels propaganda film where actors -- posed in satires of "Jews" as imagined by anti-Semites -- were standing, leaning on a wall, smoking cigars -- made up to have exaggerated noses -- when, in one of the miracles of modern cinematography -- the images of each actor was slowly morphed into a standing, human-size RAT.
The rest is history. The holocaust. The Shoah. The crimes against humanity.
The worst crimes in history.
The Germans had good people in the center-right, the center-left to choose from.
The Germans in huge numbers chose Hitler.
Now, the Republicans really dislike comparisons to Hitler.
In that case, I would ask Trump, Vance, Musk, and Marco Rubio: "STOP promoting the AfD -- the Neo-Nazis! STOP ALREADY. STOP! STOP! STOP!"
Also: Stop attacking immigrants.
Stop attacking trans-gender.
STOP!
In my daily life, I might not think that much about immigrants or transgender.
But persecute them, and immigrants and transgender arise to the top of my radar.
You want a vision:
Here, how about this vision:
INCLUSIVITY.
LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR.
PROMOTE EDUCATION.
PROMOTE BOOKS.
PROMOTE ART.
PROMOTE MUSIC.
Promote the dignity and education and careers of girls and women.
Promote the security and safety of girls and women.
Promote the health of girls and women.
Promote the rights and dignity with due process for each person.
Allow for diversity of economic approaches WITHIN CORE AND CONSTITUTIONAL VALUES.
A 900 page program could be built on these principles.
Given everything else you've written, your remarks w.r.t. Harris have to be satire but they're not written as such. I mean, she was a candidate who staffed her campaign with tech-monopolist-adjacent people, stayed silent on getting rid of Khan, continued to support the Gaza genocide.
If you're siding with Sanders/AOC/Warren (despite their lip-service acceptance of "centrist" policies), Harris is not a friend...
Albrecht Zimmermann: I am definitely a friend of Israel.
I am a friend of Palestine.
The Shoah, the Holocaust leaves us astounded as the unthinkable, genocidal horror, which begs us to safeguard Jews forever.
But the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 was unjust.
There must be a safe homeland for Jews. That homeland must be strategically defensible.
In Air War College (as a Judge Advocate, Lt Col, USAF Reserves), I studied the 1967 war carefully. I understand the need for defensible borders for Israel.
But the situation over the past Century has created a horror for Palestine.
My God, the driving out of Palestine is sadistic.
Benjamin Netanyahu has bitter, sadistic plans for remaining Palestinians in Gaza.
The terroristic capture and the torture and killing of hostages on 7 October of 2023 was horrific.
But Benjamin Netanyahu has committed unthinkable war crimes in the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.
Counter-terror operations are surgical and precise in nature, under the teachings of General David Petraeus.
Counter-terror does not tolerate war crimes, where Israel targets hospitals, ambulances, food suppliers, an Orthodox Church, Mosques, refugee camps, where thousands of children, women and other noncombatants are, let's say it, MURDERED.
The war in Gaza is a major war crime.
Suppression of Hamas terror through surgical, precise means is a strategic necessity.
The war in Gaza is one, long, stretched out war crime.
I am a friend of surgical suppression of terrorism.
I am a foe of the terrible, horrific and massive warfare carried out in Gaza and Lebanon.
Anyone who approves of the Israeli war crimes does not share my values.
I have liked Kamala Harris a lot, but the two points you raise give me pause.
As of now, the fight with cold-blooded tyranny in America is so strong that i am inclined to be at peace with any Democrat, form a united front, fight Trump.
I am comfortably a Socialist in any sense that provides for the poorest among us, secures medical care, food, shelter, an adequate living, and a dignified retirement to each.
Thank you so very much for your response, which is not only thoughtful, but provokes further research on my part.
Abundance is a utopian lie capitalists tell themselves. It's their 72 virgins. A promise of infinite exponential growth free from undesirable side-effects or trade-offs.
I'm all for abundant thinking. But with the rationalist belief that these priorities come with either intentional or unintentional costs elsewhere. No system of any sustainable existence can withstand eternal exponential growth without collapsing. We also call that "cancer".
"The first, which I don’t talk about directly in the piece, is that I would like to see common cause happen between centrists and left Democrats around some attractive goal such as abundance"
“Abundance - in the broadest sense of that term - is the closest thing to a common denominator across such futures that I know of.”
Agree v much with these statements (both in the States and w.r.t analogous issues in my home of Canada), and I enjoyed this post and your article.
I do find the left response to the Abundance argument frustrating. It seems that they just dislike the "vibes" and proximity to less-epic movements like the yimbys that don’t exclusively focus on direct-public-provision.
But as I understand the book’s argument, it wants to unfetter state actors as much as (or even more than) market ones. And without doing that, it’s very hard for the public to effectively do things directly. Look at e.g. the Biden admin’s failures to build rural broadband. If, like me, you’d prefer that the state do more things and do them directly instead of through a rat’s nest of subcontractors and non-profits, you need to make it easier for the state to act. Without that, hard to avoid starmer-ism and the deliverist pitch fails.
The left’s response is something like the “hello, human resources” meme, where they respond very differently to “the government should be able to act directly” depending on whether it’s coming from the nerds or the “cool guys”.
As a leftist I don't like the Abundance guys because they explicitly hate me and would rather pander to rich centrists and right-wing tech guys than progressives.
Them being rich assholes who think they're smarter than everyone and constantly speak in a smug, condescending tone doesn't help.
These guys are why so many people hate Democrats now lol.
Agree on Deliverism/Popularism, which seemed to me to be weird as a debate in the first place - I've seen plenty in favor of, basically, both, of different ideological stripes. I am sure better stuff was written than the sewer I was swimming in when it was a thing, but it felt like the old "Clinton vs Bernie" combatants were trying to claim new territory for their own side, rather than actually arguing over much. This feeling was INCREDIBLY strong during the flash of debate around this book as well.
I got into this conversation by way of following people like Medlock and the Niskanen Center who were surprisingly (to me) converging on territory also really interestingly covered by Greer. That made me excited for a politics of the future, and I really still think there is something there. I just wish people could let go of their inability to grant any possible ground to their previous opponents. (Obviously as someone who was a HillShill this means I think lefties need to take the win of these ideas *being an argument for a more vigorous and unleashed government,* but it's not like there isn't plenty of ideological inflexibility on the part of the matts of the world)
Seems to me the entire "Abundance" discussion is a last ditch effort by the centerist to avoid facing the fact that the vast majority of white US voters, when given the choice between an extremely qualified black woman and an aging reality TV clown, with felony convictions, sexual assault, and ongoing corruption, to say nothing of inciting a white lynch mobs to overturn an election, decided the clown was a their choice. Obviously policy had nothing to do with it.
The fact remains, the only "leftist" policy Harris represented was existing as a black woman that dared to run for president.
I wish we could also imagine a world where well-being isn't only considered on the margins either. Just as it's difficult to imagine a world where capitalism doesn't exist, so too is it difficult to imagine an economic framework that doesn't feed into hedonic adaptation
"Some of this, some of that" is not only a viable future but the only viable future in a democratic world. We might get closer to "egalitarian communism" via indexed 401(k)s, UBI, SWFs, and "baby bonds" -- i.e., via financialized "public ownership" -- than Star Trek (much less Bolshevism). Certainly if you think that actually-existing Denmark is still the model.
I disagree about Abundance being a convergence point for the non-reactionaries. I fail to see any real-world version of Abundance that does not map somewhat closely to what we have recently experienced. Yet voting publics the world over losing their shit due to momentarily higher inflation produced through proactive public stimulus (byeeeeee MMT! Smell ya later!).
I.e., Abundance creates something to fight over. Abundance gives you cool drone shots. It also gives UKR the ability to blow up Moscow's airports with remote-controlled paper airplanes. It gives you the ability to argue on the internet, but take precautions when you do: the Panopticon is significantly better-developed now than it was when Snowden landed in one of those Moscow airports.
Abundance has been achieved, as Keynes predicted. Unfortunately, as Keynes also predicted, the "Old Adam" remains. For that reason we are moving towards Frase's Rentism quadrant. Frase described it well: "an economy based on artificial scarcity is not only irrational, it is also dysfunctional". Cut to 47's use of public property to market all of Leon's cars as "self-driving"... if you pay for that software tier.
Abundance does not come from policies. It comes from systems.
Your footnotes in this post are interesting and useful, but inconvenient to view. I know it's possible to make CLICKABLE footnotes because I've seen them in other Substacks, though as a Substack reader and not a writer I don't know how it's done.
It's an in-joke about Captain Sensible and the Dolly Mixtures, whose cover version Dan is talking about. Before his rather startling makeover, Captain Sensible was the mainstay of The Damned.
I have to read Abundance to see if my gut reaction to all these reviews and summaries (their argument is we can buy off the proletariat with stuff, and peace flows from that) is correct or not. And to cut the current British government some slack, they are grabbing a life preserver thrown by some of the best snake oil salesmen in the history of Hustle. They'll regret it, but not as much as the investment banks and VCs.
Wonderful opening: "The result is the current battle between the defenders of the present, and an incoherent counter-alliance that brings the cultists of an imaginary past and the evangelists of an impossible future into common cause."
We are stuck in a hegemonic plutocracy that defines abundance in a way that many scientists believe is threatening to ecologically bankrupt the earth. Unfortunately, the biggest socialist experiments of the 20th c, intended to overthrow this ideology of the rich, resulted in police state dictatorships and mass murder. And the beacon of Red Plenty today seems to be doing well on the plenty part, adapting to a possibility of future abundance, but remains a police state dictatorship that is now producing billionaires. Or, as it turns out, just another form of militarized plutocracy. We need a third way, or other paths, to abundance, as you say. Ways that expand state capacity while resisting economic class tyranny; ways that promote commercial abundance while resisting environmental destruction and the brutal extremes of monopolistic/oligopolistic inequality. We still need a Green New Deal, damnit, one that elevates the status of environmental sustainability and workers (living wages) and the caring economy, while bringing to heel and domesticating the greed fixation of private wealth. I know, I'm just "winnowing down" again; thanks for the food for thought. I'll get to reading Abundance eventually but my fear has been that it's just another supply-side shell game that refuses to challenge the plutocratic definition of abundance in which we are stuck. I'm not against wealth, abundance, or people getting rich, but rule by the rich or rich rule is killing us.
One of the points made in the book is that even if we have a Green New Deal, we still need to build this infrastructure. It will mean building new factories to make new wind turbines and solar cells. It means laying down railroad tracks and the government acquiring and managing land to ensure high speed rail. It means densifying housing to reduce reliance on cars. These are all things that we can do now without a Green New Deal, but we aren't able to do so with the current political willpower of our system (and people getting rich making it). Opposition to new housing and new infrastructure as it stands now (600 days to permit housing in San Francisco and will take 20 years to build a single new commuter rail station in Boston) make opposition to changing anything untenable. These problems won't be magically fixed with a Green New Deal -- and we will need a lot more of both.
Henry Farrell: It appears that Kamala Harris was an ideal candidate; ran two-years of Presidential campaign in 170 days; and simply did not have enough time to win.
That having been said, Kamala Harris was the best qualified Presidential Candidate since LBJ and articulated a message of inclusiveness, Constitutional values, and overall brightness for the economic future.
Against that message, the People elected a group that ELEVATES the AfD in Germany -- a NEO-NAZI group that Germany's Constitutional Authorities deem undemocratic and dangerous, and that yearn for the values of the Third Reich.
This Group -- Musk/Tramp/Vance/Attorney General Pam Bondage -- these break down the rule of law and they give NAZI-Like terms to immigrants -- "They poison our blood!" -- "They steal little ones and eat them in blood rituals" (a crude adaptation against Haitians that originated in Anti-Semitic hatred during the Mediaeval Times, when the slogan enflamed village-destroying pogroms).
When the choice was THAT STARK, I on the Left GLADLY support AOC/Bernie-Sanders/Elizabeth-Warren.
So, Americans turn against the left because of gays and transgender -- Oh, my! (like in Oz: Lions, and Tigers, and Bears, Oh, My!) -- and turn to what?!
A reincarnation of Ross Barnett, George Wallace, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox!
I don't buy it.
I am all for the Democrats enlarging a substantial vision for America before 2026.
We have enough Think Tanks.
We are smart enough to design a winning team and message.
We DESTROYED the Republicans in the 1930s.
The Republicans are turning to a totalitarian model.
This is NOT about adjusting the tuning on your radio or TV a little to the left or right for more bandwidth.
This is about a SICK, SICK society that puts Neo-Fascism in power.
I am bilingual in German.
In 1932, the Weimar Republik had good, good people.
The Germans were recovering from hyperinflation caused by reactions to the cruel reparations of the Versailles Treaty imposed by Georges Clemenceau.
Why?
Why?
How many people know this:
The Prussians marched through Paris in 1871, as the then 30-year-old Georges Clemenceau sorrowed with his countrymen.
After the Kaiser's Army marched through Paris again, Georges Clemenceau in 1919 was steeled as a Patriot for the French Republic.
Georges Clemenceau was a leading cause of overwhelming reparations imposed upon postwar Germany.
The German Republic faced nationwide strikes and crises in 1919, including some short-lived Communist takeover in Munich, and Nationalist (later NAZI) Putsch in the same city.
As in America, Germans were unemployed and desperate.
Hyperinflation -- caused by Berlin's printing press of Deutsche Marken to make cheap the Versailles Reparations caused financial crises that likely disrupted commerce in other parts of the world.
Already in 1919, John Maynard Keynes argued STRENUOUSLY against unrealistically high reparations against the defeated power.
Despite great and good voices, the Nazis won large shares of representation in the Parliament in 1932 and the Takeover resulted in bookburnings and the rest became history.
The middle name of the Nazi party was "WORKER" -- The "nationale sozialistische deutsche Arbeiter Partei" (National Socialist WORKERS Party).
And the rhetoric was to hire the worker.
To rebuild industry.
To rearm.
To concentrate on industrial might.
To build freeways.
Down with the banks -- this was the cry -- down with bankers.
The Nazi image for the banks and bankers: The Jew.
The infamous Joseph Goebbels propaganda film where actors -- posed in satires of "Jews" as imagined by anti-Semites -- were standing, leaning on a wall, smoking cigars -- made up to have exaggerated noses -- when, in one of the miracles of modern cinematography -- the images of each actor was slowly morphed into a standing, human-size RAT.
The rest is history. The holocaust. The Shoah. The crimes against humanity.
The worst crimes in history.
The Germans had good people in the center-right, the center-left to choose from.
The Germans in huge numbers chose Hitler.
Now, the Republicans really dislike comparisons to Hitler.
In that case, I would ask Trump, Vance, Musk, and Marco Rubio: "STOP promoting the AfD -- the Neo-Nazis! STOP ALREADY. STOP! STOP! STOP!"
Also: Stop attacking immigrants.
Stop attacking trans-gender.
STOP!
In my daily life, I might not think that much about immigrants or transgender.
But persecute them, and immigrants and transgender arise to the top of my radar.
You want a vision:
Here, how about this vision:
INCLUSIVITY.
LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR.
PROMOTE EDUCATION.
PROMOTE BOOKS.
PROMOTE ART.
PROMOTE MUSIC.
Promote the dignity and education and careers of girls and women.
Promote the security and safety of girls and women.
Promote the health of girls and women.
Promote the rights and dignity with due process for each person.
Allow for diversity of economic approaches WITHIN CORE AND CONSTITUTIONAL VALUES.
A 900 page program could be built on these principles.
I propose we call it "PROJECT 2026"!!
Given everything else you've written, your remarks w.r.t. Harris have to be satire but they're not written as such. I mean, she was a candidate who staffed her campaign with tech-monopolist-adjacent people, stayed silent on getting rid of Khan, continued to support the Gaza genocide.
If you're siding with Sanders/AOC/Warren (despite their lip-service acceptance of "centrist" policies), Harris is not a friend...
Albrecht Zimmermann: I am definitely a friend of Israel.
I am a friend of Palestine.
The Shoah, the Holocaust leaves us astounded as the unthinkable, genocidal horror, which begs us to safeguard Jews forever.
But the Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 was unjust.
There must be a safe homeland for Jews. That homeland must be strategically defensible.
In Air War College (as a Judge Advocate, Lt Col, USAF Reserves), I studied the 1967 war carefully. I understand the need for defensible borders for Israel.
But the situation over the past Century has created a horror for Palestine.
My God, the driving out of Palestine is sadistic.
Benjamin Netanyahu has bitter, sadistic plans for remaining Palestinians in Gaza.
The terroristic capture and the torture and killing of hostages on 7 October of 2023 was horrific.
But Benjamin Netanyahu has committed unthinkable war crimes in the attacks on Gaza and Lebanon.
Counter-terror operations are surgical and precise in nature, under the teachings of General David Petraeus.
Counter-terror does not tolerate war crimes, where Israel targets hospitals, ambulances, food suppliers, an Orthodox Church, Mosques, refugee camps, where thousands of children, women and other noncombatants are, let's say it, MURDERED.
The war in Gaza is a major war crime.
Suppression of Hamas terror through surgical, precise means is a strategic necessity.
The war in Gaza is one, long, stretched out war crime.
I am a friend of surgical suppression of terrorism.
I am a foe of the terrible, horrific and massive warfare carried out in Gaza and Lebanon.
Anyone who approves of the Israeli war crimes does not share my values.
I have liked Kamala Harris a lot, but the two points you raise give me pause.
As of now, the fight with cold-blooded tyranny in America is so strong that i am inclined to be at peace with any Democrat, form a united front, fight Trump.
I am comfortably a Socialist in any sense that provides for the poorest among us, secures medical care, food, shelter, an adequate living, and a dignified retirement to each.
Thank you so very much for your response, which is not only thoughtful, but provokes further research on my part.
Abundance is a utopian lie capitalists tell themselves. It's their 72 virgins. A promise of infinite exponential growth free from undesirable side-effects or trade-offs.
As I've written before: scarcity cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change form (https://openwater.group/thought-leadership/the-law-of-conservation-of-scarcity/).
I'm all for abundant thinking. But with the rationalist belief that these priorities come with either intentional or unintentional costs elsewhere. No system of any sustainable existence can withstand eternal exponential growth without collapsing. We also call that "cancer".
"The first, which I don’t talk about directly in the piece, is that I would like to see common cause happen between centrists and left Democrats around some attractive goal such as abundance"
“Abundance - in the broadest sense of that term - is the closest thing to a common denominator across such futures that I know of.”
Agree v much with these statements (both in the States and w.r.t analogous issues in my home of Canada), and I enjoyed this post and your article.
I do find the left response to the Abundance argument frustrating. It seems that they just dislike the "vibes" and proximity to less-epic movements like the yimbys that don’t exclusively focus on direct-public-provision.
But as I understand the book’s argument, it wants to unfetter state actors as much as (or even more than) market ones. And without doing that, it’s very hard for the public to effectively do things directly. Look at e.g. the Biden admin’s failures to build rural broadband. If, like me, you’d prefer that the state do more things and do them directly instead of through a rat’s nest of subcontractors and non-profits, you need to make it easier for the state to act. Without that, hard to avoid starmer-ism and the deliverist pitch fails.
The left’s response is something like the “hello, human resources” meme, where they respond very differently to “the government should be able to act directly” depending on whether it’s coming from the nerds or the “cool guys”.
As a leftist I don't like the Abundance guys because they explicitly hate me and would rather pander to rich centrists and right-wing tech guys than progressives.
Them being rich assholes who think they're smarter than everyone and constantly speak in a smug, condescending tone doesn't help.
These guys are why so many people hate Democrats now lol.
Defector had something to say about the book: https://defector.com/an-abundance-of-concrete
Opinions?
Agree on Deliverism/Popularism, which seemed to me to be weird as a debate in the first place - I've seen plenty in favor of, basically, both, of different ideological stripes. I am sure better stuff was written than the sewer I was swimming in when it was a thing, but it felt like the old "Clinton vs Bernie" combatants were trying to claim new territory for their own side, rather than actually arguing over much. This feeling was INCREDIBLY strong during the flash of debate around this book as well.
I got into this conversation by way of following people like Medlock and the Niskanen Center who were surprisingly (to me) converging on territory also really interestingly covered by Greer. That made me excited for a politics of the future, and I really still think there is something there. I just wish people could let go of their inability to grant any possible ground to their previous opponents. (Obviously as someone who was a HillShill this means I think lefties need to take the win of these ideas *being an argument for a more vigorous and unleashed government,* but it's not like there isn't plenty of ideological inflexibility on the part of the matts of the world)
Mr Farrell, you might be interested in my review of Abundance. https://open.substack.com/pub/johnmcintire/p/midcult-redux?utm_source=app-post-stats-page&r=lxiat&utm_medium=ios
Seems to me the entire "Abundance" discussion is a last ditch effort by the centerist to avoid facing the fact that the vast majority of white US voters, when given the choice between an extremely qualified black woman and an aging reality TV clown, with felony convictions, sexual assault, and ongoing corruption, to say nothing of inciting a white lynch mobs to overturn an election, decided the clown was a their choice. Obviously policy had nothing to do with it.
The fact remains, the only "leftist" policy Harris represented was existing as a black woman that dared to run for president.
I wish we could also imagine a world where well-being isn't only considered on the margins either. Just as it's difficult to imagine a world where capitalism doesn't exist, so too is it difficult to imagine an economic framework that doesn't feed into hedonic adaptation
Frase's 2x2 is reductive, of course.
"Some of this, some of that" is not only a viable future but the only viable future in a democratic world. We might get closer to "egalitarian communism" via indexed 401(k)s, UBI, SWFs, and "baby bonds" -- i.e., via financialized "public ownership" -- than Star Trek (much less Bolshevism). Certainly if you think that actually-existing Denmark is still the model.
I disagree about Abundance being a convergence point for the non-reactionaries. I fail to see any real-world version of Abundance that does not map somewhat closely to what we have recently experienced. Yet voting publics the world over losing their shit due to momentarily higher inflation produced through proactive public stimulus (byeeeeee MMT! Smell ya later!).
I.e., Abundance creates something to fight over. Abundance gives you cool drone shots. It also gives UKR the ability to blow up Moscow's airports with remote-controlled paper airplanes. It gives you the ability to argue on the internet, but take precautions when you do: the Panopticon is significantly better-developed now than it was when Snowden landed in one of those Moscow airports.
Abundance has been achieved, as Keynes predicted. Unfortunately, as Keynes also predicted, the "Old Adam" remains. For that reason we are moving towards Frase's Rentism quadrant. Frase described it well: "an economy based on artificial scarcity is not only irrational, it is also dysfunctional". Cut to 47's use of public property to market all of Leon's cars as "self-driving"... if you pay for that software tier.
Abundance does not come from policies. It comes from systems.
A note on the footnotes.
Your footnotes in this post are interesting and useful, but inconvenient to view. I know it's possible to make CLICKABLE footnotes because I've seen them in other Substacks, though as a Substack reader and not a writer I don't know how it's done.
Rodgers and Hammerstein were "post-punk"? Really??
https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/southpacific/happytalk.amp.htm
It's an in-joke about Captain Sensible and the Dolly Mixtures, whose cover version Dan is talking about. Before his rather startling makeover, Captain Sensible was the mainstay of The Damned.
Keep thinking.
I have to read Abundance to see if my gut reaction to all these reviews and summaries (their argument is we can buy off the proletariat with stuff, and peace flows from that) is correct or not. And to cut the current British government some slack, they are grabbing a life preserver thrown by some of the best snake oil salesmen in the history of Hustle. They'll regret it, but not as much as the investment banks and VCs.
Is there an example of a country that has arrived at "abundance" or making progress towards "abundance"?
If such exists, it would give us confidence that "abundance" is possible.