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Comment by thrance | Hacker News Reader

It all makes sense when you take "abundance liberalism" for what it actually is: a rebranding of neoliberalism in support of establishment democrats. Its main goal is not to provide the democratic party with a new direction, but to defend the status quo against the populist left, incarnated by the likes of AOC and Mamdani.

It makes sense then, that they'd spend more time attacking the left than the right, as they realize where the existential threat to the current democratic party lies. Personally, I think it's good that they're afraid.

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The Abundance movement is decidedly not pushing for the status quo. They are pushing for removing a good number of regulations on home building and zoning.

That is an active change

You misread my comment, I meant the status quo of the current democratic party leadership.

Whatever deregulation "abundance liberalism" pushes for, it will immediately be killed off or undone by the people that benefitted from those regulations. The democratic party is plagued by private interests (almost as much as the republicans), who very much do not want to see homes getting cheaper.

The establishment, through its neoliberalist direction, has shown that it has either no interest or is completely powerless to curb the growing inequalities and societal issues stemming from them. Only a fool would fall for it again, because it is rebranded from "neoliberalism" to "abundance liberalism". "Deregulation" has been the chief word in politics for 50 years, what makes you think it will lead to somthing any different this time?

Do you think this specific criticism of the “populist left” by the “abundance liberals” is valid though?

No, this guy (the writer of the article) has no idea what he’s talking about. I say this as someone isn’t even on the left.

He sets a false dichotomy to protect himself from criticism. Zoning/building codes being too strict and monopolies existing in that market aren’t incompatible.

It’s worth noting that there’s a lot of money behind this abundance movement or whatever, so that’s something to take into account when reading this stuff.

Truthfully, I don't. IMHO, abundance liberalism has a blind spot when it comes to the power of money in modern politics. We didn't stumble into a situation where buying a house requires an entire lifetime of work out of sheer bad luck. Some private interests greatly benefit from this situation and have enough power to keep things from changing.

Until we address this, and the abundance crowd doesn't want to, all of this is pointless bickering.

Have you read the book? A large portion of it is dedicated to how we got here.

Nimbyism and people’s desire to keep their property value high is part of it. The levers that have been used to make those values high include a ton of regulation that makes it impossible to build start ups homes even if you were a perfectly moral actor seeking to generate exactly 0 profit.

> until we address all of this

Address what? I was convinced by Ezra and Derek because they constantly show real evidence as the opposing side keeps bringing vibes.

What are your actual, concrete issues that you think the abundance crowd is not addressing and what are your specific policy positions that you think need to be implemented first?

> people’s desire to keep their property value high is part of it.

Yes, exactly, and what are Klein and Thompson proposing to fix this? Fuck all. They only write about curing the symptoms of this crisis while telling us to ignore the root cause of it all: housing is now a very popular investment vehicle, used by many powerful private interests who absolutely wouldn't want to see their portfolios halve in values.

How are we to believe that the Democratic establishment, lead by the same old people, backed by the same old wealthy donors, will now be able to make a stand against the very people that put us in this situation in the first place, and are now funding the politicians and "thinkers" behind this movement?

Abundance liberalism is nothing but a rebranding of neoliberalism in a desperate attempt to astroturf a renewed interest in the failing democratic party. It is running away from any reform that would be critical to capital, hence why they dispense so much vitriol on the progressives and almost none on the right.

tldr: abundance does not address money in politics because it is birthed from it, and will therefore never be able to fix the housing crisis because its existence is convenient to capital.

What they proposed is that we reduce regulations strangling the building of housing. The sheer quantity of regulation being the problem. We can have some for things we really care about, but we need to value actually building housing at something other than at the bottom of the priority list.

If you want a real world example of policies under this agenda that have now been put into place, look at the California budget passed under Newsom a month ago under the section literally titled “Advancing an Abundance Agenda”

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/06/30/governor-newsom-signs-into...

> It is running away from any reform that would be critical to capital, hence why they dispense so much vitriol on the progressives and almost none on the right.

It has vitriol to the type of progressive who crows about if you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds. The default for the right is that they are bad, the type of discussions like the one in the article this thread is about are internal left infighting, not intended for the general public.

Also I will quibble on you that it’s not a reform to capital. Saying everyone gets rich from the benefits of capitalism, by structural design, is a reform from our current “git gud” increasingly laissez faire approach.

If you’re one of those folks whose arguing for abolishing capitalism entirely, I agree with your end goal but I think we’re a century or two of progress at reducing scarcity away from implementing that level of reform

Why do I see so many critiques of the abundance movement based on factional motives and ad hominem, and so little critique of the arguments they make?

If progressives want to expand government, government needs to be effective. Abundance liberalism is about learning from the mistakes of the past and making government better able to achieve to goals both liberals and progressives want.

If we're talking about factional infighting, leftists are "afraid" the neoliberals will offer a compelling path forward instead of pivoting to socialism, so they resist arguments that would otherwise be beneficial to their political goals.

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