The abundance movement has been deemed by some a means for the
Democrats to rebrand after losing to Trump. In reality, it is much more than
that. Since abundance is more or less synonymous with growth, it can be seen as
a revised commitment to smart capitalism and a repudiation of ideas that
emphasize scarcity, degrowth, austerity, and over-regulation. Abundance 2025 is
the recent annual conference.
Pielke Jr.
Climate impact scientist Roger
Pielke Jr. offered a preview of the recent conference, followed by a review of
it. In his preview, he gives a section where the conference organizers state
the mission:
“The state of the abundance movement remains highly
contested, interpreted variably across the ideological spectrum. For some, it
represents an internal debate within the left, challenging progressive
governance models. Others within the Democratic Party view abundance as a
strategic framework to counter conservative populism. Many on the right see
abundance as a practical reality—reflected in longstanding commitments to
housing, energy independence, and deregulation. Conservatives often view it as
a rightward policy shift paired with a broader messaging strategy to expand
appeal across partisan lines.”
“The convergence of these perspectives into a unified
movement is far from preordained. While many professionals have rallied around
abundance initiatives, some influential voices caution against formalizing it
into a mass movement.”
“What exists today is a cross-partisan coalition
committed to accelerating economic growth, reinforcing American leadership in
science and technology, dismantling bureaucratic inertia, restoring effective
governance, and reducing the cost of living. Abundance is not an abstract ideal
but a moral and civic imperative: to revitalize the nation’s productive base,
support working families, and reassert democratic control over technocratic
systems.”
Thus, it becomes clear that
abundance means different things to different people and crosses ideology and
partisan divides. It tends to ignore social issues, especially those
“hot-button” issues that tend to divide the populace and separate people into
ideological enclaves.
Pielke Jr. went to the conference
with five questions that he sought the conference to answer. I will go over
each of these.
1) Is
abundance really anything new? He answers that with
Yes and No. He notes here that abundance advocates describe their focus as “figuring
out how to make government work better to deliver more of the things that
people value.” That, he says, is not new, since everyone wants to do that
regardless of political persuasion. He notes that it was surprising to see “commitment
to bipartisan cooperation, active debate and discussion, and productive
disagreement. Political collegiality, curiosity, and collaboration do seem
pretty new in 2025.” He emphasizes that democracy works better when people
of different orientations are engaged together in discussion and debate rather
than siloed into echo chambers.
2) Is
“abundance” just a euphemism for “growth”? He answers Yes.
Here, he notes two Congressional Reps, one Democrat and one Republican, who
spoke at the conference as part of the Build America Caucus. The emphasis on
cross-partisan cooperation is a key to the success of the movement. The snippet
below gives their focus: “
“Americans have lost faith in government because they
don’t see results - they see gridlock, red tape, and delay. This self-imposed
scarcity has led to out-of-control housing costs, a constricted energy grid
system, and decades of infrastructure delays, all while foreign adversaries
race ahead.”
3) Do
“abundance” advocates really want greater state capacity? His
answer is Sorta. He notes that “many of the abundance folks want more state
capacity to do the things they want to do (like build houses) and less that
they don’t (like restricting legal immigration of those who might work in
construction to build those houses).” However, he also notes that there was
little discussion about how to improve or reform policy, a discussion that is
needed.
4) Where is
Congressional reform in an “abundance” agenda? He
answers that this was not discussed at all.
5) Is
“abundance” coherent? He answers Yes and No. He notes that many 30-ish
people were in attendance, many focused specifically on the housing problem,
especially in liberal cities. While that could energize other issues, he sees
it as focused on local and state issues rather than national ones.
“…if abundance is to morph
into anything with electoral consequences it will have to broaden, rebrand, and
lose the urban, hipster, elite vibe that it carries with it.”
He also mentions the possibility
of the future being a post-Trump and post-Progressive future, one that I can
certainly embrace.
Penney
A nuclear advocate from the
Foundation for American Innovation, Emmet Penney, also reviewed the conference.
He notes that it focused on kitchen table issues like energy
prices, economic growth, and housing costs. He found the bipartisanship
refreshing, noting that bipartisan cooperation in energy often leads to the
most durable policies. He emphasizes permit reform, long established as needed
in conservative circles but only more recently championed by liberals.
He mentions some conversations
about permit reform he had at the conference. One in particular involved the
possibility of a tradeoff between streamlining pipelines and streamlining
electricity transmission lines to help the energy transition, noting that it
would be fine. However, he also noted that there was talk of trading subsidies
for those transmission lines, which would be an added subsidy to already
heavily subsidized wind and solar, in exchange for removing red tape on pipelines,
which, as Penney notes, can cost twice as much to deal with litigation from
ideological environmentalists than to build the pipeline itself! He sees that
as just too much.
Another conversation involved a
Democrat county commissioner in Colorado who was happy about just approving
fracking permits. Penney thinks that the participation of local and state
people in the movement is a good development.
Penney also thinks that there
needs to be more participation from industry, finance/capital, and labor:
“Having people from the fracking, pipelines, renewable,
nuclear, and utility space would promote both a moderating and informing impact
on attendees and panelists alike.”
“The absence of these perspectives felt very palpable to
me. But there’s good news in even that. Abundance had many more attendees than
it did just last year. And it’s showing definite signs of scaling up. That
means greater opportunity to get more of these voices in the mix. There is no
progress without iteration.” (The conference had more than 600
attendees this year.)
Trembath
Alex Trembath of The Ecomodernist,
formerly the Breakthrough Institute, did not review the conference, but in his
presentation, sought to clarify and define what the movement is and is not.
From the title of his post in The Ecomodernist – ‘Bottom-Up Abundance:
Emergent, Not Astroturf’, he wants to clarify that this is a movement of people
coming together to contribute and define itself rather than a pre-planned
entity. He emphasizes:
“We were not herded and orchestrated: we found each
other.”
He noted that attendees were in
housing, energy, governance, tech, and more.
“I like to say that the different abundance factions use
different nouns but similar verbs: build, densify, unleash, expand. But what I
think brings us all together is not just a generic vocabulary or even just a
broadly shared agenda.”
“We face an entirely new set of challenges in American
politics and culture. It was one thing to build a more abundant society at the
dawn of the Industrial Revolution, or during the New Deal or the postwar era.
Today, abundance faces novel headwinds, and it’s not just NIMBYs and
degrowthers. Incumbency dynamics, regulatory bloat from decades of
administrative inertia, technological stagnation, and what economists call
cost-disease effects have made it difficult to deploy effective state capacity,
to afford essential but labor-intensive goods and services like education and
childcare, and to imagine let alone build a future more technologically
advanced and, well, abundant than our own.”
Trembath also mentions some of the
criticism of the Abundance Movement, mostly from the left, suggesting that the
movement was somehow illegitimate for including corporate people.
“The people and ideas in this ballroom pull on strands
from multiple fields—think tanks, activists, organizers, elected officials,
journalists, philanthropists, technologists and entrepreneurs and investors—and
multiple ideological traditions—liberalism (classical and otherwise), urbanism,
supply-side progressivism, state capacity libertarianism, industrial
conservative populism, ecomodernism, humanism, effective altruism, and beyond.
There are, as we learned this morning, many Varieties of Abundance. We’re all
here not because we agree on everything that our corporate overlords tell us to
believe, but to do the messy work of figuring out what unites us across
differences, how we can collaborate to solve real material problems in the
world, and whether this audacious thing called Abundance can meaningfully
change American politics and culture.”
In short, it is a movement that is
very diversified in focus and in beliefs but is nonetheless focused as a whole
on solving real-world problems in ways that are acceptable to different
political factions.
References:
Abundance
2025 – Review. Roger Pielke Jr. The Honest Broker. September 5, 2025. Abundance
2025 - Review - by Roger Pielke Jr.
Bottom-Up
Abundance: Emergent, Not Astroturf. Alex Trembath. The Ecomodernist. September
8, 2025. Bottom-Up
Abundance - The Ecomodernist
Abundance
2025 – Preview: Five questions I'll be bringing to the conference this week. Roger
Pielke Jr. The Honest Broker. September 1, 2025. Abundance
2025 - Preview - by Roger Pielke Jr.
Aboondance:
Brief Reflections on the Abundance Conference. Emmet Penney. Nuclear
Barbarians. September 9, 2025. Aboondance
- by Emmet Penney - Nuclear Barbarians
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