The Abundance Agenda

 The closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda is the Niskanen Center, formerly a heterodox libertarian think tank, which became a haven for Never Trump Republicans before veering, in recent years, toward promoting abundance. Some journalists, including several at this magazine, have also championed these ideas. Three new books have expressed abundance-agenda themes: Abundance, by Thompson and Ezra Klein; Stuck, by my colleague Yoni Appelbaum; and Why Nothing Works, by the Brown University scholar Marc Dunkelman. The proliferation of such works is a sign of the excitement these ideas have generated. And the abundance libs are rapidly winning over Democratic politicians, especially moderate ones.

From the March 2025 issue: How progressives froze the American dream

The movement is still working out precisely what is, and is not, included in its program. But the canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.

The closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda is the Niskanen Center, formerly a heterodox libertarian think tank, which became a haven for Never Trump Republicans before veering, in recent years, toward promoting abundance. Some journalists, including several at this magazine, have also championed these ideas. Three new books have expressed abundance-agenda themes: Abundance, by Thompson and Ezra Klein; Stuck, by my colleague Yoni Appelbaum; and Why Nothing Works, by the Brown University scholar Marc Dunkelman. The proliferation of such works is a sign of the excitement these ideas have generated. And the abundance libs are rapidly winning over Democratic politicians, especially moderate ones.

From the March 2025 issue: How progressives froze the American dream

The movement is still working out precisely what is, and is not, included in its program. But the canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.

The first, and most familiar, is the need to expand the supply of housing by removing zoning rules and other legal barriers that prevent supply from meeting demand. Over the past 90 years or so, and especially since World War II, American cities have thrown up a series of restrictions on new housing. Some 40 percent of the existing structures in Manhattan, for instance, would be illegal to build today, and where the rules don’t ban new construction outright, they make it prohibitively time-consuming and costly. The same dynamic has strangled housing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, and other places where people want to live but can’t afford to.

The second focus of abundance is to cut back the web of laws and regulations that turns any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. The cost of building a mile of interstate highway tripledin a generation. California approved a plan to build high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco 17 years ago and, despite having spent billions, still has no usable track. Permitting requirements, which have slowed the green-energy build-out to a crawl, are a special focus.

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The third domain, and the one that has received the least attention from commentators, is freeing up the government, especially the federal government, to be able to function. Policy wonks call this issue “state capacity.” The government itself is hamstrung by a thicket of rules that makes taking action difficult and makes tying up the government in lawsuits easy. The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.

the formation of ideological factions within political parties is a staple of American history. The divide over slavery ruptured the Whigs; the progressive movement began within both the Democratic and Republican Parties, before migrating entirely into the Democratic camp. A faction can reorganize a party’s priorities, generating new alliances and rivalries, and pull new constituencies into a party while driving others out. Many factions start among intellectuals and writers, eventually developing followings among politicians.

Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic

 

The Letter to the Colossians, in a Nutshell

May 22, 2025

We continue in this series that explains each book of the New Testament “in a nutshell” by turning to the letter to the Colossians.  This is a book that claims to be written by Paul, but as we will see in the next post, there are very good reasons for thinking Paul himself did not write it, but that it was written in his name by a later follower claiming to be Paul.

For now, we are interested in the letter itself, it’s major themes and emphases.

I begin by trying to explain the book in 50 words.

The letter to the Colossians, allegedly written by Paul from prison, praises the Christians in Colossae and warns them against false teachers who urge them to follow the Jewish law, live strictly ascetic lives, and worship angels; for this author, Christ alone represents the godhead and deserves to be worshiped. 

Here now is a fuller account of the main features of the book.

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“Paul” is in prison for preaching the gospel (Col 4:3). While there, he has heard news of the church in Colossae (Col 1:3), a small town in western Asia Minor not far from the larger cities of Hierapolis and Laodicea. The letter indicates that “Paul” did not establish this church, but his co-worker and companion Epaphras, a citizen of the place, did (Col 1:7–8; Col 4:12). The news that “Paul” has learned about the Colossians is mixed. On one hand, he is excited and pleased to learn that they have converted to faith in Christ and have committed themselves to his gospel through the work of Epaphras (Col 1:7–8). On the other hand, he has learned that there are false teachers among them who are trying to lead them into a different kind of religious experience (Col 2:4). He is writing to address the situation.

 To understand how much the American right has changed, consider its journey from fiercely resisting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to expand executive power to surpassing them. A Supreme Court opinion yesterday gave Donald Trump a big win by allowing him to fire members of the so-called independent regulatory agencies. (At least, they used to be independent.)

The majority ruled that the president could remove these officials for now, with arguments to come later. The opinion is not conservative in any meaningful sense. It essentially overturns 90 years of precedent, and it does so using the Court’s “shadow docket,” which means an unsigned opinion delivered typically without oral arguments. Although couched in mild terms as a stay on lower-court rulings, this ruling—if it holds—will signal a radical shift that heralds a new era of big government.

-David Graham in
the Atlantic

 

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And while the content of their beliefs can be questioned, the seriousness of their purpose cannot. Congressional Republicans are willing to endanger their hold on power to enact policy changes they believe in. And what they believe—what has been the party’s core moral foundation for decades—is that the government takes too much from the rich, and gives too much to the poor.

-Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic

 The Largest Upward Transfer of Wealth in American History

House Republicans voted to advance a bill that would offer lavish tax cuts for the rich while slashing benefits for the poor.

JONATHAN CHAIT
The Atlantic
House Republicans worked through the night to advance a massive piece of legislation that might, if enacted, carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history.

That is not a side effect of the legislation, but its central purpose. The “big, beautiful bill” would pair huge cuts to food assistance and health insurance for low-income Americans with even larger tax cuts for affluent ones.

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, warned that the bill’s passage, by a 215–214 margin, would mark the moment the Republicans ensured the loss of their majority in the midterm elections. That may be so. But the Republicans have not pursued this bill for political reasons. They are employing a majority that they suspect is temporary to enact deep changes to the social compact.

Ron Chernow - Mark Twain - Notes

 Here is the long awaited Chernow Twain biography weighing in at over 1,000 pages.

PRELUDE: THE PILOT HOUSE

A succinct summary of the life.

Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, the Mississippi River meant freedom, always an issue for Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

P. 21  The coming of the steamboat north or south would wake up the sleepy town of Hannibal.  Steamboat arrival was exciting.

 I am a writer in a long line of writers, among my people and all people who have been writing these last few thousand years. And I write, just as I read, because I believe that in the realm of literaturewe are, each of us, free. Free to imagine, to invent, to change our minds, to travel through time, across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to do what I don’t believe can be done in any other realm, medium, or dimension: to step into the mind of another. Feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy. As such, literature is fundamentally democratic but for one major caveat: To access its freedoms, we must be taught to read, value and engage with literature.

At the crossroads where we now stand, among the many other things at stake, is the future of reading, writing and literature, and all of the expansive freedom it has afforded us.

In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside of a cellphone, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachment to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.

-Nicole Krauss in The WaPost