Abundance of What

What is Abundance? When Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book first came out, Dave Karpf called it “a book for an alternate timeline… one where President Harris and Vice President Walz hold narrow governing majorities in both houses of Congress, and are faced with decisions about how best to deploy their political power.” But that was four long months ago. On Friday Karpf updated his view, recognizing that in this timeline, “the term is rapidly becoming an empty signifier…”

He’s not joking about “Dark Abundance,” by the way:

With the launch of The Argument, a billionaire funded Substack spinoff of Vox’s crypto-shill vertical which David Z. Morris accurately described as “Effective Altruism In a Skinsuit,” and the billionaire funded Abundance 2025 conference just concluded in DC, a meetup that American Enterprise Institute blogger Roger Pielke Jr. found ”incredibly refreshing,” it’s increasingly clear to what use the empty signifier is being put. Whatever it may have been in a Harris administration, the actual Abundance movement today is the nucleation site for an attempt to forge an alliance between technocratic libs who hate the left slightly more than they hate fascism, and fascists who hate the left almost as much as they love fascism, with the overall goal of… doing stuff, I guess? What kind of stuff? Who can say.

All that by way of long-winded background to, as Tom Scocca puts it, The Worst Thing We Read™ this week which was Mike Solana’s “The Abundance Delusion,” in The Atlantic, of course.

On its own merits the piece is utterly baffling, both void of evidence and yet frequently self-contradictory, as if Solana couldn’t even be bothered to make up premises and conclusions that match each other. He cites one (1) Instagram post with 43 likes as the sole piece of evidence for his major theme, that the left wing is a howling bloodthirsty mob perpetually calling for the death of “the rich,” “Abundance Dems,” “Republicans,” and generally anyone Solana finds it convenient to assert that they’re calling for the death of:

The piece seems like it’s going to be a critique of Abundance, but why would The Atlantic publish a critique of its own flagship new policy/content brand? Solana in fact declares the opposite:

What the piece is actually a critique of is the idea that Abundance should be an alliance between the left and the center, two groups that one might naïvely assume are natural partners in using government power to accomplish public goals. The right wing in America has traditionally not believed in governing at all, but that branch of conservatism lost the battle for the Republican Party for good in 2016. The current right wing in America is very much in favor of using government power to accomplish public goals, and it knows, as Josh Barro observed, “Trump isn’t going to be around forever.” The billionaires and the nazis united behind their pedophile Führer appear to be betting that when Donald Trump is at last called back to the bosom of a gentle and loving God (very soon, inshallah) their next fight will be against a resurgent left who are about to elect an incredibly charismatic and talented socialist as mayor of America’s biggest city. Clearly the nazis would like to get some libs on their side, even if it means agreeing to build a little more housing (maybe).

So, if you read the Atlantic piece, first of all I’m sorry. Secondly, if you couldn’t make heads or tails of it that’s because its argument is a political one, not an argument based on, you know, evidence or reasoned conclusions. And third, to bring it all full circle, it’s important to understand that Mike Solana is the Chief Marketing Officer at Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, a fact which somehow does not appear anywhere in his Atlantic author bio. Weird!

Also Today in Abundance: Defector’s Kelsey McKinney argued that Anthropic shouldn’t get away with pirating an abundance of published works to train its AI. Boone Ashworth and Kylie Robison got an abundance of hate for wearing an AI surveillance necklace that was also mean to them. Garbage Ryan thinks that Nate Silver is being driven mad by losing the abundance of attention he used to be able to get on Twitter. Amy Coney Barrett’s cash-grab memoir promises an abundance of clichés. Taylor Stanberry caught an abundance of snakes in the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s 2025 Florida Python Challenge. Business Insider and Wired retracted an abundance of fake articles by “Onyeka Nwelue,” “Margaux Blanchard,” and other AI pseudonyms. And John Paul Brammer ranked an abundance of cryptids.

Today’s Song: Carly Rae Jepsen, “More”