Good morning, your boy was just published in the Atlantic.

For months now, I’ve watched the center left “lib out” over “abundance” with a mix of hopefulness, as I’m glad they’re finally embracing the concept, and anxiety, as I understand this is America in 2025, and we are not allowed to have nice things. The movement is pushing for material progress (infrastructure, energy, education, healthcare), while critiquing left-wing regulatory impediments to what are framed as left-wing goals (they aren’t, but more on that in a minute).

Now right there on the ground floor, the problem with the movement is it is explicitly a left-wing project, or so it is explained in the book Abundance, and the “left” in this country includes a wide range of people, from thoughtful, sensitive Atlantic writers to Luigi Mangione fetishists. This was always, eventually, going to be a problem for earnest libs. But this summer Zohran Mamdani ran for mayor, the “center left” began a slow and cautious dance with him, and it was time for me to address the subject.

The Atlantic offered me the great opportunity to write for them, which I accepted. There is no better place for a piece like this, as the Atlantic is the actual home of the abundance movement. I’m also just personally a great fan of their specific brand of lib. These are generally kind, thoughtful people I only sometimes disagree with, and when I do they meet that disagreement with openness. In this case, they literally reached out to me and asked for the disagreement. So, that’s pretty cool. And rare. And I’m proud of the collaboration.

The team also very graciously offered all Pirate Wires subscribers the chance to read my piece for free, which you can check out in full right here with a gift link.

This is a 3,500 word piece, so I cover a lot of ground. But I’ll share a quick few handful of major themes to tease you here. Feel free to chime in down in the comments below back here on Pirate Wires when you’re finished reading, and we can discuss it all today.

First, it’s worth noting our incredible summer of violence, as I just kind of catalogue it all. Truly, the Democratic Party is in total chaos:

Back in July, following an eight-month fetishization of Luigi Mangione on the far left, another gunman in New York City killed several people, including a mother of two school-age kids who happened to work at—uh-oh—Blackstone. It was, unambiguously, a horrifying tragedy. But on the Luigi Left, reaction to the gruesome murders was not only neutral, or ambivalent, but celebratory, and explicitly supportive of the killer. (One prototypical post featured the woman’s image with the word LUIGI’D stamped over her face, along with the caption “Death is not always tragic.”) This was no small group of crazies, either. Some version of the reaction was shared thousands of times across X, Threads, and Bluesky on the grounds that cartoonish caricatures of “the rich” were, in a sense, physically harming the poor. Therefore, killing the rich was an act of self-defense.

Question: is this abundance?

Potentially, I mean. Can this be Abundance? Can center-left liberals, who claim they want to introspect and reform and actually build a lot of housing and infrastructure, and generate new resources rather than punitively redistribute us all into stagnation, open their tent in such a way that there is room for committed, eat-the-rich communism and sensible housing policy alike? Can they not only wrench the youth of their party from Hasan Piker’s armpits, but actually get Hasan, a real authentic bad-boy socialist, to join them? What do you say, fellow kids, mass murder but make it YIMBY?

Yeah, man, sorry, I don’t see it. Provided that the purpose of the Abundance movement is earnestly to galvanize the left under the banner of Abundance, which it will then produce, the project is obviously doomed to fail. Partly this is because of structural issues innate to our political system, and partly this is because large swaths of the left, which Abundance Dems need to win elections, are actively and often publicly fantasizing about sending Abundance Dems to the guillotine.

The crux of my warning for Abundance Dems is partly a reminder of values, which the far, socialist left and your standard lib do not (I think (I hope?)) share. We don’t often break this kind of thing down and interrogate it, so I think there may be some value in discussing:

Liberal values might be reduced to something like democracy, equality, and progress. But the far left’s definition of progress is primarily social—in that democracy, or the performance of democracy, along with material equality, by which the far left means a flattening of outcomes, are more greatly prized than material change. And progress defined as something more like material change—meaningful change that improves the lives of everyone, permanently—is impossible without hierarchy, vision, and power. This means, first, that the left’s values are fundamentally in conflict, which is how we so often wind up having conversations about, for example, the cost of a bus ride in New York, which Mamdani believes should be free.

But also on that value train, it’s worth remembering we have a lot in common. Or, I have a lot in common with the Abundance Dems. I am myself an abundance enjoyer, if you will. I would be a progressive myself if you nuts could just accept the concept of a border and agree that crime should be illegal.

In any case, on the biggest, wildest stuff, on the real utopian vision of “abundance,” I’ve been on the train both here, at Pirate Wires, and at Founders Fund for like 15 years now:

I want a bullet train that rips across the country from San Francisco to New York in half a day. I want to take that ride in a first-class cabin, with a little bar car somewhere onboard where I can talk shit with strangers over martinis as we travel through the Rockies. Fuck it, let’s throw in a robot bartender. I want genetically modified hydroponic gardens. I want special economic zones for manufacturing, for rare-earth-metals mining and processing, for rocketry and electric vehicles, and every other high-tech project you can think of, a reality in which Americans are liberated from local regulations that kneecap our industrial output—a reality in which our capacity is limited only by our imagination. I want gene drives, which means the eradication of invasive Burmese pythons in the Florida wetlands, the screwworm, and pretty much all mosquitoes. I want weather modification. I want geoengineering. I want to terraform Mars into a habitable world. I want a giant “Justice” statue, to complement the East Coast’s “Liberty,” on Alcatraz Island. I want this statue to depict an objectively hot person. Finally, Moon should be a state, and no I won’t be taking any further questions.

But after values, the most important challenge facing abundance democrats attempting to work within the Democratic Party toward progress is our democratic system. It is just not even remotely set up to facilitate this kind of thing.

Here, feel free to just ignore the entire grating conversation on socialists who want to kill you, because Republicans have to face this challenge as well. Trump just contended with this all himself via the longshoreman’s union.

Democracy means special interests dividing up our resources like the spoils of war, which is a pretty good analogy for our present political system — war. But meaningful progress in our material world (bridges, tunnels, schools) requires the centralization of our resources, and the direction of those resources, by a centralized authority, towards a single goal. There are three American men who really cracked this over the last century. The first is Disney, and I left him out of the piece because I’m starting to get a little bit of a reputation. (But if you want to read more, check out Golden Age).

The second man is Robert Moses. And the third is FDR:

From the Great Depression into the war years, FDR presided over what must have felt to most Americans like the End Times. He faced numerous existential crises. To overcome them, he dramatically expanded the power of the executive branch, building out an entire shadow state of federal agencies—the Works Progress Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Rural Electrification Administration. One of the most illustrative examples of FDR’s power is probably the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned utility that seized land, displaced residents, and was set up to operate beyond accountability from any local election, yet electrified and modernized a seven-state region. (The federal utility is run by presidential appointees to this day.)

These unelected nodes of power bypassed governors, mayors, and every local NIMBY council in the country (before we called them that), running nationwide infrastructural development straight from the Oval Office.

It was an absolute pleasure writing this, and special thanks to my editor Adrienne LaFrance for a lot of great thoughts throughout, and for her encouragement.

Again, you can read the entire piece for free right here on the Atlantic. And then you can hop down here in these comments and post about it with me until your heart’s content.

-Solana