Category: Toward abundance

A note before today’s column.

Yesterday’s shooting in Minneapolis is another sign of this administration’s escalating authoritarianism. Not only did an ICE agent kill a woman at point-blank range, but senior officials immediately sprung into action to justify the killing of an American citizen.

Renee Nicole Good was 37 years old. She is survived by her 6-year-old child.

I wish I had something profound to say about this. Some advice or course of action that could make this right. But there really isn’t anything that can make this right. A woman is dead and her killer is free.

It can feel weird to talk about anything else other than the biggest story of the day, but the mission of The Argument is to engage in the most important debates that will define the policy and political direction of the alternative to Trump. And just a couple hours after Good was shot, Trump was posting online about his newest housing proposals.

How I imagine Trump will reveal his anti-Blackstone strategy at Davos. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
People forget, but J.D. Vance was a key architect of the populist myth that BlackRock is the primary villain in the housing crisis.

On June 9, 2021, the then-candidate for Ohio Senate approvingly retweeted a right-wing anonymous Twitter account that went viral for the claim that “Blackrock is buying every single family house they can find, paying 20-50% above asking price and outbidding normal home buyers.”

Vance’s addition was to blame “The Left” for ignoring this problem because BlackRock was pro-DEI: “Woke capitalism: culture war against your values with one hand, robbing you blind with the other,” he tweeted.

The BlackRock myth1 spread quickly, culminating in yesterday’s announcement by President Donald Trump that he will be “taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it.”2 Like Vance, Trump blamed corporate ownership of housing for undermining young people’s ability to own a home.

The MAGA right are not the only group interested in this story. Left-leaning commentators and Democratic leadership also exhibited a bizarre fixation on institutional investors as a root cause of housing unaffordability. Not only is this false, but recent research indicates that institutional investors entering the housing market actually increase rental options and affordability (more on this later).

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If I only watched movies where the character turns directly to the camera and says “I’m exactly the kind of liberal you are,” I would not watch very many movies. Still, it’s hard not to doom when every holiday season I’m accosted with anti-development, NIMBY-coded feel-good rom-coms.

Last year, I stumbled onto An Autumn Romance1, wherein a librarian loses her job and must, of course, move to a small Montana town to live with her brother. Her brother is working to “save” a historic hotel from developers who have bought it with plans to turn it into a resort and “bring more money into town.” One of those developers, played by Chad Michael Murray (!!), is a former townie who (you guessed it) is now a big-money-guy-who-has-lost-touch-with-what-really-matters.

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The librarian discovers that because the hotel is more than 100 years old, it’s eligible for landmark status2 — they just have to prove that a significant historical event took place on the property. You know where this is going, I know where this is going, and yet, I still can’t believe it.

Our main character discovers a photo of Teddy Roosevelt pictured in front of the hotel, saving the hotel and showing Chad Michael Murray that everything he’s been looking for is in this small Montana town.

The plot of An Autumn Romance was designed in a lab to give me an aneurysm, but it’s hardly the first. Two Weeks Notice even has my beloved Sandra Bullock lie in front of a bulldozer to prevent the erection of an apartment building.3

I’d been thinking for a long time about the prevalence of the anti-development holiday romcom when I saw a recent piece by comedian and writer Jeff Maurer who came up with his own, depressing, answer for why anti-development themes do better than pro-development ones in movies:

“YIMBY narratives aren’t compatible with screenwriting principles or with human psychology, generally,” Maurer argued, adding that “movies inevitably focus on the fear of loss, not the potential for gain.”

Maurer certainly has more expertise in the screenwriting business than I do, but I don’t think this is quite right. 4

First, because there is at least one very good YIMBY TV show: Show Me a Hero, starring Oscar Isaac. It’s the story of how NIMBYs in Yonkers, New York, stubbornly opposed the development of townhomes for low-income families. It’s a complicated (and tragic) TV show, but the villains are pretty obviously the NIMBYs. There are even subplots tracing the lives of low-income public housing residents who end up in the new development. 5

So it’s clearly possible to poignantly express the benefits of new housing through film, though I’d grant that it’s probably more difficult.

But why then has NIMBYism loomed so large in the genre?

Well, the holidays are a time when people tend to go back to their childhood homes, creating the perfect setting for reflecting on community, growing up, the poignancy of change, and tradition. In the same way that coming-of-age films augur change, dynamism, adventure, and striking out into the unknown, Christmas films set up the exact opposite dynamic.

Further, the very same forces that make YIMBYism politically hard — that losses from development prevention are concentrated and benefits are diffuse — are what make YIMBY narratives more complicated. It’s not that a complex film showing the knock-on benefits and harms of new housing is impossible, but it’s much easier to showcase conflict of a more direct sort: Developer bulldozes a family’s beloved Christmas treefarm.

For low-budget rom-coms, defaulting to a simpler, tried-and-true narrative is just safer than trying to subvert the genre.

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Consumption gets a bad rap, but it was still unusual to hear the president of the United States concede that not only was his signature economic policy going to increase prices, but that was perhaps a good thing because it would reduce overconsumption: “All I’m saying is that a young lady, a 10-year-old girl, 9-year-old girl, 15-year-old girl, doesn’t need 37 dolls.”

Putting aside the disturbing choice to refer to 9-year-olds as young ladies, I’ve been mulling Trump’s anti-overconsumption take as I do my own holiday shopping. Because it’s not just Trump. The idea that Americans’ consumption habits are disgusting or over-the-top is the conventional wisdom that has spurred a thousand takes.

And while I think wastefulness is bad, comments about overconsumption have always rubbed me the wrong way. First, because most consumption is great and all better worlds feature dramatically more consumption than we have right now, not less. And second, because elite complaints about overconsumption are usually about mocking what other people spend their money on.

Is liberal just another word for moderate or centrist?

Leftists certainly think so. Take the song “Baby, I’m an Anarchist,” by the punk band Against Me!, which illustrates this dynamic perfectly:

“You believe in authority, I believe in myself.
I’m a Molotov cocktail, You’re the Dom Perignon.
Baby, what’s that confused look in your eyes? What I’m trying to say is that
I’ll burn down buildings while you sit on a shelf inside of them.

You call the cops on the looters and pie-throwers.
They call it class war, I call it co-conspirators.

‘Cause baby, I’m an anarchist and you’re a spineless liberal.
We marched together for the eight-hour day
And held hands in the streets of Seattle.
But when it came time to throw bricks through that Starbucks window
You left me all alone (all alone)”

Great song, and I guess a clean hit? I would march for an eight-hour day but am also opposed to throwing bricks through Starbucks windows. That’s not spinelessness, I just think peaceful protest for workers’ rights is good and effective, and I think intentional property damage is both counterproductive to gaining support and doesn’t really communicate anything except, well, anarchy. What radicals call moderation is often liberals honoring constraints (rights, universalism, pluralism) that have nothing to do with hugging the middle.

But it’s not just anarchists who define liberalism as milquetoast centrism.

In the aftermath of the release of Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 policy book, and after we launched The Argument, the familiar charge that liberalism is synonymous with centrism and moderation came back in full force — from both opponents of abundance liberalism and its allies:

The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait initially called The Argument a part of moderate Democrats’ counteroffensive.

New York magazine’s Simon van Zuylen-Wood called The Argument — as well as Abundance writ large — centrist.1

Another piece in The Atlantic, this time by Elaine Godfrey, again characterized us as a center-left project.

And, of course, how could I go without mentioning the Revolving Door Project, a group ostensibly focused on reducing churn between the private sector and public office, which initially characterized The Argument as “a factional publication committed to pushing strict adherence to centrist orthodoxy,” more than a month before we had even announced our existence. Charming.

Just to be annoyingly definitional for a moment: Liberalism is a normative political philosophy concerned with universal individual rights, pluralism, and the limits of free enterprise. Centrism, on the other hand, is a positional term, defined as the middle between extremes. Centrism can be a tactical electoral strategy focused on the median voter, and it can be a normative philosophy that argues for incrementalism and compromise as virtues in and of themselves.

As I’ve laid it out, it’s obvious that these are two different things, but I don’t want to feign ignorance. The best version of the argument that conflates liberalism and centrism is that liberals have become centrists in practice. More on this later.

The real problem for liberals is that most people don’t even know what the word means. Since becoming the punching bag for anti- and post-liberals across the political spectrum, liberals largely retreated from self-definition; it’s rare to even hear a politician use the term liberal to define themselves. Into that growing silence rushed our opponents’ caricatures: Leftists define us as moderates or incrementalists while rightists, to the chagrin of the far left, call us leftists.

There are left-liberals and left-illiberals, right-liberals and right-illiberals, centrist-liberals and centrist-illiberals. The fight of the 21st century will not be about the traditional left-right axis. It will be about the broader questions of individual freedom, self-determination, equal rights, universalism, pluralism, and a positive-sum view of the economy.

I’ll take my cues from “Baby, I’m an Anarchist“ — it’s most useful to define through contrast. On a wide array of issues, from abundance to democratic reforms to immigration, liberals and centrists find themselves in wildly different places.