Notes Toward a Unified Theory of Abundance, Part IV

This is the fourth post in a five part series. You can read Part I here, Part II here, and Part III here.

And we’re back — sorry for the delay.

Now that we’ve defined the relevant terms — modernity, liberal democracy, and the enemies of both — it’s time to finally discuss how abundance liberalism fits into all of this.

In the first post of this series, I glossed abundance liberalism as follows:

A quintessentially modernist project. In a sense, all 21st century political projects are modernist; modernism is so much the water we swim in that non-modern mass political movements are no longer possible. That is why I wrote about “anti-modern modernism” in Part III: the revanchist fantasies of Bronze Age Pervert, tradcath integralists, and reactionaries of all other stripes are no less contaminated by modernism than the ideologies of their enemies. So if every project is modernist, then what does it mean to be “quintessentially modernist?”

Three interrelated characteristics make abundance liberalism worthy of that label. The first is that abundance liberals tend to be progressive. Again, this is not to say that abundance liberalism belongs to the left wing of American politics. Instead, by calling them “progressive,” I mean that abundance liberals tend to think of history as something that has a teleology: it is possible to move forward (and, also, backwards).1

The second characteristic is a broad commitment to liberal democracy. If liberal democracy is, as I’ve argued previously, the last modernist political ideology left standing, then any illiberal movement in a liberal country deserves the “anti-modernist modernism” label.

The third characteristic is that abundance liberalism tries to work with modernity instead of against it. Instead of rejecting or trying to roll back elements of modernity, it focuses on channeling the course of modernist development in the healthiest possible direction.

This is all pretty woolly and abstract, even by the standards set in my last few posts. So maybe it would help to offer a concrete example of what it means to work with modernity. Let’s talk about YIMBYism.

Urbanization may be the demographic trend that defines modernity. Since the early modern period, most of the world has urbanized at a faster and faster clip. And while this has generally been a good thing — urban agglomeration has a lot of economic, cultural and social benefits — it has also created a lot of challenges for modern states: waste management, traffic management, public safety, and so on.

The United States has perennially struggled to effectively govern its big cities. While this remains true today — I believe we’re in the middle of a very serious nationwide crisis in urban governance — it was even more true sixty-odd years ago. And many local governments hit on a novel solution during that era: they attempted to halt or even reverse urbanization itself.

They did this by adopting stricter zoning rules that capped housing supply at close to contemporaneous levels. Without additional housing, the thinking went, urban populations would stop growing.

So, for example, here is an oft-cited chart of New York City’s downzoning plans from 1959:

And here is another chart comparing Los Angeles’s zoned capacity to its population since 1960:

But urbanization is not such an easy thing to reverse —not unless you’re willing to take truly dictatorial measures, like forced relocation or mass housing demolition.2 Instead of solving any existing urban problems, the attempt to halt urbanization ended up creating a number of new ones. It pushed housing development into outlying greenfield areas, which reinforced America’s car dependency and degraded local ecosystems. It muffled the agglomeration benefits of urban population expansion, causing the United States to forfeit trillions of dollars in economic growth. And it eventually caused rents and home prices in large U.S. cities to skyrocket, leading to our current housing crisis and the ongoing humanitarian disaster of mass homelessness.

The lesson is clear: under a liberal democratic state that protects freedom of movement, urbanization will likely proceed as it has for centuries. I think this is a good thing, but really our feelings are irrelevant: it is happening. So the question becomes what to do about it.

Abundance liberals have a clear answer: legalize and encourage the production of housing in supply-constrained cities, so that rents fall and everyone who lives there can afford a decent, dignified life. At the same time, we should invest in the tools of urban governance that will help a large and growing population thrive: great transit, beautiful parks, world class public transit, and so on.

In other words, abundance liberals would answer one of the central questions of modernity — what to do about urbanization — by saying we should embrace it.

A similar ideological cleavage runs through discussions of climate change. Many anti-urbanists are also “degrowthers,” meaning they think we should reduce carbon emissions by rolling back industrialization and radically shrinking the global economy. Abundance liberals consider this a dangerous fantasy: while technological innovation and economic growth helped to bring on the climate crisis, they are also a necessary part of the solution.

So that should provide a decent schematic of how abundance liberalism, broadly speaking, thinks about the dilemmas of modernity. There’s just one more thing left to cover. I mentioned it briefly when, in footnote to the first post in this series, I said that “liberal democracy needs abundance liberalism to thrive over the coming decades.”

I’ll talk about why in the fifth and final post in this series.