How will we know if abundance is winning?

There are concrete policy fights in the balance right now

I heard that a blue state politician eyeing a 2026 gubernatorial campaign encouraged his staff to look into a new book called “Abundance,” only to be told that everyone is already reading and debating it… or at least debating it.

If you watch my interview with Ezra and Derek from Monday, one of the things we talk about is that given how books come to be, Abundance was not — and could not possibly have been — primarily conceived of as a roadmap for a Democratic Party political comeback.

But it is certainly an intervention in intra-Democratic factional disputes (disputes given new urgency by Donald Trump’s presidency), and a lot of elected leaders are talking about the book. Gavin Newsom hosted Ezra on his podcast and was complimentary. Ritchie Torres, seemingly eying a gubernatorial campaign in New York, is praising it and talked about the broader concept of an abundance agenda extensively when I interviewed him. Kathy Hochul is recommending it.

And the interest is broader than one book.

Pete Buttigieg praised Marc Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works,” which came out right before “Abundance” and covers partially overlapping ground with a different analytic approach but a similar bottom-line viewpoint. Ro Khanna, in an even more general sense, is talking about “a liberalism that builds; abundance over scarcity.”

As someone who is aligned with these perspectives, it’s exciting to see these ideas getting so much mainstream play. But it does raise the question of what exactly success looks like.

Advancing ideas requires disagreement

From a book sales standpoint, having the former Secretary of Transportation praise Dunkelman’s work is clearly a big win. And because the ideas in Dunkelman’s book are good and important, I think it’s even more broadly good if he sells a lot of books and people read them. That being said, I also find it a bit vexing.