The institutional ‘Christians’ who still vocally and politically support Donald Trump tend to see him as literally Godsent. Many, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her reporter boyfriend Brian Glenn, also perceive Trump’s presidency as divinely-intended punishment against liberals. (By institutional Christianity, I mean those ‘Christians’ most resistant to Christ’s fundamental teachings of non-violence, compassion and non-wealth.)
If God really is as vengefully angry, even seemingly blood-thirsty, as institutional Christianity generally portrays Him to be, is anyone — including supposed ardent followers or conservative Bible believers — truly safe or really ‘saved’? One could reasonably theorize that He’d be especially peeved by those self-professed Christians He’d (likely rightfully) deem as fake or frauds. After all, Jesus, a.k.a. God incarnate, was about non-violence, genuine compassion, love and non-wealth. His teachings and practices epitomize so much of the primary component of socialism — do not hoard gratuitous wealth in the midst of great poverty.
Yet, they are not practiced by a significant number of ‘Christians’, likely including many who really seem to worship Donald Trump, a callous man who stands for very little or nothing Jesus taught and represents. … The Biblical Jesus would not have rolled his eyes and sighed: ‘Oh well, I’m against everything the politician stands for, but what can you do when you dislike even more what his political competition stands for?’
Meantime, some of the best humanitarians I, as a big fan of Christ’s unmistakable miracles and fundamental message, have met or heard about were/are atheists or agnostics who, quite ironically, would make better examples of many of Christ’s teachings than too many institutional ‘Christians’. Conversely, some of the worst human(e) beings I’ve met or heard about are the most devout believers/preachers of fundamental Biblical theology.
Speaking as somebody who is very active in the YIMBY / Abundance movement -- I was at an Abundance Network book launch party, with Derek Thompson, ahead of a City Arts and Lectures discussion among Derek, Ezra, and Michael Pollan, just last night -- I'd say very few of us, if any, are under the illusion that the policies we're advocating are _sufficient_ to turn back MAGA fascism. We also have to cope with various other things like how the information environment is working against us.
Paul Krugman wrote a very good summary about this problem the other day, in a piece about Social Security:
<quote>
I can’t help noticing that the inverse correlation between how Americans voted in 2024 and their real interests makes it clear that two of the main factions in the intra-party debate about Democrats’ next moves are talking nonsense.
On one side there are relatively conservative Democrats and Democratic-leaning pundits telling us that the party must move to the center. But when it comes to Social Security, which is really important to most Americans, Democrats — who want to preserve the program — are very much in the center, while Republicans — who want to kill it — are extremists. Yet last November, the voters who have most to lose from this extremism didn’t notice.
On the other side there are progressives who argue that Democrats are in trouble because they abandoned the working class. But even if you think that Democrats have been too friendly toward globalization, or deregulation, or low corporate taxes, the Democratic Party has been far more favorable to workers than the Republicans. The Biden administration was especially pro-worker. But working-class voters didn’t notice.
What all this says is that the priority for Democrats isn’t to pursue whatever you think is a better policy mix. It is to get voters to notice.
</quote>
If you like the Politix podcast, by your fellow Substackers Matt Yglesias and Brian Beutler, basically this is coming down on Beutler's side of a perennial argument between those two, about how important policy substance is relative to control of attention.
Nonetheless, the Abundance Agenda is a _necessary_ aspect of winning back power in a durable way. We need to demonstrate, in the cities and states where we hold power, that we're capable of delivering. You can't claim to be the party of the working man, when you're driving working people out of the places where you rule, with high housing costs, transit systems that are treated more like jobs programs than services for riders, and so on.
And people as diverse as AOC on the left, across to Ruben Gallego toward the current right edge of the Dem coalition, as well as plenty of center-right anti-MAGA ex-Republicans, do seem to get this.
Actually looking at this review, I find myself kind of annoyed. Like, the subhed says, "Three new books propose market solutions to problems that require government intervention."
Did you read the same books I did? Klein and Dunkelman are both great admirers of what government can do when it's operated competently. Dunkelman talks a lot about the TVA's successes in delivering hydro power. Klein and Thompson, at last night's event, talked about how Musk's companies wouldn't exist without the government having _shaped_ the markets they operate in, in various ways. They're very much pro-government, in terms of things like Biden-era industrial policy. (Abundant Dems love Uncle Sam's three cool younger brothers, CHIP, IRA, and BIL.) There's also a lot of discussion in Abundance circles about the problems of monopoly power, and the best ways to deal with it, whether that means anti-trust, or regulation, or outright seizing assets. A decent slice of Abundant Dems are somewhere between sympathetic to, and actively in favor of, the idea of getting rid of Investor Owned Utilities entirely, having the power grid owned by the public. Even if we contract out building new legs and doing maintenance, letting a private company actually own the asset _inevitably_ leads to cashing out its value over time as excess dividends and bond payments. If there's any IOU that doesn't have a serious deferred maintenance backlog problem, I haven't heard of it.
Nobody wants a full return of Robert Moses. There is a very wide range of possibilities between where we are -- with every town and county on the path of a transmission corridor able to bog it down for years, and every interest group that wants something out of a housing project able to use risible "environmental concerns" to threaten a CEQA or NEPA lawsuit in order to extract concessions -- and a total abandonment of public input and environmental concern. You don't have to be some libertarian extremist to see that the system we have is screwed up and failing to deliver the results that huge majorities want.
The plan to implement Congestion Pricing in New York was held up for _three years_ by "environmental analysis", with a bunch of work going into disproving claims that it would somehow make the environment worse in New Jersey. In Europe, if somebody had come to the city government and said, "We think this will have bad environmental impacts for the suburbs outside the city," they would've said, "That's interesting, but this is a subject that's already been studied to death, here's the stack of papers, unless you have something other than vibes on which to base your claim, we're just gonna keep working on implementation." But no matter how solid the evidence is, in the US, you have to re-do the research for this specific project, and _even if you do_ you may have to spend six months arguing about it in court. And there are very seldom consequences / penalties for people who bring these frivolous cases. If there were, perhaps we'd see only the meritorious claims brought to court. Can _anyone_ take seriously the idea that turning a surface parking lot, in the middle of a city, into housing, would have adverse environmental impacts? COME ON. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/State-investigating-S-F-s-decision-to-reject-16573167.php
I take your point on Dunkelman, whose book is the most nuanced of the three. I actually thought Dunkelman’s book was mostly quite good (though I would dispute the centrality of its arguments to the 2024 election, for which Dunkelman makes a weak scribbled-in-galleys case).
In re Klein and Thompson, my assignment was not to review what they’re saying in book talks but to review what they say in their book.
Oh, also, if you don't believe that the issue of shortages -- particularly of housing -- have anything to do with Trump's win, you should look at a map of the shift in vote share to Trump from '20 to '24, and the rise in housing prices from '20 to '24.
And in surveys, Biden '20 to Trump '24 voters _very consistently_ talked about cost of living.
Were they suckers to believe Trump's promises to bring prices down? Absolutely! And again, Dems need to learn to work with the media ecosystem we have. This isn't just the "they should have gone on Rogan" thing from fall of '24. It's that we should have been sending people on Rogan -- and all the other podcasts and YouTube shows that have big audiences -- consistently, all the time, over the past several years. Buttigieg and AOC and Bernie and others should be talking with folks. If lefty agitators want to yell at them for "talking to a white supremacist transphobe", let them yell, don't cave. A winning electoral coalition is going to include a bunch of voters who hold views that Dem activists find distasteful. You can politely push back on those views, while not acting like you think the people who hold those views are The Enemy. (Mayor Pete is the absolute master of this style, but plenty of other folks are decent at it -- Polis, Whitmer, Shapiro, Gallego, Walz... The list goes on.) The Dem activist class has spent the past decade hunting heretics, while the right wing sought converts. It didn't used to be like this, and it doesn't have to be in the future. In 2008, Obama could say he wasn't sure about gay marriage, and still handily win the nomination, and the enthusiastic support of the base. (And then of course he delivered Supreme Court nominations that were good for LGBTQ+ rights!) Now if some Dem elected says they aren't sure they agree point-by-point with self-appointed representatives of the queer community, those representatives go out and do the Right's work for them, raising the salience of issues that the public is 70-30 against us on.
But we have to _both_ actually deliver improvements in people's lives, _and_ hack the attention system to make sure people notice those improvements and understand who's responsible for them. (Calling the ACA "Obamacare" is probably the biggest own-goal Republicans have committed in the last thirty years. They were much smarter about avoiding giving Biden credit for clean energy and chip investments.)
I believe the housing affordability problem to be real. I don’t believe de-zoning has much to offer for lower-income renters, as I explain in part two.
The YIMBY / Abundance position on "affordable housing" is that yes, we probably will need to subsidize _truly_ low income people, like the bottom quintile of the distribution. (Though you'll find some arguments in the movement around whether in the long run it would be better to simply give low-income people cash, and then let them spend that cash on lower cost forms of housing, thus driving investment in that kind of housing. Folks with serious mental impairments and drug issues may be a special case, where you need "supportive housing", but for the typical "working poor" family, just giving them money and letting them figure out how much of that to spend on better housing, versus better food, and whatever else, is arguably more respectful of them, and also saves a ton of overhead, which means you can deliver more money to the end recipients.)
For a median-income renter, or even a 30th to 40th percentile income renter, it simply should be possible to find a place to rent, at a price that eats less than a third of your income, because rental units are abundant enough that landlords have to compete on price.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, that was the case -- in fact it was pretty normal to be able to find a place to stay for under a _quarter_ of one's income! Some of that housing wasn't as nice -- SROs, units that had only cold water, whatever else. But it _existed_, and it was obviously far better than a tent on the street.
Currently we have "affordable housing" programs that provide units to "moderate income" renters, at 80-120% of the Area Median Income. In San Mateo County, that's a family income that's up into six figures.
If people making a family income of $100k+ cannot find a place to rent in your county without public subsidy, something has gone deeply, deeply wrong with your housing market. And legal restrictions on what can be built near job centers are _definitely_ part of that.
We're currently having a fight in the city of San Mateo where NIMBYs are trying to turn a neighborhood of boring suburban homes into a "historic district" to prevent the use of state laws that would allow people to replace their homes with small multi-family buildings. ( https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/nimbys-ceqa-housing-historic-preservation-19761668.php ) NIMBYs don't make as good a "villain" as developers or Wall Street investors, but they are, in fact, the biggest obstacle to home construction. People seem to struggle with understanding problems where there isn't some easy-to-point to malefactor, the problem is the system itself. It's everyone's G*d-given right to gripe about traffic or not liking what a new building looks like; but it should not be their government-given right to actually exercise a veto, to preserve what they see as the proper "neighborhood character" at the expense of all the families who would've lived in the building they're blocking.
As for how we fix it, I don't think folks are picky about that. "All of the Above". Alex Lee, the big proponent of Social Housing in California, is a favorite of YIMBYs, we poured a lot of effort into getting his bill through the legislature, only for Newsom to veto it (one of many ways in which YIMBYs feel Newsom has betrayed his pro-housing rhetoric).
The institutional ‘Christians’ who still vocally and politically support Donald Trump tend to see him as literally Godsent. Many, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her reporter boyfriend Brian Glenn, also perceive Trump’s presidency as divinely-intended punishment against liberals. (By institutional Christianity, I mean those ‘Christians’ most resistant to Christ’s fundamental teachings of non-violence, compassion and non-wealth.)
If God really is as vengefully angry, even seemingly blood-thirsty, as institutional Christianity generally portrays Him to be, is anyone — including supposed ardent followers or conservative Bible believers — truly safe or really ‘saved’? One could reasonably theorize that He’d be especially peeved by those self-professed Christians He’d (likely rightfully) deem as fake or frauds. After all, Jesus, a.k.a. God incarnate, was about non-violence, genuine compassion, love and non-wealth. His teachings and practices epitomize so much of the primary component of socialism — do not hoard gratuitous wealth in the midst of great poverty.
Yet, they are not practiced by a significant number of ‘Christians’, likely including many who really seem to worship Donald Trump, a callous man who stands for very little or nothing Jesus taught and represents. … The Biblical Jesus would not have rolled his eyes and sighed: ‘Oh well, I’m against everything the politician stands for, but what can you do when you dislike even more what his political competition stands for?’
Meantime, some of the best humanitarians I, as a big fan of Christ’s unmistakable miracles and fundamental message, have met or heard about were/are atheists or agnostics who, quite ironically, would make better examples of many of Christ’s teachings than too many institutional ‘Christians’. Conversely, some of the worst human(e) beings I’ve met or heard about are the most devout believers/preachers of fundamental Biblical theology.
Speaking as somebody who is very active in the YIMBY / Abundance movement -- I was at an Abundance Network book launch party, with Derek Thompson, ahead of a City Arts and Lectures discussion among Derek, Ezra, and Michael Pollan, just last night -- I'd say very few of us, if any, are under the illusion that the policies we're advocating are _sufficient_ to turn back MAGA fascism. We also have to cope with various other things like how the information environment is working against us.
Paul Krugman wrote a very good summary about this problem the other day, in a piece about Social Security:
<quote>
I can’t help noticing that the inverse correlation between how Americans voted in 2024 and their real interests makes it clear that two of the main factions in the intra-party debate about Democrats’ next moves are talking nonsense.
On one side there are relatively conservative Democrats and Democratic-leaning pundits telling us that the party must move to the center. But when it comes to Social Security, which is really important to most Americans, Democrats — who want to preserve the program — are very much in the center, while Republicans — who want to kill it — are extremists. Yet last November, the voters who have most to lose from this extremism didn’t notice.
On the other side there are progressives who argue that Democrats are in trouble because they abandoned the working class. But even if you think that Democrats have been too friendly toward globalization, or deregulation, or low corporate taxes, the Democratic Party has been far more favorable to workers than the Republicans. The Biden administration was especially pro-worker. But working-class voters didn’t notice.
What all this says is that the priority for Democrats isn’t to pursue whatever you think is a better policy mix. It is to get voters to notice.
</quote>
If you like the Politix podcast, by your fellow Substackers Matt Yglesias and Brian Beutler, basically this is coming down on Beutler's side of a perennial argument between those two, about how important policy substance is relative to control of attention.
Nonetheless, the Abundance Agenda is a _necessary_ aspect of winning back power in a durable way. We need to demonstrate, in the cities and states where we hold power, that we're capable of delivering. You can't claim to be the party of the working man, when you're driving working people out of the places where you rule, with high housing costs, transit systems that are treated more like jobs programs than services for riders, and so on.
And people as diverse as AOC on the left, across to Ruben Gallego toward the current right edge of the Dem coalition, as well as plenty of center-right anti-MAGA ex-Republicans, do seem to get this.
Actually looking at this review, I find myself kind of annoyed. Like, the subhed says, "Three new books propose market solutions to problems that require government intervention."
Did you read the same books I did? Klein and Dunkelman are both great admirers of what government can do when it's operated competently. Dunkelman talks a lot about the TVA's successes in delivering hydro power. Klein and Thompson, at last night's event, talked about how Musk's companies wouldn't exist without the government having _shaped_ the markets they operate in, in various ways. They're very much pro-government, in terms of things like Biden-era industrial policy. (Abundant Dems love Uncle Sam's three cool younger brothers, CHIP, IRA, and BIL.) There's also a lot of discussion in Abundance circles about the problems of monopoly power, and the best ways to deal with it, whether that means anti-trust, or regulation, or outright seizing assets. A decent slice of Abundant Dems are somewhere between sympathetic to, and actively in favor of, the idea of getting rid of Investor Owned Utilities entirely, having the power grid owned by the public. Even if we contract out building new legs and doing maintenance, letting a private company actually own the asset _inevitably_ leads to cashing out its value over time as excess dividends and bond payments. If there's any IOU that doesn't have a serious deferred maintenance backlog problem, I haven't heard of it.
Nobody wants a full return of Robert Moses. There is a very wide range of possibilities between where we are -- with every town and county on the path of a transmission corridor able to bog it down for years, and every interest group that wants something out of a housing project able to use risible "environmental concerns" to threaten a CEQA or NEPA lawsuit in order to extract concessions -- and a total abandonment of public input and environmental concern. You don't have to be some libertarian extremist to see that the system we have is screwed up and failing to deliver the results that huge majorities want.
The plan to implement Congestion Pricing in New York was held up for _three years_ by "environmental analysis", with a bunch of work going into disproving claims that it would somehow make the environment worse in New Jersey. In Europe, if somebody had come to the city government and said, "We think this will have bad environmental impacts for the suburbs outside the city," they would've said, "That's interesting, but this is a subject that's already been studied to death, here's the stack of papers, unless you have something other than vibes on which to base your claim, we're just gonna keep working on implementation." But no matter how solid the evidence is, in the US, you have to re-do the research for this specific project, and _even if you do_ you may have to spend six months arguing about it in court. And there are very seldom consequences / penalties for people who bring these frivolous cases. If there were, perhaps we'd see only the meritorious claims brought to court. Can _anyone_ take seriously the idea that turning a surface parking lot, in the middle of a city, into housing, would have adverse environmental impacts? COME ON. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/State-investigating-S-F-s-decision-to-reject-16573167.php
I take your point on Dunkelman, whose book is the most nuanced of the three. I actually thought Dunkelman’s book was mostly quite good (though I would dispute the centrality of its arguments to the 2024 election, for which Dunkelman makes a weak scribbled-in-galleys case).
In re Klein and Thompson, my assignment was not to review what they’re saying in book talks but to review what they say in their book.
Oh, also, if you don't believe that the issue of shortages -- particularly of housing -- have anything to do with Trump's win, you should look at a map of the shift in vote share to Trump from '20 to '24, and the rise in housing prices from '20 to '24.
Spoiler: they're the same map.
https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/housing-market-trump-win-2024-election-rcna179153
And in surveys, Biden '20 to Trump '24 voters _very consistently_ talked about cost of living.
Were they suckers to believe Trump's promises to bring prices down? Absolutely! And again, Dems need to learn to work with the media ecosystem we have. This isn't just the "they should have gone on Rogan" thing from fall of '24. It's that we should have been sending people on Rogan -- and all the other podcasts and YouTube shows that have big audiences -- consistently, all the time, over the past several years. Buttigieg and AOC and Bernie and others should be talking with folks. If lefty agitators want to yell at them for "talking to a white supremacist transphobe", let them yell, don't cave. A winning electoral coalition is going to include a bunch of voters who hold views that Dem activists find distasteful. You can politely push back on those views, while not acting like you think the people who hold those views are The Enemy. (Mayor Pete is the absolute master of this style, but plenty of other folks are decent at it -- Polis, Whitmer, Shapiro, Gallego, Walz... The list goes on.) The Dem activist class has spent the past decade hunting heretics, while the right wing sought converts. It didn't used to be like this, and it doesn't have to be in the future. In 2008, Obama could say he wasn't sure about gay marriage, and still handily win the nomination, and the enthusiastic support of the base. (And then of course he delivered Supreme Court nominations that were good for LGBTQ+ rights!) Now if some Dem elected says they aren't sure they agree point-by-point with self-appointed representatives of the queer community, those representatives go out and do the Right's work for them, raising the salience of issues that the public is 70-30 against us on.
But we have to _both_ actually deliver improvements in people's lives, _and_ hack the attention system to make sure people notice those improvements and understand who's responsible for them. (Calling the ACA "Obamacare" is probably the biggest own-goal Republicans have committed in the last thirty years. They were much smarter about avoiding giving Biden credit for clean energy and chip investments.)
I believe the housing affordability problem to be real. I don’t believe de-zoning has much to offer for lower-income renters, as I explain in part two.
Your other points are well taken.
The YIMBY / Abundance position on "affordable housing" is that yes, we probably will need to subsidize _truly_ low income people, like the bottom quintile of the distribution. (Though you'll find some arguments in the movement around whether in the long run it would be better to simply give low-income people cash, and then let them spend that cash on lower cost forms of housing, thus driving investment in that kind of housing. Folks with serious mental impairments and drug issues may be a special case, where you need "supportive housing", but for the typical "working poor" family, just giving them money and letting them figure out how much of that to spend on better housing, versus better food, and whatever else, is arguably more respectful of them, and also saves a ton of overhead, which means you can deliver more money to the end recipients.)
For a median-income renter, or even a 30th to 40th percentile income renter, it simply should be possible to find a place to rent, at a price that eats less than a third of your income, because rental units are abundant enough that landlords have to compete on price.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, that was the case -- in fact it was pretty normal to be able to find a place to stay for under a _quarter_ of one's income! Some of that housing wasn't as nice -- SROs, units that had only cold water, whatever else. But it _existed_, and it was obviously far better than a tent on the street.
Currently we have "affordable housing" programs that provide units to "moderate income" renters, at 80-120% of the Area Median Income. In San Mateo County, that's a family income that's up into six figures.
If people making a family income of $100k+ cannot find a place to rent in your county without public subsidy, something has gone deeply, deeply wrong with your housing market. And legal restrictions on what can be built near job centers are _definitely_ part of that.
We're currently having a fight in the city of San Mateo where NIMBYs are trying to turn a neighborhood of boring suburban homes into a "historic district" to prevent the use of state laws that would allow people to replace their homes with small multi-family buildings. ( https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/nimbys-ceqa-housing-historic-preservation-19761668.php ) NIMBYs don't make as good a "villain" as developers or Wall Street investors, but they are, in fact, the biggest obstacle to home construction. People seem to struggle with understanding problems where there isn't some easy-to-point to malefactor, the problem is the system itself. It's everyone's G*d-given right to gripe about traffic or not liking what a new building looks like; but it should not be their government-given right to actually exercise a veto, to preserve what they see as the proper "neighborhood character" at the expense of all the families who would've lived in the building they're blocking.
As for how we fix it, I don't think folks are picky about that. "All of the Above". Alex Lee, the big proponent of Social Housing in California, is a favorite of YIMBYs, we poured a lot of effort into getting his bill through the legislature, only for Newsom to veto it (one of many ways in which YIMBYs feel Newsom has betrayed his pro-housing rhetoric).