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abundance
The Anti-Labor Undercurrent of 'Abundance'
The accusation from the neoliberal crowd with their new rebrand project is clear: unions are behind policies that result in scarcity.
Jul 07, 2025
The post-Reconstruction United States has never seen durable progressive change without the labor movement’s involvement. The postwar economy’s rapid, widely distributed gains in material conditions for everyday Americans may be the banner accomplishment, but the movement’s contributions to progress go far further. Working women organized through the labor movement became significant drivers of the suffrage movement. Unions played an essential role in the Civil Rights movement, including the steelworkers and UAW providing crucial support for the March on Washington. Some of the earliest workplace discrimination protections for same-sex couples were won by the United Mine Workers of America.
Since industrialization, the labor movement has been the greatest engine not just of advancing worker interests, but of achieving social progress more generally.
This is not to say that the labor movement is the perfect embodiment of hippie harmony. It has and continues to struggle with issues of sexism, racism, nativism, and other sundry prejudices. But what sets the labor movement apart is the principle of solidarity that has enabled it to build broad-based coalitions in the face of those disagreements.
As Richard Trumka, the late president of the AFL-CIO, wrote, “Progress, steadily gained, is fueled by the power of a mobilized community. Every victory in the fight against oppression has ultimately been achieved by that spirit of solidarity.”
It’s the principle of leaving no one behind that unites the labor movement, both internally and with other causes. Union organizers, members, and leadership are consistently on the front lines of fighting for broadly shared prosperity.
All of this is why the scorn shown by elements of the “abundance” movement—the latest neoliberal rebrand—ought to be deeply concerning for those of us in the labor movement as well as for everyone who believes in building an economy that delivers for working Americans and their families.
The abundance movement is a cross-partisan initiative bankrolled by money from the crypto, oil, and tech industries. What do these well-monied interests want? They seek to create newly ascendant factions within both major parties that focus on “government efficiency,” streamlining building, and eliminating chokepoints where policy implementation gets stuck. As outlined in the book Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an abundance approach invites its adherents to become “bottleneck detectives” in order to identify where governance gets stuck and who is blocking its way.
As with any broad coalition, there is not uniformity on what exactly this sort of paradigm looks like in practice. But a significant portion of the abundance movement views labor as a barrier that needs to be overcome in the name of efficiency.
There certainly are elements of the abundance movement that are not anti-union. Klein and Thompson, for their part, are at least nominally pro-labor. The opening pages of their book, which sketches out the type of utopia they want to achieve, makes mention of greater worker rights. In a recent column for The New York Times, Klein endorsed making it easier to unionize.
The Breakthrough Institute, a vocal and early proponent of the abundance approach, has explored how industrial unions could help achieve their ‘ecomodernist’ vision.
Others, though, insist that unions stand in the way of achieving abundance, and view Klein and Thompson’s agnosticism towards labor as either misguided or a fig leaf to make their book palatable to elected Democrats. To these abundists, downright hostility toward organized labor is often a necessary precondition for abundance.
This anti-union hostility was clear at WelcomeFest—alternatively dubbed “abundance coachella” or “modchella,” after being announced via festival themed promotional poster emblazoned with the slogan “responsibillity [sic] to win”— the self-proclaimed largest gathering of centrist Democrats. There, prominent writer Josh Barro declared that "when I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of Abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that's the driver."
The accusation is clear: unions are behind policies that result in scarcity. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), a vocal abundance supporter and speaker on the panel Barro was moderating, mostly demurred, but later posted a video defending unions (Torres is rumored to be a New York gubernatorial aspirant, so asking him to denounce unions was unlikely to pan out). The following day, Barro released an article on his Substack further developing an abundance-flavored broadside against unions. Barro specifically chastised his fellow abundists for shying away from fighting organized labor:
Sometimes the conflict between abundance and the labor movement gets downplayed. If you look up “unions” in the index to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, it takes you to their discussion on pages 126-7 of how the use of union labor did not prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro from using regulatory relief to speed the reconstruction of a destroyed interstate underpass. It does not take you to their discussion on page 104 of how local construction trade unions in San Francisco have sought to block the use of cost-saving modular construction in affordable housing projects.
Barro’s point is only unique in its forthrightness, not in its sentiment. In particular, public sector unions—which constitute most of the organized workforce in the United States—are a common target amongst abundance thinkers. The faction’s main organizing group, Inclusive Abundance (whose CEO was also a featured speaker at WelcomeFest, where he dreamed of “college abundist” clubs to rival college Democrats and Republicans), has identified public sector unions as a barrier to their goal of government efficiency, saying, “Public sector unions are resistant to reforms that make performance-based employment decisions easier.”
Jonathan Chait, in The Atlantic, wrote that “progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.” Those groups are, namely, environmentalists (broadly the strand of progressives most maligned by abundists), labor, and activist/issue advocacy groups (importantly only the ones to the abundance movement’s left; when it comes to the myriad abundance-focused groups that have sprung up since 2020, it’s a veritable welcomefest).
This led Todd Tucker of the Roosevelt Institute to criticize the abundance agenda’s “survivor island” mindset, where “first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” Tucker’s point was demonstrated pretty clearly when Matt Yglesias, opining on Barro’s abundance critique of unions, offered his perspective: “[unions] are useful allies against the greater evil of environmentalist organizations.”
Many of the major groups and funders across the abundance landscape have longstanding antipathy towards unions. The most obvious examples are the elements of abundance that are part of the Koch network. Charles Koch (and his late brother David), well known for their hostility to labor and bankrolling champions of euphemistic “right to work” policies like former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, have seeded or funded multiple groups within the abundance movement with track records of hostility towards unions.
- The Foundation for American Innovation (formerly The Lincoln Network) developed a tool that was deployed to entice public sector union members to opt-out by offering incentives like discounts at major retailers.
- The libertarian Reason Institute, partially funded by the Koch-backed Stand Together, frequently publishes pieces citing unions as major obstacles to progress, particularly teachers’ unions.
- The Cato Institute is the preeminent libertarian think tank and, as such, has published many, many pieces arguing against labor unions’ influence. One 2010 publication declared that “collective bargaining is a misguided labor policy because it violates civil liberties and gives unions excessive power to block needed reforms.”
- George Mason University’s Mercatus Center is a bastion of free-market idealism that was established by major donations from the Koch brothers. It has frequently produced scholarship skeptical of unions and their power.
- The Manhattan Institute—also a beneficiary of Koch funding—has a long history of publishing work opposing unions and organized labor.
- Americans for Prosperity, which has been described as the Koch’s “primary political arm,” has been involved in numerous anti-union campaigns and advocacy efforts, including celebrating “right to work” policies. (It has also been hard at work running a $100 million campaign in support of extending the Trump tax cuts this year).
- (A bit of an outlier, The Aspen Institute, which also has been funded by the Kochs and featured David as a board member, has actually worked to ameliorate executives’ hostility to unions.)
Niskanen, which was formed as a splinter group by the more moderate elements of Cato, also frequently criticizes labor.
This is not to say, however, that skepticism of labor is confined to the abundance movement’s libertarian wing. There are multiple examples of center and even center-left elements of the movement centering critiques of labor. Matt Yglesias, who has been described (by Derek Thompson, no less) as “the OG grandfather of abundance,” has been vocally critical of unions on numerous occasions, including criticizing rail unions for pushing for a two-person crew on freight trains.
Democratic Colorado governor Jared Polis, perhaps the most abundance-pilled politician out there, is now infamous for vetoing legislation (unanimously supported by the state’s Democratic legislators) that would have made it easier for workers to unionize.
This tendency was also strikingly apparent when abundance liberals vociferously accused unions of being rentiers when the UAW spoke in support of strategic tariffs.
In fact, some abundists have been pointing to labor as an enemy in their quest for factional power since before Klein and Thompson’s book kickstarted a flurry of discourse. Niskanen, which, as Chait put it, is “the closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda,” published a manifesto in early autumn 2024 that framed public sector unions as an instance of progressives standing in the way of progress, stating:
On the left, conflicts exist [with abundance] wherever progressives pursue their goals through NIMBY-like mechanisms, such as with historic preservation, public employee unions, and organized interests claiming the mantle of environmental justice.
Niskanen’s call for an “abundance faction” goes on to encourage showcasing a “a willingness to pick fights with public sector producer interests like unions” as a plank of their political pitch. Similarly, Ezra Klein’s column “What America Needs is a Liberalism that Builds,” a seminal work in the formation of the abundance perspective, prompted a clash with The American Prospect's David Dayen that focused in large part on requirements that projects use union labor.
That is not to say that abundance and the labor movement can never be allies. Both, for instance, have champions who advocate for bringing parts of project consulting (largely privatized in recent decades) back in-house to government agencies, which could improve cost-efficiency (more building, more abundance!) and create good, stable unionized public servant jobs (more people in the labor movement!).
However, while an alliance makes sense in specific cases, that does not assuage the general friction between the two movements. In fact, one of the earliest critiques of abundance liberalism came from the Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam, who doubted that abundance could find traction on the left because it fundamentally challenges the principle of solidarity that has historically undergirded the progressive movement. That insight is key to understanding why, even among abundance proponents who are not opposed to labor, there’s limited interest in building significant camaraderie with the labor movement. Even when labor and abundance are not directly in tension, their organizing principles are.
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Universalism, Not Abundance, Is the Only Real Defense Against Authoritarianism
Universalism is the only governing strategy strong enough to rebuild what Trumpism has corroded—not as a slogan, but as a material commitment.
Jun 07, 2025
She shows up just after 9:00 am, like she has most mornings since the letter arrived. The lobby is already full—mothers with strollers, older men gripping folders, a teenager in a hoodie with his eyes on the floor. She clutches the same folder she’s been carrying for weeks: pay stubs, proof of residency, a note from her landlord warning the rent will rise again. Her name will be called eventually. And when it is, a caseworker will skim her paperwork, ask a few quick questions, and decide whether she qualifies—for what, she’s not even sure anymore. Rent relief? Help with the electric bill? A food pantry referral? Maybe nothing.
This is what public help looks like in America: a maze, a line, a thousand little gates. Each with a lock that shifts depending on your zip code, your paperwork, or whether the system deems you deserving. Our safety net isn’t built to catch—it’s built to sort. And that structure—the means-tested, piecemeal logic of American social policy—hasn’t just failed to prevent collapse. It has laid the groundwork for authoritarianism.
President Donald Trump came to power on the promise to fight for the forgotten working class—for people like those in that lobby. Millions believed him. Not because they were fooled, but because the institutions that should have offered stability—unions, schools, housing, healthcare—were already gone. What remained were brittle bureaucracies that asked everything, offered little, and always arrived too late.
We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.
Trump didn’t fill that vacuum with solutions. He filled it with vengeance. Not policy that delivered—but posture that blamed. While Republicans translated grievance into governing power, Democrats lost their map.
After 2024, the party was hollowed out. Young men walked away. Working-class voters of every background followed. The party that once stood for labor and civil rights began to feel like the party of college towns and tax credits. People didn’t switch sides—they stopped believing anyone was on theirs.
In that vacuum, the Abundance Agenda gained traction. Promoted by liberal technocrats, it focuses on clearing bureaucratic thickets: zoning reform, streamlined permitting, housing acceleration. Build more. Build faster. Let growth lift all boats.
But abundance doesn’t ask who’s in the boat—and who keeps getting thrown overboard. It solves for scarcity without addressing exclusion. It tackles supply, not distribution. It removes friction but doesn’t restore trust. Growth is not solidarity. Innovation is not inclusion. And no one will rally behind a politics that treats them as consumers before recognizing them as neighbors or workers.
Now, in his second term, Trump no longer pretends. He is using the federal government not to build—but to punish. Agencies are purged. Civil rights protections erased. Grants come with loyalty tests. Through executive orders and loyalist appointments, he is dismantling the federal infrastructure of inclusion, plank by plank.
This isn’t small government. It’s selective government—enforcement without support, punishment without provision. It survives because public systems remain fractured and cruel. When your right to basic services depends on proving your worth, solidarity dies. People stop defending each other’s needs. They’re too busy proving their own.
The single mother in the lobby doesn’t call this authoritarianism. She doesn’t have to. She feels it in the form that changes overnight. In the disconnected phone numbers. In the line she waits in each morning—only to be told again: You don’t qualify.
Abundance won’t help her.
Zoning reform won’t keep her housed.
Solar panels won’t make her feel seen.
She doesn’t need a productivity agenda. She needs a government that shows up.
Because this is how democracy unravels—not in a cataclysm, but in the quiet, daily normalization of abandonment.
Trump must be stopped. But we won’t defeat authoritarianism with messaging. Not with moral clarity. Not with speeches. Democrats will not win by being right. They will win by delivering.
Universalism is the only governing strategy strong enough to rebuild what Trumpism has corroded—not as a slogan, but as a material commitment. We cannot out-message collapse. We must out-govern it.
Ask that woman in the lobby what failed, and she won’t name a policy theory. She’ll say: the office stopped calling. The money vanished. The form changed. Beneath that is something deeper: a belief that survival must be earned. That belonging must be begged for. And once that belief takes hold, it doesn’t just break programs. It breaks democracy.
Because when help is conditional, it becomes contestable. When people compete for scraps, they stop believing in the public. They stop believing in each other. When democracy fails, it’s not because people stop believing in freedom.
It’s because freedom stops being useful.
A ballot won’t quiet a hungry child. A speech won’t refill a prescription.
If democracy is to survive, it must show up in people’s lives.
And to show up, it must trust them first.
That woman is still waiting. Not for charity—for recognition. For someone to say: You matter. You belong. You should not have to beg to be seen. Universalism answers that hope. Not with pity, but with presence. Not with exceptions, but with guarantees. It does not ask what she did wrong. It simply says: You are part of this country. You are not alone.
Because if this republic is to endure, it won’t be because people begged for help.
It will be because we chose to build a government that finally refused to look away.
We chose to show up—not with hesitation, not with disclaimers, but with resolve.
Because in a nation this rich, no one should have to stand in line just to be seen.
No one should have to plead for the dignity that should already be theirs.
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WelcomeFest’s Billionaire Backers Reveal Its True Mission
Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy.
Jun 04, 2025
If the Abundance universe is to be believed, the hottest ticket this summer is WelcomeFest.
Wednesday’s confab is the second such annual gathering organized by the centrist group Welcome Party and its political action committee WelcomePAC, with this year’s event touting a distinct abundance flair. The conference boasts a rogues’ gallery of corporate-friendly cosponsors, including Third Way, the New Democratic Coalition, Inclusive Abundance, and the Blue Dog Caucus. A sizzle reel from last year’s event paints WelcomeFest as an Internet Hippo tweet come to life, complete with cameos from A-listers like ex-CNN anchor John Avlon and Democratic influencer Olivia Julianna.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.”
This year’s “Responsibility to Win” session (misspelled on the event’s official poster) has drawn viral attention online—both for its bizarre AI Ghibli promos and stacked lineup of neoliberal pundits, conservative Democratic lawmakers, and wunderkind pollsters serving up Dick Morris’ reheated leftovers.
Speakers include:
- Derek Thompson, co-author of Abundance.
- Matt Yglesias, confidently-wrong pundit and, per Thompson, the “OG grandfather of Abundance.”
- Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who doesn’t think Democrats should use the term “oligarchy.”
- Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), Abundance champion and darling of AIPAC and crypto lobbyists.
- Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.), Adam Gray (D-Calif.), and Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-Mich.), founding members of the Abundance-themed Build America Caucus.
- Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash). and Jared Golden (D-Maine), current and former co-chairs of the conservative Blue Dog Caucus.
- Adam Jentleson, anti-”Groups” crusader currently distancing himself from his 14-month stint as Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-Pa.) chief of staff.
- David Shor, pollster and prolific party animal.
WelcomePAC’s Donors
Campaign finance records reveal that WelcomePAC, the primary organizers of WelcomeFest, has raked in sizable contributions from billionaires and corporate oligarchs:
- Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman has given over $1.8 million to WelcomePAC since 2021. A major donor to former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign and the pro-Harris SuperPAC Future Forward, Hoffman strongly opposed the Biden administration’s anti-monopoly policies and publicly demanded that Harris fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan if she won the election. Hoffman has also bankrolled the Mainstream Democrats super PAC, which spent heavily in Democratic primaries in 2022 and 2024 to defend conservative Democrats like Kurt Schrader and Henry Cuellar and defeat progressives like Cori Bush and Nina Turner.
- Walton family: WelcomePAC has received over $1.1 million from relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton—the richest family in America.
- S. Robson (Rob) Walton: Rob Walton, the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Samuel R. Walton: Samuel R. Walton, grandson of Sam Walton and owner of a natural resources holding company, has given $625,000 to WelcomePAC since 2024.
- Christy Walton: Christy Walton, widow of one of Sam Walton’s sons, has given $125,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Alice Walton: Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, has given $25,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022.
- Carrie Walton Penner: Walton Penner, daughter of Rob Walton, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. She is also a prolific donor to the anti-public education charter school movement.
- Greg Penner: Penner, the husband of Carrie Walton and son-in-law of Rob, has given $150,000 to WelcomePAC since 2022. Penner is also Chairman of Walmart’s Board of Directors and a managing partner for the Walton family’s private equity firm.
- Bekenstein family: Bain Capital co-chairman Joshua Bekenstein and his wife Anita have given a combined $375,000 to WelcomePAC since October 2024.
- Michael Bloomberg: Billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since August 2024. Bloomberg is best known for his controversial mayoralty (which saw the expansion of racist “stop-and-frisk” policing tactics and anti-Muslim surveillance) and his expensive, widely-mocked 2020 presidential campaign.
- James & Kathryn Murdoch: James Murdoch—the estranged younger son of News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch—and his wife Kathryn have given a combined $2.5 million to WelcomePAC since April 2024.
- Rob Granieri: Granieri, the co-founder of Wall Street quantitative trading firm Jane Street, has given $100,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- Edward Fishman: Fishman, a managing director at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, has given $200,000 to WelcomePAC since February 2022.
- Mark Heising: Heising, the founder of private equity firm Medley Partners, has given $250,000 to WelcomePAC since June 2024.
- David Nierenberg: Nierenberg, an investment manager and former national finance co-chair for Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and his wife Patricia have given a combined $726,600 to WelcomePAC since March 2024.
- Americans Together Inc: Americans Together Inc, a centrist group founded by former Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) daughter Heather Manchin Bresch, has given over $1 million to WelcomePAC since February 2024. A core plank of Americans Together’s policy platform is opposing any repeal or reform of the Senate filibuster (the goal, ironically, of a 2021 book by WelcomeFest speaker Adam Jentleson).
- Bresch, the former CEO of pharma company Mylan, attracted national attention in 2016 for defending Mylan’s EpiPen price-gouging.
Who’s Actually Welcome to the Party?
While WelcomePAC’s donor roster makes clear who the group wants to welcome into the Democratic tent, its website is quite explicit about who they wish to exclude. WelcomePAC blames the Democratic Party’s woes on an “extreme right and socialist left […] conspiring with conflict-driven media to trash the Democratic brand.” In a poorly-aged 2021 Substack post calling for a “Jim Clyburn Day,” Welcome co-founder Lauren Harper celebrated Clyburn’s 2020 endorsement of Biden for “steering the party away from further polarization that would have led to a second Trump term.”
WelcomeFest organizers have explicitly juxtaposed their event with the purportedly left-wing Democratic National Committee, offering a refuge to those put off by the Democratic Party’s current leadership. They firmly reject unspecified “progressive purity tests” (read: having values), but lack a compelling explanation for why swing and red state voters are flocking to the progressive-populist fight against oligarchy.
Bafflingly, for a group that promises to offer “a vision for a depolarized United States,” WelcomeFest only features Democrats speaking about the need to moderate. The group, which proudly touts the label of “centrist insurgency,” has seemingly little to offer a polarized Republican Party—which is perhaps why their previous campaign to convince five House Republicans to caucus with Democrats failed so spectacularly. This has hardly hampered their push for moderation at all costs. In pursuit of this end, the group has even invented a metric that claims safe blue congressional seats are undemocratic, encouraging Republican challengers to pursue previously uncontested blue seats.
Some of WelcomePAC’s top staff have also spent their careers working to move the Democratic Party to the right. Co-founder Liam Kerr previously spent 10 years working for Democrats for Education Reform, a charter school advocacy organization founded and funded by hedge fund managers. Welcome Party board member Catharine Bellinger has also spent her career working for the same pro-charter school groups as Kerr. WelcomePAC’s political director, Daniel Conway, spent nearly six years working for No Labels, the centrist dark money group co-founded by the late Joe Lieberman that repeatedly attempted to recruit a third party candidate to run for president in 2024.
Taken together, WelcomePAC’s leadership and funding are at odds with their claimed opposition to the “buttoned-up [politics] of Washington elites.” Like Third Way and the Democratic Leadership Council before it, Welcome is yet another donor- and elite-driven operation seeking to drag the Democratic Party rightward on economic policy. That “rebranded neoliberalism” approach risks further alienating the very constituencies that Democrats lost in 2016 and 2024, and ceding further ground to right-wing faux-populists like Vice President JD Vance.
Given the WelcomeFest lineup, it’s clear that the donor class views Abundance as key to carrying out this self-serving crusade against populism.
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