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neoliberalism
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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From Fordow to Fallout: Global Hegemony on Trial
The U.S. strikes on Iran must be seen as part of a broader strategy by a declining global hegemon to reassert authority over an increasingly fractured world order.
Jun 24, 2025
This article was written and submitted before the latest development in the Iran-Israel-U.S. crisis: the announcement by U.S. President Donald Trump of an agreed cease-fire between Iran and Israel, subsequently confirmed by Iranian state television. While the situation on the ground remains fluid (with continued missile exchanges and uncertainty about the durability of this truce), we have chosen to publish this analysis in its original form for two key reasons. First, the cease-fire itself aligns with one of the primary scenarios outlined in this piece: tactical deescalation driven by exhaustion, geopolitical recalibration, and the recognition of strategic costs. Second, the structural drivers, historical context, and geopolitical stakes detailed in the article remain critical for understanding both the path to this truce and the uncertainties that lie ahead. Rather than rendering the analysis obsolete, this new development reinforces the paper's central argument: that the confrontation is not simply a regional affair, but part of a broader crisis of global order and legitimacy in which militarized interventions are used to mask systemic decline. This moment, precarious as it is, remains a potential turning point. The following reflections aim to illuminate the forces that have shaped it and what may still come next.
The recent U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities have fundamentally altered the geopolitical landscape of the ongoing Iran-Israel-U.S. confrontation. While the situation has been deteriorating since the escalation of Israeli hostilities in Gaza and subsequent Iranian retaliations, Washington's decision to bomb key Iranian sites (including the Fordow underground uranium enrichment facility, Natanz, and Isfahan) marks a game-changing shift. The strikes on Iran, justified under familiar pretexts of "non-proliferation," "peace," and "defense," serve as a warning to emerging multipolar blocs, particularly BRICS and China-led alliances, that deviation from Western geopolitical orthodoxy will not be tolerated, even when conducted within the boundaries of international law.
This piece examines the unfolding dynamics of the crisis, analyzes potential trajectories, and evaluates the broader implications for national sovereignty and global security in an increasingly fragmented world order marked by legal erosion, intensified conflict, and competing hegemonies.
Crisis as Strategy: Manufacturing Conflict in the Shadow of Decline
On June 22, 2025, the U.S. intervened in the Iran-Israel war by attacking Iran, through an operation dubbed "Operation Midnight Hammer," which involved the deployment of B-2 stealth bombers armed with GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs. It targeted sites previously thought impenetrable and marks the first time Washington has taken direct military action against Iran's nuclear infrastructure. American officials frame it as a limited, preventive measure designed to halt Iran's nuclear progress, signaling that no further strikes are currently planned. Yet such rhetoric must be critically evaluated. The scale and precision of the bombings, along with U.S. President Donald Trump's ambiguous "Make Iran Great Again" statement, raise suspicions about the administration's longer-term goals, including the possibility of engineered "regime change" by nontraditional means, escalating tensions, draining resources, and exploiting internal fractures.
What began as a regional confrontation has been instrumentalized into a global warning: a demonstration of force aimed at deterring the momentum of multipolar alternatives.
Iran's initial response has been carefully calibrated. Shortly after vowing retaliation, Tehran launched a limited missile strike on a U.S. military base in Qatar, likely coordinated in advance with Qatari and possibly even American authorities to minimize casualties. This symbolic yet pointed action appears designed to send a strategic message: Iran will respond, but not recklessly. The move suggests a preference for controlled escalation, signaling strength while leaving space for deescalation. Other retaliatory options remain on the table: cyber-attacks on U.S. infrastructure, disruption of maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), or asymmetrical operations via allies such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, or Hashd al-Shaabi. Each carries serious risks for Iran, the region, and global stability. Tehran's leadership seems intent on avoiding the U.S.' trap of full-scale escalation while assessing the fallout, recalibrating strategy, and consulting closely with allies like Russia and China to secure diplomatic backing and military preparedness. The U.S. response to this measured strike will shape the next phase of confrontation.
The Possible Scenarios Ahead
In the wake of the U.S. military strikes on Iran's key nuclear and military facilities, and the intensified hostilities between Iran and Israel, four major strategic trajectories now seem plausible. Each hinges on complex interactions between military calculations, geopolitical alignments, and domestic constraints. These are not mutually exclusive and may bleed into one another depending on evolving events.
Scenario A: Intensified but Contained Confrontation
This scenario envisions a continuation of calibrated escalation; Israel, backed by the United States, continues precision strikes on Iranian military and nuclear infrastructure, while Iran retaliates through means carefully modulated to avoid triggering direct U.S. engagement. Proxy confrontations across Iraq and the Red Sea may intensify, but red lines may be respected regarding attacks on American personnel or sovereign territory.
The strategic aim on all sides is to inflict sufficient costs to assert deterrence and save face, without tumbling into full-scale war. Israel preserves its posture as the self-designated regional enforcer, the U.S. projects its global policing role without deep involvement, and Iran upholds its position as a sovereign actor refusing to be subjugated. This scenario is already in motion.
Its durability, however, depends on multiple pressure points: the endurance of Iran's infrastructure and internal cohesion; Israel's appetite for military risk, enduring the already growingly backbreaking economic costs of the conflict and decreasing political gain; the U.S. election and economic calculus; and the reaction of regional and global powers. As weapon stockpiles diminish and war fatigue grows, the possibility of shifting into another scenario becomes more likely.
Scenario B: Direct Iran-U.S. Military Confrontation
This high-stakes scenario envisions a significant escalation whereby Iran targets U.S. military assets (such as bases in Iraq, Syria, Qatar, or Bahrain) or naval forces in the Persian Gulf. Any such action would almost certainly provoke a forceful U.S. military response, including sustained air and naval operations, with the potential to spiral into a broader regional war.
The recent limited Iranian missile strike on the U.S. base in Qatar, reportedly carried out with prior warnings to local and possibly American authorities, suggests that Tehran is testing this boundary carefully. It was likely intended as a symbolic gesture (assertive yet calculated to avoid immediate escalation), demonstrating Iran's capability while keeping the door open for deescalation.
The U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities, despite Iran's continued NPT compliance, have shattered the perceived legitimacy of the global security architecture.
Despite this, the broader risk of uncontrolled escalation remains. Miscalculations, false-flag provocations, or misunderstood retaliatory acts could still trigger a more direct and sustained confrontation. A scenario where Iran disrupts the Strait of Hormuz or targets high-value U.S. assets without prior signaling would heighten the risk of full-scale conflict.
Strategically, this path remains the most perilous for Iran. A direct war would stretch its already burdened military apparatus, require multi-front engagement, and risk massive infrastructural and civilian losses. For this reason, both Iran and the U.S. appear reluctant to pursue it, but it cannot be ruled out. Should this scenario unfold, it may quickly slide into Scenario C: a prolonged war of attrition aimed not at conquest but at systemic destabilization and regime fatigue.
Scenario C: Shock Doctrine and "Soft Regime Change"
This scenario imagines a prolonged campaign of attritional warfare (military strikes, economic destabilization, disinformation, and psychological operations) aimed at gradually eroding the legitimacy and capacity of the Iranian state without formal invasion. The goal here is not decisive battlefield victory but strategic disintegration.
This would involve more calculated acts of destruction (such as the recent strikes on Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow), imposition of even harsher sanctions via mechanisms like the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) snapback, and deliberate amplification of dissent within Iran. Western powers and Israeli intelligence would continue cultivating fractures within the Iranian elite and broader society, particularly among the disillusioned middle class and peripheral ethnic communities.
However, this is a dangerous gamble. Iran's memory of the 1953 coup and decades of resistance to imperial interventions has hardened its political institutions. The state has adapted to high-pressure conditions through robust security apparatuses, ideological cohesion, and crisis-driven legitimacy. Large sections of the Iranian public, despite the internal divisions, tend to consolidate around national sovereignty during times of external threat. Thus, while slow erosion remains a strategic goal for some in the West, the plan may backfire, further entrenching authoritarian reflexes and exacerbating regional volatility.
Scenario D: Exhaustion, Tactical Deescalation, and Renewed Covert Warfare
This scenario becomes increasingly plausible if the cumulative costs of confrontation (military, economic, and political) begin to outweigh perceived strategic gains for both Iran and Israel. For the United States, a prolonged regional conflict also carries serious geopolitical risks. While Washington becomes further entangled in a high-stakes escalation with no clear exit strategy, Beijing quietly consolidates its economic recovery and enhances its military capacity. The longer the U.S. remains embroiled in Middle Eastern entanglements, the more it risks losing strategic ground in its broader rivalry with China.
Within this context, signs of weapons fatigue, infrastructure degradation, and growing global disapproval could push the belligerents toward tactical deescalation. Iran, aware of the long-term humanitarian costs and the strategic risks of total war, may choose to delay or modulate its retaliation to maintain room for maneuver. Israel, facing mounting international criticism and potential strain on its domestic cohesion, may similarly reduce the intensity of its military operations. However, such restraint would likely represent a pause rather than peace, a recalibration rather than a sustainable resolution.
Such a pause would be fragile and conditional. It would not represent peace but rather a shift back from overt to covert conflict. Iran may strengthen its nuclear policy by shifting further into opacity, denying or limiting International Atomic Energy Agency access, decentralizing enrichment activities, and tightening information control. Western powers would find it easier to interpret this as nuclear escalation and would more decisively push for the reactivation of the JCPOA snapback mechanism that will lead to new layers of global sanctions. Internally, Iran would enter a phase of intensified securitization, i.e., greater surveillance, suppression of dissent, and policing of civil society. Externally, Israel and Western intelligence agencies would likely continue to support dissident networks, cyber operations, and economic sabotage.
Key Factors Determining the Next Phase
1. The Role of Great Powers
Russia and China have condemned Israel's unprovoked aggression and the recent U.S. strikes. Both countries have critical stakes in Iran: China relies on it for energy security and Belt and Road transit; Russia views it as a strategic partner in countering Western hegemony. While neither country seeks war, they may offer Iran advanced air defense systems, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic cover. Reports of Chinese cargo flights into Iran hint at a subtle but increasing strategic alignment.
2. Geoeconomic Implications
Oil prices surged after the strikes, with Brent crude nearing $75-80 per barrel. Financial markets responded with caution, as investors fear extended volatility. Inflationary pressures have intensified in Europe and Asia, driven by rising energy costs. Central banks in the West may now hesitate to cut interest rates, fearful of stagflation. This economic pressure acts as both a constraint on war and a bargaining chip: All actors now operate in a context where geopolitical decisions carry immediate economic costs.
3. Public Opinion
Trump's decision to strike Iranian facilities is a high-stakes gamble. It appeals to Republican hawks who view it as a show of strength, but most Americans remain wary of another Middle East entanglement. With public memory still shaped by Iraq and Afghanistan, Trump must appear decisive without triggering fears of endless war. His framing of the attack as "surgical" and "defensive" may hold for now. But a single U.S. casualty, oil price spike, or market shock could swiftly erode support, turning the move into a political liability in an already polarized election cycle.
4. Iran's Structural Resilience
Despite years of economic sanctions, internal unrest, and now direct military assaults, Iran's political structure has not fractured. The IRGC, Basij, and Artesh continue to demonstrate institutional cohesion and loyalty. While widespread discontent persists, no unified or credible opposition force has yet emerged with the capacity to rally the population against the state. The historical memory of foreign interventions still serves as a potent source of nationalist resilience. Many external analysts underestimate Iran's ability to endure crises, overlooking its layered, pluralistic, and historically adaptive modes of governance. However, the most serious threat to Iran's resilience may come not from external aggression but from within: decades of neoliberal structural adjustment have hollowed out public services, deepened inequality, and eroded economic sovereignty. By binding the national economy to global market fluctuations and dollar-based trade systems, these reforms have made Iran acutely vulnerable to inflationary shocks and currency instability. Above all, they have rendered international sanctions far more effective, magnifying their impact on everyday life and intensifying mass dissatisfaction. The current government continues to adhere to an economic model that prioritizes fiscal orthodoxy over redistribution or self-sufficiency. This approach is fundamentally ill-suited to the demands of wartime mobilization. It places the burden of conflict squarely on working people and makes the economic pressures of protracted confrontation increasingly unbearable.
Implications of the Crisis for Security and Sovereignty Beyond Empire
From a critical scholar-activist perspective, the current escalation must be seen as part of a broader strategy by a declining global hegemon to reassert authority over an increasingly fractured world order. Confronted with deep internal crises and the erosion of its unipolar dominance, the United States has exploited the Iranian nuclear issue, first by pressuring Iran into fruitless negotiations, then enabling its regional proxy, Israel, to manufacture escalation, ultimately militarizing the conflict as a calculated strategy to reassert geopolitical discipline. What began as a regional confrontation has been instrumentalized into a global warning: a demonstration of force aimed at deterring the momentum of multipolar alternatives, particularly the rising influence of China, the BRICS bloc, and other emergent alliances challenging Western supremacy.
Through this confrontation, Washington seeks to reassert the primacy of its security architecture and dollar-based economic order, even at the cost of further destabilizing international norms. Military action under the banners of "non-proliferation," "defense," or "regional stability" masks a deeper agenda: disciplining dissenting states, undermining autonomous alliances, disrupting China's Belt and Road Initiative, and reminding the Global South that any deviation from the unipolar script will be met with force. Yet this strategy is paradoxical; while aiming to halt decline, it simultaneously deepens the crisis of legitimacy facing global institutions, erodes faith in international law, and accelerates the very multipolar shifts it seeks to suppress.
This is not a time to restore a failed status quo. What's needed is a radical rethinking of security, sovereignty, and development, beyond the coercive logic of militarized capitalism.
The core issue is not whether Iran is building a nuclear bomb (there is no credible evidence that it is) but whether sovereign states are permitted to pursue energy independence, chart autonomous foreign policies, or forge alternative economic alliances. The strikes make clear that even legal adherence to international treaties offers no shield against coercion when a state resists the dominant script. What is being punished is not a violation of norms, but defiance of empire. And yet, resistance (both armed and diplomatic) endures.
The stakes are extraordinarily high. One misstep could ignite full-scale regional war, disrupt global energy markets, and deepen economic inequality. Yet beneath the immediate crisis, the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear and military facilities, despite Iran's continued NPT compliance, have shattered the perceived legitimacy of the global security architecture. The NPT's foundational bargain (non-nuclear states forgo weapons in exchange for peaceful technology and protection) has been exposed as hollow. Compliance has not shielded Iran from unilateral aggression, eroding faith in international law.
Amid this breakdown, new possibilities are emerging. Multipolar diplomacy, South-South cooperation, and grassroots transnational solidarity are rising as alternatives in a world long denied inclusive governance. This is not a time to restore a failed status quo. What's needed is a radical rethinking of security, sovereignty, and development, beyond the coercive logic of militarized capitalism. Whether we spiral into catastrophe or move toward a more just world depends on the courage and imagination of those who still believe another future is possible.
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The Mythical Rich Suburban Republican (White) Ladies Who The Democrats Chase But Can Never Find
Considering the origins of this destructive neoliberal mythology may help those who want to challenge it.
Jun 20, 2025
Clintonite Democrats are cooking yet another version of their long-running fantasy of the rich, suburbanite (white) ladies who are more committed to good government and rule of law than to their tax cuts and pissing on poor people as the anchor of the coalition that will defeat Trump and Trumpism.
This fantasy has been their go-to in nearly every presidential election since 1996. No doubt many readers recall what should have been its last stand—the 2016 election when both Senate leader Chuck Schumer and former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell boasted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
Now it has taken the form of lauding reactionary Lynne Cheney as an icon of principle, to an extent that it should not surprise if her name is floated at least as the vice-presidential candidate on a 2028 Democratic ticket. But it also appeared in Rep. Ro Khanna’s reaction to Elon Musk’s apparent break with Trump. California's Khanna, a leader within the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged reaching out to Musk possibly to win him back, despite the fact that he is, well... Elon Musk and that his break with the cosplay Il Duce was provoked by his outrage that Trump’s proposed budget wasn’t draconian enough.
[The mythology] does the ideological work these Democrats want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances.
Commitment to the fantasy showed up as well in the choice of conservative Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) to rebut Trump’s speech to Congress. Slotkin rose to the occasion by praising Ronald Reagan—the person most singly responsible for putting our national politics on the road to Trumpism—four different times. Now Democratic sages like James Carville and Hillary Clinton have floated the likes of Rahm Emanuel, whose approach to building a Democratic congressional majority as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair centered on recruiting Republicans to run as Democrats, as the party’s and country’s savior in 2028.
Even more recently, flamboyant Dallas Mavericks owner and Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban has popped up as a possible contender in a telling “it takes a billionaire” line of argument. And now it seems to have found itself a simulacrum of a social theory/manifesto to rally around in the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson 300-page beacon to the future, Abundance, which the publisher describes as a “once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.”
Klein has been anointed by such paragons of middle-brow ponderousness as David Brooks and Fareed Zakaria, who moreover predicts that “People will recruit [him and Thompson] to run the Democratic Party.” (Must be the little glasses.) The argument, as one might suspect from those authors and endorsers, is warmed over neoliberal bromides and bullshit—just the sort of intervention that would appeal to Clintonite Democrats whose politics has always come down to trying to sell right-wing policies as the limits of a reasonable left.
The Democrats are going to do what they are going to do. One takeaway from Trumpism’s victory—and I know this is a point I’ve made over and over for quite some time—should be that there is no organized left in the United States capable of having any impact on shaping national political debate and, therefore, the primary commitment of leftists as such should be doing the deep organizing work necessary to begin generating such an embedded left. So whether and how the Clintonites can be challenged in the struggle to define the terms of opposition to Trumpism is a matter for liberals to work out within the Democratic Party itself. It may be helpful for that struggle, though, to consider the origins of the fantasy that has for three decades justified dragging the party’s efforts to appeal to a popular constituency away from working-class concerns. (For example, in 2004, John Kerry’s feckless campaign called them “national security moms.”) We know that objective is why the fantasy persists among Democratic neoliberals; it does the ideological work they want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances and enables them to hide behind catering to a bourgeois feminism. Considering its origins, however, may help those who want to challenge it.
The mythical rich suburban (white) moderate Republican woman has a very specific source. It emerged out of the concatenation of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing in the fall of 1991 and the1992 national election. Its root is in the election for the U.S. Senate in Illinois that year. The Democratic incumbent, Alan Dixon, was also on the Senate Judiciary Committee that presided over the Thomas hearing. Dixon promised the George H. W. Bush administration his vote for Thomas in exchange for the administration’s guarantee that it would run only a weak Republican challenger against him. The Republicans kept their end of the bargain. Dixon’s GOP challenger was a relative non-entity, Rich Williamson, who had been an official in the Reagan administration and was from Kenilworth, an especially wealthy enclave within the wealthy Northshore suburbs of Chicago.
But the Democratic primary turned out to be a wild card. In addition to Carol Mosely Braun’s candidacy, Dixon was challenged as well by Al Hofeld, a maverick, self-financing multimillionaire who targeted Dixon and garnered 27% of the vote in the primary. Dixon and Mosely Braun split the remaining vote, and Mosely Braun won the primary with 38% of the total vote. In both the primary and the general election, she benefited from bourgeois feminist backlash against Thomas and Dixon, and she ran well among suburban Republican women against the relative non-entity, Williamson. That was a fluke, the product of very particular circumstances in a very particular moment. It has not been repeated, not even in Mosely Braun’s re-election bid in 1998, which she lost to Republican Peter Fitzgerald.
It has never materialized as an electoral reality. So that’s that.
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