The Backers of the New Democratic Abundance Agenda—and Their Larger Game
Their comeback effort looks a lot like the corrupt Clinton-era movement that shaped the 1990s.
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
In a recent report, Restoration News investigated the agenda that’s likely to set the terms of Democrats’ comeback effort in 2026: Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. Despite its widespread treatment as something new, this agenda is a retread of the agenda Democrats have been running for thirty years. As Restoration News showed, it’s a government-corporate cooperative in the name of “free markets,” prosperity, and environmentalism. Its main focus is the handful of cities where most government-backed corporate monopolies are based. Its real harms in these cities fall on a displaced and disempowered middle and working class.
Digging into the antecedents of Klein’s and Thompson’s vision reinforces this analysis. There is almost exactly twenty-five years of “literature” that predates them, all coming from the same places, all supporting the same policies and all saying the same things. This literature, and the connections of the people peddling it, have their origins in the corporate influencers who dominate Democratic politics—and who are trying to dominate national politics again.
Abundance’s Precursors…
There’s Thomas Friedman, at the New York Times, who wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999) and The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century (2005)—cheerleading the globalization decimating the working class and Middle America.
There’s Richard Florida, at The Atlantic, who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life (2002)—creating heroes for this new America, an elite-educated “creative class” collecting in a small handful of cities.
There’s David Brooks, at the New York Times, with The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011)—teaching this creative class how to “give back” to the Americans they’ve left behind with big donor philanthropy.
These operators have never been Left and they’ve never been Right. They don’t believe in principles: social democracy’s welfare state or popular constitutionalism’s limited government. They believe in power: of a permanent establishment class invested in institutions funded by Washington, D.C., who then run that power through America. They have built their financial profiles around these institutions and power players, who, not coincidentally, are heavily invested in top-down, Abundance-style urban growth.
…and their Connections
Richard Florida does it teaching at NYU, which has taken a bulldozer to lower Manhattan’s middle class neighborhoods in the name of creating spaces for his “creative class.” Between 2001 and 2015, NYU bought up much of the West Village so it could expand its footprint in order to, in its own words, “magnetize the talent class” and “generate more revenue for the city.” The result has been the result in other places where the “creative class’s” perceived needs are put before those of regular people: rising rents, homelessness, and displacement.
David Brooks does it at the Aspen Institute, which, as Restoration News has reported in the past, is honeycombed with Progressive-and-Centrist corporate, media, legal, and academic operators. Aspen’s major funders include the Gates Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation, three of which are based on fortunes earned from cornering deregulated markets; and three of which, as Restoration News has reported in the past, are, along with the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation, key funders of Social Emotional Learning (SEL). SEL is the government-and-nonprofit-backed psychological project that seeks to bring “trauma-informed” education into schools. The sources of SEL were consultant-based strategies to control factory workers a century ago. As Restoration News has shown, the ultimate purpose of SEL is the same as these earlier plays: to create docile and obedient white collar workers for conglomerates. These are the very type of people who will attend NYU and later live in re-developed neighborhoods nearby.
Thomas Friedman’s connections are to the Royal Families of the Gulf States, who have been supplying him with regular inside information for 30 years. The Gulf states’ current modernization projects are a harsher version of what’s recommended in Abundance. They are based on government-backed corporations cutting through the red tape to build new cities around massive "eco-friendly" redevelopments as fast as possible. The results have been catastrophic across an astonishing range of groups and classes: immigrant maids, blue collar workers, white collar workers, indigenous tribes. Disturbingly, these are the same Gulf states with ties to NYU, Aspen, and "growth projects" in America.
The Bloomberg Link and the Elitist Theory of Government…
One American connection that NYU, Aspen, and the Saudis share is Michael Bloomberg: the billionaire financier, three-term New York Mayor, and global philanthropist who backed NYU’s expansion, supports Aspen, and has lent the Saudis much-needed legitimacy by getting behind their publicized push for eco-friendly cities. Bloomberg was an early practitioner of Abundance on the ground: re-zoning 40 percent of New York City beginning in 2002 in the name of climate friendly growth. The upshot, today, as Restoration News has reported, is an unaffordable city that caters to twenty-and-thirty-something-short-stay finance and tech workers. It’s divided between high earners and service workers, billionaires and the homeless; and riddled with crime.
Bloomberg wouldn’t necessarily care. “People aren’t good at describing what is in their own interest,” explained Bloomberg, a decade ago, justifying his approach. “What leaders should do is make decisions as to what they think is in the public interest based on the best advice that they can get, and then try and build a constituency and bring it along.” The idea that people “aren’t good at describing what is in their own interest” is the exact opposite of constitutional democracy. But it’s very much of a piece with Bloomberg’s strategy: top-down development at any cost. It’s not a coincidence, in this light, that Bloomberg not only has heavy ties to China, the epitome along with its ally Saudi Arabia of top-down authoritarian growth, but is a Xi Jinping admirer as well.
…and Democratic Elitists’ Allies on the Right
Tellingly, Bloomberg’s top-down approach is shared by people who advertise themselves as on the Right who are major backers of the Abundance Agenda. One is the journalist and “public intellectual” Richard Hanania. Hanania identified as a conservative beginning in the 2010s but was mainly known for being considered a racist, based on considerable evidence, though not in the way mainstream media encourages us to think of the word: An uneducated person afflicted by hate. Hanania’s racism is based in elitism which he thinks is backed by science. His idea is that IQ alone equals intelligence; that groups with higher IQ are superior decision-makers; that, to achieve their potential, these groups must collect around each other; and that these possessors of “elite human capital” have the right to rule others.
The search for “elite human capital” based on inherited traits leads Hanania down some fairly weird and unattractive roads. He is on record stating, just over a year ago:
People with IQs over 125 are much more likely to report same-sex attraction, and report many more same-sex partners. If you're not gay, it might be because you're too stupid.
This is also Hanania’s approach to opponents of Abundance’s elimination of “red tape,” e.g. public oversight, namely that they’re mentally deficient:
There's a connection between mental illness…and wanting government to study and delay things forever lest anyone make a mistake. An obsession with potential downsides, fear of risk and uncertainty, and an acceptance of social and economic stagnation in the interest of safety.
Hanania’s approach, to adapt a phrase from the pre-2025 era, is how democracy dies: not in darkness, but with elites who think that feedback from regular people doesn’t matter, isn’t real, isn’t worthy of a response, is all “in their heads.”
The Threat to Trump’s Working Class Coalition…
Elitist comments like Hanania’s may sound so far-out that it’s hard to predict them making a difference in politics. But this would be a mistake. Indeed, as Restoration News noted in its previous report on Abundance, the ultimate inspiration for early practitioners of Abundance like Friedman, Florida, Brooks, and Bloomberg was late twentieth century Democrats who pushed for “free trade,” Wall Street conglomeration, and government-backed corporate development. This was the agenda which Democrats adopted in the early Nineties to woo corporate backers—centrists who had gone Republican after 1984— and their media allies. It was an agenda firmly rooted in giving power to elites, e.g. big Democratic donors and their spokespeople—many of whom embraced versions of the “biology-as-destiny” arguments that Abundance proponents like Hanania are making today.
Arguably, this early version of Abundance won Bill Clinton the 1992 election; and, after what they see as a Reagan-style setback at the hands of Trump, Democrats are pivoting (or, in Clinton’s framing, “triangulating”) this way again. Along with this pivot, Democrats are also embracing a commitment to “smarter industry”: Another Nineties repeat, since industrial transformation was such a ubiquitous Democratic concept in that decade that it became a movie trope. This transformation advertises itself as pro-worker but is anything but helpful to workers.
if you want to see the future of manufacturing, you need to go to China, not America anymore . . . but [industries like robotaxies are industries] of the future in which American technology is still more than competitive and can become even more dominant . . . A giant robotaxi industry in America and its ecosystem would surely spin off all kinds of other technologies that can sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act autonomously — all optimized by A.I. — that would be used in hospitals, homes, data centers and myriad factories.
As Friedman notes, Google and a few other government-backed companies have the lock on the technology backing this “industry of the future.” It would be in service of these companies that Democratic policy would now trend. In Friedman’s words, “to accelerate this industry further . . . Democrats would do everything Trump is doing maliciously today — but do it productively.” What this actually means is driving a stake through the heart of Trump’s populist project to appeal to tech billionaires. Friedman proposes:
Big law firms that want to do business with the federal government have to offer a certain number of pro bono hours to any start-up building A.I. or other components for…robotaxi industry.
Would-be immigrants, especially from China and Russia . . . can have an “A.I. visa” and stay as long as they want.
. . . Repurpose [the Department of Education] as the Department of Engineering and Innovation — D.E.I. for short. Has a nice ring to it.
Instead of wrecking . . . the National Institutes of Health . . . we would triple their budgets and encourage more research in robotic cars.
…The Operators it Empowers…
None of this shrinks government power or returns power to regular people or to laborers. Instead it gives more power to an insular and overlapping class of administrators and corporatists with little concern for the security of ordinary Americans. These are people like Tony West: former Vice President Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law, a key adviser on her 2024 presidential campaign, the chief counsel to Uber, and an ardent proponent of government-backed corporations and opponent of the antitrust cases now being undertaken by the Trump Justice Department. They are the pro-monopolist players Democrats have appealed to for thirty years—and are retooling to appeal to again.
This project will likely affect Americans in material ways as well. Indeed, Friedman goes on to suggest, tipping his hand to the real project at play: that robotic car innovation and other similar projects can create a natural flow of wealth (e.g. abundance) for all Americans at such a level that it will justify de-emphasizing basic safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. . This is the exact opposite of what Trump’s core working class voters believe.
The danger is that, between the Abundance pushers’ rejections of identity politics, their occasional well-timed word against crime, and their paeans to targeted industrial growth, the Democrats will not only bring certain liberal billionaires back to their side but also pull the wool over the eyes of some of the electorate—especially upper-middle class voters who switched to Trump over crime, inflation, and immigration.
…and How to Stop It
The way to stop this is for Republicans to say what’s happening: the co-option of a working-class agenda—antitrust, tariffs, pro-social security—by insider players competing for centrist billionaire money and for the benefit of corporations over voters. This argument might turn off better-off voters but it would solidify Republicans’ standing with the working class, its decisive new base. It would also help neutralize the main argument Democrats are currently using against the Trump Administration—that it’s in the pocket of billionaire oligarchs. And it would derail corporate-backed Democrats’ attempt to stop real change in the way this country has been governed for thirty years—the change that President Trump ran, and won, on delivering for voters.