This is a tale of two spaces. One is the cramped, crowded and overloaded 93-acre campus of Georgetown University, including Georgetown Hospital. The other is the lengthy, underappreciated and underutilized 235-acre Glover Archbold Park. The two places directly adjoin each other. It’s long past time that they began a relationship.

The university serves about 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students, 2,000 faculty and 1,500 administrative staff, as well as about 4,000 employees at Georgetown Hospital (plus, on any given day, about 330 in-patients and 1,500 out-patients and all their visiting family members and friends). It is such a teeming place and so crowded with buildings and support facilities that the majority of field space on campus is located on the roofs of buildings.

A park hiding in plain sight

Glover Archbold Park stretches 2.6 miles like a dagger through Northwest DC from the C&O Canal to Van Ness Street. It’s a stream valley park, but so charmless that it doesn’t announce the name of the stream (Foundry Branch) and there is hardly even a sign for the park itself. (It remains incognito while crossing five major roads—Canal Road, Reservoir Road, New Mexico Avenue, Cathedral Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue.) It runs behind hundreds of houses and thousands of apartments but has virtually no amenities and is one of the least-known major parks in the city.

With proper coordination and planning, underused Glover Archbold Park could serve as a green oasis for the overpacked campus and hospital. Conversely, the multitude of students, faculty and visitors could pump some vitality into the underperforming parkland. The right plan for Glover Archbold might not feature ballfields, basketball courts, tennis nets and spraygrounds. But, as a national park, it could certainly use graceful benches, attractive open glens in the forest, groups of great plantings, removal of dead trees, memorable stonework, and a robust signage system. It could be a place where students, patients, faculty, and visitors are eager to spend some beauty-and-relaxation time, which would also make it safer by having “eyes in the greenery.”

It would serve a lot more than Georgetown

Few people realize the true length of Glover Archbold Park. Terminating not far from Nebraska Avenue, it stretches almost all the way to American University. As a connecting linkage, it could even earn the nickname of the “G.U.-A.U. Greenway.” If the rutted and eroded dirt trail running the length of the park were upgraded to the standard of the paved Capital Crescent Trail—or even to the standard of the gravel C&O Canal Towpath—it could draw (and promote good health for) thousands of users. (There would still be plenty of room in the wide park for the joy of bicycle-free hiking paths.)

Glover Archbold Park parallels both Wisconsin Avenue and Foxhall Road. Bicycling on either street is difficult, and there is not much prospect of adding bike lanes. A cycle trail through Glover Archbold Park would be perfect for the many Washingtonians who want to ride but are afraid of Wisconsin Avenue. (Strong cyclists could, of course, still use the street.)

There is a gem buried in there, too

Glover Archbold Park contains one of the most compelling and enchanting historic structures in all of DC—the Foundry Branch Trestle, built in 1896 to serve the old Glen Echo Trolley. Like the rest of the park, this structure is hiding in plain sight, visible every day (but largely ignored) by thousands of drivers on Canal Road near the turn-off to Foxhall Road. The trestle may look decrepit, but so did the High Line in New York City before it was rehabilitated and given superstar status. (An engineering firm reports our structure is healthier than it appears and could be rehabbed for less than $4 million.)

Better than New York’s High Line, the Foundry Trestle would serve a badly needed transportation purpose—getting east-west walkers, runners and cyclists safely from Georgetown to Foxhall Road and the MacArthur Boulevard neighborhood. (Currently, the only way to make that trip is on the narrow and dangerous sidewalk alongside high-speed Canal Road.) Sadly, the trestle is threatened with imminent demolition—largely because people can’t imagine Glover Archbold Park ever being a noteworthy destination.

Significantly, both of these routes—one from the north and one from the west—could serve to reduce some of the automobile commuter traffic that now clogs the campus of Georgetown Hospital and University.

There may be a mechanism to make this all happen—underground

Most Glover Archbold hikers know that there is a large-diameter sewer pipe running the length of Foundry Branch. (Since the park is so eroded, the huge pipe has emerged and is embarrassingly now part of the trail system.) Happily, the DC Water Department is currently in the earliest stages of evaluating that sewer with an eye to modernizing it. Conceivably, the reconstruction of the pipe and the paving of the trail could go hand in hand.

In the early 20th century a proposed street ran the entire length of Foundry Branch. More recently, the former DC Department of Highways planned to build a freeway from the Beltway to the Potomac River through Glover Archbold Park. Fortunately, an earlier generation of environmentalists killed that, along with most of the city’s other proposed interstates.

Today, Glover Archbold is still a quiet, forested oasis, and it would remain so even with an upgraded greenway, just as the Capital Crescent Trail corridor is quiet and green. We’d never want to reinstate a street there, but a trail in an enlivened park with an iconic overhead trestle sure could be nice.

Top image: If you haven’t heard of Glover Archbold Park, it’s not surprising. The only sign announcing the preserve along Reservoir Road gives the wrong name. Image by the author.

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As it happens, I’m sitting in Japan right now, talking to my Canadian friend Tim about American politics. We’re talking about how a Republican President who just won a slim but solid electoral victory is using his questionable mandate to do insane foreign policy stuff and revoke Americans’ civil liberties, who might also use it to gut Social Security, and whose policies might eventually end up tanking the U.S. economy.

Twenty years ago, I was doing the exact same thing. That time, the Republican President that Tim and I were discussing was George W. Bush. Two years after that conversation, Democrats had stymied Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security and taken back control of Congress. Four years later, a Democrat had won the Presidency, and proceeded to end the Iraq War, put the economy back on a more-or-less solid footing, and partially restore America’s damaged international reputation.

How did the Democrats pull that off? Part of it was simply that Bush screwed up so badly, on so many fronts, that Americans eventually got fed up with his whole brand. But part of it was that Democrats knew how to take advantage of the opportunities that Bush’s failures offered them. They stood up for 20th century liberalism — for the stabilizing foreign policy of the pre-2001 period, civil liberties, the New Deal social insurance system, and the fundamentally capitalist U.S. economy.

They did not respond to the madness of the Bush era by unleashing madness of their own. It was a center-left, New Deal liberal resistance, and it succeeded wildly.

Right now, Democrats are having a big internal debate on how to resist Donald Trump. Already, Trump’s approval ratings are starting to sour, as Americans see the economic devastation wrought by his tariffs:

The economy is probably the main driver of this swing. But Americans are also souring on Trump’s foreign policy of bullying Ukraine and cozying up to Russia:

It’s tragic that America had to actually elect Trump in order to realize the dangers of his isolationist ideology. But the realization could give Democrats the opportunity to fight back, as they did successfully against Bush.

There’s just one big problem with that. Unlike two decades ago, the Democrats’ brand has been severely tarnished. A recent CNN poll found that the Democrats’ favorability has fallen to 29% among the American public. In a recent Michigan focus group, most Trump voters felt some buyer’s remorse, but only one out of 13 said they wish they could go back and switch their vote to Harris. People are rapidly souring on Trump, but Democrats so far seem incapable of capitalizing.

Even more frustratingly, there seem to be two different reasons people are mad at Democrats. On one hand, people seem to want the Dems to be more moderate:

And moderate Democrats have been winning elections more easily, including in 2024:

On the other hand, people clearly want the Democrats to stand up to Trump and fight harder to stop him from doing whatever he’s doing:

In fact, these two desires — for Dems to move to the center and for Dems to fight harder against Trump — seem to coexist right alongside each other. Patrick Ruffini has called this “combative centrism”:

To many progressives, this must seem like a contradiction. To fight Trump harder, in their minds, means to stand up more strongly for progressive causes — trans rights, DEI, depolicing, and a more permissive attitude toward asylum-seekers. To compromise on those ideas, by definition, would be to accommodate or compromise with Trump…right?

The flaw in this thinking is that the issues most Americans care most about — the things they want Democrats to fight Trump hardest on — are not necessarily the same things progressive activists care about. The axes of “moderate vs. progressive” and “fight vs. compromise” simply don’t line up.

What kind of things do most Americans want Democrats to fight Trump harder on? One obvious one is the economy. In a recent interview with Eric Levitz — which, by the way, I recommend reading in full — political data scientist David Shor showed a chart from a poll taken in February, about which issues voters trusted Democrats on vs. Republicans:

Note that the issues that voters say are most important to them, and the issues they trust the Republicans more on, are the same issues: the economy, cost of living, and inflation. Voters really care a lot about economic issues, especially related to living costs, and until recently they believed that Trump and the GOP would serve them better on that front. In another recent interview with Ezra Klein (which I also recommend reading in full), Shor shows that economic concerns basically trump everything else for voters:

Trump’s approval began to turn downward when he started willfully smashing the U.S. economy with tariffs. Those tariffs threaten to raise the cost of living even more, while also hurting the economy and the job market. It makes sense that voters would want Democrats to fight back against that economic arson.

There are also a bunch of other issues that might not have figured as strongly back in February, but could be very important if current trends don’t reverse. These include Trump’s defiance of the judiciary and due process, DOGE’s destruction of state capacity, and Elon Musk’s attacks on Social Security. It makes sense that people would want Dems to fight to prevent the President from acting like a dictator, preserve entitlements, and restore the basic functioning of the state.

OK, so what issues do voters want Democrats to moderate on? In two words, the answer is “cultural issues”. I strongly agree with this tweet:

As for which cultural issues Dems need to moderate on, I see four possible answers here:

1. Policing and crime

2. Immigration and border security

3. DEI and race

4. Trans issues

First, policing and crime. Shor’s chart shows that this is a fairly important issue on which voters trust the GOP more. In fact, most Dems moderated on this issue very quickly after 2020; Biden boosted funding for police by hundreds of millions of dollars, and tried to do even more through the legislative process, while most blue cities elected leaders who promised to be tough on crime. This was all good, and probably contributed to the big drop in crime in Biden’s term.

But it wasn’t enough. The long shadow of 2020, when prominent Democrats like Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave their full-throated support to the “defund the police” movement, continues to hang over the Democratic party. Democrats essentially squandered the tough-on-crime reputation that they had built up over the 1990s and 2000s.

In order to restore that reputation, Dems need to be consistently vocal about the crucial importance of police in the nationwide fight against crime. And having prominent Democrats claim that police aren’t the way to fight crime, and that welfare state expansions can do just as good a job, is distinctly unhelpful.

Now on to immigration and border security. This was probably America’s second-most-important issue in 2024 (after the cost of living), and it’s still an issue where Trump gets high marks from the public:

It makes sense that Trump should get Americans’ approval on immigration. Americans like immigration and immigrants, but they really don’t like would-be migrants flouting their laws by entering illegally to request asylum. Since Trump took office, illegal border crossings have plummeted to the lowest levels of the 21st century. Even though Trump has betrayed Americans on the economy, he has delivered at least one thing they actually want: fewer asylum-seekers penetrating the border.

Democrats seem perfectly capable of moderating on immigration; in fact, they already did it in 2024. Biden implemented many Trump-like restrictions on asylum-seeking that he had previously scorned, and the Democrats lashed out at Republicans for blocking a tough border bill. Some progressive activists still believe that migration is a human right, but these appear to a smallish minority. So on immigration, Dems probably just need to continue what they were doing in 2024.

On DEI stuff, I see only mixed evidence that Americans as a whole think the Dems are too extreme. But what’s much more certain is that the pro-DEI rhetoric and actions of the Biden administration ultimately didn’t help win over minority voters. 2024 was no white backlash — instead, white voters voted about the same between 2016 and 2024, while it was minority voters who (partially) abandoned the Dems:

Identity politics — including government promotion of DEI initiatives and programs, and including the whole progressive cultural shift toward an Ibram Kendi-style version of discriminatory “antiracism” as the best medicine for racism — just isn’t winning black or Hispanic votes. It’s time to scratch that approach and try something else. In fact, I’m pretty optimistic that Dems will be able to do that, given the rapid success of the pushbacks against DEI programs and mandatory DEI statements, which began well before Trump was elected.

Trans issues, I think, will be the big sticking point. On one hand, it’s the cultural issue where Americans seem to most strongly oppose the progressive agenda. On most policy questions, Americans are unfavorable toward the positions favored by trans activists. And on essentially all of these questions, they have become even more opposed to the activist position over the last few years:

On some polls, the percent of Americans who oppose trans athletes in women’s sports is much higher even than this.

But on the other hand, most progressives have come to see the trans movement as a civil rights movement — a struggle for equal rights for a marginalized group. Civil rights movements are fundamentally not about what’s popular, but about what’s morally right. No one wants to be the modern equivalent of the “white moderate” that Martin Luther King, Jr. excoriated in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”.

This means that although it might seem like trans issues are small potatoes compared to things like DEI and policing, they’re actually a much harder nut to crack. No one thinks anarchy in the streets and mandatory diversity statements are fundamental civil rights — they’re just policy ideas that some progressive activists thought would help black people. As soon as it became apparent that black people wanted more cops on the street and diversity trainings don’t help black workers get ahead, it became possible to ditch those ideas while still remaining fully committed to the goal of helping black people in the U.S.

Trans issues are different, because they involve questions of fundamental rights. Does a kid with a penis really have the right to change in a girl’s locker room, just by identifying as a woman? Does a 12-year-old really have the right to decide whether to take puberty blockers without parental consent? And so on. The nation, so far, says “no”, while activists say “yes”. And there’s no law of the Universe saying that those two positions will ever converge.

So I predict that while trans issues might not seem to affect nearly as many people as other cultural issues, and while they don’t particularly seem like matters of life and death, they will continue dividing the Democratic party for many years.

But in any case, it’s clear that fighting hard against Trump means very different things to progressive activists than it does to the general public. For progressives, cultural issues are the thing to fight for in America, and to moderate on these would mean surrender:

But for most voters, there are a lot more important things to fight for than depolicing, DEI statements, or permissive asylum policy. Trump isn’t just threatening the vision of social progress that many on the left entertained in the 2010s; he’s threatening the very civil liberties, national security, and prosperity that make progress possible.

“Combative centrism” is more than a political tactic; it’s based on deeply rooted values. It’s the idea that the fundamental tenets of 20th century liberalism — free speech, due process of law, democracy, and so on — are good and valuable things worth defending from regimes like Donald Trump’s. That was the strong platform that allowed the Democrats to plant their feet and topple Bushism in the 2000s; it is just as strong of a platform today.

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“We aspire to more than parceling out the present.” — Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

“It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” — Deng Xiaoping

I’ve been waiting a long time for this book. Late in 2021, Ezra Klein wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting”, in which he called for a new “supply-side progressivism”. Four months later, Derek Thompson wrote an article in The Atlantic titled “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems”, in which he called for an “abundance agenda”. Many people quickly recognized that these were essentially the same idea. Klein and Thompson recognized it too, and teamed up to co-author a book that would serve as a manifesto for this new big idea. Three years later, Abundance has hit the stores. It’s a good book, and you should read it.

The basic thesis of this book is that liberalism — or progressivism, or the left, etc. — has forgotten how to build the things that people want. Every progressive talks about “affordable housing”, and yet blue cities and blue states build so little housing that it becomes unaffordable. Every progressive talks about the need to fight climate change, and yet environmental regulations have made it incredibly difficult to replace fossil fuels with green energy. Many progressives dream about the days when government could accomplish great things, and post maps of imaginary high-speed rail networks crisscrossing the country, yet various progressive policies have hobbled the government’s ability to build infrastructure.

This is a story that many center-left commentators and researchers have been zeroing in on for about a decade now. I myself have written several posts in this vein. It’s also the theme of a recent book called Why Nothing Works, which is on my short list to read — in fact, some reviewers view Abundance and Why Nothing Works as companion volumes. (I strongly recommend this review of both books by Mike Konczal.)

Why have people been zeroing in on the idea of abundance right now, when these problems were already getting severe two or three decades ago? I think there are four basic motivating forces that have all come together at the same time.

First, there’s the housing shortage, and the YIMBY movement that has arisen to fight it. The orthodox progressive alternative — putting ever more onerous requirements on developers to subsidize rental properties, while throwing more public money at the problem — has failed spectacularly. And the anti-gentrification movement, which believes that building new housing raises rents, is simply wrong about how the world works. Economics is what it is, and the only way to make housing more affordable is to build a lot more of it.

Second, there was the experience of Covid. The U.S.’ initial failure to provide its people with enough Covid tests or face masks left the widespread impression of a dysfunctional and failing nation, but the successful effort to create and distribute vaccines very rapidly created a burst of hope that America’s dysfunction could be overcome.

Third, there’s the challenge of climate change. The average American doesn’t place a high priority on climate issues, but progressives do, and the 2010s were filled with grand plans like the Green New Deal that promised big government action to replace fossil fuels with more sustainable technologies. That effort hasn’t entirely failed, but it has proven much harder going than expected. Gallingly for progressives, the biggest thing blocking the greening of American energy hasn’t been the fossil fuel lobby or small-government conservatives, but progressive environmental laws that have allowed NIMBYs to sue solar plants and transmission lines into oblivion.

And finally, there’s the challenge of China, which Americans of both parties have (very belatedly) recognized as a major threat to their way of life. The contrast between China’s ability to build anything and everything with incredible speed and massive scale, and America’s seeming inability to build anything at all, has provided a terrifying wake-up call for progressives and conservatives alike.

Klein and Thompson discuss all of these challenges in detail. Of the five concrete items they want Americans to have more of — housing, green energy, transportation, technological innovation, and health care — four are clearly downstream of those pressing recent challenges.

Why does America not have enough housing, green energy, transportation, technological innovation, or health care? The typical progressive explanation is to blame lack of funding and the obstructionism of small-government conservatives. But while Klein and Thompson do acknowledge that this is sometimes part of the problem, they marshal powerful evidence that an even bigger obstacle is progressives getting in their own way.

Even when the checks do get written, the things progressives want tend not to get built. And even when they do, the cost ends up being so exorbitant that the money doesn’t go very far. California’s high-speed rail, hyped so much over decades and given billions of dollars in funding, still doesn’t exist. “Affordable” (i.e. subsidized) housing often costs half again as much to build as privately built housing. Biden’s programs to build nationwide systems of electric vehicle chargers and rural broadband ended up producing almost zero chargers and almost zero broadband.

Meanwhile, Texas, a red state known for its fiscal conservatism and its libertarian attitudes toward private business, has blown past blue states like California in terms of both green energy and affordable housing — a galling result for any progressive who can bear to look at the data. It’s specifically the well-funded blue-state and Democratic party initiatives that can’t seem to get things done.

Klein and Thompson identify three big categories of progressive policy — all of which were enacted in the early 1970s — that stymie progressive goals.

The first is procedural environmental laws. Instead of just making laws that say “don’t build things that encroach on endangered species”, like the developed nations of Europe and Asia do, America also makes laws that allow anyone and everyone to sue developers to force them to prove in court that they’re following all the relevant substantive laws. This legal requirement — which typically only applies to developments that receive government support — adds huge delays, uncertainties, and costs to most projects, even those that don’t end up getting sued.

The second progressive own goal is contracting requirements for government projects. Sometimes these take the form of requirements that the government use minority-owned or woman-owned contractors. When racial discrimination of this sort is outlawed (such as by a California ballot proposition in 1996), progressives often turn to requirements they think will accomplish the same goal, such as mandates to use small business contractors. But this adds vast amounts to the price tag, because it prevents contractors from achieving the scale needed to drive down costs. Other contracting requirements add costs directly, by forcing developers to provide various expensive community benefits in exchange for government support.

The third thing progressives get wrong is outsourcing. You might think progressives would like to have big-government bureaucrats do everything, but in fact they tend to outsource government functions, either to progressive nonprofits or to consultants. This ends up adding lots of costs, because nonprofits and consultants don’t have any incentive to save the taxpayer money.

Notice how all three of these progressive policies end up hobbling government more than they hobble the private sector. Procedural environmental laws typically only apply to projects that the government has a hand in. Contracting requirements apply specifically to government procurement. And outsourcing robs the government of the state capacity that it needs to be effective.

American progressivism has the reputation of supporting big government, but in practice it often just tries to use government as a pass-through entity to write checks to various “stakeholders”, while preventing it from actually being able to do anything other than write checks. This is a problem that European and Asian countries, with their powerful bureaucracies, simply don’t have to nearly the same extent. America’s progressivism is uniquely libertarian in nature, and its conception of the proper role of the state is uniquely legalistic instead of bureaucratic.

Basically, Klein and Thompson call for a return to the older tradition of a progressive state that gets things done instead of just paying people out — more FDR and less Ralph Nader. But in doing so, they also articulate an alternative vision of political economy — a fundamentally different way of thinking about policy debates in America.

Currently, most American policy debates are framed in terms of ideology — small government versus big government. Instead, Klein and Thompson, like the YIMBY movement that inspired them, want to reframe debates in terms of results. Who cares if new housing is social housing or market-rate housing, as long as people have affordable places to live? Why should cutting burdensome regulation and hiring more bureaucrats be seen as alternatives, instead of complementary approaches? And so on.

This is only one way that Klein and Thompson would have us focus on outputs instead of on inputs. Progressives love to focus on the number of dollars the government spends on high speed rail or green energy; Klein and Thompson would have us focus instead on how much actually gets built as a result of that spending. Progressives obsess over specifying which procedures government and the private sector have to follow whenever they build something; Klein and Thompson would rather we focus on the outcomes instead.

Interestingly, this reminds me a little of the debate over corporate culture in Japan. Traditionally, Japanese managers focus on how many hours their employees are working, instead of how much work they’re actually getting done. The result is astonishingly low levels of white-collar productivity. In recent years, there has been a push to shift to a more results-oriented culture. Klein and Thompson are essentially arguing for something similar in the U.S., but for government instead of big business.

But in any case, this is a huge idea, and one that America desperately needs in these trying times. For half a century, we assumed that America was this golden goose — the greatest industrial nation in the world, blah blah — that would reliably pump out massive amounts of stuff, and that we were all essentially just the custodians of this cornucopia. The fetish for ideology, for proceduralism, and for numbers on a page all reflect this bedrock assumption. But over that half century we forgot about feeding the goose, and now we’re waking up to the fact that we’re not the greatest industrial nation in the world anymore, and all the rules we devised for divvying up that bounty are worse than useless when the bounty dries up.

There is much work still to be done in order to explain the new output-oriented perspective. It has been a long time since progressives thought in those terms. You can see this in some of the critiques that are already being leveled against Klein and Thompson’s book. For example, law professor Zephyr Teachout expresses confusion about whether Klein and Thompson want big-government or small-government solutions:

[T]he vision they lay out could either fit a broad deregulatory agenda, like that of the “shock doctors” of the 1990s, or an FDR vision of rural electrification: both were driven by a hunt for vitality…[I]t would be very easy to take their critique as a muffled call for deregulation writ large; if they are not careful, the ambiguity could be used by big financial interests to make abundance a bible for a Ronald Reagan–style deregulatory juggernaut…There’s some language that casually evokes economies of scale hinting at a Chicago School efficiency and consumer welfare framework of economic productivity, but also some praise of Bidenomics, which directly confronted and rejected the efficiency paradigm…I still can’t tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore and correct (we need zoning reform) or nontrivial and deeply regressive (we need deregulation) or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential.

This confusion vividly reveals how accustomed Teachout is to thinking of policy debates in terms of ideological procedure — big versus small government, industrial policy vs. deregulation, Chicago School versus antitrust, etc. She’s sitting there puzzling over the color of Deng Xiaoping’s cat.

Klein and Thompson’s answer to Teachout’s question is that it’s the wrong question. If deregulation produces more housing, then deregulate. If building more social housing produces more housing, then build more social housing. Why not both? The point is not what legal philosophy you embrace in order to get more housing. The point is that you get the housing.

Progressivism should not be a ritual to be followed; it should be a tool to getting real stuff that makes life better for the middle class and the working class of America. That is the big insight at the core of Abundance, and of the movement behind it. And it’s an insight that legalistic, theory-oriented progressives will take a long time to understand, if they ever do.

But here we get to my main criticism of Klein and Thompson’s book. While they do a good job of explaining their philosophy of government, they are often vague and overly nonconfrontational when it comes to the ideological motivation behind that philosophy.

Throughout their book, Klein and Thompson take great pains to specify that the goals of progressive obstructionism are good, and that they only disagree with the methods. It’s littered with statements like “Every one of these is a worthy goal,” and “Each individual [obstructionist] decision is rational.” But is this really true? If San Francisco outsources critical city functions to politically friendly nonprofits, is that actually a worthy goal, or just corrupt? If federal funding is saddled with onerous reporting requirements that prevent anything from getting done, is that rational, or just plain stupid?

Klein and Thompson never spare the opportunity to pull a punch. I suspect this is because of the personalities of the authors. Thompson — who, I should mention, is the man who got me my first paid op-ed gig, at The Atlantic — is the nicest of nice guys, and not the type to bash the opposition. Klein can be a little more hard-edged at times, but ultimately he’s a big-tent coalition builder — the kind of guy who ends the meeting by saying “OK, so we all know what we need to do.”

But in this case, as at times in the past, Klein has brought a gavel to a knife fight. Progressives didn’t just adopt anti-growth attitudes because they were reacting to the excesses of Robert Moses. Anti-growth attitudes are motivated by more than just NIMBYism and fear of change. There are deep class resentments involved.

Deng Xiaoping — perhaps the most pro-abundance leader of all time — understood this all too well. He famously declared:

Our policy is to let some people and some regions get rich first, in order to drive and help the backward regions, and it is an obligation for the advanced regions to help the backward regions.

He understood that unleashing growth would lead to a few people and places getting spectacularly rich. And he offered the same bargain that abundance liberals in the West have always offered — redistribution as a palliative for inequality.1

To some, that deal is not good enough. Leftists believe that “every billionaire is a policy failure”, even if the policies that allow a few people to be billionaires result in the masses getting cheap food and clothing. The Warrenite progressives and labor-left types who are stepping up to criticize Abundance are not so extreme, but it’s clear that a lot of their skepticism comes from concern over the relative power of different social classes.

In her book review, Zephyr Teachout offers antitrust as an alternative to the abundance agenda:

If we just…took on the real bureaucratic behemoths of today—the private equity cartels and the monstrous platform monopolies like Google and Meta—we would unlock far more innovation and creativity and vitality…My view then, and now, is that to transform a bloated corporate feudal system into a dynamic one, we need to break up feudal power[.]

Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, who have another negative review2 of Abundance (also in the Washington Monthly), also label it as a “centrist” alternative to anti-corporatism:

[A]bundance liberals are almost completely silent on the alliance between corporate behemoths and antigovernment politicians that is the biggest threat to the world of plenty they envision, not to mention the republic.

Why are all these critics of abundance liberalism talking nonstop about monopolies and corporate power? It’s not as if Klein and Thompson think antitrust is bad. Part of it is just because these are Elizabeth Warren types who are ensconced in a very small elite thought-bubble, who have somehow convinced themselves that A) bashing corporations is a populist crusade that will lead people flooding into the streets,3 and B) breaking up Google and Meta would somehow make the average American rich.4 That’s part of it.

But part of it has got to be class resentment. There are a number of elite progressives who simply don’t like the idea that in an America of growth and abundance, a few techbros would be very rich. Redistribution isn’t enough to make this bargain palatable — rich entrepreneurs must be cut off from the sources of their wealth, through antitrust, regulation, wealth taxes, or whatever tools are available.

Abundance liberalism just doesn’t care about that stuff; zero-sum status struggles like that are simply not a goal. What matters to the abundance agenda is that regular people — the middle class, the working class, and the poor — have a less onerous life. If that means rich people have to give up some of their wealth, then fine, but if it means that rich people get richer, that’s also fine.

Klein and Thompson either didn’t come prepared for this ideological fight, or made a conscious decision to avoid it. But it’s probably unavoidable. In order to make the abundance agenda the new “political order” of America, its proponents are going to have to make a forceful ideological argument for why enriching the average American is Job #1, rather than one job among many.

Those arguments are out there. They include humanitarian appeals, and appeals to dignity. They include appeals to national unity and solidarity, and the idea of an America where anyone can get ahead. They include the idea that abundance is a form of freedom, and that all Americans deserve that freedom. At times in the 20th century, these arguments won out over those who were more concerned with class warfare and power than with material well-being.

But these arguments must be made forcefully, instead of quietly relegated to the background. If abundance liberals are going to win, they need to get tough.

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A 115-year-old religion, founded by a Belgian metal worker, refuses to explain itself.

MARCH 20, 2025

PHOTO: An Antoinist temple in Seraing, Belgium. (By the author)

The last thing a metal worker from Liège is expected to do is found a new religion. Yet that is just what Louis-Joseph Antoine did, in Jameppe-sur-Meuse, Belgium, in 1910. Antoinism, his namesake religion, is not nearly as popular today as it was in its early years — but to its latest followers, it remains as current as ever.

Bernard (not his real name) is an Antoinist healer, a sort of parish priest for the movement. He is elegant, slightly balding and quick to smile. His pseudonym is not intended to protect his identity, but to preserve the discretion about Antoinism required by his Council. Other Antoinists declined interviews, citing an unwillingness to proselytize. “Recruitment is not part of our statutes, writings, or belief system,” Bernard explained to me. “We do not wish to conquer the world or to tell people how to do better than they already are.” Antoine himself is said to have destroyed 8,000 booklets he had created to spread his word.

This attitude has helped to maintain an aura of mystery around Antoinism. But it may also have stymied its future. The insistence that the secrets and benefits of Antoinism can’t be explained, but must be experienced, does not have the same appeal today as it did at the religion’s inception. At the height of its popularity, Antoinism had 31 temples; today, only 10 are still functioning. For Bernard, the question has become: How to keep alive a faith that speaks to only a few? 

The reach of Antoinism in its heyday belied its humble beginnings. Antoine was a former miner, metal worker, soldier in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, blacksmith, doorman and greengrocer, among other professions. When he died in 1912, two years after founding Antoinism, his funeral was attended by 15,000 people.

Contemporary accounts describe Antoine as a pious person, initially committed to Catholicism, then to spiritualism. After discovering his gifts as a healer, he held up to 150 individual consultations per day, free of charge. In addition to prayer and magnetism, Antoine sometimes prescribed certain drugs or herbal teas. Since he was not a licensed healer, this was forbidden, and he was fined 78.25 Belgian francs. He then landed on faith as the only tool for healing mind and body.

At the height of its popularity, Antoinism had 31 temples; today, only 10 are still functioning. For Bernard, the question has become: How to keep alive a faith that speaks to only a few? 

According to French sociologist Anne-Cécile Bégot, who wrote a doctoral thesis on Antoinism, this mysterious character with an unusually long beard combined already-existing religious doctrines with things he had learned from difficult personal experiences, including accidentally killing a friend during a war training exercise and the loss of his very young son. Antoine also suffered from chronic stomach pain and developed his own methods for treating it. “The notion of flow, which we can compare to the aura or to karma, is a type of spiritual energy,” she said, “a symbolic support system onto which the faithful can project various scenarios depending on their individual needs.” 

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I met with Bernard twice; after that, his Council put a stop to our interviews. He said he understood why the Council demands discretion. Our first meeting took place in October at his mother’s house, a three-story home nestled behind three small plane trees in a working-class neighborhood outside Liège, around 5 miles from where Antoine founded his religion. There was no coffee; he offered me sparkling water. 

By the time we met, Bernard had identified as an Antoinist for about 10 years. His job is to conduct services at the temple. Several times a week, he gives a reading from what he calls Antoine’s “10 foundational principles” and takes care of the “Operation,” the “release the flow,” at the temple. He also meets with about 10 followers for individual consultations. “Antoinism has allowed me to find personal balance,” he said. Until he found the religion, he’d spent much of his life searching for answers in books from all over the world. He ended up finding them just around the corner.

“Antoinism can’t really be explained,” he told me. “It must be lived.” 

To explain the Antoinist doctrine, Bernard pulled out pen and paper. He warned me that he is no great artist, and that the religion does not work miracles. “But it can soothe the soul,” he said. “Human illnesses develop because of our way of life.” While talking, he doodled circles traversed by arrows. “Individuals evolve through flow, which I define as energy or thought, like fish in water. If they use flow to be less affected by what touches them, all the better. If they can come up with a selfless thought, they’ll be able to leave their environment and reach an even more detached state, where they will no longer be affected at all.” Bernard, who has a passion for martial arts, mentioned the Belgian martial arts champion and actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. “He’s a clown, but also an international champion; so I think he’s not totally wrong when he says you have to live in the moment and let things come to you rather than try to change them.” Antoinism, then, encourages people to evolve spiritually through illness to reach a sort of salvation. How exactly? Bernard does not know. “Antoinism can’t really be explained,” he told me. “It must be lived.” 

For a long time, Bernard forged his own way, without following any particular path. He wanted to give meaning to his life, get out from under the yoke of an overbearing father and come to terms with disturbing experiences from his past. At his father’s deathbed, he told me he sensed three entities ready to carry away the dying man. Previously, when he was about 20 years old, he’d felt a sudden pain in his back, as if someone had plunged a sword into it. For six months, no one could find the source of this strange pain. “Then I realized that if I convinced myself that an aspirin could help, I’d be back on my feet within 20 minutes. But if I took the aspirin while angry or in a hurry, nothing happened, even if I took a whole bottle. What mattered was my acceptance of a situation and my ability to modify what pain is.” He said this attitude toward illness saved him several decades later, when he was diagnosed with cancer. Initially, he’d been so angry he’d wanted to kill his doctor. But then he opened himself up to acceptance. “Somehow, I was already thinking the same way I am now. It’s as if I’d always been an Antoinist without knowing it.”

“There was no exam, level to reach, or obligation to go to Rome on bended knee. I thought I needed a diploma at least, but the brother told me to just follow my thoughts.”

He didn’t encounter Antoinism until the early 2000s, when he experienced the triple shock of a breakup, a move and a change in jobs. Then, after surviving another bout of cancer, Bernard started to look for new ways of thinking. He took long walks and one day, he passed an Antoinist temple. It was open, so he went in. “No one was there, I didn’t understand anything, but I liked the place and felt good there.” Without really knowing why, he went back the following day. “Little by little, I started to feel reassured, especially about my breakup,” he said. 

One night, just before 7 p.m., a brother invited him to take over the reading in the service. Bernard had no idea what to do, but there was only a handful of people in the congregation, so he stepped up to the dais. That’s where he had a revelation. “Suddenly, I found myself on a cloud, which is another type of flow. It was extraordinary.” Everything took off from there. Bernard received a frock (a sort of black cassock), though he was not required to wear it. He agreed to lead the Operation and consult with the faithful. “There was no exam, level to reach, or obligation to go to Rome on bended knee. I thought I needed a diploma at least, but the brother told me to just follow my thoughts.”

After Antoine had his revelation of the founding principles of the religion in 1906, Jemeppe-sur-Meuse became a sort of Antoinist Vatican. The temple there is a building in the neo-classical style, with touches of Art Nouveau. At the back of the large main room, the words “Antoinist cult” are inscribed on the black wall, along with the schedule of readings and Operations and a lecture on faith as the only means of salvation, all in the same typeface as Hergé’s Tintin comic books. 

One Sunday morning, as I pushed open the door, I saw about two dozen faithful — a far cry from the 300,000 followers in Belgium that the religion gained in its early years. The few 30-somethings at the service weren’t doing much to bring down the average age. Bernard stepped forward and began to recite the “10 principles of the Father,” which include the idea that charity is a duty, and that people ought to love their enemies in preparation for future lives (reincarnation is part of the Antoinist belief system). More generally, the cult invites everyone to focus on themselves and to accept what may come by avoiding materialism as much as possible. As Bernard explained, this can be done by “being a responsible citizen able to resist the temptation of consumerism”; by meditating, which is “a free, communal process that runs counter to our fast-moving culture”; and by adopting vegetarianism, “a healthy diet in a time of climate change.”

After a long silence, Bernard left the room, dutifully followed by the faithful. Some lined up outside a small room, hoping for a private audience to confess some trouble or ask a question. Bernard told me he appreciates these intimate moments. “People come and tell me everything, sometimes jumbled like in a big soup. They tell their doctor about physical pain, but here it’s different. They want to be reassured. Some are hoping for a magical formula that will make them beautiful, great, rich, and strong. Others ask for the next lottery numbers. I let myself channel whatever comes to me. Then the flow emerges, and I try to transmit what I sense. That’s all I can say.” 

Bernard reminds people to continue seeing their doctors, but he admitted that some still cling to the idea that sacred healers are above science. According to Anne-Cécile Bégot, Antoinism’s early popularity was due in part to episodes of unexplained healing, including the recovery of a factory worker with a stomach ache and Antoine reportedly saving a herd of cows from a mysterious death. The religion’s working-class origins also helped it succeed: “Many saw Antoinism as an escape from traditional medicine, Catholicism and their bourgeois associations,” Bégot told me. 

“Today, very few followers reject conventional medicine,” Guillaume Chapheau, an Antoinist from Lille who moved to Dortmund and who blogs about the movement, told me. “Antoinists believe in the power of thought to help doctors make the correct diagnosis.” Many followers, upon falling ill or while searching for meaning, are especially eager to find moral support in Antoinist leaders. Their practice is a sort of psychoanalysis: There will always be someone at an Antoinist temple willing to listen without judgement. An outside perspective can suggest a new way to approach a question or problem. 

They tell their doctor about physical pain, but here it’s different. They want to be reassured. Some are hoping for a magical formula that will make them beautiful, great, rich, and strong. Others ask for the next lottery numbers.

Standing in the temple’s entrance, his consultations over, Bernard smiled at the thought of his role as communal ear. “I love how Antoinism isn’t really a religion, but a concept of life that offers a freedom of worship and a way of constructing belief that are terribly modern,” he said. He mentioned that Antoinists don’t have to convert and be baptized if they don’t want to. And because there are no rites or rituals, there’s an “absence of exclusivity in worshipping experiences, and [a] simplicity,” he said. Another “modern” aspect of the religion is its gender equality, which was preached by Antoine himself. “Our ideas are inherently human: We don’t judge one another, we don’t moralize, we don’t claim to know the truth, and we welcome everyone, whether they are Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, gay or anything else.”

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Bernard is almost constantly surrounded by others. He only finds calm and solitude in his small workshop, at the back of his garden. It is heated by a wood-burning stove and full of all manner of oddities: an old basketball net, welding helmets, a host of electrical cords, coasters, an impressive anvil in the middle of the room. Bernard is an amateur craftsman, as was his father. A few years ago, he even created his first masterpiece, using objects found on old battlefields. As we sat before a large chest with the engraving “practice makes perfect, my son,” Bernard drew a parallel between craftsmanship and Antoinism. “If it’s made well, people will be automatically drawn to it. Silent, quality religious practice costs less and yields better results than when you tell the world you’ve found the truth.” 

Even so, Antoine’s theories haven’t proved appealing to today’s more informed and educated public. “We have a slightly backward side,” Bernard admitted. “We don’t leave much room for questioning and ideological innovation. And it’s hard for people to invest in something without knowing too much about how it works. It doesn’t sell very well.” 

Although the religion is recognized by the state as a foundation that provides a public good, it does not receive subsidies. Belgian law dictates that it can’t reinvest the profits from the sale of its temples — some have been reconverted into housing, others into art galleries and a mosque — into the preservation of its remaining 10 structures. The future of Antoinism seems dim. “It’s okay if the movement declines,” Bernard assured me. As Antoine said, “there may only be only one person left in the end, but from there, everything will begin anew.” Perhaps that person is Bernard.

This article was first published in the Belgian investigative outlet Médor.

✺ Published in “Issue 26: Gospel” of The Dial