MAGA & Abundance: Are the Imaginary All-Powerful Leftists In The Room With Us Right Now?
The ideologies claim imaginary leftists are to blame for their political failings. Built on this dubious foundation, both movements are collapsing.
The best way to understand the modern Republican Party is as a right-wing counter-revolution to an imagined left-wing revolution. While most fascist projects arose to challenge a leftwing victory, such as Francisco Franco's overthrow of the socialist Second Spanish Republic, the GOP didn’t wait for an opportunity. They created one. Aided by his media allies, Donald Trump convinced his base that he wrested control of the United States from woke Marxists, which justifies his heinous policies, authoritarian desires, and long history of violent sexual crimes. According to Trump World, recession-indicating job numbers are the fault of a “Biden-appointed” statistician, violent deportations are necessary to reverse ‘Democrats letting in millions of illegals,’ and Trump’s name isn’t on the Epstein List, but if it is, it’s because Obama or Biden or Clinton or Comey or all of them together put it there. No matter what happens, if it’s bad, the party with trifecta control (plus the Supreme Court) refuses to take ownership of their glaring failures and reflexively points its finger to the immediate left, accusing centrist Democrats of hamstringing the brave, strapping president.
This isn’t surprising, as left-punching is reactionary bread and butter. The Nazis entered politics claiming Jewish-Marxists (The German Social Democratic Party) ‘sold out’ Germany by negotiating a poor treaty ending WWI. Used first by Ronald Reagan and now by Trump, the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ speaks to a mythical American greatness that was eroded by civil rights, labor protections, and women being legally allowed to open bank accounts without their husbands’ permission. While it's unsurprising that the Republican Party crescendoed with a decade-long temper tantrum whining about how their failings are the fault of Democrats, I am surprised that centrist Democrats have adopted Trump’s worldview. On economics, foreign policy, and now cultural issues, modern centrism operates on the same flawed belief as MAGA: the lack of success can’t be blamed on the architects of the political program, but on those immediately to their left on the political spectrum.
While Trump can point to Joe Biden and Barack Obama as culprits of his demise, the fact that the left holds little power in the U.S. forces the center to get creative. Much like Trump blames the shadowy deep state for sabotaging him, centrists blame ‘The Groups,’ their term for environmental organizations, labor unions, Girl Scout troupes, and any other grassroots political or community association that can plausibly take the burden of failed Democratic governance off Democrats’ shoulders. One common accusation against The Groups™️ is that they incentivized Democrats to attack Trump’s draconian immigration policies. This was theorized to be bad politics, but Trump’s immigration approval has been falling since he took office, so I think the centrists were wrong here.1 Cue: 'How dare The Groups mislead us into saying the Groups were misleading us!’
Left-blaming isn’t new to Democratic politics, but the simultaneous defeat of Kamala Harris and the revelation of a new centrist Holy Scripture (Abundance) has kicked it into overdrive and indoctrinated the entire Democratic Party with the same delusion shared by Trump: “We’re great, but the people immediately to my left on the political spectrum are sabotaging it!” This mythos is so ingrained into the Democratic political consultant class that it’s even used far from the public eye. Speaking at a $2.5 million fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee, former President Barack Obama echoed the left-bashing for high home costs, seemingly forgetting he was in the White House with strong majority control of Congress following the largest housing market collapse in living memory.2
‘There’s been, I gather, some argument between the left of the party and people who are promoting the quote-unquote abundance agenda. Listen, those things are not contradictory. You want to deliver for people and make their lives better? You've got to figure out how to do it. I don’t care how much you love working people. They can’t afford a house because all the rules in your state make it prohibitive to build. And zoning prevents multifamily structures because of NIMBYism. I don’t want to know your ideology, because you can’t build anything. It does not matter.”
Obama’s ire is the core worldview of the Abundance Agenda, which is now essentially the Democratic Party platform. The book launched a donor movement based on the theory that deregulation was necessary to expand access to housing, healthcare, infrastructure, energy, and transportation, particularly in blue cities and states. As this raises the obvious question of why Democrats, whose longtime control of these municipalities gives them their ‘blue’ character, weren’t already doing this, the authors and their political allies (consciously or subconsciously) took a page from the MAGA playbook and blamed those standing to their left. Suddenly, their explanation appeared: ‘We don’t have Abundance because progressives have stopped us from doing it!’ While the specter of imaginary leftist handcuffing sold a lot of books and resonated with politicians searching for a capital-friendly way out of post-election darkness, it has left the Abundance project—and by extension, the centrist establishment of the Democratic Party—on shaky ground.
The left-blaming thesis encountered immediate trouble when the Abundance authors were forced to retract their public claim that President Biden’s high-speed broadband program was hindered by progressive over-regulation. In reality, BEADs, as the program was called, was designed by corporate internet providers who made the program untenable from the start in hopes of preserving unserved internet markets open for future profit.3 Although this should have given the authors pause and motivated them to revisit their thesis, they declined and continued pushing the myth of systemic progressive blocking, to the point where blaming leftists is now the Get Out of Jail Free card for centrist shortcomings. As the Democratic Party is polling at a historic low, despite having gained members since March, the blaming of invisible leftist boogeymen is becoming more prolific and erratic with every passing day.
A particularly striking example of centrists adopting Trump’s strategy arose in last week’s rhetorical heel turn on Gaza. Former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who commanded American foreign policy from 2021 to 2025, insidiously blamed college protestors for the mass starvation in Gaza, while Biden Administration advisor
struck a similar tone. Accusing progressives of gumming up highway construction is one thing, but blaming them for immiserating Gaza, which they were slandered as antisemites for trying to stop, is a brain-melting take on par with Donald Trump’s claim of 2020 election rigging.
Let’s stay on Mr. Abundance a bit. I focus on Matt’s work and statements because he’s a mouthpiece for the Democratic establishment. As he was bullish that Kamala Harris’ centrist, pro-Israel campaign was the optimal path to victory, her defeat drove him and the rest of political class, in search of an excuse to save his reputation and influence.4 When Abundance came along, Matt jumped at the chance to blame leftists for the center’s failure, which has led him and his friends to some delusional political prescriptions. For example, Matt recently wrote an article for the Niskanen Center (an offshoot of the libertarian CATO organization) arguing that Abundance should recognize culture — not economics — as the primary electoral issue.
‘Any serious analysis of Democrats’ electoral struggles needs to center considerations that are outside the scope of abundance. Socioeconomically downscale secular white voters — later joined by a swathe of African-American and Hispanic voters — flipped to Trump because after Obama’s reelection the Republicans moved to the center on Medicare while Democrats shifted left on topics like guns, crime, and immigration while greatly elevating the salience of race and identity issues and running one candidate laden with decades of baggage and another who had clearly aged out of the job.’
For the record, the Republicans didn’t ‘move to the center’ on Medicare, nor did Democrats ‘shift left’ on immigration. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cuts Medicare by up to half a trillion dollars, and Kamala Harris quite famously tried to run to Trump’s right on the immigration by accusing him of killing the bipartisan border bill.56 Poor political analysis aside, it’s a sign of the Abundance Agenda’s dubious thesis that its leading advocates are moving away from cost-of-living issues (which was the entire substance of the book), and towards reactionary culture wars while preserving the Abundance banner. After all, a socialist recently trounced ten more-moderate Democrats (including multiple Abundance endorsees) with a cost-of-living platform in New York City, one of the very cities Abundance claimed its program would uplift. Given that, and the continued free fall of Democratic approval with Abundanists at the helm, it’s difficult to continue pushing an economic narrative that has suffered a staunch electoral rebuke from the Democratic base, hence Yglesias’s newfound cultural focus.7 But difficult doesn’t mean impossible. And if there’s anyone whose willing to bend the rules of logic (or ethical journalism) to make the increasingly-struggling case for Abundance, it’s the book’s co-author,
.Last week, Thompson published an essay calling the anti-trust housing left — and I quote — “full of shit.” In the article, Thompson critiques a paper by
published in that argues corporate consolidation and private equity investment increased home prices in Dallas, Texas. Thompson, quite boastfully, claimed he called one of Musharbash’s expert sources, Lance Lambert, who (according to Thompson) said Musharbash had ‘distorted my points to reach dubious, or even flatly wrong, conclusions.’
WOW. That’s a serious accusation. If true, it would mean Musharbash (and by extension, Stoller) is an unapologetic liar with no journalistic integrity, only bending facts and misrepresenting others’ words to fit his ideal conclusion. It would also disprove the leading critics of corporate housing conglomeration, solidifying Abundance-style deregulation as the optimal path for the future of left-of-right politics. The only problem, is that Lance Lambert says Derek Thompson never asked him about Musharbash’s paper! In a statement posted on X/Twitter, Lambert clarified that Thompson never even mentioned Musharabsh’s article.
What I pointed out to Thompson that now he was the one whose sources were saying he was full of shit, he claimed that Lambert ‘misremembered,’ and that they had discussed the Stoller/Musharbash paper.
I cannot believe I have to say this to a self-described journalist, but if a reporter writes ‘My source said X, Y, Z,’ and then the source says they did not say ‘X, Y, Z’, the reporter has two options: either release a recording of the conversation proving what was claimed, or issue a retraction. (Thompson stopped replying to me when I pressed him on this, leading me to believe he didn’t record the phone call in question.) There are two interpretations of what happened. The first, harsher interpretation is that Derek Thompson did exactly what he accused the anti-trust left of doing: misrepresenting Lance Lambert’s words to support his desired conclusion that the housing market needed deregulating. The generous interpretation of these events is that Thompson did mention Musharbash’s article, but not enough to make it clear to Lambert that his words would be used to accuse someone he personally knows of fabrication. Regardless of the truth, Derek Thompson’s insistence that everyone trust him over the man he’s quoting is indicative of the troubled state of the Abundance movement, which requires constant stretching of established facts, logic, and procedures to stay relevant in a political reality that undercuts the Abundance Agenda’s central premise with each passing day.
Much like the MAGA project, centrism has failed to show positive results for the American people, forcing its advocates to propose more outlandish conspiracies and nonsensical theories to explain why they’re right and everyone else is wrong. Trump attributes his poor leadership to Biden sabotaging the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even though it doesn’t seem the former president had the mental capacity to make it through an eight-hour work day, never mind orchestrate a post-tenure bureaucratic time bomb. While the Abundanists present their conspiracy theories with a bit more decorum, their claims about previous leftist Democratic dominance, Orwellian logic on who is to blame for the Gazan genocide, and calling anti-trust articles they don’t like FAKE NEWS are no less preposterous than what we hear from the president’s foremost defenders. As both political programs fail to deliver results, expect the magnitude of their silliness to amplify.
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In Solidarity — Joe
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trumps-poll-numbers-immigration-shifted-enacted-agenda-rcna220826
https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/14/politics/obama-democrats-message
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/07/09/the-broadband-story-abundance-liberals-like-ezra-klein-got-wrong/
“Riding the Vibes to Victory” Matt Yglesias, August 23rd, 2024
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/09/10/harris-slams-trump-for-killing-border-bill-in-debate-here-are-the-facts/
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-03-republicans-cutting-medicare-not-only-medicaid/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/01/zohran-mamdani-ranked-choice-results-00435184
We have never been more poorly served by the paradigm of a political continuum as now, when the "centrist, moderate" Democratic position is pro-genocide. There's no left-right spectrum; just a giant, fat binder of Pantone swatches.
I gave this a like just for the title. Now to read it....