Here’s a question that no one, to my knowledge, has asked any of California’s Democratic candidates for governor: If, in January 2027, Trump decides that he’s going to turn San Diego into another Minneapolis, how would you respond?

There are any number of related questions you could ask. What do you do if Trump dispatches ICE officers to polling stations in California in November 2028? What if he illegally impounds federal Medicaid funds? And then there are the more delicate questions: In the event that federal agents run amok in California, what steps can you take to ensure the loyalty, or at least neutrality, of state law enforcement? Who is actually going to protect Californians from getting abducted or murdered by ICE? And, if and when it all goes down, how sure can you be that the governor’s security retinue is going to be a guarantor of your safety instead of another potential threat?

These are not idle questions. We’ve all seen what the Trump administration is capable of. Even now that the sack of Minneapolis has abated somewhat, the White House is still finding new ways to harass the state of Minnesota — for example, by blocking the Congressionally mandated transmission of more than a quarter of a billion dollars in Medicaid funding. There’s nothing to stop them from launching similar assaults on California.

In fact, they’re already casting around for a cassus belli. In last week’s State of the Union address, Trump announced a “war on fraud,” citing “Minnesota, where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer.” Other states, including California, “are even worse,” he said.

This “war on fraud” has alread been in progress for months, according to Trump. The racist slander against Somali immigrants in Minnesota was just one part of it. In January, Trump attempted to illegally freeze billions of dollars in childcare subsidies to California. Nick Shirley, the regime-affiliated propagandist who helped lay the groundwork for ICE’s invasion of Minnesota, was subsequently spotted skulking around San Diego day cares.

And Shirley isn’t the only apparatchik who has gone fishing. Last year, the Trump administration tried, unsuccessfully, to get access to California’s voter registration data. In February, just a week before the State of the Union, Customs and Border Protection asked San Diego County to tell them who owns every parcel of land in the county.

It is clear that the Trump administration wants another domestic invasion, and that California is a likely target. Based on Shirley’s whereabouts and that strange CBP request, I would guess that they’re zeroing in on San Diego as a potential site for their next siege. It’s something that the State of California, and in particular the next governor of California, should be prepared for. Given how much we already know about the Trump playbook, there’s no excuse to not be prepared.

And yet I haven’t seen much evidence that any of the Democratic candidates for governor are taking the threat from Trump-occupied Washington seriously. Cruising around the candidates’ campaign websites, I can find barely any mention of specific, actionable strategies for resisting Trump. Swalwell says he will “work to unmask ICE,” which is certainly worthwhile but deeply insufficient; Becerra notes that he sued Trump when he was attorney general, but doesn’t say anything about his future plans to fight the administration; Tom Steyer and Katie Porter are vocally anti-Trump but I’m not aware of any specific recommendations they’ve made regarding, for example, anti-ICE counter-measures.

In the absence of a serious and sober analysis of the threats to California, we have fairly conventional issue platforms. There’s nothing wrong with a conventional issue platform; needless to say, I am extremely interested in what all of the candidates have to say about housing policy, among other things. But this moment calls for something more than a normal campaign and a conventional governor. I’m still waiting for one of Newsom’s potential successors to recognize this.

My last post was all about the substance of what it means to be a nation. I argued that it doesn’t make any sense to talk about nations as if they are stable, discrete entities that persist in more or less the same form over centuries or millennia; it makes even less sense to describe genetic lineage as the essence of nationhood. A nation is, to quote the title of Benedict Anderson’s book on nationalism, an imagined community. It’s not a natural geographic formation; it’s a product of certain political, social, and cultural arrangements.

Nationalists of all stripes tend to consider certain types of cultural activity to be a natural product of the nation’s inner spirit; they associate their nation’s eternal characteristics with a certain aesthetic that must be constantly reaffirmed and reproduced in order to ensure the nation’s future cultural integrity. They have it backwards. “National” art does not faithfully broadcast a given nation’s unchanging features; intentionally or not, it iterates on a particular tradition to creatively reimagine it. Any aesthetic statement on the meaning of one’s country is necessarily going to be a creative act (in the sense of creating that meaning) more than a faithful report on objective conditions. There’s a reason why the defining art of America’s nationalist far right is AI slop instead of, say, precise reproductions of Gilbert Stuart paintings.

This raises a question: What is the aesthetic of liberalism? One of my favorite working literary critics, Becca Rothfeld, tackled that question in an essay published earlier this month. She ends up defining modern liberalism’s aesthetic as “a smug yet unconvincing performance of non-aesthetics [that] amounts to aesthetics too.” Its hallmark cultural products are “chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word ‘nuance,’ glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting, news startups focusing not on criticism or reporting but on commentary, and nonfiction that is a little too good for an airport bookstore but a little too slick and credulously economics-heavy for a literary magazine.”

I think Rothfeld is being a bit reductive here. A lot of the cultural touchstones she references feel dated; Parks and Recreation aired its final episode (other than a reunion special) a little more than a decade ago. Several months ago, in an appropriately savage review of Karine Jean-Pierre’s memoir of the Biden White House, Rothfeld wrote: “Jean-Pierre is an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.” The “prehistoric” Hamilton had its off-broadway premier in the same year that Parks and Recreation went off the air.

If we’re going to understand the aesthetic of liberalism in the present day, we’d be better off looking for more recent cultural developments. Off the top of my head, here are some things Rothfeld omits from her analysis of liberal aesthetics but which merit a closer look: the new Superman movie, Woke 2.0, the colossal No Kings protests, the mass outpouring of sympathy for anti-ICE resistance in Minneapolis, Bruce Springsteen’s tribute to that resistance, the protestors in frog costumes in Portland, and the furor over Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. You might find some of this stuff cringe or annoying, but it all adds up to a cultural moment for liberalism that feels a lot angrier and a lot more militant than Rothfeld lets on.

Still, I don’t want to entirely discount Rothfeld’s point. That line about the “performance of non-aesthetics” is quite perceptive when applied to a particular faction of the liberal coalition—one that, unlike the examples I provided above, has its native habitat in Washington, D.C.

I take a non-aesthetic to be something devoid of texture, taste, or substance; a sensibility that conveys nothing precisely because it has no fixed points of reference; a jumbled set of habits and mannerisms that have been strenuously cultivated to avoid any offense or provocation and that therefore, by design, fail to arouse any strong emotions at all. Examples of this non-aesthetic might include an LLM’s cheerful response to a prompt, chill beats to study to, cinematography that abolishes shadows and makes all colors pop so that you don’t miss any nuance while watching movies on your phone, and a limited streaming series that acts as a sequel to a movie based off a comic book and is intended to set up another movie based off another, different, comic book.

There’s something cold, strange and a little off about all of these examples, because they’re all the products of machine learning and market analysis, not any human creative intentionality. None of them have any coherent form; they are all song-like, story-like, or movie-like, without exactly being any of those things. They all have this uncanny quality that allows them to capture your attention without actually engaging it, like a picture that always looks slightly out of focus.

The political equivalent of this anti-aesthetic is popularism: a politics drained of content and fixed values, and driven mostly by issue polling (or its proponents’ tendentious analysis of the most recent issue polling). This politics is highly rigid in its method and outputs, but it is also somehow gaseous and insubstantial; no one can really say what it is meant to accomplish. It is an LLM that has been instructed to win elections but not to govern; it is the aliens Kang and Kodos from that one Simpsons Halloween special where they impersonate Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. (Parks and Recreation and Hamilton, with their corny but legible and basically wholesome values, are not cultural popularism. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a Disney IP excrescence that wants to to skim off the prestige of 1970s paranoid political thrillers while sweatily avoiding any confrontation with actual politics, is cultural popularism.)

Against what she describes as (again, with an overly broad brush) actually existing liberalism, Rothfeld pits the now-defunct journal Partisan Review. I am a sucker for this move; a lot of how I approach researching and writing about politics is driven by a vain desire to recover something of the old Partisan Review spirit. Rothfeld writes:

Yes!!! My biggest issue with popularism is so much that I object to specific policies and strategies that the popularists recommend (though I often do, and I think the fact that popularism consistently cashes out in a kind of anodyne DLC throwback politics is highly suspect given the perverse and arcane predilections of the median voter). My biggest issue with the popularists is that I think the method in which people try to win contests for power says something about how they would wield that power. The contributors to Partisan Review didn’t just make the case for democracy against the Stalinists to their left and the Goldwaterites to their right; they also modeled a certain type of democratic argument and deliberation.

This nexus between how you do politics and the type of political world you create is inescapable. There is a clear logic that connects Trump’s rambling, raucous, weirdly voluptuous campaign rallies to the Internet fever swamp that fueled his rise, and both of these forces are clearly manifest in the character of his regime. My fear when it comes to a liberalism fueled by issue polling is that it also possesses a sort of authoritarian logic, albeit of a gentler variety. Popularism is a politics for people who have given up on persuasion, argument, and intersubjectivity; it is a “give the piggies their slop so they don’t cause too much trouble” sort of politics.

And who knows, maybe the cynicism behind this approach to politics isn’t totally unwarranted. Like much of the rest of the progressive Internet, I find myself bewildered and enraged, and ultimately sort of depressed, when I make the mistake of reading one of those New York Times focus group interviews. Maybe it’s a huge mistake for politicians to engage with voters the way I would prefer they engage with me. In aggregate terms, basically nobody read Partisan Review; Winter Soldier grossed $714 million at the box office.

But there has to be some compromise path here that involves both a bit of strategic pandering something like a more aspirational politics. Zohran Mamdani might be something of a model for how that would work. He certainly wasn’t above a little bit of pandering, but in his public communications (and organizing strategy) he also modeled a form of engagement that felt genuinely democratic. The No Kings rallies and the Minneapolis protests have a bit of the same spirit: sensitive to popular taste in their prevailing iconography but uncompromising in their values and ambitions.

Something like Partisan Review—or Becca Rothfeld’s writing, for that matter—is naturally going to be more of a niche taste. (The same is even more true of my own writing, as you can see from the difference in our respective platforms.) But I have to think there’s still some sort of place for it. As Rothfeld writes, “Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity.” That’s an ethos I think we should all try to emulate in our own idiosyncratic ways.

“Saying the quiet part loud,” as the saying goes, is such a prominent feature of the second Trump administration’s communications strategy that the phrase scarcely has meaning these days. What could the “quiet part” possibly be when the President of the United States is posting AI slop that depicts him as a fighter pilot dropping tons of fecal matter on No Kings protestors? Or when he posts even more putrid AI slop that depicts Barack and Michelle Obama as apes?

Well, it turns out that the second video tells us something about the last remaining vestiges of the quiet part. It was a little too explicitly racist for even some prominent members of the MAGA coalition, and so Trump eventually took it down. This is the last taboo that the Trump administration needs to mind: you can summarily executive civilians, ship immigrants off to concentration camps, and openly state your intention to rule as a dictator; but you can’t actually say that there is a natural racial hierarchy with white people at the top, much less that your goal is to assert white dominance over the United States and the world. Leave that to people like Nick Fuentes, who sit at just enough of a remove to give you a veneer of plausible deniability

Trump is becoming increasingly disinhibited with age, but those regime officials with greater possession of their faculties have learned how to say “America belongs to white people” through insinuation rather than blunt assertion. Instead, they say, as Senator Eric Schmitt did at the 2025 National Conservative Conference, that the United States belongs to “a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.” Or, as J.D. Vance put it in a speech to the neo-fascist Claremont Institute, “a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” Most recently, Marco Rubio—perhaps the one member of the administration who is an even more overtly cynical and chameleonic social climber than Vance—has argued that real Americans share with Europeans “the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

One of the ways you can tell this is all code is by the combination of prolixity and imprecision that tends to accompany these paeans to the American race. Listening to them, you might sometimes find yourself paraphrasing Liz Lemon and blurting out, “J.D., just say Aryan, this is taking forever.” And indeed, when less adroit Nazis like Elon Musk try to circle around a clearer articulation of what they mean by American heritage, they end up making hilariously ahistorical claims about, for example, the “English-Scotts-Irish origin” of American culture. (“Scotch-Irish” is, in the words of one historian, “an Americanism, generally unknown in Scotland and Ireland and rarely used by British historians.”)

The fact is, there’s very little basis for any of this stuff, at least if you’re looking for historical roots deeper than the middle of the nineteenth century. “Scotch-Irish” as a self-descriptor appears to have only entered common usage after large-scale Irish immigration to the United States began in the 1840s; incumbent Presbyterian communities sought a way to distinguish themselves from the largely poor, Catholic newcomers. (Ironically, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Eric Schmitt are all Catholic; Elon Musk is “culturally Christian,” whatever that means.)

The “Western Civilization” that, according to Rubio, binds America to Europe, is of a similarly recent vintage. As Yuri Slezkine observed in a recent essay for The New York Review of Books, there were no self-identified “Westerners” until the nineteenth century—and most of the early theorists of Western Civilization made a point of excluding Russia from their definition, which would no doubt upset many of Vladimir Putin’s fans on the American far right. Even the concept of a single, coherent nation that commands one’s personal allegiance is an invention of the 1800s; one that was more commonly associated with liberalism than aristocratic conservatism in its early iterations.

American fascists like Vance now openly admire nationalist movements in places like France and Italy for their attempts to preserve a single imagined lineage; but neither Italy nor France were unified cultural-linguistic communities two centuries ago. As Richard Evans writes in The Pursuit of Power, his magisterial history of Europe between the Napoleonic Era and World War I, Sicilians still tended to speak a dialect of Ancient Greek at the time of Italian unification. National identities such as “French” and “Italian” were things that had to be invented, and they were often imposed through military or state power. As recently as 1864, Evans writes, a state inspector reported stumping a group of school-aged children in southeastern France by asking them what country they lived in.

Americanism is a similarly new and synthetic identity. It is commonly observed that up to the Civil War, residents of the United States tended to speak of “the United States” in the plural instead of the singular; their primary affective attachments were to their states of residence, not the country as a whole. This only changed with the Civil War, which is rightly described by some historians as the second American revolution. To a considerable degree, we have Abraham Lincoln to thank for our modern conception of the United States as a single nation.

This being the case, maybe we should defer to Lincoln when it comes to the meaning of American nationhood instead of spelunking in the murky past of the Celtic and Icenic tribes. Lincoln was pretty explicit on this front: in the opening sentence of the Gettysburg Address, he defines the United States as “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He dates the creation of this “new nation” back to 1776 — the birthdate not of the United States Constitution, but of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in other words, rejects the notion that American nationhood is rooted in genetic ancestry. It is instead rooted in a shared creed based on a particular conception of liberty and political equality.

Even during Lincoln’s time there were, of course, alternative conceptions of what it meant to be an American. Lincoln would have been familiar with the thought of John C. Calhoun, one of the more influential and sophisticated proponents of a quintessentially American white supremacist political philosophy. But the Union, led by Lincoln, defeated the Calhounist Confederacy. Calhounism was decidedly not the intellectual origin of what many historians now call the Second Founding. It was instead Lincolnism that became the ideological foundation for American reunification.

In his NatCon speech, Schmitt sneered at the idea that “the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence.” In their own meditations on the meaning of America, Musk, Rubio and Vance don’t deign to mention the Declaration at all. They’re more interested in resurrecting Calhounism and marrying it to modern fascist thought.

But we should be clear: when they engage in this project, they are the ones who are rejecting our heritage as Americans. It is the modern-day Calhounists who are repelled by everything that truly makes American identity distinctive: its pluralism, its privileging of a shared creed over a shared gene pool, its history of hard-fought struggles for recognition, freedom, and equality. They might call themselves “heritage Americans” based on their bloodlines and supposed connection to the soil, but they reject the aspects of American identity that really count. The racially purified despotism of their dreams would not represent a return to this country’s traditions, but a usurpation of them.

The title of this post comes from an old joke about economists. It’s a play on one of the standard critiques of the discipline: that economists are so wedded to the realm of pure theory that they take the output of their models to be more conclusive, and therefore more “real,” than any empirical evidence to the contrary.

It’s a good joke, which is why I use it here, but the serious criticism behind the joke is outdated. Over the past few decades, economists have increasingly turned to empirical methods in their research; this has led them to findings that run directly counter to what you might expect from the output of a simple theoretical model. A classic work of the “empirical turn” is David Card and Alan Krueger’s 1993 study of a minimum wage increase in New Jersey. When they compared fast food restaurants in New Jersey to those across the border in Pennsylvania, they found that the minimum wage increase had not led to a decrease in the former state’s fast food sector workforce — despite what a simple “Econ 101” supply and demand model might suggest about the relationship between labor costs and employment.

People on the left (including myself) have often been critical of those who doggedly weight crude economic models over actual evidence. This is one of the accusations that supply skeptics often level at YIMBYs: that instead of looking at the world around us, we rely on a vulgar caricature of the housing market. It’s an unfair accusation, and it grows more unfair with each year as empirical researchers uncover more evidence that building more housing leads to greater broad-based housing affordability.

Ironically, as the empirical case for YIMBYism grows ever stronger, it is the anti-”Econ 101” crowd that is now falling back on airy theorizing and simple models. It turns out that their problem with non-empirical economics wasn’t the lack of rigorous real-world investigation after all; it was just that they would rather have everyone use models that are rigged to produce their preferred outcomes.

Case in point, a recently published working paper co-authored by Michael Storper, one of the supply skeptic crowd’s favorite academics. Titled “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis,” the paper seeks to demonstrate that increased market-rate homebuilding will not make high-cost American cities affordable on anything like a reasonable time scale. The authors’ primary tool for doing this is a simulation of a hypothetical supply shock to six high-cost cities.

It’s an odd methodological choice given that we have no shortage of actually existing supply spikes to study. For example, over the past couple of years, Austin, Texas has seen both a significant spike in homebuilding and a precipitous drop in average rents. There’s some debate among economists and housing policy experts about the extent to which the rent decline can be attributed to the supply shock; it’s probably a few years too early to measure the impact of Austin’s building boom with any precision, but certainly not too early to attempt some preliminary estimates. The research on upzonings in Auckland and Minneapolis is already piling up, and before too long we’ll also be able to gather some initial findings from New York City’s recent zoning and planning reforms.

Instead, Storper and co. provide us with a model with just a handful of inputs: their assumed price elasticity, filtering rate, and rate of supply increase. Which is not to say that they ignore empirical evidence entirely; they just make selective use of it in their literature review and ignore the methodological flaws in papers that support their preferred conclusions.

For example, Storper et al repeatedly cite a paper that purportedly finds new market-rate homebuilding can actually increase rents in the surrounding area for low-income tenants. But they fail to note that the paper didn’t adjust for inflation, and that doing so causes the observed effect to vanish. Meanwhile, they wave away the empirical evidence on chain-of-moves filtering (where higher-income residents move into newer and pricier rental housing, making their prior homes available to residents on the next income rung beneath them) by suggesting that people who move into recently vacated housing may then “experience higher housing cost burdens.” That strikes me as a strange claim; if none of the recently vacated housing is actually becoming more affordable, why wouldn’t more people in the chain of moves stay put? No one’s forcing them to move up the chain. At the very least, if you’re going to argue that participating in the chain of moves simply increases the rent burden for most households, it would be helpful to offer some explanatory mechanism.

But the biggest problem with this paper is one that is common to the genre: it is arguing with a straw man. Very few of the people they call “deregulationists” think that regulatory reform on its own is sufficient to make cities like San Francisco affordable to non-college-educated workers. As I recently argued in a brief for the Roosevelt Institute, regulatory reform is a complement to targeted public investment, not a replacement for it. So-called deregulationism can actually make public investments in affordable housing and rental subsidies more effective.

It’s sort of funny that supply skeptics continue to grind out these papers that treat all YIMBYs like market fundamentalists. That has never been true—Sen. Scott Wiener, one of the OG YIMBY politicians, has always been a champion for deed-restricted affordable housing—but it appears even more ridiculous now that the most prominent YIMBY mayor in the country is a democratic socialist who wants the public sector to build hundreds of thousands of new affordable housing units. In both its rejection of empiricism and in its reliance on hidebound stereotypes about YIMBYs, this paper feels more like a time capsule from last decade than a novel intervention into the housing debate.

They say never to treat social media like an assignment desk, but this prompt from Zak Yudhisthu (whose own newsletter is well worth a follow) was too good the pass up:

This is a nice story about the civic/social infrastructure that came out of Mamdani's campaign

Now I want to see the @resnikoff.bsky.social take on it
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/n...

— Zak Yudhishthu (@zyudhishthu.bsky.social)
1:45 PM • Nov 5, 2025

If you’ve read any of dispatches over the past year, you might be able to guess at why Zak is asking for my take. I’ve been a strident proponent of what Henry Farrell calls “partyism”: the proposition that, in Henry’s words, “the road to renewing the Democrats (and remaking the Republicans into an organization that is not actively malevolent) begins with changing party organization from the blob-like congelation of chaos and self-interest … into organizational forms that actively connect political leaders and ordinary people.”

You can read my initial argument in favor of partyism, written almost exactly a year ago, here. More recently, I’ve proposed that the YIMBY movement offers a decent model of how to translate face-to-face socializing into real political power. Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign to become New York City’s next mayor offers another model. As The New York Times noted on election day: “Mr. Mamdani’s campaign wasn’t just about mobilizing, but socializing. And the social buoyancy of his campaign wasn’t just for show. Young people turned up and voted.”

Campaign events, including the now famous scavenger hunt, provided an opportunity for young supporters to connect with other people who shared their politics and interests; that ended up being the hook that drew a lot of people into volunteering for the campaign. As I’ve written many time in the past, this sort of emphasis on conviviality and neighborliness is a great tool for turning undecideds into supporters and turning supporters into committed ground troops.

But Mamdani’s success illustrates another advantage to the partyist approach that I haven’t covered as much: it’s great for intelligence gathering. The people who show up to campaign-sponsored social gatherings may be there to learn about the candidate or just hang out, but they also have a lot to tell campaign workers about the concerns and political currents rippling through key constituencies.

Campaigns have other ways of information-gathering, of course. Over the course of several traditional campaign events (i.e., stump speeches), a good candidate can learn something about which talking points are landing with voters and which aren’t. Then there’s the consultant-forward approach to campaign intelligence-gathering, which relies heavily on polls and focus groups. All of these tactics have their place, but none of them provide a complete picture of the electorate.

A good poll is far more representative than a series of incidental conversations with happy hour attendees. But you get far richer information from an actual conversation with someone than you get from asking them a single question and then recording which answer they chose from a limited set of options. Neither is really a good substitute for the other, which is why Democrats should avail themselves of both instead of treating issue polls like a definitive account of what voters think and believe.

Mamdani, of course, did not only interact with the voters who were sufficiently motivated to attend a campaign event. He also spent a good deal of time on the street and public transit talking with anyone who was willing to give him the time of day (including another YIMBY Substacker, Sam Deutsch). I have no doubt that he used these conversations as a sort of temperature check on the state of the race and the general mood of the city. Again, doing that sort of thing is not really a substitute for methodologically sound polling. But it gives someone with good instincts a much deeper, more nuanced, intuitive sense of how things stand than a poll alone can provide.

Contrast Mamdani’s approach to Cuomo’s. When he wasn’t staging awkward man-on-the-street interactions for a campaign ad — a campaign ad which, I should add, was clearly a fumbled imitation of Mamdani’s style — Cuomo barely interacted with regular voters at all. Instead, he seems to have spent a lot of time huddled with billionaire donors and internalizing their deeply warped mindset. That may help to explain why, as the race wore on, he leaned more and more into the kind of AI slop that guys like Bill Ackman seem to love, but which looked especially bad when viewed alongside Mamdani’s more amiable, cinema verité stylings. It probably also helps to explain why Cuomo resorted to outright gutter racism in the campaign’s closing weeks.

New York is a sui generis place, and 2024 was an especially weird mayoral election year. But there are still lessons that Democrats outside the city can draw from Mamdani’s campaign. Josh Marshall identified one of them: “find candidates suited to their constituencies and focus on cost of living issues and opposition to Donald Trump’s autocracy.” Another one is that the party needs to offer people something they can be a part of. It’s not enough to sell the candidate or the party brand as a product. That’s the best you can do for reaching some voters, but it isn’t how you build political power over multiple campaign cycles.

What Democrats need even more than better branding or better messaging is better party building. Mamdani can teach others how to do that. What’s remarkable is that he’s been able to do it without access to parts of the Democratic Party apparatus — Chuck Schumer never endorsed him, Hakeem Jeffries waited until the last minute, and the state party chair basically threw a tantrum over his candidacy. He prevailed anyway. And, in doing so, he helped demonstrate how to actually make the party stronger.

Civil society: good thing or bad thing? A lot of people (including myself) have spent years arguing that Americans’ weakening associational attachments helped birth the Trump era. But over the past few weeks, a few smart observers have challenged that thesis, or at least qualified it.

In a conversation with John Ganz, the social theorist Dylan O’Riley drew on Gramsci to argue that civil society is not inherently a bulwark against fascism but instead a site of struggle between fascist and anti-fascist forces. Building on this argument, David Sessions has suggested that the United States, rather than suffering from extreme social atomization, may be a victim of its opposite. We actually have an overdeveloped civil society, Sessions argues, which online communications platforms have driven into hypertrophy. Meanwhile, Henry Farrell has mounted a defense — or at least an articulation — of the liberal theory that an independent civil society is both one of the linchpins of a pluralist democracy and a critical line of defense against tyranny.

I’m sympathetic to both the liberal and Gramscian analyses of civil society, and I haven’t quite figured out how to resolve the tension between the two of them in my own mind. But I suspect that a greater synthesis begins with a more finely grained definition of civil society—or, rather, of civil societies.

Sessions writes:

This is of course correct. But the character of “digital-first” associations — think Discord servers where most of the regular contributors live in different parts of the country — differs pretty substantially from the character of and “analog-first” ones, such as labor unions, the Elks, intramural sports teams, and church congregations. There’s a certain richness to routine face-to-face engagement that you can’t get on X, Zoom, or the metaverse. We all understand this intuitively; it’s why COVID-era social distancing was so ruinous for the mental health of so many, including a lot of people who were in regular online contact with friends and loved ones throughout the ordeal.

I’m convinced the richness of face-to-face sociality lends itself to a different type of political engagement than you find on social media or other remote communications platforms. The precise difference between those two modes of political engagement is something I can’t fully articulate just yet. But the work of social scientists who study in-person organizing can help us start to fumble toward a working definition. In another post, Henry Farrell summarizes some of the scholarship produced by his colleague (and recently certified MacArthur Genius) Hahrie Hahn:

It seems at least plausible to me that in-person gatherings lend themselves to transformational organizing much more than online interactions or one-way communications channels.

There are two other differences I think worth calling out, even though it’s something of a cliché at this point to talk about them. Briefly, then: online engagement lends itself to both epistemic filtering and context collapse in a way that in-person interaction does not. Obviously, every form of association can be an epistemic bubble of sorts — think of a homogeneously white suburb populated by people who really have social intercourse with the nonwhite residents of the neighboring town — but in extended face-to-face interactions you’re more likely to be confronted by cross-cutting identity markers which force you to manage and accommodate difference. Similarly, in-person interactions, especially when thy take place over long periods of time within an established community, have a contextual thickness to them that makes them the virtual opposite of the social media feed.

This does not make IRL civil society intrinsically anti-authoritarian. In fact, Dylan O’Riley and likeminded scholars like Sheri Berman are right to insist, contra the traditional Arendtian analysis, that Nazism infected a highly developed civil society instead of filling the vacuum created by its absence. In the United States, right-wing evangelical churches are probably among the strongest redoubts of classic IRL civil society, and they constitute a significant part of the MAGA movement’s social basis.

But there aren’t enough right-wing evangelicals to elect a president on their own. To better understand the Trumpism phenomenon, we need to understand the disaffected and unorganized voters who pushed Trump over the top. Many of them reside in battleground regions — especially in the Rust Belt — that used to have much thicker civil society ecosystems. I would argue that the Arendtian analysis actually does carry some force in these areas. And it is in these areas where I suspect that mass media and online civil society is a particularly potent vector for Trumpist thought.

All of which is to suggest that anti-fascists should be attentive not merely to civil society as a general category, but to different kinds of civil society. The Internet and mass media are a form of civil society, but in critical ways they are not a substitute for in-person association. (The same applies to professionally managed nonprofits.) I would also argue that, in critical respects, the Internet and mass media as currently constituted are better at transmitting some ideas than others. Fascism as a social contagion is more at home than liberal democracy on many of these platforms.

That’s just a hunch, though. And it shouldn’t be taken as a recommendation for anti-fascists to simply cede these channels to liberal democracy’s enemies. It’s just a reminder that you can’t build a real mass democratic politics through posting alone. You also need to organize some real-world hangs.

It happened. Seven years after Sate Sen. Scott Wiener authored a bill that would have upzoned the land surrounding major transit stops — and six years after his second try — Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed SB 79, Wiener’s third major attempt to get a transit-oriented development statute into the books.

This is, as they say, a big fucking deal. My previous newsletter was about why, precisely, SB 79 is so important; if you’re looking for a more detailed explanation of the bill’s contents, I recommend this rundown from my former California YIMBY colleagues Nolan Gray and Aaron Eckhouse, both of whom were instrumental in getting SB 79 to the finish line. I also recommend Nolan’s Bluesky thread about the other YIMBY bills that Newsom signed this month — SB 79 has sucked up a lot of the public attention for obvious reasons, but there’s some other big stuff in there.

I have to confess that near the end of last week I was bracing myself for an SB 79 veto. Los Angeles elected officials and wealthy donors were turning out in force to kill the bill, and I suspected Newsom was about to put mollifying potential 2028 presidential campaign donors ahead of the state’s housing needs. I’m very glad to have been proven wrong, and I’m grateful that Newsom did the right thing in this case. It seems to have been a close run thing.

Why Newsom ultimately decided to sign SB 79 is anyone’s guess. But I’m willing to bet that the flood of phone calls his office received from pro-housing constituents might have had something to do with it. YIMBY organizations and volunteers really went all out over the last couple of weeks when it came to mobilizing a popular defense of SB 79. (I tried to do my part, exhorting social media followers and readers of this newsletter to call the governor.) All of those phone calls and volunteer action alerts didn’t just demonstrate the bill’s popularity with some of California’s most politically engaged citizens; it also raised the bill’s public salience, such that a Newsom veto would have ended up becoming a very unwelcome national news story for him.

So while this is no doubt a major victory for Wiener and for the groups like California YIMBY who worked other legislators on his behalf, the victory belongs just as much to the YIMBY grassroots. And, as it so happens, last week the Roosevelt Institute published an essay by yours truly about why those grassroots are able to flex so much muscle. The secret source of their strength is happy hours:

The bonds established at nearly a decade of YIMBY social events (and through YIMBY group chats, DMs, and Slack messages) are a big part of what allowed the movement to so quickly coalesce around a massive push to get Newsom’s signature on SB 79. There’s a lesson there that I wish the Democratic Party — and, for that matter, a lot of the capital-A Abundance groups in Washington — would take more to heart. If you want to do effective movement-building, you can’t just treat your base like consumers. Treat them instead like neighbors and citizens engaged in a shared social and political project.

This is, of course, another way of framing what Henry Farrell calls the “partyism” analysis of American politics. (You can read my contribution to partyism discourse here.) The success of SB 79 is another reminder that partyism isn’t just a hypothesis; it’s something that YIMBY organizations are already practicing. That’s a big part of why they’re winning.

Gavin Newsom may or may not realize this, but he’s about to make one of the most consequential decisions of his governorship. He has until October 12 to sign or veto Senate Bill 79, perhaps the most important pro-housing bill to ever come across his desk. One way or the other, his decision will have significant consequences for California’s housing crisis, his own legacy and political ambitions, and even the survival of American democracy.

SB 79 has been referred to as a “holy grail zoning reform,” and with good reason. At the most basic level, the bill upzones the land around certain types of transit stops to allow for the construction of mid-rise apartment buildings. It’s a less expansive version of SB 827 (2018) and its successor SB 50 (2019), either of which, had they passed, might have gotten California most of the way toward fixing the zoning rules that caused the state’s housing shortage.

SB 79 isn’t a silver bullet like either of its predecessors, but it’s a big step in the right direction. It’s not just that the bill would legalize badly needed housing production; it’s that it concentrates this housing production in the metropolitan areas facing the worst housing shortages, along the transit routes where new residents are most likely to rely on public transit instead of driving. This is a housing affordability bill, but it’s also a climate and transportation bill.

And it’s a democracy consolidation bill. As things currently stand, California is expected to lose three electoral votes in the 2030 Census; Texas and Florida respectively stand to gain three votes and two votes. That’s largely because housing is more abundant and affordable in the red states of the Sun Belt; California’s shortage is causing migration patterns to shift in a way that grants red states more representation in Congress and more weight in presidential contests.The Golden State’s restrictive zoning rules are a gift to the MAGA political coalition.¹

In 2018, Newsom ran for governor on a promise to get 3.5 million homes built in California. Since then, he’s been largely AWOL when it comes to housing; instead, he’s been occupied with more important matters like podcasting and dunking on Ron DeSantis. But if Newsom hasn’t exactly been a housing champion, he at least hasn’t gotten in the way; with the exception of Asm. Alex Lee’s social housing bill, I cannot think of a single piece of YIMBY-backed legislation that he has killed once it reached his desk.

This year, perhaps thanks to a dawning realization that he’s running out of time to rack up some housing wins, Newsom did show some actual initiative for once: he incorporated some legislative proposals to reform the California Environmental Quality Act into his suite of budget bills, smoothing the way to their implementation. That was a welcome development, but it wouldn’t come anywhere close to balancing out an SB 79 veto; the net effect would be of one tentative step forward and two very large steps back.

With all of that in mind, you might wonder why an SB 79 veto is even on the table. I didn’t think it was until this week. After all, why would he start actively thwarting YIMBY priorities now, in the twilight of his gubernatorial career? But power brokers in Los Angeles, including Mayor Karen Bass, have been fighting SB 79 tooth and nail. I suspect the governor is also getting a lot of calls from the city’s major Democratic donors asking him to kill the bill. And the scuttlebutt in Sacramento is that he’s wobbling.

It’s not hard to see why. Virtually everything Newsom does is driven by his desire to be president. The last thing he wants to do is alienate the studio executives in the Hollywood Hills who max out to their preferred Democratic candidates every four years and hold lavish fundraisers. Not when his home team advantage with them is one of the more important assets he’s going to bring into the 2028 presidential primary.

But bowing to the donors would be incredibly short-sighted. It would make him the presidential candidate who promised to end California’s housing shortage, watched it get worse for seven years, and then thwarted one of the more serious efforts to actually fulfill his promise. He would be the candidate who helped lock in California’s car dependency in the face of an existential climate crisis. And he would be the candidate who actively helped to widen Republicans’ electoral college advantage, potentially dooming the country to prolonged autocratic rule.

Newsom has one legislative session left, but he’s not going to get another chance like this one. We won’t probably won’t see ambitious legislation like SB 79 in the session leading up to a November midterm. And even if we did, the state’s incoming Senate pro tem would probably do everything in her power to stop it. If the governor wants to actually make a difference for housing, for the climate, and for American democracy, this is his shot. Squandering that shot may help him out with some big money donors, but it won’t be worth the price — for him as a candidate, or for the country as a whole.

Ultimately, I remain cautiously — very cautiously — optimistic that he’ll do the right thing in this case. But we can’t leave that up to chance. So if you’re a Californian, please take a couple minutes to call the governor’s office and urge him to sign SB 79.

Can you have a social movement that lacks an ideology? That has long been the dream of a certain segment of Washington’s policy entrepreneur class. For decades, groups like No Labels and public figures like Michael Bloomberg have tried to sell the American polity on a political vision that is neither of the left nor the right, but which instead finds its roots in an untapped national consensus that belongs to no party. As No Labels describes itself, it is a movement “for the vast majority of Americans who are desperate for leaders who govern with common sense and deliver results.”

Of course, No Labels’ claim to movement status is risible, as is its claim to transcend left and right. There is no such thing as a movement with no labels and no ideology, because ideology itself is an escapable fact of human social organization. It is something far deeper and more pervasive than a simple policy agenda. As Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft [emphasis mine]:

A movement is nothing if it is not a “collective being.” Without some sort of ideological grounding, there is nothing to hold a movement together: no shared set of values, no common understanding of how and why our social world operates like it does. No connective tissue of any kind.

This is not to say that social movements operate on the basis of unanimous consent. Even the most disciplined ones tend to be highly fractious and riven by serious—and often shockingly vicious—ideological quarrels. But those arguments are among familial relations; that’s precisely why they’re so violent. A large movement is unlikely to be defined by any single, systematized ideology, but rather a cluster of overlapping ones. The overlap is often fairly loose, but there needs to be enough of one to provide some kind of bridge language and set of common goals.

YIMBYism is one such ideological cluster. There are progressive YIMBYs, socialist YIMBYs, libertarian YIMBYs, centrist YIMBYs, and center-right YIMBYs, and plenty of intra-group tensions between all the different factions. But pretty much every flavor of YIMBY holds certain values in common, including a commitment to political liberalism (in the broad sense) and a certain cosmopolitanism. Though the vocabulary they use to describe their goals varies by partisan and ideological orientation, YIMBYs by and large share a certain vision of city life and what it means for a city to be a healthy, vibrant place.

The shared values of the “abundance movement,” to the extent that such a thing exists, are a little more ambiguous. In recent months, I’ve increasingly shied away from calling abundance a movement for this very reason. Instead, I’ve described it as a set of heuristics: a way to apply certain conceptual tools from the YIMBY movement to various non-housing policy domains. How you use those tools—the domains in which you apply them, the outputs that you are trying to maximize—is an ideological question.

When people first started talking about “the abundance movement,” I took it to be a largely liberal project, with a left/social democratic wing and a more centrist wing. Something very much like that assumption was baked into early attempts to define abundance as a movement. In June 2024, Robert Saldin and Steven Teles urged abundance advocates to establish themselves as a faction inside the Democratic Party; Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book is explicitly address to a left-leaning audience, as is Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works.

But something has changed. Compare the Saldin/Teles essay from last year to Teles’s more recent report schematizing the “Varieties of Abundance.” In their 2024 essay, Teles and Saldin wrote about capital-A Abundance; in “Varieties of Abundance,” Teles demotes abundance to an improper noun. The former publication concerned itself with a single “Abundance Faction”; the latter notes the existence of at least six, with wildly differing ideological complexions.

It is unclear what single movement could hold all six of these factions, or whether anyone would even find such a synthesis desirable. What sort of political coalition could possibly incorporate both Zohran Mamdani and Lyman Stone into its ranks? How is the cosmopolitanism of Liberal Abundance supposed to coexist peacefully with the NatCon streak in what Teles calls “Dark Abundance?" For that matter, what is the difference between Dark Abundance and good old-fashioned reactionary modernism supposed to be?

The differences between Dark Abundance and Red Plenty or Cascadian Abundance run considerably deeper than, say, those that separate left-YIMBYs and libertarian YIMBYs. Left-YIMBYs and libertarian YIMBYs may very often chafe at one another, but I don’t think one wing of the coalition would summarily execute the other, even if they could get away with it. I can’t exactly say the same of Dark Abundance, which includes people who have cheered on the ethnic cleansing campaign being run out of Trump’s DHS and people who think the entire trans community should be erased from existence. If cosmopolitanism is at the heart of YIMBY thought, then it can’t possibly occupy the same movement as a faction that wants to violently purge U.S. cities and is currently cheering on the military occupation of Washington, D.C.

That occupation served as the backdrop to last week’s Abundance Conference. The About page for the event describes abundance as, alternately, a “movement” and a “cross-partisan coalition.” The list of speakers is, I take it, supposed to represent every wing of that movement, from “Cascadian Abundance” on the left to “Dark Abundance” on the right. (As far as I can tell, no one from what Teles calls the “Red Plenty” wing was invited to speak.) That means that in addition to mainstays of liberal abundance—Klein and Thompson were two of the three headliners, and State Sen. Scott Wiener also spoke at the conference—the roster of honored guests included at least one former Trump administration official, think tankers who have called for “deportation abundance,” and a professional defender of Trump’s disastrous tariffs. Bizarrely, David Brooks also spoke.

Now, it’s one thing to engage with the far right when doing so helps a movement advance its substantive goals. YIMBYs won big in Montana by working with the state’s Republican-dominated legislature and successfully lobbying Gov. Greg Gianforte, a right-wing thug who first came to national prominence when he physically attacked a journalist. I would argue the Montana YIMBY movement did the right thing by working with Gianforte, because doing so was the only way to put a meaningful dent in Montana’s housing crisis.

Indeed, while I’ve been a consistent proponent of a left-abundance agenda, I’ve always believed that making progress on such an agenda would necessitate some tactical bipartisanship. The trick is engaging in that work without compromising on any of your core values. As I wrote for the Roosevelt Institute back in March, “Abundance liberals should continue to welcome, and even actively court, bipartisan approval. But reaching across the aisle does not mean letting yourself become a mark.”

One way to avoid becoming a mark is by enforcing a clear set of boundaries. I might advise YIMBYs to work with people like Greg Gianforte when it advances movement goals, but I wouldn’t give Gianforte a vote in determining what those goals are. And I certainly wouldn’t ask people who support an ongoing fascist coup to help me define “the abundance movement” and the principles it represents. Not when they’ve already made clear that they intend to destroy everything I think we should be trying to build.

This isn’t a matter of enforcing purity tests or deplatforming people. It’s a matter of knowing what you and your movement stand for. Frankly, it’s also just a matter of having some self-respect.

The thing about having a tent, even a big tent, is that you have to place its outer boundaries somewhere. Personally, “deportation abundance,” and the entire worldview it implies, falls well outside of where I would mark those boundaries. I don’t think you can have a coherent abundance coalition that makes room for such a thing. And even if you could, it certainly wouldn’t include me.

Trump’s claim that he ordered the federal occupation of D.C. in order to “stop violent crime” is, obviously, beneath contempt. As many others have pointed out, violent crime in the District is at its lowest point in 30 years. As he did with the occupation of Los Angeles, Trump is using crime as a pretext. For the armed agents of the federal government dispatched to these cities, the real mission is to menace the regime’s real or perceived enemies. That’s why you have DEA agents milling around the National Mall.

But if crime is just a pretext, there’s a reason why this particular pretext has been so useful for Trump. A large majority of Americans consistently report that crime is on the rise, even though, as in D.C., it is near a 30-year low nationwide. The news media consistently reinforces this misperception, and has continued to do so throughout Trump’s takeover of the District: The Atlantic ran a piece about the “plague of crime” in cities like D.C., and the Washington Post published an editorial insisting “many residents still do not feel safe.” On CNN, Anderson Cooper and The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman commiserated about how “there’s a crime problem everywhere.”

In a sense, Haberman and Cooper aren’t entirely wrong; while America may be dramatically safer than it was a few decades ago, it is still more violent than its wealthy peers. But crime in the United States is not exclusively or even primarily a big city problem. When Haberman confidently asserts that “big cities have traditionally had crime problems,” she’s describing the New York City of her childhood, not the New York City of 2025.

One wonders where Haberman, Cooper, and The Atlantic’s Michael Powell got this idea that cities like New York, Los Angeles, and the District of Columbia are still facing serious urban crime waves. No doubt it has something to do with the fact that all three of them spent their formative years in large cities that genuinely were grappling with violent crime epidemics. Maybe they, like Trump, view the external world through a filter that transmutes everything into a phantasmagoric, permanent 1990s. (That would also help to explain why they seem incapable of taking the Trumpism phenomenon on its own terms, instead of treating it like another manifestation of what came to be considered “normal” politics in the late 20th century.)

But I think there’s something else going on here too. A lot of people — particularly people who live in a cloistered world of privilege — seem to be incapable of distinguishing between actual violent crime and upsetting but non-threatening signs of social disorder. A mentally distressed homeless person is usually not dangerous, but visible poverty and suffering gives a lot of people a sort of crime-y vibe.

This crime-y vibe, more than any actual crime, forms the pretext for Trump’s invasion of D.C. That’s why, shortly began the invasion began, Trump warned the city’s homeless population that they would need to “move out, IMMEDIATELY.” It’s also why, after the invasion began, the right-wing publication The Federalist ran a whole article about how three apparently drunk homeless guys were blocking the door to their offices. (The same article describes U Street as “unsavory,” which I suppose is their way of saying it has fun bars and Black people.)

To The Federalist and company, high rates of unsheltered homelessness are associated with high murder rates because they’re both manifestations of the same underlying problem of crime and disorder. In fact, no such relationship exists: while high-cost coastal states such as New York, Massachusetts, California and Oregon have the highest rates of homelessness, the states of the Deep South have significantly higher murder rates.

Plus, the timing doesn’t make sense. The urban crime wave of the 20th century started in the 1960s and crested in the early 1990s; modern street homelessness didn’t really become a widespread problem until the 1980s, and the current spike in homelessness began around the mid-2010s. If widespread violence was one of the defining features of the urban crisis, then mass homelessness is very much a post-crisis phenomenon.

This may seem counterintuitive until we remember that large-scale homelessness is caused by housing shortages. Around the turn of the century, as violent crime plunged in large American cities, they once again became highly desirable places to live. White flight slowed and then began to move in reverse; affluent, highly-educated professionals flooded into the cities that their parents had abandoned for the suburbs. In the interregnum, those cities had destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes through urban renewal, and then, through a series of aggressive rezonings, made it illegal to rebuild that housing. So the rising class of high-income urban professionals found themselves competing against incumbent residents for a smaller and inelastic pool of housing stock, with predictable results.

In terms of its underlying causes, the current homelessness crisis is very nearly the opposite of the 20th century urban crime wave. It is a product of affluence, inequality, and political sclerosis. In the late 20th century, America’s large cities struggled in large part because their major industries and tax bases were getting hollowed out; today, they are struggling because their land use regimes and planning institutions are ill-equipped to manage rapid economic growth.

Which brings us to the real reason why Trump is an enemy of urban America. If cities like D.C. and Los Angeles truly were crime-ridden hellholes, they would pose little threat to the MAGA movement. It is because these are prosperous and dynamic places that they must be occupied.

There’s a reason why Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is posting Thomas Kinkade paintings on X. The MAGA vision for America is fundamentally anti-urban. It is all about an idealized version of small-town America: idyllic, racially homogeneous, and organized along patriarchal lines. To the movement, this vision represents the only reasonable way to live. Anything else is unnatural and doomed to collapse into violence and chaos.

Large cities are a living rebuke to this vision. If dense, multi-ethnic, socially inclusive communities are capable of functioning reasonably well, then the whole MAGA edifice is built on a lie. Trump and his acolytes can’t tolerate the possibility that these communities are not just functional but thriving and highly desirable places to live. They have to be war zones. And if they aren’t war zones now, they need to be turned into them.

I don’t mean to downplay the slow-motion disasters now afflicting D.C., Los Angeles, and other major American cities. The homelessness crisis and the housing shortage that caused it are both humanitarian catastrophes. But the solution to these twin catastrophes is fundamentally urbanist: it necessarily involves making American cities even larger, denser, and more urban. Many state and local Democratic officials have failed to move in this direction because they share some of MAGA’s assumptions about the intrinsic superiority of suburban and exurban living.

Certain journalists at prestigious news outlets appear to also hold those assumptions. But they’re wrong, and we should say they’re wrong. The very things that Trump hates and fears about D.C. are what make it a beautiful — and beautifully American — place.

“America First” in its original iteration was a slogan for isolationists. But the new America Firsters are not remotely isolationist; nor are they anti-imperialist, despite what certain credulous anti-anti-MAGA journalists and academics of the left would have you believe. Since Trump first appropriated the phrase, “America First” has gone from an isolationist credo to a neo-imperialist rejection of liberal internationalism.

But to say that right-wing nationalists are opposed to the “rules-based international order” isn’t to say they reject the notion of international rules and codes of conduct. In fact, the Trump administration, like right-wing nationalist parties around the world, is governed by very strong intuitions about how countries are supposed to behave. It’s just that those intuitions differ radically from the ones undergirding international institutions like the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions and so on.

The political dispute that lays this bare most clearly is between Europeanists and right-wing Euroskeptics. Euroskepticism is a label most commonly applied to parties in European nations that want independence from the European Union: UKIP, the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Five Star Movement, and so on. But even though the United States is in no imminent danger of joining the EU, the Trump Administration — and most overtly Vice President J.D. Vance — shares the Euroskepticism of nationalist parties on the other side of the Atlantic. Vance made this all but explicit in his February speech to the Munich Security Conference, when he scolded America’s erstwhile European allies for “[opening] the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants” and reminded them that “in England, they voted for Brexit.”

To Vance, the European Union breaks the rules of the new international order not despite of the fact that it is a rule-bound, trans-national body, but because of it. In other public remarks, Vance has frequently emphasized that polities bound together by law or civic religion are inherently inferior to those united by blood and soil. “America is not just an idea,” he said in a recent address to the formerly Straussian, now neo-fascist Claremont Institute. “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

The whole point of the EU is that it is not a “particular people.” It is, by its very nature, multi-ethnic and multicultural. And while it very often falls short of Europeanists’ highest aspirations, it remains a living rebuke to right-wing nationalist ideas about the biological foundations for political unity.

The rules of the nationalist international order are as follows. Nations are defined by common ancestry: other ethnicities must, within the boundaries of a particular nation, assume a subordinate status. And just as there must be a hierarchy within nations, there is a hierarchy of nations: the superior ones must be allowed to dominate their respective spheres of influence. Under these rules, pluralism and multi-lateral cooperation are not just naïve or misguided, but actual violations of proper international norms.

People have often remarked on the irony of nationalist globalization: right-wing nationalist parties all over the world enthusiastically share ideas, messaging strategies, and even material support with one another. But this only looks like a contradiction if you assume these parties are isolationist, or opposed to the idea of some kind of coherent international system. In fact, they’re trying to impose their international system on the rest of us.

This post was inspired by my efforts to make sense of what the hell happened in the most recent Japanese elections, where a “Japan First” party, Sanseito, gained 14 seats in the upper house of the National Diet. I was a little bemused to discover that the party, is led by an antisemite who once promised that his party would not “sell Japan out to Jewish capital.” There’s an obvious historical logic to the antisemitism of nationalist parties in Germany, France, the United States and various other Western countries. But Japan? Japan has never had a Jewish population of any size or note; there are maybe a couple thousand Jews in the entire country today.

Clearly, Sanseito’s Sohei Kamiya is guzzling down the same rancid slop as his counterparts in other developed countries. Antisemitism is just part of the nationalist package. As the ur-conspiracy theory, antisemitism also generally tends to travel with conspiracism, which is another key ingredient in the nationalist stew.

But I think there’s something else going on here, and it goes back to twentieth century tropes about “rootless cosmopolitans” or, in an expression coined by Henry Ford’s newspaper, “the international Jew.” Jews are a nation of sorts, but without national boundaries; there are more people with at least one Jewish parent in the United States than there are in Israel. The diaspora is where the majority of Jews live, it has been since antiquity, and it probably always will be.

This fact — and the fact that so many members of the diaspora, including myself, feel no identification with the state of Israel — poses serious problems for the nationalist international order. It also helps to explain the ambivalent relationship that many right-wing nationalist parties have with Israel. On the one hand, the Israeli government plays by the right-wing nationalist rules: it dominates and terrorizes non-Jewish subject peoples, it invokes blood and soil as the core of Israeli nationhood, and it even indulges in conspiratorial, antisemitic tropes about members of the diaspora. On the other hand, Netanyahu’s genocidal war of conquest in Gaza is too much to stomach for even some members of the nationalist right. Plus, at the end of the day, Israel is still full of Jews.

To the extent that Israel offers a solution to the Jewish question, it is because right-wing Zionism gives antisemites in other countries a certain amount of plausible deniability. They can distinguish between the “real” Jews of Israel, who they can claim to support, and the rootless Jewish diaspora, which represents the real menace to gentiles. But that’s not really a solution to the fundamental problem, which is that the durability of the diaspora — even after the Holocaust — is a constant reminder of why the nationalist international order will always be a mirage.

People like Vance will never get to see a world without migration, shifting demography, and ambiguous ethnic boundary lines, because that world has never existed. Multiculturalism and pluralism are not utopian ideals, but a necessary response to one of the basic, enduring facts of human civilization. People move around and intermarry. Traditions evolve and cross-pollinate. Ethnogenesis is not just something that happened in the past, but an ongoing, dynamic process. The first Syrian migrants to England arrived not under the EU, but under the Roman Empire. There are even some Jews in Japan.

UPDATE: I removed language that implied Sanseito was interchangeable with another party that also gained in the Japanese Diet elections. Thanks to Tobias Harris for pointing out the error.

It’s a bit ironic, given Ezra Klein’s critique of “everything bagel liberalism,” that the abundance agenda is now risks becoming something of an everything bagel itself. Frank DiStefano thinks it needs to transform into a “national ideology” about “how to restore a fading American dream.” In the National Interest, Kathleen Hicks and Wendy Anderson write that they want an “Abundance National Security Agenda.” And Matthew Yglesias thinks it’s “time for abundance Democrats to embrace cultural moderation,” specifically through a vehicle he calls, in the pages of the Niskanen Center’s online journal Hypertext, “Big Ass Truck Abundance.”

It’s a testament to both the success and mutability of the abundance framework that so many people are proposing their own elaborations on the basic premise. (I take that basic premise to be: YIMBY, but for other stuff in addition to housing.) But there’s such a thing as over-elaboration. “Abundant national security” is a slogan that only really makes sense if your main priority is public funding for weapons R&D; as it so happens, Wendy Anderson is a former Palantir executive. Similarly, the argument for linking “cultural moderation” with abundance has nothing to do with the innate properties of a YIMBYism+ policy agenda. The argument for Big Ass Truck Abundance appears to be that abundance Democrats should be centrists because all Democrats should be centrists.

It’s striking that Yglesias should be the one making the argument for what I’ll henceforth call BATA, because he’s a frequent critic of progressive advocacy blocs that stray outside their policy lanes. Even an earlier post of his about BATA takes a swipe at “progressive omnicause thinking.” And just three days after the publication of his Hypertext piece, Yglesias was again extolling “the power of a single-issue group.”

To his credit, Yglesias recognizes the contradiction. In his endorsement of single-issue advocacy, he writes:

To my mind, this is more interesting and nuanced than the prescriptivism of his Hypertext essay on BATA. And in general, I agree that YIMBYism wins when supported by a diverse ecosystem of groups, with a diverse set of ideological orientations and mission scopes. But his critique of “YIMBYs who are excessively focused on bolstering their ‘we’re the true progressives’ credentials rather than on building bridges with moderates” points to a telling blind spot in his analysis: he can’t bring himself to grant that there might be local contexts where establishing progressive bona fides is more strategic than uttering his preferred cultural shibboleths. The only two viable options, in his mind, appear to be single-issue advocacy and BATA. (Ask yourself whether groups like Open New York and Abundance New York should have rallied behind Cuomo instead of building bridges to the Mamdani camp and you start to understand the problem with this argument.)

One obvious reason for that gap in his analysis is ideological: he thinks more people should be centrist Democrats because he’s a centrist Democrat. But it’s also structural. Yglesias finds it difficult to resist centrist omnicausal thinking for the same reason that so many advocacy groups find themselves drawn to the progressive omnicause.

I’ve written before that I’m sympathetic to the criticism that Yglesias and others make of “the groups” that comprise much of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, albeit with some reservations on my part. One of those reservations has to do with the implication that “the groups” are a specifically progressive phenomenon. In fact, centrist Democratic groups often indulge in the very pathologies that they ascribe to the left wing of the party: motivated reasoning, insularity, political naiveté, and a tendency to claim they speak on behalf of communities that they rarely (if ever) interact with.

Those pathologies are not personal failings—or at least they’re not only personal failings. They’re what happens when party politics gets monopolized by lavishly funded nonprofits, staffed by highly educated and affluent ideological dead-enders. Those lavishly funded organizations are sometimes referred to as the nonprofit industrial complex, which is assumed to be an exclusively progressive phenomenon. But it’s a no less accurate description of the WelcomeFest coalition.

These sorts of coalitions are inexorably going to pull their constituent issue groups toward omnicausal thinking because they’re bound together by shared funding sources, cultural and ideological affinities, professional networks, and social ties. In-group solidarity has a way of burying official mission statements, whether the in-group in question is the progressive professional class or the centrist professional class.

It’s not hard to understand why. In both cases, members of these coalitions are primarily accountable to their funders and their peers. They may aspire to act on behalf of the common man, but they don’t represent the common man in any formal or official sense. If you work in the nonprofit sector, that isn’t who pays your salaries or rates your job performance. And even for Democratic politicians — who are paid by the public, and who can be hired or fired by them — the link between job performance and electoral performance is pretty tenuous, confounded as it is by any number of other variables.

To the extent that the national Democratic Party can be said to rule anything, it is ruling the void. That phrase comes from the title of a 2013 book by the late political scientist Peter Mair, who argued that Western political parties had become increasingly remote from the constituencies they ostensibly served. In his analysis, mass participation in party politics is a thing of the past; instead of being rooted in civil society, political parties have become cloistered institutions managed by an isolated governing class. "The groups” are not so much an American progressive failing as they are a symptom of a pan-Western pandemic.

Mair was writing specifically about European parliamentary democracy, but it’s not hard to see the relevance of his critique to the American context. It rhymes with the thesis of Theda Skocpol’s Diminished Democracy, a book which I’ve probably cited in this newsletter dozens of times at this point. Skocpol’s book, as you might recall, concerns itself with the erosion of mass membership civic groups in the United States and the rise of the professionally managed advocacy organizations that imperfectly filled the ensuing vacuum.

If we understand the problem with “the groups” as an epiphenomenon of mass democracy’s erosion, then the BATA-versus-single-issue-advocacy debate starts to look like it’s beside the point. A political movement can be oriented around a single issue or around a set of centrist cultural signifiers, but without civil society roots it’s going to end up hovering in the same airless vacuum as every other well-intentioned but free-floating elite project.

This is a trap that the YIMBY movement has largely avoided up to now: it began as a grassroots, volunteer-led project, and grassroots membership still comprises the core of its coalition. “Abundance” as an extension of the YIMBY project will fail if it loses that connection with (and accountability to) a nonprofessional membership base. It will simply add several more groups to The Groups.

There’s still value in trying to articulate a larger vision. But that vision needs to have some organic basis in the ground-level work of YIMBY activists. They’re the ones who determine the movement’s overall ideological complexion. Any attempt to impose one from above is essentially Group-think.