An Altogether Different Kind of Abundance Agenda

In 1935, The New Republic chronicled the first big “abundance” movement—and mapped the fault lines of what could be the next big debate on the left.

https://newrepublic.com/article/197941/abundance-agenda-new-republic-klein

https://archive.ph/LDEaD


Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, leader of the populist Share the Wealth campaign, eight months before his assassination.

Back in 1935, on the pages of The New Republic, the editors wrote that the United States was in desperate need of “a party with real possibilities of becoming powerful in elections in the not distant future, and devoted to the purpose of establishing collectivism so that the working masses may produce abundance for themselves.” Those words ring as true today as they did when they were first published 90 years ago.

You might have noticed the word “abundance” lurking on TNR’s pages lately. While abundance is all the rage as a political clarion call these days, its modern iteration is entirely disjointed from a long history of the word’s use on the left to call for a very different political program from the one imagined by current abundists like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson discussed on their Citations Needed podcast, the term was long used in social justice circles as a foil for focusing on growth or wealth building. We should prioritize ensuring widely shared prosperity over the generation of new wealth, the argument went.

Last winter, I chanced upon a copy of The New Republic, Volume 83, from the summer of 1935 while doing some Christmas shopping in a neighborhood antiques store. As I perused the volume, I was struck by how often the word abundance was used to describe the purpose of a proposed new political party on the left. By this point, I had been following the rise of our modern abundance movement for the better part of two years. The abundance called for in the pages of TNR in 1935 is strikingly different from the abundance called for today by a loose coalition of (largely) centrist liberals and libertarians.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been frequently invoked by both proponents and critics of the abundance movement in recent months. Critics point to the New Deal as a paradigm that we should strive to replicate, where capital is disciplined, wealth redistributed, and direct government action used to build critical infrastructure the private sector won’t. Proponents retort that such public investment was only possible because of how many fewer bottlenecks to public policy existed during FDR’s time than do today and that the emphasis on disciplining capital belies a “monomaniacal” disdain for the private sector.

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