These Ideas Don't Fit Any Political Box (That's Why They're Winning)

I thought we were organizing a niche policy meetup, but when 50 people showed up to talk about abundance, I realized we tapped into something huge: Americans who just want their government to work.

I co-organized a meetup in DC that attracted libertarians, progressives, independents, Republicans, and Democrats.

The secret was focusing on abundance—making it easier to approve life-saving drugs and build things in America.

Abundance = responsive governance

When people hear "abundance," they sometimes think it's just techno-optimism or covert business interests. Abundance is actually a more intentional framework for governance. It’s a focus in government on actual, not theoretical, end-results of policies. Real-world impact on people should be the metric to obsess over.

This matters for big issues:

Housing affordability requires building more units where jobs are—when nearly half of renters pay over a third of their income in rent, building is essential for protecting the middle class and democratic stability.

Climate and energy resilience requires building things—lots of renewable energy, transmission lines, batteries, heat pumps, electric car chargers. The Inflation Reduction Act allocated hundreds of billions for clean energy, but this isn’t helpful at building it.

Pandemic preparedness depends on rapidly scaling vaccine manufacturing, running clinical trials, and distributing medical countermeasures. The countries that handled COVID well (Taiwan, South Korea) had built responsive governance systems ahead of time.

U.S. leadership in AI requires massive energy infrastructure and compute resources. Every permitting delay in data center and energy grid capacity pushes AI development toward less regulated jurisdictions.

The pattern is usually the same: we agree on what needs to happen, but our modern-day institutions are very complex and overarchingly structured for saying no.

The Coalition That Built Itself

The head of Northern Virginia YIMBY Luca (follow his Subtack!) and I decided to host an abundance meetup. We have good networks, but I mostly in tech policy circles and Luca mostly housing circles. I wanted to meet people excited about and working on abundance and progress, not only those at the main abundance/progress think tanks. There was no list of “people who read about abundance, are scattered across the DC area, and want to meet others”. Luca and I promised ourselves we would do the event as long as we got just two RSVPs.

The event announcement jumped across communities we hadn’t expected—Slate Star Codex readers, longevity researchers, science policy nerds, and left and right wing circles.

We reached 90 RSVPs.

Around fifty people came, wrote their ideas on whiteboards, led small discussion groups, and met future collaborators.

These people disagree about plenty of things. But they all shared frustration with the U.S. government inability to build and deliver important things. The longevity researcher wants reforms to drug approval processes. The congressional staffer wants more power plants for national resilience. The science policy person wants better structures for science funding and less overhead.

Why this matters now

Abundance thinking is important because the alternative is pretty dark. If democratic governments can't deliver, people will either give up on democracy or turn to authoritarian alternatives that promise to cut through red tape.

We're already seeing this globally. Authoritarian governments love to point out that they can build high-speed rail and manufacture vaccines quickly while democracies debate for years.

But abundance offers a different path: keep democratic accountability while dramatically improving state capacity. Focus on outcomes.

Democracies who excel at efficiency and responsiveness, like Norway and Switzerland, garner high trust from their citizens. Unlike America, these democracies consistently deliver critical services like building more housing, fixing bridges, and maintaining ice skating rinks without years of delays.

The abundance agenda offers a path toward responsive governance in America that doesn't require anyone to leave their political commitments. You can be a progressive who wants faster housing approvals and a republican who wants more aggressive science funding.

By focusing on abundance, you filter for people who care more about fixing than signaling. And by getting offline and talking to people advancing abundance behind the scene, we realized that abundance is getting a lot more traction and has a lot fewer enemies than what the Twitter-sphere battles would lead you to believe.

If we want responsive governance that can handle 21st-century challenges, this seems like a promising avenue for it.

If you’re in DC, come to our next meetup: a State Capacity Afternoon Tea on June 7. Even if you cannot attend this time, RSVP ‘no’ to add your name to the list, along with filling out our email contact form.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s and do not represent those of the US government.