'Left, Right, & Center' Breaks Down

Transcript

0:00 Welcome to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. It's time to build again, folks. Fascism never made America great, but when progressives build, that's where you'll find American greatness. Tonight's guest is Jeremiah Johnson. He's a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism and the host of the New Liberal podcast. As the old posters say, conservatism's the old way, socialism's the wrong way. Liberalism is the right way. Look askance at MAGA fascism and horseshoe leftism and choose the path to renewed American liberty and greatness, Progressive Abundance. We also feature a special cameo from Sean Astin, star of Lord of the Rings and Stranger Things, who you may know as Samwise Gamgee. That's coming up right now on Radio Abundance.

0:52 You're listening to Radio Abundance, a podcast by YIMBY Democrats for America. Now let's get to the show. Please welcome your host for the evening, YIMBY Democrats for America Executive Director Steve Boyle. And to kick things off, here's Steve. I'm Donald J. Trump, and I hate these guys. All right, welcome to Radio Abundance, Jeremiah Johnson from the Center for New Liberalism. We here at YIMBY Democrats for America are huge fans of the Center for New Liberalism, or CNL. They were big supporters of us back in the days of YIMBY's for Harris and helping amplify the message and join us and get involved with some of the events that we were doing. And in the days of YIMBY Democrats for America, CNL helped sponsor our big happy hour in San Francisco, which was a co-production with 10 different groups, including CNL's local chapter, the Bay Area New Liberals.

1:43 So we are massive fans of theirs for their ideas and also for sponsoring food for that party, which people like. The most important part, obviously. It always is. You know, my background is as an event producer, and it doesn't matter how good the event is, the story, the aesthetics, the experience. If people are hungry or if they don't like the food, they're going to be cranky, and it's the only thing they're going to remember. So thank you, Center for New Liberalism, for creating a great event. I think the Wall Street Journal's raves all can be tied back to people having full stomachs from the apps out there. And I'm a big fan of yours, Jeremiah. So maybe we can kick this off. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about CNL? Well, my name is Jeremiah. Thank you for having me here, Steve. I founded the Center for New Liberalism, gosh, like seven years ago, something like that.

2:33 It's been a while. And the Center for New Liberalism is basically a center-left organizing group, think tank, collective that tries to promote basically abundance values in the Democratic Party. We are trying to make the Democratic Party the party that builds, the party that wants to build more homes, more green energy. So we are pro-immigration. We are pro-trade. We are pro-economic growth. We tend to be pretty pro-market as well. But we also understand the value of the social safety net. We try to position ourselves in the middle there between, you know, market dynamics and the need for a strong safety net. We think those things are both compatible. And so we have got chapters in, gosh, like 60 to 70 cities around the country at this point.

3:23 And our local chapters do activism. They do organizing. They show up at city council meetings. They try to help get, you know, people elected. They go knock on doors. They volunteer for congressional campaigns, city council campaigns. And trying to get that type of Democrat, the type of Democrat who you probably often have on this show, trying to make that the center of the Democratic Party. So, you know, it's been a few years now since we've really kind of formally gotten going. And it's been very exciting. It's been a wild ride. And I mean, working in politics right now is somewhat of a wild ride, as I'm sure you're aware. Yes, it is. It's a crazy moment. Actually, before we get to the main thrust of our conversation, I mean, you've been at this for a little while.

4:08 And, yeah, it seems to me we've entered a new era of American history. What's changed for you? I mean, this is just like it brings to mind there's like an old Chinese proverb. And maybe this is apocryphal that says, you know, it's a curse. And you curse someone by saying, may you live in interesting times. And I think we're in the interesting times right now. And, you know, it's I'm a pretty optimistic guy by nature. It's hard to stay optimistic sometimes just with the nature of everything going on. But under Donald Trump's in the second term, I'm not a fan. It does not seem to be as well managed and as well controlled as his first term where, you know, in the first term, it seems like a lot of bad things happened.

4:57 But it was bad things that fit within kind of a standard paradigm. And now it feels like we've broken the paradigm and it's very unclear what happens over the next five to 10 years. You know, I you brought up an old Chinese proverb and I always get curious. So I have looked up the origins that is from it. It's it's arguably an English expression. It is from an English ambassador to China in the 1930s. Well, who who reported hearing hearing from a friend about this Chinese curse? The most similar phrase in China, because there isn't an exact equivalent. The most similar phrase is is better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.

5:43 Well, a lot of these things are always, you know, apocryphal. But we got we got the spirit of it. Hey, the the chaos and the interesting times, you know, I I'm a person who cares a lot about I I I think about this a lot because, you know, I remember growing up. I was most passionate about history and I remember being in even like middle school and like, you know, in the late 90s, in the end of history era and and wishing I could have lived in historic times. And and sort of idolizing the artistic salons of the lost generation after World War One and sort of yearning for that. And then a few months later, 9-11 happened. And then four years later, I survived an al Qaeda terrorist attack. And I thought, shit, careful what you wish for.

6:28 But it is it is a prompt for heroism, I like to think we I in the fall campaign, I ran a in addition to Yimmy's for Harris, I I did something called immersive for Kamala. And adventures for Harris, where we literally raised 100K for the campaign, throwing D&D games, Dungeons and Dragons, virtual games. And we had Sean Astin, who played Samwise Gamgee and Lord of the Rings, join us for our second game. And he he he read out a speech that Samwise gives Frodo in those movies. I'm trying to figure out if it's copywritten or if I can play the rendition that he did at our event. I think I can do that. So maybe I'll I'll insert it here into this portion. Pause for Sean Astin.

7:21 It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really matter, full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

7:45 But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass and a new day will come. And when the sun shines, it'll shine out the clearer.

7:58 Those are the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why.

8:05 I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand now.

8:09 Folk in those stories had lots of chances of going back, only they didn't.

8:14 They kept going.

8:17 Because they were holding on to something.

8:20 That there's some good left in this world, Mr. Frodo.

8:24 And it's worth fighting for.

8:32 And back to the interview. So that's my theory of that. But yes, so now that we are in interesting times, let's talk about politics here, Amaya. And let's talk about the politics of abundance today. We talk a lot at UNB Democrats for America about the politics of abundance on the left. That's kind of why we exist, is to champion the idea of Progressive Abundance and to connect the dots between the progressive movement and abundance, because we see them not as contradictions, but as more than compliments, but necessary ingredients of each other. We've had some great conversations with folks like Congressman Jake Aukenkloss, Congressman Ro Khanna, just about the connection between abundance and fight oligarchy, abundance and progressivism, abundance and a strong social safety net. So we talk about the left a lot. We'll do that in a little bit, but let's start by talking about the right.

9:18 Jeremiah, what is going on with abundance on the right? It's really interesting. And you're going to see this, I think, as we talk about both the left and the right, political coalitions have been fracturing and kind of reshaping themselves over the last 10 years. And the most obvious way this is happening is with Donald Trump, right? Donald Trump has completely remade the Republican Party. The kind of George Bush, Mitt Romney style conservatism is almost totally dead now, outside of a few congressional holdouts or whatever. And Donald Trump has remade the party in his image. It's a more nationalist party. It's a lot more skeptical of standard economic theory, you know, trade and deficits and all these things. He does not seem to have a real economist anywhere in the White House.

10:06 And one of the interesting ways that that's played out is that you see this split that's very clear in the second Trump administration between what people call the tech right and the MAGA right. And, you know, the MAGA right being your Steve Miller, your Steve Bannon. Sometimes I just call them the Steves, the kind of the nationalist, nativist, America first wing. And yes, sorry, Steve. I don't mean to impugn you, but there's a lot of bad Steve's out there, you know, some we assume are good people. But so you've got this. And, you know, the tech right really does. I wouldn't call them explicitly pro abundance, but they share a lot of abundance E kind of things, right? Like if you talk to Elon, for instance, who's kind of the prince of the tech right, he very much wants to, like, accelerate economic growth.

10:58 He wants to invent cool things. He wants to go to space. And for him, this it's a very tech bro kind of version of this. But fundamentally, I think it's aligned. You know, he left California because it was too hard to operate a business there. Also, maybe for political reasons. But I think a lot of people would recognize that, like, the cost of living is too high in California. There's a lot of regulation that for when you're running a business that you have to deal with in California that you don't have to deal with anywhere else. And there's a lot of, you know, tech right ecosystem that would agree with us about, you know, the need to build more energy, more infrastructure, more housing. And, you know, that deregulation is one of the ways that we can get there, that get getting rid of certain zoning things, setback requirements, you know, stair required, all these nerdy topics that we talk about.

11:49 Now, sadly, on the right, at least at the national level, this movement has pretty much been crushed. The tech right has been utterly crushed nationally in terms of influence. They're losing every single battle in the White House. Steve Miller and Steve Bannon are getting their way pretty much all the time. You know, we all saw a very public breakup between Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And so I don't have a lot of hope for the Republican Party to become a real pro-abundance party. This is a little bit nuanced because, you know, you can look at like the state and local level and you can see some patterns where like, obviously, there are many red states that build a lot more housing than blue states do. There are Republicans in Montana that have passed massive suite of YIMBY legislation.

12:40 They're doing a great job. I would applaud them. I would tell them to keep going. You know, obviously, in Texas, they've done certain things that make it really easy. But it's not universal, right? You know, there's like the Northeastern Republicans, for instance, are for some reason that would be interesting to get into. But they are way, way more like NIMBY than anywhere else in the country. In general, blue state Republicans sometimes have this problem. And even in the states where things are going pretty well, like in Texas, Republicans seem to be inching more towards skepticism of this kind of stuff. Like, I would give the example that everybody knows Texas builds a lot more green energy, builds a lot more solar than anywhere else, even in California.

13:26 It's not because Texas is a bunch of hippies. It's because it's easier to build in Texas. And yet there was an attempt this year in the Texas state legislature to kill solar, basically to to cripple solar. And I won't get into the details of the bill. And luckily, it did fail narrowly. But it seems like they might be moving in that direction. So I there's there's complications there. There's nuance. But in general, it seems like the nativist right that has this very like almost degrowth agenda is triumphing over the tech right. And so there I'm not sure how much hope there would be for abundance on the right. You know, as as you say, we are in a weird political moment, but it's a weird political moment only in the context of, I think, our lifetimes that it's different.

14:16 But it is a big party shift in the way that there have been party shifts. I you know, I was just speaking with someone from the Democratic Party the other day and from their social media team. And we were talking about the use of the donkey as their profile photo. The donkey, of course, is from Andrew Jackson, who is the most Trumpian president. And yet it is the insignia of the Democratic Party. So there are shifts. He in one of our first conversations spoke with Congressman Jake Auchincloss. And, you know, as a history geek, I was so delighted when kind of out of nowhere, he jumped in it. And what he said was around about 2016, we entered what I think of as the seventh party system in the United States. There's been six previous iterations of partisan alignments going back to the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans when it was Hamilton and Jefferson all the way through Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Lincoln, FDR. And around 2016, the Republican Party stopped being Reagan Republicans and started being something closer to an elitist Christian nationalist part.

15:16 And what he continued to say was Democrats have not yet realigned ourselves for the seventh party system. As we do, the opportunity that we have is to embrace markets because Republicans are retreating from markets. They are the ones becoming more statist, more skeptical of trade and commerce and exchange. And Democrats have an opportunity to say, hey, markets work pretty well. Yeah, absolutely. And and this is something we are seeing play out in the Democratic Party. I think you're right. And Congressman Auchincloss is right in saying that the Democratic Party has not realigned itself as fast as the GOP has. The GOP transformation has been very quick as these things go. There's been an interesting fight going on about abundance, I would say.

16:03 And, you know, this is kind of an abundance podcast. It's kind of a Yimby podcast. It's arguable. Like, are those two things even really much different anymore? But the book abundance came out in March, I think, of this year. And there's been this like slow rolling conversation that's really heated up over the past month, especially between various factions of the Democratic Party about is this book abundance good? Is it bad? Should we be remaking the Democratic Party in the image of this book? As many of its loud advocates are saying that it certainly has a lot of backers, but it also has a lot of detractors. And I think it's really interesting to kind of drill deeply into who they are, because this is not something that, you know, can really be described as just like, oh, this is moderates versus progressives. It's not just that this is like, you know, the the center left versus the left as as people want to frame it sometimes.

17:03 You know, I I consider myself a staunch progressive. I idealize FDR. I often say, you know, abundance is is not just for private markets. Abundance is for governments, too. If you want the government to take on big public projects, build abundant public housing, green energy, public transportation, then, you know, the government is is subject to those same zoning laws, as well as like onerous amounts of process and and hoops to jump through. And so so you actually need the same stuff you'd have to clear out of the way for the private market to build. You need for government to build as well. And what I often say is, if you want to see a new FDR, a 21st century FDR, you can only get that through abundance. I like to hearken back to the mythology of the FDR era, because you have citizens building the umpire state building in 13 months in the Great Depression, you have governments taking on big projects, Hoover Dam, Golden Gate Bridge, you have the federal government passing the New Deal, and you have us curb stomping Nazis in Europe and authoritarianism around the world. And to me, that's the spirit we need to get back to. But it's also raised a lot that in that FDR era, the rules around building are more similar to what the abundance movement wants to get back to. The restrictions around building and the giant processes are things that came later. We often sort of cite the 70s as a turning point. But that was in a sense, an undoing of FDR's America. And there's a sense to me that what abundance wants to get back to is, is the spirit and the some of the policies of the FDR era. So I see abundance, and it's the reason I call it Progressive Abundance, but I, I see it as a deeply progressive movement and progressive dream both to enable governments to do the big things that people want them to do. And also when citizens can do them too, with their ingenuity and innovation and, and the sort of anarchy of the market that allows new ideas to rise that government can then learn from and utilize itself and create a scale that, you know, is nice when you can build things also without taxpayer money. So I, I, I see abundance as, as very left driven. And, uh, and some of the detractors on the left, you know, in this realignment, I mean, I, I sort of wonder how many of the red DSA hats will be traded in for red MAGA hats in the years to come.

19:18 I'll say it's interesting that you say, and I, you know, I think there's been an effort for this to happen. You say that this seems like it should be driven from the left, right? It's a very progressive thing to do. But what's interesting to me is that at least in vibes, it is not coded that way. It is coded as kind of a centrist thing or a center left or a neoliberal left or moderate, or we, we, there's all these words we can use. Right. And we're going to kind of be tossing around terms, very loosey goosey, like the left in like capital L left with, you know, that includes the super progressives and the socialists and, and things like that. But I want to dive in a little bit to the specific groups, because it's not just a, a center left versus left thing. There are certainly a lot of center left people who are really in love with abundance and really in love with Yimby ism and all the ideas we're talking about here. But there are also people on the left who very much, you know, like you, like, like many others who want to build more housing, who agree with some of this stuff.

20:26 And then there are some on the left who don't, and it's valuable to just say, you know, beyond just, well, there's different groups, like who specifically are they? So I want to give that a shot. The first group I would talk about is, I'm going to call them like the monomaniacals. And these are people who they're on kind of the left, but they are mostly focused on one issue. And I'm going to use the antitrust people as an example. If you ever wander into like the very small policy niche that is like antitrust Twitter, there are people who make antitrust like their whole thing. And, you know, maybe you think we need stronger antitrust enforcement in the United States. Maybe you don't think that, but either way, just like factually, the people who care a lot about antitrust are like, they are all about it. And they tend to think that every issue is an antitrust issue.

21:24 You know, the wage gap is an antitrust issue. You know, the racial wealth inequality is an antitrust issue. Housing is an antitrust issue. Trade is an antitrust issue. You know, economic growth is an antitrust issue. Like everything comes back to antitrust. There's a guy named Matt Stoller who wrote a book called Goliath in which, you know, and he's probably the crown prince of the antitrust movement. And in his book, Goliath, he says that like the revolutionary war and the civil war were both actually secretly about monopoly power, you know, and it's, it's just like everything in the world comes back to that. And I think for that group of people, they tend to be very, very anti-abundance.

22:13 They've argued against it really, really strenuously because it's an alternative theory of, of what needs to be done. Right. It says, well, actually you can solve this problem without dealing with antitrust. And it's not that, you know, like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of the book abundance don't favor antitrust enforcement, but they don't have that as a, you know, single guiding light. They don't believe it is the single policy that will solve everything. So the monomaniacals tend to like just zero in on your theory is fake. All we have to do is this one thing. And that is at least one group that I think is part of what's driving this kind of conflict on the left. I almost buy that theory about the American revolution in terms of, uh, you know, the tip of the spear of, of the American revolutionaries where, uh, we're smugglers, you know, rum smugglers and folks who, uh, were rebelling against the British attempting to, uh, to raise some funds by enforcing the East India company's monopoly on tea and sugar and things like that.

23:20 So I'm kind of interested in this, but, uh, you mentioned also loosey goosey terms, which is a pet issue of mine, right? We have conservatives trying to tear down the system, progressives who hate the future. I have no idea what a neoliberal is. I'm sorry, Jeremiah. Uh, but, uh, uh, you know, I, I, I, again, I like history. So I think the origins of the progressive movement was anti-populist promoting expertise and, and the sort of word and action of, of experts. That's how it began. It was a kind of elitist expert driven data driven, the idea that you could scientifically and rationally understand the world and solve problems. That's where progressivism came from. And obviously the, the codes changed and shifted over time. The anti-monopoly thing is funny to me because to me, abundance is anti-monopoly at its core. And if monopolies, the problem is somebody with a immense power status and incumbency taking advantage of their winnings to pull the ladder up on everybody else and entrench their status. I think you see the same thing in, in, in housing markets where, uh, people who've made it, they have homes, they're millionaires, not billionaires, but a million millionaires will get you further than one billionaire, you know, pull up the ladder and other people entrench their status, consolidate their winnings at the expense of the sort of new entrants and innovators and new players who might chip away at that. So I, I see abundance as fundamentally part of fighting oligarchy.

24:52 Well, and like the, the quintessential moment between like the, the abundance folks and the antitrust folks, I think came when Ezra Klein was interviewing Zephyr Teachout on his podcast. And he, you know, she's been a critic of abundance. She's kind of fits in this antitrust framework. And he asked her like, you know, okay, you've got this theory, but like, can you name me one issue that like solving monopoly power wouldn't fix? Like, is there anything in America that, and she kind of thought for a second, she's like, well, I guess there's some, like for instance, race relations, but actually, and then she goes to talk about how actually race relations are like just a monopoly problem. And like, and it was just, it was almost like a very comical moment where even when asked, like, is there anything in the country, any problem at all that is not attributable to monopoly power? She tried to come up with one and then, but actually herself, but that's just one group. There's a second group that I would call the, I don't know, maybe the dirt bag left. And these are folks who are just, you know, highly online. They don't tend to be policy wonks in the same way that, you know, your antitrust people for all that I may disagree with them. They certainly know a lot about the policy they care about. They can talk to you about antitrust policy all day. They have a lot of knowledge, but this is more your online commentator, influencer whose personality for better or worse is kind of built around number one, being on the left and number two, hating anyone who is like a single atom to the right of them. And, you know, there's an old joke that like, you know, Republicans have built an entire media ecosystem and where all they do is bash Democrats all day long and Democrats, you know, the left responded by building a leftist media ecosystem that also bashes Democrats all day long. And so this kind of person, I think it's basically running off vibes, you know, abundance for better or worse has been coded as a kind of a centrist moderate thing to do. Maybe it's because it respects market power. Maybe it's because it says you don't need like a, a revolution, you know, we're not going to solve society's problems by, you know, having the proletariat usher in a communist utopia. We're just going to make some fixes to the zoning code.

27:24 This kind of person is, you know, a lot more vibes based, a lot more social media based and essentially like to some degree. And I know it sounds like I'm hippie punching here, but to some degree, this is the, you know, like I'm mad at my mom and I made it a style of politics kind of person. And they dislike abundance because it's not, you know, giving into this kind of influencer LARP about how we can just, you know, if we just crushed the man, then all of the things we want would be solved. That's another group that I think it's kind of important to kind of know when you're dealing with them. You know, the phrase I use for the dirtbag left is the horseshoe left, which is going to kind of bring us back around to our conversation about the right, right? Because you have on, on both the far left and the MAGA right folks who in a sense both want a revolution. They want different revolutions. Although I got to tell you, as a history nerd, you don't really get to choose your revolution and, uh, and they all tend to go not very well for a while. But, uh, you know, who you want to tear down the system and, uh, you want to sock it to the people who, who you are mad at. To me, it's a zero sum. And I think of Trump as kind of negative sum, but it's zero sum versus positive sum, right? If you're positive sum, the question is how can you create the most wins for the most people? If you're zero sum and somebody for somebody to win, somebody has to lose. Then the question becomes, well, who needs to lose, right? Who needs, who needs to suffer? And, uh, and so I think both from the, what I would call the horseshoe left and the MAGA right, there's a conversation around who needs to suffer. And you see this, you know, in California, you see, uh, you know, we can't build new housing because developers might make money. Not, Oh, they'll benefit, but we can benefit more, but because they benefit, we won't benefit. And so we need to make sure that they don't benefit or they do suffer. I think you see this in Trump's trade policy, right? Trade is meant to be positive sum, but he thinks trade always has winners and losers and therefore other people need to lose.

29:26 And of course, in both the example of California leftists on housing and Trump on trade, by trying to make the other person lose, you end up losing quite a bit yourself too. No, I mean, I totally agree. And we're, we're going to get into even more of this in a second, but a lot of this is, you know, there's, there's a difference between the kind of person who does zero sum thinking that any gain must be coming at someone else's expense that, you know, the, the, the size of the pie is fixed. And all we can do is battle over the size of our respective slices. And then there's, you know, people who think in it, not in zero sum terms, who think I want to grow the size of the, the, the pie. I want a pie that 10 years from now is going to be way bigger than the current pie. Um, and, and having that not zero sum thinking is really important. I think where you see a lot of the zero sum thinking coming from is what the third major group that I think is kind of opposed to abundance on the left. And that would be the dreaded groups, the, the capital G groups. And if you've ever kind of listened to this discourse before, if you've been involved in these discussions, you will of course have heard of the groups. And this could mean, you know, it could mean various unions. It could mean environmental activists and environmental nonprofits, ideological groups. It could mean people who are advocating for disabled people. It is not that the causes that they are fighting for are bad in and of themselves. It is not that unions are bad or accommodating disabled people is bad or the environment is bad or any of that. But typically when you work for, or you support one, or you're volunteering for one of these groups, you're part of a movement that really started, I would say, with, um, with Ralph Nader in the seventies. And there's a great book called why nothing works by Mark Dunkelman that, you know, if you, if you really like the abundance agenda, if you read abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and you want something that's not as airport bookie as that one is, because look, I love Ezra and Derek, but they definitely wrote an airport book. They wrote a simplified book for the masses. And if you want the book that really, really dives deeper, I really strongly recommend going to read why nothing works. But the main story of that book is basically how starting around the 1970s, you have this effort to kind of decentralized power. People are suspicious of the U S government now, but partially this is because of Vietnam. Partially this is because of, you know, the environmental pollutants that are everywhere. You know, the, the Cuyahoga river is catching on fire in Cleveland and we're tearing a hole in the ozone layer. And like the acid rain starts to happen at some point. And genuinely there are a lot of bad things happening. And so people get suspicious of the government and they start with this idea that we need to shackle the government and we need to enable regular people at a very, very low level to protest what the government is doing and to sue the government and to basically act as watchdogs for government. And there are understandable reasons why that happened. Some degree of that is probably useful, but the Nader movement was incredibly successful to the level where we have now this kind of power structure where anyone and everyone can protest anything and everything pretty much indefinitely. And the result is what we have now that it's really hard to build housing. It takes way too long. It's really hard to build green energy. It's hard to build basic infrastructure like bike paths and bus lanes and public toilets.

33:06 It's just hard to get anything done of any kind. And this is kind of the crowning achievement of the Ralph Nader movement. And at the center of that is the groups, you know, the, the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club are the expression of this. We can sue to stop anything. And you end up in this very weird position where like there are environmental groups suing to stop solar farms from being built in Massachusetts or suing to stop wind farms, but also in Massachusetts and like environmental groups are just totally lined up against actually building green energy in many cases. And this is their job to a large extent. A lot of these people have built their jobs and their careers and their identities around kind of this work of organizing and suing and protesting and abundance is, is pretty much telling them in, you know, sometimes politely, sometimes not politely, everything that your movement has built over the past 30 years needs to be torn down. You know, your entire theory of power is broken and we have to just undo everything you've done. And naturally they are often not happy about that.

34:20 You know, if you're, uh, why nothing works is an amazing book. And if what Jeremiah just said intrigues you, you should probably check out episode three of radio abundance, where we interview, uh, the author of why nothing works, Mark Dunkelman. Oh, you got Duncan. That's great. We got Duncan and we'll get him again. He's amazing. I mean, it's brilliant. And the conversations about that pull between the sort of Hamiltonian impulse to centralize power versus the Jeffersonian impulse to diffuse power, both running through the history of the progressive movement, super compelling. And, you know, you talk about airport books, right? If, if abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is abundance one Oh one, and you have to start there, uh, why nothing works to me is, is two Oh one. And I, I love it. You know, when you talk about the groups, the way I think about the groups is, um, it is, is there, there are groups that are demographics that need to be listened to and valued and taken into account, but they're sort of necessarily non-representative portions of them in the same way that who shows up, uh, at a city hall meeting to block housing is not going to be representative of the people in town because you can only get them from voting. The people who show up are going to be whiter, are going to be older, are going to be more nimby. They just are, you know, it's important as Democrats, as progressives, as Americans to listen to voices that are different than yours, people of color, marginalized voices to understand your experience is not universal and that you need to listen to people to understand their experience.

35:45 But if you want to know what it's like to be Latino in America or Latino in San Francisco, are you going to get that answer from the Latinx democratic club in San Francisco, which called the San Francisco democratic party fascists and left the party? Well, no, I don't think you are. And the clue is in the name because, uh, Latinos, uh, are on record in extensive polling as hating the term Latinx. And so we're probably not going to be represented by a Latinx club. Uh, and the same, you know, we have this conversation in labor, which is a tricky topic, but it's like, you want to uplift workers. You want to create jobs. You want to create better working conditions for the working class in America and uplift American labor and the union movement. And yet we see sometimes unions that, uh, go to the mat for their members while disadvantaging other unions and other American workers. And so I think you get these groups where the name and the demographics are like, yeah, that's, I need to be listening to them. That matters. That's important to me. I value that. And then you get a particularly one representative side of things.

36:49 Yeah. Look, it's the kind of thing we're talking about here is like, there should be an environmental movement. There should be unions in America, but they, frankly, we have to say out loud, they should not have as much power as they have right now, or at least they shouldn't have this specific kind of power they have right now. Because, you know, if you read why nothing works, one of the interesting things about that book is that like FDR would start some, some giant project right in the 1930s. And he would just appoint a guy who was in charge and the guy could just do things. He had all the power to just do what he wanted. And certainly that, that can be abused. You know, you can, you can end up in a Robert Moses situation where there one guy decides he wants to build a freeway through your neighborhood. And so you're screwed. But, you know, if that's too far in one direction, right now we live in a world where no one has the ability to say yes. If you want to do some sort of big ambitious project, whether it's a housing development that'll build hundreds or thousands of homes, whether it's a big infrastructure project, we live in a world where there are dozens, if not hundreds of groups that can tell you know, and can meaningfully stop and delay what you're doing. And there are hundreds of these groups and hundreds of veto points and opportunities for them to do this. And nobody who can just stand at the top and say, I overrule all of this. Yes, it's going forward. We have a hundred ways to say no. And very few, you know, nobody who can just say yes. And so, you know, we should have an environmental movement in America, but we should not have a system that allows environmental groups to indefinitely delay green energy projects. And so, yeah, necessarily the current setup of what like the Sierra Club is built to do structurally for decades, their institutional expertise is that they are good at suing things and stopping projects. And they're going to have to change and accept having a little bit less power and accept that they're going to have to do different things other than just be good at lawsuits. And that I think is why so many of the, you know, the capital G groups are kind of uneasy about this, that they are opposed to this is because, yeah, you know, they are not built for the world that abundance will create. They're going to have to change and and change is scary and they don't like it. I love FDR. And one of the things I love about him was that he was an experimenter and an iterator and an innovator. He's got a great quote, which is it is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. And this is a philosophy of mine, right? Just do things, look at them with very clear eyes to see if it's actually working and iterate as you go, tweak as you go, learn and grow and expand and build as you go.

39:53 But you got to get started. You got to do stuff in order to know what you're doing and how to do it better. You can't learn to do something better if you don't do it. And so I really love that philosophy and that mindset and and that era. I do have a question for you, Jeremiah.

40:10 Are we groups? We have groups. We might be groups. Are we groups? Perhaps. You know, it depends exactly on how you qualify it. If you want to say that we're groups, I would say that we are both not the groups that are the problem, that I'll just create a subgroup of the groups that are the problem. You know, my kind of thing is when you are lobbying, let's say a state legislature and they've got some bill and you are, you know, it's a housing bill or it's an energy bill. Are you trying to make it harder for things to happen under that bill or are you trying to make it easier for things to happen? And, you know, what how we define the groups, you know, Center for New Liberalism is a group and, you know, YMBA Democrats for America is a group. Is it part of the capital G groups? You know, I don't know. But to me, the useful distinction is the type of group that makes things more difficult that, you know, well, we've got a housing bill, but if you want to build something new, it's got to be 30 percent affordable and it must use, you know, union labor and it must be made in America materials. And it has to have certain quotas for gender and certain quotas for racial groups, you know, who are hired to build these projects. And it has to pass this extensive environmental review. And, you know, and any single one of these things has a reasonable justification. Right. But by the time you've added 40 of them, your bill has become a totally worthless bill that, you know, we end up in a situation where Washington, D.C. is trying to build affordable housing and it costs them one point two million dollars per unit to build affordable housing. And that's not even an outlier. It costs one point one million in Chicago and one point one million in L.A. and San Francisco. I don't know the number for San Francisco, but I'm sure it's horrifying. And, you know, that is where kind of I think about like, again, are you trying to make it easier or are you trying to make it harder? And that that's the problem that we need to solve?

42:27 I'm going to take that quote of yours, stick it on a poster and splash it across our website as a testimonial. You can be Democrats for America, not the groups that are a problem. You know, I like I mean, we talk about everything bagel liberalism, right? Like I like everything bagels. And also you should be able to make other bagels. And also if a shipment of poppy seeds is late, you still need to make bagels that day. You know, I think actually some of this everything bagel liberalism started with a positive sum mindset. The idea is, oh, we can do this and that can also create jobs and that can also uplift people. And that's the right mindset. And then speaking of being like FDR and actually evaluating how stuff went, I don't think the idea was wrong. I think that the result is wrong because what you see is when you try to please so many people, you end up pleasing nobody and sometimes doing nothing. Part of this, I think, is just an institutional problem where, again, I'm probably going to quote this wrong, but there's something like the iron law of institutions where at some point you, you know, you stop optimizing for what the what is the actual goal of the institution? You know, maybe the goal of the institution is help the environment, right? But individuals within that institution will actually start optimizing for advancement through the institution itself, that I just want to be powerful in the institution. And so you get this thing where the environmental movement is much more concerned with hoarding power for the environmental movement rather than doing what is actually best for the environment. So I don't know if you were looking it up, if I got that.

44:05 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So the iron law of institutions comes from a blogger named John Schwarz, who was in 2007 originally talking about Nancy Pelosi not consulting with Iraq war protesters. And he wrote the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution fail while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to succeed if that requires them to lose power within the institution. And on this little website, Wikipedia website, there is a quote from Paradise Lost by John Milton, which is, it is better to rule in heaven. No, sorry, excuse me. Let's get this right, because this is Lucifer speaking. It is better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.

44:58 It would burn down the environment if they could be king of the ashes is one way. Yeah. But but it leads to one of the things that's interesting about this whole discourse is that surprisingly few people who argue about abundance, who are anti abundance, actually disagree on any concrete thing about abundance. Like the core message of abundance is that, hey, you know, this it's kind of crazy to do a 4000 page environmental review for congestion pricing, which is like something that will reduce driving. It is clearly an environmentally sound policy. And yet it was delayed by three years and required a 4000 page environmental review. You know, it's crazy that, you know, 17 years later, after high speed rail was approved in California, that not a single working mile of track exists.

45:53 And nobody will sit here and actually tell you, no, I think the 4000 pages were valuable, and we should have done them. And it's I'm glad that it was delayed for three years. And in fact, we probably should have done even we probably should have had a 5000 page or a 6000 page environmental review for congestion pricing. And I'm glad that we've taken so long for high speed rail to get built in California, where, you know, 17 years later, here we are. And they're still saying, oh, it's not going to be completed until 2046, or, you know, 3009 or whatever the year is. Nobody actually defends that. They just kind of attack from the margins of like, well, why didn't you talk about this other thing? Why didn't you do this? Why didn't you do that? But almost never do they actually stand up and say, you know, like, I'm happy with the results we're getting. I'm happy with what the current system is producing. Because it's, it's pretty obviously indefensible, right?

46:50 You know, as a verbose person myself, I have had to learn that there is a level of length at which point no one will read it. And, and it is not for anybody else. It is not for compliance. It is just you spinning your wheels. Speaking of Lucifer and hell and paradise lost. It is like Sisyphus in the underworld, whiling away your infinity by rolling a boulder up a hill or writing a 5000 page paper either way. A lot of references here. All the listeners are getting very educated. It's what we do here. We're going to do, you'd be Democrats. We're going to do mythology here, American history. I guess Chinese proverbs, though, that was you. And we'll work in Greek mythology and English literature as well. One of the other things that's funny about this, Steve, is that like, a surprising amount of the people who are critical of the book, Abundance, have not actually read the book, which is astonishing to me. Because a lot of these people are very nerdy people. There's a guy named David Austin Walsh, who is kind of, he's a historian, and he exists, like he's a big poster. He's kind of halfway in between, I would say like the antitrust, and the dirtbag, and that he's he's a super online guy who's on the left and kind of aligns himself with like the antitrust people. And he's been posting about abundance for weeks about how stupid it is about how it's a neoliberal plot to take over the Democratic Party by, you know, funded by billionaires and shadowy forces. And it's a return to Reaganism and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's been doing this for weeks. And a couple days ago, he actually posted in response, somebody was like, he made some post. And all the response did was somebody just posted an actual screenshot of the book itself, directly contradicting like he's abundance guys just want blah, blah, blah. And they just post the page from the book. Here's, here's what they actually said. And his response to that page was, well, I haven't actually read the book other than a few passages. And just like, it makes you wonder. It makes you wonder, because personally, I would be humiliated to admit that kind of thing that I've been fighting about a 200 page book that you can read. And frankly, again, it's a little bit of an airport book, you can read this book in three to four hours. And I've been fighting about it for weeks. And I haven't even read it like I would crawl in a hole and die before I admitted that. And and David just admits it pretty freely. And everybody makes fun of him for it, obviously. But it makes you wonder, like, why so much vitriol? Why so much anger and seething resentment against a book that you haven't read? And I don't know, I think there's a lot of this that is just like people have decided, you know, months ago or years ago that like, they dislike somebody who's a Yimby, they dislike Matt Iglesias or something. And so anything that says Yimbyism on the can, I'm going to assume is associated with him. And I'll just push back against it. And it's this very like cynical way of doing politics where, you know, rather than actually evaluating ideas, you know, ideas are not things to be evaluated on their own merit. They are just associated with one group or another and then called good or evil based on that vague association. And like that's if the longer you look at like this whole abundance debate, the more you're going to see that, the more you're going to be like, none of this is like internally consistent. This is just this is just vibes and people getting mad at people who they have beef with from like eight years ago. You know, it's that that's the one thing that gets me a little bit depressed. But but I do think we're winning. I don't know. I'm curious how you if you see that same dynamic of like, I've called this like arguments are soldiers in a piece I wrote, where like arguments are not, you know, judged on their own merit, they're judged based on whose side they're on. And you know, you can't, you always have to defend every argument, even if it's a stupid argument, because the argument is a soldier. And the other side is the enemy. And like to abandon your argument is to abandon a soldier in a time of war. And like, that's how seriously it's treated. It's why people never back down in these discussions, because you don't want to give the enemy a win, right?

51:12 Like, do you see that same dynamic? Well, I mean, first of all, like, yeah, the conversation on online about the abundance book is comical and weird and sort of dada to me, like the idea that Ezra Klein is some kind of oligarchy shill, as opposed to a bleeding heart liberal is, well, can I give you a bit of a groaner pun for a second? Do it. Jeremiah, how is the idea that Ezra Klein isn't liberal like Ezra Klein?

51:44 It's wonky. Boo! You stink!

51:49 That's a bad pun. I might cut that. It's terrible. But I liked it. It was worked in my head. Look, but to the question, are we, like, we are winning. Jeremiah, we are winning, okay? The news when I woke up this morning was, you know, out of New York City, Zoran Mondani, the leftist, the DSA candidate, was asked, you know, what's an issue that you've kind of changed your mind on? And, you know, he talked about the need to build market rate housing. Like, we are winning. That's a really interesting one, because, and look, cards on the table, like, I'm more of a center-left guy. Like, I'm not a big fan of Mondani. But at the same time, maybe you think Mondani's being real sincere there, which would be wonderful if he's being sincere. Maybe you think he's, like, more cynically just trying to position himself, and he doesn't actually believe in this stuff, and his actual beliefs are terrible. But either way, it's important that he felt the need to clarify. Like, even if, even if you're, like, on the center-left and you think Mondani is actually still terrible and he's just sucking up to you, the fact that he needs to suck up to you and that his political calculation is that I have to at least try to move here. And even if I'm not going to do it for real, I have to convince people that I'm going to build more housing. Like, the fact that he feels the need to do that means that we are winning the rhetorical war, right?

53:08 I mean, it's an important first step. And it's like on Twitter, when people, people nowadays, you see this often on Twitter, are like, yeah, I know zoning is a problem, but that's not why housing is expensive. And you're like, ah, I'll take it. I will take it. And you can say whatever mean stuff you want to say about me and us, as long as you keep saying that zoning is bad and try to get rid of it. I don't care if you think it is the problem, as long as you know it's bad and will support getting rid of it. I don't know, obviously, Zoran's heart nor anyone's heart because there's sort of, there's the politics of the conversation, there's the individual mindset, and then there's the politics of how stuff happens. And I think, like, in San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie is crushing it right now. He got mad at me when I called his reforms up-zoning and was very clear that I should call it family zoning. But like, I didn't support him in the campaign because I didn't see that in the campaign. I didn't hear it. I didn't see it. I didn't think that's where he was going to go. He got into office and has done it immediately. And so I wonder, speaking of up-zoning versus family zoning, I mean, you know, who's like, you're, you're alleging that maybe Zoran, this is a feint and lip service. You've also got that example of, I think, Mayor Lurie, who maybe kept it under wraps and now is doing it, but doing it under his verbiage.

54:28 So, you know, but for all those reasons, it's going places. Like, and I think, I mean, the momentum is strong. Well, is it in enough time? I don't know, but it's strong. You know, I think about two things, right? One is like the immediacy of abundance, besides the obvious, which is a lower people's cost of living that are immiserating them, as well as like give Democrats examples of success in their states that they can run on and win on as soon as next year's midterms. You know, I think a lot about the 2030 census. It's a pet issue of mine because the way that red states have accelerated their population growth versus blue states mean blue states are going to lose a ton of electoral votes in 2030 means unless we massively change course and do so this year, Republicans and MAGA Republicans and MAGA fascists simply will win the presidential election from 2032, the 2032 election and be in power until January 2045. That's insane and terrifying.

55:27 So that's immediate. And then when it comes to elections, obviously there are some very important ones. I mean, right now in New Jersey, imminently in New York City. But, you know, the big sort of finish line is is the November midterms of next year, God willing. And so the conversation around the politics of abundance, I think, is mostly premature because like let it saturate a little bit more, let it be discussed a little bit more. You don't know what folks are going to run on in 2026, we don't know what the country will look like in the fall of 2026. So we'll we'll see about the politics there. But I think the momentum is pretty strong. Yeah. And I'll make one more point as we're probably drawing to a close here. But we've been talking about the political camps here and how, you know, you can't understand this as just the center left versus the left or the moderates versus the socialists or whatever. There are there are leftists who are very, very pro, you know, even the outright socialists who are very pro Yimby who want to build things. And there are leftists who aren't. And so it's complicated in the ways that we've been talking about. And you have to get down into the specific groups. But one thing that I do take seriously as a critique is that abundance, people will say, is not a very good message. People will show polling that like, well, voters like it better when you say you're just going to go after corporate power rather than that you're going to, you know, up zone and deregulate or whatever. And you can quibble with how those polls are run. But you know, yeah, on a fundamental level, voters do like populist messages. That's that's not a surprise.

57:01 That's never been a surprise. But while I think it's important to note that there's two things I would say there. The first is that, you know, this is really more of a governing agenda than it is a political message. I don't think that the presidential candidate in 2028 for the Democrats should make their entire campaign about abundance or that they should have Yimbyism as the first plank on their platform. Like it's fine if that's not the case. More than being a campaign strategy, this is a governing agenda. This is once you're in power, are you going to do the right things? Are you actually going to get things done? The second thing I would say is that governing and campaigning are not as separate as you'd think. You know, one of the classic results in politics is that if you ask people what they want in the federal budget, they want lower taxes and they want higher spending and they want you to balance the budget. All three at the same time. And the thing is, voters will tell you that. And that's part of the reason why we always have, you know, a deficit is that people like low taxes and high spending. But at the same time that they do tell you that they will punish you for the inflation that that causes. You know, your policies do not exist just as messages to be tested among voters. They exist in the real world and they have impacts. And if like the Biden administration, you just kind of ignore that, you know, we're going to pass like four different trillion dollar bills and we're not going to care about inflation. We're just going to run the economy hot.

58:37 Voters will punish you for that, even as they say that they like a lot of the things that you're doing. If inflation is too high and the cost of living increases, they will punish you. And on the reverse, even if abundance doesn't pull well, this is kind of what you're talking about. Even if it's not the most politically salient message, voters will reward you if four years after you get into office and on the flip side, kind of what you were talking about earlier, voters will reward you if your policies markedly improve their lives. If you do something that doesn't test well in the polls, but does end up lowering the cost of housing, does end up lowering their energy bills, does end up making the trains run on time better. They will reward you for that stuff very quickly. And so, you know, it's the link between what works as a governing ethos and what works as a campaign slogan is not as separated as you would think. Well, given that I am now on record in the Wall Street Journal as saying that I hope the 2028 primaries and presidential election will be about who is for Progressive Abundance, quote they chose. I probably have to speak to that, which is that I think, uh, in whatever words makes sense for us to use at the time, I happen to like build America and defeat fascism, but we'll see. I do think Progressive Abundance will be a winning campaign issue. And the reason I think that is, and you mentioned, uh, you know, abundance and populism, it will abundance will win when abundance is populist. And it easily can be, this is a rhetorical exercise because abundance is about tearing down the incumbent privileges that hold us back and pull up the ladder of opportunity.

1:00:21 It is about overcoming decades long inertia and stagnancy with a revival of the spirit of American greatness and the liberal and progressive spirit of American ambition and, and cause. And it is about creating opportunities, letting everybody rise, letting everybody create, reducing the cost of living. So everybody can thrive, bringing communities and cities together. So our culture and our society can come back together, taking our culture and our neighborhood character and our heritage and our history and our diversity and extending it skyward to its greatest heights yet. And building, building our future, building our growth, building our thriving, building our dreams and building the greatest era of American history yet. I think all those things are contained within the same movement that also likes to talk about neighborhood zoning and single stair reform. I think it's the same thing. And it depends on the flourish as you use. But to me, it's, it's going to be a winner. It doesn't have to be today. It is a new idea. And we are a year and a half from the midterms, but we'll, we'll see what happens. I, if we find the words and find our voice, I think some big things can happen.

1:01:40 Yeah, absolutely. Look, I'm agnostic. What, what phrases you have to use to get elected, whether you foot, whether you center, center abundance or you don't, I just think that the, the real electoral politics of abundance are that they work, that these policies are good policies that will improve people's lives. And in the end, that's what we'll be rewarded for, you know, rather than the messaging problem that we have. I, ultimately, if we get things done, the messaging solves itself. So, you know, I, I hope it happens. That is a workable finale and a good one, but we mentioned Lord of the Rings earlier, so we can have several endings. Uh, Jeremiah, as we start to come to a close and build to a finale, uh, I wonder, uh, what we didn't get a chance to talk about what thoughts and ideas and passions you'd like to leave us with. And with one more grand finale or several strung together, uh, Jeremiah Johnson from the center for new liberalism. Thank you for joining us on radio abundance.

1:02:38 Bring us home. I will just say anybody who's listening in a New York city, this will probably come out before the, the democratic primary encourage you to rank, uh, one and two in some order, Whitney Tilson and Zelnour Myri to very, very Yimby Democrats who are, would be very, very good in a lot of ways on the economy on mass transit, on housing. Zelnour Myri in particular has really seems to grasp the scope of the problem in a way nobody else does. He talks about building a million units over the next 10 years. So I don't, we've got pretty good polling in New York and sadly, neither of these guys is polling all that well, but still I, the, the better they come in, in the results, the more rounds they make it in our ranked choice system, the, the more pressure there will be for candidates to have that kind of message. So rank Tilson rank Myri. Yeah. And we've talked about this in the context of Zelnour Myri, right? Even, even if he doesn't win, look, you don't get to, to Zoran, who is his friend saying that we need to build market housing without Zelnour pushing the envelope and, and being that leader. You don't get to all the candidates talking about housing. The debate, I watched the debate the other day. The moderators started by talking about housing. The first three answers were about building housing. Something is happening. And I think, uh, and I think Zelnour Myri and, and perhaps Winnie Tilson have a lot to do with that, uh, and pushing that forward. Let me ask you two lightning round questions because New Yorkers get what they can rank like five. You can rank five. Yes. Yeah. All right. On, uh, in your five, maybe fifth, uh, two questions. Do you rank Zoran? This is an active debate I'm having and I'm not ranking Cuomo. I am ranking Myri and Tilson first and second. And then after that, you know, the real debate is, do I rank Momdani fifth or do I rank him not at all? The, I, this is getting into non-abundance stuff, but like, I genuinely do think that like, he's got a lot of terrible ideas. There's stuff like let's put homeless services in the subway, which is like, I don't even know how you let those words out of your mouth as a candidate in New York. Seems like the most disaster waiting to happen kind of thing. The best argument I've heard from Momdani is that like, well, he's not actually going to have that much power and he won't be able to do most of the stupid things that he's, he's proposing. So I don't know. I'm, I'm still going back and forth. I'm very torn whether to rank him fifth or not at all because ranking him fifth while not ranking Cuomo is in some sense, effectively a vote for him over Cuomo. The real spicy part of this is if we enter kind of a Andrew Cuomo beats him in the primary and so Ron runs in the, uh, general anyway, under the working families party label, uh, which in New York has this weird system where there's like a dual democratic working families party kind of thing going on. It ends up being Eric Adams versus Cuomo versus Zoron versus the Republican, whose name is Curtis Sliwa.

1:05:43 Who do you go for in that situation is, is a real spicy question in the four-way Thunderdome and in the look, Eric Adams is corrupt, but like, I don't know. I, I would consider ranking Adams because he's does seem to have actually gotten a lot of things done on like city of yes. And just weird New York issues, like actually putting our trash into trash bins has been like a giant victory. It's taken us like 40 years and it finally happened. So I don't know. These are all things I'm still very conflicted about. I guess, uh, I guess if, uh, if Zoron does survive in one way or another to the general election and goes into a Thunderdome with, uh, Mondani, Cuomo, Adams, and the Republican, I guess we'll, we'll, we'll see what, uh, what future Yimby evolutions, uh, can happen on that platform. So as, as promised, we've done, uh, several finales. I think we had three endings, the final one being about how to fill out all five spots on your New York city mayoral primary ballot because the electoral stuff matters. Uh, and Jeremiah Johnson, just really grateful for the time. Super fun conversation. And thank you for joining us on radio abundance. Absolutely. Glad to be here. You've been listening to radio abundance. Join the movement for Progressive Abundance at Yimby Democrats.org. Yes, we can build again. Yes, we can trounce the fascists. Yes, you can be the difference. This is AI by the way. You think these jokers actually got Obama check in with me in a few months. It'll happen. Thank you for listening to radio abundance, a new podcast by Yimby Democrats for America. Now it's time for you to join the movement. We're building a big tent and it's going to take all of us join us and together we'll fight to build America, defeat fascism and unleash the era of Progressive Abundance. Join the movement at Yimby Democrats.org. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of going back. Only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding onto something that there's some good left in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for.