Abundance progressives and pro-growth conservatives are right to reject the hostility to science, industry, and entrepreneurialism of “de-growthers,” who dream of an economic stationary state in the near rather than distant future. Such a stationary state existed for most of human history, when long periods of economic and technological stagnation meant that powerful individuals and states could increase their wealth only by plundering the weak. The explosive growth and once-unthinkable technological advances of modernity have vindicated the 18th-century British writer Jonathan Swift since he wrote in Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

But we can reject mindless anti-growth ideology without mindlessly embracing growth for its own sake. Yes, we need growth — but good growth, not bad growth. To understand the difference, don’t look to the Silicon Valley overlords who are increasingly determining the shape of politics on both sides of the political spectrum.

Good growth leads to, and sustains, countries with strong middle classes and workers and families with decent wealth, leisure, and the power to bargain with their employers. Bad growth maximizes gross domestic product at the expense of individual autonomy, social solidarity, and other fundamental elements of a decent human society.

As an economic metric, GDP is compatible with both good growth and bad growth. Because it measures output per hour worked, it can be improved in a good way — improving the productivity of each worker, lowering the prices of goods and services for society as a whole, and allowing workers to earn the same income with less effort, assuming they can bargain effectively with employers to share in the profits.

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But GDP can also be boosted in bad ways by expanding the hours worked in a country without boosting individual worker productivity. In a modern industrial society, in which the majority of adults must toil for wages, GDP can be raised by cutting social-insurance benefits to compel the elderly to have much longer working lives, or by legalizing child labor. Abstract GDP would go up, but few people other than some employers and capitalists would be happier.

It’s also possible to expand GDP without increasing productivity by flooding a country with migrants. Excessive immigration may lower wages in various occupations, immiserating natives and immigrants alike, even as GDP improves in numerical value because of the population-driven ballooning of the workforce. Conversely, birth rates that outstrip productivity growth can impoverish a country, even as its GDP rises because more workers mean more work hours.

In a good society, work must be balanced with time for family and community and recreation.  Members of a society with a healthy work-life balance would be rational to choose somewhat less growth in personal income and the national economy — if the higher-growth alternative requires sacrificing essential social values.

Edith Cresson, the Prime Minister of France from 1991 to 92, is (barely) remembered today for asserting that a quarter of men in Anglo-Saxon countries are homosexuals who aren’t interested in women and that the Japanese were “little yellow men” who “sit up all night thinking how to screw us”. Whatever may be the case with Anglo-Saxon men, the Socialist premier was right to defend the work-life balance of the French against East Asian cultures of overwork, however chauvinistically: “I said they were working like ants. We cannot live like that, in minuscule apartments with a two-hour journey to work like animals. Work and work and work and producing children to work like animals. We want to keep our social security, our holidays, and live like human beings.”

Long work hours have been correlated with low fertility rates, and East Asia has some of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 2024, South Korea won the dubious honor of being the country with the lowest fertility in the world for six years in a row — 0.75, far below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a national population without mass immigration. In response, South Korea has imposed a 52-hour work week — compare that to the 35-hour work week in France and 36 to 40 hours a week in Germany. Likewise, Japan since the Seventies has suffered from an epidemic of karoshi — stress-related death by overwork.

Which brings us to Silicon Valley. The tech tycoons who have emerged as the dominant oligarchy in 21st-century America have contradictory views of work and life in the future.  Many predict that automation will eliminate most jobs, making it necessary to create a universal basic income that allows citizens to enjoy a minimal level of subsistence without working at all.

Other tech leaders, however, want to import the East-Asian model of overwork and fanatical schooling to the United States (and the West more broadly). According to Elon Musk, who despises labor unions and laws protecting American workers, Chinese factory workers “won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, initially appointed by President Donald Trump as co-director with Musk of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency, has claimed that East- and South-Asian students are superior to American students. In an X post that likely doomed his political career, he wrote: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…. More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’. More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall’.”

Ramaswamy is confused. Individual Indian-Americans excel in many areas, but national productivity is the result of well-designed economic, legal, and political institutions, not overwork by particular individuals. That explains why India, with the longest work hours among the top-10 economies (49 hours or more per week), is much poorer than the United States (38 hours) and Canada (32.1 hours). Indeed, thanks to their productivity, countries with high per-capita GDP in general have lighter workloads.

Not content with opposing organized labor and wage-and-hours laws, many of today’s techno-libertarians dream of carving up democratic nation-states into “freedom cities” or “charter cities” — privately owned cities free to create their own regulations without interference by the countries in which they are geographically situated. This is the revival of an old and very bad idea, formerly embodied in the United States in early-industrial-era company towns and mining towns policed by private detectives — and symbolized today by the high-tech despotism of city-states like Singapore and Dubai.

If the new city-states were bottom-up democratic versions of Athens or Florence, the idea might be appealing. But the tech oligarchs have something more sinister in mind — top-down autocracies in which privileges bestowed on workers by investors and managers replace civil rights in a given territory.

Curtis Yarvin, treated as a guru by some tech executives, has popularized the acronym RAGE (Replace All Government Employees) and called for a “Butterfly Revolution” to centralize “absolute sovereignty” in a corporate state with a dictator-CEO. And foreshadowing Trump’s appointment in 2025 of Musk to head DOGE, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney in 2014 called on then-President Barack Obama to appoint Google boss Eric Schmidt as CEO of America, terminate all federal employees, turn federal power over to the tech industry — then resign.

Symbolizing the convergence of libertarianism with the libertine drug culture in Silicon Valley and the Burning Man festival, Peter Thiel has funded a project to promote private “seasteads” unregulated by nation-states, which might allow medical experiments on human beings that are banned elsewhere: “Could you have something where you use psilocybin” — the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms — “or MDMA” — better known as the rave culture drug ecstasy — “as an antidepressant drug? Or could you get new medical treatments where you break the FDA monopoly on medicine worldwide?”

A comment on X by a Thiel protégé, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, suggests the danger of replacing liberal, constitutional democracy with the tyranny of an all-powerful tech-industry Wizard in a private charter city of Oz: “If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will try and quickly hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Public executions and deregulated experimentation on human beings, combined with technological innovation as a goal in itself — it is hard to imagine a better example of bad growth.

Then there is the Freedom Cities Coalition, which calls for states to cede land to new private corporate governments exempt from selected federal and state laws and regulations, no doubt including labor laws. President Trump, who in his second term has largely abandoned his working-class voters in favor of tech plutocrats like Musk and Ramaswamy and David Sacks, has called for 10 such post-national, privatized corporate zones on the soil of the United States.

In this dystopian fantasy, America’s federal lands — divided in the 19th century by Lincoln and his allies into homesteads for free family farmers who were considered to be the bulwarks of bottom-up democracy — would now be given over to capitalists and managers to create special economic zones like those in China that host Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, which has had to install “suicide nets” to prevent overworked and underpaid workers from jumping to their deaths from their dormitory towers.

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In Honduras, experimental corporate-controlled charter cities like Prospera, which drew more than $100 million in investments from tech libertarians including Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Adam Draper, were seen as so menacing by locals that the Honduran government has repealed the laws that enabled their establishment.

Undeterred by the popular rebellion against Prospera, libertarians bankrolled by tech plutocrats are promoting new, semi-sovereign company towns in places like the Presidio in San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay.

In the “Immigration and Workforce Strategy” section of its Orwellian proposal for a Guantanamo Bay Charter City, the Charter Cities Institute proposes using it as a probationary detention center for potential immigrants to the United States: “this model also introduces a phased approach to immigration: Individuals demonstrate their skills and reliability in Guantanamo Bay before transitioning to the US mainland.”

The new Guantanamo Bay charter city would combine Dubai’s indentured-servant workforce with the pleasing façade of a Potemkin village: “by controlling the narrative — weekly media updates, tours for foreign dignitaries, and televised speeches from the new city — administration officials can shape the story of ‘America’s frontier spirit, revived.’”

A humane and enduring society doesn’t resemble a mining boom town or a slave plantation or a nightmarish “freedom city” of the kind promoted by ketamine-dosing, harem-collecting, neurodivergent tech oligarchs. Technological innovation and economic growth are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Good growth is economic growth that balances desirable technological progress and economic innovation with equality of condition and worker bargaining power. Bad growth increases GDP at the cost of the powerlessness of most citizens in the workplace, as well as the voting booth.

Edith Cresson inadvertently spoke for all human beings, French and Japanese and Hondurans and Americans alike. We are not ants.

For months after Kamala Harris’s loss, you could practically hear the wind whistling through the think tanks. Lately, however, the factions have begun to re-emerge from the woods, each clutching its own plan for reinvention. The result is a flurry of competing visions for the party’s future: the “Welcome” moderates, the “Persuasion” progressives, the “Abundance” techno-optimists, the Kamala Harris loyalists (whose approach seems to be waiting for the GOP to self-destruct), and now a new entry — an institutionalist wing led by the Roosevelt Institute and former Biden officials, who insist that the party should ditch the incrementalism of old for a leaner, meaner government.

It’s proof of a party wrestling with itself — or, considering the dreadful state of the party, trying to fuse pieces of dead flesh for the sake of a Frankenstein-like revival. But there’s a problem: talk is cheap and almost none of it answers the harder question. How do you change a party whose 21st-century structure and ecosystem — donors, NGOs, media, universities, consultants — thrive on staying exactly the same? That’s something none of the Democrats’ blueprints sufficiently addresses.

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First, the good news. There are some clever ideas here, especially in a new report titled “Deciding to Win.” It was produced by the center-Left organization Welcome, which began as a political action committee in 2022 and has since developed a broader research arm. The report argues bluntly that since 2012, Democrats have become the party of donors, activist groups, and media pundits — “the affluent and highly educated” — while losing contact with voters without college degrees and working-class communities of all races, which isn’t exactly new information.

But what is novel is that its cure is — for lack of a better term — populist moderates: candidates who are both economically populist and moderate on culture-war issues, and ideally have a legitimate working-class background. These Democrats will tax Wall Street but still own a pair of work boots that have actually touched dirt. Historically, moderate has become shorthand for a kind of weak, mealy-mouthed neoliberal or technocrat. But Welcome says it means a bold leader who takes popular but often heterodox positions and who doesn’t reflexively defend the establishment or corporate interests. A dream populist moderate candidate, for instance, might look like Dan Osborn, the independent union leader in Nebraska who talked like Bernie Sanders about economic issues but more like MAGA on other matters: “If Trump needs help building the Wall, well, I’m pretty handy,” Osborn says in an October campaign ad.

This approach is surfacing elsewhere. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego is a progressive who has doubled his overall favorability with Republican voters after talking like a border hawk. In an interview with Ezra Klein last week, Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, also cited Nathan Sage in Iowa, Graham Platner in Maine, and Wisconsin’s Rebecca Cooke as economic populists “taking pragmatic positions” on some cultural issues.

For all of its wisdom, the Deciding to Win report still has blind spots, however. Welcome blasts the “timid and risk-averse culture” that pervades much of the institutional Democratic Party, but then treats Medicare for All as a boutique issue. America’s health-care system is decaying fast — costs soaring, hospitals closing, insurers consolidating — and pretending otherwise won’t make Democrats seem “moderate.” Likewise, the report suggests that Amy Klobuchar, Josh Shapiro, and Andy Beshear should be top candidates in 2028, which to me sounds like the world’s most polite LinkedIn webinar.

Not everyone in the party agrees that Democrats need to sound more like gruff Midwestern union bros. A rival vision, calling itself Persuasion 2025, insists the party’s problem hasn’t been progressive ideology at all but a lack of guts and poor narrative discipline. Backed by donors in the Way to Win network, Persuasion types argue that Democrats have tried to coast on polite incrementalism when they should have been shaping public opinion with moral clarity and relentless message repetition. In their telling, the last decade didn’t prove progressivism is out of touch — it proved Democrats never really tried it. Unlike Welcome, Persuasion is doubling down on wokeness, vowing to find “disability justice, racial justice, economic justice, water justice and air justice,” and warned against throwing any progressive constituency “under the bus.”

Their solution is more activist energy, more movement politics, and a renewed attempt to win back young people, MAGA voters, and disaffected minorities — especially in the Sun Belt. They don’t promise persuasion in the old retail, diner-booth sense, but in the broadcast-to-the-algorithm sense: flood the zone with justice-oriented messaging and let the vibes do the work. It is, effectively, the 2020 movement’s greatest-hits album, remastered for TikTok — what if the Democrats had a woke Joe Rogan?

If Persuasion imagines victory through moral passion and mobilized constituencies, Abundance imagines it through capacity and confidence: bulldozers, not bullhorns. Popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book-length manifesto, your typical Abundance Bros are Silicon Valley-adjacent urbanists who imagine that supporting zoning reform is a personality. They argue that voters do not crave another lecture about norms; they crave more houses, more trains, more power plants, more child-care centers — proof that the state can build again.  It’s an appeal to the future-oriented optimism Democrats lost in their drift toward becoming the party of the status quo.

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Meanwhile, the new Roosevelt Institute manifesto insists on talking about power. Authored by former senior Biden officials, it is perhaps the most explicit repudiation of the party’s post-Obama instinct to act like a think-tank fellowship rather than a governing coalition. Their program reads like a liberal answer to the Right’s “administrative state” crusade — a Democratic (and milder) answer to Project 2025 with 161 “practical ideas” such as rewriting the creaky “notice-and-comment” regime of the Administrative Procedure Act so it can’t be weaponized by bad-faith judges, and building new institutional guardrails — up to and including a specialized court for administrative cases and, yes, expanding the Supreme Court itself.

At one level, all of this intellectual ferment is healthy and necessary. At another, it resembles 1989 again. That year, the Democrats talked themselves into a necessary reinvention after losing their third consecutive presidential election. That included a loser of a candidate in Michael Dukakis, whom one pundit described as “slightly less animation and personality than the Shroud of Turin.” In response to Dukakis’s drubbing, a group of political consultants wrote “The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency.” It’s a document that makes the Democratic Party of the Bush I years sound strikingly similar to the 2025 version. (Indeed, “The Politics of Evasion” is even cited as an intellectual inspiration for Deciding to Win). “Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defense of their national security,” they wrote.

The problem is that the man who took their advice and won — Bill Clinton — decided that in order to beat the Republicans, you had to govern like a free-trading Wall Street-loving one.

And that is the danger now. Democrats are again cataloging their failures with admirable honesty, again workshopping manifestos full of bold verbs, again flirting with the idea of governing with purpose rather than vibes. But even as they welcome talk about reform and renewal, you can already feel the gravitational pull of the consultant class and big money donors.

If history is a guide, the most likely outcome of all this renewal talk is not a populist-moderate revival, a progressive crusade, or an abundance revolution. I’d wager that the Democrats go into 2026 with an approach that might be called Kamala Harris-ism in the wake of the finger-pointing and empty posturing of Harris and former Biden Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during their recent book tours. It means to do very little — or, as James Carville bluntly put it in an essay for The New York Times, the “play-dead” strategy.

The idea is that Republicans are mired in chaos, so the smartest move is to let them collapse under the weight of their own contradictions and self-inflicted absurdities. That instead of fighting tooth-and-nail, Democrats should project calm and responsible governance while MAGA self-immolates. It is the least imaginative vision, but also the one that fits the institutional muscle memory of today’s Democratic Party: avoid fights, avoid risk, avoid offending donors, let the chaos on the other side do the persuading. Call it the Path of Least Resistance school of politics.

So yes, maybe their time in the woods did Democrats some good. They return with maps and theories for building a new path. But paths aren’t plans, and maps don’t matter if you refuse to leave camp. It is one thing to emerge from the forest enlightened. It is another thing to actually walk out.

Since then has bloomed the youthful field of “Progress studies”, which hopes to unleash cheap energy, plentiful housing and daily technological breakthroughs. Progress studies has some presence in academia, but exists principally in think tanks, blogging and journalism (I have made some modest contributions regarding geothermal energy) and is part of an ecosystem that is beginning to acquire political influence. The field owes much to economists such as the recently anointed Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr, who has argued that year-on-year enhancing of prosperity is not a law of nature; rather, it must be deliberately brought about. And so the Cowen crowd has tried to do exactly that: finding obstacles to progress — bureaucracy, Nimbyism, legalism and so on — and looking for ways society might circumvent them.

In recent years, the world has benefited from some amount of technological freshening up. Reusable rockets, large language models, self-driving cars, mRNA vaccines, cheap solar power: these are the kinds of innovations that excite technophiles. Yet China is pulling ahead, and the Gordian knots remain. At last weekend’s Progress Conference, in Berkeley, California, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman — never one to knowingly understate the galaxy-shaping potential of his product — told Cowen that AI alone would not be able to solve the housing crisis. Even God-like intelligence, in other words, would struggle to get around Western planning regulations.

Altman’s presence at the conference betokens the intellectual clout that the progress scene enjoys in both technology and, increasingly, politics. Progress thought now comes in a variety of flavors, with each carrying different political valencies, and with each having different ramifications for industry and society alike. Usefully for its survival prospects, progress thought is syncretic: that is, able to attach itself to existing ideologies rather than needing to defeat them. It is worth paying attention to the question of which flavor is likeliest to win the day.

So far, one of them has achieved particular prominence. In May, two liberal journalists, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, published Abundance, a book that argues that their country has spent decades prioritizing process over progress. The book is now well thumbed among Democrat staffers, and its style of thinking was visible in the planning reforms signed by Gavin Newsom, governor of California, four months later. This is the state, of course, whose flagship high-speed rail project has produced an even more outrageous and ineffective boondogglethan HS2. In this context, where post-Seventies California has been entirely unequal to the task of building housing and infrastructure to accommodate its population boom, some regulatory streamlining might be no bad thing.

Whether the Democratic party is the optimal vessel for the progress movement, though, is debatable. Other political scenes seem more infused with vigor. Both the Right and non-mainstream Left are developing their own versions of abundance. In August, the political scientist Steven Teles made an early attempt at taxonomizing these new schools of abundance, which we can think of as flavors of progress. “As abundance becomes a larger part of our political discourse”, he predicted, these new varieties “will increasingly structure political identities”.

In the Teles taxonomy, the Left-most entry was “Red Plenty”. Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who beat the centrists to the Democratic nomination for the mayoralty of New York City, falls into this camp. Under Red Plenty, the state would lead economic development. Your power plants would be built with union labor, as would your housing. High rents would be solved by, er, banning landlords from charging high rents.

The “Red Plenty” approach will make economists roll their eyes, but it has the virtue of speaking to a more visceral part of human psychology than does the “Abundance” school. In socialist thought, there is an “us” and a “them”. Red Plenty offers to stick it to the landlords, to the wealthy, to the extractive capitalists. Abundance, in contrast, is rigorous and illuminating, but will not stir your passions. In classic liberal style, the book is carefully triangulated so as to avoid controversy. When Klein and Thompson discuss California, for instance, they make little acknowledgment of the fact that the state’s neglect of public transport might have something to do with the kind of people you encounter on it. (If you encounter anti-social behavior on the subway, as often happens in large American cities, then you will be less inclined to take the subway in future, and less willing for your taxpayer dollars to be spent on improvements to the subway.) Similarly, the authors are much more interested in the constraints on Californian housing supply than in recent decades’ gargantuan and immigration-driven increase in demand. Abundance, in their view, is universalist.

We can observe an intriguing contrast in the “American Dynamism” aesthetic, which valorizes modern American technological and architectural achievement. The coinage derives from an essay, published in 2022, by an investor who argued that America’s best hope is in “technologists building companies that support the national interest”. On X, accounts like “Based Americana” post appropriately bombastic images: Starship’s Raptor engines spewing blue flames, arrowhead silhouettes of B-2 bombers lowering in a hangar, the neoclassical magnificence of the long-lost Penn Station, American astronauts beholding the curve of the Earth, and Trump watching fighter jets soar over Mount Rushmore. The curation of these images amounts to propagandizing rather than policy prescription. But it speaks to something that the Abundance movement would rather avoid: chauvinism. By this I mean that, as with Red Plenty, American Dynamism is for a particular group of people. It has a brash patriotism to it. Universalists, by definition, cannot be chauvinists, but they might nevertheless note the intrigue stirred up by another of Teles’ categories, the provocatively named “Dark Abundance”.

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Within the Dark Abundance category are the think tankers and MAGA personnel who, like the Klein and Thompson crowd, want to reinvigorate American industry and improve American living standards, but, unlike the Klein and Thompson crowd, are inclined to do so via means that are more aggressive and, in their way, more chauvinistic. Dark Abundance, in the Teles taxonomy, is alarmed by the decline of America’s industrial base relative to China’s, and willing to take a Milei-esque chainsaw to the institutions it deems to be failing. (DOGE, in all its anti-bureaucratic fervor, is cited by Telos as an example.) Champions of Dark Abundance, whether or not they identify as such, are likely to be supportive of, or part of, the new generation of defense-adjacent tech firms — SpaceX, Anduril, other creators of Based Americana — and unsentimental about the use of fossil fuels en route to new forms of energy production. One might even classify Trump himself as a proponent of Dark Abundance. In an open letter to Michael Kratsios, who directs the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, Trump wrote in March that the US needed to “accelerate research and development, dismantle regulatory barriers, strengthen domestic supply chains and manufacturing, spur robust private sector investment, and advance American companies in global markets”. The US, wrote Trump, is in competition with other nations, and on a quest to become “greater than ever before”. Prosperity, in this view, is tied to security. “We will make America safer, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before.”

There is geopolitical safety, and there is day-to-day safety. Teles touches only glancingly on crime, but Dark Abundance was to take on new resonance in September. To the horror of the American Right, widely circulated CCTV footage showed a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, being fatally stabbed in the neck by a man who had been sitting behind her on a bus. “The Abundance crowd has no solution for this,” wrote Drew Pavlou, a high-profile Gen-Z political activist. Referring to the transformative, but severe, former prime minister of Singapore, Pavlou wrote: “This is why we need to combine Abundance with Lee Kuan Yew Thought: extremely harsh penalties for crime and public disorder.” Dark Abundance, in Pavlou’s subsequent framing, is not just about introducing gleaming subway carriages, but about ensuring those carriages are safe — even if to do so requires punitive measures.

Liberals, naturally, are scandalized by Dark Abundance. Jerusalem Demsas, the editor of a prominent new liberal journal, The Argument, wrote that Teles’ description “sounds like a not-so-charming euphemism for fascism”. The accusation is overblown, but Demsas was right to note that the conventional Abundance crowd is better on detail, is more collegiate, and can point to a growing body of patiently accumulated legislative achievements that the Dark Abundance crowd cannot.

Still, the Democrat flavor of abundance has little to say about the reality that some forms of technological progress are being held back by urban disorder. Every time an autonomous taxi in the Bay Area is vandalized, the technology becomes more expensive. It was announced last week that autonomous taxis will come to London next year, and we can quite reasonably hope that our own level of urban misbehavior, being lesser than the Bay Area’s, will leave these new taxis, defenseless as they are, generally unharmed. Other forms of robotics, such as pavement-trundling delivery robots, will be more vulnerable, especially in a city where phone theft and shoplifting have skyrocketed. Public goods depend on public order.

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It’s curious, then, that Dark Abundance is so-called. Should people who want lean and functional institutions or clean and safe public transport willingly identify as “dark”? One reason is that those ends require some unsavoriness: long prison sentences, intrusive surveillance, mass sackings, a devotion of our industrial energies to weaponry. This principle of unsavoriness applies even to construction, where to get rid of proceduralism is often to deny people the opportunity to object to a new housing estate or train line. The compromises are even more stark when it comes to crime.

But another answer is that the Right has been so often framed by the Left as morally wrong, as being on the dark side of a Manichean binary, that some of its disciples have developed some quasi-ironic contrarian relish for the role. There is a long and amusing history of Republicans professing support for, of all causes, the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars universe. In May, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, Scott Jennings, delivered a defense of Emperor Palpatine on CNN. “He took on an entrenched deep state [in] the Jedi Council… he wanted free and fair and reciprocal trade around the galaxy. [He] protected law and order.”

As another guest pointed out, Palpatine blew up an inhabited planet. But Jennings dug in. “Some could argue that it was warranted given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.”

Which brings us back to Trump. “I think the Trump administration is less interested in sunshine and rainbows than, say, Ezra Klein is,” an attendee of this year’s Progress Conference told me. She reported that there was much more discussion of nationalism than there was at the same conference in 2024, which I attended, and plenty of pragmatic discussion of how to work with the MAGA White House. One success in this regard is Blake Scholl, whose company, Boom Supersonic, has built the first civilian supersonic jet since Concorde. Boom was the principal beneficiary of an executive order (EO), signed in June, that was designed to reduce the regulations holding back supersonic air travel. As the EO put it: “This order begins a historic national effort to reestablish the United States as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation.”

In this case, then, chauvinism has propelled progress. A knot has been cut, and it might once again become possible to travel from London to New York within three hours. We can expect that Boom’s airliner, the Overture, will feature heavily in the next generation of “Based Americana” imagery.

So where will we be in another 50 years? If Dark Abundance wins the contest of ideas, and if the result is that supersonic airlines fill the skies above a wealthy, safe America, then its corner-cutting might appear to be justifiable. There remain many corners that Dark Abundance is unwilling to cut, many eggs that it hasn’t cracked into an omelet: eugenics, autocracy, wars of conquest, El Salvadorean prisons, and whatever it takes to wrench the birth rate back up. Each of those measures could, theoretically, enhance a country’s material progress; each requires significant moral compromise. Darker Abundance, as we might call it, would make Dark Abundance seem tame. The habit of corner-cutting is not always for the best, and nor is the habit of relishing the mantle of darkness.

Well, so much for that.

“If you’re passing legislation that is effectively giving huge tax cuts to the rich and stripping away Medicaid, that speaks for itself,” Khan tells me in an interview Thursday, referring to President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. “It’s difficult to paint that in any type of populist brush…. It’s very much a continuation of the kind of Reagan-Bush-type philosophy: ‘Let’s concentrate wealth upwards, and maybe it’ll trickle down.’”

She worries that the same corporations that used “woke” and “ESG” (environmental, social, and governance) tropes to legitimate their market power over the last decade are now deploying anti-woke rhetoric to do the same thing. And the Trumpians are letting them get away with it.

As chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden, Khan went further than perhaps any one official in giving teeth to post-neoliberalism. She reawakened the FTC, which for decades had lain dormant, enchanted by Reagan-era lullabies about how corporations can do no wrong. She went after firms that slapped false “Made in USA” labels on foreign-made goods; sued Facebook over its monopolistic practices; attacked fee-skimming middlemen in the drug industry; banned non-compete clauses used by employers to prevent workers from seeking better opportunities elsewhere; and much else of the kind.

Her crusades garnered praise from JD Vance, who, during the 2024 campaign, suggested she could stay in her job in a second Trump administration; young GOP staffers took to calling themselves “Khan-servatives.” And while she didn’t, in fact, get to keep her job once President Trump took over a second time, Khan saw early promise.

“In the first few months, and with some of their appointments, and certainly with their rhetoric, it did seem like there was going to be much more continuity” with the Biden approach, recalls Khan. As secretary of labor, Trump tapped Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, one of only three GOP lawmakers to cosponsor the PRO Act, the top legislative priority of the labor movement, which would reverse the decade-long hollowing out of collective bargaining.

On antitrust, Trump nominated Gail Slater, a former Vance Senate aide, to lead the Department of Justice’s antitrust unit. Antitrust types on both sides of the aisle viewed Slater as someone who gets it, an impression reinforced at her Senate confirmation hearing, in which she warned about the possibilities of market-based coercion and “private tyranny.” Trump’s antitrust team, moreover, retained the merger guidelines put forth by their Biden predecessors — standard practice, but enough to enrage the US Chamber of Commerce and the neoliberal Wall Street Journal comment pages (where, full disclosure, I used to work).

But then, as the honeymoon phase passed, says Khan, “we saw, just going back to this era of greenlighting really problematic mergers [and] accepting really flimsy promises for merging companies that create a huge risk of failure.” There were also “very troubling allegations about lobbyists kind of now taking over the process … and antitrust decisions being made not based on the facts and the laws, but based on what Trump lobbyist companies could get.”

She’s alluding to the DOJ’s controversial settlement in the merger between Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Juniper, the second and third largest providers, respectively, of networking solutions for large institutions (universities, hospitals, sports stadiums, and the like). Early on, the Trump II DOJ sued to block the merger before putting the case on a settlement path.

But as contentions arose over the terms, HPE retained a pair of MAGA lobbyists to petition higher-ups in the department, circumventing Slater’s team. The final deal, as UnHerd first reported, was hashed out in a literal clubby backroom over cocktails, and two of Slater’s deputies who raised objections were fired. As one of the fired deputies, Roger Alford, wrote in an essay for UnHerd: “MAGA-in-name-only lobbyists and the DOJ officials enabling them are … determined to exert and expand their influence and enrich themselves.”

Reflecting on all this, Khan asks, “I think ultimately, a real realignment and a real commitment to economic populism require a willingness to make rich and powerful people upset, right?”

Not, it turns out, if the rich and powerful are willing to mouth the culture-war pieties du jour. During the “peak-woke” era, a firm like Amazon would march at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter column — even as it brutally suppressed the nascent Amazon Labor Union and called its African-American founder, Christian Smalls, “not smart or articulate.” Likewise in 2025, the Federal Communications Commission clears mergers between Paramount and Skydance Media based on the firms’ commitment not to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Khan is critical of both mirroring tendencies: the power of big business to adapt itself to prevailing cultural conditions, depending on who’s in power. “I’ve long been a skeptic of ESG-type initiatives,” she tells me, and when she took office as FTC chair, “I made very clear that there’s no ESG exemption to the antitrust laws. If companies come to me and say, ‘Hey, let our illegal merger through, but don’t worry, we’ll make some nice, full commitments,’ I tell them that was not what the FTC did.”

Put another way: You can’t act monopolistically and get away with it just because you hire a trans disabled CEO or donate to climate-change initiatives.

But are Republicans equally alert to how business uses anti-woke as a shield against regulatory scrutiny? Says Khan, “It is interesting and quite perverse, candidly, that we are now seeing [how] companies will make certain commitments to shut down their DEI projects…. And suddenly, you know, potentially troubling mergers” win approval.

Fair enough. But given the post-neoliberal thrust of much Biden economic policy, why did Trump and the GOP end up walloping Democrats in last year’s election, especially among working-class voters? Khan’s answer, in short, is that the Bidenites didn’t have enough time.

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“There’s no secret that people were very concerned about cost of living,” Khan says, by way of explaining Kamala Harris’s failure. “Initially, there was a surge in pricing during the pandemic, because there were legitimate supply-chain issues. As those supply-chain issues got resolved, prices didn’t come down as quickly. We have seen companies be quite open about how, be it the supply chain issues, be it tariffs, these can be very useful covers for inflating prices.”

Neoliberalism, she says, was too entrenched for post-neoliberalism to overcome in short order: “Big picture, the [Biden] administration in a whole bunch of economic domains really did break with the 40-year Reagan-Bush-Clinton neoliberal playbook…. But at the end of the day, you’re going to need more than four years to fully undo the destruction of that 40-year regime.”

Not all Democrats agree. The so-called Abundance movement — a cohort of pundits and intellectuals led by the likes of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and the newly founded Argument magazine — traces the party’s troubles to too much populism and not enough deregulation, especially when it comes to building up housing and transportation in blue cities and states. They’ve courted, and received, the backing of some major donors in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

What does Khan make of Abundance? “I haven’t seen any credible analysis that suggested why Democrats lost was we didn’t have enough donors on our side,” she says. “I just haven’t seen that presented in a convincing way.” Indeed, Harris had the backing of one tech heavyweight, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who called for Khan’s head as the price of ongoing support. “There’s some prominent tech donors who are opposed to the antitrust and competition work that we were doing.” Some of those donors are now throwing their weight behind Abundance.

Still, Khan grants part of the Abundance argument. Says Khan, “To the extent that there are arguments about making government more effective, more efficient, absolutely, let’s do that.” But even that, she goes on, depends on taking on oligarchic power and monopoly, since it’s often the largest firms that benefit most from byzantine bureaucracy and from deliberately gumming up economic governance as means to discredit it.

Asked which active politicians today she finds most congenial to her agenda, Khan doesn’t hesitate: Dan Osborn, the independent union organizer running to unseat a Republican senator in Nebraska; Abdul El-Sayed, the Bernie protégé running for Senate in Michigan; Nathan Sage, a progressive running for Senate in Iowa; and Zohran Mamdani, the socialist New York mayoral hopeful (and likely shoo-in).

The upshot of her analysis: given that the Trumpians are drifting away from robust antitrust, protection of entitlements, and friendship with organized labor, the future of post-neoliberalism turns on battles within the Democratic Party.

That (global) statistic is from Jake Swearingen’s report on the future of the smartphone industry for New York Magazine.

If you don’t give a fig for the future of the smartphone industry, then don’t hang-up – because it illustrates something of great importance to the future of the entire economy.

We’ll begin with a little recent history:

“From roughly 2007 until 2013, the smartphone market grew at an astonishing pace, posting double-digit growth year after year, even during a global recession. They were the good years… millions and then billions of smartphones going out; billions and then trillions of dollars in rising company valuations; every year new models of phones hitting the market, held up triumphantly at events that were part sales pitch, part tent revival.”

Double-digit growth during the deepest recession since the war? Who wouldn’t want to be in that business? But remember the wise words of Herbert Stein: “If something cannot go on forever, then it will stop.”

Why smartphone sales growth can’t go on forever (or at least for a while yet) is an interesting question. Market saturation is one answer – pretty much everyone has one of the blasted things (I’ll come on to the developing world later). Another factor is that we’re not upgrading as fast as we used to:

“…there’s no doubt that the replacement cycle for phones is elongating. ‘Over the last five years, the replacement cycles of smartphones in the U.S. has has increased from an average of 20.6 to 24.1 months,’ says Jennifer Chan, global insight director at Kantar. More worrying for smartphone manufacturers is that desire for new technology doesn’t really spur consumers to buy new phones.”

The underlying problem is that the latest smartphones are both too good and not good enough.

They’re too good because they do just about everything you’d want from a smartphone – and do it with increasing reliability

“Durability has vastly improved; waterproofing is now standard on smartphones, so a brief dip in the sink or toilet doesn’t mean you need a new phone, and the weakest links in smartphone hardware — batteries which tend lose their ability to hold a charge over time and screens that crack and shatter — have improved.”

These are near-perfect products, so why would you want another one next year?

And yet smartphones also aren’t good enough because new models have ceased to offer breakthrough, must-have features.

Thus the industry is left to compete on price or luxury. Price – and therefore commoditisation – is what’s driving competition in an as yet unsaturated market in developing nations. The luxury, high-end product strategy has worked out pretty well for Apple so far, but without those breakthrough advances, where does it go next?

The trouble with beautifully made, ultra-reliable products is that they’re keepers – and at Apple prices one would hope so. As for super-luxurious products, there’s only so many people rich enough or foolish enough to want a gold-plated iPhone, which in any case, is more about jewellery than technology. Even worse for the tech companies, the real status symbol among the elites has become not having a smartphone.

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As I’ve argued before, the most dangerous word in economics is enough. One of the worst things that an industry can do is fully satisfy what we want from it. And as more and more industries do that there are profound implications economic growth itself.

Imagine that an omni-capable electronic gadget hits the shelves in 2019. Let’s call it the Acme ‘Everything’ – because that’s literally what it does: everything you could possibly want. Furthermore, it never wears out or breaks down, so each person only needs one of them. Effectively, we’d all be immensely rich, our material needs and wants abundantly catered for. The effect on the economy, however, would be disastrous. In fact, after the last sale to the last customer, GDP would fall to zero as there would be no need to buy anything ever again.

Obviously, we’re nowhere near to such a device, but collectively the many devices we currently depend on are getting closer to a state of sufficiency than they were. By producing extra functionality and reliability at no additional cost, they increase their value to us, but without increasing consumer spend, producer revenue or GDP.

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Does capitalism have an answer to ‘fully automated luxury communism’?

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Of course, not having to buy another smartphone or have your car repaired, frees up money that can be spent on other goods and services. But for a particular industry – and ultimately the whole economy – that requires the development of products that can cater to previously unmet needs and wants. Moreover, consumers have to recognise that they actually have these needs and wants.

This gets more difficult the less obvious they are. Jake Swearingen mentions the manufacturers who hoped that we’d want “3-D televisions and curved TV sets” – but for the most part we didn’t.

It’s hard persuading people to desire something they’ve never felt the lack of. And in some ways the bigger the technological breakthrough represented by a new product, the harder it is. It requires an intuitive breakthrough on the part of the consumer.

It helps to work with familiar concepts. For instance, the motorcar was initially understood as the ‘horseless carriage’. Mobile phones are the great example of our own time. Consumers intuitively grasped the relevance of the technological leap because it combined the idea of telephony with that of mobility. Similarly, smartphones combined the idea of the mobile phone and that of the internet (not to mention the camera).

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The next leap forward, however, is less obvious. Swearingen mentions augmented reality, but a device that combines all the things that a smartphone gives you access to with your natural field of vision is not especially intuitive or attractive.

And that, in a nutshell, is a fundamental challenge to economic growth in 21st century: while advanced economies are getting better at improving the familiar; they are getting worse at envisaging the new.