The number was once unthinkable. BuzzFeed went public in late 2021 at a valuation of more than $1.5 billion. As a private company, it had been worth $1.7 billion, and was the unicorn that set the benchmark for the decade’s digital-media venture funding. Allen acquired the entire operation for roughly 7% of that peak figure. Most of the purchase price is a five-year promissory note; the cash portion was only $20 million.

Meanwhile, Vox Media has spent the past three years quietly accepting that its 2015 NBCUniversal valuation of a little more than $1 billion is not coming back. Penske Media took a controlling stake in 2023, at a $500 million valuation, half what NBC had paid eight years earlier. Vice Media, valued in 2017 at $5.7 billion (yes, billion), filed for bankruptcy in May 2023, sold to its creditors for $350 million, and by February 2024, stopped publishing on Vice.com altogether. The brand survives. The company does not.

This is not really a story about three failed startups. This is a story about a genre of media that disrupted nothing, lasted briefly, and is now being sold for parts. Each of these companies was an experiment in betting that new distribution platforms could underwrite editorial ambition. The bet was wrong, but for a few years it looked right.

Vice began in 1994 as a Montreal free magazine, founded by Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith, and Gavin McInnes; that last went on to found the Proud Boys, an awkward provenance that Vice Media still prefers to leave underdiscussed. By the mid-aughts, the magazine had relocated to New York and developed an aesthetic of irony-laced gonzo reportage: well-educated young men visiting war zones and methamphetamine encampments with their smirks intact. An HBO deal in 2013 conferred prestige. The editorial product retained its faux-outlaw posture. At its peak, the company ran 35 offices, an HBO show, an in-house creative agency called Virtue, and a record label. James Murdoch invested through Lupa Systems. So did Disney, TPG, and Technology Crossover Ventures. The 2017 valuation implied that Vice had cracked the code of monetizing youth-culture authenticity.

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It had not. What Vice had cracked was the willingness of corporate advertisers to pay premium rates to associate themselves with disreputability. When that willingness faded — and it began fading the moment the brand became too familiar to be transgressive — Vice had nothing left.

BuzzFeed’s story is more interesting, because the journalism, for a stretch, was real. Jonah Peretti, a co-founder of The Huffington Post, built BuzzFeed in 2006 as a viral-content laboratory. The famous early product was the listicle: “21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.” But in 2012, Peretti hired Ben Smith from Politico to build a news division on top of the listicle engine. Smith’s bet was that the same social-platform mechanics that propelled animal-rescue videos could also propel investigative journalism. He hired aggressively, opened bureaus across the world, and soon presided over a newsroom whose international reporting on the Chinese government’s mass internment of Uyghurs won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize. BuzzFeed News published the (dubious) Steele dossier in 2017. It covered Silicon Valley with greater sophistication than most of the legacy press. For five or six years, it was the most consequential newsroom in American digital journalism.

The catch was that the apparatus rested on Facebook’s referral algorithms. When Facebook decided, around 2018, that it had grown tired of subsidizing publishers, BuzzFeed’s traffic collapsed. The news division burned cash. In an April 2023 staff memo, Peretti admitted that he had “overinvested” in the news division because he loved the work, and confirmed what had been obvious for months: BuzzFeed News was shutting down. About 180 staffers were laid off.

Finally, there was Vox Media. Founded by media executive Jim Bankoff with seed funding from Comcast, the firm traveled a different route to the same destination. The Vox website launched in 2014 with two policy bloggers, Ezra Klein from The Washington Post and Matt Yglesias from Slate, joined by Melissa Bell, an editor with a digital pedigree from the Post. Vox’s premise was technocratic. Smart people were busy and confused; journalism’s job was to package the underlying expertise behind the news. The site’s design templates — an index-card-styled “explainer” footer, providing background context on stories, embedded charts, and house-style explainer videos — were copied by other publications. At its peak, Vox had a Netflix series called Explained, a billion-dollar valuation, and ambitions to be the equivalent of CNN.

Each of these companies succeeded by being native to the larger social-media platforms it depended on. Each was undone the moment the platforms changed terms. The collapses were not symmetrical. Vice went bankrupt. BuzzFeed shrank into peddling snark and lists, and shed half its workforce. Vox negotiated a soft landing inside Penske’s stable of legacy titles, which includes Variety and Rolling Stone. But the trajectory was the same.

Klein left Vox for The New York Times opinion section in late 2020. Matt Yglesias departed a week earlier for a Substack newsletter called Slow Boring, where he now earns considerably more than he did at Vox. Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, decamped in 2020 for a Times media column, then in 2022 co-founded Semafor, a newsletter platform, with the former Bloomberg Media chief Justin Smith. Semafor today employs some 80 people, has 750,000 newsletter subscribers, and generates more than half its revenue from live events. Lauren Williams, the BuzzFeed News deputy editor, left to start Capital B, a black-civic-journalism nonprofit. Other BuzzFeed alumni founded subscription products on Substack and Beehiiv. At Vice, the diaspora was wider and quieter: writers scattered to legacy outlets, independent production, freelance. 

Each departure made the same point. The value the platforms had accumulated was always portable. The audience attached itself to writers, not to the brand. When the writer left, the audience left, too. BuzzFeed could not retain Ben Smith’s authority because Ben Smith was the asset. Vox could not retain Klein’s subscribers because they were reading Klein, not Vox. These companies turned out to be temporary scaffolding around durable individual reputations.

This is, of course, what newspaper proprietors used to understand. H.L. Mencken’s name sold The Baltimore Sun. Walter Lippmann’s column ran in 250 newspapers because it was Lippmann’s column. Westbrook Pegler, Stewart Alsop, Jimmy Breslin, Mike Royko: their bylines moved subscriptions. The new-media companies briefly persuaded themselves that the brand was the asset. They were corrected. The talent walked. The shells remain.

The transactions of the past three years tell a story not of media renewal, but of media dismantlement. Vice’s $350 million 2023 sale to a consortium led by Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management, and Monroe Capital was a creditor takeover dressed as a sale. CNBC reported at the time that the new owners planned to hold the company for two or three years and “further shave off the business.” They did. By February 2024, the new CEO had announced “several hundred” additional layoffs and confirmed that Vice.com would cease publishing original content. The website would now syndicate or partner with others. The brand was kept alive because brands have residual value. The journalism was finished.

Vox’s 2023 deal with Penske Media was less brutal but more revealing. Jay Penske, who built his fortune in motorsports media and entertainment trade publications, took the largest outside stake at a valuation that halved Vox’s 2015 mark. Vox now sits in a bigger portfolio alongside media commentary and taste-curation outfits. These brands continue to elevate cultural trends, but they are more about vibes than news. Their editorial ambitions have been quietly downsized. This is what survival looks like.

The Byron Allen acquisition of BuzzFeed is the most candid of the three transactions — and the most instructive. Allen is not a journalist. He is a Detroit-born comedian who built a syndication and distribution empire from a foundation in 1990s television production. He owns 13 broadcast affiliates across ABC, CBS, and NBC; 10 cable networks, most prominently the Weather Channel, which he bought in 2018; four streaming platforms; and a two-hour late-night comedy block on CBS that just expanded into Stephen Colbert’s old slot. He understands the economics of distribution. 

When Allen looked at BuzzFeed, he did not see a journalism asset. We can imagine that he saw three things. He saw a recognizable brand, nostalgia for which could be monetized. He saw a content library of two decades of audience-tested digital material that could be licensed to an AI company. And he saw an integration opportunity: his BuzzFeed could feed his streaming infrastructure, with the hope of growing ad revenue. He said as much in his announcement: “Our vision is to build on the iconic foundation of BuzzFeed and HuffPost by expanding into free-streaming video, audio, and user-generated content. As of this moment, with the power of AI, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube to become another premier free video streaming service.”

Note what is absent from that sentence: any reference to journalism, reporting, or news. Note also the AI mention. Peretti’s new title, head of BuzzFeed AI, is the giveaway. The asset Allen is buying is not the company. It is two decades of human-written content that can be used to train AI systems, plus a brand name under which machine-generated content can plausibly run. The Reuters licensing deal at $200 million annually, the OpenAI partnership announcements, and the recent Disney-OpenAI billion-dollar deal: these are not isolated transactions. They are the new revenue model. Publishers’ archives have become a training data inventory. Their brand names have become trust-laundering vessels.

For buyers of declining new-media brands, there are three distinct logics that overlap.

The first is distribution integration. A company like Allen Media Group, which owns broadcast and streaming pipes, can use a content brand to fill those pipes more cheaply than it can produce original content. The economics are roughly the ones William Randoph Hearst used in the 1920s, when his magazines fed his newspapers, and his newspapers fed his radio stations. The form is updated; the structure is identical.

The second is intellectual-property licensing. The archives have value as content libraries that can be repackaged for streaming, podcasts, or, increasingly, AI training. Vice’s old documentaries get licensed. BuzzFeed’s listicles get repurposed into vertical video. The journalism, where it ever existed, becomes incidental to the intellectual-property play.

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The third is what we might call brand-laundering. A trusted-sounding brand name carries value beyond the journalism that originally built that trust. Algorithmic content running under “BuzzFeed” or “Vice” carries credibility freight that the same content would not carry under its own name. This is why the brands survive even when the newsrooms don’t. The empty shell is the asset.

The dominant theme is that none of these logics requires the people who originally made the brand worth anything. Once the talent left, the shell still had financial value. Not as a journalism business, but as a content asset, a brand asset, and an audience asset, monetized in ways the original founders never imagined and would not have wanted.

What this tells us about the state of the media industry in 2026 is not subtle. The mid-tier digital publisher is dead. The economics that briefly sustained newsrooms of 200 or 300 journalists at outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice no longer exist. Programmatic advertising has collapsed. Google’s AI overviews have throttled search referral traffic. Facebook deprioritized news years ago. Apple’s privacy changes wrecked targeted-ad economics. The only viable models left are very small (Substack, individual subscriptions) or very large (The New York Times, with its 11 million digital subscribers, has functionally replaced the regional newspaper system as the country’s national paper of record). Everything in between is being either absorbed into the very large or stripped for parts by the financiers.

The consolidation logic has reshaped every other consumer industry over the past two decades. Private equity buys the brand, fires the staff, and runs out the residual value of the customer relationship until it runs dry. Gannett, MediaNews, Tribune Publishing, McClatchy: the American local-newspaper system was hollowed out this way over 15 years by hedge funds like Alden Global Capital. Digital media are now experiencing their own such moment, abbreviated and accelerated. What took the local papers a decade and a half is taking the new-media companies about six years.

The familiar pieties about democratization will not survive contact with this story. The new media was supposed to break the gatekeeping monopolies of legacy publishers. It did so, briefly, replacing them with venture-funded shells whose economics were never sustainable. But once those shells collapsed, the gatekeeping has reconstituted in a more thorough form than before — we used to have gatekeepers at a constellation of local papers; now there’s only The New York Times.

This is the lesson of the last decade, and it is older than the internet. Disruption is rarely what the disruptors claim it is. It is more often a redistribution of who collects the rent.

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.

The country is plagued by an affordability crisis, a housing shortage, crumbling infrastructure, and a general sense of diminishing expectations. For abundance liberals, it’s no accident that these crises are most acute in the states and cities where Democrats hold most of the political power.

The journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have emerged as the most prominent faces of this movement. In their buzzy new book, Abundance, they argue that scarcity is a choice, and that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need”. Progressives, in this telling, must be on the side of dynamism and productive capacity, even if this means bucking the Left’s orthodoxies.

The abundance movement gives hope for a progressive revival amid Trumpian gloom — even if proponents fail to fully reckon with the material incentives that keep many of their constituents on the side of the un-abundant status quo.

Supply-side liberals want to roll back regulations that make it harder to innovate and build. Yet it would be a mistake to cast them as neoliberals in the Clinton-Obama mold, as many on the Left are now doing. They emphasize the role of a strong, active government in shaping policy and directing markets. And while some abundance liberals describe themselves as moderates, many more are explicit about their passion for progressive ideals. The concern that unifies them is the tendency of progressive governance to hinder its own ostensible goals.

Stringent zoning laws block the construction of new housing, while burdensome rules around the use of public money make affordable public housing too expensive to build. Endless environmental reviews delay public transportation and green infrastructure projects. As Klein and Thompson put it: “Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do.”

Ordinary people suffer as a result. A majority of California tenants are now “rent-burdened”, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on housing. The same is true in New York City. Nearly a quarter of Seattle residents spend more than half of their income on rent. Even middle-class workers are being priced out of the most desirable cities and job markets.

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Nonetheless, deep-blue cities permit far fewer new homes than those with more conservative governance. Despite having 8 million more residents than Texas, the Golden State issued only half as many residential building permits in 2023. Meanwhile, in Austin, the median rent has fallen a staggering 22 percent over the last two years, even amid a tech boom, thanks to a concerted push to build new rental housing.

Difficulty building isn’t confined to the housing sector. Large infrastructure projects in blue areas regularly run behind schedule and over-budget due to onerous regulations and activist litigation. In 2008, California approved funding for an ambitious high-speed-rail project stretching across much of the state. The project is now $100 billion over-budget and a decade behind schedule. Meanwhile, the Lone Star State, with its loose regulatory climate, beats environmentally friendly California in solar and wind power capacity.

These failures partly explain why blue areas drifted most dramatically to the Right in the 2024 election, with core urban voters in liberal bastions like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City shifting 8 percentage points toward Trump. This should terrify Democrats, but they appear incapable of correcting course.

To be sure, the toxic and inane cultural politics progressives championed over the last decade did Democrats no favors at the ballot box. But rebranding the party as more socially moderate — with performative gestures towards masculinity, sports, patriotic kitsch, and Joe Rogan fans — won’t solve the deeper problems of progressive governance.

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For some supply-side progressives, the warning signs were flashing red long before the election. Thompson began to reconsider the cause of supply shortages during the Covid pandemic, when the country was short on protective equipment, drug supplies, and hospital beds. He saw these shortages as more than mere supply-chain failures. The authorities were failing to fast-track an appropriate pandemic response in the same way they failed at housing, energy, infrastructure, and skilled labor. In a January 2022 Atlantic essay Thompson called for a broad “abundance agenda” that would harness the power of both government and markets to supply more of what people need.

Supply-side has long been a Right-coded phrase. The term refers to the economic theory that low taxes and small government boost economic output and living standards for all. Progressives have instead generally focused, to borrow Klein’s words, on “the demand side of the ledger”: subsidizing the cost of housing, food, health care, education, and other essentials.

But price controls and food stamps don’t put more eggs and other goods on supermarket shelves. Simply handing out money for people to buy a limited supply of goods drives up prices, as the inflation of recent years has made clear. Had Kamala Harris been able to follow through on her campaign promise to give $25,000 grants to first-time homebuyers, the likely result would have been a rise in the cost of housing.

When demand outstrips supply, especially for inelastic goods, redistribution is an insufficient response. Hence why supply-side progressives are calling for a political shift away from redistribution toward the production and supply of more goods and services. They want a liberalism that builds and innovates and therefore lowers prices, not just redistributes.

This is a radical departure from the last 50-plus years of progressive orthodoxy, which has focused mostly on inequality and, more recently, climate change. The climate dimension is especially prone to a combination of radicalism and pessimism that alienates ordinary people. The “degrowth” movement — which calls for managed decline and even winding down industrial society in the face of ecological collapse — has gained purchase in many corners of the Left. Even many mainstream liberals espouse tacitly antigrowth sentiments.

Such policies sabotage progressive governance. Then, too, the legislative model was forged in a different era with different problems. The environmental regulations of the postwar era sought to ameliorate the harms associated with rapid economic growth and technological progress. The postwar American economy was vibrant. Suburbs and highways and factories were going up all across the country. But the air and water were polluted, manufacturing was degrading natural environments, and crime, smog, noise, and crowding had the affluent fleeing cities.

But these environmental regulations, zoning laws, historic preservation statutes, and “grassroots” public-interest policies, implemented to protect the public in a time of rapid change, have since been captured by special interests. Activist citizen and business groups weaponize these same laws to stymie construction and growth for their own personal ends.

A willingness to grapple with the failures of progressive governance — and the ideological choices underpinning those failures — sets supply-side progressives apart from many of the other rival factions seeking to remake or just rebrand the Democratic Party. But for now, the abundance faction consists mostly of policy wonks confined to media, think tanks, and academia. A few prominent politicians have expressed support for their ideas, at least as they appear on paper, and others hit on similar themes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently issued a State Economic Blueprint teasing new infrastructure, innovation, government investment, and dynamism. (The cover features hard hats, construction cranes, and a commercial farm that is notably not bucolic.)

However, the “pathologies of the broad Left”, as Klein and Thompson put it, didn’t arise by happenstance, and they won’t be easily cured. Though regulatory hurdles were raised as well-intentioned solutions to the problems of another age, the entrenched interests keeping them in place are very much contemporary. In the cities home to much of the Democratic base, NIMBYism remains a potent force. Affluent homeowners have moved back into the cities, but they still fear the traffic, crime, noise, and blocked views that come with high-density affordable housing and infrastructure projects. They are unlikely to be happy about slumping home prices as new housing stock becomes available.

Klein and Thompson are too quick to excuse or brush aside the vested interest affluent liberals have in the status quo. Klein has asked for grace and understanding for the contradictory but human impulses of those practicing what he calls “lawn-sign liberalism”. Elsewhere, Thompson floated promoting the abundance agenda as pushback against greedy elites but stopped short of openly blaming homeowners.

Yoni Appelbaum, another supply-side progressive with a new book out, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, is more comfortable naming villains. Appelbaum points the finger at Jane Jacobs, the community activist famous for keeping planning virtuoso Robert Moses from running highways through Manhattan. Jacobs’s writing and activism against large “top-down” urban development in favor of community-based planning laid the blueprint for activist groups that would squash urban development for decades to come.

In Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back, yet another text simpatico to the abundance movement, Marc Dunkelman argues that such activists, and progressives in general, have leaned too far into a “Jeffersonian” impulse as opposed to the Hamiltonian tradition’s emphasis on developmentalism and large-scale solutions to mass problems.

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Though such honesty is refreshing, Thompson is probably right that a politics vilifying homeowners would struggle to find a constituency among affluent liberals with property in major cities. No one likes to be told that they are the problem. Even if the movement can find support among young progressives struggling to break into the housing market, the youth vote isn’t easy for progressives to mobilize (just ask Bernie Sanders); many young people are now pivoting to the Right anyway.

Immigration is another sticking point. Supply-side progressivism shares traditional progressivism’s support for expanding migration. Matthew Yglesias, a longtime associate of Klein’s, made this argument explicitly in his book One Billion Americans, published in 2020 (the title gives away the gist). However, while supply-side progressives are mostly in agreement, few seem so eager to foreground the point — understandably, given the ferocious public backlash against an unrestricted border under former President Joe Biden.

Klein and Thompson make only passing mention of the need for more skilled immigrant labor to build new infrastructure and technologies, but they spend little time defending or even making the case. Obvious questions go unacknowledged. Why can’t American citizens do these jobs? Won’t more people create even more issues with supply? The reason is surely strategic: the public has soured on mass immigration, which has been electorally damaging for progressive parties across Western democracies.

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Then there are unions. The abundance movement’s critics on the Left charge that making building easier would disrupt unions and be “politically ruinous”. It’s true that Klein & Co. identify labor laws as one of the factors holding back development. Yet Klein has also underscored his support for the labor movement, noting that countries with stronger unions build transit infrastructure faster and for less than the United States, with its much weaker labor movement. Klein is correct to warn, however, that nothing threatens the labor movement more than a public that blames it for the failures of progressive governance.

Still, criticizing labor law risks making enemies for abundance within organized labor. Likewise, few “affluent metropolitan liberals” will take kindly to the movement’s criticisms of environmental regulations, DEI initiatives, and other progressive pieties.

That’s why some abundance liberals have sought to forge partnerships across the aisle. Colin Mortimer of the Center for New Liberalism, a think tank that serves as a home for this rising strain of progressive thought, pointed to the Abundance Institute as a “Right-wing institution” promoting an abundance agenda centered around science and technology. Then there is the economist Tyler Cowen and his “state-capacity libertarianism”, which can be thought of as an inverse movement tackling the pathologies of the Right: above all, a perverse adherence to laissez-faire principles and refusal to harness the unique powers of government.

Likewise, figures in the so-called Tech Right — such as the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, who have both lamented the country’s inability to build — get lumped into the abundance mix. “The degree that we can make this a cross-partisan, bipartisan issue, we think that’s fantastic, and it’s going to be all the more reason why this movement can be effective”, Mortimer told me.

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Yet the danger is that Right and Left abundance proponents will each double down on their own side’s respective preferences without taking up the productive ideas of the other: that is, Republicans will deregulate without building up state capacity, while Democrats will splurge without deregulating.

The first months of the new Trump administration are instructive. The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, himself pro-building and pro-dynamism in the Andreessen-Thiel sense, doesn’t appear to share any interest in making government perform better — or at all. The new Trump administration, largely abandoning the pro-worker populist posturing of the campaign trail, now seems intent on realizing Grover Norquist’s quip about shrinking the government until it can be drowned in a bathtub.

For their part, Thompson and Klein frame their agenda as an opportunity to step into the vacancy Republicans create by peddling what they call a “scarcity mindset”, in which, as JD Vance infamously claimed, illegal immigrants are taking up all of the homes that could go to native citizens. Their great hope is that Democrats might help forge a new political order that displaces the faltering neoliberal consensus.

Until recently, this did not seem so out of the realm of possibility: some Republicans had shown more openness to state interventions and industrial policy, and the Biden administration, which chose to leave many of Trump’s strategic tariffs in place, was able to garner enough bipartisan support to enact no fewer than three large spending bills centered around infrastructure and industrial policy.

Lately, however, supposedly populist Republicans have come more and more to resemble their tax-cutting, government-attacking, laissez-faire predecessors, while many Democrats are falling back into tired #Resistance tropes. Can abundance liberals (and thoughtful counterparts on the Right) cut through these familiar battle lines to forge creative new solutions to the nation’s supply problems? At stake is the future not just of the Left, but American prosperity in the 21^st century.

Well Mr Trump of course. When it comes to a choice between political or medical approaches to the virus, Americans are overwhelmingly plumping for the politics. They afford, in that choice, the most basic of victories to their self-obsessed President. Whether they love Trump or hate him, it’s the emotional/political response that matters most to them — as it does to him.

Kool Aid has become bleach: and they are drinking it.

Even perfectly rational Americans have been caught up in a politicisation of virus facts. And so, if you know how anyone voted in 2016, you will also know whether they think opening beaches in Florida is a good thing, or whether an earlier lockdown would have saved lives. You think Chloroquine might be a good treatment? You voted to Make America Great Again. You think everyone should wear a mask? You’re a milquetoast San Francisco dreamer.

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Anyone waiting for a reckoning — the equivalent of the public enquiry we expect in the UK; blame apportioned, defences accepted or rejected, the results widely disseminated and accepted — will be waiting a long time. No proper accounting for these mad months will ever be possible. However many die. Whatever the long-term economic impact of lockdowns. Coronavirus, in America, has mutated from pathogen to political event. The media won’t help. That the virus has been so politicised is in large part thanks to the intellectual laziness of a class of commentators, fat bottoms sitting on CNN stools, who like nothing better (and know nothing more) than to chat about who’s in and who’s out and who’s hot and who’s cold.

But wait: there is hope. Hope of a vaccine. Not for Coronavirus but for this political and social disease. The extreme nature of the malady is revealing something about how it strikes and how it might be repelled.

The coronavirus pandemic has given students of American society the opportunity to watch, in real time, a giant psychological experiment taking place. They are seeing something much more interesting than the relatively banal stuff about facts not mattering any more or being chosen at will. No: at a molecular level a much more interesting and deeper dysfunction is being revealed.

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A simple question serves as our microscope. Why are Left-wing Americans more afraid of the virus than Right-wingers? As the writer Ezra Klein has pointed out on the Vox website, this feels odd given what we know about the psychology of being on the Right: fearing threats, being more sensitive to them, and on the Left: welcoming contact with the world, seeing progress everywhere.

“Here we are,” Klein writes, “in the midst of a pandemic, and it’s conservatives seemingly dismissing the danger, opening states and counties prematurely, refusing to wear masks, waving off the deaths of older people as a small price to pay. And, more often, it seems to be liberals who’re locked in their homes, who are warning the worst is yet to come, who are shaming anyone who dares step foot on a beach or forgets to don personal protective equipment.”

Klein talks to psychologists who express a range of views entirely explained — of course — by their own biases. He gets nowhere. Until he turns to a paper written in 2018 which still serves as one of the foundational pieces on Trump and the world he inhabits.

The paper, by political scientists Jeremy Pope and Michael Barber of Brigham Young University, is little short of revelatory. It is, or should be, the central text of modern US politics 101. Here is the conclusion: “group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.”

Alright, it needs some additional colour. What they did, Pope and Barber, was an extraordinary first in the annals of academic endeavour: they used Trumpism as a heuristic device. They noted that The Donald has taken a range of ideological positions on policy issues in the past, so they divided 1,300 conservative voters into two groups and asked them about those different positions, liberal and conservative; one of the groups was told Trump’s view and the other was not. The revelation was that the more strongly ideologically conservative the voter (as self-identified) the more likely he or she was to go in the direction, any direction, that Trump went in. Bingo!

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To repeat: “group loyalty is the stronger motivator of opinion than are any ideological principles.” They are loyal to Trump. They want him to win every battle. Identity groups want to further the causes of the group: in the complex real world they may care about science, or income tax or anything, but in their gut they know who they are, where they belong, and only this matters.

So if Trump wants the borders closed: cool. If he wants the shops open, amen. If he thinks Xi Jinping is doing fine, attaboy. If he decides the virus is a Chinese plot to destroy the world: makes sense to you.

But here is why the Coronavirus might allow the Pope and Barber paper to be freshened. It concentrated on Trump and his people. Perhaps the authors rather assumed — as political science professors at major American universities tend to — that on the Left, in the moderate centre, no such identity trap exists.

Well Hello Coronavirus Times! While Joe Biden sits largely un-noticed in his basement trying to work out how to use his autocue, Americans on the Left have binged on disaster, to the extent that the comedian Bill Maher was forced to issue a warning to his natural pals: “Trump calls you Fake News: don’t make him right!”

He had in mind the ‘panic porn’ of the mainstream media. Headlines declaring ‘war zone’ conditions next to a picture of a person buying eggs. A news story in the New York Times about how things had been turned round in that city, but with the headline, ‘Braced for apocalyptic surge, New York avoids worst so far.’

Maher had done some research. As he saw it:

“The media also seems obsessed with finding young people who’ve died of COVID-19. The Washington Post says there were 759 under 50 years old. Horrible, of course. Then I looked up how many under 50 died of the flu last year, almost 3,000. So, all this misery from distancing did some good, can I be happy about that?”

No of course not. Because the American Left is as subsumed by identity group needs — mostly the need to be the opposite of Trump and his people — as is the Right. The myopia is cross party. There might be talk of ideology, of the policies that spring from deeply held beliefs about how life should be lived and a modern nation governed, but none of that matters much any more. Beat Trump. He has talked the virus down so talk it up. That’s it.

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The vaccine for this virus — the political one — will almost certainly take longer to develop than for coronavirus. But we understand at least what the process of infection is: the challenge will be to find a serum of balm that might be injected into the body politic that allows that inflamed identity protein (sorry) to be blocked or reduced, and healthier political instincts encouraged. The post Trump world needs to think about civic education. About a properly just society which works for all Americans. About a return to due process after the horrors of the campus culture that destroys on a whim.

It will take two women: Joe Biden’s successor (his vice president will be a woman) and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina Governor and ambassador to the UN who I think is likely to be the Republican best positioned for the delicate task of rescuing the GOP from Trumpism. Is it too much to hope that they might be able to disagree agreeably and to persuade the nation to do that much missed bipartisan stuff again?

Cards on the table: I am enormously optimistic. America’s ability to put ideas to good use is one of its central features. So is its ability to produce the sort of people who rise the task. Many presidents have been great and visionary: FDR, JFK, Reagan, Obama. Again and again America makes a mess but it clears it up. Or clears up the messes created by others. In that vein, it may well provide the first vaccine for coronavirus and inoculate the world.

Then (post Trump) it can get on with the job of curing itself.

Richard Dawkins does not have the same rule, I think it’s fair to say. “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds,” he tweeted recently. “It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice.”

Lots of people got very cross about that, and I was naively surprised; surprised enough to break my own rule. I thought he was saying something fairly obvious, which is that if you bred humans for some trait then it would probably make that trait more common, and that he was explicit in saying he wasn’t talking about whether it was morally acceptable. But other people thought — they told me so — that he was literally in favour of eugenics. (Dawkins later clarified that no, he was not: “I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy [but just] as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. Heaven forbid that we do it.”)

The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

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Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

But for Klein, the editor of Vox, the ritual was not strong enough. Murray’s ideas are reminiscent of a grim history, in which pseudoscientific ideas about a hierarchy of humans were used to justify slavery or Jim Crow laws. For Klein (a low-decoupler, in Nerst’s taxonomy), you can’t simply take an idea out of its context like that. The context comes with it.

These two paradigms are very hard to square. Harris thought he was having a coolly rational debate in the philosophy-seminar style, so was baffled to find he was being accused of racism; Klein thought Harris was trying to sneak racist ideas in under an academic smokescreen, and couldn’t believe Harris claiming otherwise. Their models of the world were so different they just couldn’t understand each other. So obviously it descended into a massive online row with accusations of bad faith and racism.

That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” =  “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other. 

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I think a lot of arguments in society come down to this high-decoupler/low-decoupler difference. And while I hope I’ve done a good job of putting the case for low-decoupling, I am very obviously a high-decoupler, so often I find myself thinking “but they performed the magic ritual! They said they didn’t mean Y!” and being really confused that everyone is very angry that they believe Y.

Dawkins, to my knowledge, never explained why he suddenly brought up eugenics out of a clear blue sky, but the word is in the news at the moment because Dominic Cummings hired the weirdo he wanted to hire, a man called Andrew Sabisky. Inevitably enough, the media has gone through his old social media posts and found various things he’s said, and he has since quit.

For the record: some of it is genuinely unsettling, for instance that “there are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly — even mostly — genetic in origin”. This is, I think, not true — I don’t know how you square it with the simple fact that poor black boys in the UK get better educational outcomes than poor white boys, for instance. And none of this should be seen as a defence of Sabisky’s hiring. (Watch me perform the decoupling ritual: will it work?)

But I thought a few of them were interesting from this high/low decoupling point of view. For instance, he described female genital mutilation (FGM) as a “moral panic”, because the actual numbers were low, so the risk to girls in the UK was pretty tiny. The full quote was “It is still unclear to what extent FGM represents a serious risk to young girls, raised in the UK, of certain minority group origins. Much of the hue and cry looks more like a moral panic.”

It seems fairly obvious to me that Sabisky is saying that FGM is rare in the UK – a view, incidentally, shared by at least one consultant obstetrician in the BMJ, who said “there is no evidence that large numbers of girls living in UK are having FGM”. He’s not belittling the impact itself.

Similarly, I’ve said before that claims about a wave of teen suicides are “absolute bollocks” and that the “epidemic of loneliness” is not real; that doesn’t mean I don’t think that suicide and loneliness are terrible things. You can decouple the frequency of the event from the seriousness of the event when it does happen. But for low-decoupling people, you can’t; by downplaying one, you are downplaying the whole package.

Similarly, Sabisky said that “women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s”. But the context was that of Caster Semenya, a female runner who has an unusually high level of blood testosterone, and whether she should be allowed to compete in women’s sport. Sabisky is suggesting, as I understand it, that there is a need to draw boundaries around women’s sport in a way that you don’t around men’s, but you do around the Paralympics; if anyone could compete in women’s sports or the Paralympics, then lots of mediocre able-bodied men would win them and there would be no women’s sports or Paralympics left. The concept of “boundaries around the sport” has been separated from the idea of the sports themselves. But to a low-decoupler, it sounds, I think, as though he is saying they are inferior. 

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Even his “eugenics” argument, in an interview with Laura McInerny in SchoolsWeek in 2016, strikes me as quite a separating-the-feelings-from-the-facts, decoupling-style situation. In fact he even says so, explicitly: “You have to separate yourself from what you feel and from what are the facts of the matter.” He asks whether parents should be able to screen IVF embryos, whether for disability or schizophrenia, or for intelligence. The former is not a million miles away from our current situation, where pregnancies at high risk of chromosomal disorders can be terminated if the mother wishes; the latter will probably be happening in China in a few years. The fact is that it’s possible; that doesn’t say whether it’s right. 

Sabisky himself, according to that interview, seems to be against it: “He is personally uneasy about the ethics of many of the things he talks about and as a Christian — he married in church last year — he has moral views on the topics that may not be what people expect.” It seems to me that he is explicitly decoupling what he thinks is true, or what he thinks is effective, from what he thinks is right.

I don’t think, as some people do, that these remarks have been “taken out of context”, as such. I think that even with the context, lots of people would still assume that when he says “FGM isn’t a major risk” he means “we don’t need to care about FGM”. Similarly, Dawkins’s tweet wasn’t taken out of context: the context was all there, but the magic ritual didn’t work. It’s a translation problem: some people think they’re having a cold, rational discussion; other people are alive to the implications; there will be frequent occasions when the two groups will hear the same words and yet understand totally different things by them.

Again, to perform the decoupling-ritual one more time, none of this is to defend the hiring of Sabisky — who, full disclosure, I met in 2017 and interviewed for my book. It wouldn’t surprise me, to decouple again, if he was a useful person to have around government: he is a “superforecaster”, which means that of the 20,000 people making predictions about the future for the Good Judgment Project, he was one of the 150 who scored best for accuracy. (Read a bit more about that here, if you like.) I suspect having people who are really good at predicting the future is useful, but that is decoupling his abilities from his views, and maybe that’s not a good thing to do.

But I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. Sometimes the ritual fails, and the spirits break through the warding circle.