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Kalen's avatar

A lot of the 'abundance' discourse seems to be really trying to do that watery centrist blogger thing of not actually having any sort of politics at all. The sort of ephemerality of 'we should have things....somehow' that you note is a feature that enables them to sell books to the 'socially liberal, fiscally conservative' PMC set but doesn't really indicate who should be doing what.

There's a version of abundance that's basically 'all that New Deal infrastructure stuff seemed to work great, let's do that again' and, hell yeah. But that would entail doing the New Deal tax, regulatory, and financial stuff that had kleptocrats in the '30s planning literal coups, and again, if that's the plan is, hell yeah. But if that's the war you're prepared to fight, you need to come out and say it so people know to show up. But it's been a couple months and 'abundance' has already been completely assimilated by the usual suspects assuring you that if you just leave their giant pile of cash dressed as a picture-sharing website or a taxi service or whatever alone they'll invent a Santa Claus machine for the good of all mankind.

Which, surely we can just come out and say at this point, they won't.

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Philip Koop's avatar

If we're taking the position that words ought to have meanings, then I am obliged to balk at the use of "syncretic" here. Syncretism ought to mean the conjoining of two or more disparate religions, belief systems, or doctrines into a *coherent* whole. But the point of this post seems to be that "Abundance" is just a bag of random stuff with the word "Abundance" stamped on it. If we're being charitable, that is perhaps eclectic; but syncretic it ain't.

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