All Aboard for Abundance
Why the problems facing the abundance agenda mirror those of the original American frontier
Political pioneers, one and all, climb aboard and blaze a trail with us away from decades of stagnation into a new frontier of abundance. So goes the abundance democrats’ attempt to herd the Democratic Party into a new era of growth. In their recent book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson frame their entire proposal as a new American frontier. But the issues facing the abundance agenda mirror those of the original American frontier.
The Abundance Agenda
The abundance agenda, as articulated by Klein and Thompson, argues that many of our pressing political issues such as housing, clean energy, infrastructure, or innovation can be solved by increasing supply. The problem, they argue, is that outdated regulations and bureaucracies stall the building of more housing, clean energy, or railroads, and make the systems that incentivize scientific research and new technologies risk averse. In the proposal of a “liberalism that builds,” they want democrats to steer the US government in a direction that not only deregulates industries but also plays an active role in making new construction and innovation possible.
They invoke the image of the American frontier at least seven times throughout the book. Most prominently, at the beginning of the first chapter, they explicitly frame their entire argument about growth in terms of the frontier. They begin with the quote attributed to Horace Greeley, saying “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” Although the quote suggests that wealth can be made by going west, Klein and Thompson engage in some demythologization by pointing out that Greeley himself made his fortune in the large cities of the East. “Americans have long lionized the frontier,” they write, “But our futures have largely been made in our cities.”
The land that drives innovation and growth, they argue, is not the edges or the borders but cities. For them, the city is the true American frontier. But with soaring housing prices, cities are becoming inaccessible to most people, threatening a twenty-first century version of the closing of the American frontier.
The American Frontier
At one point, the word “frontier” just meant the border or outer boundary of a territory. But at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, a historian named Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper that would forever change how historians talk about the American frontier. The development of the United States, Turner argued, could be explained by its continual expansion into an ever expanding frontier full of “free land” and an “abundance of natural resources.” He reworked the concept of the frontier, making it not only a site of geographic expansion but also a process that transformed the American spirit.
In his book, The End of the Myth, historian Greg Grandin points out the connection people in the 19th century made between the safety valve of a steam engine—which released excess steam pressure from boilers to prevent them from exploding—and the American frontier. Whenever the country faced problems, whether overcrowded cities, unemployment, social unrest, or racial problems, the federal government would look to the west as a safety valve to release excess social steam.
For many, this was the solution to keep the federal government as small as possible. If problems could just be sent westward, then the federal government didn’t need to pass laws or regulations to address the root of any problems. But rolling the problems westward without addressing the underlying social problems only created a giant snowball that eventually came back to crush everyone.
By using supply-side solutions as a safety valve for today’s problems, the abundance agenda risks creating an equally pernicious snowball. Unless it simultaneously addresses today’s underlying social problems, we too will be crushed.
An Abundance of Trains
One of Klein and Thompson’s favorite examples, and the one that Klein highlights in his New York Times article promoting the book, is the failure of California’s high-speed rail. The forty-years-in-the-works rail project meant to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco has stalled out as projected costs have ballooned to $130 billion. The bulk of this cost, Klein reports, comes from legal battles with impacted businesses and homeowners as well as dealing with environmental regulations. If more of this red tape were cut, Klein supposes, the railroad would get built.
There’s a deep nostalgia in the abundance agenda for the days when the U.S. built things fast and cheap. Let’s entertain that nostalgia by thinking more about trains.
Railroads remain an enduring and favorite image of the American West. The steady spread of steel rails girded the vast and barren lands into a country ready for settlement. Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, about 158,000 miles of new track were laid—increasing US rail infrastructure fivefold. The railroads literally made the frontier. As Sandeep Vaheesan points out in his review of Klein and Thompson’s book, much of the abundance agenda mirrors the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Sticking with this comparison elucidates much about the abundance agenda.
The issues facing the abundance agenda are remarkably similar to the problems of the original American frontier in at least two ways: (1) The original frontier was a site of displacement in the same way that deregulation would further accelerate the displacement of people today; and (2) the original frontier consolidated corporate wealth at the expense of the working class just as the abundance agenda risks increasing the wealth gap today.
Make Way for Abundance
Frederick Jackson Turner wrote idyllically about growing up in Portage, Wisconsin where he watched members of the Winnebago and Menominee nations as he paddled down the Wisconsin River. But despite having witnessed these Indigenous communities firsthand, neither they nor any other Native people appear in his landmark essay on the frontier.
At age thirteen, Turner would have seen federal troops forcibly load the Winnebago and Menominee people onto trains for relocation, an operation requested by local leaders that included his own father. The new railroads, as it turns out, were useful not only for moving cargo but also for removing people.
Three years before Turner unveiled his famous frontier thesis at the Chicago World Fair, the U.S. Army massacred nearly 300 Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee as part of an ongoing campaign to clear Indigenous lands for white settlement and gold mining in the Black Hills.
The vanguard leading the charge into native territories was often the railroads. As the country’s new railroads snaked their way across the country, they were usually given land grants from the federal government. The U.S. government found it easier (for them at least) not to make these land grants from land already in the public domain but from land already belonging to Native peoples. Sometimes this land was handed to railroads as part of treaties with particular tribes, but other times, railroads were given land on unceded Native territories.
As the railroads cut deeper into Native territories, their encroachments were often taken to be an action on behalf of the U.S. federal government. Or put differently, the federal government used the railroads as vehicles for taking Native lands.
But none of this makes it into Turner’s account of the frontier.
Turner’s silence on this forceful displacement reveals a major problem with his account of the frontier. The land was never empty, waiting to be settled. It was taken by force from those already living there.
That same myth of an empty frontier lives on in the way the abundance agenda talks about building more. They forget that people already live in those neighborhoods and cities that they want to develop. Police delivering eviction notices and demolishing unhoused communities to make way for construction eerily echo federal troops loading Native people onto trains.
For all their writing about increasing the housing supply—creating a frontier of housing abundance—Klein and Thompson neglect to address this issue of who gets displaced by new development. The housing affordability crisis, they suggest, is just a supply issue.
Indeed, the US has a shortage of some 4.5 million units, and housing prices are rising everywhere. But simply building more housing without other strategic policies like tenant protections, housing subsidies, and affordability requirements, risks repeating a familiar pattern: new developments arrive, neighborhood prices rise, and long-time resident (often low-income residents and people of color) are pushed out.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t build more. Despite what the abundance agenda says, there is a third option. But letting developers build as if it were the wild west will result in wild west levels of displacement.
Abundance for the Rich
Jeff Bezos famously wore a cowboy hat and boots during his first ten minute trip to space with his company Blue Origin. His costume signaled that he was pioneering a new American frontier. Space is, after all, the final frontier—and promises an abundance of resource extraction for those with the capital to get there.
Bezos’ framing of the launch as inaugurating a new frontier mirrors the first frontier in another way: Both took huge amounts of government support and capital. Blue Origin was fueled by over sixty years of publicly funded NASA research and Bezos selling off stock in his other company, Amazon.
Settlement of the original frontier was hitched to the development of the railroads which were pulled forward by the engines of government support and capital. As the historian Richard White argues in his book, Railroaded, the transcontinental railroads were constructed in a short amount of time—the kind of speedy abundance for which Klein and Thompson are nostalgic. But what was constructed usually did not match what was actually needed. The railroads were engineered more as vehicles for profiteering than as vehicles for carrying passengers or cargo, enriching a small group of people through the sale of stocks and bonds.
The abundance agenda assumes that if industries are deregulated and given government support, that corporations will help us build our way out of problems. But corporations are not incentivized by solving problems. They only care about making profits.
In the housing market, for example, the abundance democrats mindlessly parrot the intro-to-economics analysis that increasing supply will stabilize prices. But since corporate developers are constructing financial assets and not consumer products (let alone homes), they won’t build in a way that leads to more affordable housing. That would hurt their real estate portfolios.
Across the country, homes sit empty not because no one needs them, but because they are priced beyond reach. Meanwhile, corporations like Blackstone benefit from this “structural shortage of housing.” This is not a supply problem. It’s a financial capitalism problem. Further deregulating development won’t address the core issue. When housing is treated as a financial asset instead of a human need, the system produces artificial scarcity to maximize corporate wealth.
The abundance agenda’s oversimplified solutions are attractive because understanding economic nuance is hard, so let’s keep thinking about trains.
Towns assumed that when a railroad came through, prosperity would pull in closely behind. The railroads had shown little interest in western Kansas until the 1880’s when local politicians bent backwards incentivizing them to build. A frenzy of construction resulted in seven haphazard lines aimlessly meandering through western Kansas. The results made money for railroad corporations but turned western Kansas into a land to speed through on the way to somewhere else. Between 1887 and 1897, the region’s population fell by half. The railroads that promised to bring people and wealth to the region instead just carried them away.
The transcontinental railroad was a chaotic mess of tracks strewn across the frontier, subsidized by millions of dollars from the federal government, that primarily enriched the executives and stockholders of railroad corporations.
The people that built the transcontinental railroads did so not to respond to the needs of the country but to amass personal fortunes. This same pattern played out in the abundance of other emerging industries such as steel, oil, mining, and meatpacking. By 1890, the top 1 percent owned 51 percent of the wealth while the lowest 44 percent owned only 1.2 percent. People at the time were saying that the U.S. resembled something closer to a European aristocracy than a republic.
Turner didn’t recognize the role of government and capital in his original 1893 paper, instead arguing that the frontier was settled by the hard work of individual families clearing the land, creating pastures, and banding together for collective action only as needed.
This is the image of the frontier that Bezos wanted his cowboy cosplay to communicate. The wealthy of this country have always tried to dodge the label of aristocracy by presenting a pioneering rags to riches story.
We are not quite at gilded age levels of wealth inequality, but we are getting close. Today, the top 1 percent owns 31 percent of the wealth while the bottom 50 percent owns just 2.5 percent. Creating abundance without also planning for its distribution will only make things worse.
Striking for Abundance
There were key moments when the history of the American frontier could have gone differently. Many tried to forge alternative versions of the frontier. I’ll share just one example: the Pullman Strike.
Then, just as today, the mystified growth and abundance of the frontier depended on the labor of the working class. This became clear in 1894 when the American Railway Union (ARU) literally closed the frontier between June 26 and July 20 with its boycott of Pullman train cars.
At the Chicago World Fair earlier that fall, where Turner unveiled his frontier thesis, a fifth of the US population had the chance to tour what had become the famous Pullman passenger car. Through George Pullman’s monopolistic practices, the Pullman car had become the most popular method for travelling from coast to coast, operating 2,135 cars at its peak in 1890.
Following the Panic of 1893 when demand for new cars fell, Pullman significantly cut the wages of manufacturing workers, even though the company still paid out generous dividends that same year. The workers all lived in Pullman—the company town which Pullman patronizingly named after himself—and paid rents directly back to their town’s namesake. After paying for rent, water, and gas (which were deducted from their paychecks), many families were left without money for food. When they asked Pullman to reduce their rents in proportion to their wage cuts, he refused to negotiate with them. They turned instead to the ARU and its leader, Eugene Debbs, to help organize them.
To encourage workers to join the ARU, Debbs often reworked Turner’s frontier thesis, casting workers’ movements as the true pioneering spirit of the frontier. Even if they didn’t own most of it, the frontier was built by the sweat of working people. To survive, Debbs argued, they needed to band together into labor unions. This was a viable alternative vision of the frontier. As the historian Edward O’Donnell finds, between 1881 and 1900, there were 36,757 strikes in the US involving six million workers. Together, they wanted to create a frontier where abundance would be equitably distributed.
But the federal government and monopolistic corporations had other ideas. In response to the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland used his constitutional authority to maintain a U.S. postal service to get an injunction against the ARU since trains often carried mail. This gave him authority to dispatch the army against the ARU to protect the efficiency of the mail service. One of the regiments unleashed against the striking workers was the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old regiment that had massacred the Lakotas at Wounded Knee just a few years earlier.
They killed around thirty striking workers and supporters. Most strikers were fired and blacklisted. Several of the leaders, including Debbs, ended up in prison for their defiance of the injunction. The Pullman workers were defeated along with Debbs’ alternative vision of a frontier for the working class.
Socializing the Frontier
In his later lectures and writings of the 1920s, Turner finally recognized the role of capital in settling the frontier and the consolidation of capital that it made possible. Unwilling to let these “masters of industry” claim the pioneering spirit of the frontier which he had devoted his career to describing, he set to work writing about a “new frontier” in public social policy
This would be the alternative frontier that got the most traction. Henry Wallace, who would go on serve as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president, published a book in 1934 titled New Frontiers, picking up where Turner left off. He argued that the new US frontier was the reorganization of society itself. In response to the gilded age and the depression it caused, Wallace thought the solution was planned and cooperative uses of resources to promote an abundance for all.
Reworking the meaning of the American frontier myth has been at the heart of the concept for the last century and a half. It has become a site for contesting the spirit of the United States. Ronald Reagan’s cowboy act repurposed the myth to stamp out the new deal state (and Wallace’s “new frontier” along with it). George W. Bush tried to justify his invasion of Iraq with his image of an international gunslinging vigilante. Even Jeff Bezos, as we saw, invoked the myth of the frontier.
At this point, there is no getting rid of it. But we can continue the effort to repurpose it. We can create an alternative frontier myth for our own time.
From Lil Nas X and the “Yeehaw Agenda” to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album and Jordan Peele’s recent documentary called High Horse: The Black Cowboy, people are recognizing the power of the frontier myth. Klein and Thompson also understand this power, so they tactfully frame their abundance agenda as a new frontier. It’s a good start, but we can keep building on their “liberalism that builds.”
We need a frontier not only of abundance, but one of shared abundance that benefits everyone. We need a frontier that, like the alternatives promoted by Debbs and Wallace, distributes abundance to everyone. As Huber, Phillips, and Stafford put it in their article, “What’s needed is not just a liberalism that builds, but a socialist left that builds—and builds differently: with democratic planning, redistribution, and working-class power at its center.” Who builds, for whom, and under what conditions are questions just as important as how much gets built.
The abundance democrats correctly diagnose that the Democratic Party cannot remain where it has been. Like the pioneers of old, it must move on towards something new. They are also right that this must be through a positive vision for the future.
The Left has long articulated such a vision. We also want trains, affordable housing, clean energy, and technology that reduces how much we have to work, but only if it benefits everyone. We also want a frontier of abundance, but only if we’re all aboard. Otherwise, we’ll be crushed by the same problems as the first American frontier.
mandatory reading for Durham City Council with the UDO!