Can you have a social movement that lacks an ideology? That has long been the dream of a certain segment of Washington’s policy entrepreneur class. For decades, groups like No Labels and public figures like Michael Bloomberg have tried to sell the American polity on a political vision that is neither of the left nor the right, but which instead finds its roots in an untapped national consensus that belongs to no party. As No Labels describes itself, it is a movement “for the vast majority of Americans who are desperate for leaders who govern with common sense and deliver results.”
Of course, No Labels’ claim to movement status is risible, as is its claim to transcend left and right. There is no such thing as a movement with no labels and no ideology, because ideology itself is an escapable fact of human social organization. It is something far deeper and more pervasive than a simple policy agenda. As Karen and Barbara Fields write in Racecraft [emphasis mine]:
Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and recreate their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.
A movement is nothing if it is not a “collective being.” Without some sort of ideological grounding, there is nothing to hold a movement together: no shared set of values, no common understanding of how and why our social world operates like it does. No connective tissue of any kind.
This is not to say that social movements operate on the basis of unanimous consent. Even the most disciplined ones tend to be highly fractious and riven by serious—and often shockingly vicious—ideological quarrels. But those arguments are among familial relations; that’s precisely why they’re so violent. A large movement is unlikely to be defined by any single, systematized ideology, but rather a cluster of overlapping ones. The overlap is often fairly loose, but there needs to be enough of one to provide some kind of bridge language and set of common goals.
YIMBYism is one such ideological cluster. There are progressive YIMBYs, socialist YIMBYs, libertarian YIMBYs, centrist YIMBYs, and center-right YIMBYs, and plenty of intra-group tensions between all the different factions. But pretty much every flavor of YIMBY holds certain values in common, including a commitment to political liberalism (in the broad sense) and a certain cosmopolitanism. Though the vocabulary they use to describe their goals varies by partisan and ideological orientation, YIMBYs by and large share a certain vision of city life and what it means for a city to be a healthy, vibrant place.
The shared values of the “abundance movement,” to the extent that such a thing exists, are a little more ambiguous. In recent months, I’ve increasingly shied away from calling abundance a movement for this very reason. Instead, I’ve described it as a set of heuristics: a way to apply certain conceptual tools from the YIMBY movement to various non-housing policy domains. How you use those tools—the domains in which you apply them, the outputs that you are trying to maximize—is an ideological question.
When people first started talking about “the abundance movement,” I took it to be a largely liberal project, with a left/social democratic wing and a more centrist wing. Something very much like that assumption was baked into early attempts to define abundance as a movement. In June 2024, Robert Saldin and Steven Teles urged abundance advocates to establish themselves as a faction inside the Democratic Party; Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book is explicitly address to a left-leaning audience, as is Marc Dunkelman’s Why Nothing Works.
But something has changed. Compare the Saldin/Teles essay from last year to Teles’s more recent report schematizing the “Varieties of Abundance.” In their 2024 essay, Teles and Saldin wrote about capital-A Abundance; in “Varieties of Abundance,” Teles demotes abundance to an improper noun. The former publication concerned itself with a single “Abundance Faction”; the latter notes the existence of at least six, with wildly differing ideological complexions.
It is unclear what single movement could hold all six of these factions, or whether anyone would even find such a synthesis desirable. What sort of political coalition could possibly incorporate both Zohran Mamdani and Lyman Stone into its ranks? How is the cosmopolitanism of Liberal Abundance supposed to coexist peacefully with the NatCon streak in what Teles calls “Dark Abundance?" For that matter, what is the difference between Dark Abundance and good old-fashioned reactionary modernism supposed to be?
The differences between Dark Abundance and Red Plenty or Cascadian Abundance run considerably deeper than, say, those that separate left-YIMBYs and libertarian YIMBYs. Left-YIMBYs and libertarian YIMBYs may very often chafe at one another, but I don’t think one wing of the coalition would summarily execute the other, even if they could get away with it. I can’t exactly say the same of Dark Abundance, which includes people who have cheered on the ethnic cleansing campaign being run out of Trump’s DHS and people who think the entire trans community should be erased from existence. If cosmopolitanism is at the heart of YIMBY thought, then it can’t possibly occupy the same movement as a faction that wants to violently purge U.S. cities and is currently cheering on the military occupation of Washington, D.C.
That occupation served as the backdrop to last week’s Abundance Conference. The About page for the event describes abundance as, alternately, a “movement” and a “cross-partisan coalition.” The list of speakers is, I take it, supposed to represent every wing of that movement, from “Cascadian Abundance” on the left to “Dark Abundance” on the right. (As far as I can tell, no one from what Teles calls the “Red Plenty” wing was invited to speak.) That means that in addition to mainstays of liberal abundance—Klein and Thompson were two of the three headliners, and State Sen. Scott Wiener also spoke at the conference—the roster of honored guests included at least one former Trump administration official, think tankers who have called for “deportation abundance,” and a professional defender of Trump’s disastrous tariffs. Bizarrely, David Brooks also spoke.
Now, it’s one thing to engage with the far right when doing so helps a movement advance its substantive goals. YIMBYs won big in Montana by working with the state’s Republican-dominated legislature and successfully lobbying Gov. Greg Gianforte, a right-wing thug who first came to national prominence when he physically attacked a journalist. I would argue the Montana YIMBY movement did the right thing by working with Gianforte, because doing so was the only way to put a meaningful dent in Montana’s housing crisis.
Indeed, while I’ve been a consistent proponent of a left-abundance agenda, I’ve always believed that making progress on such an agenda would necessitate some tactical bipartisanship. The trick is engaging in that work without compromising on any of your core values. As I wrote for the Roosevelt Institute back in March, “Abundance liberals should continue to welcome, and even actively court, bipartisan approval. But reaching across the aisle does not mean letting yourself become a mark.”
One way to avoid becoming a mark is by enforcing a clear set of boundaries. I might advise YIMBYs to work with people like Greg Gianforte when it advances movement goals, but I wouldn’t give Gianforte a vote in determining what those goals are. And I certainly wouldn’t ask people who support an ongoing fascist coup to help me define “the abundance movement” and the principles it represents. Not when they’ve already made clear that they intend to destroy everything I think we should be trying to build.
This isn’t a matter of enforcing purity tests or deplatforming people. It’s a matter of knowing what you and your movement stand for. Frankly, it’s also just a matter of having some self-respect.
The thing about having a tent, even a big tent, is that you have to place its outer boundaries somewhere. Personally, “deportation abundance,” and the entire worldview it implies, falls well outside of where I would mark those boundaries. I don’t think you can have a coherent abundance coalition that makes room for such a thing. And even if you could, it certainly wouldn’t include me.