Pondering (societal/political) "Abundance"

A new political movement emerges (audio interview and transcript)

Excerpt:

"Lindsey: So today, we’re going to talk about all things abundance related, and that topic actually allows us to start off with talking about how we met and the history of our relationship, because I think that has something to do with the history of the abundance movement. So let’s start off with how you and I met. I’ll tell my version of it. I had written an article for the New Republic at the end of 2006 called Liberaltarians. This was in the second half of the Bush administration when libertarians were disgusted with the George W. Bush administration on a whole bunch of different fronts.

And so with that context, I was writing an article that said, Hey, libertarians have always seen themselves as beyond left and right, and yet in practical terms and sociologically, they’ve been part of the right. They have affiliated with the right. They’ve tended to emphasize their common positions and to figure out how to finesse their differences and work together. Maybe we could do that now with the left, given that the fusionism between libertarian economics and social and foreign policy conservatism seemed at that time to be unraveling. Maybe there’s a possibility of a new fusionism between libertarianism and liberalism or progressivism.

And turned out, the article, at least in the short term, was spectacularly ill timed because it came out right after the 2006 midterm elections and the Democrats had swept into power. So they weren’t really looking to be told what to do or what kind of new compromises to make or new allies to seek out. They were feeling heady and chesty. So it didn’t really go anywhere in politics terms, but it did plant some seeds. One of them sprouted. About a month after that, I got a phone call and voice said, “Hi, I’m Steve Teles.” I think you were at Maryland back then. You said, “I’m a political scientist at Maryland and I think I may be a liberaltarian.”

I don’t know if you recall that the same way, but we started talking and we tried to figure out some liberaltarian thing to do. My first idea, I remember, was having a big liberaltarian conference at Cato, which is where I was working at the time, the Cato Institute. As I started to map it out, I thought, there’s no way I can hold this at Cato and keep my job. It would cross too many red lines to address too many possible libertarian heresies to have a conference. So then we started thinking about, well, why don’t we have a dinner series, an off the record dinner series where we could get liberals and libertarians together?

I think that was your idea. But we started it up back in 2008 and then over a dozen or more years between then and the time I moved to Thailand in 2021, we had over a hundred of those roundtable dinners, pulling together journalists and policy wonks and academics. Started expressly as the liberaltarian dinner Series, but it eventually became sort of an ideologically diverse group of people across the political spectrum who could play nicely with others. And I look back on it very proudly. It still exists in altered form now under Johns Hopkins auspices, but that was our first attempt to build bridges across ideological lines.

Teles: Yeah, so the… Well, this to say a couple of things on that. One, you may have noticed a couple days ago, Jonathan Chait dropped a big article on abundance and its conflict with other factions in the Democratic Party. This connects into our conversation because one of the big attacks on your original Liberaltarian essay came from Jonathan Chait, who I think, in that article famously told you to get the hell out of his party.

Lindsey: Yeah, so it was nice for the New Republic to run the piece by a Cato guy, but Chait insisted on having a rebuttal in the next issue. What he said, he quoted Michael Corleone from The Godfather so, you can have my offer now. My offer is nothing. We will give you nothing. We need nothing from you. We need to borrow nothing from you. We need to learn nothing from you.

Teles: I mean, Jon has evolved more on this than you have.

Lindsey: Yeah, life moves in mysterious ways. Jon has written a number of articles that have spoken more kindly about my ideas and about the places I’ve been affiliated with, Niskanen in particular, since then. And so here in this article he did for The Atlantic on abundance, he cites the Niskanen Center, where we both work, as close to an institutional home for the abundance movement as exists. So yeah, very good to see the liberaltarian moment showing up a couple decades later."