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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   27705 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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The Discourse around Abundance has truly been something to behold. It's hard not to nutpick about this stuff. On the plus side, some politicians really are taking it seriously, not by saying "Abundance!" really loudly, but by trying to refocus on outcomes over process; see Buffy Wicks' permitting reform report; among other things, it's behind some of the CEQA streamlining that's been taken up by the governor.

I agree that running on permitting reform and streamlining and bottlenecks isn't a political winner; voters aren't nerds, if anything, they're the opposite. But voters notice when nothing works, when CAHSR doesn't ever happen, when housing just gets more expensive, when medical costs keep rising, when college is stupidly expensive and even if you don't want to go now everyone's whining that they want you to pay back their loans.

So, the left is very happy to point out that populist red meat sells better than wonkish problem-fixing. But as that essay I linked at the bottom of the original post says, "Criticism is all well and good, but at some point you have to build something." My theory of the 2024 election is (a) everyone hated high prices and blamed the incumbent parties for them, and (b) the Democrats tried to tack to the center, but the disengaged voters who decided the election didn't believe them. Demonstratively yelling about taxing the rich and guillotining the oligarchs isn't going to fix that.

If I may indulge, I note that a "suggested article" linked to from the above is "A Different 'Abundance Agenda': Avoiding Delusions and Diversions", from Robert Jensen, previously famous for other far-left things.

If there is to be a decent human future—perhaps if there is to be any human future—it will be fewer people consuming less energy and creating less stuff.

The text of the article is detailed about "less", but is coyly silent about "fewer". Like many critics, he seems not to have read the book beyond the title, but he does propose an alternative.

Instead of the promise of endless material abundance, which has never been consistent with a truly sustainable future, let’s invest in what we know produces human flourishing—collective activity in community based on shared needs and reduced wants. For me, living in rural New Mexico, that means being one of the older folks who are helping younger folks get a small-scale farm off the ground. It means being an active participant in our local acequia irrigation system. It means staying home instead of vacationing. It means being satisfied with the abundant pleasures of this place and these people without buying much beyond essentials.

A cheap shot suggests itself. ("You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. So maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.") Horseshoe Theory is real.

But on a serious note, when I see this kind of thing, I hear my ancestors screaming from beneath pails of water and bales of hay and endless subsistence-farming toil, and I wonder to what degree the women of the Hill Country, pre-electrification, would agree with Jensen.

Sometimes these women told me something that was so sad I never forgot it. I heard it many times, but I’ll never forget the first woman who said it to me. She was a very old woman who lived on a very remote and isolated ranch—I had to drive hours just to get out there—up in the Hill Country near Burnet. She said, “Do you see how round-shouldered I am?” Well, indeed, I had noticed, without really seeing the significance, that many of these women, who were in their sixties or seventies, were much more stooped and bent than women, even elderly women, in New York. And she said: “I’m round-shouldered from hauling the water. I was round-shouldered like this well before my time, when I was still a young woman. My back got bent from hauling the water, and it got bent while I was still young.” Another woman said to me, “You know, I swore I would never be bent like my mother, and then I got married, and the first time I had to do the wash I knew I was going to look exactly like her by the time I was middle-aged.”

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