Should libertarians ally with abundance liberals?

I was intrigued by the way that Ilya set out the kind of common enemies of the nationalist right and the harder progressive left.

Because from what I've seen from a distance, I don't follow this all too closely, but a lot of abundance intellectuals have got pretty excited about certain things that Zoran Mamdani has proposed on housing.

He then undercuts a lot of that with his policies of rent freezes and inclusive zoning and all of those things.

commitments to public housing and all those other things that can actually gum up the private sector from delivering abundance of private apartments or whatever.

But a lot of progressive politicians have started putting the abundance banner on various pieces of proposed legislation, or at least trying to combine the populist elements of their program with an abundance component of their program.

Do you agree with Ilya that libertarians and abundance liberals share a common enemy in the heart of progressive left? Or is the elite abundance movement trying to influence the progressive left?

Yeah, I agree that there is a common enemy.

And Mamdani is an interesting case because his greatest political superpower right now is doing kind of whatever he feels like doing and convincing everyone that he's on their side.

And so you see abundance liberals kind of taking certain signals that, oh, he really he's he's read about Yimby.

He knows what's up.

Whereas the socialists are reading different signals that, like, no, he wants to do what we want.

And even very mundane things that he does, that every mayor does, filling in potholes, he gets people really excited about it, and that's a function of his charisma.

But in the broader context, like, Mamdani is not the worst case, is one of the things I would emphasize here.

Mamdani is, I think, at least partially... partially open to smart wonkish ideas.

And he's coming from a different value system than I do and probably than anybody in this conversation does.

But I think there's at least a little bit of like baseline seriousness.

There are much worse candidates coming down the road.

There are much worse mayors in major American cities.

There are much worse congressional candidates on the left.

And there are people who are, you know, going to be openly advocating for degrowth, openly advocating for kind of like very authoritarian style, you know, socialism.

Almost you could you could make a cut.

There are people on the left who are sympathetic.

to the Communist Party of China.

This is a really worrying trend that, you know, not just kind of a touchy-feely democratic socialism, but like, you know, outright, you know, boot-in-your-face socialism has a actual audience now in America.

So there is a serious threat to... liberalism, you know, small L liberalism coming from the left.