Don't let these guys steal an entire word. It may be that some Tesla-implanted Libertarian weirdo co-hosted an "Abundance 2024 conference". That doesn't kill "abundance" as a goal. We need an abundance of housing. It is necessary and critical to our material success as a nation.

You can't let the Koch Bros. fabricate a conference called "YIMBY America 2024" or whatever and then point to it and say "see, I warned you about those YIMBYs!" You have to engage with the substance of the debate.

"What if we did _more_ neoliberalism but maybe were a bit more racist?"

If you don't do the post-mortem of "how did we end up here", no project, no plan makes a change.

* First understand every point on the curve between a healthy democratic society and autocracy is slippery, not stable.

* Next, understand how autocracy rises. If you want to look at the drivers toward autocracy, you will find them invariably in the same places.

* The US problems

  - Braunhemde, already before WOII, then imported more of them afterwards. No press coverage, they are real. Even the "Sieg Heil"s on CPAC did not draw media coverage.

  - Cultism. Serious, deep cultism.

  - As a specialization: Christian nationalism + conservatism, replay of the '30s

    - https://xcancel.com/YourAnonCentral/status/1910179753430299043
    - https://xcancel.com/sola_chad/status/1802398272293581272#m1

  - Incredible concentrations of (inherited) wealth, deformed perspectives of the other 99% cultivated over generational spans

  - No real journalism, instead, career in media house depend on commercial ownership. Narratives tailored to segment, but no deep and critical impact of analysis. 

    - "Let us talk about the tariffs today, they make zero economic sense" 
    - "I think what he meant is..." 
    - "Of course this is not entirely correct, but..." 
    - "President Trump has said.."
    - "Rubio did a press conference today"

    - Only drama, never the Big Picture.

    - Elections? According to the press, those are just
       - The latest polls!
       - Repeat marketing from spin doctors at affiliated media houses
       - "Debate" = Reality TV, scores are given on wit and emotional play
     
  - Fake news is allowed as a business model. 

  - Rigidity => distorted beliefs. See rigidity about "free speech" via decades of pushed narratives. Now look at all the book banning, canceling of research based on keyword match.

  - Rigidity about free markets. Now you pay 5 million for a dinner with The Suppreme Sovite to get your business free. Tariffs, because, you know?

  - No concept of "Paradox of Tolerance". Parties that don't want to participate in a democratic society with rule of law and separation of powers CANNOT be part of the system. Period.

  - Overall corruption by oligarchy. The GOP has been killed, but the Dems have the problems too, making it difficult to make any postmortem

  - Exceptionalism
  
  - Vast information deserts (there are states where information cannot reach people at all ), where nothing is served but right-wing reality distortion as commercial fast-food

  - Normalization of personal retaliation against political enemies (that is why everybody is obeying in advance, people are used to be abused by power). Americans are frightened.
  
  - No concept of common good, everyone hustling. Also: competition means *killing* the competitor. That playbook is deeply normalized, see Big Tech. Microsoft, Intel->AMD, Google etc

  - Regulatory capture, rules for thee, exceptions for me

  - "If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?" Deep cultural programming

  - State capture, this is reaching the critical stage now.

  - Normalisation of sado-populism. "I don't care, I want the other suffer". 

  - Class-based society

This was my TED talk.