But Trump’s grandiose rehab allows conservatives to coopt, in a uniquely annoying way, the “Abundance liberalism” arguments set forth by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their book Abundance; by Marc J. Dunkelman in his book Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back; and by Yoni Appelbaum in his book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. I doubt any of these authors approve of how their ideas have been dragged into a defense of a Trumpian power grab—my email attempts to solicit comment from Klein and Thompson were unavailing—but they really should have seen this coming.
Rather than take the position of being anti-zoning or pro-zoning, we should regard zoning as a tool that can be applied for good or ill. We want thriving and inclusive neighborhoods, and as Jane Jacobs noted in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, doing so requires thoughtful planning by the people who live there. Communities have a right to protect both their natural environment and their built environment in ways that make them flourish, because if they don’t it’s unlikely anybody else will. They just shouldn’t abuse that right to discriminate against minority or low-income populations.
Nevertheless, conservatives are wielding the club of abundism—explicitly in the case of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and implicitly in the case of the Washington Post editorial board—to defend Trump’s remodeling binge.
The Post editorial says much the same, avoiding for some reason direct mention of the Abundance books but parroting them nonetheless:
The Abundance books are about how society at large suffers from NIMBYism. (For those just tuning in, NIMBY means “Not In My Back Yard.”) But nobody I know is trying to build a high-speed rail from the White House driveway to the South Lawn. Nor does anybody hold title to a back yard situated inside the White House complex—not even Trump, because it isn’t his house. You and I own that house. That gives us a legitimate right to elevate preservation above all other concerns—never mind what the current tenant desires—unless there’s some very compelling reason not to. Preserving buildings like the White House and the Capitol helps us preserve the principals they stand for.
The second protection is a pair of executive orders and a statute. The executive orders, one by President William Howard Taft and one by President Woodrow Wilson, require that the federal government solicit “comment and advice” from the Washington, D.C., Commission on Fine Arts before it builds anything inside the District of Columbia. The statute is a 1924 law creating the National Capital Park Commission, later renamed the National Capital Planning Commission, which reviews all federal building plans inside Greater Washington, D.C., excepting the Capitol, which has its own architect.
Then there’s the ballroom itself. Douthat accepts that “the presidency has needed one for a long time, and it’s absurd that the leader of a superpower has to host state dinners inside temporary tents.” The Post editorial voices the same complaint in near-identical terms: “It is absurd that tents need to be erected on the South Lawn for state dinners, and VIPs are forced to use porta-potties.” The Wall Street Journal editorial says “There really is a case for a larger hall at the White House for holding big state dinners and other events, without having to pitch enormous tents on the South Lawn.”
I do lose sleep over the question of scale. A ballroom with twice the square footage of the White House itself is plainly going to be ugly and weird and creepily triumphalist. Douthat dodges the size issue, stating only that the ballroom’s “cautious classicism” is harmonious with the surroundings. But nobody’s complaining about the ballroom’s cautious classicism. They’re complaining about its size.
Douthat can give short shrift to the aesthetic stakes because the Abundance cult delegitimizes aesthetics as a snobbish consideration. It does the same with historic preservation. Both, the abundoids argue, are elitist pretexts for exclusion, so to hell with them. The Post and Journal editorials bypass aesthetic questions altogether and dismiss preservationist arguments with a wave of the hand. We can’t make the White House “a museum to the past” (the Post) that’s “set in amber” (the Journal).
Whether Trump could accept a building whose aboveground profile is minimized to this degree I can’t say. A man with small fingers may feel threatened by a ballroom of small height. But if Trump were to reject such a compromise we could muddle along as we have before with present accommodations. It’s a fantasy, of course, that Trump will listen to anybody else’s opinion. But I wish Abundance liberalism didn’t make that so easy for him.
Hence then, the article about trump s ballroom defenders have adopted the abundance argument was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Trump’s Ballroom Defenders Have Adopted the “Abundance” Argument )
Also on site :