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Abundant Fantasy
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Abundant Fantasy
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have created a typical liberal artifact—a pleasant idea that can’t survive contact with political reality.
Credit: Amanda Wayne via Shutterstock
Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 304 pages.
Abundance, the hottest new book to hit the shelves of Politics and Prose, Kramers, and the other haunts of Democratic staffers in Washington, DC, is not really an original work. Much of the book rehashes articles and discussions that are several years old now, and people who are familiar with the authors will not be surprised by its contents.
The book’s purpose is to jumpstart a new political movement and drive a discussion that will change the fundamental perspective of the Democratic Party. With the decisive defeat of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election and the resultant confusion among Democratic leadership, Klein and Thompson have seized the chance to accomplish their objective, and the book has already provoked considerable commentary among the liberal chattering classes.
The thesis proposed by the authors is that various cultural and political movements in the 20th century led both liberals and conservatives to impose restrictions on the United States’ capacity to provide foundational goods—housing, energy, infrastructure, and basic scientific research in particular. These unnecessary restrictions have reduced economic growth and created a political system that is prone to thinking in zero-sum terms, as exemplified by Donald Trump on the one hand and the dysfunctional NGOcracy of California on the other. To remedy this issue, Democrats—the book is explicitly aimed at the left—should focus on eliminating procedural barriers to construction and growth and work towards building state capacity to implement efficient and effective government programs.
Klein and Thompson put their fingers on real, serious problems faced by the American public, many of which have been inflicted by Democratic administrations. Democrat-governed California is a case study: The state has been losing population for years as people flee, among other things, high taxes, ubiquitous and intensely unpleasant homelessness, and most of all high costs of living. Attempts by both the government and private sector to mitigate the most obvious problem California faces, sky-high housing costs, run into unforgiving zoning laws, compliance costs from the California regulatory regime, and environmental reviews and public consultations that can last for years. The result is that not only does red-state Texas build far more housing, with the attendant benefit of a lower cost of living for its citizens, it also outstrips California even in the progressive priorities of building solar and wind power.
The same issues, of course, play out on the national level. The Green New Deal and Biden’s infrastructure bills, for example, were strangled by lengthy regulatory procedures originally put in place by liberals, and by the inevitable impulse to use major projects to advance every Democratic policy priority simultaneously, piling diversity requirements and ideologically-motivated quotas of every kind onto contractors and grantees.
Republicans, of course, receive the necessary repudiation—Trump in particular is criticized for having centered his politics around “scarcity” and zero-sum thinking—but the real thrust of the book is aimed at pointing out the flaws of progressive politics since the 1970s and presenting an alternative vision, one oriented towards “abundance”: promoting innovation and economic growth instead of just redistribution, expanding state capacity instead of regulatory restrictions, and providing broad public goods (cheap energy, cheap housing, cheap healthcare) instead of catering to special interest groups like homeowners or environmental lawyers.
Even for those on the right, there is much to sympathize with in Abundance. Indeed, among the priorities of the Trump administration are making building easier, reducing the strangling effect of the environmental regulatory process, and providing plentiful, cheap energy (albeit fueled by nuclear and fossil fuels, as opposed to solar and wind power). Klein and Thompson even helpfully point out a common failure mode for conservatives who distrust big government: Attempts to limit government power by reducing the number of public-sector employees or restricting their funding, without actually changing the responsibilities of government, don’t work. Instead, they simply make it less efficient and more painful for citizens, or worse, they result in the government handing off the job to unaccountable NGOs and contractors.
Once the alert reader leaves the narrow confines of economic policy, however, the deficiencies of Abundance become clear. Political philosopher Philippe Beneton writes that the economist “is a fraction of a man who occupies himself with fractions of other men.” Klein and Thompson may have a grasp on the effect of zoning laws on the supply of housing units, but their understanding of politics, and indeed of human nature, is strikingly deficient.
Why is it, one might ask, that these obviously harmful policies came to be implemented in the first place? Klein and Thompson give only the barest analysis of the origin of the problem, blaming some of it—ludicrously enough—on a naive faith in markets shared by both Democrats and Republicans. To be fair to the authors, examining the origin of these policies is very much not the purpose of the book, and might well be impolitic. But therein lies the difficulty: The problems described are creations of Democratic constituencies. Klein and Thompson do call out the influence of lawyers and homeowners in the party (groups that carry little moral weight), but many of the unnamed constituencies have sufficient sway that the authors are incapable of even hinting at their culpability.
Take the CHIPS and Science Act. Abundance laments that the bill was hamstrung by the plethora of political requirements that companies were forced to comply with in order to receive the promised manufacturing subsidies:
Page 20 mandated that applicants prepare an “equity strategy, in concert with their partners, to create equitable work force pathways for economically disadvantaged individuals in their region,” which should include “building new pipelines for workers, including specific efforts to attract economically disadvantaged individuals and promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” Pages 21 and 22 asked for a plan “to include women and other economically disadvantaged individuals in the construction industry.”
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are among the most fundamental values of contemporary liberal politics, and they have been for well over 50 years under various names and guises. Underperforming minorities are one of the most powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party, and their influence is also perhaps the single strongest moral force among educated, prosperous white Democrats, for whom egalitarianism is an article of faith. Any attempt to reckon with the failures of “everything-bagel liberalism” must inevitably clash with the titanic political force embodied in DEI.
DEI is necessarily opposed to outcome-oriented political projects. The entire purpose of the program is to elevate poor performers by granting them positions, power, and influence that they would not have been able to obtain by the normal qualifications and standards. Proponents of DEI accept implicitly that any reductions in efficiency or any sacrifices in the quality of the product are justified by the (assumed) resultant uplift of the ostensibly oppressed populations being patronized.
Klein and Thompson, however, simply attempt to sidestep the issue. They make no challenges to DEI or to the assumptions that produce it. Instead, they suggest that infrastructure projects are not the right way to achieve diversity objectives. Surely, there are better alternatives than to force building projects to shoulder the heavy burden of creating a more equitable society.
The difficult reality for Klein, Thompson, and the left generally is that better alternatives do not obviously exist. The black experience is one of the principal drivers of the Democratic Party’s politics, both constituting an interest group within the party and furnishing a moral symbol of the United States’ incomplete promise of an equal and equitable society. To achieve that society, Democrats tried heroically to level the playing field with redistributive policies.
Affirmative action, the predecessor of DEI, created a legal framework to push minority groups up higher on the professional and educational ladders. A long campaign to make American culture more open and accepting of racial differences was largely successful at reducing racial prejudices among the population. But despite the massive educational, cultural, legal, financial and political efforts expended in the 20th and early 21st centuries, racial equality has not been forthcoming. The extreme exertions of DEI, forcing ever-more discriminatory racial quotas and political consciousness into every nook and cranny accessible to liberal elites, have been the result of this long failure to achieve equality by other means.
If “abundance liberals” really wanted to create a meritocratic, results-focused policy platform, they would need to throw out one of the central ideological planks of Democratic Party politics, and worse still, alienate the powerful Democratic constituencies that represent the various minorities that benefit from the profitable patronage provided by DEI programs. This is something that Klein and Thompson almost certainly have neither the disposition nor the capacity to do. They do not want to do it, because at bottom they buy into the premise that America can be socially engineered to create a genuinely equal society; they could not do it even if they wanted to, because “the groups,” as some liberal analysts have taken to calling them, have far more power and moral influence than the authors and their allies.
Klein and Thompson criticize zero-sum thinking and base their political platform on the concept of “abundance,” because economic growth is positive-sum. But politics is not simply the economy, and their fundamental failure is the inability to recognize that some things are in fact zero-sum. Status, power, identity, even land—these are things that can be acquired by a person or group only at the expense of others.
Take the most important of these, power. Every political program is ultimately a claim by one group or another that they deserve to rule. Klein and Thompson’s program is essentially a technocratic one: The United States should be ruled by experts who can deliver economic growth and technological development that will benefit everyone in the country (and more broadly everyone in the world). This will naturally require taking power from the existing authorities in the Democratic Party—“the groups,” among others—and this is not a reality that abundance liberals seem ready and willing to face.
It is also a curious and difficult claim to make in 2025. The pandemic, the Great Awokening, and the sundry excesses and failures of American experts and elite institutions over the past decade have reduced social trust and confidence in technocrats lower than perhaps at any time in American history. Americans do not trust that experts have their best interests in mind.
And why should they? For a book that implicitly seeks to lay out a political platform for an American political party, there is very little discussion about the United States itself—what it is, why it is valuable, and what it means to be an American, if anything. Abundance takes as a given that the U.S., like any other nation, is what Vice President J.D. Vance has derided as an “economic zone,” an undifferentiated polity that exists for the sole purpose of provisioning certain material benefits to whomever it happens to encompass (and Klein and Thompson mean to make that sphere broad indeed, as they advocate a loose and expansive immigration policy to bring large amounts of additional workers, scientists, and other immigrants from abroad to supplement American labor). This purely economic view is in direct opposition to the strong tide of rising populism and nationalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, that demands a sense of national identity and cultural coherence—in short, that politicians treat their nation as a home.
All of this is the real reason that the political platform of Abundance, despite providing some genuinely insightful and productive commentary for both Democrats and Republicans, is ultimately doomed to failure. In too many ways it is a rehash of failed left-wing approaches that have produced some of the bitter fruits currently being experienced by the modern West: a rejection of national identity and culture that has left the populace adrift and demoralized; a wilful blindness to the nature of identity and the promotion of mass immigration, which has introduced ethnic balkanization and exacerbated racial resentment in every Western country; the embrace of a delusional egalitarianism which, frustrated by the failure of its attempts to create an “equitable” society, resorts to ever-more authoritarian measures of social engineering.
Democrats are in grave need of a political revitalization before 2028. Klein and Thompson are capable policy analysts, but Abundance, for all its attractions, is not likely to provide a program capable of transforming the party and setting it back on its feet again.
The post Abundant Fantasy appeared first on The American Conservative.
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