The new book Abundance by New York Times and Atlantic writers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has taken the center-left intelligentsia by storm this week, as it has received backing from outlets ranging from The Economist to Vox while America’s football coach Tim Walz has even endorsed it to a degree. I have not read the book yet, so I will refrain from entering the weeds of the many policy debates it raises, and if you want to read a critique of those weeds, there are thoughtful ones in The Baffler about how “the Abundance authors ask too little of themselves and their readers” and in The American Prospect about the litany of abundance liberalism’s corporate connections that may be informing its market-based policy recommendations.
What I want to critique is the overall vision of this agenda that Klein and Thompson have been selling on The Daily Show, CNN and their own major outlets, among many others in this press tour. You don’t have to read the book to see the clear outline they paint in their descriptions of it, and the lines in the sand it draws are familiar. Klein and Thompson’s central thesis is that since the 1970s, American liberals have pursued anti-growth strategies, and a lot of burdensome regulations are to blame for many of our current problems that all center around a lack of supply, and we should change our policies to ones that create an abundance of supply. While that thesis is undeniably true in some of their cited examples like housing, the underlying logic of how to ameliorate these problems simply reheats the debate between those who believe our capitalist system will eventually function just as we want it to if only we gave it the right incentives, and those who believe that capitalist incentives themselves are the problem.
In Eric Levitz’s defense of abundance liberalism in Vox, he points out that “privately funded housing projects don’t need to comply with as many requirements as public projects do,” which is true. It makes for a dynamic that challenges progressive ideology, where right now, it is easier to address America’s dearth of housing supply through private corporations than the government. But this fact is treated by the abundance liberals as a natural law of the universe, and not as the logical conclusion of a capitalist system. When so much of the private market has commanded control over the government, why would you be surprised to see regulations that also favor the private market? Isn’t that basically what Citizens United was all about? Klein and Thompson’s case for building more housing, which may be their strongest, still accepts that the economic system which has helped lead to the collapse of America as we know it does not need to be fundamentally changed, just differently regulated.
Clean energy is another area where this liberal cognitive dissonance is revealed, as Ezra Klein told CNN, “why are we [in California] not going to hit our clean energy targets? Well, we’ve made it harder to build clean energy. So Texas, which does not love clean energy the way that California does, is building more clean energy than California is.” Again, their critiques of self-destructive red tape constructed by a not in my backyard (NIMBY) generation of big city liberals and over-eager progressives are spot on, but they fail to see the larger problem that fostered this anti-growth environment that requires much more work to reverse than simply cutting needless regulations.
If red tape is all that can destroy the ability to build the supply of basic things that people need to live in America, and our seemingly only other choice is to eliminate an avalanche of red tape like Texas, then perhaps our economic system is not built for abundance. Perhaps this problem has less to do with red tape, and more to do with the basic dynamics of supply and demand where less supply for something in demand means higher prices and thus, higher profits for the capitalists who own the businesses that Klein and Thompson want to cut red tape for.
Abundance liberals are not arguing that the entire country should look like Texas, but they are closer to that endorsement than even acknowledging the capitalist incentives that create the environment they are trying to fix with technocratic tweaks. All I see so far from abundance liberalism’s defenders is the same “if only we incentivized capitalism in the right way, it would solve all our problems” pablum that the center-left has been saying my entire life, all while capitalists shovel billions towards Republicans dedicated to eliminating the very concept of regulations and government.
America’s problems are not technocratic and bureaucratic–although you can find many specific descriptions of our issues through those mechanisms–our problems are existential. This is a country devised as a compromise between slave financiers and slave owners where land-owning white men were the only people who were supposed to vote. While NIMBY liberalism has its own half-century-long problems it has created for itself and the rest of us, it still operates in the broader context of America being a playground for major capital at the expense of everyone else. Until that central tension literally built into this country is addressed, every policy fix for the problems it creates is a bank-shot at best.
The reason the left focuses on labor so much is because that is where the rubber of capital’s power meets the road. Someone needs to make their stuff after all, and the varying degrees of focus on labor says a lot about the political vision of the respective wings of the Democratic Party, which in its heyday before everyone associated it with inherent cowardice, was a party dedicated to building labor power. Thompson doesn’t even talk about unions or labor power at all in his Atlantic article promoting the book, and in his and Klein’s 18-minute CNN interview about building things, they never even touched on who would actually build them outside of the private/public distinction they make in their exhortation to cut red tape to create more supply. This entire political vision of abundance is sold as a top-down system of technocratic wonkiness where Very Serious People are supposed to come in and save the day for the rest of us. Klein talks repeatedly in his interviews about the need to build a broad liberal coalition that believes in good government, all while selling a vision that doesn’t ask most people to be an active part of it. We’re all just supposed to watch from the sidelines and cheer on the experts as they work their technocratic magic to cut red tape.
Even though ideologically, I fundamentally disagree with their worldview, I respect Klein and Thompson as thinkers and think they are far more thoughtful than what has historically passed for the Democrats’ typical center-left apologist. But what I see in these interviews and articles they have written defending the book is a masterclass in repackaging a limited vision of technocratic governance that already failed during the Obama era. The modern resentment on the left was borne out of the seeming populist revolution of 2008, only to have it overseen by a bunch of center-left technocrats who argued in favor of incrementalism and didn’t fix the central problems they campaigned on, then handed off the government to Donald Trump.
There is nothing wrong with pointing to specific policies and saying, “this is why this does or doesn’t work,” and these suggestions to cut red tape to increase growth could easily be part of a larger policy platform, but using that as your central ideological vector is simply just an endeavor to preach to the Democratic Party’s professional class choir. Every government of every ideological stripe needs technocrats to dive through the weeds of how policy actually affects people’s lives, but a political movement needs an emotional appeal rooted in a broad-based message that makes people feel involved in the betterment of their own lives. That center-left Democrats have landed on “just let us do technocracy again, but smarter” is yet another example of a party of elitists in denial about why they are so unpopular.
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