Well, it looks like Abundance isn’t going away as quickly as I’d hoped. The book, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has spent months on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. It’s “spectacular” (David Brooks). It’s “terrific” (Fareed Zakaria). Klein was recently a special guest at a retreat for Democratic senators. The Wall Street Journal reports that “Democratic politicians are rushing to embrace the new mantra” of “abundance,” that “not one but two congressional caucuses have recently formed to push legislation advancing the ideas laid out in the book,” and that politics nerds are starting “Abundance Clubs.” 

What is “abundance,” exactly? The book’s promotional copy touts it as a “once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty, face up to the failures of liberal governance, and abandon the chosen scarcities that have deformed American life.” It’s a kind of manifesto, the gist of which is that we could live in a wondrous utopia if we removed “bottlenecks” that are stifling innovation and the production of “plenty.” I think that’s only slight hyperbole, since the book begins with a description of a literal wondrous utopia in which there are no pandemics, no homelessness, and no financial crises. In this fabulous future, factories in space produce miracle drugs, the workweek is brief, and all the cars are electric. Klein and Thompson say that for years, human beings “simply didn’t build” this utopia because “we constrained our ability to solve our most important problems,” and then spend the rest of their pages pointing to a set of constraints (e.g., zoning rules, NIH grant paperwork, environmental impact reviews, racial equity requirements for government contractors, progressive lobbying groups) which supposedly keep us from getting us to the glorious sparkling tomorrow.

This might sound like a rehash of the standard right-wing narrative. Government regulation gets in the way of innovation. Environmental groups hurt the very cause they wish to help. We must slash the bureaucracy, roll back the regulations, and let the invisible hand of the free market work its magic. But Klein and Thompson are saying something different. They believe in government. They are not exponents of laissez-faire capitalism. “The state is no enemy of invention or innovation,” they say. In fact, one of their arguments is that right-wingers are wrong to conclude that government inefficiencies are inevitable. They are highly critical of the view that markets should be left to solve problems on their own, citing examples like Operation Warp Speed and Josh Shapiro’s lightning-fast rebuild of the collapsed I-95 bridge to show that we need state-directed solutions to our biggest problems. Klein has professed himself frustrated that he’s perceived as “neoliberal” (or “neo-neoliberal”), because, he says, “this is a book about making the state more, not less, powerful and capable of doing big things.”

This is true. It would be wrong to classify Abundance as classically “neoliberal.” Some of its arguments are compatible with left-wing politics, and Klein and Thompson even favorably quote Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism—to the distress of the Wall Street Journal’s reviewer. 

But as a manifesto for a new kind of Democratic politics, its framework is a disaster. Democrats do not need Abundance Clubs. They need a social democratic, populist agenda that echoes FDR and Bernie Sanders. Unfortunately, the donor class is horrified by this kind of politics, and centrist Democrats are desperate for an alternative to it, which is why they are flocking to the “abundance agenda.” It offers them the possibility of appearing to stand for something, without standing for anything that will radically challenge the economic status quo. 

Some of what’s in Abundance is both true and important. Klein and Thompson argue that California should have been able to build high-speed rail faster and more cheaply than it has (the project is an infamous boondoggle), and that blue state governments have not delivered for people. No argument here. This magazine is constantly critical of the failures of the Democratic Party to govern well. And Klein and Thompson are right that progressives should be willing to recognize when red tape and bureaucracy are getting in the way of government efficiency. They argue that instead of measuring success by how much money we spend on a program (“we’ve allocated a billion dollars to climate initiatives” and the like), we should pay more attention to whether the program actually accomplishes its objectives. These passages of the book sound exactly like what this magazine was writing in 2019: 

A leftist committed to strengthening the public sector, then, must also think about how to have a public sector that is well-run and accomplishes left objectives. Part of this, yes, is simply a matter of funding—the #1 thing that keeps the Detroit school system from succeeding, for example, is that there is little money in a poor city to provide quality education. Funding isn’t enough, though: You also have to have democratically-operated organizations, so that money gets spent well and those who run the system aren’t stymied by poorly-designed Rules And Regulations… We’ve got to think: How do we make government less complicated and frustrating? This isn’t “deregulation”—it’s a mistake to think that a critique of bureaucracy has to be a critique of government’s scope… If we don’t critique “red tape,” the right will, and they will be persuasive, because red tape is a pain in the ass. But there is nothing inherently “conservative” about believing that applications should be processed quickly, rules should be clear and simple, institutions should be democratic rather than run by unaccountable technocrats, and paperwork should be minimized. If we cede the anti-bureaucratic perspective to the right, it will become synonymous with “allowing corporations to do as they please.” Instead, we should make clear that we’re committed not just to having a robust public sector, but a public sector that works.

The problem with Abundance is that it’s doing more than making an argument that the government should be effective at achieving its goals. It is also offering itself as a fully comprehensive agenda that Democrats should reorient themselves around. In fact, Klein and Thompson sometimes appear to believe they’ve found a panacea, a cure for everything. Thompson’s original essay outlining the “abundance agenda” carried the unfathomably arrogant headline “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems.” You might think that was cheeky overstatement, but the whole argument of Thompson’s essay is that while it may look like America has many problems (expensive healthcare and housing, bad public transit, a climate crisis), they are in fact manifestations of the same problem, namely the failure to “build” enough.

One reason leftists are frustrated with the book, then, is that Klein and Thompson do not stick to the narrow point that regulations impeding the construction of high-speed rail, or the deployment of electric vehicle charging stations, need to be rewritten. They also purport to offer, as the jacket copy states, some kind of paradigm-shifting rewrite of the entire political playbook. And that’s where we need to be suspicious. 

Consider two possible arguments:

1. Regulations are preventing government from achieving important objectives. Democrats should identify bottlenecks that inhibit housing construction, clean energy infrastructure, and medical breakthroughs, and work to eliminate those obstacles. Red tape is an issue. 
2. The core story of our time is the story of regulatory failures that inhibit construction and innovation. Our political agenda should be built around eliminating these failures. If we do this, we will live in a utopia. Red tape is the central issue of the era. 

These are not the same argument, and one of the frustrating things about Abundance is that it appears to be making both of them. Then, when leftists criticize #2, Klein and Thompson can retreat to #1. (What, you think regulatory bottlenecks are GOOD?) This is often called a “motte-and-bailey” argument, in which an extreme (indefensible) claim is coupled with a mild (defensible) claim. Sometimes Abundance seems to be making the very modest claim that the government should work well, and sometimes it seems to be making the very grandiose claim that an “abundance versus scarcity” paradigm should be applied to “all of America’s problems.” As Luke Savage writes, it “offers us a series of discrete ideas related to the likes of zoning policy and high speed rail” but “also presents itself as an epochal political manifesto sketching the outlines for an entirely new kind of liberalism.” I, like Savage, have little problem with #1, but a very big problem with #2, because it means ditching social democracy as the centerpiece of the progressive agenda, and I agree with Matt Bruenig when he writes that “it would be a huge mistake, on the merits, to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.” 

Make no mistake: That’s what Klein and Thompson are doing here. They insist that their agenda is not incompatible with social democracy and wealth redistribution. But it’s clearly a different set of priorities. They say that for years, “American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark,” but we now need “something different.” (Bruenig points out that this is, in fact, ludicrously false, since American liberalism has not pursued Nordic social democracy.) Sanders-style politics is built around higher wages, single-payer healthcare, paid family leave, free college, a humane immigration system, and a Green New Deal. Abundance liberalism, Klein and Thompson say, is “new set of questions around which our politics should revolve,” like “What is scarce that should be abundant?” and “What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?” 

Abundance purports to tell a comprehensive story: “the story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities.” Not, in other words, a story of wealth concentration, plutocracy, and the war on workers. Klein admits that his “theory of power” is one anathema to the left, because it says, essentially, that there is no class struggle between owners and workers. Sometimes, Klein says, unions are the problem, and sometimes corporations are the problem, and the abundance liberal just cares about what works. He rejects the view of politics as a “morality play,” which is why the language of justice, rights, and equality vanish from the Abundance framework.

That explains why Abundance has been embraced by the right-wing Democrats who hate Sanders’ politics. At a recent conference of centrists, with the comically vacuous name WelcomeFest, Abundance was the hot book of the moment. It fits the agenda of Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, the Blue Dog Democrat who loves to talk about how we’ve snarled the country up with red tape. (She is even willing to make up stories about nonexistent bureaucratic absurdities involving bananas.) It fits the agenda of right-leaning pundit Josh Barro, who has declared that “Abundance will require fighting labor unions.” The confidently wrong Matt Yglesias delights in the way Abundance overlaps with his longstanding criticism of “The Groups,” the progressive nonprofits he thinks drag Democrats too far to the left. (I suspect he says “The Groups” in part because admitting you’re talking about the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and the Sunrise Movement makes you sound awfully reactionary.) Klein might personally believe in wealth redistribution and unions, but he’s offered a great program for billionaires who don’t want us to talk about the predations of the health insurance industry or big corporations crushing union drives. Let’s talk about zoning reform instead! 

One reason leftists have been critical of Abundance is that it ends up ignoring some of the chief villains in the stories it tells. The book, the authors say, “is an effort to focus more of American politics on a surprisingly neglected question: What do we need more of, and what is stopping us from getting it?” Good question, but they then say that “the book is largely a critique of how Democrats have governed in the places where they’ve held power.” That implies they believe “a critique of how Democrats have governed” is the proper answer to the question of what is stopping us from having more of what we need. This results in telling a story of climate politics that focuses on the cases in which environmental groups have opposed solar plants, without talking at all about the fossil fuel industry or the Republican Party! 

Klein and Thompson say they deliberately do not discuss the right, because they don’t think they’re likely to persuade the right, and a critique of liberals is more valuable. (“We focus, in this book, on the pathologies of the broad left. One reason for that is we don’t see ourselves as effective messengers to the right.”) Fine, but then they’re not actually answering the question of “What is stopping us” from having the things we want, because an honest answer to that is giant corporations that profit from the destruction of the planet, exorbitant healthcare costs, and a hobbled government. Klein admits that dealing with climate change will require confronting the fossil fuel industry (“You cannot decarbonize the economy without running headlong into fossil-fuel interests”), but the industry’s role is just left out of Abundance’s story of our times, which, again, purports to be a sweeping tale of how everything went wrong and why we didn’t reach the utopia.  

In fact, they spend more pages criticizing Ralph Nader and the degrowth movement (both politically marginal) than they do explaining how corporate power stands in the way of, for example, a universal healthcare system. It is no wonder that Abundance has received a chilly reception on the left. Sam Adler-Bell calls it “myopic about power, and flattering to those who have it.” Malcolm Harris, while conceding that Abundance is “hardly the worst thing for sale at the airport” (that would probably be Jordan Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God) says that Klein and Thompson believe that “if there appears to be a problem regarding scarce resources or conflicting values, we should just innovate our way out.” In the American Prospect, Hannah Story Brown says that by “failing to recognize who has vested interests in our unequal economy, the authors don’t seem to recognize that serving the public interest will require political leaders willing to make powerful enemies.” Sandeep Vaheesan, in Boston Review, says that Abundance “often blames government for bad outcomes where it should be blaming the whole structure of the market” and “instead of calling for steeper progressive taxation and anti-monopoly policies that would rein in the power of the affluent, Klein and Thompson focus single-mindedly on red tape,” while “embrac[ing] Silicon Valley’s vision for America” and the “familiar futurism of tech oligarchs.” 

That’s all pretty accurate. I’d add that when Klein and Thompson do bash leftists, they often do so unfairly. For instance, they are very negative toward degrowth, the movement that argues resource limitations mean we need to stop pursuing endless economic growth and start measuring the success of our societies by whether they meet human needs. But they don’t hesitate to misrepresent degrowth’s proponents. For instance, they say that “to the extent that degrowth has a specific climate plan, it is to shut off or scale down areas of production it deems destructive, like military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion.” But that’s not true. Their plan does not just involve shutting off destructive production, but also building renewable energy infrastructure. Leading degrowther Jason Hickel, whose work they cite, has said that “we absolutely need a Green New Deal, to mobilize a rapid rollout of renewable energy and put an end to fossil fuels,” and has even co-written a full GND plan compatible with degrowth principles. To fairly criticize degrowthers, you must critique their actual plans, not a selective cartoon of their plans. 

Likewise, in their segment attributing public sector sclerosis in part to the Nader’s Raiders of the ‘70s, Klein and Thompson portray Ralph Nader as gleefully litigious: 

Nader didn’t just criticize the government. He launched a movement to tame it. His Raiders contributed to some of the most important environmental laws in history[...] but what they were building was an arm of liberalism[...] designed to relentlessly sue the government itself, and that would go on to fight for more bills and rules that would widen opportunities to sue the government… When the PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer asked Nader why he was qualified to be president, Nader told him, “I don’t know anyone who has sued more [agencies and departments].”

In fact, that’s not what Nader said when Lehrer asked him why he was qualified to be president. His full answer to that question was: 

Well, I've been a full time citizen for 40 years. I think the auto industry knows what I can do in terms of safer cars. We've tried to represent environmental/consumer interests. We're almost experts at how to make government and corporations accountable, if they only give us a chance, and they'll all be better off as a result. I think also… I have a talent in getting people to have a higher estimate of their own significance, whether they're civil servants, whether they're in the business community, whether they're labor, whether at universities. I think we're suppressing a lot of talent in this country by excessive concentration of power.

The quote about suing the government was actually in response to a later question, which was “As a practical matter, do you believe [you have] the experience and the background to run the vast bureaucracy, the vast agencies and bureaus and departments of the United States government?” To that, Nader replied: 

Well, I don't know anybody who studied more of them... I don't know anybody who has sued more of them. I don't know anybody who's gotten more plain envelopes from more civil servants—I don't know anybody who has participated for over three decades in the process. In fact, I think we've created some of the safety agencies like the Auto Safety Agency.

This may seem like a small distortion, but it’s important. Nader was not saying that he was qualified to be president because he sues the government. That would fit Klein and Thompson’s story that Nader and his ilk saw suing the government as the best way to enact policy, and restraints on the state as more important than state capacity. Rather, Nader brought up suing the government because he was asked if he really understood the federal bureaucracy, and his point was that he had incredibly extensive knowledge of the federal bureaucracy (which he does) in part because of all of his interactions with it, including through lawsuits as well as writing detailed studies of agency activities. 

Some of Nader’s 1970s study group reports on federal agencies. 

I actually asked Nader himself (who is still extremely sharp at 91!) what he thought of Klein and Thompson’s argument that his movement created some of the primary roadblocks keeping America from having nice things. He replied: 

Shame on Ezra Klein... He doesn’t know how to use phrases like corporate crime or corporate welfare. So let’s address what he’s saying. We got a lot of good laws through in the early ’70s and late ’60s. There were laws to save lives on the highway, in the marketplace, in the food arena, in the hospitals. There were laws to reduce air and water pollution, to make household products safer. So basically, it was the government saying to corporations, you’re not going to decide who’s going to live or die anymore by your profit calculation. You will have to meet mandatory safety standards. So what’s so wrong about that?

 

You would think he would at least focus on all the lives saved and remarkable reduction in lead poisoning of people’s body with the end of lead-based paint and gasoline, and cleaner water and so forth. Instead, he hops on this [narrative of] obstruction by bureaucracy, and [says] you can’t get anything done in terms of projects because of all the permit complexities. Well, see, he doesn't go deep enough. For example, the greatest obstructions often come from corporations… The tax code is massive and full of loopholes and inefficiencies and preferences and privileges. That’s the result of all the corporate lobbying.

 

So he doesn’t mention the role of the tax code. He mentions that if you want to get a building permit in New York, it’s like a nightmare, and there’s a lot to that, but to blame consumer advocates and environmental advocates? Why don’t you blame the local government and the various business interests who get locked in and demand this kind of response, or this kind of product, or this kind of material, or this kind of review? To make Ezra Klein’s narrow argument legitimate, he’s ascribing too much power to the people, instead of the corrupt politicians who are always responding to one special interest after another that has a stake in a particular project or a particular undertaking that we used to call public works. The problem with Ezra Klein is he doesn’t focus sufficiently on the corporate domination of our political economy, of our culture, of our children, and he’s lost his way.

Nader is right here. Abundance does leave out the role of corporate lobbying. It’s barely discussed! Klein admits that “corporations and billionaires do have too much power,” but his book on why we don’t have a utopia essentially leaves them out of the story. As Aaron Regunberg and David Sirota argue that this myopia leads to Klein and Thompson misunderstanding the reasons why certain policy initiatives fail. 

Also strangely left out is the New Deal. One reason Abundance is easy to mistake for a neoliberal tract is that while Klein and Thompson want a government that builds, Klein praises Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and they leave out the most obvious precedent for a “building” Democrat: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If you believe in getting stuff done through the state, your prototype should be the New Deal, its massive construction of dams, public parks, schools, bridges, airports, its programs to put people to work on everything from planting trees to writing plays. Klein has said he avoids “getting into arguments over who gets to claim FDR” because “he was too capacious and self-contradictory and unique and in too specific a historical moment.” But if your philosophy is that we need a “liberalism that builds,” why would you not spend time discussing the era of Democratic governance that built huge parts of the country as we know it? 

“The book has given voice to a feeling that people have had for a while—that it’s just too hard to build things,” said Rep. Josh Harder, a centrist Democrat. If that’s all it’s doing, then fine. It’s too hard to build things. Important point. We must note this and govern accordingly. But if Abundance is making “it’s too hard to build things” the centerpiece of the Democratic message, it is both morally contemptible and will compound Democratic electoral failure. I say morally contemptible because I don’t believe we should sideline issues of trans rights, abortion access, immigrant justice, student debt, and climate justice, or substitute the language of Building Stuff for the language of equality. I also think the centerpieces of a Democratic agenda should be universal healthcare, free childcare, paid family leave, minimum wages, sick leave, labor organizing, and a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants.

I admire the campaign of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, who has been laser-focused on free transit and low-cost housing. Mamdani himself accepts the Klein/Thompson view on the importance of good government, commenting “Bureaucracy, efficiency, waste: if you care about public goods, public services, these have to be your primary focuses because any evidence of that inefficiency is then a justification for the elimination of the public sector.” But he is not building his platform around tackling waste. He’s building it around tackling inequality through free public services and rent control. 

“Abundance liberalism” does not tackle the major injustices of the time, but I also don’t think it can inspire people much. Nor, to his credit, does Klein, whose response to a poll showing that populist messaging (you’re being robbed by corporate criminals) does better than Abundance messaging (red tape is keeping us from building) was that he would not advise politicians to emphasize the abundance message in their campaigns. I could not agree more. We do need effective governance, efficiency, and public services that people actually have faith in. A good model for that is FDR, whom Klein and Thompson are reluctant to discuss. What we do not need is to pivot our political conversation away from the most pressing outrages of our time and toward a billionaire-friendly focus on efficiency instead of justice.