All about the 'abundance' agenda — and its right-leaning appeal
A new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has taken the platform to its widest audience yet. In this newsletter, we link essays from the left, right and center that chew over the book and its ideas.
The idea of ‘abundance’ is hard to hate as a concept. The word conjures up images of bountiful harvests, overflowing aquifers, and resources without limit — a description fit for a natural paradise. Who could disagree with a world like that?
But the set of political ideas organizing under the name, led by journalists like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, has been a prompt for heated debate. The two authors didn’t invent the movement, but have played a large hand in naming it, inspiring it, and now, with the release of their new book, advocating for its implementation.
It is hard to argue with a central point Klein and Thompson make — that our governing structures are hamstrung, and that Democrats actually need to start getting more stuff done if they want to solve problems and win elections again. Where it gets more complicated in Klein and Thompson’s formulation is the assertion that it is government, in the form of regulations and other barriers, that is often to blame for holding us back.
It would be foolish to dismiss the ideas out of hand. They are percolating widely in political and intellectual circles, and finding a receptive audience among people at the highest ranks of power, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “Abundance” is joined on the shelves by two other books that critique liberalism from within: “Stuck” by Yoni Appelbaum and “Why Nothing Works” by Marc Dunkelman.
For this week, I’m linking a list of essays and articles that analyze Klein and Thompson’s work.
On the left, Michigan Law professor Noah Kazis has a good take in The Guardian. He writes:
This is a book written during the Biden administration and published in the midst of a constitutional crisis. As Donald Trump and Elon Musk attack the underpinnings of constitutional democracy, Klein and Thompson sometimes share the latter’s Silicon Valley-inflected fear that we must choose between that democracy and a bountiful future. To be sure, they are no authoritarians, and there are virtues in a book focused on 2050 rather than 2025. But those of us seeking a “liberalism that builds” cannot turn away from the work of pluralistic democracy. Like Futurama, Abundance is a utopian project. In order to show what could be, it conceals the hard parts.
In The American Prospect, Researcher Dylan Gyauch-Lewis shrewdly traces some of the money behind the Abundance push to a lot of places on the right, including the Kochs, and other libertarian and tech-fueled think-tanks. As he writes:
“The coalition [behind Abundance] includes many prominent centrist organizations, but also corporate interests and conservatives that MAGA pushed out of power within the Republican Party. Many components of this faction have financial ties to crypto, AI, Big Tech, and oil.”
I enjoyed this profile of colorful Colorado Governor — and potential 2028 presidential candidate — Jared Polis, which characterized him as the quintessential Abundance Democrat. For The Baffler, Alex Bronzini-Vender writes:
“The ‘abundance agenda,’ a Koch-funded initiative to roll back regulation in the energy and housing sectors has found in Polis its ideal Democratic messenger….If capital’s latest attempt to push the party further to the right succeeds, it may very well wear Polis’s face.”
That, and Malcolm Harris’ piece that we linked a few weeks ago from the same publication, are particularly sharp.
On the more centrist side, Eric Levitz at Vox, who is a strong and independent political thinker, has a nice, center-of-the-road take, that critiques the theory but acknowledges what he sees as its winning points.
Mike Konzcal traces the historical antecedents and intellectual roots of the movement in a balanced critique of Klein and Thompson’s book in the journal Democracy.
The Abundance agenda has drawn a mixed reaction from the right, winning some predictable applause from old-school conservatives like George Will and others who believe that regulation, the administrative state, and government intervention are the great limiters of this country’s potential.
To give you a good sense of these, this opinion piece by James Pethokoukis, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in the Washington Post is a worthwhile example. Pethokoukis writes that conservatives should leap at this across-the-aisle opportunity to “‘own the libs’” 😬 :
The emergence of a center-left movement — pundits today, politicians tomorrow, I hope — championing deregulation and government efficiency offers conservatives and Republicans an extraordinary political opportunity to solve big, persistent national problems. Should it catch on with Democrats, the right should treat Abundance-ism, also known as “supply-side progressivism,” as a natural bridge to cooperation.
But for others on the right, Klein and Thompson’s critique, also predictably, fails to go far enough in bashing liberals. Former Republican speechwriter Barton Swaim, has this withering take in the Wall Street Journal. He writes that:
[Klein and Thompson] have spent the past 15 years or so championing policy ideas advanced by the left, and in the book they reaffirm support for every major welfare-state program of the 20th century. Yet they purport to tell the left where it has gone wrong, while mostly criticizing ‘the right’ and censuring liberal policies so gently as to sound commendatory. What’s going on here? These two liberals have been relieved of their wallets but can’t admit they got mugged.
And I liked this quote from San Diego Republican Brian Jones, in a piece from CalMatters about whether Abundance will help the housing push in California. “[Democrats are] going to blow it,” said Jones, the Senate Minority Leader in the state. “They still believe in government control. They’ll release this regulation, but not this other one. They’re not willing to deregulate enough.” Translation: Try all you want, but you will never be Republican enough.
The debate and lack of agreement is not overly surprising, but obviously raises the question as to whether centrism is truly the path to a broader state of national consensus.
I have read dozens of reviews and analysis pieces on the book to the point where I’m familiar with what seem to be its central anecdotes: Josh Shapiro’s red-tape cutting efforts to reopen I-95 in Philadelphia just 12 days after a tanker exploded and collapsed a bridge; California’s decades long stalemate over high-speed rail, to name a few. But I have yet to read it myself. My two cents, with that caveat: I’m struck by how Democrats keep trying to reinvigorate themselves by being less like Democrats. It feels like this effort gets rebranded and remixed every few years, but the relentless pull toward the center, or even further right, is the same. This push says Democrats should sand off some of the idealistic edges and beliefs that animate the left in order to appeal to folks in the center and on the right. There is a contradiction at the heart of the idea: that Democrats could be better Democrats by being more like Republicans. And major electoral failures that have accompanied this approach, the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections perhaps most top of mind, seem to complicate its sales pitch as a recipe for success.
Here’s what else we’re reading this week:
Things are getting a bit chippy at Starbucks, where workers who unionized in a historic sweep are still working without a contract. After 3 years without a contract, Starbucks workers are turning to civil disobedience (Fast Company)
A regional director at the NLRB has issued a complaint against Amazon, saying it broke labor laws when it failed to negotiate with workers organized by the Teamsters at a San Francisco warehouse (Bloomberg). The complaint may set the stage for similar orders “at many other locations where Amazon has dodged its legal obligation to negotiate with the union,” the Teamsters said, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Benjamin Y. Fong, the associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University and the author of the labor-focused Substack On the Seams, has a monthly round-up of large scale union elections at Jacobin that was recently brought to my attention. This month’s edition featured a nice look at a United Steelworkers win at offshore wind turbine manufacturer JSW Steel. Despite the green and ethical business pitch the company makes, they still fought the union aggressively, he writes.
The Center for American Progress has a piece this week seeking to re-ignite the push for labor law reform, most prominently the Pro Act. It’s a good succinct rundown of where things are, labor-wise, after four years of Biden and approaching the first 100 days of Trump.
See you next week!