As much as Trump’s chaos may appall liberals, part of the president’s appeal is that he breaks things. He breaks expectations, norms, even laws, and he breaks promises and alliances. He is seeking to break much of the federal government; he may recklessly break the social safety net to deliver another tax cut to the rich. He is the proverbial bull in the china shop, with no thought for what he’s breaking and no plan for cleaning things up.
If status-quo arrangements are working well enough for you, none of this is likely to be very attractive. But if things aren’t working for you—if you can’t make ends meet without going deep into debt, if you can’t afford a decent house in a safe neighborhood, if your community is declining economically and awash in drugs, or if your health insurance is so expensive that you might as well not have any—then a president who breaks things may look pretty good. You might reason that he’s better than the existing order, which seems fixated on protecting the interests of the people who already have it made. At least Trump is doing something new. He isn’t bound by the old pieties that no longer seem to get us anywhere—for example, the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine, or a commitment as “the leader of the free world” to a stalemated war in Ukraine. Things can’t go on as they are. So, in November 2024, either you pulled the lever for Trump, or you decided just to sit it out.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book isn’t addressed to such a voter, nor to the hardcore MAGA enthusiast who thrills in President Trump’s transgressions, nor, for that matter, to the MAGA intellectual who dreams of “regime change.” Instead, Klein and Thompson write as liberals to other liberals, in particular people who occupy positions of relative power—politicians, activists, academics, journalists, and professionals. They agree, however, with the disaffected that things aren’t working for many people and that something needs to change. “The pathologies of the broad left” and the failures of “liberal governance” are real and a central reason we got Trumpism. As two political scientists they quote say, “populists don’t just feed on socioeconomic discontent. They feed on ineffective government.”
Klein and Thompson are highly successful journalists. After building a following at The Washington Post and founding the news site Vox, Klein is now a columnist for The New York Times, where he also hosts a popular podcast. Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic with a podcast of his own, Plain English. Together, they have produced an exciting, hopeful book. Filled with insights and provocations, it amply fulfills the promise of its title. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, infuriated, and demoralized by the chaos, incompetence, corruption, and cruelty of the new Trump administration, read Abundance for a vision of a very different future, one that is beyond our grasp at the moment, but still possible if liberals can return to power.
Abundance is not, Klein and Thompson specify, a policy manual. The book proposes “less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?” Its stated thesis is that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” A running thread is that the liberalism of the last fifty-plus years failed to do that. According to the authors:
We are attached to a story of American decline that is centered around ideological disagreement. That makes it easy to miss pathologies rooted in ideological collusion. Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it. Debates over the size of government obscured the diminishing capacity of government. An abundance of consumer goods distracted us from a scarcity of homes and energy and infrastructure and scientific breakthroughs.
In brief, neither liberals nor conservatives have focused in recent decades on “‘state capacity’: the ability of the state to achieve its goals.” To the contrary, “Liberals speak as if they believe in government,” but then they “pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do.” So we have, for example, “well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block[ing] the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first.”
To be clear, state incapacity hasn’t driven Klein and Thompson toward a DOGE-style desire to destroy the administrative state. Elon Musk, they comment, “is focused on slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.” Their abundance agenda, by contrast, envisions government as an accelerant of innovation and invention. It seeks to ensure the plentiful supply of goods that people need to improve their lives but that markets can’t be counted on to provide:
The world is filled with problems we cannot solve without more invention. In the fight against climate change, the clean energy revolution will require building out the renewable energy that we have already developed. But decarbonization will also require technology that doesn’t exist yet at scale: clean jet fuel, less carbon-intensive ways to manufacture cement, and machines to remove millions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
Klein and Thompson advocate for “pull” funding mechanisms like advance market commitments that can help eliminate bottlenecks stifling new technologies. The government promises to buy a product if it is successfully developed, thereby incentivizing its development and driving down the cost curve. This is the project of “a liberalism that builds” in the interests of securing the general welfare.
Abundance contrasts its supply-side liberalism with the failures of Democratic Party governance in recent decades. Liberals, Democrats, and progressives (terms Klein and Thompson use interchangeably) have largely focused on “the demand side of the ledger” by “giving people money, or money-like vouchers, to go out and buy something that the market was producing but that the poor could not afford,” like health insurance. That’s clearly an important good, but subsidizing it doesn’t address the underlying affordability crisis that has loaded people with medical debt, on top of housing and student-loan debt.
Similarly, the federal government’s backing of thirty-year fixed mortgages, which act as a hedge against inflation (borrowers make the same monthly payment while prices go up), has helped turn housing into many people’s principal asset and pitted the interests of incumbent homeowners against potential newcomers. The authors cite journalist Jerusalem Demsas, who writes, “Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time.” Zoning regulations, in particular, serve the interests of incumbents by choking growth. Democrat-dominated California, with 12 percent of the nation’s population, is now home, so to speak, to “30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, and about 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless population.” The people California Democrats claim to care about, Klein and Thompson observe, can’t afford to live there, or at least in its cities, where the opportunity is.
Klein and Thompson’s deepest concern is the climate crisis. “[T]he only way for humanity to limit climate change while fighting poverty,” they write, “is to invent our way to clean energy that is plentiful and cheap and then spend enough to deploy it.” We must “remake the world we have built,” which “isn’t just a manufacturing challenge; it’s a political one.” The drill, baby, drill agenda obviously stands in the way. If the Trump administration lifts sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports, gas prices will likely plummet, boosting MAGA’s prospects in the midterm elections while undercutting clean-energy development (and dealing a blow to U.S. oil companies). But the “degrowther movement” seems to worry Klein and Thompson even more. It holds that “climate change reflects humanity’s thrall to an impossible dream of endless growth” and that “[r]ich countries must accept stasis,” if not a decline in economic productivity, in order to stave off climate doom.
The book opposes “degrowtherism,” which has become popular on the political left, on three grounds. First, as political scientist Erik Voeten notes, “people who bear the cost of climate policies increasingly flock to the far right,” with the upshot that degrowtherism virtually promises, Klein and Thompson write, “to deliver a future of populist authoritarians who drill and burn their way back to a false prosperity.” Second, they hold that “[w]e are early in the story of humanity’s relationship with energy. Today’s technologies will come to seem comical, even barbaric,” to the point that we can imagine someone asking incredulously in the not-too-distant future, “Wait, you just burned it?” Third, they claim that “[i]t’s not realistic to demand that the entire planet stop building things. The only truly global solution is invention.” The role of government is to overcome the “most important technological bottleneck of our time” and help usher in clean-energy solutions.
The degrowther movement has adherents among left-leaning Catholics and finds support in at least some passages of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on the environment, Laudato si’. Francis criticizes “those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology” (60), rejects “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth” (106), and submits that “the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth” (193). By contrast, Klein and Thompson seem to envision a secular paradise “beyond scarcity” (the title of the book’s introduction). The thought that poverty, voluntarily assumed—loosening our attachment to our own power and pride and increasing our dependence on God and neighbor—might be good is as foreign to their universe as are MAGA’s techno-feudal fever dreams.
Yet Abundance doesn’t claim to solve all our ills; its focus is solely on the material, not the spiritual. And even then it says nothing about the affordability crises in health care and higher education, and only briefly discusses immigration, specifically to note that “immigration politics has been subsumed by debates about border control policies.” The book concludes by proposing that “[w]e are in a rare period in American history, when the decline of one political order makes space for another.” The New Deal order, prevailing from the 1930s to the 1970s, gave way to the neoliberal order, and now we await the crystallization of what the historian Gary Gerstle calls a new “constellation of ideologies, policies, and constituencies” with the power to shape our politics beyond a single election cycle. If the abundance agenda came to define that new order, it wouldn’t make for heaven on earth, but it would make things a whole lot better than they are now.
Abundance
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Avid Reader Press
$30 | 304 pp.
