Democrats should be able to campaign by saying ‘vote for us, we’ll govern like California.’ Instead Republicans campaign by saying ‘vote for us, or they’ll govern like California.”
The American left lacks a central organizing principle, other than slowing progress with an ever growing checklist of rules: they need an alternative. So argues Abundance, a book by prominent, center-left national journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As a perfect representation of the divided era, the book’s commercial success and the author’s rising popularity has created a backlash from many progressives. Classic liberal Klein in particular just seems to irk a whole class of leftists.
As the authors write in the book: “One way of understanding the era we are in is as the messy interregnum between political orders.”
Their “abundance agenda” is polarizing in part because their interest is in operating the current system, and many of their would-be-allies turned critics are not. The identifiers of “liberal,” “progressive,” “leftist” and “socialist” are discussed tirelessly among smart people with graduate degrees and little serious focus on governing. Many of them contribute to the dismaying see-sawing of elected Democrats, that have for generation focused on appeasing a diverse coalition.
The left, the authors write, “seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.“ The United States is a big distributed republic, with thousands of layers of government, at town, county and state levels, to experiment and demonstrate an ability to solve problems. Instead, as the authors argue, rather than solving homelessness in some Democratic city, leaders oversee a multi-year research phase to hire a BIPOC-led consulting firm that confers with a full list of constituent groups from identities, environmental and social causes to gather community feedback.
Nothing is solved, everyone complains. Most vote elsewhere next go-round. This has gotten Klein and Thompson lots of glowing praise from centrists, and ferocious pillorying from progressives. One small contribution I kept thinking about while reading the book: Lots of their perspective would play nicely in local political contexts, rather than vicious national conversations.
Meanwhile, public trust continues to decline, and green infrastructure is slowed. Setting aside the Biden administration’s ambitious IRA green energy bill and the Chips and Science Act focused on industrial policy, Democrats long ago gave up “supply side” policies. Their book argues that should change.
Politics today is a fight over what we have, or had — not what we can create.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Abundance
