The Poverty of Progressive Abundance

March 25, 2025

By Robert Bellafiore

Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30.00

Abundance, the much-anticipated manifesto from the New York Times’s Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is “dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Beginning with a vision of the world in 2050, full of clean energy, plentiful housing, and advanced technology, they work backwards to a rallying cry for a politics that sweeps away zero-sum thinking and bureaucratic meddling in favor of a bounteous economy and competent government.

But riding on that simple idea comes a much more fraught one: that liberalism is the political movement that will get us to this abundant future. With their first thesis and its dream of a more prosperous America, Klein and Thompson offer some worthwhile, if unexciting, policies and suggestions for their fellow progressives; but their second thesis is wholly unconvincing.

The bulk of Abundance focuses on a few prominent policy problems, from which it develops a blueprint for liberal governance. We’re not doing enough to protect the environment by deploying nuclear and solar power. Housing has grown wildly unaffordable, especially in major cities. And for all the money we pour into scientific research, we’ve seen relatively few breakthroughs. In short, why can’t we have nice things?

It’s a question that Americans of every political persuasion have been asking in recent years. But Abundance is explicitly by liberals, for liberals. It’s also against liberals. At the heart of Klein and Thompson’s argument is an attack of the dominant mode of liberal governance in recent decades, which they argue has elevated rules and compliance over substance and results.

Consider housing. Liberals talk about wanting to help the homeless, but a mess of zoning laws, building codes, and construction restrictions have made housing prohibitively expensive, worsening homelessness, harming workers, and forcing out families. Embarrassingly, the problem is worst in blue areas: “California has about 12 percent of the nation’s population, 30 percent of the nation’s homeless population, and about 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless population.” West Virginia has much more poverty, unemployment, and addiction than California, but the latter’s overzealous regulations and resulting housing dearth mean that California has six times the per capita homelessness.

Or consider the climate. In an effort to thwart polluting companies, liberals have created a thicket of environmental permitting laws that make it exceedingly difficult to grow America’s energy supply, including in green energy. In 2020, there were more than 60 federal permitting programs in the “infrastructure approval regime,” making compliance an enormously complicated paperwork exercise. Klein and Thompson point to a plan for a wind farm in Wyoming that will be the largest in the country—if it ever escapes the energy bureaucracy labyrinth. “If all goes well from here, it will be completed in 2026—eighteen years after it was proposed.”

Finally, look at science policy. For all liberals’ love of science and the following thereof, the government is doing a lousy job of supporting it. In its focus on proposal reviews, progress reports, grant administration, and the like, the federal government’s administration of science funding has become deeply biased against bold new ideas. Klein and Thompson tell the depressing story of Katalin Karikó, whose scheme to use mRNA to fight disease was consistently rejected by the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s for being too risky and unproven, only to become critical to developing the COVID vaccine.

At each point, Klein and Thompson blame liberals’ approach to governance in recent decades. A stringent legalism, driven by the desire to prevent bad things—polluted rivers, unsafe buildings, and so on—has also blocked all the good things they say they want. Then, struck by the scarcity in green tech, housing, and breakthrough discoveries, they conclude that we just need more money. Klein and Thompson seek to counter this blind proceduralism and delusion of spending our way to abundance with a “supply-side progressivism” that clears away the red tape and lets us build again.

One might wonder at this point why Klein and Thompson are writing to progressives, or why they remain progressives themselves. If they think government regulation, and liberals, are the problem, why not become moderate free-market Republicans? But Klein and Thompson’s concern isn’t with government per se, but rather with sclerotic government, which we have today thanks to both liberals’ proceduralism and conservatives’ kneejerk distrust of the state. The Right thus also comes in for plenty of criticism. Acting on the premise that government can only do wrong, conservatives have for decades made it less and less capable, tying bureaucrats’ hands with the same red tape that liberals use to regulate out of existence anything they dislike. Klein and Thompson’s solution is a renewed “state capacity” that empowers the government to do the big things Americans expect of it, rather than hamstringing or gutting it and then wondering why the DMV is so terrible.

It’s hard to disagree with any part of the argument so far, and if Klein and Thompson are able to convince liberals six decades after the Great Society that sometimes government involvement has downsides, more power to them. And although their policy arguments are rather underwhelming for a book that the front flap calls a “one-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty,” that’s still preferable to the apocalyptic degrowth movement on the fringe left, which Klein and Thompson single out for criticism.

But one thing is notably scarce in all of this: any argument for why a vision of a more energetic, ambitious government, united with a freer market, is going to find its home on the Left. For all their criticism of their fellow progressives, Klein and Thompson barely scratch the surface of the reformation that liberalism would need to undergo for this vision to come to fruition.

A hint of the problem comes early on. In the first chapter, they note in passing “The Problem with Lawn-Sign Liberalism”—a reference to the “In This House We Believe” signs that blanket blue neighborhoods—but only in the narrow context of zoning laws. But within that phrase lies the kernel of a crippling problem for the abundance agenda’s viability on the Left: liberalism’s mutation into an elaborate status game for affluent, bien-pensant climbers whose putative beliefs are almost entirely a matter of blaring fashionable catchphrases which signal their moral superiority while leaving unchanged the material conditions of those supposedly in need.

Klein and Thompson do note the gap between liberals’ supposed beliefs and their actions:

We say that we want to save the planet from climate change. But in practice, many Americans are dead set against the clean energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar power projects. We say that housing is a human right. But our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new homes.

At some point, however, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the saying, the continual adjustment and enforcement of the latest slogan to indicate one’s right-thinking, is the point, rather than a first step toward reform that has stumbled in the execution. The problem here isn’t so much that substance has been replaced by procedure, but rather that the appearance, the display of righteousness, has become the substance itself. Thus, for example, progressives’ shifting vocabulary for preferred minorities that does nothing to help those minorities, but does much to indicate one’s skill in a convoluted and morally charged competition. Abundance wants a liberalism without the hall-monitor mentality; but that mentality just is contemporary liberalism. Indeed, the scientist Karikó’s criticism of federal grantmaking offers a perfect description of the modern progressive sensibility: “You needed to know how to climb a political ladder, to value a hierarchy that had always seemed, at best, wholly uninteresting.”

Abundance is therefore mistaken in supposing that presenting a few stories and statistics, or summarizing a few papers, will change its intended audience’s mind. Just look at the COVID-era mask debate. Klein and Thompson write, “A year into the pandemic, researchers were still debating the most elemental questions, such as: Do masking rules event work?” before swiftly moving on to the development of the COVID vaccine. But the Left’s obsession with masks was not one of struggling to weigh the evidence across conflicting academic studies, but of a farcical “hygiene theater,” as Thompson knows; he coined the term. The problem wasn’t too few peer-reviewed papers; it was a groupthink that punished all dissent. To make a liberal abundance agenda work, Klein and Thompson would need a solution to that problem, not just to environmental regulations.

Their discussion of why California has become a cautionary tale shows a similar weakness. They lament, “Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California! Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California!” Here, they finger homelessness, expensive housing, and the lack of high-speed rail—important problems all, but ones that hardly form a full picture of California’s plight. Far more influential in turning voters across the country against blue governance have been the open-air drug markets, shoplifting, and prioritization of “justice-impacted individuals” over public safety that have made much of San Francisco resemble a third-world slum. A refusal to enforce public order and thereby show that liberal governance can work is not going to be fixed by looser zoning codes.

This is all a shame, because a political movement that sought, as Klein and Thompson, a better balance of state and market, one that boosted state capacity while unburdening the economy, would be a great thing. Happily, there is such a movement today, which Klein and Thompson would spot if they looked across the political aisle.

The Right is in a period of genuinely exciting deliberation about the future of American governance, seeking to do away with the shibboleths of recent decades in favor of a more muscular government, at the same time that it works to cut off the state’s fat. In fact, on the very day of Abundance’s release, Vice President Vance delivered a speech encapsulating this outlook, arguing for the compatibility of the administration’s support for “energy abundance” and a “pro-innovation economy” with the populist-nationalist strains of the Right that favor a more active government. Even the Department of Government Efficiency has largely focused on ending leftist outposts and obsolete pet projects, not dismantling the government for its own sake.

Klein and Thompson have nothing to say about any of this beyond trotting out tired warnings about the “populist-authoritarian right” and the “false promise of strongmen.” Rather than acknowledge the Right’s exploration of new approaches to political economy and administrative capacity, they complain about a “conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention”—a criticism that is about a decade behind the times. On the contrary, all the energy on the Right is squarely in the camp that wants precisely the abundance agenda’s fusion of more effective government and freer markets.

Nevertheless, politics is fickle. The surest proof that any political coalition can in fact take up the abundance mantle will be the actual doing of it, and one must avoid either overestimating the practical need for intellectual consistency, or underestimating voters’ vicissitudes. But in the spirit of ending on an inspiring note, here is one feel-good story about abundance.

The year is 1986. The City of New York has spent six years and nearly $13 million trying and failing to rebuild Central Park’s ice-skating rink. But one enterprising real estate developer thinks he can get it done. He strikes a deal with the mayor, promising to get the rink up and running within six months for only $3 million. Five months later, and with $750,000 to spare, New Yorkers are enjoying a big, beautiful skating rink, a jewel of urban abundance. Don’t tell Klein or Thompson, but that developer is now our president.

Robert Bellafiore is Managing Director for Policy at the Foundation for American Innovation.