The hotly-debated new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is a grand sketch of liberalism's future that fails to reach beyond the lean horizons of its present
Your description of what freedom means -- or ought to mean -- was bracing and is rarely heard in these parts.
Americans struggle to give it that abundantly (yes, indeed!) generous definition. The stirring tones of the Proclamation of Emancipation could have been a start and FDR's Four Freedoms did hint at a guarantee of something more than mere subsistence but the effort stalls soon after that. We look back at what Gary Gerstle calls the New Deal Order with fondness, a type of Fordism on a national scale for the country's white population. Even so, we tell ourselves, it was far better than the Social Darwinist alternatives from the Gilded Age that reactionaries like Robert Taft and Fred Hartley wanted us to return to. Yet it was just a matter of time before the dismantlers would succeed and they made their first move with the 1973 Powell Memo, still worth reading as the guiding spirit for today's Project 2025.
As you point out in your review essay, but in a too circumlocutionary way, this book is In the spirit of Gerstle. Klein and Thompson -- with their fellow travelers, Noah Smith and Matt Ygelsisas -- want to claim the mantle of that New Deal Order but substantially reworked and without a jot of the redistributionist and regulatory force of the original program. In fact, they would happily identify with deregulatory zeal of the current Gilded Age for large swathes of the economy.
Their vision then amounts to this: "efficient" delivery of "public goods" that increases the "productivity" of the economy. (Quotation marks only to emphasize their touchstones.) From this, we get the non-zero sum game. Workers receive cheaper and better housing, child care, health care, education, social insurance, etc., thanks to government investment while the private-sector gets highly productive and economically secure labor input and can count on high growth to sustain their drive for profits.
This not how capitalism works, or has ever worked. The primeval drive for profits is maximal and all-consuming. Michael Kalecki told us, capitalism needs -- even requires -- the insecurity of workers to survive. Private capital in a market economy is savage, predatory and will use politics, the law, technological innovation, whatever, to suck the marrow of economic value to usurp for itself. It must necessarily be shackled.
Your conclusion was right on the mark. The book is another artful attempt to salvage the discredited belief system known as neoliberalism. Lipstick on a pick? Quite possibly.
It’s always like this, more or less w Ezra Klein: he gives an extremely insulated ideological take that he’s convinced is not ideological (bc as a liberal wonk, he thinks ideology is a pejorative). So the thinking never gets outside of that neoliberal box. I mean: there cannot be abundance in capitalism and the (corporate captured) state is inefficient in regulating it—by design, right? How is that not a premise the book must deal with? This is exactly why Bernie is not the Trump of the left, I mean? As an average person it’s a particularly exhausting experience, watching this kind of political immaturity pass for the latest “innovation.”
I don’t even disagree with many of the Abundance Agenda policy proposals--I'm all for making the government less bureaucratic (like removing means-testing and making social programs universal) and for making government services more consumer-friendly. But this scans as a déjà vu rebrand of Elizabeth Warren’s "I Have a Plan." It's policy without the politics, and it seems like this class of pundits either don't get power, or willfully obfuscate it. The government is inefficient and poorly regulates industries because both parties have a vested interest in keeping it dysfunctional, because it gives their donors the political ammo to privatize public services while maintaining record-high profits.
Housing would be a great example of them conflating the symptom with the disease. Sure, zoning is outdated, and building regulations are cumbersome, and we should increase urban density and prioritize 15-minute neighborhoods. But why is our housing in this state? My hunch is that it's because housing is financialized, which turns the main goal of housing into making it a vector of profit rather than sheltering the most amount of people. This profoundly warps incentives. Anything to increase housing supply will decrease the value of existing housing, so NIMBYs, BlackRock, HOAs, or whatever interest that benefits the status quo will weaponize the government to prevent any changes to housing policy.
These people keep arguing that a Bernie-style politics is untenable because it alienates the oligarchy, which they say is essential to stand up to Trump. But the oligarchy is unreliable! They are amoral to anything other than what maximizes their profits and perpetuates their standing in the national order. Most of the same companies that "went woke" after the George Floyd protests mostly turned on those corporate policies and branding once Trump took office and they sensed a vibe shift. The center is out of ideas, and this brand of politics needs to die in order to make room for a movement that will really challenge the status quo.
Thank you for doing the work here. From the brief bit I'd heard or picked up about Abundance, I was assuming it was simply neoliberalism rebranded and it's nice to have that confirmed.
She much talk but the answer is short: one cannot dismiss the fact that capitalism itself is the elephant in the room by creating some innocuous, performative nomenclature of “abundance.”
Your description of what freedom means -- or ought to mean -- was bracing and is rarely heard in these parts.
Americans struggle to give it that abundantly (yes, indeed!) generous definition. The stirring tones of the Proclamation of Emancipation could have been a start and FDR's Four Freedoms did hint at a guarantee of something more than mere subsistence but the effort stalls soon after that. We look back at what Gary Gerstle calls the New Deal Order with fondness, a type of Fordism on a national scale for the country's white population. Even so, we tell ourselves, it was far better than the Social Darwinist alternatives from the Gilded Age that reactionaries like Robert Taft and Fred Hartley wanted us to return to. Yet it was just a matter of time before the dismantlers would succeed and they made their first move with the 1973 Powell Memo, still worth reading as the guiding spirit for today's Project 2025.
As you point out in your review essay, but in a too circumlocutionary way, this book is In the spirit of Gerstle. Klein and Thompson -- with their fellow travelers, Noah Smith and Matt Ygelsisas -- want to claim the mantle of that New Deal Order but substantially reworked and without a jot of the redistributionist and regulatory force of the original program. In fact, they would happily identify with deregulatory zeal of the current Gilded Age for large swathes of the economy.
Their vision then amounts to this: "efficient" delivery of "public goods" that increases the "productivity" of the economy. (Quotation marks only to emphasize their touchstones.) From this, we get the non-zero sum game. Workers receive cheaper and better housing, child care, health care, education, social insurance, etc., thanks to government investment while the private-sector gets highly productive and economically secure labor input and can count on high growth to sustain their drive for profits.
This not how capitalism works, or has ever worked. The primeval drive for profits is maximal and all-consuming. Michael Kalecki told us, capitalism needs -- even requires -- the insecurity of workers to survive. Private capital in a market economy is savage, predatory and will use politics, the law, technological innovation, whatever, to suck the marrow of economic value to usurp for itself. It must necessarily be shackled.
Your conclusion was right on the mark. The book is another artful attempt to salvage the discredited belief system known as neoliberalism. Lipstick on a pick? Quite possibly.
It’s always like this, more or less w Ezra Klein: he gives an extremely insulated ideological take that he’s convinced is not ideological (bc as a liberal wonk, he thinks ideology is a pejorative). So the thinking never gets outside of that neoliberal box. I mean: there cannot be abundance in capitalism and the (corporate captured) state is inefficient in regulating it—by design, right? How is that not a premise the book must deal with? This is exactly why Bernie is not the Trump of the left, I mean? As an average person it’s a particularly exhausting experience, watching this kind of political immaturity pass for the latest “innovation.”
“The paucity of abundance” well done, Luke. You’re embracing Marx on title shithousery.
I don’t even disagree with many of the Abundance Agenda policy proposals--I'm all for making the government less bureaucratic (like removing means-testing and making social programs universal) and for making government services more consumer-friendly. But this scans as a déjà vu rebrand of Elizabeth Warren’s "I Have a Plan." It's policy without the politics, and it seems like this class of pundits either don't get power, or willfully obfuscate it. The government is inefficient and poorly regulates industries because both parties have a vested interest in keeping it dysfunctional, because it gives their donors the political ammo to privatize public services while maintaining record-high profits.
Housing would be a great example of them conflating the symptom with the disease. Sure, zoning is outdated, and building regulations are cumbersome, and we should increase urban density and prioritize 15-minute neighborhoods. But why is our housing in this state? My hunch is that it's because housing is financialized, which turns the main goal of housing into making it a vector of profit rather than sheltering the most amount of people. This profoundly warps incentives. Anything to increase housing supply will decrease the value of existing housing, so NIMBYs, BlackRock, HOAs, or whatever interest that benefits the status quo will weaponize the government to prevent any changes to housing policy.
These people keep arguing that a Bernie-style politics is untenable because it alienates the oligarchy, which they say is essential to stand up to Trump. But the oligarchy is unreliable! They are amoral to anything other than what maximizes their profits and perpetuates their standing in the national order. Most of the same companies that "went woke" after the George Floyd protests mostly turned on those corporate policies and branding once Trump took office and they sensed a vibe shift. The center is out of ideas, and this brand of politics needs to die in order to make room for a movement that will really challenge the status quo.
Thank you for doing the work here. From the brief bit I'd heard or picked up about Abundance, I was assuming it was simply neoliberalism rebranded and it's nice to have that confirmed.
She much talk but the answer is short: one cannot dismiss the fact that capitalism itself is the elephant in the room by creating some innocuous, performative nomenclature of “abundance.”