Since the 2024 election, Democrats have struggled to figure out why their agenda seems to have lost its hold on so many working-class American families. This kind of political introspection has a deep intellectual history, even at the high point for American liberalism. Back at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, a cohort of talented scholars asked why Democrats were unable do more to deal with economic insecurity and inequality. Writers such as the political theorist Louis Hartz and historian Richard Hofstadter decried the ideological straitjacket on American political debate, a liberal consensus over values such as individualism and private property that left little room for the social-democratic ideas that informed European thought. As Hartz wrote, despite the intense debates in U.S. politics, “there is about it all, as compared with the European pattern, a vast and almost charming innocence of mind.”
By the twenty-first century, the left and center left had shifted to asking why working-class Americans supported Republicans, against their own economic self-interest. In 2004, Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? explained how the GOP used cultural arguments to attract working Americans, even though conservatives attacked unions and cut taxes for the rich. In 2022, historian Gary Gerstle argued that a neoliberal order had pushed aside compelling economic arguments—the importance of economic regulation and the virtues of a robust social safety net—that had made the Democratic Party strong from the 1930s to the 1970s. One year later, in Ours Was the Shining Future, David Leonhardt suggested that a more elitist party interested in cultural issues had lost focus on the bread-and-butter pocketbook policies that mattered most to the base.
Entering into this tradition of introspection are New York Times columnist and podcast host Ezra Klein and Atlantic writer Derek Thompson. In Abundance, the two left-of-center journalists propose a very different reason why so many working Americans have turned away from Democrats: It’s the ineffective government, stupid.
While partisans may argue about whether we need more government (liberals) or less government (conservatives), Klein and Thompson stake their ground on the need for better government. Promising truly effective government, they believe, will strengthen a liberalism that has accepted dangerous levels of dysfunction in day-to-day operations, which has made it difficult for fellow Americans to see why market-based solutions are not superior.
Decades of public policies that liberals enacted in the 1950s and 1960s, Klein and Thompson observe, saddled government with multiple layers of regulations, rules, mandates, and paperwork, all of which have since made it nearly impossible to accomplish key objectives. As demand has increased for many social goods, such as reasonably priced homes, clean energy, education, and medicine, the government has failed to supply. Liberals keep throwing money at the problem, but the authors believe that the money is not being well spent. As a result, we have a supply crisis that raises prices because we don’t have enough of what we need: “The problem we faced in the 1970s was that we were building too much and too heedlessly. The problem we face in the 2020s is that we are building too little, and we are too often paralyzed by process.” Personal and public debt exploded as Americans tried to keep up with higher costs for scarce goods.
The recent bout of inflation under President Joe Biden was the final straw that broke this entire system. Right-wing populists have capitalized upon the problem of scarcity, with President Donald Trump arguing during his campaign that voters need to expel outsiders—such as undocumented immigrants—in order to redistribute limited goods to those who deserve them. The Trump administration has also supported a slash-and-burn approach to cutting government spending, culminating in Elon Musk’s abrupt takeover and attempted shutdown of whole government agencies through the newly created Department of Government Efficiency.
Klein and Thompson’s vision for more effective government is something like an anti-DOGE: They imagine a future United States where careful and informed elected officials find ways to strip back the barriers to effective policy and allow the government to invest efficiently in underdeveloped pockets of society. They call for an “abundance agenda.” Abundance here does not mean the greater access to disposable money and goods for which twentieth-century liberals fought. For Klein and Thompson, abundance means a government that is capable of building things, capable of innovation, and capable of implementation at scale.
A vast infrastructure of regulations and rules has become a barrier to effective governance, Klein and Thompson explain. In major cities such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco, there is inadequate housing stock, other than for those with immense wealth. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has found that in the United States there are about 425 dwellings per 1,000 people, far lower than the 600 in France or Italy. Thirty percent of Americans are “house poor,” spending 30 percent of their income or more on shelter. Without sufficient housing, it is hard for younger Americans to live in cities, and many are forced to move out. This is bad for the economy, because cities remain “engines of creativity,” Klein and Thompson write: “We create in community. We are spurred by competition.” Even Walmart, they note, located its e-commerce software engineers a few miles from San Francisco rather than in Bentonville, Arkansas. Nor will remote work alleviate pressure to live in or near these expensive locations. Zoom—a company that boomed by supporting remote work—decreed in 2023 that its workers had to spend several days in the office, and many other major companies have done the same.
Klein and Thompson reject the claim that housing is in short supply because developers are only willing to build upscale units. Rather, environmental and workplace protections have made the construction of affordable housing extraordinarily difficult even when there is the will and money to do so. They point to measures such as San Francisco’s Local Business Enterprise and Non-Discrimination in Contracting Ordinance (14B), which started in 1984 as a measure to impose preferences for minority and female-owned contractors when building affordable housing. It was rewritten in the 1990s “to favor small businesses,” Klein and Thompson write, by adding a cap on qualifying contractors’ annual gross revenues; the effect was to discourage the city “from working with large contractors that have grown in size and revenue precisely because they are good at delivering projects on time and under budget.” The cost of compliance reaches into the millions and extends the time of construction by six to nine months.
Also in San Francisco, they note, contractors need to clear plans with the Mayor’s Office on Disability even though they already must show compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Without specifying the details, the authors also argue that permitting and procurement rules that no longer serve any value must be streamlined. They want to sharply cut zoning restrictions, such as rules prohibiting the construction of homes of a wide range of sizes and onerous requirements to provide parking.
To combat climate change, the United States needs to do a much better job of building clean energy facilities and public transportation. Here, too, the regulatory morass is a major obstacle. As an example of what can go wrong, they cite the history of the high-speed rail system in California, which has been receiving money since the 2000s. Despite strong political support, the scope of the project keeps narrowing, and actual construction is slow. Why? Implementation keeps running aground against the regulations. When Klein toured the stalled project, engineers on the ground complained about lengthy delays as the state attempted to obtain land that was necessary to build a path for the trains: It took two and half years to move a stretch of freeway and take possession of a patch of land where there had once been a mini storage facility. They also ran into problems at locations where their path intersected with freight lines; freight is so busy with holiday-based work from October to December that all construction had to pause during those months. And the environmental review process went on forever.
Other countries, such as Canada and Germany, spend less money but get much more bang for their Canadian dollars and euros: Whereas the cost of building a little over half a mile of rail in the United States is about $609 million, Canada completes the same amount of rail work for the equivalent of $295 million. And “in the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” the authors point out, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”
In the field of science, big bets are rare and innovation is fleeting. Decision-making and approval processes are slow. The enormous amount of paperwork required to apply for government funding, along with a peer review process that tends to reward status quo thinking, mean that established scientists who can afford to devote time to making these requests benefit most. Young, new voices, who are often crucial to generating big ideas, find themselves squeezed out of the system. Big labs get bigger while startup labs languish. Klein and Thompson quote the MIT economist Pierre Azoulay, who said, “American science has accumulated a set of processes and norms that favor those who know how to play the system, rather than those who have the most interesting ideas.” The authors call for experimenting with streamlining the application process and setting up funding streams that prioritize younger scientists.
Even when scientific breakthroughs occur, moreover, implementation often fails, as a result of broken government institutions. They note how little urgency the government has put into investing in and spreading solar energy such as solar panels into homes. In the 1970s, amid an ongoing energy crisis, the United States was at the forefront of solar technology. Yet in the 1980s things moved backward. As gas prices fell, Ronald Reagan’s administration clawed back subsidies for the solar industry; companies lost interest in working on the product. Meanwhile, Germany’s solar market took off in the early 2000s, thanks to heavy government investment. China has funneled massive resources into the solar industry, outpacing competitors. Had the United States built on its success as the first mover in the 1970s, Klein and Thompson argue, we would be way ahead of the rest world. Instead, we are now playing catch-up.
Klein bemoans the effects of what he calls “everything-bagel liberalism”: the left’s tendency to add an excessive number of goals to individual projects. A case in point is the lengthy questionnaire that applicants were required to fill out in order to apply for funding under President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act. On page 12 of the pre-application process, the applicant needed to address the “likely level of review under the National Environmental Policy Act,” while page 20 instructed them to have “an equity strategy, in concert with their partners, to create equitable workforce pathways for economically disadvantaged individuals in their region.” On another page, there were questions about plans to include “new pipelines” for economically disadvantaged persons and to ensure diversity—all the while including small businesses. All the goals were virtuous, they argue, but all put together, unachievable. Each line aims to fulfill a different policy objective, most of which have nothing to do with each other or, worst of all, with the production of CHIPS facilities.
There have been exceptions to the pattern of delay and stagnation, which show how things can be different. A hero in the book is Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who was able to reopen a collapsed stretch of I-95 in 12 days. He accomplished this stunning goal by simply putting aside many regulations as an emergency measure: The state skipped the bidding process that it typically requires to approve a contractor—which could take from one to two years—and instead used contractors who were already working on public projects nearby. (Notably, Shapiro did not compromise on working conditions; the project used union labor.) Another example of success, though one from which Republicans have distanced themselves for political reasons, was Operation Warp Speed. This project tackled a crisis by investing big, accelerating the FDA approval process timeline, and drafting officials from the Defense Department’s Army Materiel Command for logistical help with the rollout of vaccines against Covid-19. The government also committed to distribute the vaccines for free.
If the government worked better at all levels, the promise of abundance is that liberals could make a more compelling argument to voters. Through government investment, future liberals might say, they can deal effectively with vital gaps that private markets can’t handle. In Klein and Thompson’s estimation, “whether government is bigger or smaller is the wrong question. What it needs to be is better. It needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers.”
The book can be evaluated under two lights. In its argument about policy, Klein and Thompson are certainly on to something important. It doesn’t take a sophisticated policy wonk to perceive that government is far from perfect. Many Americans have walked into government offices like the DMV to experience how slow and frustrating bureaucratic ways can be. The authors make an important intervention by claiming that a government capable of producing more and of using taxpayer dollars more efficiently is an overall good, and they present a convincing case that removing the bottlenecks in government should be a central project for a revitalized liberalism.
There are some notable oversights in the analysis. Abundance downplays the ways that some rigid rules serve an important public purpose that often becomes clear in times of crisis. For instance, after the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, some experts have warned against California rushing into a rapid rebuilding process that jettisons rules for safer construction, such as a requirement for metal roofs that would contain future fires. Are those rules cumbersome, or are they in fact essential to good government?
Nor is there sufficient attention to how rules and regulations can serve as firewalls to protect us from elected officials who, in the name of efficiency, attempt to abuse power for their own political or personal purposes. The arguments in this book could easily provide more fuel for radical conservative efforts to dismantle entire programs without regard for the consequences.
Moreover, Klein and Thompson sometimes overlook how power politics and vested interests would stop some of these policies regardless of how user-friendly government processes became. After all, scarcity in health care is nothing new. Americans have suffered from inadequate coverage, high drug prices, and unfair private insurance practices throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. This was happening long before the regulatory expansion of the 1970s took place. Champions of affordable housing were decrying the way poor and middle-class residents had been pushed out of cities to make way for the preferences of the wealthy—just read Robert Caro’s classic The Power Broker—long before many of the most burdensome construction regulations were introduced.
As a political tract, Abundance is less persuasive. Klein and Thompson are two of the smartest voices from their generation of policy-oriented journalists, moving beyond horse race coverage of politics and integrating serious social science into political commentary. But in this work, they do not demonstrate that there is a strong political constituency for the abundance agenda. Have Klein and Thompson offered a big idea that will never find strong political support? Just to start, removing bottlenecks means removing policies that matter to powerful Democratic interests who struggled to have those provisions entrenched in the administrative state. Going after each line in the forms means going after some constituency that someone believes should be there.
At the same time, it’s unclear that the promise of better government can ultimately have a major effect on the size or structure of the Democratic coalition. The authors don’t provide the evidence to show Americans clamoring for the ideas in this book. On the flip side, it is easy to imagine this tract having a political effect similar to the campaigns of Ralph Nader—whose public interest movement in the 1970s, as Yale historian Paul Sabin showed in Public Citizens, fueled the anti-government arguments that became central to modern conservatism.
In fact, Klein himself has devoted a great deal of time on his podcast to speculating on whether voters actually care about public policy when making electoral decisions. As Democrats shouted from the rooftops about how much President Biden’s policies had done for the economy, the administration’s disapproval ratings worsened. Even if the government started to produce everything Americans need at a good price, might not Republicans be able to capitalize on the current information ecosystem to persuade voters to think otherwise? Or simply to direct voters to focus on cultural grievances? Nor does Democrats’ rational approach to politics—if systems work better, people will support the system—grapple with the emotional and ideological forces that Trump has been so good at tapping into.
Seventy years ago, Richard Hofstadter published one of the most influential texts of the era, The Age of Reform. In his history of the decades from the 1890s to 1930s, Hofstadter argued that the populist and progressive movements were driven by irrational nostalgia about a past that no longer existed in the urban, industrial age. Farmers yearned for an era of yeoman farmers that would never return. Upper-class Brahmins were desperate to restore the status that was slipping away from them with the emergence of new forms of industrial wealth. Political movements capitalized on their “status anxiety” with solutions that would never work. The hero of his book was FDR, who eschewed ideology and instead turned to a pragmatic, experimental approach to dealing with problems.
While much of Hofstadter’s work has been disputed, his argument about the psychological dimension of politics is prescient. As such, Democrats who follow the abundance road map could end up creating a government that truly builds more great things, but still find themselves on the losing end against opponents who peddle on sensational falsehoods of immigrants eating dogs and cats.
For Democrats to win back power, institutional reform can only be part of the solution. They will still have to figure out how to develop more compelling emotional narratives of their own that recapture some of the magic FDR spoke with, when he presented Americans with a New Deal, outlining a vision of security, equity, justice, and democracy that helped them make sense of the alphabet soup of programs coming out of the White House.
Without a fresh narrative, Democrats can build and build, but MAGA Republicans will just keep tearing their buildings down, whether brick by brick or with a wrecking ball.
