part 2:
Leave arguments over the specifics of Mamdani’s program to another day. As Klein and Thompson both noticed, his desire to build and create — including housing and a system of city government-owned grocery stores — and the arguments he makes echo Abundance’s hope of rebuilding government’s capacities.
Mamdani told Thompson in an interview that as “someone who is very passionate about public goods, about public service, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence. And one of the most compelling things that I think ‘Abundance’ has brought into the larger conversation is how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about.”
The left, he said, needed to recognize “that any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector.” The thing the left relies on has to work.
A campaign poster for Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on June 26 in New York. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)
Arguments about the need to “reinvent government,” of course, go back to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, and finding the right balance between the state and the market is a perennial imperative not only for the center but also among social democrats, democratic socialists and progressives of all kinds.
For decades, the broad left across the democracies have labored to find the right recipe for what is often called “the mixed economy.” It’s the entirely sensible idea that prosperity depends on both smart, egalitarian action by a not-all-powerful government and a dynamic market operating within sensible limits.
Too much state — and the dynamism disappears. Too much market — and both wealth and power get concentrated among the richest. When economic gain takes priority over all sorts of other competing goods, from clean air and clean water to the dignified treatment of every citizen, a lot gets lost. And excessive deregulation can lead to such calamities as the financial crisis of 2008.
What’s different about the Abundance argument is that its focus is not just on how the state regulates the market, but also how extensive rules for consultation, public participation and various social and environmental protections can inhibit government action itself. As Klein and Thompson write: “Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.”
A lot of truth there, but the Trump/Musk/Project 2025 push for deregulation has created an awkward problem for Abundance champions. It’s one thing for the Abundance crowd to argue when Democrats are in power that environmental and other rules need to be smarter and more flexible. It’s another to do this when Trump is trying to toss them out altogether. In a Washington Monthly essay on Klein and Thompson’s book, Zephyr Teachout, a prominent progressive law professor and a leading advocate of a tough antitrust push, argued that “it would be very easy to take their critique as a muffled call for deregulation writ large.”
This is the baby/bathwater issue Team Abundance needs to deal with. Klein and Thompson acknowledge that we have cleaner air and water thanks to the regulatory push in the 1970s. We also don’t want planners and technocrats to be as unaccountable as many of them were in the 1950s and 1960s. New York’s visionary but imperious city planner Robert Moses is the prime historical villain. So which rules do they want to get rid of and which do they want to keep?
“In assembling a brief against creaky and costly aspects of the status quo,” Noah Kazis, a University of Michigan law professor, wrote of their book in the Guardian, “it leaves unanswered the question of what should be kept – which costs are worth it.” The success of the Abundance agenda will depend on the details.
This gets to the broader challenge Abundance advocates face from the left: By placing so much blame for government failure on the accretion of well-intended rules, regulations and reviews imposed over the years by progressives, the new disposition, in the view of its critics, “redirect the public’s rage away from the parasitism of economic elites and toward the regulatory regimes of state and local Democrats,” as Aaron Regunberg, a former Rhode Island state representative, wrote in the Nation.
Other critics on the left see abundance campaigners as blaming government red tape for what are fundamentally private sector failures. Hannah Story Brown of the Revolving Door Project, for example, argued that the crash in home construction owed not to zoning rules but to the collapse of the housing bubble in and after 2008, “driven by the deregulation of housing finance and a securitization machine that broke the market.”
Similarly, Adler-Bell argued that the Abundance vision is “smaller than it purports to be, myopic about power, and flattering to those who have it.”
But there’s a secret hidden in plain sight in Klein and Thompson’s book: They might be closer to the left overall than either they or their critics acknowledge. In the arresting techno-utopian opening pages of their book, Klein and Thompson describe a world of cheap and clean energy, abundant and affordable fresh food grown in skyscraper farms, cures to diseases that have long plagued humanity — and affordable housing for all.
But to get there, they assume an awful lot of what the left is fighting for. “Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek,” they write. “Labor rights” and “economic reforms” sound like the kinds of corrections to inequality that progressives have long supported.
“Higher productivity from AI,” they add, would create shorter workweeks, longer weekends and vacations without any cuts in pay. Why? Because “AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.” It probably occurred to you that sharing the profits from the development of AI across society flies in the face of the deregulatory hopes of many of Silicon Valley’s titans — and, again, is a policy critics to their left would applaud.
There is also this: As Klein and Thompson acknowledge, former president Joe Biden was in many ways an Abundance guy. They rightly praise his investments in infrastructure, technology and clean energy. True, some of the projects (electric car charging stations, for example), were caught up in the red tape they bemoan. But a reckoning with why long-term investment did not have the political payoff Biden hoped for has to be part of the reckoning over whether these ideas can have the political payoff their promoters claim for them. Maybe the good Biden Era news was just drowned out by clamor over inflation and the southern border. Maybe, as Mamdani showed in the New York mayoral primary, a long-term vision has to be tethered more tightly to voters’ immediate concerns. Or maybe the party needs better communicators.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on Oct. 19, 2022, in D.C. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
This accounting by no means exhausts the slings and arrows that have been hurled Abundance’s way, but the energy of this debate suggests that its disciples have struck a nerve. Frustration with government failure is by no means the only reason the country took a gamble on making a man unfit for the office of president of the United States. But it’s certainly part of it. As Dunkelman writes in “Why Nothing Works,” “A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism.” He wrote those words before the 2024 election.
Fifteen years ago, progressive writer Harold Meyerson marveled at the speed with which Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of commerce, Harry Hopkins, pushed through big new projects during the New Deal. He mourned that it had become impossible for contemporary Democrats to repeat the feat.
Responding recently in the American Prospect to the Abundance push, Meyerson agreed that progressives need to find a better balance between “regulation” and “production” or else “their days with the power to make such decisions will be few and far between.”
Nor is it an accident that “Abundance” has drawn an appreciative audience among governors and mayors in big Democratic states where housing shortages, transportation problems and homelessness are commonplace. One of the most alarming portents for Democrats in the 2024 election was how sharply their vote share declined in their traditional bastions — particularly in New York, New Jersey, California and Massachusetts. Progressive politicians in places becoming a much paler shade of blue know they need to find ways to govern better, build faster and deliver more efficiently.
Leave arguments over the specifics of Mamdani’s program to another day. As Klein and Thompson both noticed, his desire to build and create — including housing and a system of city government-owned grocery stores — and the arguments he makes echo Abundance’s hope of rebuilding government’s capacities.
Mamdani told Thompson in an interview that as “someone who is very passionate about public goods, about public service, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence. And one of the most compelling things that I think ‘Abundance’ has brought into the larger conversation is how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about.”
The left, he said, needed to recognize “that any example of public inefficiency is an opportunity for the argument to be made against the very existence of the public sector.” The thing the left relies on has to work.
A campaign poster for Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on June 26 in New York. (Yuki Iwamura/AP)
Arguments about the need to “reinvent government,” of course, go back to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, and finding the right balance between the state and the market is a perennial imperative not only for the center but also among social democrats, democratic socialists and progressives of all kinds.
For decades, the broad left across the democracies have labored to find the right recipe for what is often called “the mixed economy.” It’s the entirely sensible idea that prosperity depends on both smart, egalitarian action by a not-all-powerful government and a dynamic market operating within sensible limits.
Too much state — and the dynamism disappears. Too much market — and both wealth and power get concentrated among the richest. When economic gain takes priority over all sorts of other competing goods, from clean air and clean water to the dignified treatment of every citizen, a lot gets lost. And excessive deregulation can lead to such calamities as the financial crisis of 2008.
What’s different about the Abundance argument is that its focus is not just on how the state regulates the market, but also how extensive rules for consultation, public participation and various social and environmental protections can inhibit government action itself. As Klein and Thompson write: “Over the course of the twentieth century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left that hobbled it.”
A lot of truth there, but the Trump/Musk/Project 2025 push for deregulation has created an awkward problem for Abundance champions. It’s one thing for the Abundance crowd to argue when Democrats are in power that environmental and other rules need to be smarter and more flexible. It’s another to do this when Trump is trying to toss them out altogether. In a Washington Monthly essay on Klein and Thompson’s book, Zephyr Teachout, a prominent progressive law professor and a leading advocate of a tough antitrust push, argued that “it would be very easy to take their critique as a muffled call for deregulation writ large.”
This is the baby/bathwater issue Team Abundance needs to deal with. Klein and Thompson acknowledge that we have cleaner air and water thanks to the regulatory push in the 1970s. We also don’t want planners and technocrats to be as unaccountable as many of them were in the 1950s and 1960s. New York’s visionary but imperious city planner Robert Moses is the prime historical villain. So which rules do they want to get rid of and which do they want to keep?
“In assembling a brief against creaky and costly aspects of the status quo,” Noah Kazis, a University of Michigan law professor, wrote of their book in the Guardian, “it leaves unanswered the question of what should be kept – which costs are worth it.” The success of the Abundance agenda will depend on the details.
This gets to the broader challenge Abundance advocates face from the left: By placing so much blame for government failure on the accretion of well-intended rules, regulations and reviews imposed over the years by progressives, the new disposition, in the view of its critics, “redirect
Other critics on the left see abundance campaigners as blaming government red tape for what are fundamentally private sector failures. Hannah Story Brown of the Revolving Door Project, for example, argued that the crash in home construction owed not to zoning rules but to the collapse of the housing bubble in and after 2008, “driven by the deregulation of housing finance and a securitization machine that broke the market.”
Similarly, Adler-Bell argued that the Abundance vision is “smaller than it purports to be, myopic about power, and flattering to those who have it.”
But there’s a secret hidden in plain sight in Klein and Thompson’s book: They might be closer to the left overall than either they or their critics acknowledge. In the arresting techno-utopian opening pages of their book, Klein and Thompson describe a world of cheap and clean energy, abundant and affordable fresh food grown in skyscraper farms, cures to diseases that have long plagued humanity — and affordable housing for all.
But to get there, they assume an awful lot of what the left is fighting for. “Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek,” they write. “Labor rights” and “economic reforms” sound like the kinds of corrections to inequality that progressives have long supported.
“Higher productivity from AI,” they add, would create shorter workweeks, longer weekends and vacations without any cuts in pay. Why? Because “AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.” It probably occurred to you that sharing the profits from the development of AI across society flies in the face of the deregulatory hopes of many of Silicon Valley’s titans — and, again, is a policy critics to their left would applaud.
There is also this: As Klein and Thompson acknowledge, former president Joe Biden was in many ways an Abundance guy. They rightly praise his investments in infrastructure, technology and clean energy. True, some of the projects (electric car charging stations, for example), were caught up in the red tape they bemoan. But a reckoning with why long-term investment did not have the political payoff Biden hoped for has to be part of the reckoning over whether these ideas can have the political payoff their promoters claim for them. Maybe the good Biden Era news was just drowned out by clamor over inflation and the southern border. Maybe, as Mamdani showed in the New York mayoral primary, a long-term vision has to be tethered more tightly to voters’ immediate concerns. Or maybe the party needs better communicators.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on Oct. 19, 2022, in D.C. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
This accounting by no means exhausts the slings and arrows that have been hurled Abundance’s way, but the energy of this debate suggests that its disciples have struck a nerve. Frustration with government failure is by no means the only reason the country took a gamble on making a man unfit for the office of president of the United States. But it’s certainly part of it. As Dunkelman writes in “Why Nothing Works,” “A government too hamstrung to serve the public good will fuel future waves of conservative populism.” He wrote those words before the 2024 election.
Fifteen years ago, progressive writer Harold Meyerson marveled at the speed with which Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of commerce, Harry Hopkins, pushed through big new projects during the New Deal. He mourned that it had become impossible for contemporary Democrats to repeat the feat.
Responding recently in the American Prospect to the Abundance push, Meyerson agreed that progressives need to find a better balance between “regulation” and “production” or else “their days with the power to make such decisions will be few and far between.”
Nor is it an accident that “Abundance” has drawn an appreciative audience among governors and mayors in big Democratic states where housing shortages, transportation problems and homelessness are commonplace. One of the most alarming portents for Democrats in the 2024 election was how sharply their vote share declined in their traditional bastions — particularly in New York, New Jersey, California and Massachusetts. Progressive politicians in places becoming a much paler shade of blue know they need to find ways to govern better, build faster and deliver more efficiently.
