Lawn-Sign Liberalism vs. Supply-Side Progressivism
"Supply-side progressives" like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are ultimately technocrats, not libertarians. But they recognize that more is better than less and that a good society is not zero-sum.
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press, 297 pages, $30
At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of "what labor wants" added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. "We want more," Gompers said in an 1890 speech. "We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more."
More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride "little boxes made of ticky-tacky," but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more.
In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk. The expansiveness of President Lyndon Johnson and California Gov. Pat Brown became the austerity of President Jimmy Carter and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Activists unleashed lawsuits to block public and private construction. Government spending began to skew away from public goods like parks and roads and toward income transfers and public employee compensation. Outside the digital world of bits, regulation made achieving more increasingly difficult if not downright impossible—in the public sphere as well as the private.
With the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the politics of more came to mean giving people money or loan guarantees to buy things: houses, college degrees, child care, health insurance. But regulation grew along with the subsidies, and the supply of these goods didn't expand to meet demand. The subsidies just pushed up prices. Instead of delivering bounty, government programs fed shortages, and shortages fed anger and resentment. "Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward," write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance.
Klein and Thompson believe in supply-side progressivism, a term Klein coined in a 2021 New York Times column. Abundance is their manifesto on behalf of "a liberalism that builds." The authors want an activist government to emphasize creation rather than restriction, generating abundance rather than stoking resentment. Although concerned about climate change, they have no sympathy with the degrowthers who invoke it to argue for shutting down industry and imposing stasis. Making people worse off, they believe, is not a progressive cause.
"We imagine a future not of less but of more," they write. "We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity. We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants. We will not turn back climate change by persuading the world to starve itself of growth. It is not merely that these visions are unrealistic. It is that they are counterproductive. They will not achieve the futures they seek. They will do more harm than good."
Klein and Thompson take on the "lawn-sign liberalism," endemic in California, where signs declaring that "Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal…sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize against efforts to add the new homes that would bring those values closer to reality."
Progress, the authors argue, is not about enlarging a familiar pie. "The difference between an economy that grows and an economy that stagnates is change. When you grow an economy, you hasten a future that is different," they write. "The more growth there is, the more radically the future diverges from the past."
Abundance is the left-leaning complement to James Pethokoukis's 2023 book The Conservative Futurist. Both books represent a growing intellectual movement to replace the zero-sum politics of pessimism and sclerosis with a hopeful vision of progress and abundance. "The nostalgia that permeates so much of today's right and no small part of today's left is no accident," Klein and Thompson write. "We have lost the faith in the future that once powered our optimism. We fight instead over what we have, or what we had."
Although Abundance doesn't question the many environmental laws passed in the early 1970s, it does challenge the expansive interpretations that let activists block projects ranging from new apartments to wind farms. Klein and Thompson explain how a single court decision turned the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into a procedural barrier against new construction.
Signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1970, CEQA required substantial government projects to file environmental impact reports before proceeding. Neither the governor nor the legislature saw it as a sweeping measure. In 1972, however, the state Supreme Court ruled that a private developer's plans to build condominiums and shops fell under the law merely because the project needed a permit. Regulation, in other words, became an excuse to treat private projects as the equivalent of freeways and dams. In the words of a Sierra Club lobbyist quoted in the book, CEQA had come to cover "anybody engaged commercially in putting two sticks of wood together." The ruling produced an enormous industry of lawyers and consultants while choking off construction. It was a prime example of lawn-sign liberalism: Affluent professionals benefited, while the general public got much less for its tax money and its housing dollar.
Within the abundance movement, Klein and Thompson fall into the "eco-modernist" camp, embracing technology and prosperity as solutions to environmental problems. "This book is motivated," they write, "in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy to head off the threat of climate change." They worry that regulation and litigation are blocking green infrastructure. They want to make it easier to build solar arrays, wind farms, and the transmission lines to connect them to a new smart grid. They deem the war on nuclear power a massive government failure.
"By some counts, nuclear power is safer than wind and cleaner than solar," they write. "It is inarguably safer than burning coal and petrol. And yet the US—facing a crisis of global warming—has almost stopped building nuclear power reactors and plants entirely. Between 1973 and 2024, the country started and finished only three new nuclear reactors. And it has shut down more nuclear plants than it's opened in most of our lifetimes. That is not a failure of the private market to responsibly bear risk but of the federal government to properly weigh risk."
Klein and Thompson want political authorities to have more discretion. They recount how Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro used an emergency declaration to speed repairs after a tanker truck exploded and destroyed a bridge on Interstate 95, a crucial artery through the northeast. After he waived the normal procedures for taking bids, drawing up environmental reports, and halting construction at the first sign of rain, rebuilding took just 12 days rather than months.
"The process Shapiro used would typically be illegal," Klein and Thompson write. "Yet national Democrats and Pennsylvania voters alike loved it. What does that say about the typical process?" Government, they conclude, "needs to justify itself not through the rules it follows but through the outcomes it delivers."
That prescription sounds like common sense: Deliver the goods. Give the public what it wants. Make taxpayers feel they're getting their money's worth. But rules matter. A strongman unhampered by picayune restrictions may seem efficient at first, but even a wise and virtuous abundance czar will make serious mistakes when left unchecked by either rules or competition. Such mistakes are why rules accumulate in the first place.
By their nature, manifestos are not deep. Abundance is more thorough than most, but in rallying progressives to the cause of more it avoids the hard questions. More what? Who decides and how? Where does feedback come from?
Klein and Thompson isolate much of their abundance agenda from the valuable information conveyed by prices, preferring central direction even to market-based mechanisms like carbon taxes. "The market cannot, on its own, distinguish between the riches that flow from burning coal and the wealth that is created by bettering battery storage. Government can," Klein and Thompson write. "The market will not, on its own, fund the risky technologies whose payoff is social rather than economic. Government must."
So the book doesn't make the case that California should have a high-speed rail system, for instance. It simply assumes that high-speed rail would be good and uses California's disastrous project to exemplify the absurdities of procedural progressivism. "In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail," the authors note. But China has also built whole cities that no one wants to live in. It has more steel capacity than it can profitably sell. China has more but not necessarily more of what people want. Who decides and how?
Or take the national network of electric vehicle charging stations authorized in the Biden administration's infrastructure bill. Out of the 500,000 stations promised, Klein and Thompson lament, "by March 2024—more than two years after the bill passed—only seven new chargers were up and running." Assuming that electric charging stations are politically popular, they fear the delay will give the Trump administration credit for their construction.
They misread public sentiment. At a conference put on last summer by the eco-modernist Breakthrough Institute, veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake gave a presentation on climate-related messages that do and do not move voters to support Democrats. The absolute worst message touted the 500,000 charging stations. While most unsuccessful messages had tiny positive effects, this one actually moved people toward Republicans. Don't talk about electric cars, Lake warned. Women in particular hate them, Lake said, because they're terrified of being stranded. But women love hybrids. In the automotive marketplace, hybrids are a success. But the technocratic vision Abundance offers doesn't have a place for them.
In 2022, I served on a Breakthrough Institute conference panel moderated by Klein. As we assembled, he made a point of noting how much we disagree, citing my 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies. "I am a technocrat," he said, a term I use in the book to describe people who "promise to manage change, centrally directing 'progress' according to a predictable plan." They aren't the good guys. I argue instead for a more emergent, bottom-up approach, imagining an open-ended future that relies less on direction by smart guys with political authority and more on grassroots experimentation, competition, and criticism.
What we share are the convictions that more is better than less and that a good society is not zero-sum. These days those beliefs make us allies. We can fight about the rest later.
