Here’s my notes on the two commentary pieces I chose to read/listen to. Block quotes are me quoting from the pieces and then adding my two cents to parts that intrigued me:
What Abundance Lacks - Isabella Weber - Foreign Policy - 5/9/25
- I have a list of six broad takeaways from reading this article to help condense all of our thoughts on reading these pieces in order to identify key reasons as to why “liberals always lose.” It’s also here for those who don’t want to read through all of my more detailed thoughts on Weber’s article.
TLDR - Takeaways
1.) There’s a contemporary misunderstanding about where liberals stand on economic issues that still presents Democrats as being the party of the welfare state, which hasn’t been true since the latter half of the 20th century. Liberals still spread this misconception today either out of sheer ignorance of recent political history, or to purposefully obfuscate from the party’s role in supporting deregulation and other neoliberal practices.
2.) There’s always been scarcity and abundance in America. The real question is who actually has abundant access to goods and services in our current society. The Democratic Party has not been the party of the working class for a very long time, though it still tries to present itself as if it is. Democratic politicians and members of the media like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson won’t even address material interests and power imbalances when talking about policy. Liberals have the tendency to de-politicize class issues, instead presenting them as problems that can be fixed within capitalism without having to reshape our capitalist system.
3.) Nothing about Abundance is new. It’s simply regurgitated neoliberal ideas about deregulation and serving market interests first that Democrats have pushed for 30+ years now. The names may change behind different slogans and policy platforms, but the content is similar.
4.) Liberals are unwilling to honestly engage in discussions of class and power, but they love taking on slogans and platforms that sound vaguely progressive. Abundance as a potential agenda item is simply a distraction for Democrats over how they want to advertise themselves until the next election cycle.
5.) Liberals advocate for policies that are undemocratic, in that they are willing to relinquish control of key sectors of American industry to private corporations with no say from their actual constituencies. Abundance is simply just the latest attempt to sell the current neoliberal regime of thought to the American public, but in a way that sounds less harsh and at least promises a future (albeit unlikely) compared to the conservative version of explicitly cutting social welfare programs like Medicaid and having those most affected by it deal with the fallout on their own.
6.) Liberals will always shift to the Right and concede power to conservatives before ever considering to turn left and address the more progressive elements of the Democratic Party or farther left groups. The abundance agenda exemplifies this mentality in how Ezra Klein himself has framed his ideas on Abundance as a “liberal answer to Elon Musk” and has even received praise from Musk himself on Abundance.
Klein and Thompson’s analysis of the failure of the pre-Trump policy playbook boils down to an unproductive division of labor between Democrats and Republicans.
Klein and Thompson in a simplistic and inaccurate fashion, frame the economic difference between Republicans and Democrats as one side focusing on supply-side, laissez-faire economics, while the other party is more focused on demand side economics. Political Science 101 crap that fails to give a real basic understanding of how both parties actually operate in the 21st-century. The kind of superficial economic divide that the mainstream media often promotes. It has a kernel of truth to it, but hasn’t been accurate for several decades. The authors use this framing to make the argument that Democrats are too focused on maintaining the welfare state rather than producing and innovating, even though Democrats have been fully committed to stripping the welfare state since the Clinton era.
… leaving supply to the market was a bipartisan consensus. The result was an abundant supply of consumer goods and a scarcity of public goods and infrastructure development.
The abundance idea Klein & Thompson promote is ridiculous because, as Weber points out, America’s already been practicing “abundance” in the very manner the authors seem to suggest. They are essentially saying: “more neoliberalism, please.” With the gradual stripping of the welfare state in America and other Western nations since the rise of neoliberalism by the 1970s, the forced-upon deal to the working class for a growing lack in quality public services and social safety nets in order to make private corporations wealthier was an increase or “abundance” in consumer goods made cheaply in parts of the world with fewer labor protections like China. There’s always been scarcity and abundance in America. The real question is who actually has access to abundance in our current society.
… the vision in Abundance mostly neglects questions of power and redistribution.
Klein & Thompson acknowledge a “scarcity” in infrastructure that needs to be resolved, but seem to completely disregard and admonish the idea that a stronger welfare state is needed to actually improve American life. They’re interested in controlled and targeted measures to increase infrastructure and manufacturing in America, with the proposed claim that if Americans had an “abundance” of housing, energy, transportation, manufacturing jobs, etc., then those gains would automatically benefit all Americans, that there would be no need for economic redistribution. Klein & Thompson seem to be using their abundance theory as a way for liberals to promote the supposed goals/benefits of economic redistribution without actually proposing redistribution. Instead, what they’re really proposing seems to be “neoliberalism 2.0” - that the private sector instead of the state will rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure if we just deregulate smartly, and that the “abundance” from this will “trickle down” to the bottom 90% of people.
From where you sit, the problem is not that there is not enough material wealth around but that you are shut out; that after working long hours, juggling care work and several jobs, you are still living in scarcity while others are dwelling in abundance.
Weber’s sentence here I feel pinpoints a level of frustration that Klein & Thompson are unwilling to honestly engage in: that the majority of working Americans that they claim will benefit from Abundance are already deeply skeptical about these kinds of agendas/policy platforms that Democrats turn into talking points that sound vaguely progressive. Many working class people disinterested in and who’ve divested from politics might not be able to fully articulate their skepticism/frustration with both parties, but they do understand that they are being ripped off in some way. Weber questions the efficacy of Abundance as a real policy platform and views it as something little more than a “distraction” for Democrats to fixate on that fails to address or even acknowledge the power conflicts and issue over distribution of this “abundance”. Most people would still be screwed over if an agenda like this were to be implemented, contrary to what Klein & Thompson believe. Weber also views the Abundance agenda and in extension previous policy paradigms Democrats have relied upon as wholly undemocratic. The Abundance agenda would be giving more private companies control and influence over industries that traditionally have been administered, either fully or partly by the federal government and/or respective state governments. Based on how the authors present Abundance, it’d be mainly outsourced to corporations to implement with little to no representation from actual American voters.
Before Abundance caught on as the new, catchy slogan Democrats seem to be flocking to at the moment, Weber reminds her readers that before this, there was Kamala Harris’s “opportunity economy” during her presidential campaign in 2024. As can still be found on her campaign website, Kamala’s economic agenda was focused on lowering the costs in response to inflation, making housing affordable, investing in small business and American manufacturing, etc., a lot of the kind of liberal, technocratic platitudes and promises that Klein & Thompson also seem to make in their book. Liberals have the tendency to use vague and harmonious concepts like “Opportunity” or “Abundance” that gloss over inequality in order to appear progressive without actually committing to real progressive actions. Instead, committing to smaller actions that may help a very small and specific group of people, but nothing addressing systemic issues that affect people who need the most help. Kamala’s “Opportunity Economy” failed to make an impression because her campaign was too squeamish to talk about the economy because then they’d feel pressured in having to talk about economic inequality. Weber argues that the only thing that will actually mobilize people in taking the Democratic Party seriously again is if it genuinely addresses people’s material concerns. Abundance and slogans before it are just obfuscating from real questions of power in this country.
https://www.kamalaharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Policy_Book_Economic-Opportunity.pdf
If this kind of nuance is dropped and all regulations are seen as blockage or anti-abundance, that risks playing into the hands of DOGE-style deregulation.
The focal point outlined in Abundance is cutting bureaucratic “red tape” to speed up the building of housing and infrastructure. Klein & Thompson focus on zoning laws around the country (particularly Texas) and certain environmental protection laws they claim that NIMBY property management estates and municipal governments take advantage of to prevent housing/infrastructure from being built. A key case study they use is California’s failure to build a high-speed rail whereas China has successfully build multiple high-speed rails already in the matter of decades that California has failed to build even one.
Weber points out that Elon Musk on X praised Ezra Klein on a recent interview he did with Jon Stewart about Abundance. Weber uses this as an example to explain how the Abundance agenda aesthetically is not truly a progressive economic agenda, but really more of a libertarian call for “sensible” deregulation. In this light, one can view the Abundance agenda perhaps as part of the Democrats’ strategy of winning back some of the Silicon Valley tech professionals and billionaires like Musk who have shifted to the right in the last few years, whereas Silicon Valley was at least portrayed as nominally progressive during the Obama era. Klein himself even did an op-ed video for the New York Times presenting his thoughts on Abundance titled “There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo&t=1s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwjxVRfUV_4
Weber is a German economist and currently associate professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also published a book in 2021 titled How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate that offers an explanation for China’s current economic growth. The last section of Weber’s review is her taking umbrage in how Klein & Thompson characterize China’s economic success as wholly a result of surgical market deregulation mixed with the abuse of an abundant supply of Chinese laborers. Weber argues that Klein & Thompson’s analysis of China’s market successes has more to do than just the power abuses of an authoritarian government, pointing out that plenty of authoritarian governments with loose environmental protection laws and building regulations have failed to succeed at the level of China. Weber boils down China’s success to the fact that China actually has state capacity to pull off something as expensive and time-consuming as high-speed rail, whereas America hasn’t truly had the capacity to pull something like that off in 40+ years.
Weber cites a 2019 study from the World Bank that explains key factors to how China was able to quickly and efficiently build high-speed rail: (1) creating a 15-year plan laying out long-term goals with successive five-year plans to revise goals based on progress; (2) incentivizing special-purpose construction and management companies to work with central and provincial governments in China; (3) coordination between rail manufacturers, research institutions and engineering centers; (4) hiring competent project managers, giving them clear goals and responsibilities, and providing specific performance-based compensation that incentivizes them to stay on the project long-term rather than being headhunted by a more lucrative private company; (5) high standards in design quality and building procedures; (6) enabling a steady supply of high-speed rail projects in order to sustain a capable supply of workers who know how to build them.
To get closer to the utopian vision Klein & Thompson lay out in the first pages of their book, Weber argues that the best approach to do so would be to actually implement a “multi-solving,” whole government approach similar to China. Instead of relying on private companies to just build and produce largely uncoordinated or using a top-down executive action, community, worker and environmental interests all need to be taken into consideration in order to ensure that the “abundance” will actually be fairly distributed. Doing it this way would also help build more trust, especially within communities that have already been ravaged by deregulation.
https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/933411559841476316/pdf/Chinas-high-speed-rail-development.pdf