WCU Article: Why Liberals Lose: Josh Harder, Abundance Caucus, and Making Neoliberalism Great Again

Working Class Unity
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I’ve talked to a few folks about this already, but in the interest of Members wanting to get to know more about our local-ish politics (national), I wanted to make a thread where we could discuss Josh Harder’s “Build America Caucus.” Its disappointing that San Joaquin County of all places gets to be ground zero for this, but maybe we can use it to push an alternative narrative.

Here is a list of links I bookmarked, in no particular order.

Introducing the Build America Caucus

Various commentary around the abundance agenda, not necessarily Harder’s caucus

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During the last steering committee meeting, we decided to hold a meeting to go over the Abundance agenda / Harder’s new committee and see if it would be a useful way to tackle the topic of our next article: why liberals always lose.

We scheduled the meeting for Thursday 6-8pm. Zoom link can be found at the calendar link.

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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

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Debunking Abundance Nonsense w/ Matt Bruenig & Luke Savage - Give Them An Argument Podcast w/ Ben Burgis - 4/18/25

TLDR - Takeaways

1.) Liberals have an aversion to the idea that there are clearly identifiable antagonists in politics, something that conservatives are not squeamish to use and exploit to their advantage. They don’t like politics to be structured around conflict.

2.) The political practicality argument is selectively applied by liberals when trying to shut down the discourse around policies they don’t want to engage in. Bruenig in his review of Abundance proposes the “Matt Yglesias Theory,” that because Democrats have become more of a party of college-educated professional types and abandoned their working class roots, they’ve taken on an attitude similar to that of English gentry, where liberal commentators like Yglesias and Ezra Klein are compelled to explain to the common folk, the “poors”, as to why social programs like Medicare For All are impractical.

3.) Liberals view politics as exclusively a concern amongst elites that must be played out through think tanks, corporate entities, and government sectors. They are deeply disinterested in receiving input from the common public who they claim to represent. Most liberal policies carry an air of condescension and paternalism, that liberal politicians “know better” than their constituents.

4.) Liberals will present every social issue as one study or policy proposal away from being fixed. They think that every problem can be technocratically resolved with just enough focus on the problem. Liberals don’t like having to sit with unclear issues that don’t offer any easy solutions. They don’t like to sit with uncertainties. To liberals, everything is just a puzzle that can eventually be solved.

Since this was a podcast I listened to (several times), I’ve summarized the most key and interesting details brought up during this conversation. For each bullet point, I will add the name of which of the three commentators was making the point.

Luke Savage’s review of Abundance on his Substack provides a more comprehensive outline to what he talks about in this conversation, for those interested in looking at further commentaries on Abundance. Savage doesn’t have a paywall on this specific piece so it’s easy to access.

https://www.lukewsavage.com/p/the-paucity-of-abundance

  • Luke Savage: Abundance argues that there are too many administrative and regulatory costs when it comes to building infrastructure, like housing, transportation, and energy. The second part of the book talks about there being too much risk aversion in scientific research and innovation. Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson argue that the “Left” (in their case, meaning the Democratic Party?) has been too focused on a “scarcity” mindset and propping up the welfare state, not allowing the private sector to be as productive and innovative as they could be. Essentially Abundance as a book is offering “sensible” supply-side liberalism. The authors claim that this form of Third-Way liberalism will produce a utopian society by 2050, as imagined in the first pages of the book.

  • Matt Bruenig: Klein & Thompson argue that the Left has been too focused on the welfare state, even though liberals haven’t been truly invested in it for decades. The authors’ terminology use for the “Left” seems to shift as to which groups they’re talking about, whether they’re meaning center-left Democrats, progressive/social Democrats, socialist/far-left fringes, etc.

  • Luke Savage: Authors are evasive about topics like wealth redistribution. American liberalism since the conservative ascendancy in the 1980s has stood in opposition to the maintenance of the welfare state as portrayed in Scandinavian social democracies. Klein & Thompson conflate centrist programs in America like the Affordable Care Act as equivalent to socialized medicine and other progressive social welfare programs in Scandinavia without backing up their claims. Apparently, Klein & Thompson are quoted as saying in Abundance: “For decades, American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark.” Klein & Thompson have found an oblique way to present the familiar, centrist critique of social democracy.

  • Matt Bruenig: Klein & Thompson misrepresent how Chinese and Scandinavian welfare states actually operate. Welfare states don’t just redistribute wealth, i.e., give money to people. They also pull certain goods and services out of the private sector in order to establish universal programs. They create certain entitlements/incentives separate from the private sector to bolster state capacity. People living within strong welfare states are given a higher degree of power over their workplace because they are afforded alternative income options through universal programs so they aren’t beholden to their employer for services like healthcare.

  • The authors want to draw a distinction between increasing supply and changing distribution in America. Essentially, the authors want to change the production of infrastructure development in this country. When talking about “abundance” what Klein & Thompson really need to consider is distribution. The question of distribution involves how it will occur now and into the future. At what proportions, at what levels of inequality? Authors are only focused on production, not distribution. In fact, “production” is a more useful term than “abundance” to describe what they’re really getting at. Without properly examining how things like wealth, homes, roads, bridges, rail systems, etc. are going to be fairly distributed across the nation, the entire Abundance agenda becomes pointless and takes us back to square one, in that we already have plenty of production (abundance), the problem is how it’s distributed.

  • Ben Burgis: Klein & Thompson quote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto in a way that makes Marx & Engels sound like liberals whose only problem with capitalism was that it didn’t produce enough for the poor. They specifically cite Marx & Engels’ comments on the transition of feudalism to capitalism in Europe, how capitalism emerged as the prevailing economic system in early modern Europe because feudalism “no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets” (59). Klein & Thompson are quoted as such:

  • Quotation above from my personal copy of the Communist Manifesto:
    Moore, Samuel, translator. The Communist Manifesto. By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 1848. Simon & Schuster, 1964, p. 59.

They did not want to end this revolution in production. They wanted to accelerate it just as feudalism blocked production that only capitalism could unleash. So did capitalism constrain an abundance that a new paradigm might really unleash. At the core of this analysis of the economy was an idea that’s come to be called the forces of production. Marx observed that many companies’ obsession with profit kept the entire economy from exploring ideas that threatened incumbent margins or failed to produce immediate returns. Among capitalism’s many sins, Marx wrote, was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place. An economy run amok with useless federating serves the rich few at the expense of the poor many. Marx’s aim was not to return the abundance machine off but to direct it towards a shared abundance to unburden the forces of production and make possible what would have been impossible to imagine. There’s much he got wrong, but one need not be a Communist to see the wisdom in this analysis.

  • Matt Bruenig: Marx acknowledges in his writings that capitalism contains within it contradictory forces and institutions that ultimately either increase or deter production, that can prevent a capitalist system in a country from growing exponentially. A more honest approach of Abundance would interrogate how capitalism does things against its own benefit. Even Klein & Thompson in their own opaque way of recontextualizing Marx admit that forces like property relations and corporate profit motives are what’s hampering infrastructure development in America. But they’re only truly interested in technocratic tweaks in America’s current economic system.

  • Luke Savage: Klein & Thompson’s strange interpretation of Marx and of how leftists supposedly perceive the functions of the welfare state is intellectually lazy. Savage says that it’s “worthy of a Thomas Friedman column" in how intellectually bankrupt Abundance is as an agenda or theory.

  • Ben Burgis: How Abundance as a political agenda is framed in the book makes it open to legitimate criticism as to why the authors don’t mention policy measures that have been openly proposed within the Democratic Party in the past like Medicare For All or the Green New Deal.

  • Matt Bruenig: At times, Klein & Thompson are writing from a policy particular and policy goal level, or even a philosophical framework level, but very poorly. The book itself isn’t very interesting without the philosophical framework around it. Without it, it’d just be a section in a Project 2029 white paper for Democrats.

  • Luke Savage: Refers to a Substack named JoeWrote who theorizes that Abundance is the culmination of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson writing two different books and then being persuaded to merge them together. The basis of Abundance can be found in a series of articles Klein & Thompson have been writing since 2021. Initially the idea of “abundance” came out of the idea that there’d be a second Biden/Democratic administration after the 2024 election, and that some of the Abundance Movement’s ideas stem from some of the better policies coming out of the Biden administration. What might have initially been a white paper was given a grander narrative to help position a “new” political agenda for Democrats for 2026 and 2028. Abundance can also potentially be seen as an attempt to appease Silicon Valley types who were nominally liberal/libertarian just a few years ago, but have now drifted further right. Abundance is neither cohesive nor intellectually coherent, which requires any critical thinker to read around it and read into the glaring omissions. The book’s omissions are so glaring that they have to be deliberate.

https://www.joewrote.com/p/ezra-klein-should-be-honest-about

  • Matt Bruenig: New NGOs have been popping up with “Abundance” in their names. Literally, over the course of a few months, Abundance has turned into a growing movement that Democrats hope will catch on. There’s now “abundance conferences” popping up in Washington, D.C. Liberal think tanks and donors are astroturfing Abundance within Democrat circles. Abundance as a concept is being thrown around in a similar way as to how think tanks or NGOs try to move policy ideas around DC. No politician has staff that can actually write policy themselves, so a lot of policies Democrats or Republicans hawk are typically outsourced from third-parties like think tanks.

  • Luke Savage: Much of the momentum around Abundance is an attempt by liberal policymakers in crafting a lexicon for Democrats to learn and to be trained on before the 2026 midterms. Representatives like Josh Harder in Stockton and Richie Torres of the Bronx in New York have already started talking in “abundance speak”. Ezra Klein had an interview with a Massachusetts congressmember, Jake Auchincloss, on his NY Times show back in February, who seems to be an early Abundance convert. Auchincloss has already learned the terms, no matter how convoluted, which demonstrates that there’s already an infrastructure in place to sell the Abundance agenda to Democrats. Savage finds it funny that liberals really think that they can sell Abundance to the American populace, because as of right now, the terminology behind Abundance is too convoluted and opaque for it to connect with working class voters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tnQTEJKOeU

  • Ben Burgis: Most leftist and center-left critiques of Abundance such as Bruenig and Savage’s have stated that most of Klein & Thompson’s proposals are fine individually and on case-by-case situations, like giving more grant funding to early-career researchers, specific zoning law reforms, etc. However, Klein & Thompson showcase a lack of interest in “parceling out the present or future” in their Abundance agenda. Burgis asks if what the authors are proposing should really be considered “abundance?” Since their agenda is based around a series of individual “reforms,” the supposed gains from these “reforms” will actually be a lot smaller than what the overall agenda proposes.

  • Matt Bruenig: Klein & Thompson fixate on a housing development project located in San Francisco that provides affordable housing where the money to build per unit was a lot less compared to other housing projects in California. The development project was funded entirely through private money to avoid state interference. But the units themselves are really small, about the size of prison cells. This case study Klein & Thompson use in their book conflicts with the grander claims of their Abundance narrative in that building micro apartments really isn’t abundance in the way most people think of it, in that being abundant means you have a lot of something and aren’t worried about running out of it for some time. Something like a micro apartment is better than being homeless for the bottom 5% of Americans, but they’d still not be living an abundant life, just barely scraping by. It’s only marginally better than living on the streets. That Klein & Thompson don’t mention the size of the apartments undermines a lot of their Abundance narrative.

  • Luke Savage: Journalist Ryan Grim on Breaking Points responded to something Ezra Klein mentioned on his podcast interview with Jon Stewart, that the Biden administration had spent a lot of money ($42.5 billion) investing in rural broadband and had little to show for it. Grim points out that telecom companies like Comcast influenced politicians to ensure carveouts in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act bill before it was passed and signed into law in 2021 so that they wouldn’t have to compete with public infrastructure. What Klein uses as an example of Democrats misallocating money is actually an example of corporate interests interfering in public projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi8IBAEpAd4

  • Luke Savage: Klein & Thompson simultaneously claim that there’s a NIMBYism indicative of individualist strands found in the New Left, but also of Democrats being too focused on central bureaucracy, that’s stifling growth in America. The level of analysis that the authors are using is “pop sociology” at best. There’s no depth to anything they’re saying. Klein & Thompson also offer their own revisionist take on how New Deal and Great Frontier programs began to falter by the 1970s:

In the 1970s the New Deal order collapsed beneath the weight of crises it could not contain. Stagflation and the Vietnam War most notably. But there was more to it than that. Abroad, the horrors and absurdities of communism became clearer. At home, millions of oppressed Americans marched, sat in, and organized for rights. A change in values took hold. The promise of collective action lost its luster. Nurturing the dignity and genius of the individual in the face of regimes that seem to squelch both became the reigning ethos.

  • The legacies of the New Deal and Great Frontier were undone because of a concerted conservative political project, which Klein & Thompson omit in this backstory. This omission demonstrates how liberals have an aversion to the idea that there are actually antagonists in politics. They don’t like politics to be structured around conflict.

  • Matt Bruenig: Ezra Klein is too knowledgeable on the subject of healthcare to completely dismiss Medicare For All as bad, so he doesn’t engage in the topic at all in Abundance. Bruenig cites the irony of how liberals obsess over the supposed impracticality of Medicare For All, but then propose a vision or policy that is untested and impractical.

  • The clearest “villain” Klein & Thompson present is that of the American homeowner, who make up about 75% of the voting population. The politics of Abundance are impractical because in practice it would require assembling an electorate willing to be onboard with policy that would definitely negatively impact homeowners and strip more of them of their assets and economic power. Bruenig claims that Klein & Thompson are failing to see the clear political obstacles in implementing Abundance as a real national policy. According to Census.gov, there was about 174 million registered voters according to statistics from the 2024 election. Klein & Thompson are implicitly advocating for policies that would be profoundly unpopular and detrimental to at least 130 million Americans.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-presidential-election-voting-registration-tables.html

  • Luke Savage: We are constantly presented with the assertion from political leaders that “nothing is possible” in America. We’re told that nothing can happen in the public sphere, whereas in the private sphere, we’re told of grand claims by tech billionaires like Bill Gates or Elon Musk that AI will soon reduce the 40 hour work week to 25 hours, that a Mars colony will be possible in a few years, claims that don’t stand under scrutiny compared to the evidence that demonstrates universal healthcare as a material reality that’s already been proved to work in other developed nations.

  • Klein & Thompson cite political scientist and historian Gary Gerstle as to the components needed for a successful political agenda: (1) making political inroads amongst a broad swath of people; (2) big donors; (3) think tanks and policy networks; (4) inspiring candidates; (5) an inspiring message. What Abundance lacks is a plan on actually organizing a real mass movement besides astroturfing the Democratic Party. You need to organize popular pressure to exert demands on political institutions. Klein, Thompson and other liberals onboard with Abundance want a mass movement without actually taking into consideration the demands of the masses.

  • Ben Burgis: If you’re going to have ambitious goals that require you to overcome vested political opposition, then it is critical to have a popular movement with majority support within a society that claims to be a democracy. For Abundance to work, you’d have to implement it in a way that benefits the majority of the American population.

  • Many of the anxieties that stoke opposition to construction projects and rapid development are a result of homeowners’ rational fears of sacrificing or losing some of their economic wealth. These kinds of fears that inform public opposition to infrastructure development could easily turn the utopian vision of Abundance into a dystopian nightmare. Burgis quotes from Bruenig’s review of Abundance that for this agenda to work, you’d have to create a more equal society first to eliminate a lot of the incentives that drive both public and private opposition to infrastructure development.

  • Matt Bruenig: You can’t just focus on either production or distribution because both relate to each other. You actually have to think about the political economy of what you’re proposing as a policy/agenda.

  • Bruenig made a calculation to identify income loss if you were to drop 10 percentage points in income distribution in America, say being at the 60th percentile and falling to the 50th because of a scenario like losing your job and then having to take a job that pays less due to technologies like AI making your previous employment redundant. In this situation, your income would decline by 25 - 30%, which is true more or less across the board except for the extremely poor and wealthy. America on average gains 2% of economic growth each year. Even if America could increase growth by 3%, which is a 50% bump, it’d take about 18 years for somebody on average to climb back up to the income percentile they were initially at. If economic differences between percentiles were compressed, where you’d stand to lose only 2 - 3% of your income, then something like Abundance suddenly becomes much more appealing to concerned Americans.

  • The more unequal a society is, the more invested one is in holding onto their economic wealth. The more equal a society, the more likely you’re willing to sacrifice some of your wealth to maximize the average living outcome for everyone. The average outcome will become more important to you if everyone is living within similar means. Wage distribution in Scandinavian countries is hugely compressed; the gap between the 90th and 10th percentile is much smaller in Scandinavia than in America. Losing your job won’t be as severe a blow if you live in a society that gives you good unemployment benefits and universal healthcare, and where there isn’t a wide discrepancy in worker pay. A good chunk of your income would be going to free college, childcare, healthcare, etc., so you’d stand to be okay with making less in return for these benefits. Inequality makes people afraid of change because change could mean that they might fall down the economic ladder and never recover.

  • Ben Burgis: Abundance as a book and agenda frames an internal debate within the Democratic Party as to what kind of liberalism is the best to combat against Trump by the next election cycle. The crux of Abundance is that a lot of big, Democrat-controlled cities like L.A. are mismanaged. That premise is true, but Klein & Thompson are treating Abundance as an all-encompassing answer to all of America’s problems. They also fail to circle around to the fact that plenty of Republican-controlled cities in America are also woefully mismanaged. Ultimately, the vision of Abundance is not that inspiring of a vision since its narrative is tied to boring topics like zoning law reform that don’t mobilize voters.

  • Luke Savage: People are less likely to be creative and innovative if they’re forced to work long hours that alienate them from more fulfilling avenues in life, if they’re spending most of their mental and emotional health on their work just so that they can earn the bare necessities. People flourish more when they don’t have to worry as much about healthcare, rent, childcare, the price of food & gas, etc. It’s a mistake to construe innovation as something that can be perfectly achieved. Innovation is a much more nebulous process that requires a lot of room for failure. It is not easily quantifiable. You can’t “wonk” your way into a better future.

  • Matt Bruenig: Capitalism horribly misallocates the talent of people. Bruenig provides an anecdotal example of the smartest kid he knew in high school, who won several state science competitions in Texas. Bruenig caught up with this acquaintance 5 - 6 years after high school, discovering that he had a Wall Street job following the stock for Monster energy drinks. Bruenig’s high school acquaintance could’ve easily been a renowned physicist instead of a mid-tier stock broker if our economic system did a better job incentivizing people to go into government-funded, non-profit fields.

  • Luke Savage: The current Silicon Valley model of “innovation” is incredibly wasteful if we look at companies that turned out to be fraudulent like WeWork, Theranos, Builder.ai, and FTX. It’s a high-risk environment where huge amounts of capital is wasted on companies who fail to deliver on a product, fail to make their money back, and/or turn out to be a scam. Statistically, one out of 100 tech start-ups might create a consumer product that sells well and people actually like. The most important innovations in American society since the 20th century have come out of public investment/subsidies.

5

At the last General Meeting, we discussed how we wanted to frame the next “Why Liberals Lose” article using this new Abundance Agenda as a case study.

Some key points that Members raised were:

  • The abundance agenda claims that scarcity is caused by bad ideas, excessive regulation, and a progressive fear of growth
  • In reality, capitalists won’t build things that reduce their profits or if the profit is not large enough
  • There is a valid critique that NGOs/excessive bureaucracy does present roadblocks, but the answer is greater democratic control of decision making, not putting it in the hands of the wealthy few and hoping they do what is right for the vast majority of people
  • Democrats keep recycling the same neoliberal ideas about private + public partnerships and cutting regulations
  • There’s a disconnect between Democratic Party politicians + their wealthy base and the majority of working people

Article Outline
We voted to approve this as a general outline for the article:
1. Neoliberalism 2.0/3.0

  • Show how the abundance agenda is just a repackaged version of old neoliberal ideas

2. Material analysis framework

  • Teach readers how doing a material analysis and asking questions such as “Who owns? Who profits? Who labors?” are good places to start analyzing people’s claims, instead of taking them at their word because they work for Vox

3.Why liberal worldview makes them lose

  • Democrats promise things they cannot deliver without fighting the wealthy portions of their base
  • This disconnect leads to them appearing as if they cannot govern, followed by electoral losses

4. Practical Examples

  • Housing, infrastructure decay
  • Showing how our explanation for how the world works may resonate more with people

The goal is to give readers the tools they need to see through idealist arguments and understand the material forces that shape society.

We have two upcoming meetings to further discuss and start drafting this article:

June 23rd (Monday) - 6pm-8pm | Working Meeting - “Why Liberals Lose” Article Review (Calendar)
June 30th (Monday) - 6pm-8pm | Working Meeting - “Why Liberals Lose” Article Review (Calendar)