I have had a fascinating few months. “Abundance,” the book I wrote with Derek Thompson, is either going to save the Democratic Party or destroy it. You think I’m kidding. Here’s The Wall Street Journal’s headline: “Can the ‘Abundance Agenda’ Save the Democrats?” Here’s The Nation: “Why the ‘Abundance Agenda’ Could Sink the Democratic Party.” The Atlantic placed the book at the center of “the coming Democratic civil war.”
Before “Abundance” came out, I worried that its argument would be too agreeable to generate much debate. I didn’t foresee Ragnarok.
But I was wrong about who would perceive it as a threat. The book is largely a critique of how Democrats have governed in the places where they’ve held power. But the obvious targets of that critique — blue-state governors like Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul and top Obama and Biden administration officials — have largely embraced it. Maura Healy, the governor of Massachusetts, laid out a plan for “housing abundance.” More than one top Democrat I expected to react defensively to the argument told me that they felt that they could have written it.
This is, for Democrats, a liquid moment. The party is reimagining itself after its crushing loss in 2024, and a lot is riding on which critiques are woven into its renewal. And so the backlash to the book has come from a faction of the party that saw itself rising within the wreckage and worries that “Abundance” will derail its ascendance: the anti-corporate populists.
“Abundance” is an effort to focus more of American politics on a surprisingly neglected question: What do we need more of, and what is stopping us from getting it? It is that focus that some of my friends on the populist left object to. Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law professor who’s a central figure on the anti-monopolist left, told me that her problem with “Abundance” wasn’t the policies but the central question: “We should be focusing Democratic politics and politics in general on the problem of concentrated power and the way in which concentrated power is making it impossible to do things.”
Demand Progress, a leftist advocacy group, went so far as to commission a poll to see which message appealed to more voters. Voters were asked to choose between the two framings of “the big problem” in American life: Was it “‘bottlenecks’ that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production or build new roads and bridges” or rather that “big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government.” Unsurprisingly, the latter won.
I would also advise politicians not to center their messages on “bottlenecks,” but let’s ignore that for now. I found this poll interesting. It reflects a tendency to treat actual problems as secondary to campaign messaging. No matter how well a message polls, it’s not going to solve a problem unless it is right about what is causing the problem in the first place. And Democrats aren’t struggling primarily because they choose the wrong messages. They’re struggling because they fail to solve problems.
I often focus on housing because it is — by far — the largest item in the average family’s budget. If you want to help the working class, the place to start is housing. Can you fix the housing market by breaking corporate power?
A recent RAND report compared the costs of producing multifamily housing — both market-rate housing and affordable housing — in California and Texas. Per square foot, it cost 2.3 times as much to build market-rate housing in California as it does in Texas. If what you care about is affordable housing, the gap is even worse: It costs more than four times as much to build a square foot of affordable housing in California as a square foot of market-rate housing in Texas, largely because of the avalanche of everything-bagel requirements that public money triggers.
It also takes, on average, 22 months longer to bring a project to completion in California. I find it implausible to argue that the reason for this disparity is that Texas has solved the problem of corporate power and oligarchic influence and California has not.
In March, Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago, tweeted that Chicago had “invested $11 billion” to “build 10,000 more units of affordable housing.” That nets out to $1.1 million per unit. If you dig into the process for selecting affordable housing projects, you’ll find there’s a rubric that awards each project up to 100 points for fulfilling different goals. A project gets 10 points for “advanced level” green-building certification; it gets 11 points for “BIPOC development control” or a woman-led development team; it gets seven points for fulfilling certain accessibility requirements; “cost containment” is worth three.
Johnson is the most proudly left-wing big-city mayor in the country. He is happy to attack corporate power and oligarchic control. He’s also the least popular big-city mayor in the country and may well end up as the least popular mayor in Chicago’s history. Policy failure breeds political failure.
Don’t get me wrong. Corporations and billionaires do have too much power over the economy and the government. The tax code is deformed around their preferences. The campaign finance system is designed for them to freely funnel money to their favored candidates and causes. There are markets in which corporate concentration or monopolization raises prices and chokes off competition. All kinds of facially neutral processes — from the writing of regulations to the rules that govern procurement — are bent toward their enrichment. President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cuts $1.1 trillion in taxes for Americans making more than $500,000 and cuts $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and food stamps. The Trump administration is proving itself a festival of corruption and self-dealing.
But these are the problems that Democrats already know how to see. What bedevils the party is the problems that they refuse to see. Steven Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, is wise on this point. Populism “only works if it’s full-spectrum populism,” he said on “The Realignment” podcast. “If it looks like you only deploy populism to attack the alternative governing coalition to yours, then people don’t believe it. They don’t believe you’re really on their side. They think you’re just a regular partisan.”
Many of my more leftist friends and antagonists have asked me if “Abundance” has “a theory of power.” I often say it does — but they’re not going to like it. And that’s in part because its theory of power is liberal rather than populist.
Cas Mudde, the Dutch political scientist, defines populism as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite.’” Different forms of populism populate these groups differently. Right-wing populism defines the people in geographic and nationalistic and racialist terms; the corrupt elite tend to be educated, foreign and cosmopolitan. Left-wing populism tends to sever society economically: the 99 percent against the 1 percent or the corporations against everyone else.
What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored. When I said we needed “a liberalism that builds,” David Dayen, the editor of The American Prospect, responded that “we need a liberalism that builds power” and that the way to get it is for the government “actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”
Every policy, in this telling, has two goals. One is the goal of the policy or the project; perhaps you’re trying to decarbonize the economy or build affordable housing or increase competition in the market for hearing aids. But the other is the redistribution of power among groups: Does this policy leave unions stronger or weaker? Environmental justice groups? Corporations?
Under the populist theory of power, bad policy can be — and often is — justified as good politics. In California, the California Environmental Quality Act is defended by unions that use it to “greenmail” all manner of projects. CEQA is meant to protect the environment, but the threat of unending litigation can be used to win non-environmental concessions on virtually any building project in California.
I support making it radically easier to form unions. I don’t support making it harder to build anything and everything because unions — and oil companies, and NIMBYs and billionaire real estate developers — find that CEQA offers them leverage.
My view of power is more classically liberal. In his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.”
To take this view means power will be ill used by your friends as well as by your enemies, by your political opponents as well as by your neighbors. From this perspective, there are no safe reservoirs of power. Corporations sometimes serve the national interest and sometimes betray it. The same is true for governments, for unions, for churches, for nonprofits.
A lot is lost when you collapse the complex interests of politics into a simple morality play. There are often different corporations on different sides of the same issue. There are often different unions on different sides of the same issue. To know where you stand — and who stands with you — you need to know what you are trying to achieve. This is not, I should say, some untested approach to politics: It’s how Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the two most successful national Democrats of the past 50 years, approached both their campaigns and their presidencies.
In New York magazine, Sam Adler-Bell writes that “the abundance agenda has the virtue of not demanding any significant showdown with capital or corporate power.” This is wrong. You cannot decarbonize the economy without running headlong into fossil-fuel interests. You cannot fund the kinds of public projects I support without raising taxes on the wealthy. But “Abundance” does have the virtue of not believing that politics is solely a showdown with capital or corporate power.
Much of what our society needs is made by corporations. It is what corporations do, not just what they are, that matters. I thrill to see come to market new drugs that save lives that would otherwise be lost; I despair to see the minds of entire generations fracked for the last drops of their attentional capacity. There will be no green transition without corporate ingenuity; there will also be no green transition without fighting fossil-fuel interests. Undue corporate concentration is a problem where it exists, but there is plenty of for-profit villainy in highly competitive sectors. What liberalism seeks to do is align corporate capacity with public goals by shaping the markets in which they operate. You can’t do that effectively if you treat corporations — or the people within them — as a categorical enemy.
But there is much that corporations cannot — or should not — do. For that we need a strong state. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of that strong state. Too often, it isn’t.
Ben Wikler, the former chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me last year that, “fundamentally, Democrats are the people who are in politics to make government work for people, which is a very old, New Deal conception of what the Democratic Party is about.” He went on to tell me a story about some huge piles of coal in downtown Green Bay that had been an eyesore for decades but that the state’s Democrats had pulled together the money to remove. “Democrats are the party that gets rid of the giant piles of coal,” he said. I loved that line. But it proved premature. The coal is still sitting there.
I’ve been amused to see “Abundance” described as some form of rebranded “neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism is a slippery term, but the shackling of the state was a thoroughly neoliberal project. This is an argument that historians like Paul Sabin and Gary Gerstle have been making, and it is central to the story we tell in the book: The New Left was deeply skeptical of the state — often for good reasons — and it put considerable effort into tying it down in process and lawsuits. This is why the state is often most encumbered in the blue states where the New Left held the most power. This is also part of why so many on the left today refuse to confront the ways the state fails: That hobbling is partly their inheritance. Those processes — even if they have grown beyond the intentions of their architects — are their achievements.
So, yes, I want to see more redistribution, but I want to see that redistribution deliver what it promises. If Democrats are taxing people to build high-speed rail, that high-speed rail should exist; if they are taxing people to build electric vehicle chargers, those chargers should get built; if they are promising lower drug prices in Medicare, those lower prices should show up quickly.
One way you build support for higher taxes is to point out the monstrous levels of wealth inequality; another is that you deliver things people want, and you deliver them quickly. Democrats are good at one of those strategies and bad at the other. But that is not an accident: To overhaul the government so it can deliver what it promises would require Democrats to confront not just their enemies but also their friends.
I’m all for fighting concentrated corporate power — break up Ticketmaster’s monopoly! — but I worry about a politics that often sees only problems of corporate and oligarchic control. That is a politics with so totalizing a theory of power that it has a lost a clear view of policy. Too many problems defy that framework. A left that wants to build public housing and decarbonize the economy will need a government capable of building fast, well and cheaply — confronting corporate power will not be enough to rebuild a capable state. A world in which local regulations drive the cost of an affordable housing unit in a Washington, D.C., project to $1.2 million — to be fair, that includes the cost of the “rooftop aquaponics farm” — is a world in which the left simply cannot house the people it has promised to house. That is a world in which the left will fail, both substantively and politically.
So I don’t see any contradiction between “Abundance” and the goals of the left. I don’t think achieving the goals of the modern left is even possible without the overhaul of the state that “Abundance” envisions. But I’ve come to appreciate the tensions between “Abundance” and the purer forms of populism. We really do have different theories of power.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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