It's time for Abundance to get mad

Sunny visions of the future are great. But if you want to lead the Democrats, you need to fight.

Art by GPT, based on a portrait of Ida Tarbell

One thing I’ve learned, in my time as a pundit, is that many people claim to have read books that they have not actually read. This is true of giant dense tomes like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but also — perhaps surprisingly — true of light, quick reads like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. The text of Abundance is only 222 pages long, and the font is large. And yet none of the book’s progressive critics seem to have any idea what Klein and Thompson actually wrote. For example, Aaron Regunberg, a lawyer who has been on a crusade against the abundance movement, writes:

[Y]es, abundance is about defeating progressives and remaking the Democratic Party as a libertarian, Never Trump Republican Party. Great, can we stop pretending it’s anything but that?

This is, of course, complete nonsense. To believe that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are libertarians or Republicans requires never having read anything that either of them wrote (or at least, pretending not to have done so). But most importantly, Abundance is all about how the government should have more power to build green energy, provide health care, and accomplish other progressive goals. You can argue with that idea, but you can’t call it libertarian in good faith.

But my favorite example comes from David Austin Walsh, America’s favorite angry history postdoc, who said all kinds of nasty things about Abundance before admitting, quite openly, that he hadn’t actually read it:

The Abundance critics continue to do a remarkably poor job of engaging the book or the abundance movement in general on an intellectual level. In general, they tend to be poorly informed, lazy, and sloppy.

And those critics aren’t winning. At the elite level, Democrats are embracing the abundance idea, and there’s plenty of grassroots interest too. I recommend the recent excellent writeup in the Wall Street Journal by Molly Ball. Some excerpts:

Democratic politicians are rushing to embrace the new [abundance] mantra. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis have all name-checked it publicly. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker discussed it at length in his recent 25-hour Senate speech. Former Vice President Kamala Harris and the U.S. Senate’s Democratic caucus are among the many politicians who have recently sought the authors’ counsel. Not one but two congressional caucuses have recently formed to push legislation advancing the ideas laid out in the book…

It isn’t just party elders who have bought into the idea. Local Abundance clubs have formed in multiple cities and on college campuses…The book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has been a surprise hit, with a sold-out national tour, hundreds of thousands of copies sold and two months on the bestseller list since its release in March.

But a recent poll suggests that although there’s lots of interest in the abundance idea, the message is still less appealing than populist red meat. Although you might think a poll by some pressure group calling itself “Demand Progress” might be biased toward populist causes, I found the wording in the questions to be reasonably fair:

Source: Demand Progress

Source: Demand Progress

Could I write a new phrasing for the “abundance” statement in this poll that would probably get more support? Sure, of course I could. It would go something like this: