Progressives take their best shot at Abundance (but it falls short)

A review by Sandeep Vaheesan fails to discredit Abundance, but it points to what the movement could be doing better.

Photo by David Brandt via Wikimedia Commons

It continues to be the case that almost none of Abundance’s critics seem to have actually read the book. The first wave of critics basically ignored the ideas in it, and talked about their own ideas instead. Later critics became more aggressive, frenetically lobbing insult-words at the authors — “libertarian”, “Republican”, “oligarch-funded”, etc. — that completely ignored the book’s argument that excessive regulation is holding back big government. Occasionally, these shouters would admit that they had not, in fact, read the book they were insulting.

What explains this frantic, scrambling assault? I have no doubt that many progressives instinctively feel that anyone who criticizes any kind of regulation is a small-government pro-corporate neoliberal. But Marc J. Dunkelman’s book Why Nothing Works — which makes the same exact point as Abundance, with more depth on the history and legal details of anti-government regulation — has provoked no such outpouring of vitriol.

My best guess is that it’s not the ideas in Abundance that frightened progressives, but the identities of the authors — or, more specifically, one of the authors. Marc J. Dunkelman is a bookish academic, and Derek Thompson is a well-read wonkish opinion writer, but Ezra Klein is a powerful tastemaker and arbiter of opinion within the Democratic party. If Ezra Klein says that it’s time for the Democrats to start concentrating their energies on raising state capacity, then there’s a good chance that five years later, “raising state capacity” is what the party will be all about.

That shift in focus is inherently threatening to progressives who had thought that their moment had come — that in the wake of neoliberalism’s overthrow, anti-corporatism would define the Democrats’ economic agenda going forward. It threatens to disempower one set of thought leaders, policy wonks, and activists, and empower a different set. And although the Abundance agenda is often about empowering government, it doesn’t attack the private sector the way the progressives want to; that will mean continued corporate influence in the Democratic party, and more social status for private businesspeople who get to keep making profits, which are two things progressives really don’t want.

So what looks like Ezra Klein Derangement Syndrome¹ is probably all about factional control, and about struggles for status among groups of elites.

But I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush, because there are a few progressive critics who do seem to have actually read Abundance. One of these is Sandeep Vaheesan, who wrote a 6500-word review of the book for the Boston Review. I commend Vaheesan for spending the effort.

Vaheesan’s review is, to be blunt, not very good. Despite having clearly read Abundance, he insists on mischaracterizing its central arguments and putting words in the authors’ mouths. And when he tries to marshal evidence that America’s high housing and energy costs are due to the inherent limitations of the profit motive rather than to red tape, his efforts fall short.

But at the same time, Vaheesan’s criticisms do successfully highlight one of the Abundance movement’s key weaknesses. Although Klein, Thompson, and other Abundance thought leaders are clear about what kinds of things they want Americans to have more of (housing, energy, health care, etc.), and although they make a great argument for more state capacity as a way to get those things, they do tend to leave out one intermediate step — they rarely discuss what concrete steps a more empowered government might take in order to provide abundance. This omission doesn’t destroy their case, but it makes it easier for critics to misinterpret their message.

OK, so first, let’s go through Vaheesan’s review of Abundance, and talk about some of the reasons why it misses the mark.

No, Abundance isn’t warmed-over neoliberalism

The first big problem with Vaheesan’s review is that, like other progressive critics, he views the Abundance agenda as being all about private-sector deregulation. Here are some excerpts:

Many readers will find [Abundance’s argument] persuasive, primed by decades of anti-government rhetoric directed at certain state activities from Democrats and Republicans alike…

But achieving [material abundance] requires breaking with the ethos of neoliberalism—its deference to private capital and hostility to public governance—that structures so much of Klein and Thompson’s thinking, even when they are praising Biden’s “post-neoliberal” industrial policy…A much more promising path to abundance than the one this book offers is to embrace a twenty-first-century New Deal. That is the tried-and-true model for a “liberalism that builds” in the United States, and Abundance rightly invokes it as a foil to the present. Yet Klein and Thompson strangely shy away from calling for a new (or Green) New Deal…

Remove [regulatory] hurdles, Abundance contends, and private actors will deliver abundance—at least when goaded by sufficiently high levels of public subsidy…

It’s not insignificant that Klein and Thompson’s attacks echo the Trumpist agenda they disclaim…

Replicating [public-sector success] on a national scale and across a range of urgent challenges calls for a serious revival of New Deal politics, not a doubling down on the ethos of neoliberalism—however appealingly rebranded. [emphasis mine]

Like many other progressive critics of Abundance, Vaheesan claims that the book is all about private-sector deregulation and rebranded neoliberalism. Unlike the others, he ought to know better.