An Abundance of Blind Spots
Abundance Liberalism presents an inspiring vision of the future without providing any effective battle plan to get us there.
In this gloomy age of austerity and scarcity, over the past two weeks, we’ve at least enjoyed an abundance of one thing: discussions of “Abundance Liberalism.” With the release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance on March 18th, debates have raged within the American left over whether the book provides the key paradigm shift the Democratic Party needs to move forward or whether it is just a rebrand of the same pro-corporate neoliberalism that has diluted the party’s message and condemned it to its current state of impotence.
When Abundance was first released and the chatter about its merits was most fervent, I was tempted to throw my two cents in before actually reading the book. Many of Abundance’s objectives run parallel to my reasons for starting this Substack and naming it 2076. I share Klein and Thompson’s vision of a future where healthcare, energy, employment, and housing transcend the self-imposed scarcity that causes so much unnecessary suffering and instability in this society. The point of naming this Substack 2076 was to reorient our thinking toward the kind of long-term strategizing that enabled the Republicans to take their party from death’s doorstep in post-Watergate 1976 to such a dominating position that Democrats are rightfully fearful of the possibility that the 2026 elections might never happen. Having so many overlaps with the futuristic materialist vision of Klein and Thompson, I decided it was necessary to actually read the book rather than rely on knee-jerk reactions based on other commentaries and book reviews. I repressed the urge to chime in while the Abundance debate was the hottest, stifled the urge to stick to a once-a-week posting schedule, and cooled the compulsion to switch topics based on all the latest cruelties (e.g. AI generated animations of ICE apprehensions) and incompetencies (e.g. Signalgate) unleashed by the Trump regime over the past few weeks. I decided to read the book and I did. Here are my thoughts.
On the positive side, Klein and Thompson, deserve credit for shifting the mainstream Democratic perspective toward futurism and materialism. Abundance invites us to envision a future where material constraints that limit human potential have been overcome. It is a world where abundant green power sources reduce the cost of energy to nearly zero, where abundant public transportation and new construction will make cheap mobility and affordable housing available to all, and where Artificial intelligence will free us from drudgery, allowing us to use our talents to the most socially optimal ends.
One of the greatest weaknesses of today’s Democratic politicians is how narrow their horizons of possibilities are when envisioning our American future. Klein and Thompson provide a much-needed broadening of that horizon, although their vision is far from original. Much to the chagrin of the far left who are skeptical of mainstream liberal bandwagon jumping, Klein and Thompson’s vision can sometimes feel like a carbon copy of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, a 2018 book published by Aaron Bastani that Klein and Thompson openly acknowledge in Abundance’s introduction. Even the Davos set co-opted many of these utopian recommendations in the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Great Reset plan, spawning all kinds of right-wing paranoia that globalist elites would soon be outlawing cash, cheeseburgers, and combustion engines. What makes Abundance remarkable is not the novelty of its ideas but that those ideas are being promoted by a New York Times columnist and podcaster like Ezra Klein, one of the most prominent voices in mainstream liberal discourse. Seeing Klein and Thompson praised for the novelty of their vision can spark in the far left the same kind of annoyance triggered by watching liberals who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 post cheerful updates on Bernie Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy Tour. But for those of us who value societal progress over ideological gatekeeping and holding on to old grudges, Klein and Thompson's mainstreaming discussion of a more abundant and just future must be acknowledged as a step in the right direction.
While I share much of Klein and Thompson’s vision of the future, Abundance provides the sketchiest of roadmaps to getting there, sending us on a path riddled with blindspots around every turn. The most glaring blind spot is Klein and Thompson’s failure to confront the fact that the past 50 years of economic stagnation have coincided with an explosion of wealth inequality, an economy where the 99% struggle within the bounds of scarcity but the 1% have enjoyed abundance that kings and emperors in times past could scarcely imagine. Those who currently control our economy and both political parties have a vested interest in preserving a political and legal order where profits are driven by artificial scarcity. Klein and Thompson briefly mention Karl Marx to explain how the pursuit of profit often stifles innovation. But in explaining the dangers abundance poses to the status quo, they would be better served to consult not the father of socialist economics but the father of the free market Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. For Menger, markets were the most efficient mechanism for distributing economic goods i.e. goods that are not only useful but also scarce and rivalrous in their enjoyment. A superabundance of a good will render it non-economic, even if it is not only useful but even necessary for human life itself e.g. oxygen in the atmosphere or rainwater. Abundance is, therefore, a threat to the vested interests of anyone owning a scarce good that will lose its economic nature if supply is increased significantly beyond demand. Abundant clean energy threatens oil and gas companies. Abundant healthcare threatens pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Abundant public transportation threatens automobile manufacturers and airline carriers. Abundant housing threatens the financial future of every American homeowner who has heeded the standard advice of making their home the primary investment for building personal and intergenerational wealth. Abundance renders currently economic goods non-economic and Carl Menger understood the radical repercussions of goods becoming non-economic in nature. In Principles of Economics, Menger states, “We can actually observe a picture of communism with respect to all goods standing in the relationship causing non-economic character; for men are communists whenever possible under existing natural conditions.” Even in 1871, Menger knew we could not create abundance without radically reconfiguring society, inflicting losses on entrenched interests that profit from scarcity. Klein and Thompson fail to grapple with the existential threat abundance poses to the current ruling elite. By neglecting to provide insights into overcoming the resistance of those most invested in preserving this status quo, Abundance often sounds more like a childish fantasy than a practical guide to building a real future.
Unable to identify the true enemies of abundance or at least unwilling to confront them, Klein and Thompson’s Abundance Agenda degrades into the typical self-help guide for educated liberals eager to demonstrate their willingness to do better. If there is a villain to be found in the pages of Abundance, it is the well-meaning but misinformed liberal. Klein focuses relentlessly on how liberal activists advocating environmentalism, consumer protections, or labor rights have stifled our collective ability to grow our economy and build our infrastructure in a way that will resolve the housing crisis and expand public transportation. Klein and Thompson are correct that Democrats often try to solve every problem with each piece of legislation and end up solving none of them in the end. They make a valid point that Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act boasts the largest pool of funds ever devoted to green building and energy projects yet much of the money has not been spent and many of the projects have not even begun because they are hampered by union-friendly prevailing wage requirements, steep minority hiring quotas, and protections afforded to even the most obscure endangered species. For Klein and Thompson, the path to abundance is paved not by fighting those who profit from scarcity but by educating liberals to realize that their devotion to regulation and lawsuits against the government are impediments to growth and the large-scale building we must undertake to become a more prosperous society.
While the well-meaning liberal may at times stand in the way of building and growth, Klein and Thompson devoting most of their criticism to Democrats threatens not just the prospect of an abundant future but also our barely adequate present. Klein and Thompson’s employing liberal-on-liberal shaming to advance the Abundance Agenda bears an ominous resemblance to the ill-fated racial justice campaigns of the late 2010s and early 2020s. To defeat institutional racism, activists often spent more time lecturing a well-meaning liberal teacher for unconsciously mixing up the names of two black children in her class or a well-meaning liberal food blogger clumsily claiming to have “discovered” Dim Sum rather than attacking the conscious malevolence of right-wing organizations like the Koch network who stoked long-simmering racial grievances to thwart the agenda of Barack Obama or social media companies making billions while on-ramping young men to alt-right and Neo-Nazi communities. While we should all strive to be more conscious of racial bias, the liberal-on-liberal shaming employed by the racial justice movement often left the real villains off the hook, and here we are in 2025, grappling with a once unthinkable reality of a Nazi-saluting mega-billionaire infiltrating the internal workings of our federal government. Similarly, Klein and Thompson focusing their critiques mainly on the Sierra Club and Nader’s Raiders without attacking the entrenched interests profiting from scarcity will likely do far less to advance an Abundance agenda than it will further weaken the already beleaguered environmental, consumer rights, and organized labor movements. Malicious right-wing racists capitalized on the well-meaning woke liberal’s confession of his own unconscious racism to normalize conscious acts of overt racism. We can only expect malicious right-wing profiteers of scarcity to co-opt the deregulatory ethos of Klein and Thompson’s Abundance to crush any remaining safeguards protecting workers, consumers, and the environment.
Maybe the most dangerous blindspot in Abundance is Klein and Thompson dismissing economic redistribution as a preoccupation of liberals that threatens the advancement of the Abundance Agenda rather than a necessary precondition for radically reconfiguring our economy. Klein and Thompson mistake economic redistribution as the mere act of moving money, items, and assets from the rich to the poor. They overlook the 21st-century reality that the line between economic wealth and political power has completely vanished, creating a dystopian world where the richest man Elon Musk can give away $1 million checks to those voting in a Wisconsin supreme court election. Failing to grapple with obscene oligarchic influence over government, Klein and Thompson’s hope that the Abundance Agenda will create a new economic order (like the Neoliberal and New Deal Orders that preceded it) reads as pathetically naive. They are blind to the fact that all tectonic shifts in the economic-political order are driven by and subsequently accelerate radical redistributions of wealth. The New Deal Order could not have been established without the euthanasia of the rentier class and the subsequent downward redistribution of wealth brought about by the inflationary spending of the two world wars and their aftermath. The Neoliberal Order would not have been established without the radical upward redistribution of wealth brought about by the Roth-Kemp tax cuts in 1981. The Abundance Order will never take hold without the expropriation of obscene wealth controlled by the likes of Elon Musk that perverts both our economic and political systems today. Without a strategy to break this oligarchic grip on our economy and government, the Abundance Agenda’s dream of a “liberalism that builds” will do little more than build the wealth of the corporate elites who are the perpetrators and profiteers of scarcity. The struggle for abundance is a class struggle against those who have subjected America to stagnation through ruthless hoarding of resources and opportunities. By presenting the struggle for abundance as an internal struggle by Democrats to do better, Klein and Thompson’s Abundance amounts to little more than the latest outbreak of self-lacerating liberal futility.
Glad to hear some thoughts from someone who actually read it. Especially after watching Kamala lose, the release of this book should be the end to this kind of abundance liberalism discussion as a viable political strategy.