Forgive me, I wrote about "Abundance"

Forgot to post my last column. Here it is!

The great British historian E.H. Carr said, "In order to understand a political issue, it is not enough to know what the point at issue is. It is necessary also to know between whom it has arisen." And that applies here. There are policy stakes to the debate over the so-called “abundance” agenda, but the underlying factional conflict is probably more important.

All of it, I fear, is the product of the Democratic Party’s rudderless desperation. Many of the staffers and operatives I talked to for this piece began by assuring me the whole debate was a tempest in a teapot — “mainly a Twitter thing” — before proceeding to reveal very strong and pointed opinions about the ideas and personalities involved. It gave me the sinking feeling I was watching dogs fight over a clean carcass.

From my column:

As Bidenism — with its welfare-state expansion and antitrust enforcement — has failed to reverse working-class defection, moderate Dems have made a bid to regain control, embracing an agenda called “abundance,” most recently articulated in a book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Abundance partisans assert the enemy to Democratic success is not corporate greed but regulatory red tape, NIMBYs, and environmental laws, all making it impossible to build and innovate. It’s a “simple idea,” as Klein and Thompson put it: “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Who could disagree? It brings to mind my favorite George W. Bush–ism: “I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington,” he told the AP two days before his inauguration in 2001, “but I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure.” In Washington, tautology is a way of life.

For certain liberals, I suspect abundance also appeals on a psychological level. In my experience, liberals are prone — in equal measure — to self-flagellation and self-flattery. Abundance supplies both: On the one hand, stagnation and dysfunction are our own fault, the product of a timorous political culture, which fetishizes procedure over results. As Bloomberg’s Joe Wiesenthal archly put it, Klein and Thompson have “accomplish[ed] something important by giving liberals something new to apologize for.” On the other hand, the reasons for liberal over-caution are admirable: these procedures, the onerous restrictions placed on building, zoning, and contracting, were enacted out of (an abundance of) sympathy for the environment, for minorities, and for workers. If only we weren’t so damn noble, we wouldn’t be in this mess!

Anyway. I barely dipped a toe into this whole debate. Since writing the column, I’ve heard from some lovely/smart abundance leftists who thought I was a little dismissive. Maybe I’ll come back to this topic. (My pal Waleed Shahid has a more thorough analysis over on his stack.) Maybe I’ll return to this topic. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll quit writing altogether and start a country rock band. You never know.