Abundance is the Next Big Democratic Excuse

Making a book's marketing campaign the center of your political agenda is a surefire way to lose.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson promoting their book in San Francisco.

Part of me feels sorry for Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, co-authors of the new book Abundance. Their book was released in mid-March, so they likely began the project two or three years ago, back when it was widely believed Trump was done for. It’s evident that Abundance was intended to supplement an age of Democratic political dominance, suggesting slight improvements in blue state governance while the GOP scrambled to find a post-January 6th identity. But as the political winds changed faster than a Republican’s anti-choice stance once his mistress gets pregnant, the book launched under an authoritarian President empowered by a trifecta. With the government disappearing dissidents to foreign prisons instead of the expected milquetoast Democratic administration tinkering around the edges of the country’s liberal capitalist system, Klein and Thompson needed to rebrand the book as a means to oust the Musk-Trump administration and regain Democratic control. Just as a canoe built for tranquil streams is unfit to traverse the storming ocean, an encouragement to loosen zoning reform will fail to defeat fascism.

I want to be clear — this is not a book review. I haven’t read Abundance, and I don’t plan to. Instead, what I’m concerned about is the liberal world’s acceptance of Klein and Thompson’s book tour marketing campaign as the anti-Trump trump card. Not only was Abundance not designed to be a political platform, but if it is jury-rigged into one instead of formulating an actual political coalition, Democrats might as well nominate Trump in 2028 themselves.

The first bit is indistinguishable from the GOP platform.

Throughout their media tour, Klein and Thompson present a clear thesis: blue states have let bureaucratic red tape stop necessary production, leading to a high cost of living and population exodus. By cutting said environmental and zoning regulations, Democrats can quickly build infrastructure fitting a 21st-century superpower, maximizing economic growth so that the wealth will trickle down flow to the working class in the form of lower rent, faster transportation, and cheaper energy. Simply put, Democrats should make it easier to build things so that goods are abundant and accessible. Klein summarized the thesis in a recent New York Times op-ed column entitled There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball:

“The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it.”¹

This framing is a bit misleading, as Klein and Thompson don’t want to “organize government” to produce. They want it to help private companies produce. Despite claiming to be on “the left edge” of American politics, Klein and Thompson’s media hits all begin by discouraging collective solutions to scarcity, such as Medicare for All (“would create a supply crisis) and the Green New Deal (“couldn’t have done it”). Instead, they urge politicians to get the government out of the way so oil companies and healthcare conglomerates can satisfy citizens’ needs. If this sounds like the same neoliberal economic theory that has ruled America since the late 1970s, that’s because it is. Much like the Abundance Agenda, the name supporters have given the vague deregulatory mindset the book encourages, neoliberalism was not a policy list but a guiding principle. In his 1951 essay Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects, Milton Friedman summarized the idea:

“Neo-liberalism would accept the nineteenth-century liberal emphasis on the fundamental importance of the individual, but it would substitute for the nineteenth-century goal of laissez-faire as a means to this end.”²

Basically, neoliberalism believes the Free Market is the best way to give people a happy life, so the government should step aside and let the profit motive do its thing. Unburdened by regulations, real estate companies will build, energy companies will drill, and healthcare companies will treat. This is the core of the Abundance Agenda. Cut the red tape, unleash businesses, and Democratic states will have enough housing, transportation, and energy for all. To make this point, Klein and Thompson have spent their book tour pointing to the failure of the 2021 Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program (BEAD), which allocated $42 billion to deliver broadband to rural areas. Four years later, as no homes have received government-funded internet access, Klein and Thompson see this as an instance of “government getting in the way,” setting up byzantine requirements that ultimately thwart well-intentioned liberal policies. In their view, this is a clear case of why we must return to the neoliberal principle of letting the market, not the government, fulfill the needs of the individual. Here’s Thompson explaining it to Pod Save America.

From this telling, one could think the fault lies with the bureaucratic nonsense of the “fourteen steps” supposedly imposed on the Democrats’ process by environmentalists, interest groups, and unions. If this were true, then the Abundance Agenda would make sense. Cut the nonsense. Give the people broadband! However, this is not the full story of what happened to the BEAD program.

It will come as no surprise that telecommunications lobbyists are largely responsible for BEAD’s lack of results. Back in 2021, as BEAD was being written, Common Cause published a report detailing the extent to which internet service providers (ISPs) were influencing Congress and purposely slowing public broadband programs. Not only did ISPs spend over $230 million on lobbying during one two-year congressional term, but they showed a pattern of attempting to “block or derail” public broadband projects through their corrupt legislators.³ When the BEADs program began, it ran head-first into the derailment Common Cause spoke of. ISP lobbyist groups immediately tried to gum up the works, petitioning the Secretary of Commerce that the low-cost requirement of $30 a month was an impossible requirement.⁴⁵

The special-interest groups that petitioned the Commerce Secretary about the infeasibility of the law.

Then, there was the corporate capture of the process to determine which areas lacked modern internet and needed federal assistance. In the above clip from PSA, Thompson says the first of the fourteen steps in the BEAD program was “the FCC drawing a map.” He’s referring to the FCC’s National Broadband Map, which charts communities by internet access. While Thompson claims the map is “drawn” by the FCC, in reality, it’s primarily shaped by three groups: local governments, nonprofits, and — drumroll please — internet companies! Hoping to keep market options open for the future, internet companies influence the map to say, “Actually, this place already has sufficient internet! No federal help needed.” As expected, ISPs are known to abuse this process.

“What we are finding is that the National [Broadband] Map overstates coverage.” — Adeyinka Ogunlegan, the vice president of government affairs and policy for EducationSuperhighway

Once an ISP tells the government an area doesn’t need public broadband, it’s damn near impossible to reverse. To do so, someone in the underdeveloped neighborhood must be aware of the BEAD program, the existence of the FCC map, and know how their neighborhood was categorized. Apparently, not even Derek Thompson knows about this process, so it’s a long shot the average American does. Then, they must purchase the highest-costing internet plan available and conduct three-speed tests, three times a day, over three days.⁶ Only after submitting results to the FCC do they have a chance to change the map to reflect the lack of internet coverage and make their community eligible for BEAD funding. Even if they succeed in all that, they’re still up against some of the largest companies in America, so the chance of success is minimal. Remember that BEAD was intended to help low-income areas, so those with incorrect internet designation likely lack the funds for Comcast’s premier option or the ability to skip work and run complicated speed tests all day.

Having written a book about why public programs fail to deliver results, it’s extremely bizarre that Klein and Thompson fail to mention the role of corporate capture in their interviews. They’ve cited the BEAD failure repeatedly yet brush over how billion-dollar companies control the process from start to finish. And it’s not just Derek Thompson. In a now-viral clip from Jon Stewart’s podcast, Klein walks Stewart through the FCC map challenge process but never states private companies are involved in drawing the maps. When Stewart asks who is challenging the maps, which frequently come from pro-public broadband and education groups like the one I quoted above, Klein portrays them as “environmental groups,” suggesting the challenges are for no good reason. No, Ezra. The challengers are literally the people who want public broadband.

I, an amateur political writer with five thousand subscribers, discovered and wrote the above information about the corruption behind the FCC National Broadband Map in one afternoon. It wasn’t hard to find, and I’d expect journalists who write for the fucking New York Times and The Atlantic to at least spend a few hours researching their vanguard argument. So, either Klein and Thompson discovered ISPs’ role in controlling the BEAD program and ignored it because it undercut their argument that regulations were the primary hindrance to public goods, or they didn’t bother to look. Given Klein’s meticulous recital of the challenge process, it’s hard to fathom he didn’t know ISPs had their fingerprints all over this process. If he wanted to argue that the internet companies’ role was minor compared to the education advocacy groups he blames as needlessly preventative, then OK. Make that argument. Maybe there are bureaucratic requirements that degraded the BEAD program. However, if Klein and Thompson seriously believe their thesis is valid, they should detail the entire story and explain why oligarchy is less obstructive than educational advocates. Their decision to ignore the role of corporate capture is not only journalistic malpractice but should be a glaring red alert for anyone looking to make the Abundance Agenda the future of Democratic politics.

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For anyone familiar with the work of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, this rebranding of neoliberalism isn’t really a surprise. During a Democratic administration, they’d market the book as something President Kamala Harris should consider, and “abundance liberals” would have the White House’s ear, just like they did during Biden’s presidency. What appears to be tacked on given the unexpected political environment, is that the authors are now claiming cutting the excessive approval processes is the antidote to Trumpism. Here’s Klein stating so again in his NYT promotional op-ed.

“If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. They need to offer Americans a liberalism that builds.” - Ezra Klein⁷

Prominent Democratic politicians and liberal pundits have full throatily endorsed this premise, positioning the Abundance Agenda as the way forward for the Democratic Party. While the book’s release date was set months ago, the overwhelming celebration of this “new” political plan feels extremely astroturfed, which isn’t surprising. Currently squeezed between Trump on their right and surging Bernie/AOC populists on their left, the Democratic Party is weak and rudderless. Its approval rating is at a dismal 29%, polling lower than stepping barefoot on a Lego.⁸ In this precarious position, those who hold power in the Democratic Party (including its favorite media figures) need an idea to rally around that will satisfy the following three requirements:

1. It must plausibly be able defeat Republicans,

2. Excuse why they lost all three electoral branches in 2024, and

3. Preserves the Democratic establishment by not blaming anyone holding institutional power or ceding ground to the party’s left wing.

As the Abundance Agenda and its prevailing narrative of needing to override litigous progressive groups doesn’t threaten big-money donors and not-so-subtly blames the left for Kamala Harris’ lost, it’s the perfect solution for capital-friendly centrists. As expected, each passing day has seen more members of the Democratic establishment raise their banners for the Abundance Army.

Vox, which Klein co-founded, spent most of its review defending Abundance from leftist critics than actually reviewing the book itself.⁹ Fellow abundance liberal Noah Smith called it “a whole new way of thinking about political economy,” while Matt Yglesias started his account by recalling the time he, Klein, and Thompson were protested by climate activists, a framing device to introduce the authors’ left-critical message. Disturbingly, 2028 Presidential hopefuls have already begun copy-pasting the Abundance Agenda into their campaign platforms. While interviewing Klein on his podcast, Gavin Newsom called Abundance “One of the most important books Democrats can read.” Ro Khanna was “all in” on the Abundance Agenda four days before the book launched, and Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who was featured in the book as an example of abundance liberalism, promised to enact Klein and Thompson’s vision. As I said, this feels extremely astroturfed.

Here’s the thing. I don’t mind that Abundance exists. Notable pundits write mass-market political books all the time. Intrigued by the promise of high sales and prestigious speaking events, they synthesize their essays into approximately 100,000 words, smack their recognizable name on the cover, stick them in airport kiosks, and watch the sales roll in. While they occasionally have interesting ideas, these works aren’t supposed to be revolutionary. The goal is to sell books to people who already enjoy Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s work. That’s why, by the author’s admission, Abundance holds almost no policy suggestions. Speaking to Pod Save America, Klein admitted the book was “a call to arms,” which is a better way of saying "it’s a vibe.” As they’ve been writing in the highest-profile publications for decades, the duo have lot of fans. Those fans like the authors because they agree with their politics and vision. They know what they’re getting when they open Ezra Klein’s new book, which is why they buy it. This is how the publishing industry works, and as writers, Klein and Thompson are playing the game. I might not agree with their politics, but like I said, I’m not losing sleep the book exists.

But what I do mind is that the Democratic Party and the liberal media establishment are making the Abundance Agenda their next Get Out Of Jail Free Card. I say “next” Get Out Of Jail Free Card because, every since November, 2016, the Democrats have been searching for excuses as to why they keep losing to a senile game show host. While it’s true Putin bought Facebook ads to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton, the Russiagate conspiracy theory that dominated liberal punditry wasn’t the reason Trump won. After 2024, the excuses became more far fetched. On election night, MSNBC host Joy Reid infamously insisted Kamala Harris ran a “perfect” campaign, absolving the candidate, campaign managers, and the Democratic Party, of any wrongdoing. A week after the election, Klein was on Pod Save blaming the loss on the ACLU asking Harris about transgender prisoners four years prior, as if its the American Civil Liberties Union’s fault she alienated young progressives by refusing to break from Biden’s despicable Gaza policy. The most absurd excuse was the widespread practice of prominent liberals throwing up their hands and saying, “What can we do? The Mexicans and Blacks just hate women! Don’t blame us!”

It also doesn’t take a political genius to realize the Abundance Agenda won’t work as a campaign platform. Much like Kamala Harris trying to run to Trump’s right on immigration by baiting him to kill the bipartisan border bill, running on deregulation against the DOGE administration is a fool’s errand. If Pete Buttigieg stands on a debate stage in 2028 across from J.D. Vance and says, “Democrats are cutting regulation to lower the cost of housing,” Vance will say “The Trump-Vance Administration cut 1000x more regulation through DOGE, which means are homes will be 1000x cheaper.” Once Democrats admit deregulation is the most pressing political issue, they’ve already lost.

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What Democrats are searching for is an easy answer to their electoral woes, but are unable to find it because they are stuck in the consultants trap — because the party ranks and media allies are filled with exclusively uniform centrists, the organization becomes unable to audit itself and offer anything besides the same old neoliberalism. People like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson can’t suggest an actual worker-friendly program, because then readers and politicians would forego them in favor of left wing voices. Josh Shapiro and Ro Khanna can’t advocate for a ban on Super PAC money, as there go their biggest donors. So, the consultants, politicians, and pundits that comprise the Democratic universe have to come up with an solution that fits within their personal political preferences and established ideological wheel house. As they’re unwilling to look inward or consider moving left, the only options available are pathetic excuses and slight deviations to their political programs presented as The Next Big Thing. It’s like trusting a football coach to figure out why the team is losing. He’ll blame the players, fans, refs, and even the mascot before he says coaching is the issue, as doing so would put him out of a job.

This is why the Abundance Agenda and the Abundance Discourse have been so prominent over the last few weeks. The powers that be within the Democratic Party are trapped in their echo chamber, shouting loudly that Abundance is the next evolution. Everyone else rightfully sees this as pitiful attempt by centrists to ignore the consensus for change and cling onto power. Everyone and their mother are calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside, Democrats now sympathize more with the Palestinian plight than Israelis,¹⁰ and Bernie Sanders and AOC are attracting Super Bowl parade-sized crowds eighteen months before the next election. The people want change, and the Abundance Agenda is an easy for centrists to pretend they’re delivering it without doing so.

Abundance liberals look at this and think, “What the people really want is fewer building permits.”

Back in 2021 during the Afghanistan withdrawal, I remember a CIA officer saying it was unfair to blame the State Department’s nation building program for the collapse of the Afghan government, as they had never had the chance to do “real” nation building. While he listed reasons America was blocked from creating the government it wanted, I kept returning to the same question: Even if that’s true, why should we trust you to do it right this time? Perhaps there were obstacles to your agenda. But by your own admission, you failed to overcome them. Now you want us to put you back in charge for another twenty years? When you’re standing here telling me you weren’t up for the task?

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I felt the same way while listening to Klein and Thompson spend interview after interview blaming advocate groups and regulations as the source of Democratic failure. Okay, let’s say there is too much red tape in blue state governments. And your solution is to put the liberals back in charge? But now things will be different because they read your book and are Abundance Pilled? If the solution is so simple, why didn’t Governors Gavin Newsom and Josh Shapiro and the rest of your ideological allies do it already?

By Klein and Thompson’s own logic the Abundance Agenda doesn’t make sense. There’s no policy suggestions, and as we saw, they’re outright ignoring the influence of oligarchy in their analysis. If the centrists championing the Abundance Agenda want to be taken seriously, they must answer the fundamental question: Why should we continue to listen to you guys, when your own argument centers your failures as the reason Democrats lose?

If the thesis of Abundance is true, then it’s a strong case to let the politics of Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, and the centrist Democratic establishment wither away and be replaced by a bolder, better vision for America. If you’d like to hear my ideas on what the vision looks like, then I suggest you subscribe.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/musk-trump-doge-abundance-agenda.html

2. https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/214957/full

3. https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CCBroadbandGatekeepers_WEB1.pdf

4. https://stateline.org/2025/02/25/already-lagging-broadband-program-faces-more-uncertainty-under-trump/

5. https://acaconnects.org/index.php?checkfileaccess=/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/telecom-industry-letter-raising-concerns-about-bead-implementation.pdf

6. https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2024/07/bead-funding-challenge-period/

7. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/opinion/musk-trump-doge-abundance-agenda.html

8. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/16/politics/cnn-poll-democrats/index.html

9. https://www.vox.com/politics/405063/ezra-klein-thompson-abundance-book-criticism

10. https://news.gallup.com/poll/472070/democrats-sympathies-middle-east-shift-palestinians.aspx