Ezra Klein Should Be Honest About the Abundance Movement

I have a simple question for the New York Times columnist.

Like every other political commentator on planet Earth, I previously contributed to the Abundance Discourse, the political conversation surrounding the new book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. If Abundance had simmered like any other topic in the news cycle, my comments would have ended there. However, Abundance didn’t slip into the background. Driven by wealthy donors, centrist politicians, and influence-seeking pundits, the book’s thesis was elevated into the ‘Abundance Agenda’ (which is odd because the book offers few policy proposals). Then it became the ‘Abundance Movement,’ a group of high-status ‘Abundance liberals’ who promote the deregulatory mindset as the key to political success. Unlike Bernie Sanders’ anti-oligarchy movement currently selling out NBA arenas, you won’t see rallies holding “ABUNDANCE NOW!” signs anytime soon. That’s because the Abundance Agenda is a top-down program. The political elite created it, and now they’re trying to convince the electorate how great it is. I think this is the wrong way to do politics, but I’m sure the experts who ran Joe Biden in 2024 know better than I do!

Abundance is the Next Big Democratic Excuse

Since Abundance was released in March, Congressman Josh Harder formed the ‘Abundance Caucus,’¹ and Klein was the guest of honor at the Senate Democrats’ one-day issue retreat.² Open Philanthropy, a grant-making foundation funded by Dustin Moskowitz, the co-founder of Facebook and Asana, recently invested $120 million in an ‘Abundance & Growth Fund’ to support Abundance-style politicians and policies.³ The Niskanen Center, a center-to-center-left think tank, encourages an Abundance faction to wrestle the Democratic Party back from supposed ‘left control.’

Creating an abundance faction within the Democratic Party isn’t just good news for the Democratic Party – it’s good news for America. First of all, the problems targeted by the abundance agenda are immensely important, and addressing them successfully will ultimately require contributions from both major parties. And to maintain our two-party system as a functioning democracy, the Democrats desperately need to break decisively with leftist folly and return to the cultural mainstream if they are to reliably outcompete MAGA for votes. The abundance agenda gives moderate Democrats a bold and appealing program of reform to be for – in the middle of a legitimacy crisis like the one we’re presently enduring, being tagged as an apologist for the institutional status quo is a political death sentence – while they condemn and seek to root out the left’s pernicious influence.”⁴

(Anyone who says leftists control the Democratic Party should be laughed out of politics.)

Clearly, what started as a book tour marketing plan has evolved into a concerted, financially backed political agenda. Numerous Democratic politicians, many of whom are 2028 nomination hopefuls, have swallowed the Abundance pill and argued it’s the future of the Democratic Party. According to these Abundance liberals, blue states should slash unnecessary and overly burdensome regulations to allow private capital to build more housing, public transportation, healthcare, and other infrastructure. They claim this will lower the cost of living, stop the exodus of blue-to-red state migration, and show voters the Democratic Party is committed to improving their lives. Formulated as both a political program (how you’ll attract voters) and a policy agenda (the things you’ll do once you’re in power), the Abundance Agenda has become the Democratic establishment’s plan to win the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. One of Abundance’s authors has leaned into the book’s newfound stardom. The other avoids addressing it.

On the Lex Friedman Podcast, Derek Thomson described what he sees as his book’s purpose.

“On the Democratic side, there is a fight that’s happening right. Our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party.”

I’ll ignore describing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a “left-wing environmentalist” because…yikes. Besides that, The Atlantic writer could not be clearer. He believes Abundance is the optimal way to solidify the center’s control of the Democratic Party, define what the party stands for, and win elections. While I highly doubt either author expected it, Derek Thompson is all for the astroturfed campaign to make his work the 2028 Democratic Party platform. He’s even critiquing Sanders’ anti-oligarchy campaign, which the Abundance Movement was created to counter, because “We need the oligarchy to stand up to Donald Trump.”

However, Ezra Klein won’t debase himself like this. Instead, he muddies conversations about the role Abundance should play in national politics. Because his book is based on local and state politics (Abundance exclusively talks about improving Democratic state governance), Klein redirects questions about the Abundance Movement to Abundance, the book, enabling him to imply his writing is a national solution without embarrassing himself by saying so.

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This was painstakingly clear in his recent interview with Sam Seder on The Majority Report. Whenever Seder asked Klein how Abundance relates to national politics (the Abundance Movement) the author turned the discussion to specific, local examples (Abundance, the book). In the clip below, Seder disagrees with the Abundance Movement’s thesis that the primary problem with national politics is the state handcuffing itself. In Seder’s words, the state doesn’t handcuff itself on its own, but because private interests (mostly moneyed interests, sometimes not) want to slow things down. Instead of answering whether that’s the primary problem in American politics, Klein dodges, says he doesn’t want to ‘stay high,’ and starts talking about regulations in building power transmission lines.

I don’t doubt that some of the things Klein says about unnecessary burdens are true. I have no experience researching power line permits, and he does, so I’ll take his word for it. However, what happened here, and the reason this interview was so inconclusive, is that Sam Seder is asking questions about the Abundance Movement — the two-month-old concerted effort by establishment forces to shape the Democratic Party for deregulation. Ezra Klein answers with something from Abundance, the book — an example about needing to decrease regulations to build green-energy power lines. Klein’s anecdote might be true, but it’s still a single, contained example. As the Abundance Movement claims that Klein’s ideas are how Democrats can win voters and defeat Republicans, focusing on an issue 99.9% of Americans have never heard about is political suicide. Pledging to simplify business for energy companies isn’t going to pull rural Pennsylvanians away from presidential candidate J.D. Vance. When Seder expressed this frustration, Klein pivoted to an extremely bizarre claim. After hearing his co-author’s above quote about Abundance winning the fight for centrist control over the opposition party, Klein claims the fight in left-of-center politics is between people who wanted to build things and people who don’t want to.

Klein: The really profound fight [on left-of-center politics] is, “Do you think delay as an omnipresent tool of governance is a virtue? Or do you think speed is more of a virtue?” And if you think speed is a virtue, as I do, I think we should deliver government services much faster.’

Seder: ‘I’m confused. You were surprised that your fight was with the Neobrandisians [anti-monopolists]. Who do you think you were fighting with?’

Klein: ‘There's a big schism in the environmental movement between the side that thinks we need to build our way towards decarbonization and the side that worries when we build things, we're going to change the environment.’

Seder: ‘I’m trying to figure out who you’re talking about. Degrowthers?’

Klein: ‘If you follow or report on any part of the decarbonization fight, you will find that the entire architecture of environmental policy we have is being mobilized against it to sue it out of existence. Sometimes by moneyed interests, but there was a point in time when a chapter of the Sunrise Movement signed onto a solar moratorium.’

Ezra Klein is being purposely disingenuous. Notice how none of Seder’s questions get an answer. ‘Who do you think you’re fighting?’ ‘Theres a schism in the environmental movement… ‘Who are you talking about?’ ‘If you follow or report on any part of the decarbonization fight…’

Ezra Klein isn’t dumb, far from it. As a professional political commentator, he is well aware that the left-of-center divide isn’t between degrowth environmentalists and growth-focused environmentalists. It’s between those inclined to capital and those inclined to labor: the center vs. the left, Bernie Sanders vs. Joe Biden, Abundance vs. populism. Ezra Klein knows this, because he’s made a career fighting for the centrist side of the divide. Quite famously, Klein was one of Obama’s leading defenders against left critics. He penned ‘The Green Lantern Theory,’ which defended Obama by claiming the president didn’t have the power to enact his campaign promises. (This was dubious in 2014. In 2025, it’s debunked.) There isn’t a single person who believes the defining characteristic of left vs. center political struggles is between environmentalists who want to build solar panel plants and environmentalists who want to tear them down. Ezra Klein doesn’t believe this, so why is he pretending he does?

My theory is that Ezra Klein knows Abundance was never meant to be what it became. Derek Thompson and he wrote two similar books, and someone suggested they merge them. The final product was a mass-market political book about zoning reform and eliminating unnecessary regulations to increase the abundance of goods and necessities. Abundance was written for travelers to pick up at Hudson News to pass the time during their flight. The book was even given a futuristic flair to make it pop from the newstand. And to be honest, I don’t have a problem with the book itself. I agree with Klein that there probably are unnecessary burdens hindering the construction of housing, public transportation, and infrastructure. As part of his NYC mayoral campaign platform, socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani is pledging to reduce permitting regulations for New York’s small businesses so they can better compete with national chains. That certainly sounds necessary, and something that could have come from Abundance.

‘For small businesses, who are so much of what we associate with our city and what makes it special, city government has suffocated them instead of supporting them, and this plan is at the heart of making it easier to not just start a small business, but for it to thrive.’ — Zohran Mamdani

While I don’t detest Klein’s book, what I absolutely refute is that the Abundance Agenda is The Answer to America’s woes. Abundance may have some ways to reduce the cost of living, but its contents are inadequate to uplift everyday Americans and combat the fascist surge of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Last week, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a leading Abundance liberal, vetoed a bill that would have ended Colorado’s preposterous 75% majority vote requirement for workplace unionization.⁵ Unions are proven to help raise wages, and Polis is beholden to his anti-union corporate donors. The need for increased worker power and decreasing corporate control of politicians are two of America’s most pressing problems. Not only does the Abundance Movement fail to address them, but as Polis shows, it exacerbates them.

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And make no mistake, The Answer is what the Abundance Movement is claiming to be. By cutting unspecified regulations, sidelining progressive interest groups, and having a Bob the Builder attitude (Can we build it? Yes we can!) Abundance liberals claim to have discovered who was to blame for their recent pathetic performance. (Spoiler: It’s everyone except themselves.) As this claim is false to anyone without a career interest in keeping the Democratic Party centrist, Klein is forced to walk a tightrope. He doesn’t think his book’s message should be The Answer, likely because there’s so much it didn’t touch upon: labor, foreign policy, immigration, the underlying influence of money in politics, and how to attract swing state voters. However, he doesn’t want to state this and burst the Abundance Movement bubble, which has made him exceedingly popular and wealthy. So, he shifts every question about national politics to a hyper-specific Abundance example to create the illusion that the book addresses top national issues. It’s the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Klein wrote a book about deregulation, and then influential people anointed it the key to defeating fascism. Klein is aware Abundance was never intended to survive such scrutiny (and because he doesn’t want to sound stupid like Thompson saying the oligarchy needs to tell Trump to ‘cut it out’), so he’s trying to retcon America’s political landscape as a fight about Abundance-related issues: power line permits, zoning reform, and other regulatory burdens. Abundance was an answer to a small problem, but as powerful actors told Ezra Klein it’s the answer to The Big Problem, he’s trying to make the small problem into The Big Problem. Not only is this bad-faith, it’s not going to work. As we saw from Kamala Harris’ failed strategy to campaign for the non-existent anti-Trump, conservative-leaning American, top-down political ideas, such as the Abundance Agenda, fail to entice voters. Political parties need to ask people what they want, then campaign for it, not tell them what they should think and blame the left when they lose.

The Abundance presidential ticket.

So here’s my question for

Ezra Klein

: Should the Abundance Agenda be the core message Democrats bring to the American voter? Is the Abundance Movement correct that your book is the key to defeating fascism?

If these questions ever made their way to the authors, I bet Derek Thompson would answer ‘Yes’ to both. I also bet Ezra Klein is smart enough to think ‘No,’ but he’ll avoid answering with a diatribe about how feminists delayed highway construction in Whogivesashit, Oregon. Or some other convoluted case that gets ‘granular’ and shifts the debate from one of national politics to local malfeasance, absolving him of the need to state what he think.

But let’s not let bad-faith book selling confuse the truth. Abundance is not The Answer to getting America out of this hellhole. Donald Trump won seventy-seven million votes in 2024, about two million more than Kamala Harris. However, eighty-nine million Americans didn’t vote in 2024, meaning Trump lost to apathy 600% more than Harris lost to Trump. Political success won’t come from Gavin Newsom promising a mythical suburban White mother that he pinky-promises to reform the zoning codes in her neighborhood. It will come from giving the majority of Americans a reason to engage in the political process. In modern America, the next dominating political movement won’t belong to who can win over the lauded Silent Majority. It will belong to who ever activates and organizes the Apathetic Plurality.

And that’s something Abundance — the book, Agenda, or Movement — cannot do.

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1. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/08/house-democrat-abundance-caucus-00333760

2. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/senate-democrats-ezra-klein-david-shor

3. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/announcing-our-new-120m-abundance-and-growth-fund/

4. https://www.niskanencenter.org/abundance-and-the-permanent-problem/

5. https://tsscolorado.com/polis-vetoed-the-labor-peace-act-overhaul-now-what/