Ezra Klein on Abundance and Reclaiming the Democratic Vision

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

In the 10 steps to autocracy, step four is convincing people that democracy just isn't working.

In America, the theory is that every family deserves the freedom to feel safe in a home they can afford and the neighborhood they choose, that they can earn a good living at a good job, breathe clean air, and raise their children in a country where they will do better than their parents, no matter their zip code, skin color, or name.

How do we get it?

Democracy, we tell them.

Yet, when the act of voting seems futile and the hope of better feels ephemeral, people will search for alternatives.

They will be seduced by populist promises and a grievance politics that lays blame at someone else's feet.

And the best way to hold your new audience is to break government so that services flounder, divides widen, and the people start believing democracy is just a cruel fantasy.

This is how authoritarians win.

And here we are.

A Republican trifecta in Washington is already resulting in terrible consequences for our country, building on experiments in Republican-led states.

Washington, D.C., our nation's capital, is under federal military occupation so the chaos agent of a president can distract from his multiple cascading failures and scandals.

Inflation is rising and higher taxes on everything from bananas to toys to cell phones are coming to a store near you.

While the Republican carnage unfolds, Democrats have been grappling with conflicting visions of what our party should offer in response.

We face a nation of skeptics who increasingly hate what they are witnessing, but do not trust us to deliver a viable alternative.

Here at Assembly Required, we make it our mission not to simply diagnose problems, but to dissect the solutions on offer.

So today, we will examine one such political and policy vision, the abundance agenda.

Crafted by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and laid out in their co-authored book, Abundance, the message is simple.

Democrats need to operate from a place of plenty, not scarcity.

Liberalism can't just protect and preserve.

It can't be mired in process.

It must build.

Build our economy, build our infrastructure, build our power and our reach.

Klein and Thompson argue that one generation's solutions have become the next generation's problems, our problems.

Rules and regulations written in the 1970s now help block the urban density and green energy projects that we need today.

Laws meant to keep government in check have created created a government too paralyzed to act.

The solution isn't simply to cut through red tape or construct at any cost.

It's about balancing rules with action if we intend to recapture the public trust and convert those who see little difference between the parties or much prosperity in their futures.

However, If we are to chart a course away from the authoritarian present that we currently inhabit, we must have a plan that is more than compelling.

It must seem achievable.

Abundance, especially in a time of inequality, restriction, and hardship, is a good place to start.

So, on today's show, I'm sitting down with the co-author of Abundance, Ezra Klein, to ask, can abundance help us reclaim the promise of democracy and the brand of Democrats who actually serve the people?

And how can we use it to not only improve Americans' lives, but to stop Trump and the Republicans in their tracks?

Ezra Klein, thank you so much for joining us here on Assembly Required.

Such a pleasure to be here.

Thank you, Stacey.

I appreciate it.

Okay, so for the seven people who have not heard about the abundance agenda, I want to, I know, there are at least, I think there's seven, there may be six, I might be overcounting, but I would love to kick off this conversation with some table settings.

So can you you talk a little bit about the pillars of the Abundance Agenda and its origin story?

Sure.

So Abundance, which is a book I co-wrote with Derek Thompson, is a book trying to open up a set of conversations among Democrats.

The sort of core of it is trying to look at places where, in the places where we govern, whether that's been at times nationally, say under Joe Biden and Barack Obama, whether that's in states like California or New York or Illinois, why we often fail to produce or allow the production of the things people need most?

Why in blue states and blue cities are there not enough homes, particularly affordable homes?

Why is there not enough clean energy?

Why is there not enough usable public infrastructure?

Why do so many big projects fail to get off the ground or come in way late or over budget?

Why going back to Barack Obama's stimulus bill?

in 2009, right?

Where the three headline items were high-speed rail of the reinvestment side, the three headline items were high-speed rail, electronic health records, interoperable across the country, and smart grid are none of them around today.

So it's sort of trying to look internally and ask, why are we not giving people the fruits of good governance in the places where we have the power to do so?

Why are we failing?

That's one piece of it.

The other piece,

which you sort of queued for me with, you know, what is the abundance agenda, which I think is less fleshed out in certain ways than the prescriptive and diagnostic side of it, is what kind of future are we trying to work towards?

I think of abundance as trying to differentiate what I would think of as a goal-oriented liberalism from a process-oriented liberalism, right?

I want to be clear about what we are trying to achieve and I want to work backwards.

And on that level, I don't think we do a good enough job painting a vision of the future.

We talk about things where we know how to redistribute in the present, things like that Europe already has, and these are important.

Truly universal health care, a bigger child tax credit.

I would like to do something like Corey Booker's baby bonds, right?

There's a lot we could do with what we already have.

But what should this country look like in 10 years, in 15 years, in 20 years?

What kinds of technologies do we want to exist and be widely accessible that aren't today?

Where are we trying to go in terms of prosperity that we've not already been?

That's the other side of it.

That's the visioning side of it.

So who's your intended audience?

I mean, there's a conversation to be had with...

politicians.

There's a conversation to be had with the bureaucrats responsible for implementation or correction.

There's also the public conversation because as someone who was in public office, I can tell you lots and lots of regulatory schemes are developed because somebody complained to a legislator and they then go and write 17 new bills so they can prove that they listened.

So who exactly is your intended audience or is it none of the above or even more than I mentioned?

It is more than you mentioned.

Those are all intended audiences.

And you write a book and it is,

I don't know, I think of a project like this as very generative.

You You know, my first book was about political polarization.

And it's not that I thought that would be the last word in political polarization, but it was more trying to give people a model based on all this political science we had and all this information we had, trying to explain why things went the way they did.

I didn't, it's not that the book was the end of a conversation, but nor was it really the beginning of one.

It was just supposed to be explanatory about the world we lived in.

This is meant to be generative.

It is meant to be a space in which people can do their own thinking, a set of tools and lenses that they can use to see or approach the world that is in front of them, not the world that is in front of me.

And so where it will be taken will be different from different people.

One of the things that has been most surprising to me about the book's reception has been how big it has become in other countries.

I mean, we are basically taking a book here where it's very rooted in California specifically, but also somewhat in New York, right?

We're looking at kind of big blue states, generalizing out because we could see the places where we thought it generalized across the nation.

And then it's become a huge book on Downing Street in the UK.

It's being talked about constantly in the Australian government, in Mark Carney's government in Canada.

It's about to launch in Germany and already the reception there is pretty significant.

So we seem to have diagnosed or begun to, you know, get at something that is somewhat endemic in certainly Anglophone countries, maybe beyond that too.

And so to me, I try not to write these books, certainly this book, with too tightly intended an audience.

I try to describe reality well and offer some, you know, useful provocations.

And then in a million different ways, a million different people hopefully will take this and do things with it that I don't really imagine or could not see because what is in front of them is not what is in front of me.

One of the thoughts I had as I was reading the book is that In addition to being generative, I tend to read books written by conservatives, by conservative thinkers, because I want to know what they're up to.

I want to know how they're constructing the world, and I want to understand where the tensions lie.

And I think you got into that in your book on polarization.

You extended that in the book on abundance.

And in both places, you don't prescribe to the other side.

You do some diagnostics, but you aren't targeting them.

If there was someone from the other political end of the spectrum reading your book, what do you hope they take from it?

Oh, there's been a ton of this.

The book has a real audience on the right.

It's not as big as its audience on the left.

But

there are, you know, some of the critiques of the book about government are critiques many on the right find congenial, that it becomes overly bureaucratized, that it becomes focused on process and rules as opposed to outcomes, that it can be easily captured by all kinds of special interests.

They would sort of focus on special interests like unions rather than other interests like corporations.

But, you know, they, you know, this is a very sort of public choice inflected theory of what can go wrong in government.

Place where I differ with them.

The reason this is not a book to them

is that they don't want the world I want.

And this, it's so important to me that people get this, that when you're talking about a goal-oriented liberalism, a goal-oriented anything, You really have to decide, like, what are your goals?

So I want clean energy abundance.

There are many ways in which a Trump administration is trying to unleash energy production.

They just only want to unleash the production of fossil fuel energy, right?

They are at the same time trying to wreck the solar, the wind, to some degree, the battery industries, definitely the EV industry.

So it would be strange to talk about the ways in which government is not set up for clean energy abundance to the Trump administration.

To them, that's a success.

Everything they can do to make clean energy more tied up in procedure, more tied up in red tape, more tied up in uncertainty, they will do.

They are not trying to build high-speed rail.

They are, as far as I can tell, not trying to do a bunch on affordable housing.

They talk about the housing crisis, but they turn it into an argument for keeping, for deporting immigrants from this country.

And so I've found there to be very interesting conversations to be had with people on the right.

But where they break down is around goals.

They just have a different set of goals.

They are trying to achieve something different than what we are.

And

I think that one of the things that I am certainly trying to bring abundance into the conversation to do is that I think we need a more effective and more aspirational liberalism to counter right-wing nationalism.

I don't think it's an accident that strong men like Donald Trump arise saying, I alone can fix it at a time when government has become sclerotic, at a time when it's begun to have much more trouble delivering.

This would be something I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on, but a place where my mind has been going recently is into the way liberalism itself has weakened.

There's sort of right-wing populism, there's to some degree left-wing populism, but liberalism itself, although there are many liberals,

I think has just become an identity, an ideology that feels exhausted, that feels insecure, that feels like it doesn't know how to even protect itself from the critiques to its left and its right, to say nothing of how to inspire people with its vision for the future.

And I really think liberalism needs to be rebuilt.

But one of my, I have a lot of reasons I think this happened, but one of them is that I think that Obama was in some ways like an apex of liberalism.

And people were very excited by the moral ambition inside his campaigns, what it meant to elect him, someone like him.

And then when what he was able to deliver was modest, both in terms of

policy wins, even though things like the Affordable Care Act were a very big deal.

They weren't what people had hoped for.

And in terms of a change to our politics, politics, to our culture, to the way it felt to be involved in America and American conflicts, I think that liberalism after that, it sort of lost its moorings.

And it's going to need to be revived as something that has a vision of the future that is thrilling unto itself, an ambition, a mission worth being part of.

if it is going to become something capable of countering the threats we now face.

But I mean, you're actually running for office in this time and you've seen some of these currents rise and fall and strengthen and weaken.

I'm curious how you think about liberalism itself, like the thing underneath abundance.

I think you diagnose it properly when you say that there was a modesty to the liberalism that was the apex of the Obama administration.

But I would broaden it and say that for the last 40 years, we've had both a scared and a careful liberalism, where we believe in it, but we don't believe it's strong enough to actually

be viewed, endured, or trusted.

And so we have broad ambitions that we negotiate against ourselves to achieve.

And rather than what I would laud the right for doing, the right, especially, and we'll get into this in a second.

When you look at the right, they have these broad, aggressive ambitions and they trust the

moorings of their ambition and therefore are willing to reach.

I despise their intention, but

I admire their lack of caution.

We are a walking cautionary tale that says that even though we know what we want, we don't trust that we deserve it or that

others want us to achieve it.

And so

in my campaigns, when I've run for office, but more importantly, when I was in the legislature, there is certainly a set of compromises you have to make to

get things done.

I live in the South, so my job was minority leader.

I was never going to win on my own volition.

I was always going to have to bring someone from the majority over.

But that's not where you start the conversation.

That's where the conversation ends.

But we often start from a place of what do we think we can convince the other side to let us have, as opposed to what is it that we want.

So I think your framing of goal orientation is so critical because we've exchanged goal for

possibility.

And we limit our possibility to the limits of the imagination of our opponents, as opposed to the imagination of our constituents.

And for me, a true liberalism says,

what does your constituency need?

And then how do you shape the politics to make that possible?

And instead, we start with what can our politics sustain and how do we dampen our ambition so that it doesn't offend those who do not want our success?

You know, it makes me think about one of the very few things making me hopeful right now, which is that when Donald Trump came into power the second time, the way I thought the meaning of him had changed the most was that he had represented in his first term the past.

And in his second term, he had made a series of alliances and coalitions that made him represent some part of the future.

Because Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel,

what these people are, separate from whatever they have or have not achieved in technology and industry, is they're futurist influencers.

They are, I mean, Elon Musk, with his ownership of Twitter and his sort of amplification of his own megaphone there, he is the largest futurist influencer in existence.

And in the coalition Trump had made with them, and sort of separately, but I think not

irrelevantly with RFK Jr., Trump had begun begun to represent something different, something not that had had its time.

I think in his first term, a lot of people saw, liberals saw Trump as a kind of dying gasp of a dying power structure.

And in the second term, it wasn't that at all.

It isn't that at all.

It was something new, some new coalition emergent.

The breakup between Trump and big parts of the tech right, I mean, the breakup with Elon Musk, I think, was significant to the extent it holds, just in part by depriving Trump of Musk's money and power and attention.

But also

between what they have done to clean energy, what they have done to scientific institutions and scientific funding, what they're like just canceling mRNA vaccine research,

the

futuristic version of Trumpism that seemed to be emergent for a minute there,

which I thought could be very, very powerful if you could combine his sort of, you know, his sort of revanchist traditionalism with that kind of sense of

futuristic ambition.

Like that's a very, very tough coalition to beat.

I think it has opened up some possibility of Democrats, if they were up to the challenge, which so far in my view, they haven't been, of reclaiming some vision of the future, right?

Not being just the people who are sitting here in defense of the way things are against the challenge of Donald Trump, but are people who actually want to make things different.

Now, that means deciding the way in which you want to make them different.

And that means letting go of some of the caution that you're talking about.

And I would also say it means operating not just on the level of, I often, I've talked to a lot of people who are preparing to run in 2028.

And I so often come away from those conversations feeling that they're operating at the wrong level, that they're thinking about this policy or that policy.

And I'm a policy guy.

I like to hear about this and that policy.

But this sense that we're actually in a conflict for like, what are the fundamental values of this civilization?

How might this era of politics really work?

Like, who are we?

I feel like

there are not enough of them, I think, sensing

how fundamental

the questions really are right now.

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Let's go back to the question you asked me.

How do you define liberalism?

For a person who has never set foot into a conversation about the body politic beyond they heard epithets about being liberal versus conservative, what is liberalism in your mind?

And

when you think about the people that you're talking to, how are they thinking about what liberalism means?

How to describe liberalism, how I think of this thing that I have been part of

and know it when I see it is one of my really big projects for the year.

So what you're going to get here is very, very like 15% into the work.

Bring it on.

But at some level, liberalism is a set of ideas about how we live given the unchangeable reality of disagreement alongside each other.

That's one lane of it.

Like, how do you accept?

that society is going to be riven by conflict and disagreement and turn that conflict to productive ends rather than to civil war and disunion.

Another is a recognition that on the one hand, yes, the world is complicated and yes, things are hard to change and fix and at the same time, they can 100% be improved and made better and made decade to decade unimaginably better from where they were before.

And third, that

there is a belief

in

the fundamental dignity of other human beings And that what we are doing here in politics is trying to make it possible for them to flourish.

And that is

the bonds of obligation and friendship are particularly strong to those right next to us, our families, our friends, our neighbors, our communities, our countrymen.

But they also exist between human beings.

It's why we have international laws around how war is conducted.

It's why we, you know, we need to have borders and we need to control those borders, but we need to also think of immigrants as human beings, right?

Liberalism, I think, is very opposed to cruelty and domination.

And

it's a, you know, I've been reading a lot of old histories and modern histories of liberalism, and it is a basket of things.

It's no one thing, and it's not unchanging.

I think one thing that really distinguishes liberalism from populism, both of its left and right varieties, is liberalism is not about seeing society as composed of we the real people, and then some small set of enemies.

If you could only defeat those enemies in a total and irrevocable fashion, you get the society you want.

People are all changing, complex, multifaceted.

You know, you have friends on this issue and they're not your friends on the next issue, and you're constantly balancing this incredibly pluralistic society.

And one of liberalism's great virtues to me is its openness to self-critique, is its openness to being told, you got this wrong, you failed, you didn't deliver enough.

And I think oftentimes the correct response of liberal is, you're right, we got it wrong.

We failed.

We didn't deliver enough.

But I think one thing that happened is that

for a variety of kind of reasons in the last like 10, 15 years, it got overwhelmed by its own self-critique and lost any confidence.

And now we watch people who said they could stand up and deliver more, not just failing, but really unleashing

a form of darkness

that, you know, we did a reasonably good job keeping somewhat more caged, not for that long, but for some time.

And it's been really the feeling those forces return.

It really feels to me, I don't know if it feels to me to you, but between what's happening here and what's happening geopolitically, internationally, it feels like we've returned to the 19th century.

It feels like we are in a past era where the idea is, it's not an accident, Donald Trump is obsessed with McKinley of all people.

You know, the obsession of territorial expansion, the gleeful cruelty, the

treating of immigrants or people in other countries as if their lives don't have value, as if they are not part of our human community, the way war is being conducted right now in Gaza, siege in Gaza, that it feels like things that we, at terrible blood and cost,

began to push more towards the margins, didn't eliminate, but push more towards the margins, held some protected space against, that those levies have been completely breached.

And

yeah, it feels like we've had a, you know, a hundred years ripped away from us

in a way that feels like very profound and

difficult and dangerous to me.

No, I think you're right.

I situated in this way.

We've got, we're in the 1850s in so many very real ways.

And part of the revisionist history that is being written, not by Trump, but by, I would argue, his puppeteers and those who are really the architects of the moment we're in,

they miss those days.

They miss the ability to have unchecked power, to have sublimated populations, to shape an America where half of it can be slave owning and the other half can be free.

And not to say that there's an intention to return to slavery, but that notion that you can diminish

the humanity of entire segments of people because it does not fit with your world vision.

It doesn't fit with your understanding of who is entitled to being an American.

And I link it back to what you said about liberalism and its self-critique, because you pegged it at about 10 to 15 years.

I would say it's about a 40-year paralytic that when the aggressive attack on liberalism really reached an apex with Reagan, we stopped critiquing and we started internalizing those critiques, but without offering ourselves a reason to improve.

And that paralytic has led to, to your point, you achieved this apex with President Obama, who had grand ambition, but who began negotiating against himself and against,

we argued with ourselves about whether our ambitions were right.

If you remember, you remember this.

In 2009, we held a trifecta with a super majority in the Senate.

And the things that could have been achieved.

Now, yes, we were in the midst of of watching the economic structure of the world fall apart, but there was also an opportunity.

And I think liberalism in that moment argued with itself and said, well, we don't want anyone to notice that liberals have won.

And so we're going to do only those modest things that we can convince conservatives are appealing to them, even though we held power.

And I raise that because I want to link this to the last eight months of this Republican trifecta and how they've leveraged what is

undoubtedly less political power in terms of the raw numbers, but their achievements with that power have outstripped their achievements in pursuit of this vision.

And I hesitate to call it conservativism because that's not exactly what it is, but their pursuit of their ambitions with, I would say, remarkably limited numeric superiority outweigh our ambitions when we actually had the numbers and the imprimatur of the people to take action?

Am I wrong?

It's a good question.

I have to think about that.

So I wouldn't say that's true legislatively.

I mean, I think if you compare what they've done, I mean, fundamentally, the OBBBA

is the extension of existing tax cuts and the addition of new tax cuts, which is just, that's what Republicans do.

If they get power, they're going to extend and create some tax cuts and cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and clean energy subsidies.

I would rate that as less significant than the Affordable Care Act, than Dodd-Frank,

and a collection of other bills that the stimulus bill that came under Obama.

But in terms of the restructuring of what the government is and what the powers of the executive are and the role the executive plays

in American life, then undoubtedly you're right.

Now,

this I think goes to a critique that we are making in abundance.

Liberals became rule followers.

They became process creators.

They were more committed to making sure nobody said they were doing things the wrong way than they were to getting things done.

And when people like me were arguing for the abolition of the filibuster, you know, under Obama and then also under Joe Biden, you know, we were told that was sort of ridiculous.

And, you know, and it was insane.

And, you know, like, imagine what would happen if we did that.

Well,

they're kind of passing a lot of what they want without the filibuster.

And maybe if liberals had been able to pass what they wanted without the filibuster, because, you know, you are right that they had a trifecta and it was a supermajority in the Senate, but it's only a 60-vote supermajority for a matter of months.

It was then 59.

And so then everything gets stopped by the filibuster.

And

I understand all the fears about what would happen, but maybe if you had gotten rid of it, and you could have done the thing you promised people, then maybe they would have appreciated what you did and they would have have voted for you.

Because ultimately what people come to politics for is for their lives to get better.

And if you are not making their lives better on a timeframe they can feel and they can vote on, then they're going to go for the other people.

They're going to go for the other guys.

I am obviously not pleased by what Donald Trump is doing

to the executive doing to the separation of powers doing in his pursuit of his aims in government.

But I do think one thing he is proving, and it's going to be very interesting to see to what degree the next Democratic president does or does not internalize his lesson or what they do with this lesson, that much that we thought was a rule or even a law was in fact a norm.

And it relied on people following the norm.

And when you don't follow the norm, nobody stops you.

including very clearly the Supreme Court.

And so this question of how much power does the executive really have?

What can you do?

You can't do anything.

I mean, one difference I think between Trump and Obama is: Obama wanted to create, and Trump has wanted to destroy.

Yes.

And I don't, I'm not saying there's nothing Donald Trump has wants to create, but you cannot, through executive authority, stand up something like the Affordable Care Act, right?

You cannot, through executive authority,

do all kinds of building, but you can destroy a lot, including the way the government works.

So it is, I think, going to be harder in a fundamental fundamental way to use the powers of the executive branch to achieve liberal goals than to achieve sort of conservative revolution, you know, counter-revolutionary aims.

But

it is nevertheless the case that under Obama, under Biden, and different ways under Clinton, I've talked to many of the people in these administrations, including the principals,

They were just so stopped and caught up in process.

It took them so long to do even small things.

The speed with which the Trump administration moves, their complete unwillingness to sit, to allow people inside the bureaucracy to say, oh, I'm sorry, we've got to go through a nine-month notice and comment period.

Are there any lessons in that for liberals?

I think there are some.

And what are those lessons?

That you really have to decide

how you want the government to work.

And there is more latitude on that.

I talked to Jake Sullivan, who was, of course, President Biden's national security advisor, was very, very involved and on a number of domestic policies too.

And he talked about the way they became self-restraining, that they were so, they come in after Trump and they so wanted to put the government back together that they were like terrified of saying no to any lawyer anywhere in the bureaucracy.

And things would just get caught and caught and caught in process.

And so they get money to build the electric vehicle chargers.

And at the end of their, in 2021, and at the end of their presidency, they've built a couple hundred for $7.5 billion.

They haven't been able to build their charger network.

So they can't run on it.

And you can sort of go down the list on this.

They get the authority to negotiate down prescription drug prices in 2022, I believe it is.

The first year those 10 drugs will have their lower prices is 2025, just in time for Donald Trump to run on their accomplishment.

The willingness to not move at the speed of the electorate, not move at the speed of delivering for people so they can pay you back, appreciate it at the election, but instead to move at the speed of bureaucracy and lawsuit and environmental review.

It was a mistake.

And liberalism cannot deliver and sustain itself at that speed if people begin to feel as they have.

And it's not the only thing they feel, but if they begin to feel as they have, the government cannot solve their problems when it is run by

these academics at hall monitors.

They're going going to go to the people who seem to be able to solve problems, the strongmen, the industrialists, the people who can stand up and say, look at me, I know how to get shit done.

You won't be waiting on anything for me.

I would say, I'd be curious if you disagree with this.

Donald Trump is the only president of my lifetime where the thing people are angry at with him is that he has done too much and even more of what he promised.

Every other president, the problem is that they haven't done enough, that they promised you all this and you got a quarter loaf.

Trump, you would see all these focus groups where people would be like,

he's going at 85 miles an hour.

I wish he were going at 50, right?

He is the only president I have seen the attack be, including from his own people.

Like, I wish he would slow down a little bit.

I think that there's something to, I don't want to see Democrats become Trumpists,

but I think that I would like to see a Democratic president where

the feeling was that they were so possessed of energy and will that they were almost doing a little bit too too much.

No, I think that that's a legitimate

desire.

I think the challenge, and I'm going to tweak it a little bit, I don't think it's just that he's done too much.

It's that he's done too much

without the,

without what we understood to be the authority to do it at the expense of so many who have no ability to fight back.

So I kind of see the longitudinal implications of what he's doing.

I agree with you about the need for speed.

When I was in the state legislature, I requested among my committees the code revision committee

because I'd read the code of Georgia as a state, before I became a state legislator, as deputy city attorney for Atlanta.

I read the code of Georgia because there were so many rules for what we could or could not do.

And there were internal conflicts with those rules.

There was a lack of integrity of intent to those rules.

And so when I got to the legislature and you get to list like your top three committees, I think I was the only person who asked to be on what was considered a rump committee, which was code revision.

But for me, it was: we have too many rules, too many regulatory schemes that stop us from doing the things we've been given authority to do.

So, from that very pure belief system that we should move faster, that we are too often caught in process rather than intent, completely agree with you.

I think the critique of Trumpism is an appropriation of a power that does not exist for the accomplishments of ends that are cruel in their intent.

That's

your critique of Trumpism, though, right?

I'm actually saying that I'll make his own people.

Like my critique of Trumpism is that he's cruel and his vision of the future is abhorrent, right?

And everything he's doing is a wrong thing to do, like almost completely.

But

I, I mean, I talk to Republicans and you, you read the focus groups and people are like,

he promised us tariffs, but we didn't think we we were going to get this many of them.

Yeah.

He promised deportations, but we didn't think we were going to send people to El Salvadoran torture prison.

Right.

He promised, like, you, you sort of hear this over again, like, they, they sort of applied the normal politician discount rate to him.

And instead, like, you know, he promised that he would make government work differently, but we didn't expect him to decapitate the Department of Education.

Right.

Like, and I'm always like, he promised.

He told you who he was.

Oh, yeah.

Like, don't come to me and say, as you did during the election.

I remember sitting down with a vape Ramaswamy and talking about the tariffs.

And he's like, oh, Trump's not going to do those.

Those are a negotiating tactic.

He did more.

Oh, absolutely.

If the question is, do I think Republicans are shocked by the speed at which their fever dreams have become reality?

Yes.

Am I concerned that they are surprised by it?

I am because he has been unequivocal.

But more importantly, it's not him.

And I'd love your thoughts on this.

I chafe at the dedication with which we attribute everything to Trump as though he sat in his basement and architected this thing.

He is a tool.

He is a chaos agent.

But if you read Project 2025, which I doubt he has, if you look at what Russell Vogt and what

Stephen Miller and to your point, the techno billionaires, the futurists, what they have found in him is an avatar that that can execute their wildest dreams of what I think

at some point will be seen as deeply in conflict.

And we saw a moment of that when Musk decided he had to break up with him.

I wonder if we are giving too much

weight to the name of Trump and not enough weight to the power of the movement that is using him to achieve their ends.

I think this is the way we normally

think about presidents.

And I don't think it's different for Trump than it is for other people.

When I say Biden did X, I usually don't mean Joe Biden.

I usually mean the constellation of figures and forces and

bureaucrats and appointees and advisors and so on that were part of the like massive organization that was the Biden administration and everything that revolved around it.

And the same is, you know, know, true for Barack Obama, more involved than Joe Biden was

just due to age and energy and temperament, but also not, you know, in the inners of every single thing.

So on some level, I think you're, of course, right, right.

My view is not that Donald Trump is sitting there reading Project 2025 or anything.

My sense of how many

pages of text Donald Trump has read this year is not very high.

A guy watches a lot of TV.

I think he's more of an oral figure than a written figure.

At the same time,

one thing I think is true, I always say that the way to think about Trump is not that he's the president, although he is, and he's certainly not the prime minister.

He's the grand Ayatollah of his movement.

Yes.

And these people have reshaped themselves around him to a large degree.

Who Russell Vought is today, who Stephen Miller is today, where some of the tech right went, although I think that isn't working out in part because Donald Trump is not authentically interested in what they think.

He's occasionally interested and he definitely wants the crypto money, but he does not sit up thinking about futuristic technology.

He's much more interested in coal than he is in solar or nuclear or advanced geothermal.

And you could see that in the way his administration ends up acting.

So I do think that

even more so than for normal presidents, Donald Trump's impulses have become

nearly religious emanations from a figure viewed within his own coalition as nearly in his second term, this was not true in his first, mystic, having, you know, come back through the court cases and the assassination attempts and won this victory right there.

They have changed.

They view him.

Many of them view him as somewhere between touched by God for these purposes, to at least some kind of man of destiny.

And he,

the way his administration works is not the way Biden's worked, not the way George W.

Bush has worked.

It's a court.

And

things happen when the king nods in your direction.

And if one day something is happening the king doesn't like, you will be executed.

Like you're out.

And so you have a lot of people vying for influence.

And you have a lot of people acting, I think, functionally without his knowledge even, but with a sense of what they believe he and the people around him want.

And it's allowed for an administration that moves very fast and does a lot of things very violently.

Because in other administrations, you would not have people taking as many flyers as far down the bureaucracy as they are,

because, you know, there'd be a policy process for that.

And you'd have to go through a bunch of meetings.

You'd have to hear what the lawyers said.

Here,

people act.

You, you know, if it creates enough static, it like runs up the chain and you hope you're going to get backed up at the end of the day.

And usually you do.

But so yes, Donald Trump is not the person doing all this.

And on the other hand, he has completely remade the Republican Party, remade American politics.

And he's remade it in his image.

And those people have taken directions he wouldn't because he doesn't have the attention span or the interest.

But,

you know,

he's not a lone cannon.

And I don't agree with the people who sort of see him as a puppet, right?

I think he's very much a force around which everybody else has remade themselves.

I don't think Puppet in the traditional sense, but I guess my question is, or my concern is that there's a naivete we have that if we can depose him through election or undermine him through

lifting up the Epstein files and mockery, that his departure changes the restructuring that we've seen.

And that's what worries me, that we believe that know, a couple of elections will change us back.

And I want to tie this back to the abundance agenda and how you think about blue state power.

If it is true that he's a grand Ayatollah, that mystical power extends and can be, you know,

he can anoint his

prophets and he can remain in power even if he doesn't hold the title of president.

And if that's the case, then there is no

relief from this that is achieved by election, especially if we are truly in an authoritarian regime where elections are not

real,

where Texas remakes its map and California tries to fight back, but there are more red states that have been thinking about this than blue states that have.

So,

with a very, very jumbled question, I ask you this.

Where do we sit if we believe that he is this mystic figure who certainly wants what he wants, but is not necessarily building the infrastructure to make it so?

Where does a blue state position itself?

And where does an abundance agenda position itself so that it has the opportunity to actually become real and become a counterweight?

So I think a few things.

So one, anybody who thinks the Republican Party is going to snap back to its 2012 iteration after Donald Trump,

I mean,

I'd love what you're smoking, if only for an evening to relax myself a little bit.

It's not.

It's done.

This is what it is now.

And that doesn't mean it'll be the same thing after him.

You always have an issue in movements when the charismatic central figure moves on or even loses power somewhat, right?

I don't think he's going to run for a third term or can,

that the next person has to hold together through promises,

through giveaways,

through coalitional work.

But the charismatic figure was able to hold together through the force of his own personality and power.

And so, for J.D.

Vance, for Marco Rubio, for any of these people who want to succeed Trump, it'll be a little bit like when Hillary Clinton, or for that matter, Joe Biden, tried to succeed Barack Obama, where what Obama could do through his connection with his own base, they could not do.

So they had to do it through policy promises and a lot of other things that caused them more problems.

To your question about blue states and abundance and other ideas for democratic reformism,

look, if Trump is as dangerous as many of us believe he is,

then what that means is you have to really think through ruthlessly, strategically, what it means to become the kind of coalition or the kind of leader that the American people want in charge right now.

And too often,

everybody in politics, but Democrats do,

they want to run in the ways that are comfortable for them, that don't cause dissension in their coalition, that don't offend anybody they like.

You got to win Senate seats in Kansas right now.

You need to win Senate seats in Ohio.

If you just started with that question, where does that lead you?

Not in the same place Democrats have been because they've become become fundamentally uncompetitive in Kansas, in Ohio, in Missouri, in places where Democrats used to win

and where they need to win if they're going to retake the Senate anytime soon.

And in blue states, yeah, they need to govern in a way where to say, hey, elect us and we'll govern the country the way we govern California, govern New York, govern Illinois, sounds like an advertisement for yourself, not for the other side.

I will say I am currently more and more impressed by what Gavin Newsom is doing.

And for a very simple reason compared to other people.

One thing I think that has become a problem in the culture of the Democratic Party is it is highly risk averse.

The people in it, the leaders in it, are unwilling to do things that might make people mad at them.

They are unwilling to choose strategies that have possibly a high potential payoff and a high potential risk.

And you look at Newsom over the past year, and he's doing thing, he's just changing, number one, right?

So few politicians are willing to change over time.

He is changing, giving abundance shout outs as he signs bills on housing reform, which I appreciate.

But also you look at his podcast.

He got a lot of shit for doing that.

And you know what?

A lot of people talked about him.

And he heard from people Democratic politicians don't often hear from or talk to.

And he probably got a little bit stronger, but he was willing to get shit for doing something other Democrats would not try to do.

Was it a good idea?

I mean, it's ongoing.

Is it a good good idea?

I'm not exactly sure, but it's an idea.

It's a person trying something new.

What he's doing with redistricting, where he's stepping out where a lot of Democrats wouldn't and saying, look, if they are going to do this, we're going to fight fire with fire.

We are not going to lay down and play dead for it.

We don't want gerrymandering to work like this, but if they force us, we will respond in kind.

And again, he's put himself at the center of the conversation when he's going and debating

Ron DeSantis with Sean Hanning moderating on Fox News.

One thing Democrats have to become is less afraid.

I mean,

you've been a politician.

You know this better than me.

Voters, they're not all policy wonks, but they can sure as hell smell fear and smell caution and smell when you're not telling them what you really think.

And you watched, you know, the last crop of National Democrats sit on a podcast.

or do something unstructured and you could feel the fear oftentimes.

You could watch them, like the thing they actually thought flicker across their face and they tell you something else.

And it doesn't work, not in this media environment, not in this era.

And so, you know, we'll see.

But

the politicians who are interesting me right now, the ones who are going sort of up in my mental rankings for 2028, are the ones who seem like

in a moment that is so different

than the moments we've had in recent American political history.

If you are not doing things that are new and uncomfortable, you are not alive to it.

If you are running the same strategies, if it looks to me like you are running the way you could have in 2016 and 2020, you're not there.

It's going to require this country has changed.

Politics has changed.

The politicians are going to have to change too.

I have four thoughts happening in my head right now.

No,

I think you're right.

I think that goes back to your very early point that we've become a sclerotic party and we are cautious to an extent that is not just disconcerting, but it's self-defeating because we're often negotiating against ourselves based on what we think the other side thinks of us, as opposed to what do our people think of us and what do they need of us.

And when your first question is, what does the other guy think of me?

And not what can I do to serve the people who need me?

I think you end up with the hyper-cautious narratives that we see having.

And

I also appreciate your point about being willing to make mistakes publicly.

We don't like it.

And again, it's not a worry of cancel culture.

I think it's a worry of not being absolutely right.

So we'd rather be silent than wrong, which is not where, I mean, one of the chapters of abundance I really loved was the conversation about invention

and how important it was for the scientists to keep trying and how even in our attempt to manufacture the science of tomorrow, we are afraid of what tomorrow might look like.

So we only pay for the science of yesterday.

And that that is emblematic of a lot of what we see happening in our policymaking and in our delivery of services

in service of liberalism.

So I agree with that, but let me maybe add one thing that is less comfortable.

Because you've talked a couple of times about how the core problem for Democrats is that they're always operating first with the question of what do the people who disagree with me think?

What will they allow?

Part of the problem for Democrats is obviously their enemies.

And then part of it is their friends.

Okay.

And getting too wrapped up in coalitional dynamics where the politician is no longer leading, they're following.

And they're building things that are ungainly and they're compromising to too many interests, some of whom we like, some of whom we don't like.

And they're not in charge.

They're not the one at the end of the day balancing the interests of constituents the thing that i think you're like a thousand a million percent right on is at the end it has to be about the constituents um but when you're talking about blue states the problem in blue states the problem where they have often failed it's not republicans fault we didn't build enough housing in california they didn't do that to us

that's not republicans are not why people have been leaving California and Illinois and New York.

Yes, our opposition can be a big problem.

And they have many, many sins to account for.

And they have blocked a lot of important things from happening, particularly nationally.

But we have made, the Republicans are not why we did not build high-speed rail in California.

We didn't build high-speed rail in California.

We failed to govern.

And one thing that abundance is trying to do that I do think is good politics is be self-reflective and self-critical.

Yes, there are things where the only way forward is to beat the other side, but then you actually have to be deliver.

You have to be able to deliver when you're the one in power.

And recognizing why we have so often failed to deliver when we're in power, recognizing that we have

given too much away and made things too procedurally complex and made things too expensive.

And that in order to unmake that, we will sometimes have to make people we like mad.

Like that's really important too.

I was talking to somebody about New York politics recently.

And they were saying that, you know, we're talking about Zorn Mamdani and they were saying,

oh, like he's going to have a really hard time.

His enemies are so organized.

And I was saying, yes, but also he's going to have a really hard time because his friends are so organized.

And the hard thing, and you know this so much better than I ever will, but I think the hard thing about being a great leader, being a great executive, which is what we're talking about for governors and the president, is saying no to people over and over and over and over and over again.

And

being

somebody who, in the end, is a thousand percent committed to delivering what was promised, not

keeping anybody from being angry, not holding the coalition together.

I do think for a lot of people who like Donald Trump, whether or not you think this is true about him, this is one of the things they like about him.

They see him as his own man, and they believe that when people get in his way, he's going to like just wipe them off the board.

He's going to fire them from his administration.

He's going to break up with Elon Musk and like throw him out.

That Trump in the end is independent to them in a way a lot of politicians aren't because he doesn't care that that much when people are mad at him.

And again, I think Donald Trump is one of the most dangerous human beings to ever take power in this country.

So

I don't talk about him with a hope that he is emulated.

But I think that the hunger you sometimes see for people like that

reflects a suspicion that voters have across the board about their politicians, which is that they're not in the end there for you.

They're in the end there for their friends, their donors,

their allies, and you're going to get screwed either because nothing happened or because the wrong thing happened.

So I think, yeah, that not pre-compromising for your enemies is super important, but also being willing to not pre-compromise to your friends is the same thing.

Like you need to be an actual independent voice for the people who elected you.

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At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I I will not accept this world that is.

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I will say the one critique that resonated for me when I was reading Abundance comes about because I'm from the South.

And often, legitimately, the comparative between Blue States and the South was, you know, there was a celebration of the speed and efficiency.

My concern was that in the conversation, and I think it's the right conversation of what do you do?

How do you tell your friends no?

Sometimes the friends you're telling no have never heard yes.

And their only pathway to yes required the creation of process.

And that is not an excuse for a process that becomes an impediment to action.

But the question I have for you is that

often in the South, when we see things moving fast, it's because this is an economic system that relies on low wages, on limited political power among poor communities and communities of color.

We have a very fragile civil society that just isn't as robust as the rest of the nation.

And while the South

has the predominant populations of communities of color, those populations also exist in blue states.

And often those speed bumps that reduce efficiency are

in service of those communities that without these speed bumps, they will not have a voice.

They will not have a seat.

That is not an excuse for not solving the problems.

But I'd love for you to, as we finish up this conversation, I'd love for you to just talk a little bit about sort of the populations that exist in these blue states that have to rely on those very efficiencies to have any purchase in the debate.

Everything is a balancing act.

But the truth is, if I thought we were serving those constituencies, those people,

in blue states, I would not have written the book.

It's not the case that Georgians are moving to California or New York.

Because in California, New York, they have a voice.

It's the case that people are moving from California, New York to Georgia, to Arizona, to Texas, because they can afford to live there and they can't afford to live in California, New York.

San Francisco has watched, at least at the time I wrote the book, its black population drop in every single census, like for decades.

You know, you see a million Black Lives Matter, kindness is everything, no human being is illegal, lawn signs.

And meanwhile, we have set up the policies with incredibly complex and capable forms of review and contestation and process.

And you know who owns them?

The people who can hire the lawyers and the lobbyists, the people who know when every meeting is, the people who have the money to game the system.

Jennifer Polka, the great sort of policy analyst and digitizer of policy, she says, and I love this line.

She's like, paperwork favors the powerful.

If what we were doing in Blue States is working for the people

you're talking about, I'd say keep doing it.

If it was giving them power and giving them voice and they were owning homes and staying in their homes and, you know, people were coming to the, then we'd, then we'd be winning.

Like if we were adding population, because it's such a great place to live, we'd be winning instead of losing population and losing electoral college votes so rapidly that if current trends continue after the 2030 census, a Democrat could win that whole blue wall, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and still lose the presidency.

And so

this is what I mean about being outcome focused.

We got really wrapped up in procedure and people debated why we created these procedures.

And good, if the procedures were doing what we wanted them to do, I'd support them.

But to the extent we are driving folks out of these states, working class, you know, disproportionately immigrant and non-white, then we're just failing, right?

Everybody always talks about San Francisco, which is a place I lived and I love, as being unlivable.

San Francisco is not unlivable.

San Francisco is great to live in if you have a lot of money.

It's a disaster if you don't have a lot of money.

The tenderloin, which is the worst part of San Francisco, the absolute like the concentration, the containment zone for disorder, the tenderloin has the highest proportion of children living there of any part of San Francisco.

Very highly immigrant community.

People live there and we're failing them and we're driving them out.

And so

I want people to have voice.

I want people to get the things that they're asking politicians for.

The book, Abundance, is motivated by the recognition that they're not.

And that is why you had a huge shift to the right in blue states and blue cities in 2024.

If it was working, we should keep doing it, but it's not working.

So we have to change.

So here's a chance for change.

What's your call to action?

So what we do on Assembly Required,

every guest has to say, here's something you can do.

And you have been in, I think, an extraordinary and necessary public conversation about what we need.

And even this conversation is a call to action.

But other than calling on their legislators, how can the person who believes you and agrees with you, what do you need them to do to pursue the politics of abundance?

Show up to local meetings and advocate for the people not in the room.

I said a minute ago that meetings favor, that I'm sorry, that paperwork favors the powerful.

Meetings favor the powerful too, because the people who go to them are the people with something at stake, the people who already have representation, the people who want things usually to stay the way they are.

Don't build that affordable housing down the block.

Don't build that apartment complex.

Don't lay that transmission line.

And,

you know, to go to a city council meeting, to go to a local planning meeting, you have to know about it.

You have to feel confident being there, right?

That's a lot easier if if you're part of an organized group of, you know, people already live there who have money and have time and have experience navigating

the byways of the powerful.

But the people who might want to live there, the people who might need that energy that would come through there, the people who might need government to work better and differently than it does, they're probably not going to be there.

And there are a lot of people who are incredibly engaged in national politics, who are donating to out-of-state Senate races, you know, and governor's races and want to, you know, know, wanted to beat Mitch McConnell a couple of years ago, who couldn't name for you their state rep,

couldn't name for you their state senator.

There is a huge amount you can do where you are.

And a lot of what has gone wrong nationally flows from a lot having gone wrong locally first.

And so getting very involved, and you can do that with Yimby groups.

There are now abundance groups popping up around the country, which is very cool to see.

But you can also just do that yourself and just be there.

And maybe you won't have the same conclusions I would have.

But actually being involved in local politics is a very, very, very underrated way to be involved.

Being involved in national politics is, frankly, overrated.

It's very hard to change national politics.

But your city council member, your state rep, they'll probably meet with you.

So get involved locally.

As a recline, thinker, prognosticator, and hopefully fixer of abundance for the rest of us, thank you so much for being here on Assembly Required.

Thank you so much, Stacey.

As always on Assembly Required, we're here to give you real, actionable tools to face today's biggest challenges.

First, be curious.

If you want to dig deeper into the abundance agenda, grab Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book, Abundance, available wherever books are sold.

Two, solve problems.

Part of solving problems is understanding what's happening in the world.

And for smart trust it takes, I strongly encourage you to listen to the Ezra Klein show.

Third, do good.

What is unfolding in Washington, D.C.

is more than an overreach.

It is yet another example of step nine in the 10 steps to autocracy.

This one expands the use of military power and creates space for private violence.

Unfortunately, one of the targets for this occupation and removal project are the homeless and unhoused in Washington, D.C.

If you want to support those who are pushing back, please consider making a donation to Miriam's Kitchen, which uses a comprehensive approach to eliminating the housing crisis in Washington.

From providing meals and connecting people to social services to advocating for providing the homeless with permanent, stable housing.

Visit Miriamskitchen.org.

As always, if you like what you hear, be sure to share this episode and subscribe on all of your favorite platforms.

And to meet the demands of the algorithms, please rate the show and leave a comment.

You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you go to listen and learn.

Over the next few weeks, we're going to continue talking about the 10 steps to autocracy and how to fight back.

I'd love to hear more about what you're seeing on the ground, groups providing mutual aid, innovative neighbors doing extraordinary things, and issues you aren't hearing enough about.

If you have a report, a question, or a comment for me, send it in.

You can start with an email to assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail and you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That wraps up this episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams.

Be careful out there and I'll meet you here next week.

Assembly Required is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Lacey Roberts and our associate producer is Farah Safari.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilis Photopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroote, Kyle Seglin, Tyler Boozer, Ben Hethcote, and Priyanka Muntha for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long and me, Stacey Abrams.

At the University of Arizona, we believe that everyone is born with wonder.

That thing that says, I will not accept this world that is.

While it drives us to create what could be,

that world can't wait to see what you'll do.

Where will your wonder take you?

And what will it make you?

The University of Arizona.

Wonder makes you.

Start your journey at wonder.arrizona.edu.