Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Jon Favreau.

We have a special bonus episode for you today.

If you're someone who spent any time wading into the debates within the Democratic Party about why we're doing so badly, why we have done so badly, which I'm sure you are if you listen to this show, you have probably heard about the Abundance Discourse.

Abundance is a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.

It is a book about governance and in large part how blue states and cities need to govern better and deliver more.

It is about envisioning a liberalism that builds, that actually delivers on the promises Democrats make, particularly in places that Democrats control fully.

The book is fascinating.

It's very thought-provoking.

So obviously it's become the subject of a lot of online controversy and debate.

Ezra and Derek were in L.A.

this past week to talk about the book.

So sat down with them here in the studio.

It was supposed to be a quick interview, but it was such a fascinating, fun conversation that it went long and we decided we're just going to make this its own bonus episode for all of you guys.

So without further ado, I hope you'll enjoy.

And as always, if you're a member of the Discord community, I hope you'll let us know what you think.

Would love to talk about it more there.

Here's my conversation with Ezra and Derek.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, good to see you guys in person.

Thanks for having us.

Great to be here.

So your new book, Abundance, has been out about a week now.

And the surest sign of its importance is that there is a full-blown abundance discourse that's going on in an online debate where people are tearing each other to shreds.

It's great.

So I am excited to come in a week later to talk about the debate about abundance.

It's time to work on the discourse.

Right.

It's a discourse generating machine, as one person called it.

Perfect.

Before we get into it, though,

I should say I am a

full-fledged abundance pill.

I'm in.

I would love for you to, though, sell me on abundance like I am not a partisan political junkie, but a skeptical, casual news consumer, which is most Americans.

All right.

I'll give this a shot and then Derek can jump in where I failed.

We're trying to get Democrats in this case, but it could be both parties, to ask a pretty simple question, which is what don't we have enough of and how do we get it?

And that seems like too simple of a question on which to base much of a politics.

And then you look around.

And like, if you're in California, as we're in California right now, we don't have enough enough houses and there are reasons for that.

We don't have enough clean energy to meet our clean energy goals and there are reasons for that.

We don't have high-speed rail and there are reasons for that.

And, you know, if you go to the national level, we didn't get that rural broadband we were promised and there are reasons for that, even though $42 billion was passed in favor of it or that nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers.

And so at a pretty basic level, liberals should care that the government delivers the things it promises to you.

Like that should be baseline.

And if it doesn't, nobody should be more pissed than we are.

And if we're not, then over time, the government is going to get a reputation for not delivering and people are going to turn to political movements that promise to make it deliver in another, much darker fashion.

So, like, that's the sell here.

Government should be about giving us more of the things we need to build our life on.

It should be about making a future better than the past.

Some of that better future is material abundance in different ways, energetic abundance, houses for 25-year-olds to live in that they can afford.

And we've been failing at doing this.

And so we've got to be able to work backwards from the failures and fix them.

So I'll ask you

in the same character, as someone who doesn't really know all this, why have liberals failed to do this?

It's a complicated question.

You know, something has happened in the last 50 years of liberalism.

that has marked a really clear shift in its character.

If you go back 100 years to the beginning of the New Deal era, America was building like crazy.

We were building roads, we were building bridges, we were building energy.

We built and built and built.

And sometime around the 1960s, 1970s, the character of liberalism changed.

And the politics of building gave way to a different kind of politics that we think of as the politics of blocking, essentially.

You had the rise of environmental laws, which were very important in their age.

The 1940s and 1950s were absolutely, heinously disgusting.

We needed a Clean Air and Water Act.

We needed NEPA for its time.

We needed ways to protect endangered species.

But the rules that we wrote in the 1960s to protect the environment have created strictures and rules that keep us from building the things we need in the 2020s, like houses and energy.

There was also a legal change that we get into in detail in the book, where we made it easier for neighbors to control what could and couldn't be built around them.

And when neighbors have the ability to say no to any new development that might have a chance of creating new construction headaches or adding new parking headaches or maybe even reducing the value of their homes, when you give that power at the local level, it has the ability to stop development entirely.

And that's really what we've seen in so many areas that are governed by liberals.

I mean, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all governed by Democrats.

There was a study that my colleague Yoni Applebaum talked about in a recent cover story in in The Atlantic that found that in the state of California, every single time a city adds 10% vote share of progressives, the number of housing permits declines by 30%.

So as an area becomes more liberal, it permits fewer homes.

So I think, as Ezra said, it's so important, I think, to look very clearly in the mirror and say we're at this moment right now where the opposition to Donald Trump needs to be popular and effective.

And right now, we have a Democratic Party that is incredibly, historically unpopular, and also incredibly ineffective in the places that it holds the most power, like New York and California and Oregon.

And so it's really important, I think, not just to have a movement that can criticize Donald Trump effectively, but also have a movement that can say, give us power because we've earned it.

Give us power because we deserve it.

Give us power because when we have it, we can build the things that are most important.

Houses, energy, even science and technology.

Abundance is clearly a governing philosophy.

To what extent is it also meant to be a campaign platform or the basis for a grassroots political movement?

I mean, do you think it would work?

You're the political professional.

Well, honestly, this is what I, most of my questions are like this, because as I read the book, I got excited about it, but I started thinking, like the wheel started turning and I'm like, all right, how do you sell this?

How does this look like in a campaign?

Is this going to appeal to regular normie Dems?

I'll say a couple of things on this because I think about it on a couple levels.

Cause there's one level on which there's a part of me that wants to say, not my job, and lie

that I wasn't thinking about this while writing the book.

But it's funny.

You clearly did because the book is like I was saying this, I was talking to Ben Rhodes, my former speech writing colleague in the Obama White House.

And I was like, they wrote the book like it was a speech that a politician could give.

A lot of it.

Like it's not like two in the week.

It's a call to arms.

So I think a couple of things.

One, I would just say as a matter of experience, like you sort of don't know how things will play, how the material works, so you try it out on the crowd.

And so we've been sort of working on this in a back room for a long time.

And then it comes out and people actually.

It is mimetic.

People do want to argue about it.

And nothing I have ever done in all of my years of politics has been picked up as quickly by actual politicians.

So clearly they see something in it.

Both, I think, something substantive, right?

Which is a framework for confronting some mistakes liberals have made and also a framework for thinking in a different way about the future, but also something political.

I think the other thing that I would say, though, in terms of what I think works in it politically is First, I think liberals have found themselves in a dysfunctional relationship with the future.

I think we have lost most of the people who are the big like futuristic influencers, your Elon Musks, your Mark Andreessen's.

And it's not exactly that I want them back at the moment.

I have some disagreements, it turns out, with them.

But that question of

what is your relationship to technology?

What is your relationship to what is coming?

Is it fundamentally optimistic?

Are you telling people a story where they can imagine a life that is better for them in the future rather than a life that is built around different kinds of sacrifices?

And I actually think this is a pretty profound, I don't think I've said this anywhere.

I think this is a pretty profound difference that American liberalism,

it is a transformation of American liberalism from, say, Obama to more or less the present.

You know, the critique of Obamaism, as you know, better than most, was that it was teleological, right?

You know, the arc of history bends towards justice.

It was relentlessly optimistic.

So, you know, the audacity of hope, right?

All of it is about looking to a future that you, on a very fundamental level, believe is going to be profoundly better, morally better, economically better than the past.

And a lot of the rhetoric is very abundance-esque.

And I think that liberalism in the year since got into a rhetoric of sacrifice.

Moral sacrifice, because we are a nation built on sin and on stain,

but also environmental and material sacrifice because climate change is a disaster, deforestation is a disaster, biodiversity is a disaster.

So it wasn't always said explicitly, but I think liberalism had stopped having a theory of technology because it didn't like the technologists anymore.

It was quite consumed with arguments, understandably so, about the deep injustices of the past.

And I'm not saying they were not true or there,

but it was a tough politics.

And its environmental side, as things got worse,

it had a lot of trouble arguing what I think we should be able to argue, which is that the clean energy future should be fucking awesome.

Not like our present, but a little bit worse and more solar, but amazing.

We are doing miraculous things with this technology.

Electric vehicles made by whomever now are better than what came before them in a million different respects, right?

That is how Tesla became like a player in the market.

There's a lot to be excited about, but you have to orient the resources of government around making that true.

I say all that because one of the things we're trying to do with abundance, and it's why we started with this little sci-fi even yet for a couple pages, is try to say that you win in politics when your vision of the future is both more exciting and more credible than the other people's vision of the future.

And I think it's been a while since Democrats have offered that kind of future forwardness.

I think if you look at Bill Clinton, he represented the future very much against H.W.

Bush and Bob Dole, certainly.

I think if you look at Obama, he represented the future against John McCain and then Mitt Romney, who sort of stepped out in the 1950s.

And since that, it's been a little harder.

I think you got to win the future back.

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I also had these experiences reading the book where I would,

you know, get excited about the possibility for this to be a democratic platform, and then I would go back to my job of mainlining the news, which is mostly about how, you know, a bunch of corrupt oligarchs are, you know, turning America into hungry and shipping off people into foreign gulags.

And it makes me wonder, like, how do you think the politics of abundance meets the gravity of the political crisis we're in right now?

I think the politics of abundance meets this moment somewhat perfectly.

I think when you look at the economic agenda of Donald Trump, or maybe let's be more accurately said, the personality of Donald Trump, which is manifesting itself in what appears to be some kind of economic policy.

It is just one example of scarcity after another.

I mean, this man does not believe in the concept of a positive sum interaction at all.

He doesn't believe in the concept of cooperation.

And so I don't think it's any surprise that when you look at his economic agenda, you see him constantly identifying elements of scarcity and then trying to take something else away, right?

So he says, we don't have enough manufacturing.

So what we need to do is have less trade.

We don't have enough housing.

So what we need are fewer immigrants.

We don't have enough enough money.

There's really high debts.

What we need is less health care for poor people by cutting Medicaid.

There's a lot of, let's solve this scarcity here by taking away something that America needs.

And I think that, by juxtaposition, abundance is the exact opposite message.

Yes, we don't have enough houses.

Let's fucking build more.

Yes, we don't have enough manufacturing of some critical goods that are essential to national security.

Let's have an explicit policy to encourage their construction in America, not by cutting off trade, but rather by working with our allies, our trading partners, to build an industrial base that can take on the future.

So I see that being a very, very close fit.

I also frankly see the way this book sits alongside Doge as being very apt, right?

You have right now in government, nominally, a department of government efficiency, but it's basically a department of just slamming government to the ground and then grabbing whatever can be discovered in the ruins for Elon Musk, right?

So, I think by contrast, we're talking about a vision of government efficiency that is very explicit.

Going into specific programs, whether it's the Chips and Science Act, high-speed rail in California, and saying, this is how government isn't achieving its ends right now.

And if we are going to be the party that believes in government, we have to be the party that makes government work.

That's a true department of government efficiency.

And then, the last thing I guess I would say is: you know, the book is very detailed about how government fails and how to make government better.

But to your point about speechwriting and, you know, meeting people in the moment at the level of meme and vibes and emotions, I also think that toward the end, in our conclusion, we have this history that we tell.

about political orders, about how America's changed in the last 100 years, with a New Deal order that rose between the 1930s and the 1960s and a neoliberal order that was overseen by Ronald Reagan.

And one thought that I had as I was sort of thinking about these two big political orders that have defined American history in the last century is that each one defined freedom for its own time.

You know, Franklin D.

Roosevelt said, you know, he talked about the four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of belief, from want, from fear.

And then Ronald Reagan redefined freedom in the 1980s.

Freedom didn't mean a kind of positive freedom, it was about freedom from the government.

I do think that

it's not too cheap to say that successful political movements often succeed by defining freedom in the terms that the age demands.

And right now, I think that one of the main issues that Americans have, the main internal crisis of America, which in many ways defined the 2024 election, is unaffordability.

And at the core of unaffordability is housing.

It's the biggest part of a typical family's budget, of almost any family's budget, is rent or mortgage.

Donald Trump won the unaffordability election, and he's immediately driving up prices with his trade policy.

I think that housing policy is about freedom.

The freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to stay where you want to stay, the freedom to not feel burdened by costs, especially the cost that's the most important and emotionally intimate part of your life, the walls around your body and the ceiling and the roof.

Redefining freedom, I think, for our own age through abundance is like, is a message that I think politicians can click into because it does show that we're not just talking about fixing government here and there with this sort of point-to-list agenda.

We are after something, something bigger and more capacious.

And I think politicians are seeing it right now.

It's interesting you brought up cost of living and the affordability crisis, because clearly when you talk to voters, not just in, especially in the last election, but in every election I can remember, cost of living issues are top of mind.

And

when I think about

there's like an extra step with abundance on some of this, where it's like when you start testing a bunch of policies that Democrats have proposed for the last, I don't know, however many years, you know, the stuff that does well is,

you know, in the ACA, it's the insurance protections, you know, protection for pre-existing condition or the protection or expansion of retirement and healthcare benefits or a middle-class tax cut or a child tax cut or something that people are just going to get.

And

with housing, you still have to make the step up, okay, we're going going to build more housing, and then that's going to make housing cheaper.

I remember when we were doing the Affordable Care Act.

Me too, I also remember that.

Remember that?

Simpler time.

And what Obama was always very excited about were the cost-cutting measures in the Affordable Care Act and bending the cost curve in the out-years, which is a line that I would try to get out of every single speech.

And that is clearly very important, but that's not what people cared about, you know?

And I'm wondering how you think about connecting abundance to the affordability crisis like directly.

Well, let me say something on healthcare, because as you know, it's like that's my breadline.

That was that's where I come from, man.

You were talking about the discourse generation on abundance.

And one of the things I did not totally expect was for at least like some faction of like the Bernie left to see it as this big threat to them, which I don't think it is, but I want to sort of make this connection a little bit more explicit.

Go back to healthcare.

I used to cover the various single payer bills that would arise in different state legislatures and nationally, right?

And all these different ideas for how to do universal healthcare.

And there were ideas that were much more expansive, much more generous, and what we ended up doing, the Affordable Care Act.

One of the truly lethal weak points of all of these that would not come in when you would pull it the first time, like, does it sound good to you if Medicare gives everybody health insurance, but would come in immediately when people began to debate it, was the fear of rationing, the fear of wait times, the fear fear of not being able to get what you wanted or what you needed, which happens in other countries, right?

It is not a fake thing.

And frankly, it happens in our country.

I would always say that the way we ration care is by price.

If you can't afford it, you don't get it.

In other countries, you do waiting lines and different things.

But imagine you did do Medicare for All.

Imagine some future

DevGrad gets elected and wants to do something more like Medicare for All.

If you gave the kind of highly expansive health insurance that, you know, Bernie Sanders' version of this envisions to every American what you would have immediately is a supply crisis in medical care we don't have enough doctors for that not enough nurses there are key areas where we don't have enough hospitals you could very much have shortages of certain kinds of drugs we just saw this with Ozempic in in a certain way you would need in order to do the kinds of things we want to create the kind of equity and possibility and social insurance we want, you actually need the supply of the thing you're trying to give people.

And so this connects, I think, in some ways to like the left-wing agenda, but it also then connects, I think, to what you're talking about, the affordability crisis,

a coined term by my lovely wife, Amy Larry.

One of my potted models of politics right now is we had a long period in American politics where what defined economic politics were problems of demand, wages, how many jobs we had.

I mean, Jobs Day, right?

Jobs Dow Today was a big deal for a long time and still is.

But the fundamental issue we had was an economy that for a very long time had been running at low demand.

So in early 2020, my wife Ann Larry at the Atlantic, a colleague with Derek, writes this big piece about the affordability crisis.

And her sort of point there, this is early in 2020, a month before COVID hits, at least our shores in a big way.

She says, look, like, behind this economy people think is good.

If you look at the core things people need to build their life on, housing, child care,

elder care, health care, and education, it's all getting really expensive and has been for a very, very long time.

It's eating up more and more and more of people's budgets, even as they're getting these wage increases.

And you could sort of see this unusual divergence in the data between like an economy that looks good and people feel pretty good about as consumers, but they're really getting upset about this.

And you can really see it beginning to stress their budgets.

Then we go through the pandemic and then comes inflation.

And what inflation is, is like a saliency portal for prices.

We go from all of the attention in the economy being the demand side, wages and jobs, to all of it being on prices.

And even as the price increases in consumer goods begin to slow down, what is then left is like everybody's been staring at prices for a long time.

It's like, oh shit, housing, healthcare, elder care, child care, this has all gone completely unaffordable.

And energy has become a really big question in this too with Russia and decarbonization.

And so I just think we're now in a period that the future is going to be defined on affordability.

We are in a period where the big economic problem for a long time is going to be things people need the most of.

We just don't have enough of them.

And I think it is actually pretty intuitive to people that you make something cheaper by making more of it.

And I think one reason it is good for Democrats to admit this is that there is a political power in admitting your own mistakes.

Like there is something that is unlocked, controversy, controversy, interest, and to some degree, credibility.

Democratic states are losing people, not for no reason.

The reason hundreds of thousands of people are leaving California and Illinois and New York every single year for Texas and Florida and Arizona, We survey them.

It's cost of living.

We've made the places we govern too expensive.

And that's because we have not created enough of the things that we need.

And I think that requires like a, like not just like a self-examination, but a message that says, we actually fucked up, right?

This didn't happen completely by accident, but we understand the way in which we fucked up.

And we have a plan to not do it again.

And I don't think that what is energetic in that is like every individual housing idea.

I think it is the generalized notion that the people came before me, whoever this imaginary politician is, they made some mistakes.

Like we're in a different era now.

And what I have is a, not the continuation of the last 30 years of liberal policies that you're already not happy about.

What I have is something new that is, takes the best of that and then is alert to the things that you're upset about.

Because in this last 30 years, things got worse for you in a bunch of real ways.

So you mentioned like some of the critique from the left.

I'm sure you've read all of it, read most of it.

I'm sure you've talked about the Zephyr Teach Out review of Abundance.

I wanted to get your reaction to one part of that because I think it summarizes a lot of the criticism on the left.

I mean, you mentioned the Bernie side.

There's also sort of like a Warren-esque critique as well.

And she writes, I still can't tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small bore and correct, we need zoning reform, or non-trivial and deeply regressive, we need deregulation, or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential.

Matt Brunig has a similar critique.

He says it would be a huge mistake to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens and construction.

Obviously.

Now, in the book, right, like it's not a book about monopolistic power and practices and corporate concentration.

So I get that.

I guess to the question that Teachout asks, is there room in abundance for a critique of concentrated economic power and anti-monopoly politics and all that?

Of course, there is.

It's been really interesting reading some of these reviews and discovering within the critical reviews a kind of memoir of the author's ideology.

We read books not as they are, but as we are.

That is precisely what I meant to say, but with shorter words.

And so, of course, someone interested interested in antitrust is going to read our book about abundance, the future of America, and say, why isn't there a chapter or seven on antitrust?

And someone who's coming from a place of, I'm a democratic socialist, why isn't there a chapter or seven about how democratic socialism is the best way to run a country?

I understand that.

I think the fair thing to say is that we are, in many ways, asking for a set of reforms that live alongside the existing welfare state and a strong antitrust enforcement in a beautiful way.

I mean, chocolate, peanut butter, and whatever raspberry jam that seems like maybe would be like a good trio.

These are tastes that absolutely go well together.

And just because there's an issue that people care about that isn't a full chapter of the book doesn't mean it's not important to me and Ezra.

I mean, we talk about in the book about, you know, wanting these policies to fundamentally help people's lives we are not interested in an abundance of things that fill a house we're interested in an abundance of homes where there's no chapter about you know making it easier to build as many you know flat screen televisions as possible we're interested in the most important material conditions of people's lives to that end of course we support the earned income tax credit and universal health care and social security and we want to protect medicare and medicaid and even expand the child tax credit which would be absolutely fantastic not only for reducing poverty in this country but also helping working-class families afford to live in the cities that they live.

All these policies are worthy.

But at the same time,

one frustration that I've had with the reviews is that they don't see clearly that what we're trying to do at the end of the day is to help liberal government achieve liberal ends more efficiently.

Just quick example.

2021, Joe Biden signs the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

He and Pete Buttigieg call it, rightly, the most important infrastructure bill passed in the last several generations.

There's $42 billion that are earmarked for rural broadband construction to help the most poor and outside of mainstream metropolitan America people hook up to the internet so that they can lead richer lives, get in touch with doctors when they need to.

This is a classic progressive agenda.

What happens is that four calendar years later now, practically nobody's been hooked up to rural broadband.

And it's because the way the program worked out through the Commerce Department is that there was a 14-step process that began with the FCC drawing a map and ended with the states essentially begging the Commerce Department for money and being told, nope, you didn't file that paperwork correctly.

Nope, there's a bureaucratic issue there.

Nope, you have to refile it.

Yada, yada, yada.

Nothing is built.

Donald Trump is trying to take over the program, shut it down, and hand the whole thing to Elon Musk.

We want government to work.

If government has progressive aims and it can't accomplish them, you can't blame the oligarchy for that.

You can't blame monopolies for that.

You can't blame...

Especially if you control the government.

If you control the government, you certainly can't say the reason we didn't accomplish this is that we don't have a welfare state akin to Denmark.

We failed to accomplish this program because government got in its way and was subsumed with the kind of everything begaliberalism that Ezra's written about so eloquently.

So this is where I think think the emphasis on, well, you should talk more about antitrust and welfare states, misses the core, a core function of this book, which is to say if you're trying to build a progressive political movement, you should be obsessed with making political power work for liberals.

Because when it doesn't, the public will notice.

And when they notice, they either won't vote for you or they will literally vote in the most expensive way with their feet and spend thousands of dollars leaving the states and cities that you govern.

I want to be a bit more of a bad cup on this,

which is to say that everything Derek says is right.

But also, there are a lot of ways antitrust harmonizes here.

And that

if I were to, I'm trying to think about the nicest way to say this.

My friends in the

whole problem is oligarchy part of the party.

And I believe a good part of our problems are oligarchy.

But there are certain kinds of problems they are then willing to see and certain kinds kinds they're not as willing to see.

So in housing, I find a lot of them get obsessed with this idea that

private investors are buying up a bunch of rental housing.

And this is an extremely small part of the market right now and is just not the main problem in housing.

But because it is the villain they are comfortable having, it is where they want to put their focus.

Kamala Harris had, I was very excited when she brought out her big plan for 3 million, to build 3 million units of housing, but her plan never would have achieved anything like it.

It did have a big thing about trying to do something about this private investor buying up housing issue, though.

So you can really get, I think, taken off the track

when

you're very concerned with how policy codes.

A thing I found like really interesting in Zephyr's review was that, is it something good and small like zoning reform?

And like, try doing zoning reform if you think it's small, right?

But, or something bad like deregulation?

Okay, interesting, right?

Yeah.

Deregulation is a word that I think shuts liberals down a bit.

And it shouldn't.

A lot of what we're pointing out in the book is that the player that is often most regulated is not the market, it's the government itself.

If you want to understand why the government can't build public housing effectively, I mean, in many ways, the federal government building public housing is now functionally illegal.

It's been regulated out of possibility.

If you want to know why we didn't build California high-speed rail, if you want to know why it's so expensive to build affordable housing in a lot of liberal jurisdictions when you trigger public money, it is because of the regulations we we put on government.

In the same way that deregulating the market can often allow corporations to do things they couldn't do before and move faster, you can decide in any given instance if that's good or bad, deregulating the government can do the same thing.

We're inspired here not by some conservative legal theorist, but by Nick Bagley, who was Gretchen Whitmer's former lead counsel and has this great point about the procedural fetish among liberal lawyers, where he kind of makes this whole argument that for some reason liberals are always on the one hand defending against the Republicans' effort to wrap the government in paperwork and administrative procedure as a way of slowing it down but they never realize that if they could unwrap it themselves it could actually speed government up so in general i don't like i am quite left and what i'm trying to build here is a much more capable government so i consider myself on the left edge of this uh of this american debate But we are trying to be much more agnostic.

The problems are different in different places and in different domains.

But if you had done Bernie Sanders' Green New Deal with the old environmental laws, you simply couldn't have built it.

Like you just cannot build fast enough for what he wanted to do unless you really restructure that.

And so again, going back to the core question that we're trying to get people to focus on in the book, what do we not have enough of?

And how do we get more of it?

Like, to me, what separates the left and the right are goals.

It's not just...

It's not means, but I find that a lot of people in this debate, they think, they seem to think what separates the left and the right is means, right?

The right wants to deregulate, the left wants to regulate.

But what I care about in regulation is whether or not it's achieving my goals or not.

If I'm regulating the market in a way that harms my goals, like making it too hard for developers to build market rate or affordable housing, then that's bad, even though my answer there would be deregulation.

And if I've regulated government in a way that doesn't make sense for the government to achieve my goals, but what matters is the goals.

And too often, liberals are, I think, very symbolic in this and not outcomes-oriented.

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What I saw in some of the reviews is some of it's a policy disagreement or, you know, sin of omission, whatever it may be.

But some of it's a political concern in that the best political stories and the most appealing political movements have villains.

And, you know, abundance doesn't have enough of a villain or to the extent there is a villain, it's liberals or maybe they're well-meaning, right?

But like people who screwed up.

I kind of think that you could square the circle by just

fusing like an anti-monopoly politics and economic populism or a

big enough welfare state with the politics of abundance by making the whole thing a fight against entrenched special interests, whoever they may be.

Sometimes they might be like a big corporation or a monopolist.

Sometimes it might be NIMBYs or politicians who are just caught up in their own, you know, years of old regulations that they can't get out of the way.

Like I kind of feel like both of those can coexist.

I would like to see a lot of different political flavors of this.

Like Derek was saying earlier that there's like, you know, it's raspberry jam and peanut butter and chocolate.

They go, but I would like to see a lot of different combos.

There is a very left-wing, even democratic socialist version of abundance, right?

If you're AOC and you have a big public housing bill, which she has, and you want to do a big Green New Deal, which she does, there is a bunch of questions about how you unlock supply and how you deepen state capacity and how you bring back in the expertise you needed to build these things when you've outsourced it for decades now in order to achieve that agenda.

And there's like the Josh Shapiro version, right?

His get shit done agenda, where he's bringing down procurement reform and he's bringing down the times it takes to get a business license and he's making the government work a lot faster.

And there's a Jared Paulus version in Colorado.

And there's a lot of versions because the question of how do you make the state capable of doing what you want done actually can work with a lot of different goals.

And I sort of want to see different people, you know, come up with their versions of the villains and their versions of the allies and so on.

Like I have my own version of this because I have my own politics, but we're trying to create in the book a framework capacious enough for different kinds of people to think in and generate insights out of.

It's not supposed to be one narrow politics, right?

The different flavors of the politics of redistribution are vast, right?

Bernie Sanders' version is different than

Jared Golden's version, which is different than Barack Obama's version, which is different than where Kamala Harris's version was, right?

You can do a lot when you ask this question of how do we move money from richer people to working class people and make their lives better through doing it, right?

That's like a very simple thought of like the marginal dollar is worth less to a rich person.

Let's move it to a poor person.

And you can do a lot with that thought with a lot of different forms of politics and a lot of different, both like enemies and visions.

By the way, I think the obvious enemy Democrats are really going to have in 2028 is the Trump administration.

And one of our views is that the Trump administration, as Derek was saying earlier, is an administration of scarcity.

And this is a way to actually put them not on the wrong side of institutions, but on the wrong side of any kind of vision of the future you might actually want to live in.

Truly never tire of trying to convince people that it's not just that their means are bad, but that their vision of the future, if they achieved everything they want to achieve, completely sucks.

Well, it's scarcity and it's scarcity that they want to take it all for themselves.

Right, right.

They don't just want to destroy the the government.

They want to destroy the government for the purpose of turning it into a kleptocracy, to turn a bunch of wealth over to Elon Musk, give it to his companies, and then also turn the money over to the Trumps, right?

Oh, hey, maybe we'll forgive the head of Binance if we can invest in this company.

Maybe if someone gives us $75 million, we'll release them from the civil fraud charge that they were on because they gave us $75 million.

Like, this is classic Gilded Age 1885 shit that I thought we lost in the 20th century, and we're just bringing it back with abandon.

That is easy to run against.

It's a terrible state for the country, but it's easy to run against.

So just quickly to your question, like, who's the enemy here?

At the highest possible level, the enemy is very clear.

It's Donald Trump, it's Elon Musk.

If J.D.

Vance runs and he's running on the legacy of Trump and Musk, that sort of combination of cacistocracy and kleptocracy, that's a clear high villain.

At the local level, I do think that this book offers, as you said, a nice lens on the idea that sometimes we think of special interests or we think of power as residing exclusively at the level of big companies, right?

But sometimes when the problem is housing and the problem is NIMBYism, the power that you're fighting, the special interest that you're fighting, doesn't exist at that high level of company.

It exists at the level of the homeowners that show up at city council meetings and say, I don't want to add housing here because it's going to reduce my housing, my home value.

Creating a memetic charge against that NIMBYS world, I think is very, very important and relatively, not easily easily done, but it's a clear story to tell.

But the last piece of this that I think is really important

is that we live in an anti-institutional and anti-establishment age.

If you look at trust institutions, it's plummeting for practically every single one and among practically every demographic, especially for young people.

One danger that I see Democrats falling into is that as conspiracy theorists and cranks and anti-institutional crazies migrate toward the right, they leave the Democratic Party as the party of institutionalists and establishmentarians and folks who are just like, well, if you attack the NIH, all I will do is defend the NIH, which now actually is a fairly reasonable thing to do.

If you criticize the government, I'm just going to defend it.

If you say we don't trust the public health system, I'm just going to defend it.

And if we argue ourselves into a position, if Democrats argue their way into a position where all they can do is defend the status quo against the assaults of the Trump administration.

We have put ourselves in a situation where we are fundamentally out of step with the sentiment of the age, which is anti-institutional and anti-establishment.

And one thing the book I think does at a level of vibes, not at the level of any particular sentence, but the level of vibes, is offer people a vocabulary for, a lens for, being the party of institutions that seeks to understand how those institutions fail for the purpose of reforming them.

Not the party that says the status quo is fine, do not attack it, but rather the party that's completely obsessed with understanding how government works, where it fails, where the levers are that we can work, so that we can actually get shit done.

I do think that it offers parts of the left this new language for taking institutions seriously and critically at a time when voters are honestly going to be for the foreseeable future angry at the status quo.

I'm curious for your thought on this.

One of my

glosses on the 2024 and even a little bit the 2020 election, but that was such a weird election with COVID and everything else.

But is that the core thing the Obama coalition lost was the politics of reform.

Like it kept most of its other pieces, but Obama was a reformer.

I think now people forget how much, but you don't.

How much of that early?

It's like, you know, the political consultants and, you know, cable news and red and blue America, right?

Like, you know, and money and politics and the special interests.

And it was this whole thing wasn't totally true, but like everybody's deceiving you.

And they're like, there's this good politics right behind it.

But Bill Clinton was also a reformer.

Donald Trump is a reformer.

The reformist impulse in American politics has always been one of its most important streams.

Like the people who grab it have grabbed a lot of high ground.

And one of the most dangerous things to me about both how Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris ran was they ran fully in defense of, not in reform of.

Like, it would be great if they had done like Doge for Real, not like the Department of Destroying the Government, but the Department of Actually making the government work better.

Bill Clinton did with reinventing government.

Barack Obama often made a big point of how he didn't like this, whatever it was, the thing about the salmon and salmon, yeah.

Who regulates the salmon?

The Interior Department regulates salmon when they're in freshwater, but commerce regulates them when they're in seawater.

And he wanted to.

And then when I couldn't even, I almost, I got a call from Gary Locke, the Commerce Secretary, the night of the State state of the union, yelling at me that this was wrong.

And we, even that, even that example.

And he wanted to remake the commerce department.

He was never able to do it.

He wanted to combine it with SBA.

He wanted a small business.

So there was a lot, like there was a big reform that he wanted to do a lot on money and politics.

Democrats have lost reform.

And this is a place where I really do think the streams go together for us and people to our left.

Like on this, Bernie Sanders and them are totally right.

The power of money in politics is grotesque.

And it should be central to Democrats, like in an age of both actual oligarchy and intentional oligarchy, to try to do something about it.

But also, like there are other forms of power and institutions, and I think this is something people get at them, often become captured like from within or they become captured by local stakeholders and incumbents.

Things that were very well intentioned, like notice and comment periods on regulations, are now captured by lobbyists.

It's not like your mom who goes to a notice and comment period for like the affordable care regulations.

It's the entire health insurance industry.

We've created a lot of things that were meant to create small D democratic participation, and they've been captured by big interests.

And one of the things that we're trying to say is, in addition to money and politics, which I think of as a real problem,

you also need to be very skeptical that government and institutions are working.

And you should be most skeptical if you are somebody who believes in them.

It's actually not a problem for Republicans when the government fails.

It's great.

They love it.

It's why they try to make it happen.

It should be a big problem for liberals when government fails.

Like, it should be a big problem that every really large infrastructure project, California high-speed rail, the big dig, the second avenue subway, that a blue state tries becomes like a byword for government failure.

And one of them in the aftermath of it should have changed their procedure so fundamentally that they believe it wouldn't happen again if they tried it again.

Zero of them have.

It is the tolerance of government failure on the left that I actually can't abide.

Like if you are the people who believe government should do things, then make it fucking do things.

And when it doesn't, get mad and change it.

But just moving on and making excuses and and then saying like, well, what about them?

It's not good enough.

And the way you know it's not good enough is you're losing and you're losing people.

So like, yeah, like big government, but government that actually works, being trapped between like one party that wants to make government fail and another that doesn't really care if it works, like that's intolerable to me.

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Pre-Trump, I think the challenge was a lot of this, when you're actually talking about reforming government, making government more efficient, making it work better, it wasn't as sexy as some of the other stuff, right?

So every time we would, and Obama was very focused on this, and we'd always be like, well, it's too much of that in the speech and the efficiency, and people don't care as much about that.

And then there's the inertia of governing in the bureaucracy, right?

Like we, there was always a proposal to combine education and labor departments, but then it was like, like, well, which secretary do you keep?

And then is Congress gonna let us do this?

And all the things where, you know, like you said, now that we have a doge that's awful, but like you could imagine one where

they're just shaking some things up within the law and actually making some change.

I think post-Trump and as the country got more polarized, I think among Democratic strategists and politicians, there is this feeling that

because we are in such an existential crisis for democracy, if we admit failure or focus on our own failures, then we are just wasting time and energy and attention that could be going towards the big fight.

I don't agree with that.

I absolutely disagree with it.

No, yeah, like, I don't think it's right.

I think that is what's, I think that is at the core of some of this is that every, and you can see that with some of the criticism of the book, too.

It's like, well, you know, Donald Trump's destroying democracy and doge, blah, blah, blah and they're, and they're giving, like, they're offering doge light.

Like, what is that?

You know, it's like, well, no, but actual voters, they don't like the Democratic Party right now, and they don't like the Republican Party much either.

But in order to like the Democratic Party again, they want to hear an alternative and they want to hear that you made some mistakes, that you actually believe that you made those mistakes.

Bernie Sanders, I mean, tell me if you if you disagree with this, this interpretation:

Bernie Sanders seems to be objectively the most popular figure in the Democratic Party right now.

He runs against the Democratic Party every day.

So, this idea idea that Democrats should be afraid of self-criticism makes absolutely no sense to me in the context of the most famous self-critic of the Democratic Party being objectively the most popular.

Donald Trump, who ran against the Republican Party.

Ran against the Republican Party.

But they also, they, you know, Bernie's criticism is coded as from the left, which then people on the left like that.

Any other criticism

is coded as from the right or centrist, which then freaks out all the time.

Let's run the experiment of criticizing the Democratic Party from the center.

Let's have someone give it a shot.

I don't know that it's going to work.

I don't consider myself like

some part-time political consultant.

But like I said before,

I do think that the Biden-Harris model fell into a trap of finding itself in defense of a status quo that they knew to be unpopular.

And that's a terrible position to be in.

You've wiggled your way into the one corner that you know won't be majoritarian popular because people are upset at the system.

I mean, it's coalition politics in the most, like, in the messiest way, right?

Which is like, we need every single person we can get in this fight against Donald Trump.

So I'm going to say, this is your, you know, everything bagel politics.

I'm going to say yes to everyone and make everyone happy and keep the coalition together, which is a very sort of Biden thing to do just personally.

And then we ended up with nothing.

But that was weakness.

I mean, I think we all see that now.

Yeah.

That was Barack Obama had the direct connection to his own coalition that allowed him to pretty easily say no to its internal members.

And Biden

on domestic policy didn't, or at least felt he didn't.

I would say in a different way, Hillary Clinton in 2016 did it.

They were both trying to do what Obama was able to do directly.

They were trying to do it in a mediated fashion, right?

Do it through the groups, through the institutions, through the sort of coalitional work of party building.

And both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are party builders.

They're both creatures of the party.

They work coalitionally.

That's fine, but not at a time when people fundamentally don't like your coalition.

And it doesn't work if you then don't govern in a way that makes you popular.

Look, I've been trying to say this to people recently because I think it helps get at something

why the Liz Cheney effort failed, but other things might succeed, which is that the salient fact about independence is not that they don't really like the other party, though that's true.

It's that they don't really like your party.

And the way Democrats tried to appeal to independence in 2024 was to try to bring in other people who didn't like the other party.

We, but also Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, don't like Donald Trump.

But actually the problem was these people didn't like you.

And you needed to communicate to them on some level that you understood why they didn't like you and you were going to make an effort.

to address it.

When people have doubts about you, you have to like not just deepen their doubts about the other people, you have to actually allay their fears about you.

And I think that's a place where we've had some failures here.

And look, my view is this book, this argument, it critiques the Democratic Party from the left, from the right.

It critiques just failure.

And I think that's not actually that ideologically coded or different ones are maybe coded ideologically differently.

But to what was said a minute ago, we actually do have a ton of examples of politicians who run with a somewhat arm's length relationship to the Democratic Party.

And Bernie Sanders is unusual in that he's been doing it sort of from the left for a long time.

But if you look at who overperformed in the House in 2024, they're the House Democrats trying to reformat the blue dogs, right?

They're sort of centristy.

You know, it's your Jared Goldens, it's your MGPs, it's a bunch of them, right?

And so we actually know this politics works pretty well.

We have a lot of evidence of what works.

And the politicians who are somewhat independent and criticizing the Democratic Party, look, I don't like where John Fetterman has gone for a million different reasons, but he has become more popular, not less in Pennsylvania.

And like, people don't like the parties.

And they have a sense like the fund, the most powerful special interests in this country, I think to a lot of Americans are not just like the rich people, but the parties themselves.

Like the parties themselves are just collections of special interests.

And if you can't show in some way, like send a costly signal that makes some people mad, that shows you are willing to say no to people on your side, then what they believe is you are completely corrupted by whatever that thing is that corrupts everybody else too.

Yeah.

Like the like, I do think we have to be honest about this.

Like, you know, I'm like much more a Democrat, but

people think the parties themselves are zones of corruption.

And the reason the politicians who run to their left and to their right often succeed better is that it is a way of showing independence from a kind of special interest that most Americans don't like, which is like the miasma of political dealmaking that are the two main political parties.

Which is what Trump ran against, Obama ran against, Bernie Sanders ran against, three of the more successful elect politicians of the last couple decades.

Which Democratic politicians seem abundance pilled or at least abundance curious to you guys?

Jared Polis in Colorado, Josh Shapiro certainly in Pennsylvania.

Shapiro in particular not only features in a chapter for his work on I-95, repairing the I-95 bridge that fell down, project should have taken 12 to 24 months under normal conditions because because of the emergency declaration that he announced, it was instead rebuilt in 12 days.

Great example of the kind of abundance liberalism that we're pointing to, the kind of get shit done liberalism that we're advancing.

And then I've seen in the last few weeks, he's sent a bunch of tweets that are all about essentially making government work faster, reducing permitting times.

I mean,

I think in many ways, the policies that he's announced just in the last week since the book came out are policies that you could absolutely tie in a bow and label abundance build, not to suggest that he's only doing them because the book came out, of course.

So I think there are great examples there.

I'm interested here.

Russ Moore, Richie Torres, the representative from New York, you know,

Jake Auchinclaus, who we've both spoken to.

He's been on Ezra's show.

Richie Torres, in response to Ezra's colleague asking where's the Project 2029 of the Democratic Party, just tweeted the cover of this book, which is, A, I guess, you know, wonderful advertising that we certainly did not ask him to do, but B, a great example of someone representing that the ideas of this book are central to his idea of the future of the Democratic Party.

So I think that the early nominees abound, and right now they're mostly at the governor and representative level.

But

I think it's growing.

I think people are picking up.

In an interesting way, there are some politicians who have read this book in a clearer way than some of the critics, which is to say that

we ask people very explicitly in the conclusion to see this book not as a list of the perfect policies to work everywhere, but rather as a lens that someone in San Francisco can look through that lens and see the right policies to increase housing production in San Francisco.

And then someone in Georgia can look through that lens and see the right policies to increase clean battery manufacturing in Georgia.

And someone can look through that lens in the Commerce Department and say, next time we want to spend $40 billion in rural broadband, let's get that money out in nine months rather than not get the money out at all in four years.

I see a lot of people

reading the project as it was intended as a kind of mimetic inspiration for them to apply their own ideas about how is this going to work in Maryland?

How is this going to work for upstate New York?

How is this going to work for Pennsylvania?

And I think that's cool.

And it makes me optimistic that there's a lot of people that are reading the book in the way that we intend it to be read.

On our favorite platform, formerly known as Twitter, there's been quite a bit of chatter, even some AI-generated images that suggest the presidential candidate most suited to run on the abundance agenda is you, Ezra.

Care to comment or announce anything?

God help this country if it turns to me.

Some good AI.

Krok is making my life worse on the daily in so many different ways.

Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, the book is Abundance.

It is fantastic.

Like I said, I'm Abundance Build.

You don't have to convince me.

I think I probably, because I read it from a political lens, like a, I read it through the political lens.

Yeah.

You know, and I do think it, it offers a very useful frame.

I've heard you, Derek, say that it gives us another axis to think about.

That's left, right, and scarcity, abundance.

And I think that's, that's, um, that's well said.

So everyone, go get the book.

Thanks for coming by.

Appreciate you guys.

Thanks so much, man.

Thanks, man.

That's our show for today.

Thanks to Derek and Ezra for coming on.

Tommy, Lovett, and I will be back with a new show on Tuesday.

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