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Mar 23, 2025
Headline: Abundance is the new buzzword on the US left. Now it’s coming here
Sub-headline : The US left’s focus on redistribution is failing. A new approach, emphasising economic growth, is gaining traction — but faces big hurdles
Editor: Colvive can hardley contain his glee via the use of the US Left in his headline and sub-headline! The Reader need only read Bari Weisse’s column of March 18, 2025 in the The Free Press to find the source of Colevile US Left fixsation.
Headline: Can Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Save the Left From Itself?
Sub-headline : The Democrats desperately need a new vision. Two prominent liberal journalists are offering one.
Can Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson Save the Left From Itself?
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic…
5 days ago · 124 likes · 533 comments · Bari Weiss
Editor: To put it bluntly Bari Weisse is the very bottom of the Neo-Conservative Intellegencia! Neither Ezra Klien nor Dereck Thompson are Liberals: Klien is at The New York Times and Derek at The Atlantic, a Neo Conservative publication. And Bairi Weisse lives in an Imagined World!
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today—Ezra at The New York Times, and Derek at The Atlantic.
Although they insist they’ll never go into politics themselves, they are offering Democrats a path back to power.
To get out of the political wilderness, they say the Democrats need a new vision—one that goes beyond resistance to Trump. A vision that can bring back the disaffected Democrats who stayed home or voted red for the first time this past November.
While other progressives are doubling down on zombie ideas, afraid to confront a country that has moved decisively to the right, Ezra and Derek are willing to face reality. They see that blue states are functioning similarly to the DMV—and, as a result, losing people to states like Texas and Florida.
In their new book, Abundance, they offer a blueprint for winning them back—to cities like San Francisco and New York, but also to the Democratic Party.
The thesis is simple: To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.
While conservatives and libertarians might say, Yes, exactly, let the free market do its thing, Ezra and Derek insist that the government can play a crucial role—if liberals will let it. They want to rein in the laws, regulations, and bureaucratic thinking that have made it nearly impossible to do anything in this country.
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Editor: Colvile as a Thatcherite attacking the Left is a civic, political duty!
The US elections were brutal for the Democrats. But here’s the most brutal fact: the places that swung hardest against them were those where they’d been in power for longest — New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles. And the people there aren’t just voting against left-wing rule but increasingly leaving it behind: one of America’s great demographic trends has been migration from blue states to red.
What’s the problem? In their new book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson make a simple argument: the left has been awful at governing. In particular, it has prioritised keeping its coalition of interest groups happy over getting stuff done — and brought in a raft of rules, not least on environmental protection, that make it too hard to build or invent things that might give those voters a better life, whether that be homes, high-speed railways, solar farms or life-saving medicines.
When this approach has, inevitably, produced a gap between supply and demand, the solution has been to throw subsidies at the problem — for affordable housing or childcare, say — rather than to actually tackle the blockages.
Klein and Thompson’s book is filled with chilling examples: the ghastly failure of cities like New York to build housing; the California high-speed rail project that makes HS2 look like a model of prudent procurement; the steady decline of risk-taking in science. But it is also filled with inspirational stories: the reforms that enabled the construction of cheap housing for the homeless in San Francisco; the Pennsylvania governor who repaired a bridge half melted by a crashed oil tanker in days rather than weeks; the warp-speed development and deployment of Covid vaccines.
Why does this matter? Partly because the authors are pretty influential — celebrated writers at The New York Times and The Atlantic respectively. But mostly because it represents one of the first serious attempts to chart a course for the Democrats that doesn’t involve doubling down on progressivism or shouting about the nasty orange man.
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Editor: The final paragraph compares Abundence with Foundations written by three of his friends? Or just three of his employees?
But there is one final problem, which is that many voters, particularly on the right, do not want abundance at all. They are the people who decry the desecration of the green belt, who want new power cables buried underground (at billion-pound expense), who complain about tower blocks being built on car parks. And Labour’s planning reforms — which I largely support — will give them more ammunition, in particular via the hugely contentious plans to expand compulsory purchase of private land.
Indeed, the whole reason the Tories did not take up the abundance agenda while in power — despite my and others’ best efforts — was that they had become almost exclusively focused on protecting the privileges of pensioners, including the delightful views from their windows. Because, as I’ve pointed out before, it is OAPs that hold the electoral whip hand.
Abundance is one of those books that matter. Like the UK-focused essay Foundations — written by three of my friends — it explains that the scarcities that afflict our economies are scarcities we have actively chosen. Making it easier to build, making better choices, will enable us to build a better future. But it is a future that needs to be not just argued for, but fought for.
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