Last year, in the wake of the Trumpian seizure of power and Elon Musk’s vandalizing government agencies, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson sparked a brief tizzy among the chattering classes with their book “Abundance Liberalism.” The Democratic establishment was in a funk over losing the 2024 election, and the book seemed to offer a panacea for winning over the fickle American voter.
The idea was that Democrats should drop their phobias about environmental degradation, urban sprawl, interstate highway construction and other quality-of-life considerations, and instead engineer the economy to crank out more stuff for the masses — housing, green energy jobs, infrastructure. All they have to do is defang regulations contained in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, zoning restrictions and other examples of Luddite do-gooderism. Grateful voters would flock to the Democratic Party, and right-wing extremism would lose its steam.
