Not Another Substack

In a few weeks Ezra Klein will release his new book, “Abundance.” As a card-carrying member of the Abundance Movement, I’m concerned that the book might be full of hand-wringing and short of solutions.

Klein’s recent NYTimes article paints the picture of the failing Democratic Party, bound down by layers of Process and unable to get things done. What Klein’s work has mostly been missing is any clear vision of what is needed to reverse that trend- how to cut through the layers of process to unlock some form of creativity and innovation, while still meeting the Democratic ideal of equity for the disempowered.

Fundamentally, I don’t think that Klein has grasped that DOGE’s cost-cutting isn’t a bug- but rather a feature, a vision of decreased government trumpeted by every Republican strategist since at least Milton Friedman’s 1962 “Capitalism and Freedom,” and pushed by the Heritage Foundation on every Republican President since Reagan.

These are not new ideas- Milton Friedman called for the abolishment of the Department of Education, Paul Ryan called for restricting Welfare in favor of private charities, and when you read those authors you will realize that they have the same goals as Klein and the Abundance Movement: to decrease the costs of providing goods and services.

The challenge that Klein and the Democrats face is that they don’t have a coherent idea of how to cut red tape without abandoning the platform which the Democratic Party has built over the past three decades of identity politics. The “fetishization of process” which Klein and Pahlka discuss is at the core of the progressive identity, which is why Progressives in cities like SF have been able to weaponize it to defend the status quo, to the frustration of the Abundance acolytes.

Republican intellectuals have been aware of this problem for decades, and have been screaming about inefficient allocation of capital by the State since the start of the Cold War. By focusing on Chicago-school economics and neoliberal ethics of Hayek and others, they have built up a strong political theory for the cuts they are currently making. At its core: They are willing to accept that in order to efficiently deliver services to maximize net social benefit, some people will not (and should not) be covered by government services; those needs should be met by the private sector or charity.

The left, by contrast, has focused on codifying the needs of the populations disenfranchised by free markets, and designing processes which can meet each of those populations’ needs. The work of Patricia Hill-Collins and Kimberle Crenshaw on intersectionality may serve as a lens on how progressive policies have developed: if government programs do not adequately triangulate the needs of a particular population within the matrix of oppression, a new set of policies should be targeted for that particular vertex of intersectionality. Equity may be served, efficiency is not considered, and as the dimensions of the critical analysis grow the potential for new policies explodes exponentially. This mindset, explicit or implicit, has dominated liberal academic thought since the 1930s without ideas which can yield radical political reform- leading the liberals to dominate the academy, paradoxically at the same time that the GOP is “The Party of Ideas.”

Klein finds himself caught in this gap, between liberal values of equity and the conservative-coded value of efficiency, without a clear path forward. The identity-driven approaches of the Democratic Party over the past decades have resulted in a government which is bound ever more tightly by processes meant to serve equitably but inefficiently. Some of Klein’s guests (e.g. Pahlka) favor improving efficiency in order to slow bloat, but do not have a clear path to enshrine that drive for efficiency within political power. Others (e.g. Scott Wiener) favor centralizing control in order to set more efficient policies, at a risk of disenfranchising communities. Neither is able to provide a method for balancing the dual needs of efficiency and equity.

I am hopeful that the idea of “Abundance” may yet come- but I am not sure that there is enough depth currently being discussed that this idea may have hopes of flourishing.