Revisiting Ezra Klein's "Abundance" After His Charlie Kirk Encomium, Plus

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Some sort of waterfowl, I believe (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

Today is a medical day so this will be mercifully brief.

Revisiting Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” After His Charlie Kirk Encomium

Ezra Klein co-authored with Derek Thomas a book called Abundance, which is meant to provide Democrats a roadmap to an idyllic future and a permanent majority along the lines of what they enjoyed following the New Deal. Trevor Jackson reviewed it, along with another book called Overshoot, dealing with the climate disaster in progress, in the September 20 issue of the New York Review of Books. I’m pretty sure the essay isn’t paywalled.

The review predates Klein’s characterization of Charlie Kirk as a man who “did politics right,” meaning that he went out among the callow masses to engage with people whose views he despised and about whom he often said horrible, degrading, dehumanizing things. But, you see, he was bearding the subhumans and their enablers in their own dens and surely that counted for something. Outreach!

Jackson finds the same level of credulity throughout Abundance, and his description of Klein’s position in the liberal firmament beautifully prefigures the Charlie Kirk incident.

Ezra Klein was one of the leading intellectual lights of Obama-era liberalism. Throughout his trajectory from early Internet blogs to The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” to founding Vox to The New York Times and his own podcast, Klein has been the exemplar of a certain style of politics that has dominated the Democratic Party and its ancillary media for fifteen years. It is an urban, affluent, and educated political outlook, one that is conflict averse, self-consciously “smart,” and enthused about “complexity,” but with specific meanings for both of those words—where smart conveys a certainty of opinion and the speed of its expression, and complexity means a grasp of the arcane self-referential rules and vocabulary of policy and economics. It’s a style that can be glib and smug but also earnest and excited. Klein might be the most influential figure in liberal media at the moment, and he played a powerful part in advocating for the end of Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign.

Abundance intends to set an agenda for a reconstituted liberalism, which Klein and Thompson think has gone astray. It is addressed to American liberals and especially to officials in states and cities governed by Democrats, and it covers policies the authors describe as being “within the zone of liberal concern,” such as climate change, health care inequality, affordable housing, and higher median wages. They describe their agenda as “a liberalism that builds,” one focused on production and increasing supply, not on consumption, and certainly not on redistribution. They believe that technology and invention are the most powerful forces for social change: “It is not just that the politics we have will affect the technologies we develop. The technologies we develop will shape the politics we come to have.”

Spooky.

Klein may have lost some of his shine after praising Kirk, but he’s still an exemplar of the kind of politics Jackson describes. Some of the unwashed—the affluent unwashed who read his Charlie Kirk thing and responded with a resounding “what the fuck, Ezra”—have definitively abandoned him but he’s still out there persuading Democrats that his approach to politics, economics and the human factor is right on the money, where, in a happy coincidence, the money is that which flows from the deep-pocketed corporate and billionaire donors to Democratic party causes and campaigns.

The evidentiary core of each chapter (of Abundance) consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation (emphasis mine).
. . .
Abundance closes by quoting the historian Gary Gerstle to the effect that the creation of a new historical era requires (in this order) deep-pocketed donors, think tanks and policy networks, a political party that can reliably win elections, the ability to shape political opinion everywhere from the Supreme Court to broadcast media, and a persuasive moral perspective.

By that measure, their project has met with immediate success. Members of the House have launched a bipartisan congressional Build America Caucus. Open Philanthropy set up a $120 million “Abundance and Growth Fund.” Reforms consistent with the abundance agenda have been made in other quarters: the Supreme Court has limited the scope of environmental review, the California Environmental Quality Act has been substantially rolled back, and at least 1,200 National Institutes of Health employees have lost their jobs. Abundance has generated debate, denunciation, and conversation across almost all major publications, but so far those forming a new political order have been the Republicans. Nevertheless, Abundance has been understood as the rallying cry of one side of a civil war for the future of the Democratic Party.

Ouch?

Overshoot sounds like a book worth reading. Jackson, the reviewer, doesn’t give it universal high marks but does find it more persuasive than the massage-parlor-happy-ending optimism of Abundance.

Overshoot, by contrast, argues that “any attempt at meaningful mitigation of the crisis would have to waylay the dominant classes with a force and confrontational resolve unlike anything in the common memory or imagination.” The authors envision a range of possible interventions that could rapidly provoke a fire sale of disinvestment from fossil capital: governments could remove subsidies, restrict exports, close state-owned land, revoke permits, cut off credit, or outright seize assets. Malm and Carton do not think these things likely, only possible, but also necessary. “As things now stand,” they write, “the crisis will not wait for anything less than a blitz to strip elites of the assets they hold and defend.”

Overshoot is written in an academic idiom drawing freely from Marx and Freud but with none of the cautiously hedged claims that can characterize academic writing. The book’s commitment to using political power to destroy elite property is not likely to gather much philanthropic funding. Readers of Abundance will probably find Malm and Carton’s rhetoric too florid, their diagnosis and their prescription too unrealistic.

But the point of Overshoot is exactly that a small group of people making billions of dollars by building oil pipelines while hundreds of Pakistani villages are washed away and Los Angeles burns is hardly a realistic way to organize society. For Malm and Carton, it is impossible to take the scientific consensus on climate change seriously and still reject revolutionary transformations of economic and political life.

“[H]ardly a realistic way to organize society” reminds one of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail line, “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” Zow.

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Music

Anna Erhard, “Three Tons of Steel”

Adrianne Lenker, “Free Treasure”

Orcutt Shelley Miller, “A Star Is Born” and more

The The, “Some Days I Drink My Coffee by the Grave of William Blake”

And that, Comrades in Abundance, is all I got time for today. Be well, take care, please share, and think about subscribing if you’ve not.