If you listen to New York Times columnist Ezra Klein describe his new book Abundance, it would seem the entire thesis is that at some point, Democrat-run cities stopped building houses, and if that were reversed, it would solve the party’s problems.
There’s plenty of truth to the idea that Democrats have made it nearly impossible to build new housing in the places they control, especially in California, where zoning and environmental regulations have stifled building and caused prices to soar. Nationwide, it is estimated that the country is short some 4.5 million homes, with the shortage most acute in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. Coincidentally, those cities have spent decades under Democratic control.
As Klein tells it, if Democrats simply built more housing, cities and states that the party runs would become the left-wing paradises every liberal believes will be achieved by electing Democrats.
But while Klein and his co-author Derek Thompson certainly spill a lot of ink on the housing problem, the underlying promise of Abundance is that building homes, improving government services, and producing excess quantities of goods will effectively produce a utopia.
In the book’s introduction, Klein and Thompson envision what the world would look like if their political agenda were implemented. Some of it sounds ideal — a desalination plant delivering ocean water as the primary water source and an excess of nuclear power plants making energy so affordable it barely registers as a bill. Travel is easy and affordable, with supersonic jetliners accessible to all.
But then come the darker aspects. In this futuristic abundance utopia, people don’t live in rural farming communities anymore because all farming is done in skyscrapers that use vertical farming technology. Meat is now grown in petri dishes. Artificial intelligence has reduced human work to the point that idleness is a virtue. Phones have been replaced by “micro earpieces,” and something called a “star pill” brings a life free of illness and addiction while slowing down aging and thus prolonging death.
On the surface, most of these things sound pretty nice. Less work, less disease, longer lives, more leisure, and more convenience in day-to-day life. Who would be against that? The world Klein and Thompson dream of is a utopian paradise of technological advancement and, to borrow a word, abundance.
But it is exactly that — a utopia. It is an attempt to build heaven on earth, a civilization built around the premise that human beings are destined simply for material pleasure. Less work means more play and more play means more happiness, or so the thinking goes. To that end, the Abundance agenda is fundamentally a transhumanist one, an agenda that believes technology holds the secret to life, allowing humanity to “transcend” its limits.
Some weeks ago, I highlighted the transhumanist influences that have found a home in the Trump coalition, largely in the person of Elon Musk. Like Klein and Thompson, Musk believes that technology is the great liberator of mankind. With it, we can harness the power of the universe and build a prosperous utopia for all.
But while Musk believes a prosperous utopia will come exclusively from private enterprise and that any government involvement is an obstacle to it, Klein and Thompson believe the government has a duty to facilitate the creation of this utopia. Pass better laws and regulations and partner with private industry to create an era of abundance in which everyone is happy and wealthy.
In this sense, the bill of goods that is sold in Abundance is simply another side of Musk’s tech-bro utopia coin.
Much like Musk’s Silicon Valley vision of utopia, the utopia of Abundance is a false promise. Sure, some of the prescriptions Klein and Thompson have could help the Democratic Party regain some semblance of an agenda that can resonate with the population. But the promise of a world of abundance as they envision it is fundamentally unattainable, and for many people, it sounds dystopian.
Advancing an agenda of “rewilded” farmland, lab-grown meat, and “micro earpieces” may play well among the urban elite crowds of Manhattan, Boston, and San Francisco, but try selling that agenda in the Midwestern states that Democrats used to be competitive in. Telling the people of an agriculture-heavy state such as Wisconsin that they need to give up the farms their families built for generations is about the surest way to drive this competitive swing state toward Republicans.
For some time, a major part of the Left’s political project has been embracing the notion that the perfect civilization is attainable. The entire experiment of communism in Eastern Europe was premised on the idea that the perfect society could be built if private property, religion, and private education were all abolished, replaced by the communal distribution of goods, mandatory public education, and a centralized labor plan.
Today, it takes a slightly different form. If we don’t prosecute criminals and instead treat them with compassion, then they will stop committing crimes. If the government guarantees healthcare for all, then everyone will be healthier. If people had more jobs, they would not engage in criminal activity. None of those things necessarily follow from one another, but that hasn’t stopped policymakers, academics, and activists from preaching that they do.
But promising a utopia is simply an act of arrogance, born out of the notion that man can master the world he inhabits. The utopia of abundance could come with terrible costs that the authors never envisioned. There has never been and never will be a perfect city or nation. Humanity is too flawed and different to achieve it. This is something Christianity has always recognized. The founders of America recognized it as well, intentionally implementing a system of governance designed to shield against humanity’s flaws.
Today, in the United States, the political Left is in a rough spot. Its vehicle for attaining political power, the Democratic Party, has been rudderless ever since President Donald Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and delivered the first Republican trifecta since 2016. For the past decade, the party defined itself simply as being opposed to Trump and refused to articulate a different vision of what the country should look like. In the meantime, the people voted for Trump and left the Democratic bastions of New York, New Jersey, and California for the Republican-run states of Florida and Texas.
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Now, the party is stuck in opposition for another four years, at the end of which Trump will permanently exit the political scene, thus depriving the Democratic Party of its primary unifier. At the same time, the party continues to struggle to appeal to the working-class constituencies that once were a major part of its coalition. The Abundance agenda’s vision may be billed as the way to fix that problem, namely, by fixing the Democratic Party’s problems with competent governance, but it will not solve the party’s problems with voters.
Instead, it will only exacerbate the urban-rural and coastal-heartland divides that have come to exemplify the red-blue map. It’s a political vision by urban elites for a party dominated by urban elites, and it will only resonate with urban elites.