Once, it seemed everyone loved the California high-speed dream. The idea sounds so appealing: a sleek, ultra-fast train whisking travelers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in hassle-free comfort. Japan, France, China, and, heck, even Italy all have high-speed rail lines. Why not California, the world’s preeminent hub of tech innovation? Various California governors have been pushing the high-speed rail project forward since the early 1980s. Over the years, voters approved billions in funding and the federal government kicked in billions more.
Dream on, folks. Despite strong political support and massive infusions of cash, California’s rail project is barely limping along today. Instead of a 380-mile link between the state’s populous coastal cities, the current scheme merely aims to connect Bakersfield and Merced, two inland cities few care to visit, much less travel between, with 170 miles of absurdly expensive track. And that’s assuming the pitiful plan ever gets completed, which appears dubious. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) says voters constantly ask him, “’What the hell happened to the California of the ‘50s and ‘60s?’”
It’s a good question, and one that Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein set out to answer in Abundance, their bracing survey of how American liberalism went off the rails — and how to get the country back on track. In many ways, Abundance is a liberal version of James Pethokoukis’s The Conservative Futurist, which I reviewed for the Washington Examiner in 2023. Both books explore how the rapid innovation and economic growth America enjoyed in the 1950s and ‘60s fizzled in the ‘70s and never quite rekindled. The ambitious dreams of that era — cities on the moon, endless clean energy, a cure for cancer — keep getting delayed, while simple things, say, building houses or paying for college, have only gotten harder.
Klein, a New York Times opinion columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staff writer, are both icons of brainy liberalism. In Abundance, they seek to get past rosy political rhetoric and address the challenge of achieving actual results on the ground. To help our society move ahead, they argue, “we need to invent and build more of what we need.” But neither political party has figured out how to do that, they say. Traditionally, Republicans focus on deregulation and tax cuts, assuming the unfettered market will solve most problems. Democrats, on the other hand, look for opportunities to subsidize the things people need through programs such as food stamps, housing vouchers, and the Affordable Care Act.
But few policymakers in either party think enough about how to increase the supply of things our society needs. The authors believe the Right puts too much faith in markets, which are often slow to fill gaps in fields such as healthcare or education. Meanwhile, the Left’s subsidies increase demand for healthcare, housing, and other goods without doing anything to train more doctors or build more houses. As a result, they write, “The story of America in the twenty-first century is the story of chosen scarcities.” Scarcity is more than a lack of resources, they warn. It also has a polarizing effect on our politics, turning every policy debate into an us-versus-them battle for slices of a seemingly shrinking pie.
But if scarcity is a choice, Klein and Thompson argue, we can also choose its opposite: abundance. They seek “a liberalism that builds.” This is not an argument one often hears from the Left, and it is refreshing. For decades, progressives have viewed the capitalist world as structurally unfair. So, instead of promoting growth, they look for more equitable ways to slice the existing pie. Many green activists go further, concluding that our environmental and climate problems stem from consuming too much — to save the planet, we all must cut back. In its extreme form, this antimodernist ethos explicitly argues for “degrowth.”
The authors reject this downbeat thinking. They want liberals to embrace America’s historic faith in progress and economic growth. Abundance doesn’t mean “omni-directional moreness,” they point out, but positive change and innovation: new medicines, cleaner energy, safer transport. They believe the right kind of growth can simultaneously boost human flourishing and help the environment.
Klein and Thompson are mostly talking to their fellow liberals. They want the government to take a more aggressive role in promoting and, if need be, subsidizing housing, medical research, green technology, and other sectors they think will enhance people’s lives. But the authors also want these progressive programs to work. And so, to their credit, they direct their harshest criticisms toward their progressive allies. Abundance ruthlessly details how the liberal dream of activist governance foundered in red tape and lawsuits.
California is their cautionary tale. The state’s Democratic Party officeholders haven’t faced serious challenges to their one-party rule for decades, the authors note. And yet “many of the people Democrats claim to care about most can’t afford to live there.” Half the nation’s unsheltered homeless live in California, even though the state accounts for just 12% of the U.S. population. Walking the needle-strewn streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles means entering “the dystopia tucked amid the plenty of these cities,” they write. These hell holes didn’t emerge spontaneously in the shadows, the authors explain. They are the direct result of progressive policies. While this wasn’t the outcome liberal policymakers wanted, they write, “It is what they got. It is what they made.”
Klein and Thompson outline a host of liberal policies that drive up homelessness and other problems while making solutions more difficult. These include zoning rules that make home construction slow and expensive and state and federal environmental laws that let activists entangle projects in years of litigation. Such lawsuits often target affordable housing developments, wind and solar farms, and other projects progressives claim to want, though usually in someone else’s backyard. Not surprisingly, it now costs about $600,000 to build a unit of affordable housing in deep-blue Los Angeles. Meanwhile, in red-state Texas’s most populous city, Houston, which has minimal zoning restrictions, the median home costs about half as much — and homelessness is low. Tell us again, which model is more compassionate?
Progressive initiatives also fail because they try to do way too much, a problem the authors call “everything-bagel liberalism.” The secret to an everything bagel, they write, is adding just the right amount of flavors. Pile on too much and the bagel becomes inedible. Too many liberal policymakers, they argue, can’t stop adding unrelated goals to their pet projects. Building affordable housing? Why not also require builders to use green tech, install pollution filters, and seek design input from local arts groups? Building green power infrastructure? The Biden administration demanded such projects follow complex “environmental justice” rules, such as favoring unionized labor and conducting months of “community outreach.” These requirements seem reasonable to liberal activists even when they mean some projects will never get built. The authors call this mindset “trade-off denial.”
Klein and Thompson offer many practical solutions, including streamlining environmental and permitting reviews and shifting power away from lawyers and courts. They cite the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed COVID-19 vaccine project as an example of the kind of public-private partnerships they recommend. In that case, federal incentives helped pharmaceutical companies cover the financial risks of beginning vaccine production even before clinical trials were finished. The project delivered life-saving vaccines in record time, something neither the government nor private industry could have done on its own.
Occasionally, the authors fall into the old central planners’ conceit that wise government experts know best which innovations deserve support. They repeatedly cite renewable power as the kind of technology that the U.S. government should favor even more than it has. But running a power grid mostly on intermittent wind and solar is proving to be tricky. Germany, which attempted this feat, has seen electricity prices skyrocket and its economy shrink. A bit more technological humility is in order.
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The authors also tend to gloss over the risk that lavish subsidies can lead to rent-seeking and corruption on the part of politically connected industries. For example, the book’s index contains no mention of Solyndra, the notorious Obama-era solar energy startup that soaked up $500 million in federal loans on its way to bankruptcy. Abundance is on firmer ground in recommending the government diversify its funding of fundamental science and tech research. We can’t predict which technologies will grow up to be winners, but better basic research can ensure that more seeds get planted.
Overall, Klein and Thompson have produced an eminently rational and readable analysis of America’s policy morass. Liberals should take their advice to heart. And conservatives should welcome this outbreak of pragmatism on the Left.
James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the co-host of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.