We didn’t need a memo to understand that the future looks bleak.
Even before the book hit the shelves, it seemed to us hopeless cynics that the Democratic activist class would not embrace the economic modesty endorsed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in their best-seller, Abundance.
The oxymoronic concept of “supply-side progressivism” — what with its advocacy for fewer regulations, expanded tax credits, and the decentralization or even (gasp!) privatization of “core social goods” — seemed unlikely to appeal to a party that was nominating candidates to high office who pledged to seize “the means of production.” Well, sometimes cynicism is well-earned.
Yet another polling memo conducted by parties with an interest in throttling the “abundance” movement in its crib — including a “liberal economics group” which seeks to “break up concentrations of private power” — is being bandied about in the legacy press as evidence that the left is in a “populist” mood.
“If candidates are asking which focus deserves topmost billing in Democrats’ campaign messaging, the answer is clear,” the memo read, “though some voters believe excessive bureaucracy can be a problem, it ranks far behind other concerns and tackling it does not strike voters as a direct response to the problem of affordability.”
Democratic voters, the memo indicated, do not draw a connection between reducing or eliminating barriers to market entry, unburdening productive sectors of the economy from unnecessary compliance costs, and allowing people to keep more of their own money will give way to either personal or macroeconomic growth. That says a lot more about Democratic voters than it does the “abundance agenda,” but that is reality, as this memo indicates. Politico quotes far-left Representative Greg Casar in their effort to channel the sentiments of “populist” progressives: The “outsized power of billionaires and corporations in our government is a bigger problem than red tape and bureaucracy.”
We cannot call this a theory of economics. It dispenses with any logical progression from point A (“billionaires and corporations” are suffocating us) to point B (prosperity). It’s naked, contemptuous class envy. But there is room for appeals to humanity’s basest impulses in the “abundance” theory, according to one of its authors who seems incapable of mustering enthusiasm for his own project. “I expect there will be a number of politicians in 2028 that are running on abundance, populist and anti-oligarchal themes,” Ezra Klein told Axios. “The idea that someone is going to just pick one of these things is stupid — talented politicians aren’t just one thing.”
Sure, but two completely incompatible “things” can and often are mutually exclusive. And at a time when “the era of weak demand is over,” according to the arch conservatives at New York magazine, empowering government to punish the sources of capital while going to war with prices — e.g., “cracking down on price gouging” — will yield a shrinking pie, even if it satisfies the Democratic Party’s inchoate desire for vengeance against their imagined tormentors.
But then again, there really is no market on either side of the political aisle for that sort of sound economic theory. After all, the Republican president is busily gobbling up shares of private interests, charging a vig to firms that the White House allows to trade security technology with our adversaries, and creating score cards designed to intimidate private actors. He may bequeath those new interests and tools to a Democrat in the Oval Office, who will wield them in ways preferred by a party whose voters are out for revenge.
We didn’t need a memo to understand that the future looks bleak.