“Abundance” liberalism is the new hot idea among the liberal pundit-chattering class. Left-wing politics is at odds with the goal of abundance, though, which is why Republican states are models for increasing abundance and why Democratic states fail in that regard.

The new framing of “abundance” stems from Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, who have put forward a new book painting an idealized liberal future that will never come. Klein has been on a media tour, touting his views as if he made some groundbreaking discovery that Democrats are bad at building things, which took him to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast.

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Newsom’s California almost perfectly personifies why Klein’s abundance agenda would never work for Democrats. When Klein tried to point to Democrats’ overregulation as a reason they could not effectively and efficiently build housing, Newsom made sure to find some Republicans in Huntington Beach to blame it on. According to Newsom, the governor of a state with a Democratic supermajority in the legislature, it is “NIMBY-ism that persists in rural and red parts of the country” that should be blamed for failing housing policies.

When asked about his housing goal of 2.5 million units by 2030, Newsom admitted that the state was “not even close” and proceeded to blame the economic condition of the country coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first step to addressing a problem is admitting that you have one, but the partisanship of the Democratic Party, even in a state where Republicans are irrelevant, prevents even that little bit of introspection.

Texas has typically been the Republican foil to California’s Democratic governance, and Texas may, in fact, be the model of “abundance” that Klein supposedly wants. A new report found that Texas is issuing more new housing permits and building more new homes than any state in the country. That includes more new affordable homes than any other state. Texas’s housing market is more affordable than the national market, driven by a wealth of supply: Texas accounts for 12.6% of all U.S. homes for sale, while the state has about 9% of the country’s population.

California, meanwhile, is about 34 years away from building enough housing to meet the estimated 4 million home shortage the state is facing. Housing costs have been the driving force behind people leaving California for Texas, which is projected to surpass the Golden State in population by 2045.

Energy is another area where Texas represents abundance and California represents scarcity. Texas brought its upstream oil and gas employment to over 205,000 people as of February. Texas’s oil and gas job growth has helped the state lead the nation in U.S. job creation for 56 of the last 58 months. The average salary for these oil and gas jobs is about $128,000, 74% more than the average of all private sector jobs in Texas.

An abundance of well-paying jobs powering the country is not the kind of abundance Klein has in mind. As Klein said in another of his media appearances, “I want more clean energy, not more dirty energy. Right? If you come to me with a proposal for how we can build a s*** ton more fossil fuel plants, I am not excited about that. I will oppose you.” Icky oil and gas jobs are not part of Klein’s utopian future.

But Texas also added more gigawatts of solar and battery capacity in 2024 than California. In 2022, Texas generated more than double the gigawatt-hours of wind and solar energy than California. It is easier to build renewable energy infrastructure in Texas, the king of the domestic oil industry, than in climate-obsessed, Democratic supermajority California.

Texas’s energy grid functions on an abundance of energy. California has made scarcity the focus of its own grid, doing all it can to eliminate oil and gas from the state. The state has even tried to eliminate nuclear energy, which produces no carbon but makes environmentalists uncomfortable enough to brand it as “dirty.” California has instead embraced a rapid transition to a grid powered only by renewable, state-approved green energy sources, such as wind and solar.

The result was a predictable catastrophe, in which California endured multiple rounds of rolling blackouts because its grid did not provide enough energy to meet demand. California Democrats have since had to backtrack on numerous energy policies, which included the state using temporary gas-field generators to support the grid, Newsom supporting an expansion for a gas storage facility that he campaigned on shutting down, and state officials trying to stop the anti-nuclear momentum they created by keeping the state’s last nuclear plant open, as it provides about 9% of the state’s energy on its own.

Texas has already recognized that a balanced energy grid is the best solution for residents. California has had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, by reality and the terrible political optics of allowing rolling blackouts to reach the same conclusion. One state is willingly practicing “abundance,” and the other is only doing so after years of self-sabotage made it a necessity.

This is the case for California on issue after issue. California’s burdensome regulatory regime has left residents with fewer insurance options, as insurers have determined it isn’t worth the costs. California is in the process of banning gas cars, gas stoves, and other gas-powered items, forcibly limiting options for residents, who don’t have political connections, to serve the state’s ridiculous climate agenda. That same agenda is behind California banning plastics as well, and the state is trying to export its anti-abundance policies by using its economic power to dictate how farmers in other states do their jobs.

Klein can make California’s failures the focus of his complaints about “abundance” all he wishes, but California is the Democratic model. Former President Joe Biden plucked former Vice President Kamala Harris out of her Senate seat in California and proceeded to model his administration after Newsom’s, one job-killing policy at a time. Biden put multiple California Democrats in his Cabinet, and both liberal media and Newsom offer the state as the model of Democratic governance due to its population and its Democratic supermajority. California is where Democrats are able to act on every legislative and executive impulse they have, and the state’s failures are the result.

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Klein should know this all too well. He was the media face of former President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms, which led to people losing their health insurance plans all across the country. Klein, like the California Democratic Party, thinks that a few intelligent do-gooders can micromanage the government and achieve utopia. The bloated bureaucracies and regulatory regimes that result from this mindset naturally reduce options for people, whether that be in insurance, housing, or energy. It is the inescapable contradiction between “abundance” and “liberalism.”

If you want an “abundance agenda” for the country, a Republican-run state like Texas would be the model. But you cannot get Texas results with California thinking, meaning you can’t get Texas’s abundance using the same old bureaucratic thinking that comes with a Democratic Party that has been defined by people like Klein and Newsom for the past decade.