The release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance has set off a policy debate between what is generally called the center and the left, but from an economic perspective is better understood as between the left and the right.

Much has been written critiquing the problems of the book and the abundance approach to governance. Essentially, the movement sees removing government regulations and encouraging the private sector to build as the answer to the Democrats’ problems. Former San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston has summarized the abundance agenda succinctly, calling it a rebranding of “trickle down economics.”

The abundance idea also fails to lay a substantial amount of blame on American federalism for the failure of Democratic-led states and cities to build infrastructure and affordable housing. American federalism creates little incentive for the national government to work with solidly Democratic cities in solidly Democratic states like San Francisco, New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. Refusing to address this is a key oversight at the heart of the abundance argument.

I am less interested in the abundance agenda itself, which strikes me as the kind of policy that a conservative economic party that had not been captured by MAGA fascism would be supporting, than I am in how this idea will likely begin to dominate political discourse in the coming months. 

It is, in some respects, appalling that at a moment when the country is threatened by an angry white Christian nationalist movement seeking to shift wealth upwards to the already super-rich, a sizable proportion of the Democratic Party is now prioritizing undoing government regulations, as opposed to, for example, defending programs like Social Security and Medicare or pursuing meaningfully redistributive economic policies. However, the process of this idea moving to the center of the Democratic Party is revealing in its own right.

Abundance is a good word with excellent connotations. After all, who doesn’t want more things and enough things for everybody. However, the abundance agenda itself is not particularly new and is yet another effort to turn the Democratic Party, particularly in big cities, into essentially a Republican Party with a handful of liberal positions on social issues. San Franciscans should be relatively familiar with that dynamic.

The effort to rebrand unbridled deregulation as abundance is possible because of an opening that the Trump MAGA movement has created in American political life. 

The price of entry to being considered a progressive in many circles today is simply vehement opposition to Trump himself and to the greatest excesses of the Trump-Musk regime. Klein certainly qualifies on that level and has facilitated some excellent discussions about Trump over the years. However, opposition to Trump is not particularly progressive, but simply a necessary position for anybody who believes in democracy or in the US. 

Therefore, as long as one’s anti-Trump credentials are solid, there is ample room to pursue what are, at their core, conservative solutions to policy problems.

Over the last decade no media platform has captured this paradox better than the New York Times where Klein is a columnist and podcast host. Despite the big picture problems facing legacy media, the Times is still extremely influential, particularly with the donor class liberals who flock to Klein’s writing and podcast. 

A central reason why the Times continues to be so influential is because it consistently offers succor to those affluent elements among its readership who want their hatred for Trump reinforced while never having to consider the need to address some of the underlying economic problems that are immiserating so many millions of Americans, many of whom have found their way to the MAGA cult.

The elder statesman of that project is David Brooks who, despite some of his clownish foibles in recent years, has spent much of this century making the most extraordinary Republican mistakes and political venom more palatable to Democratic readers of the New York Times. Brooks is a symbol of the kind of never (but in reality sometimes) Trump Republicans that so much of the legacy media continues to celebrate.

In recent years, Klein has picked up a bit of this mantle. Klein is more liberal than Brooks, and frequently engages in conversations with his guests that have more depth than anything Brooks writes, but Klein’s latest book and political pet project underscore his own unwillingness to confront the need for redistributive politics that would directly address the yawning wealth gap.

The central challenge facing the US at the moment is not how to build housing for wealthy people more quickly, but to defeat a MAGA fascist movement that is working to destroy democracy and the American state with almost no regards to the rule of law or even the US Constitution. 

The only way to defeat that movement and begin to (re)build American democracy is to create a broad omnibus coalition. We do that by working together on the things on which the potential anti-Trump coalition, which spans from far left to center-right, agrees, not by highlighting issues that are divisive. However, the abundance agenda, is located on the center-right – a kind of Rockefeller Republicanism for the twenty-first century, and therefore the right-wing, rather than the center, of the anti-Trump coalition.

At a time when US democracy is under an unprecedented attack from the White House, joining the GOP chorus for getting rid of regulations, ignoring any real discussion of inequality and spinning a story about how Democrats have failed our cities while failing to focus on the now decades long war on cities from the GOP is absolutely not the way forward.