“Abundance:” Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s Bold Vision for Democrats

PAULA NEWTON, ANCHOR: Next, we turn to the United States where the Trump administration is creating a task force to identify federal lands suitable for building affordable homes. Now, the initiative marks a first step by the Trump White House to address one of the worst housing shortages in decades. That shortage is part of the focus of the new book, “Abundance.” Co-Authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson join Walter Isaacson to discuss how the crises we see today can be traced back to the regulatory policies of previous generations.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Paula. And Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, welcome to the show.

EZRA KLEIN, CO-AUTHOR, “ABUNDANCE”, OPINION COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES AND HOST, “THE EZRA KLEIN SHOW”: Thank you, Walter. Great to be here.

ISAACSON: So, Derek, a few years ago, you coined the words the abundance agenda. And now, this book sort of builds on that. Tell me what you meant by the abundance agenda.

DEREK THOMPSON, CO-AUTHOR, “ABUNDANCE” AND STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: This is January 2022, and I was standing in line in Washington, D.C. in the frigid air, waiting on a COVID test, which at the time were being rationed during the Omicron outbreak. And I thought to myself, it’s kind of crazy that we are now two years into a pandemic, and we don’t have enough COVID tests. And I was thinking about the experience of the pandemic. I thought it wasn’t just that we don’t have enough COVID tests, we don’t — or haven’t had enough COVID vaccines. And before that, there was a scarcity of PPE for hospital workers. The pandemic I thought was really just this experience of one shortage after another. And as I zoomed out from the experience of the pandemic, I thought, you know, it’s not just this pandemic alone, it’s really America in the 21st century that has dealt with one crisis of scarcity after another. There aren’t enough homes. And as a result, affordability is a major crisis in American cities. We don’t have enough clean energy construction in this country or many other countries. And that’s one of the reasons why climate change has been so difficult to take down. And as I thought about all of the scarcities, that have defined this modern age, I thought what America needs most is the exact opposite, not a reality of scarcity, but an agenda, an agenda of abundance. And I thought this abundance agenda could take on housing, to create an abundance of housing. It could take on clean energy. But far beyond that, you could look at all sorts of other blockages and bottlenecks in the economy, whether it’s policies that limit the number of doctors we have or policies that make it harder for scientists to do their best work. We need to think about what an agenda for true American abundance would look like. And then yada, yada, we have a book.

ISAACSON: So, Ezra, you’ve written a lot about this when it comes to housing, which is the core of this book in many ways. Really interesting part. Including the shocking statistic that in the 1950s housing was about twice as much as your annual salary. Now, it’d be six times as much. Why is that?

KLEIN: Because in the places people want to live, we stop building homes. I mean, it’s really that simple. I’m a Californian. I grew up in California. I went to public university in California, then lived in D.C. for 13, 14 years and moved back to California, which is where I lived during a lot of the writing of this book. And Derek’s experience of the pandemic has sort of been my experience of California. I love my home state. It is on the technological frontier. It is the cultural frontier. It is beautiful. So, why is it losing hundreds of thousands of people every year to Texas, to Arizona, to Colorado, to Florida? And the answer is that the working class can’t afford to live there, right? These are — these families are my friends, right? I was in San Francisco watching people have kids and have to move away because they couldn’t afford a home in the city that often they did essential jobs to protect or to serve. And parts of the book that we wrote are futuristic. Parts of them are about how we pull the inventions we want in the future forward into the present. Those are things that we don’t yet know how to build. But there’s no technical problem around building apartment buildings. The question of how to construct a house is solved. What is the issue here is politics, is process, is the ability to get people to say yes. And frankly, the process where you have to have so many people say yes along the way. And you’ve been looking at other problems in California. Why are we not going to hit our clean energy targets? Well, we’ve made it too hard to build clean energy. So, Texas, which does not love clean energy the way California does, is building more clean energy than California is. What happened to high-speed rail? Sort of the same story. And it’s something you begin to realize what you have in a lot of big liberal states, is true for New York, true for Illinois, true for others, is we have not focused as liberals on creating the supply of the things people need most.

ISAACSON: You know, Derek, as you just said, as liberals, and this book is written, both of you consider yourselves sort of liberal, moderate Democrats, but it’s largely pushes back at the Democratic Party for being engaged in process, regulation, how much of the problem, let’s stick with housing, comes from regulations and rules and everything and nimbyism and zoning?

THOMPSON: Some things happen to the identity of liberalism in this country. Between the 1930s, the 1960s, the New Deal era, we built and built and built, and it was a Democrat, FDR, that got us kick started on this habit of building. We built houses and roads. We built transmission lines and electricity. We built dams. We built canals. We built it all. And something happened, I think, to the identity of liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s, where we decided that the key to being a good liberal was being good at the politics of blocking rather than the politics of building. And there were lots of good reasons for this shift. The environmental situation in the 1950s America was horrendous. I mean, people were waking up to waters that were disgusting and air that was choked with smog. And so, we made it harder for states and companies to change the physical world. But the medicine of the 20th century that we administered to this country has become the disease of the 21st century. It’s simply become too difficult to build in this country. And too often, as we look in the mirror, we see that it is liberals who are responsible for this.

ISAACSON: Ezra, why is that, that liberals did that?

KLEIN: The parties right now, the coalitions, have mirror image problems of each other. The personality type of the right is autocratic, and the personality type of the left is bureaucratic. Liberals are the rule followers, we’re the people who listen to the lawyers, right? Elon Musk does not listen to the lawyers, to put it gently. In a way, both sides could use a little bit more of what the other one has in excess. Liberals could use a little bit more of a knock it down energy, and certainly the right could use a bit more respect for systems, for institutions, for laws. This is not just a kind of searing act of self-criticism for no reason. Our goals are liberal ones. We’ve been talking about housing, but decarbonization is a huge part of the book. And one of the reasons it makes sense to aim that conversation at liberals is that they share our goals. We are liberals, we want to decarbonize. When the right builds fossil fuels at a torrid pace, when Donald Trump gets up there, as he has and tries to destroy the solar and wind industries, which is what he’s doing, he just doesn’t share our goals. He’s not trying to build the world we’re trying to build. So there’s a second problem, which is simply that our goals for liberal. And so if liberal states are not achieving those goals, like that’s an issue. It was true that for a while, as we were running through the natural space of this country, the question of how to block thoughtless development from happening was a very pressing question. We all, we had functionally no muscle for doing that. Now, climate change inverts that. To conserve, to conserve anything of the climate we’ve known for the entirety of human civilization, we have to build clean energy infrastructure at a torrid pace. And so now all of a sudden to preserve the environment, instead of stopping things from happening, you need to make things happen very quickly. That requires new laws, it requires new ideas, it requires a new culture.

ISAACSON: So, Derek, on the environmental issue, you in the book talk about the fact that the way the progressives and liberals tend to approach it is stop growth, stop growth. That seems to be antithetical to an abundance agenda. What should they be doing instead?

THOMPSON: We need to reinvent what environmentalism means to face the challenges of the 2020s and not the 1960s. And the problems of today are that we cannot continue to grow by burning stuff we find in the ground. We have to use solar and wind and geothermal and yes, even nuclear power to have a modern economy that people enjoy without destroying the biosphere. That means having a new relationship to building in the physical world and defining liberalism as what can you build and not what can you block.

ISAACSON: So, Ezra, if you look at what President Biden did for clean energy and the infrastructure, there were many things, but one of them was to try to have electric vehicle charging stations across this country. I’ll tell a tale about one of my Tulane students who ended up going in the city government. He was so proud he was going to help build those charging stations in Louisiana because it’s a state thing. And yet, by the end of it, they had built zero because every time he came up with a plan, they said, well, this plan doesn’t fit our equity matrix or it doesn’t fit our labor standards or it doesn’t fit this. And so, zero got built. Is that what you’re talking about?

KLEIN: That’s absolutely what I’m talking about. There’s another example like that, which is that in the infrastructure bill, a huge amount of the money in that bill, more than $40 billion was earmarked for rural broadband. It’s a great idea. That was passed in — I forget if it’s late 2021 or early 2022. Either way, by the end of 2024, the number of people it had hooked up to broadband was approximately zero people. You then wonder, why didn’t they win? Right? You talk to the Biden people. I’ve spoken to them many, many times. I know you both have too. And they’re very, very, very proud of the decade of infrastructure investment that they set off with the CHIPS Act, with the infrastructure bill, with the IRA, and I think in a way they’re confused about why that didn’t have more political upside for them. But one reason, maybe not the only, is that people didn’t feel it. The money didn’t move fast enough. Having — you know, getting $42 billion dollars for broadband isn’t all that important if people don’t get broadband. And a lot of the book is about this dynamic in which Democrats will pass a big bill. And it is sometimes at the national level, right, like the Inflation Reduction Act, or it’s sometimes at the state or local level, like I report in some detail on Los Angeles’ efforts to raise money to build affordable housing. And then, you look at how it’s implemented. And it is the amount of complexity layered onto it is astonishing. And a lot of these intentions are well meaning. The equity intentions are well meaning. You know, the environmental things you’re building into it are good. But I was talking to somebody who builds affordable housing. And my God, have they been slow in doing that and using public money in Los Angeles. And she was saying that when she tries to build it, and she has housing people who live in tents under the freeway, you know, she has to go back and back to the planning board and they’re like, well, you need a higher quality air filtration system because this development will be near a freeway. Higher quality, by the way, than a private development would have. And that’s fine, but it is delaying housing when the alternative is people living in no house at all with infiltration system under an overpass underneath the freeway. Liberals should be much angrier about this than conservatives, right? This is a part of modern politics that upsets me. For conservatives, it’s fine when government fails. They kind of want it to fail. That proves their point. Liberals should not be excusing it when it fails. They should be fixing it when it fails. They should be making sure it doesn’t happen again. And that’s what I don’t see. That’s, I think, the cultural change that needs to happen here.

ISAACSON: Let me say, Derek, there’s been such a backlash that we now have, you know, what Trump is doing, what Elon Musk is doing in government, but it’s partly a backlash, because as Ezra just said, they were supposed to build broadband internet access and build zero. Whereas Musk and Starlink have put up a million since then, likewise put up, you know, hundreds of thousands of chargers. Do you think this is what’s causing this backlash that has led to people like Trump and Musk and others wanting to blow up the regulations?

THOMPSON: Let’s make no mistake, you know, we have in this country, a right-wing movement that is trying to destroy government. And not just destroy it, destroy it to take it over, to purge it of all sources of potential pushback and ideological disagreement, right? Not a coincidence that we’re turning over our telecom policy to Elon Musk himself, or that Trump is, you know, getting out into the front lawn of the White House in order to basically make an advertisement for Tesla, or Tesler, as he calls it. We have a government right now which is defining or combining the worst parts of kleptocracy and kakistocracy, government by theft and government of the worst people. All that is to say, we need an opposition movement in this country that is popular and strong and competent. And it’s a problem right now. The Democrats in the left are unpopular and weak and often not competent in the places that they govern. You know, to elaborate on Ezra’s point. It’s been a terrible political mistake to measure success in dollars authorized rather than things accomplished. That’s how you get California authorizing $33 billion to build a high-speed rail system that doesn’t exist. It’s how you get a story of a $1.7 million toilet, yes, $1.7 million public toilet built in San Francisco because the city has such procedural kludge. That’s how New York City has the most expensive mile of subway construction in the world. It’s how you get the Chicago mayor bragging on twitter that they spent $11 billion to build 10,000 affordable housing units coming out to $1.1 million per affordable, affordable housing unit. This is the record of a movement that has forgotten to judge political success by outcomes. And instead, has judged political success by how much money can we spend.

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Let me ask you that, Derek. Why is there no Democratic city mayor who’s making the city work?

THOMPSON: Well, there are Democratic city mayors making the city work. I mean, there are Democratic city mayors, for example, in the State of North Carolina and the Raleigh-Durham Chapel Hill area, which is adding more residents and almost any metro in the country. That’s where I’m living for this year. There are mayors who are making things work. It’s happening.And many mayors and many governors are outcome oriented. Jared Polis from Colorado is a great example of a governor, a Democratic governor, who I think is thinking in a very forward looking way about the need for housing abundance. How do we bring down regulations, and also how can we make it easier technologically to put up housing? Because if you can put up housing for cheap, then that reduces the price that people have to pay to live in those units. There are people on our side. There are YIMBY’s who are younger progressives. There are people who are —

ISAACSON: Wait. Explain what a YIMBY is real quick.

THOMPSON: Yes, there are people who are defining themselves, I think as abundance progressives, there’s people on our side, but we’re trying to enlarge this movement.

KLEIN: I would add to that. The YIMBY’s are the Yes in My Backyard Folks, right? The YIMBY’s have their center in San Francisco and California for all the intellectual victories and even statutes passed, bills passed, have not begun building more housing. This is very hard to do. Everybody wants to say, I passed a big bill on affordable housing. Saying that I went into the guts of the processes and I closed down a bunch of ways people in the community could come out and voice their objection to somebody building an apartment building down the block, that’s a lot less popular. It’s a harder fight. You often don’t have the power to do it. Maybe the mayor wants to do it, but the board of supervisors doesn’t want to do it. You see this all over, right? Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, he knows perfectly well what a problem the housing crisis is, both for California and for any presidential ambitions he might harbor. He has signed bill after bill after bill. But the coalitional dynamics of this aren’t easy. And that’s why it does require, I think, some long, aggressive ideological change, because nobody wants to focus on process, right? Nobody wants to hear about it. You don’t win elections by saying, well, I’ve reconstructed the jury — the overlapping jurisdictional authorities that created 14 veto points in how we built a public restroom. It makes people in the agencies mad. They get mad at you. They leak things into the press. You have to see it as enough of a crisis to break some eggs. And again, I am lord knows no fan of what DOGE is doing, but I do hope Democrats take one thing from it, which is that there is a lot that they have treated as inviolable in the way government works. A lot of rules, regulations, interagency processes, notes from their lawyers that weren’t exactly laws. They were just sort of guidance, and they treated all of it as something that was a hard boundary. You just couldn’t do anything about it. I mean, there is a dimension where I think liberals stop, too many Democrats stop at the first sign of internal bureaucratic resistance. They treat the structure of government as too settled. The Republicans right now are treating it as completely unsettled, and they are trying to unmake it. They are trying to destroy it. I do not want American politics trapped between a party that will not make government work and a party that wants to make government fail. We are going to need, after the sort of institutional defenders that the Democrats became, the institutional arsonists the Republicans became, we’re going to need some kind of synthesis, a party, a coalition, a movement that insists on making government work, not because it hates government, not because it doesn’t want government to do big things, but precisely because it cares about government and it does want government to do big things.

ISAACSON: Derek Thompson, Ezra Klein, thank you so much for joining us.

KLEIN: Thank you.

THOMPSON: Thank you.