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ezra klein
The Mythical Rich Suburban Republican (White) Ladies Who The Democrats Chase But Can Never Find
Considering the origins of this destructive neoliberal mythology may help those who want to challenge it.
Jun 20, 2025
Clintonite Democrats are cooking yet another version of their long-running fantasy of the rich, suburbanite (white) ladies who are more committed to good government and rule of law than to their tax cuts and pissing on poor people as the anchor of the coalition that will defeat Trump and Trumpism.
This fantasy has been their go-to in nearly every presidential election since 1996. No doubt many readers recall what should have been its last stand—the 2016 election when both Senate leader Chuck Schumer and former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell boasted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
Now it has taken the form of lauding reactionary Lynne Cheney as an icon of principle, to an extent that it should not surprise if her name is floated at least as the vice-presidential candidate on a 2028 Democratic ticket. But it also appeared in Rep. Ro Khanna’s reaction to Elon Musk’s apparent break with Trump. California's Khanna, a leader within the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged reaching out to Musk possibly to win him back, despite the fact that he is, well... Elon Musk and that his break with the cosplay Il Duce was provoked by his outrage that Trump’s proposed budget wasn’t draconian enough.
[The mythology] does the ideological work these Democrats want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances.
Commitment to the fantasy showed up as well in the choice of conservative Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) to rebut Trump’s speech to Congress. Slotkin rose to the occasion by praising Ronald Reagan—the person most singly responsible for putting our national politics on the road to Trumpism—four different times. Now Democratic sages like James Carville and Hillary Clinton have floated the likes of Rahm Emanuel, whose approach to building a Democratic congressional majority as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair centered on recruiting Republicans to run as Democrats, as the party’s and country’s savior in 2028.
Even more recently, flamboyant Dallas Mavericks owner and Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban has popped up as a possible contender in a telling “it takes a billionaire” line of argument. And now it seems to have found itself a simulacrum of a social theory/manifesto to rally around in the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson 300-page beacon to the future, Abundance, which the publisher describes as a “once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.”
Klein has been anointed by such paragons of middle-brow ponderousness as David Brooks and Fareed Zakaria, who moreover predicts that “People will recruit [him and Thompson] to run the Democratic Party.” (Must be the little glasses.) The argument, as one might suspect from those authors and endorsers, is warmed over neoliberal bromides and bullshit—just the sort of intervention that would appeal to Clintonite Democrats whose politics has always come down to trying to sell right-wing policies as the limits of a reasonable left.
The Democrats are going to do what they are going to do. One takeaway from Trumpism’s victory—and I know this is a point I’ve made over and over for quite some time—should be that there is no organized left in the United States capable of having any impact on shaping national political debate and, therefore, the primary commitment of leftists as such should be doing the deep organizing work necessary to begin generating such an embedded left. So whether and how the Clintonites can be challenged in the struggle to define the terms of opposition to Trumpism is a matter for liberals to work out within the Democratic Party itself. It may be helpful for that struggle, though, to consider the origins of the fantasy that has for three decades justified dragging the party’s efforts to appeal to a popular constituency away from working-class concerns. (For example, in 2004, John Kerry’s feckless campaign called them “national security moms.”) We know that objective is why the fantasy persists among Democratic neoliberals; it does the ideological work they want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances and enables them to hide behind catering to a bourgeois feminism. Considering its origins, however, may help those who want to challenge it.
The mythical rich suburban (white) moderate Republican woman has a very specific source. It emerged out of the concatenation of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing in the fall of 1991 and the1992 national election. Its root is in the election for the U.S. Senate in Illinois that year. The Democratic incumbent, Alan Dixon, was also on the Senate Judiciary Committee that presided over the Thomas hearing. Dixon promised the George H. W. Bush administration his vote for Thomas in exchange for the administration’s guarantee that it would run only a weak Republican challenger against him. The Republicans kept their end of the bargain. Dixon’s GOP challenger was a relative non-entity, Rich Williamson, who had been an official in the Reagan administration and was from Kenilworth, an especially wealthy enclave within the wealthy Northshore suburbs of Chicago.
But the Democratic primary turned out to be a wild card. In addition to Carol Mosely Braun’s candidacy, Dixon was challenged as well by Al Hofeld, a maverick, self-financing multimillionaire who targeted Dixon and garnered 27% of the vote in the primary. Dixon and Mosely Braun split the remaining vote, and Mosely Braun won the primary with 38% of the total vote. In both the primary and the general election, she benefited from bourgeois feminist backlash against Thomas and Dixon, and she ran well among suburban Republican women against the relative non-entity, Williamson. That was a fluke, the product of very particular circumstances in a very particular moment. It has not been repeated, not even in Mosely Braun’s re-election bid in 1998, which she lost to Republican Peter Fitzgerald.
It has never materialized as an electoral reality. So that’s that.
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Economic Populism, Not Neoliberal Abundance, Is the Best Path to Defeating Trumpism
At a moment when Democrats’ efficacy in defeating Trumpism carries such existential stakes, new survey results demonstrate why many of us on the left have found the campaign to make abundance the new face of the Democratic Party so deeply concerning.
Jun 01, 2025
If you follow intra-Democratic discourse on social media, then you probably saw the frenzy that erupted this week following Axios’ coverage of a poll by Demand Progress that found populist messaging far outperforms the messaging being pushed by proponents of the “abundance” movement.
When asked about a candidate who wanted to “get money out of politics, break up corporate monopolies, and fight corruption,” 48.5% of respondents said they’d be much more likely to vote for that candidate and 33.1% said they’d be somewhat more likely, for a total of 81.6%. When asked about a candidate who wanted to “make the government and economy do a better job of serving working and middle-class Americans” by reducing “regulations that hold back the government and private sector from taking action,” 18.8% said they’d be much more likely to vote for that candidate and 28.9% said they’d be somewhat more likely, for a total of 47.7%. (The massive gap between the two options is actually slightly larger among independent voters, with 84.8% more likely to support the populist candidate versus 44.9% for abundance.)
At a moment when Democrats’ efficacy in defeating Trumpism carries such existential stakes, these survey results demonstrate why many of us on the left have found the campaign to make abundance the new face of the Democratic Party so deeply concerning. In the fight against authoritarianism, we simply cannot afford to repeat the mistake Kamala Harris made in 2024, when her shift away from an initially populist message to an abundance-adjacent strategy coincided with a significant drop-off in popular support – a disastrous approach that abundance advocates are working to recreate (or, perhaps more appropriately, maintain) within the Democratic Party, with the aid of millions of dollars from their crypto, AI, Big Tech, and fossil fuel backers.
In the fight against authoritarianism, we simply cannot afford to repeat the mistake Kamala Harris made in 2024...
Perhaps more revealing than the actual poll, however, have been the responses to it from the abundance camp. Abundance proponents immediately lashed out to try to dismiss the survey, cast doubt on its methodology, and explain away the obvious conclusions that Democrats should draw from its results. But each of their arguments is so profoundly weak, if not outright disingenuous, that reviewing them one by one calls into question nearly every aspect of the abundance program.
Abundance proponents’ first strategy was to attack the poll’s wording. For example, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait immediately sprung into action after the results were published to claim that the poll “is literally worthless, because the language is crafted to yield the desired outcome.”
Here’s how the poll described the abundance argument:
The big problem is ‘bottlenecks’ that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges. Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment - but these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow things down. This increases costs and makes it harder for us to provide for everybody’s needs. We need to push back against these groups so the government and economy can work better for working and middle-class Americans.
I don’t know how anyone could read this language and not think it’s an accurate articulation of the abundance agenda. Maybe abundance advocates could come up with a more generous framing of their argument, but if so, they haven’t provided it.
The one specific criticism I have seen came from Adam Jentleson, self-appointed warrior against “the groups,” who wrote, “This is a good example of how groups cook polls. Candidates typically say ‘cut red tape,’ which probably performs better than just ‘bottlenecks.’ But the group massages the question wording [to] get the outcome they want.” But that’s just not how abundance proponents frame their program. In Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s agenda-defining book, "Abundance," the word “bottleneck” is used over a dozen times. The phrase “red tape” does not appear once. Bottleneck also frequently appears throughout the authors’ other writings on this subject, and in the materials of the institutions backing the abundance campaign. If this isn’t a compelling message, that’s not an issue of unfair wording – it’s a problem with the abundance message, as pushed by abundance’s top messengers.
The reason I’m advocating for Democrats to campaign as economic populists – and then govern as such – is because all evidence indicates that this strategy gives us our best chance of beating fascism, before it’s too late.
The next move from the abundance camp was to attack the very idea of comparing populist and abundance messaging, given that it’s possible for Democrats to embrace both programs. As Jentleson put it, “This binary is silly and it’s a structural problem to have foundations pumping millions into calcifying it. The top Dem electoral performers talk about breaking up concentrated corporate power AND cutting gov’t red tape.” There are two big problems with this argument. First, the poll actually tested this point directly. One of the survey’s questions combined populist and abundance messaging to see how a both/and approach performed. Lo and behold, while the combined message did much better than the plain-abundance option, it did significantly worse than the plain-populist one.
But even more importantly, this “we can do both” line completely sidesteps the reality that most of abundance’s top backers have spent the last six months actively fighting to stop Democrats from embracing populism. Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank that has been a major booster of the Abundance agenda, recently complained that “demanding economic populism is its own form of purity test” and argued that Democrats should stop using a “fighting the oligarchs” message. Jonathan Chait just published a piece about abundance titled “The Coming Democratic Civil War” which stated with admirable honesty that “progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement.” At one Abundance promotion event, Derek Thompson said, “What is ‘oligarchy’ doing for you? The tool they have used to explain the world fails to do so.” In another interview he said, “On the Democratic side, there is a fight, and it’s happening right now, and our book is trying to win a certain intra-left coalitional fight about defining the future of liberalism in the Democratic Party.”
For the abundance camp to contend that they never claimed their program could help Democrats win elections is gaslighting, pure and simple.
In reality, there are pieces of the abundance program that could fit in with a populist agenda. For example, it’s often been progressives who have led the fight against exclusionary zoning. But the abundance movement – its top proponents, the institutions behind them, and the interest groups that are, to use Jentleson’s words, “pumping millions into” standing them up – have generally presented abundance as either in conflict with economic populism or, as Thompson put it, as an alternative that must displace progressivism in “defining the future” of the Democratic Party. Given the battle lines they have drawn, information about which framework voters respond best to seems extremely important. And let the record be clear: The idea of merging populism with abundance is a concession they are making only now that it’s clear that abundance alone could spell disaster for Democrats at the polls.
But it is the final argument from the abundance camp that is both the most disingenuous and the most telling. Many abundance proponents responded to the poll’s evidence that abundance offers Democrats a weak message to run on by arguing that their framework was never meant to be an electoral program. As Vox’s Eric Levitz argued, “[T]he point of abundance reforms is to govern well, not win elections.”
The idea of merging populism with abundance is a concession they are making only now that it’s clear that abundance alone could spell disaster for Democrats at the polls.
Of course, this claim is patently false. Abundance proponents have, beyond any shred of a doubt, been pitching their program as the electoral strategy that will give Democrats their best shot at defeating Trumpism. In his keynote description of abundance in The Atlantic this March, Thompson could not have been more explicit on this point, writing, “If Trump’s opponents are going to win at the polls, they will need to construct a new political movement, one that aims for abundance instead of scarcity.” For the abundance camp to contend that they never claimed their program could help Democrats win elections is gaslighting, pure and simple.
And yet, accepting this claim entails accepting an even more devastating indictment of the abundance movement. Because in the midst of Trump’s ongoing authoritarian takeover of our country, winning elections is the number one existential goal we must achieve. Yes, I am a progressive, so I want to see economically populist governance because I believe it will improve Americans’ lives and strengthen the prospects of our shared future. But I believe the same about maximalist policies on a number of social issues that I’m not advocating for Democrats to campaign on. The reason I’m advocating for Democrats to campaign as economic populists – and then govern as such – is because all evidence indicates that this strategy gives us our best chance of beating fascism, before it’s too late.
This debate matters greatly, because the stakes are so high. If abundance isn’t going to help Democrats defeat MAGA, then abundance advocates – or at least the ones who care about ending Trumpism – should stop trying to “define the future of the Democratic Party.” Let’s leave that work to the Democrats who are trying to orient our party around a vision that voters actually do find compelling.
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Democratic Voters Choose Fighting Corporate Power Over Neoliberal Abundance 'Scam': Poll
"At a moment when U.S. democracy is threatened by MAGA authoritarianism and deep inequality, doubling down on private-sector solutions while ignoring redistributive policy is a dangerous distraction," said one critic.
May 29, 2025
Democratic voters overwhelmingly prefer a populist program that takes on oligarchy and corporate power over the so-called "abundance agenda" that's all the rage among many liberals as party leaders examine why they lost the White House and Congress in 2024 and strategize about how to win them back.
That's according to a new Demand Progress poll of 1,200 registered voters "to test the resonance of the 'abundance agenda' being promoted as a potential policy and political refocus for the Democratic Party."
"What these voters want is clear: a populist agenda that takes on corporate power and corruption."
The poll revealed that 55.6% of all surveyed voters said they were somewhat or much more likely "to vote for a candidate for Congress or president who made the populist argument," compared with 43.5% who said they were likelier to cast their ballot for a candidate promoting the abundance agenda.
Among Democratic respondents, 32.6% said they were somewhat or much likelier to vote for abundance candidates, compared with 40.6% of Independents and 58.8% of Republicans. Conversely, 72.5% of surveyed Democrats, 55.4% of Independents, and 39.6% of Republicans expressed a preference for candidates with populist messaging.
"To get out of the political wilderness, and win over not just Democrats but also Independent and moderate voters, policymakers need to loudly state their case for helping middle- and working-class Americans," Demand Progress corporate power program director Emily Peterson-Cassin said in a statement Thursday.
Our poll got some notable responses last night! We went out of our way to generously characterize abundance using language from that camp but they responded by nitpicking and moving the goal posts. Check out our poll to see for yourself why abundance is an electoral loser.
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— Demand Progress (@demandprogress.bsky.social) May 29, 2025 at 4:38 AM
"What these voters want is clear: a populist agenda that takes on corporate power and corruption," Peterson-Cassin added. "The stakes are too high for Democrats to fixate on a message that only appeals to a minority of independent and Democratic voters."
Inspired by San Francisco's YIMBY—or "yes-in-my-backyard"—movement to build as much market-rate housing as possible with scant consideration for the fact that only relatively wealthy people like themselves can afford to live there, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson earlier this year published Abundance, which topped the Times' nonfiction bestseller list.
Klein and Thompson assert that well-meaning but excessive regulation in Democrat-controlled cities is thwarting progress, and that U.S. liberals' focus on blocking bad economic development has come at the expense of good development over the past half-century. They cite environmental and zoning regulations, as well as burdensome requirements attached to public infrastructure projects and housing construction, as some of the barriers to development.
The Demand Progress poll found that Republicans were much more likely to have a positive view of candidates embracing the abundance agenda. However, the movement has been gaining traction among centrist and even left-of-center Democrats in cities like San Francisco, where the Abundance Network, a YIMBY nonprofit, has become a major player in city politics and has bankrolled a tech-backed takeover of the local Democratic Party, as Mission Local's Joe Rivano Barros and others have detailed.
Leftist critics have pulled no punches in calling out the abundance agenda as neoliberalism dressed in progressive clothes.
"The abundance movement is a scam," Brandee Marckmann of the progressive San Francisco Education Alliance told
Common Dreams on Thursday. "It's a rebranded Trumpian movement that punches down on working-class families. The only abundance these guys want is for themselves, and they want to line their pockets through political schemes that steal money from our public schools, public housing, and public transportation."
The “abundance agenda” promoted by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is gaining traction among center-left Democrats, but it’s largely a rebranding of deregulation and market-first policies -- more Rockefeller Republican than progressive.
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— The Phoenix Project ( @phoenixprojnow.bsky.social) April 18, 2025 at 1:46 PM
As Phoenix Project, a grassroots San Francisco group fighting dark money in politics, recently noted, "Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance helped rebrand Reagan-era economics for a new generation, but behind the gloss lies a familiar web of tech, real estate, and right-wing influence."
"At a moment when U.S. democracy is threatened by MAGA authoritarianism and deep inequality, doubling down on private-sector solutions while ignoring redistributive policy is a dangerous distraction," the group added.
Pointing to the Demand Progress poll, The Lever's Veronica Riccobene wrote Thursday that "Democratic voters know who their real enemy is."
"A majority believe the 'big problem' in America is that corporations and their executives have too much economic and political power," she said. "It's not surprising, considering Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) are pulling huge crowds on their 'Fighting Oligarchy' tour, even in deep-red states."
"Meanwhile, fewer Democratic voters believe the country's big problem is regulatory bottlenecking, a core argument of the neoliberal 'abundance' movement," Riccobene added.
The “abundance” agenda will not make sense to the average American because yall can’t even explain it clearly on here. Fight to guarantee people healthcare, housing, education, and living wages. It’s that simple.
— Nina Turner (@ninaturner.bsky.social) May 27, 2025 at 3:42 PM
As progressive political strategist Dan Cohen said in response to the new poll, "The voters are demonstrating that they understand the problem with quite a traditional view of American politics and economics: that there is too much power and influence in corporate hands and everyday Americans aren't getting their fair share."
"Democrats would be wise to listen to the voters and respond directly to those views with their rhetoric and actions," he added.
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