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ezra klein
Voters Again Shown to Prefer Populism Over Neoliberal 'Abundance' Agenda in New Research
"Majorities of Democrats and independents and two in five Republicans believe the outsized power of billionaires and corporations in our government is a bigger problem than red tape and bureaucracy."
Sep 04, 2025
A new strategy memo written by a progressive think tank and a pair of high-profile Democratic Party operatives makes the latest case that a populist economic message will help the party more than a message centered around the so-called "abundance" agenda, Politico reported on Thursday.
The memo—which was written by Democratic pollster Geoff Garin and Democratic strategist Brian Fallon, in collaboration with Groundwork Collaborative—uses polling and focus group data to argue that a sharp populist message is more effective at winning back working-class voters than a message focused on cutting regulations in order to build more housing and infrastructure.
"While there are elements of the Abundance agenda that have appeal, and the choice on which messages to deliver is not zero-sum, a populist economic approach better solves for Democrats' challenges with working-class voters," the memo states. "If candidates are asking which focus deserves topmost billing in Democrats' campaign messaging, the answer is clear: 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."
The memo went on to argue that "majorities of Democrats and independents and two in five Republicans believe the outsized power of billionaires and corporations in our government is a bigger problem than red tape and bureaucracy."
In a head-to-head messaging test, voters told researchers that government giving preference to large corporations and billionaires was a bigger problem than government bureaucracy causing inefficiencies by a nearly two-to-one ratio. By roughly the same ratio, the researchers found, voters preferred cracking down on price-gouging corporations to cutting bureaucratic red tape.
The researchers did credit abundance-centric messaging with generating "some fresh ideas that challenge the status quo," but warned that "there are significant questions about whether a focus on it in political messaging adequately meets the moment Democrats face today.
The memo is set to be presented to Democrats on Capitol Hill next week, and Politico noted that it has the support of Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), who represents a competitive congressional district and who in the past has embraced populist messaging.
The "abundance" movement got its name after a book released earlier this year by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who both argued that Democratic-led state governments have put up too many bureaucratic roadblocks to achieve ambitious goals such as affordable housing and high-speed rail.
Some critics of the book, however, argue that it fails to address issues such as corporate power and wealth inequality as the real roadblocks to progressive change.
As Common Dreams reported last week, a recent analysis by Revolving Door Project and Open Markets Institute detailed how the abundance movement "erroneously" claims that environmental reviews hinder clean energy progress while having little to say about "the real causes of delay," including interference by fossil fuel-backed politicians and profit-driven privately-owned utilities.
The memo's release comes just as an "Abundance" conference is set to kick off in Washington, DC on Thursday that will include Klein and Thompson as featured speakers, as well as Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox.
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Detailed Report Exposes Serious Threat of the Neoliberal, Trump-Lite 'Abundance' Agenda
"With the Trump administration, the Republican-led Congress, and right-wing Supreme Court advancing their attacks on bedrock environmental law, Abundance proponents are sounding more like their echo than their opposition."
Aug 27, 2025
The much-discussed 'Abundance Agenda' is not the solution its proponents claim it be, according to a devastating report published this week by a pair of progressive watchdogsdraw which argues the policy framework is more of a neoliberal Trojan Horse than anything else.
Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance, released earlier this year in the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, was described as a "once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call" to change how the US thinks about problems like housing and the environmental impact of infrastructure projects, with the authors calling on the Democratic Party to fight the Trump agenda with "liberalism that builds."
Instead of getting bogged down in debates over wealth and income inequality or harnessing growing outrage over the hold that the superrich have on the US political system, Klein and Thompson advised the party to reach out to voters by pushing to end the "stifling bureaucratic requirements that killed private sector innovation."
Reining in "burdensome government processes" like environmental and tenant safety regulations—not fighting for programs that would benefit everyone in the US regardless of their wealth or income—was the key to securing "abundance for all," said the authors and their supporters in government, such as Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Josh Harder (D-Calif.).
But in addition to beginning their book with a "glaring error," said the authors of a new report by the government watchdogs Revolving Door Project (RDP) and Open Markets Institute on Tuesday—asserting that "supply is how much there is of something" without accounting for the fact that private corporations decide how much of a product they want to sell to make a profit—Klein and Thompson ignore the fact that long before they put pen to paper, right-wing politicians and think tanks were already pushing an "abundance" agenda.
"When abundance-supporting politicians are asked about it, Klein's name is often the first word out of their mouth," said Jeff Hauser, executive director of RDP. "But this obscures the powerful coalition of political pundits, politicians, and think tanks that have painstakingly constructed a national movement around 'abundance' for years before the publication of this book. These interested parties have taken on the more detail-oriented work of actually producing policy for abundance, and it is often far more conservative and destructive than implied in Klein and Thompson's superficial tract."
Klein and Thompson rely on a "dishonest or sloppy" interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which they equate with a permitting law and claim requires drawn-out environmental impact reviews, to make their argument that approvals for new infrastructure should be less cumbersome, said RDP.
The law requires the government to assess environmental impacts before developers can build major infrastructure, and has been heralded as a bedrock environmental statute—but it had been a target of the fossil fuel industry and the policymakers that do its bidding long before "abundance" proponents took aim at NEPA.
"When abundance-supporting politicians are asked about it, Klein's name is often the first word out of their mouth. But this obscures the powerful coalition of political pundits, politicians, and think tanks that have painstakingly constructed a national movement around 'abundance' for years before the publication of this book."
Proponents of "permitting reform"—a tenet of the abundance movement—claim that NEPA is a barrier to clean energy development, but the report finds that renewable energy projects are typically delayed for other reasons and that NEPA oppenents' frequently cited examples of "four- to ten-year timelines to complete a NEPA analysis are the exception, not the rule," as University of Utah law professor Jamie Pleune found in a 2023 Roosevelt Institute report.
Quoting Pleune, the report—titled Debunking the Abundance Agenda—notes that "most delays in the NEPA process are functional, not regulatory."
Pleune explained that most sources of delay are "insufficient staff, unstable budgets, vague or incomplete permit applications, waiting for information from a permit applicant, or poor coordination among permitting authorities." Such delays, however, "can be addressed without eliminating environmental standards, analytical rigor, or community engagement."
RDP's report recounts efforts by former right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass permitting reform legislation in 2022-23, as the Biden administration fought to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, in the interest of getting approval of the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline fast-tracked.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised the debt limit, expedited the MVP's approval, and codified a number of changes to NEPA—including arbitrary time limits on environmental impact assessments—came out of Manchin's efforts.
NEPA has been credited with protecting crucial wetlands near an industrial facility that was built with with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds; providing a process to explain to the public in Stephentown, New York the greenhouse gas savings that could be achieved if the area's new electrical grid shifted away from fossil fuels-based frequency regulation technology; and ensuring soil and groundwater contamination would be remediated ahead of the construction of a senior living facility in Kansas City, Missouri.
But as RDP noted, throughout Manchin's efforts to roll back environmental assessment requirements and pave the way for the MVP, "abundance proponents... criticized progressive skeptics who warned that weakening environmental review procedures would likely benefit the fossil fuel industry most of all."
Klein argued that “stream-lined permitting will do more to accelerate clean energy than it will to encourage the use of fossil fuels,” because "a simpler, swifter path to construction means more for the clean energy side of the ledger."
He claimed that Democratic opponents to right-wing "permitting reform" legislation lacked their own solutions for expediting the construction of clean energy projects—but soon after he made those claims, lawmakers including Reps. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) and
Sean Casten (D-Ill.) introduced a bill "that would expedite the green transition by facilitating quicker construction of interregional transmission lines, incentivizing renewable energy production on public lands and in federal waters, and increasing grid reliability—all while enhancing community engagement and without giveaways to the fossil fuel industry."
As RDP senior researcher and report co-author Kenny Stancil said, "Abundance advocates erroneously blame environmental review for hindering the clean energy transition, for example, but they have little to say about the real causes of delay, including privately owned utilities' profit-driven opposition to building interstate transmission lines, investors' prioritization of short-term oil and gas profits, and interference from fossil fuel-backed politicians."
The RDP report also points to Klein and Thompson's "indiscriminate anti-regulatory ethos" in regards to their arguments about housing supply, which they argue should be increased by reforming land use policy and loosening zoning rules.
"We agree that it’s a good idea to increase housing supply, and that liberalizing zoning rules is necessary in many places (especially in affluent, low-density suburbs, important locations the book ignores almost entirely)," reads the report. "However, abundance advocates seem to lose their way when they begin to veer away from arbitrary restrictions on housing construction... towards regulations that—in their mind—impede housing development. For instance, zoning can keep polluting industrial activities away from residential areas and ensure adequate infrastructural capacity like water, sewers, schools, and hospital beds for a community."
Klein and Thompson claim that requirements for air filtration systems in housing next to highways raise construction costs and contribute to homelessness, and suggest tenant protections could contribute to housing shortages by making "landlordism less profitable."
"In both cases, abundance proponents prioritize aggregate housing supply above all else, spending little time examining the real
world impact of their policy prescriptions," writes RDP. "What percentage of overall construction cost is the addition of a HEPA air filtration system? Will this requirement truly result in increased homelessness? How much? What are the potential long-term health
benefits and financial savings from having these residents breathe cleaner air? Will this requirement begin to alleviate the dire
racial disparities seen in asthma rates? These questions go unanswered in Klein and Thompson's book."
The Abundance authors also support eliminating land-use regulations in disaster-prone areas, even as hurricane and wildfire threats intensify—a policy that would "not only imperil human life, but it will result in post-disaster housing crises and could threaten the stability of crucial financial institutions."
The real estate investors the abundance movement focuses on maximize profits, which do not always correlate with construction output, said RDP—and centering the interests of landlords and developers who aim to cut construction costs distracts from what RDP calls the only solution that would provide affordable housing for all: social housing, or community-owned housing that exists outside of the private real estate market.
The report details how—although Thompson and Klein may identify themselves as liberals—their abundance worldview mirrors that of commentators and policymakers on the right, from the libertarian Niskanen Center to Trump's own appointees.
The stated mission of Trump's National Energy Dominance Council, chaired by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, couches its mission in the language favored by the Abundance authors, calling for "improving the processes for permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation across all forms of American energy"—and has been praised by abundance enthusiasts like author Matt Yglesias.
The administration has also expedited permitting for liquefied natural gas exports while undertaking permitting reforms against clean energy.
"As the report explores, abundance talking points have already been adopted by Trump's energy appointees to justify new fossil fuel projects, while circumventing public participation and transparency in the environmental review process," said Hannah Story Brown, RDP research director and co-author of the report. "With the Trump administration, the Republican-led Congress, and right-wing Supreme Court advancing their attacks on bedrock environmental law, Abundance proponents are sounding more like their echo than their opposition."
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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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