Peter Franklin: Abundance – the big idea from two American liberals that British Tories should make their own

Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.

Like the British Tories, the American Democrats find themselves out of power and out of sorts. But in one way their recovery has got off to a much better start than our own.

What any defeated political party desperately needs is fresh thinking. The Dems have received an infusion in the form of Abundance — a New York Times bestseller by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Miraculously, for an era in which the “big idea” book is all but dead, this one’s sparked a national conversation. I hope it becomes international.

The authors’ core argument is for what might be called “super-yimbyism” — i.e. a pro-growth agenda with progressive objectives. Needless to say, affordable housing is high on their list, but it also features clean energy, public transport, and accessible healthcare.

But isn’t this just another justification for a debt-funded, public spending splurge? Actually, no.

It’s true that Klein and Thompson are both (in the American sense) liberals who definitely don’t want to roll back the frontiers of the state. And yet they also make a convincing case that the government bureaucracy – plus the liberals who work for and vote in support of it – are guilty of systematic self-sabotage.

Take the example of housing affordability. What could be more progressive than sympathy for the homeless (or “persons experiencing homelessness” as we’re now encouraged to say)?

But, embarrassingly, there’s an inverse relationship between how liberal (i.e. left-wing) is a city and the affordability of its housing. Places like San Francisco might be really good at finding empathetic ways of describing their unhoused population, but they’re not so good at actually housing them, which is surely the more important thing.

That inverse relationship is no geographical accident. The tradition of neighbourhood activism and local democracy in liberal cities has been used by residents to push for restrictions on new development (while also electing ultra-progressive city governments and law enforcement officials). The results can be seen on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles (mind where you tread).

California is also home to some of the greenest voters on the planet. So why aren’t they leading the world in the deployment of high-speed rail? After all, what better way to link up the most productive cities and take traffic off the freeways?

Unfortunately, the California High-Speed Rail project rivals our own HS2 for cost over-runs and time delays. Though billions of dollars have already been spent, actual construction is so far restricted to a section between the inland cities of Merced and Bakersfield. One might have thought that the major cities of the coast might be the priority, but that’s to reckon without the expensive wrangling over land rights, environmental impacts, and various regulatory impediments.

The result is that while China approaches 30,000 miles of high speed rail, America struggles with a few hundred.

Perhaps the most absurd example of the self-sabotaging state is the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) programme – which was announced by Joe Biden back in 2021. With the objective of getting high=quality internet to underserved rural areas (and boasting a budget of $42bn), here was the proof that Democrats care about ‘Red State’ America too.

So, by the time of last year’s presidential election, how many Americans had been connected? Well, that’s an easy one, because the number is precisely zero.

To understand why BEAD has achieved so little in so much time and with so much money, one need look no further than the fourteen stage process which states have been required to go through to obtain funds and start laying cable. For fans of utter bureaucratic lunacy its worth listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Jon Stewart on the subject. Together, they take us through every Kafkaesque twist and turn.

In other words, there’s a huge amount that government could deliver, but doesn’t through it’s own needlessly stupid fault.

Grover Norquist, who founded Americans for Tax Reform, once denied that he wanted to abolish the government. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”. The pre-Trump conservative movement, which Norquist did so much to shape, has clearly failed in this objective; the American state is more bloated and debt-ridden than ever.

Nevertheless, government in America is drowning… in its own red tape. Right-wingers have always attacked excessive bureaucracy for its impact on the private sector and private life, but what the authors of Abundance have noticed is the burden that out-of-control regulation places on the state itself. Indeed, one might conclude that those who oppose an active state owe a lot more to pen-pushers and nimbies than to low tax campaigners.

Klein and Thompson’s plea to their fellow liberals is to recognise this irony and unleash the power of government to do good. However, they’re over-generous in trying to explain why officialdom behaves in the self-defeating way that it is does. Such people are well-meaning, but misguided, they think. But is that the whole story?

It’s worth remembering that the worst totalitarian regimes in history didn’t just sustain themselves through terror and fanaticism, but also by harnessing the humdrum flaws of humanity: pettiness, laziness, greed, conformity, and wilful stupidity. The dysfunctional bureaucracies in our own time and place aren’t of course totalitarian, but it would be naive to attribute the enormous damage they do to honest mistakes alone.

Anything that drains the life out of an entire nation is, at some level, malignant. Admittedly, the same could be said about the vampiric tendencies of rentier capitalism, but that reinforces the point that I think that Klein and Thompson gloss over: we’re dealing with wickedness here, not just wrongheadedness.

Another reason why I doubt that ‘abundance’ will be taken up as a left-wing cause is that it isn’t exciting enough. Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, and Free Palestine all inspired huge demonstrations; planning reform not so much. You’d think that young people would be willing to protest in favour of their own economic self-interest, but it just hasn’t happened, not as a mass movement.

Until the left stops being defined by its noisiest activists, it’s never going to be about common sense, let alone efficiency.

Indeed, one could see the abundance agenda as a modified form of supply-side economics, which is of course associated with the Right. Klein and Thompson can protest that their version is focused on the state, not the market, and the common good, not private gain – but by the time they’ve explained I wonder who’s still listening.

The conventional left is still focused on the demand-side: specifically, subsidising demand through fiscal transfers and socialised public services. Look how the Biden administration prioritised an extremely expensive student debt write-off, but without doing anything to reform the grotesquely extractive higher education sector. ‘Free stuff’, without a thought as to where it might come from, dominates the progressive imagination.

If there’s any hope for the Abundance agenda, it lies on the Right – or at least it ought to. Unfortunately, until 2016, American conservatism was so blinkered by its rhetorical hostility to government that it never seized the potential of streamlined state action.

Since 2016, there’s been a shift in attitudes. Strong government is no longer anathema – but only as long as it projects the will of the current inhabitant of the Oval Office: l’état, c’est Donald.

That can be seen in the actions of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which isn’t primarily about making government more efficient or, for that matter, shrinking the state. Rather, it’s about destroying centres of resistance to Donald Trump. In itself, that’s not unreasonable for the elected head of state, but his highly personal, whim-driven agenda won’t produce the systemic change needed to realise the goals of abundance.

However, there is a huge opportunity here for the British right. During 14 years of Conservative government, ministers tried to cut the size of the state but, for the most part, left it unreformed. It’s instructive that the few exceptions to this pattern (for instance, schools policy or, during the pandemic, the Vaccine Taskforce) delivered impressive results. Imagine if we’d made reform, with the objective of abundance, our mission across the board.

Though it might now too late for the Conservative Party in it’s current form, it’s not too late for whatever comes next. The Abundance agenda was written for the other side of the aisle on the other side of the Atlantic, but let’s steal it anyway.