"Abundance," the liberals' bold new idea that conservatives have been talking about for as long as I can remember

A pair of liberal writers, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, have come up with what passes among liberals as a big, new idea — one that its proponents claim can save the Democrats. It’s called “Abundance.”

The idea, presented in a best-selling book, is that America needs to build and invent more of what it needs. This sounds an awful lot like Joe Biden’s big idea — “Build Back Better.”

But what distinguishes Abundance theory from Biden’s liberalism is the view that excessive government regulation stands in the way of building and inventing what America needs. Stated differently, it stands in the way of a government that works.

As new ideas go, this idea is hoary. Conservatives have been complaining about government “red tape” standing in the way of getting things done ever since I started paying attention to political discourse. I can well recall that it was a big talking point of my conservative friends with whom I argued during junior high school in 1962 and 1963.

It’s true that conservatives favor the private side, not the government, doing much of the building. But President Eisenhower presided over the building of the interstate highway system. And President Trump backed a federally supported infrastructure initiative.

The more astute liberal politicians have long acknowledged the obvious truth of the Abundance critique of government. Bill Clinton and Al Gore did when they talked about “reinventing government.” Barack Obama did when he quipped in connection with his stimulus program that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”

Of course not. Red tape blocked the shovels.

However, Democrats have never internalized this critique of government. If they internalize it now, I won’t complain.

Will they? Maybe, but I’m not betting on it.

The massive amount of red tape impeding the building of what America needs wasn’t produced by accident. Liberals love to regulate.

Moreover, to deregulate significantly would be to admit that the problems the regulations in question purport to address aren’t really major problems, or else that the regulations have caused more harm than good. Perhaps more to the point, it would be seem like an admission that conservatives were mostly right and liberals mostly wrong about regulation. These aren’t easy admissions for liberals to make

Klein and Thompson describe their book as an expose of the “pathologies of the broad left.” I don’t expect the broad left to acknowledge its pathologies.

In fact, the left is already pushing back. For example, one hard-core leftist calls the movement “a Trojan horse for reviving neo-liberalism.” These are fighting words.

Even if liberals could embrace a considerable amount of deregulation in normal times, can they embrace it in the era of Donald Trump? With Trump slashing regulations and the workforce that implements and enforces them, do liberals want to be saying that America needs deregulation? Do they want, as Barry Goldwater would say, to offer “an echo, not a choice” on the issue of deregulation?

I doubt it. It seems to me that the Democrats’ best play is to decry deregulation and wait for tragedies they can attribute to lack of regulation. We see a variation of this play with the exploitation by the left of the tragic events caused by a natural disaster in the hill country of Texas.

The other big question is whether, assuming liberal do embrace Abundance theory, it will turn the political tide in favor of the Democrats. Here, too, there is plenty of room for doubt.

At the state level, Democrats are paying no political price I can discern for over-regulating. The states the Dems control are almost exclusively Blue ones. Over-regulation may frustrate voters, but it’s not causing them to vote Republican. Adopting the Abundance agenda might help reduce the number of people moving from Blue states to Red ones, but that’s hardly a game-changer.

In Red states, Dems talking about deregulation isn’t likely to win over the electorate. Even if voters believe the talk, they won’t need to switch from “R” to “D” in order to constrain the government.

Abundance theory has little relevance for U.S. Senate and House races, but what about the presidency? In my lifetime, we’ve had only one Democratic president who engaged in serious deregulation. That was Jimmy Carter. He is one of only two Democratic presidents in my lifetime to lose a reelection campaign.

The other was Joe Biden. He was an Abundance guy in the sense that he wanted to build stuff, but not in the sense that he was serious about removing obstacles to building.

Biden touted his building programs, including investments in infrastructure, technology, and clean energy. Voters seemed unimpressed.

It’s clear to me, then, that even if implemented, the Abundance agenda won’t be the magic bullet some are cracking it up to be. And I suspect it will turn out to be a gimmick, like reinventing government was in the Clinton-Gore era, only even less sincere.

Consider this: Zohran Mamdani, the far-left Dem nominee for mayor New York, is giving lip service to the Abundance movement. He granted Derek Thompson a friendly interview in which he called the movement “compelling” because it is talking about “how we can make government more effective, how we can actually deliver on the very ideas that we are so passionate about.”

Mamdani calls for the building of housing and a system of new grocery stores. But the grocery stores would be “publicly owned” — in other words, government-run. Does anyone believe government-run grocery stores will be a model of efficiency? Does anyone believe that a self-styled Democratic Socialist, who seems further to the left than that, is going to prioritize efficiency and the slashing red tape over producing “equity” and “social justice”?

I don’t.

Still, I’m glad that there’s a movement among Democrats that adopts a large slice of the conservative critique of government. If the Abundance movement produces a Democratic party less obsessed with regulation, I won’t complain. If, as seems more likely, it produces damaging strife within the party, I won’t complain about that, either.