Is abundance the liberal answer to Trump?

This past Sunday the New York Times ran an essay (gift link) adapted from Ezra Klein’s new book with Derek Thompson.  The book, which I look forward to reading, is on abundance liberalism.  Klein’s essay begins as follows:

I keep seeing Democrats say the resistance failed. On these pages, James Carville counseled Democrats to “roll over and play dead” until the Trump administration collapses beneath its own weight. Assuming corpse pose, Carville said, would be “a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics.”

But Democrats succeeded at the art of resistance politics. They won the 2018 midterms, flipping 40 House seats, seven governorships and six state legislatures. Democrats won the 2020 presidential election, driving Donald Trump into exile in Mar-a-Lago. The resistance succeeded. The problem was what came next — and, in some ways, what came before: Democrats failed at the work of governing.

I think this is mostly wrong.  Democrats won in 2018 and 2020 primarily for two reasons:  1) there was a standard thermostatic reaction against the incumbent, and 2) Trump was an unusually unpopular incumbent because he did very unpopular things (ACA repeal, the regressive tax cuts, his wildly inept covid leadership, racism, xenophobia, etc.).  The truth is that the 2020 election was far closer than it should have been, given all the manifestly good reasons not to vote for Trump, and the Democratic victory was hardly due to the brilliant communications strategy of either Biden or the progressives he defeated in the primary.

Klein continues:

Trump won in 2024 because Americans were furious about the cost of living and they trusted Republicans, not Democrats, to lower it. Part of that was the burst of postpandemic inflation that deranged the economy from 2021 to 2023. But in 2020, before that burst, exit polls showed voters evenly split on whether they trusted Trump or Joe Biden to manage the economy. In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton on that question.

I know many Democrats believe this is a byproduct of Trump’s years of playing a businessman on TV. That may be part of it. But Democrats allowed an affordability crisis to metastasize on their watch in ways they cannot blame perception or messaging for. If they are going to marginalize MAGA, they need more than a resistance; they need new answers that admit past failures.

Most of Klein’s essay examines the ongoing debacle of California high speed rail, a genuinely shocking example of liberal governance going awry and making it difficult to produce goods and services that people need at reasonable prices.  I agree with Klein that the inability of the government to complete projects on a reasonable timeline and at a reasonable cost is a big problem.  So is overregulation that prevents private businesses from building houses and solar farms.  These are problems that the Democrats should try to fix because doing so will make America a better country.  I am a strong supporter of Klein’s abundance agenda.

But Klein seems to think that fixing our inability to build will help Democrats politically.  This I very much doubt.  Most people have very little idea what the government does and whether it performs well or poorly.  If Democrats succeeded in making government more efficient, whatever credit they received would be transitory as people came to expect more efficient government.  (Similarly, people strongly approve of Social Security and Medicare, and Democrats are trusted on these issues, but voters take these programs for granted and often elect Republicans.)  In fact, Democrats could make the government more efficient and then get booted from office for a recession that they played no role in causing.  This kind of “blind retrospection” is likely an important part of what happened in 2024 with inflation.  (In my view Democratic policy can be blamed for only a modest part of the post-pandemic inflation.)

Democrats might gain from greater governmental efficiency if their policies succeeded in substantially raising growth rates and living standards, but not because they would be credited with bringing about a new era of prosperity.  Instead, they would gain because growth tends to make people more tolerant, a point Benjamin Friedman emphasized in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.  Greater toleration would benefit the Democrats as the party of toleration and social equality. 

One reason it is important to get this right is that it is relevant to the ongoing debate over how Democrats should respond to the outrages being perpetrated by the Trump administration.  Klein seems to think that Democrats should claim the mantle of abundance, in opposition to the scarcity mindset that he believes fuels right-wing populism.  But on Klein’s own account it is difficult to see how this is a useful short-term strategy, since Democrats have little credibility on this issue and no power to implement reforms at the federal level.