Building an Up-Left Politics
A Review of "Abundance" by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
With Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have written a timely, compelling manifesto for progressives who want to build a bright future. The book now defines the Up-Left Quadrant of American political economy thought (which I’ll discuss below). Even If you’re steeped in the Abundance Agenda, you’ll learn a lot. Reading about California’s Employment Development Department unemployment claims system and its incredible complexity was, for me, bewildering, frustrating, and fascinating all at once.
Klein and Thompson make good point after good point on how growth requires change, how Democrats became too beholden to process over results, how blue states are squandering their advantages, how paperwork is choking everything from construction to basic science, and much else. I could write thousands of words on all of the things the book gets right. I won’t, but I could. I’d like to focus this piece instead on some of the areas that the book strategically bypasses or pulls punches in that I think are worth discussing.
Defining the Up-Left Quadrant
A way to understand this book is to combine the normal left-right spectrum with what James Pethokoukis has termed the Up-Wing, Down-Wing spectrum. The Up-Wing perspective adopts an optimistic, even enthusiastic view of the future, wants to achieve as much economic growth as possible, and sees technological progress as the key to solving big problems and creating a more prosperous world.
Down-Wingers, by contrast, are much more pessimistic about the future. They accept and -to some degree even like- limits to growth. They see America as a much more zero-sum society where a win for one group must be coming at the expense of another. They are much more skeptical of technological innovation and believe that problems like climate change require scaling back ambition and prosperity.
If you combine that with the left-right axis, you get a matrix with four quadrants: Up-Right, Down-Right, Down-Left, and Up-Left.
Up-Right politics champions entrepreneurs, innovation, deregulation, and economic freedom as the path to abundance. Think Mark Watney from The Martian meets Ronald Reagan. It wants to embrace disruption, cut red tape, and let private enterprise build the future. Space exploration today, flying cars tomorrow—all powered by free markets and bold risk-takers. Milton Friedman would have fit well here. If you’re looking for thinkers in this mold today, see James Pethokoukis’ The Conservative Futurist, the Abundance Institute’s Eli Dourado and Neil Chilson, R Street’s Adam Thierer, FAI’s Thomas Hochman, and a number of libertarian such as Cato’s Scott Lincicome as well the writers of Reason Magazine.
Down-Right politics is relentlessly zero-sum and pessimistic about modernity. In its purest form, it combines a strident traditionalism that wants to undo much of the 20th century—if not much of the Enlightenment—with a dogged belief that the essence of politics and of life is competition for dominance. It’s post-liberalism meets Donald Trump. In addition to Trump and Vance, this describes people like Rod Dreher, Patrick Deneen, Tucker Carlson, Roger Scruton, Josh Hawley, and Viktor Orban.
Down-Left politics blends progressive social values with anti-development sensibilities and skepticism toward modernity and technological solutions. It prioritizes equity, localism, conservation, community, and distribution over growth. In this view, it’s better to have regulated scarcity shared equally than unequal abundance. This quadrant contains people like Naomi Klein, Paul Ehrlich, Jason Hickel, and Greta Thunberg. Its slightly milder cousin “Small is Beautiful” ideology ran very strong in certain corners of 1970s liberalism and has deeply infused a lot of left-leaning thinking in places like California and Vermont. Klein and Thompson do a good job of explaining how this kind of thinking became entrenched in Democratic Party politics and why it has done so much to cause scarcity.
Up-Left takes those same progressive values but sees growth, science, technology, and international cooperation as their delivery vehicles. It rejects scarcity thinking and argues that technological progress and building things are essential for achieving social progress —we can innovate rather than ration our way to sustainability, equality, and freedom. A lot of the energy in the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement is in this Up-Left direction. Prominent figures in that quadrant include Barack Obama, Steven Pinker, Jerusalem Demsas, Bill Gates, Erik Brynjolfsson, Noah Smith, and Matt Yglesias.
Klein and Thompson’s Abundance is now the canonical book laying out the Up-Left viewpoint. From housing to high-speed rail, from the reconstruction of bridges to the invention of vaccines, they make a strong case for leaning into abundance politics as the means by which progressives can achieve their goals.
Complementing Vision With Action
Klein and Thompson do an extraordinary job of succinctly and clearly explaining how we got to now. Their diagnosis of the origins of our scarcity problem and its contours today is spot on. They don’t have as many concrete policy proposals as one might like – but to be fair, in the conclusion they do discuss why they wrote the book as “a lens, not a list.” And one can easily understand why they did this. Abundance the book is about articulating a vision, not about being a series of white papers stapled together.
But…. if a laundry list of policies is what you’re looking for, boy do we have the list for you.
You can find more than 50 of these ideas spelled out in more detail here. If you like the vision of Klein and Thompson’s Abundance and you want to hear actionable policy reforms that advance abundance and bring down the cost of living, that’s what we’re doing here at The Rebuild.
Abundance, In Service of What?
Klein and Thompson’s book opens with a progressive dream vision of what 2050 could look like. The book is capital-P progressive in a way I had not anticipated before reading it. These are two stars of Democratic wonkery; I did not expect so much poetry in their writing. It says to its readers “you like progressive politics, you’ll like abundance too, two great flavors that go together.” It’s an abundance that’s for everything Democrats are for. That’s one of its strongest selling points. If you want to persuade progressives to like abundance, showing them how it advances other things they care about is a smart approach.
They present abundance as being about the cost of living, inequality, climate change, labor, industrial meat production, and numerous other laudable goals. But there’s the rub. What do we do when interests collide? How much should we value abundance when it makes things more plentiful doesn’t also advance those other goals?
They imagine profits from AI being redistributed. What if they’re not? I’d argue that the other benefits are still worth having. They imagine abundance reducing inequality. What if it makes everyone three times as rich as they are now? That would not technically reduce inequality but it sure would do a lot for prosperity. They imagine abundance increasing labor rights; do those rights include the freedom to do gig work and independent contracting? That’s something some on the left won’t want to hear, but helping people have more freedom in the labor market and do jobs that aren’t a traditional 9-to-5 is a good thing.
While I understand why they paint their vision the way they do, I would argue that bringing down the cost of living has to be the priority, and that prioritization means that abundance should be vigorously pursued even when it doesn’t or can’t achieve other progressive goals. Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Blame versus Build
Democrats are at a crossroads. November was a catastrophe. We have to figure out where to go from here. We can be a party that goes in the Down-wing direction and that mostly looks for someone to blame. That’s what some in the party seem to want to do. Their approach to something like high rents is to blame landlords, AirBnB, and institutional investors. On healthcare, they would fix their ire on insurance companies, even going so far as to make excuses for the murdering of an insurance executive. On energy and the environment, they want to protest fossil fuel companies and [checks note] Matt Yglesias at a panel.
Or we can be a party that builds. We can admit that “small is beautiful” was a mistake. It was a worldview long on vibes but short on delivering a better society. We can loudly state that degrowth is even worse. It’s poverty on purpose so that champagne socialists can self-indulgently feel righteous while personally suffering few, if any, of the harms caused by their own ideology. A political party that cannot clearly reject it deserves the political ruin that it receives in response. (Note: this also applies to right-wing degrowthers who want to make us all poorer for the sake of nostalgic nationalism rather than campfire communism).
We can adopt a more case-by-case approach to unions. They are not always helpful to progress and abundance. The head of the dockworkers union threatened to strangle the rest of the U.S. economy if he did not get his way in, among other things, blocking automation so that American ports can be more efficient like ports in other parts of the world. The elevator union opposes pre-fabricated elevators, which drives up the cost of housing. Labor unions are some of the strongest backers of CEQA (it gives them the ability to extract more concessions from developers). The maritime union supports the Jones Act. The UAW supports Trump’s tariffs. These moves aren’t even particularly pro-worker seeing as 94% of private sector workers aren’t in a union anyway. Where unions help create a society that builds, we can work together. Where they don’t, progressives should politely ignore them.
Conversely, Democrats should be friendlier to market actors that want to build. Most of the abundance-generating in the 21st century is going to be done by businesses seeking profit, and that’s okay. Can the government help with that? Of course. Klein and Thompson speak to this a lot around vaccines and Operation Warp Speed for instance. To give another example, there are basically no known cases of large-scale nuclear energy development that do not involve significant financial backstopping by governments (though some serious NRC reform would be helpful too). Democrats do not need to give up our belief in government being a force for good or in society pulling together as a “we”, but we do need to lean into market-friendliness and into a certain form of business-friendliness. If you look at all of the awesome possibilities in Klein and Thompson’s opening vision of 2050 and think about who is going to make those possibilities realities, in most cases it will be businesses. Contra Aaron Bastani, the most plausible vision of a 2050 dream scenario is Fully Automated Luxury Capitalism.
Though I would have preferred if Klein and Thompson had leaned a little harder into some of these intra-party fights, Abundance is great, and I highly recommend it. It is one of the most important and—if it drags the Democratic Party in a more Up-Left rather than Down-Left direction—one of the most socially and economically salubrious books to come out in a long time. Everyone interested in how we build a better, brighter American future should read it.
-GW
To your list of complaints about unions, I would add the role of public employee unions in making government at all levels much less effective at achieving progressive goals. They are a principal reason why it's so hard to hire the right people, fire those who aren't working out, outsource where it makes sense and insource where it doesn't.
And the political economy of fixing that is going to be particularly tricky, since those unions in particular are such a powerful part of the Democratic coalition, and it's hard to stand against them right now without being seen as an ally of the Trump/Musk criminal wrecking crew. But this is a big part of what Yglesias is getting at with his "Common Sense Democrat Manifesto" plank: "Public services and institutions like schools deserve adequate funding, and they must prioritize the interests of their users, *not their workforce* (emphasis mine) or abstract ideological projects."
Nice read. One important point to add about the lower right and left quadrants is that they both tend toward populist authoritarianism, despite their differences. AOC and Bernie Sanders would likely support a left-wing "benevolent" authoritarian figure, just as the MAGA movement rallies behind right-wing nationalist authoritarian leadership.
I'd like to challenge some of your healthcare policy recommendations. We don't have a healthcare spending problem. We have an over-regulated industry. If we can focus on deregulation first, then we can see where spending may need to be reallocated. We don't need an agency to monitor antitrust tendencies of hospitals. The states are inherently giving and managing hospitals like cities manage taxi tokens, limiting competition, leading us to not realize increased quality and lower price potentials. I’d be surprised if Republicans and moderates in most states would oppose health care deregulation.
More importantly, the upper left should be finding common ground with Republicans, who largely occupy the upper right quadrant (at least in spirit!). There are numerous deregulatory policies both sides could potentially agree on - repealing cabotage laws, simplifying approval processes, and eliminating tariffs. Unfortunately, it seems the upper left can't bring themselves to collaborate on these shared interests because they're unwilling to give the Trump administration any perceived victories.