Liberals’ ‘Abundance’ Discourse Is Good for Donald Trump and Elon Musk

This article is being published in partnership with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. If you like this story, sign up for The Lever’s free newsletter.

Last week, Abundance co-author Ezra Klein went viral on social media. In a widely shared video clip from Jon Stewart’s podcast, Klein described the maddeningly bureaucratic process for deploying rural broadband funding under the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure bill — a procedure so cumbersome that barely any of the entities seeking these grants have even finished the application process, years after the bill’s passage. 

The anecdote hit hard — Stewart groaned and cursed as Klein elegantly demonstrated the central thesis of his book, Abundance: Red tape and overregulation, allegedly the outgrowth of progressives’ obsession with process over outcomes, have become primary drivers of scarcity in America. Boosted by Fox News, Elon Musk, and thousands of retweets, the soundbite was the kind of fable of inefficient liberal government that Ronald Reagan told throughout the 1980s.

There was just one problem with the story’s premise: It is demonstrably false. 

The Kafkaesque nature of Biden’s broadband application process was not, in fact, the result of “everything bagel liberalism,” pressure from doctrinaire leftists, or Democratic politicians’ penchant for governing through checklists, which Klein and his co-author, Derek Thompson, frame in Abundance as the key obstacles to housing security, decarbonization, and other critical 21st century needs. 

Rather, this burdensome procedure was created at the insistence of vote-withholding Republican senators and their cable industry donors — companies seeking to block funding to upstarts that might challenge their regional telecom monopolies or force them to provide affordable prices for broadband. After they loaded up the funding legislation with a Byzantine process, telecom giants and GOP-led states — not protocol-obsessed lefties or overly rigid bureaucrats — then manufactured a monthslong fight over what constitutes “affordable” rates, delaying quick funding for the build-out.

There are lessons to draw from this failure — for instance, Democrats’ unrequited pursuit of bipartisanship can lead them to undermine their legislative initiatives. But the story Klein shared absolutely doesn’t support the thrust of Abundance or the themes of the wider Abundance movement. 

In fact, the takeaway from the broadband tale is that the biggest obstacles to efficiency and abundance are often corporate power and its corrupting influence on our politics — factors typically downplayed or unmentioned in the Abundance Discourse.

Censoring such topics from the conversation may get Klein and Thompson platformed by large media outlets, praise from bankrolled politicians, and ever-more book sales, but it also fortifies a narrative that lets corporate power continue to create the very scarcity that Abundance laments.

A Scarcity In The Abundance Discourse

Take the United States’ failure to build out renewable energy infrastructure at the scale and speed required to avert a climate catastrophe. In Abundance, Klein and Thompson ascribe this failure to environmental laws like the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), because, while these regulations are often used by green groups to slow down dangerous oil and gas developments, they can also be misused to disrupt renewable energy projects.

Somehow, this analysis fails to reckon with the central role the fossil fuel industry has played in blocking the clean energy transition. 

Green energy developers will tell you that among the biggest obstacles to new solar or wind projects online are 1) intransigence by gas-dominated utilities that make it practically impossible for renewable developments — which are less profitable for utilities than fossil-fuel infrastructure — to interconnect with the grid, and 2) campaigns by oil and gas front groups that work to gin up opposition to clean energy with deceptive claims like “wind turbines kill whales” and “solar panels cause cancer.” 

We could pass all the federal permitting reforms Klein and Thompson could dream of, but if powerful fossil fuel interests continue to call the political shots, we’ll never achieve the clean energy build-out we desperately need. 

Similarly, when it comes to the scarcity of affordable housing, Abundance primarily blames zoning laws for constraining supply and driving up prices. 

It’s hardly some new Einstein-level revelation that NIMBY-motivated zoning laws are bad and can exacerbate problems in some markets. Well before the Abundance media tour, many lawmakers — including progressives — have been calling for an end to exclusionary zoning. 

But unlike progressives, Abundance Liberals obsessively focus on zoning to the exclusion of most other factors — a sleight of hand that characteristically distracts from systemic corporate-linked drivers of affordable housing scarcity. 

Last month, University of California and Federal Reserve researchers found that “constrained housing supply is relatively unimportant in explaining differences in rising house prices among U.S. cities,” conclusions which “challenge the consensus that relaxing regulatory constraints would substantially lower housing prices and meaningfully expand housing quantities.” 

Instead, “higher income growth predicts the same growth in house prices” — meaning the housing crisis reflects a more mundane problem that the Abundance Discourse avoids: economic inequality fueled by corporations keeping working-class wages below what’s needed to afford a home in locales full of rich people. 

In many of those areas, there’s no actual scarcity of structures that could be living space. It’s just that corporations and oligarchs hoarding wealth and land aren’t being compelled by zoning and tax laws to open up the space for housing. 

For instance, vacancy rates have hit a 30-year high in commercial buildings, many of which could be converted to housing. In New York City between 2008 and 2014, “30 percent of condo sales in large-scale Manhattan developments have been to purchasers who either listed an overseas address or bought through an entity like a limited-liability corporation.”

Meanwhile, there’s also the recurring problem of monopoly. A 2022 Johns Hopkins study spotlighted how more and more local markets are dominated by fewer and fewer housing construction giants. These home-building behemoths are making higher profits while choosing to build fewer homes than they once did, knowing that there aren’t as many competitors to fill the gap. In all, the study estimated that corporate concentration has resulted in $106 billion less housing volume every year. 

“We have some large, dominant players who do not want to produce as much as they can because they know it will bring down the prices of their other units — so, they intentionally avoid building, or they build over a staggered time period,” said Johns Hopkins economist Luis Quintero. “That’s why you see new neighborhoods with only a couple of houses over the span of months or even years. They deliberately keep the housing they’re producing scarce.”

At the same time, housing affordability is exacerbated by Wall Street investors buying up existing housing stock, as well as by financial firms algorithmically jacking up rents, allegedly through illegal price fixing. 

This trend of corporate monopolies — not construction-hating progressives, anti-growth zealots, or imperious bureaucrats — creating scarcity and blocking pro-abundance government policies is pervasive. 

Shortages of affordable baby formula, eggs, prescription medicine, ammunition, airline tickets, hamburgers, medical supplies, and hospital services are all connected to oligarchs and corporate donors using campaign cash to make sure that for decades there was a lack of consistent and robust enforcement of antitrust laws. Those same donors also used their political influence to create a zealous regime of restrictive patents to enforce profit-maximizing scarcity in technology and pharmaceuticals. 

And of course, there was Democrats’ decision to brush off the idea of a single-payer health care system and instead champion the Affordable Care Act — a move that Klein defended and that strengthened the power of health insurers, whose entire business model is rationing health care into a scarcity product, rather than an abundantly available service. 

These examples of scarcity-producing corporate maneuvers should be an abundant topic in the Abundance Discourse, but they are scarcely mentioned, if at all.

Empowering The Right

When asked why progressives’ corporate power analysis finds almost no place in Abundance, Klein told Pod Save America: “There are certain kinds of problems they’re willing to see and certain kinds of problems they are unwilling to see.” 

But that’s the trouble with the Abundance Discourse: It writes America’s central scarcity problem — corporate power — out of the economic story, encourages Democrats to focus on the wrong solutions, and elevates deregulatory narratives already being weaponized by the right. 

Consider the first few months of Donald Trump’s second presidency. His administration has both claimed an unprecedented amount of executive authority to ignore laws and independent agencies, while launching a far-reaching deregulatory campaign to fully dismantle NEPA, eviscerate pollution rules, and kill off financial regulations. The Trump White House says it is aiming to “unleash prosperity.” This is MAGA’s own version of Abundance storytelling, and it’s now being fortified by liberal pundits similarly pretending we must choose between building and prosperity on one hand, and responsible environmental and health decisions on the other.  

“Does it make sense to be asking for special air filtration systems for developments near freeways when the alternative, for many of the would-be residents, is a tent beneath the freeway?” ask Klein and Thompson — implying that in the world’s richest country, it is unreasonably anti-development to require real estate developers (like Trump) to make accommodations for breathable air. 

It’s a reminder that when airport-book narratives are devoted to avoiding any confrontation with corporate power, they help create false oligarch-appeasing choices. In this case, readers are asked to believe that the only possible choice is between forcing working-class citydwellers to inhale toxic tailpipe exhaust, or relegating them to permanent homelessness. 

There’s a similar dynamic unfolding with Trump’s financier, Elon Musk, who’s heading the president’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. After a prominent right-wing commentator described Klein’s Jon Stewart interview about broadband as “the greatest DOGE ad you’ll ever see,” Musk posted: “This shows why regulatory overhaul is necessary.” (The world’s richest man did not mention he wants his own company’s slower, more expensive satellite Internet service included in the broadband program.) 

Musk went on to claim, “The burden of mountains of regulations is why the high speed rail can’t get down [sic] in California.”

Again, this is a perfect distillation of how Klein and Thompson’s framing provides ammunition to the actual villains blocking abundance. Musk himself played a role in disrupting high-speed rail in California — he admitted to his biographer that he came up with his Hyperloop proposal, which he had no intention of actually pursuing, specifically to undermine support for the rail project. 

Like cable monopolies, Big Oil cartels, and consolidated home construction companies, Musk had a direct interest in blocking competition — in this case, selling cars to Californians who might otherwise prefer a bullet train. 

But Klein’s Abundance narrative lets the Musks of the world cover up their destructive role in government failures while strengthening their claims that government is loaded with waste, fraud, and abuse.

This is not to argue that Klein and Thompson explicitly support Trump and Musk’s unconstitutional slash-and-burn assault on the federal government. On their book tour, they have repeatedly criticized DOGE’s actions, correctly pointing out that Musk is seeking to destroy the government rather than reform it. But they have decidedly not criticized DOGE’s stated premise, arguing instead that we need a more effective DOGE that will pursue government efficiency for positive, rather than destructive, ends. 

Though they make this substantive distinction, ultimately, the rhetoric put forward by DOGE and Abundance feature some of the same main villains: red tape, bureaucracy, overregulation, and lefty do-gooderism-gone-wrong. 

You don’t have to look at The Lorax’s denuded truffula groves to know what this kind of storytelling creates when it eschews a focus on regulating and reducing corporate power. You can look at the real world. 

It looks like Pittsburgh and Los Angeles choked with smoke and smog in the 1940s. 

It looks like the Cuyahoga River catching on fire in 1969.

It looks like an abundance of subprime loans, Wall Street speculation, and slapdash construction in absence of financial regulations and building codes – all of which combined to create the 2008 financial crisis, mass foreclosures, the Great Recession, a cratering of new home construction, and the rise of corporate landlords trapping residents in high-rent dilapidated housing.

The Choice For Democrats

It is no accident that the Abundance Discourse effectively absolves oligarchs and corporations from blame for scarcity. We live in a political and media ecosystem that is owned by oligarchs, and that rewards their mouthpieces with media amplification and book sales. So when it comes to Abundance’s authors, Upton Sinclair’s aphorism seems relevant: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

What everyone else needs to understand is that misidentifying the villains is one of the primary political objectives of the Abundance project. After all, if there’s one thing Trump has proven, it’s that villain stories matter in electoral politics. Oligarchs do not want to be the villains in any kind of story told by Democrats heading into the next set of elections, and they’re concerned about a growing Democratic consensus that the party needs an economic populist rebrand — one that opposes the billionaires and rapacious corporations making the lives of working people harder.

This sentiment stretches across the party’s ideological spectrum. It is embodied by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) wildly successful Fighting Oligarchy Tour, but also by more traditional Democrats, from Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) to many of the party’s highest-performing (and often moderate-identifying) front-line members, like Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.). 

This growing populist coalition understands that in a world where $79 trillion was taken from the bottom 90 percent of households over the last few decades, the central problem isn’t a lack of “abundance.” The problem is that abundance is being hoarded by the rich. 

Abundance Liberals see their agenda as being in competition with the long-overdue populist approach. Thompson made this contrast explicit at a recent Abundance promotional event when questioned about the antitrust movement. He said, “If you want to understand why Texas builds homes while California does not, ask yourself: What is ‘oligarchy’ doing for you? The tool they have used to explain the world fails to do so. At times, it offers a beautiful account of history, but it does a terrible job of describing today’s problems.” 

Considering the Republican state’s housing shortage and other serious scarcity problems, Make America Texas Again is a bizarre message for any liberal to champion. And the attempt to pooh-pooh criticism of oligarchy is equally odd, coming at the very moment the Justice Department alleges that a corporate price-fixing scheme engineered by a Texas company fleeced renters across the country — including in famously de-zoned Houston.

And yet Abundance Liberals’ underlying sentiment has plenty of adherents among well-heeled Democratic elites who want to head off the spread of economic populism that centers a critique of corporate power. Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank that has been a major booster of the Abundance agenda, recently complained that “demanding economic populism is its own form of purity test.” 

He argued that Democrats should stop using a “fighting the oligarchs” message — though “fighting the oligarchs,” was the exact message Democrats just centered in Wisconsin to notch a huge win in the first swing-state election since Trump took office, after Musk poured millions into the state Supreme Court race and hosted a town hall where he gave away $1 million checks, yet still lost big.

Groups like Third Way, which are largely funded by billionaires and corporations, have a vested interest in pushing the Democratic Party to focus on overregulation and bureaucracy rather than the parasitism of economic elites. And they’re not the only ones — much has been written about the many financial ties the Abundance movement has to crypto, artificial intelligence, Big Tech, and the fossil fuel industry.

But you don’t need to see a conspiracy here to understand why, as a political project, the Abundance Agenda presents an electoral danger to the Democratic Party. 

In 2024, Kamala Harris rejected a populist message and was lauded by Washington media for specifically running on an Abundance Agenda. Voters who’ve seen this kind of Democratic bait and switch before ended up trusting Trump more on economic issues — and handed him the presidency. Only months later, Abundance now aims to suppress Democrats’ renewed populist zeitgeist, despite how necessary it is for the fight against Trump and Musk.

Right now, the Democratic Party is facing off against the most corrupt administration in history — a government of, by, and for billionaires that is using the rhetoric of “government efficiency” to dismantle popular social programs, fire veterans, let corporations run roughshod over working people, and slash taxes for oligarchs. 

Ask yourself: Does it make more sense for Democrats to rebrand as the “fighting the oligarchs” party against corporate-created scarcity, highlighting a clear contrast with the Trump administration’s top political vulnerabilities? 

Or should they focus instead on the need to streamline bureaucracies and pare down red tape — a message that reifies Trump and Musk’s own rhetoric around waste, fraud, and abuse?

The answer should be abundantly clear. 

Aaron Regunberg is a lawyer, contributing editor for The New Republic, and former Rhode Island state representative. David Sirota is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever.