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‘Abundance,’ darling agenda of centrist Democrats, comes home to San Francisco [1]
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Date: 2025-03-28 21:00:00+00:00
Michael Pollan wasted no time cutting to the heart of the matter: The top-selling recently released book “Abundance,” a 288-page manifesto on creating a “liberalism that builds,” may no longer be relevant.
“It’s almost like a sick parody of your book,” Pollan said of President Trump’s actions in D.C. — cutting a trail through the federal bureaucracy, firing tens of thousands of workers, cancelling the kinds of research grants the book seeks to reform.
“Abundance,” by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, critiques inefficient bureaucracy and seeks a deregulatory scalpel; Trump and his pit bull Elon Musk have opted for a red-and-chrome chainsaw.
The book was written before Trump’s election and the experience of reading it now, Pollan told Klein and Thompson onstage at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on Thursday evening, induced a kind of “cognitive dissonance” for him.
Learning details about “the sclerotic grant process for [National Institutes of Health] and medical grants and scientific grants” landed differently, “now they’ve just been torched.” Plus: “The fact that regulations are getting in the way of building the way we need, and then having all the [Environmental Protection Agency] regulations torched.”
Trump is “arrogating new powers” left and right, Pollan continued, and “efficiency” — a core concept of the “Abundance” agenda — is now the name of the game in Washington.
“How do you process that?” he asked Klein and Thompson, sitting to his left in red armchairs before a sold-out crowd. The two are on book tour and Pollan, the famed journalist and author of the 2006 best-seller, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” was moderating. “How does the book feel to you, and the idea of ‘abundance,’ in light of Trump’s election?”
In answering Pollan’s question, Klein and Thompson made clear “Abundance” is not just a white paper of policy prescriptions. It is explicitly a political manifesto aimed at transforming the Democratic Party in the face of incipient authoritarianism.
“This book and its themes and its arguments are more profound and more urgent now than they would be in an alternate reality where Kamala Harris would be president,” said Thompson, who called Trump a “tragic dark foil” to “Abundance” arguments who has a “scarcity” outlook that pits one disadvantaged group (like blue collar workers) against another (immigrants).
“What would it have been like if you brought it out in the other timeline? The ‘Kamala Harris wins’ timeline?” wondered Klein. The Democrats, he mused, would have said “Hey, thanks, those are some good points.” Instead the book is seeing “reception and interest” from “inside the political system” and garnering dozens of reviews from CNN to the New York Times.
There is, Klein said, a “sense that if you do not make liberal democracy, and liberals leading liberal democracy, deliver again, you might just lose liberal democracy.”
‘Abundance’ born of San Francisco’s ills
“Abundance,” released March 18, is the latest and most forceful entry in a set of books and policy papers that critique the “protectionism” and “proceduralism” of liberal homeowners and wealthy elites (though, to the chagrin of critics, not corporations).
The authors — Klein is a columnist at the New York Times, Thompson a staff writer at the Atlantic — and their acolytes seek to reduce the costs of basic goods like housing, healthcare, and transportation that have, in recent decades, grown even as other consumer goods have gotten cheaper.
The book is filled with examples of government process adding years of delay and billions to the cost of these goods — California’s high-speed rail boondoggle, a dearth of urban housing, subway costs-per-mile that vastly exceed other countries, and more.
The Democratic Party — which has a 29 percent approval rating per CNN, the lowest since its poll began in 1992 — must become “an opposition that is popular and that is effective,” Thompson argued.
That means deregulating, albeit selectively, to build solar farms and semiconductor plants and dense cities, the latter devoid of the urban ills of homelessness, drug addiction, and street chaos that are streamed in a loop on Fox News.
“We’ve created a situation where Democrats have turned the places in which they have the most power into advertisements for the opposition, rather than advertisements for our own movements,” said Thompson.
Klein and Thompson, for their part, do not push punitive policies — they want to build homes to cure homelessness. But “Abundance” supporters are, broadly, part of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party and have, at least locally, embraced tough-on-crime officials and ballot measures like Prop. 36, which re-introduced felony charges for drug and theft crimes.
Klein specifically points to the San Francisco YIMBY movement as his inspiration — when Klein and Thompson first chatted by phone it was “on Mission Street or Valencia maybe” to speak about, of all things, cryptocurrency. The YIMBY nonprofit Abundance Network has in the post-pandemic period become a key player in the interconnected network of big-money pressure groups in city politics.
Last year, the Abundance Network bankrolled a tech-backed takeover of the San Francisco Democratic Party, financed the Great Highway measure Prop. K, and unsuccessfully backed Mayor London Breed with hundreds of thousands of dollars; it is involved in similar efforts in Oakland, and has another chapter in Santa Monica.
Zack Rosen, founder of the Abundance Network, sat in the audience on Thursday, in a particularly cheery section. “Oh good,” Klein said at one point, “I know where the Abundance Network is sitting.”
So far, the general “Abundance” refrain has been adopted by this self-same moderate wing of California Democrats. “This is one of the most important books Democrats can read — wake up,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in an interview with Klein this week. “Reimagining government instead of slashing it. Good stuff!” tweeted Rep. Ro Khanna.
“I’m thrilled,” said Sen. Scott Wiener, speaking by phone after the event, of the widespread interest in the book.
The longtime YIMBY legislator sees San Francisco housing politics as the purveyor of the “abundance movement.” Klein and Thompson say as much personally, and housing is a major part of their book.
“Process reform, permitting reform, is a big focus in the legislature this year,” Wiener said. Politico reported that, on Thursday, Klein privately gathered with state lawmakers including Wiener, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, and Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire.
As policy? Sure. As a politics? ‘It’s wonky.’
But Mission Local spoke to several experts skeptical that “Abundance” is the right medicine for this moment — even if they believe in its ideas.
“No one gives a shit about NIMBY vs. YIMBY — none of the regular people, and that’s who we lost,” said Rudy Gonzales, secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, a pro-development group of unions.
He called the movement “technocratic” and symptomatic of “hyper insular divides among Democrats” at a time when the base is clamoring for “more meat” and unification. “But what do I know? I’m just elected by blue collar people, a lot of whom voted for Donald Trump.”
“My strong impression is that this is deregulation tricked out in new clothing, and deregulation has been a Republican mantra forever,” said David Kennedy, an emeritus history professor at Stanford.
Kennedy saluted Klein and Thompson for tackling the bureaucratic obstacles against housing and infrastructure, but as a political alternative to the current moment brought up the offerings of European-style welfare states. “Other societies just pay more attention to publicly consumable goods. We’ve paid a lot less attention to that.”
Jennifer Burns, a Stanford history professor, agreed with the general premise of the book and spoke favorably of its policy prescriptions. But as an electoral strategy? “It’s hard to boil it down. It’s inherently wonky, I think that’s a real challenge.”
At a time when Trump’s deportation agents are collaring students on the street, Tesla dealerships have been firebombed across the country, and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes are holding mega-rallies decrying oligarchy, the “Abundance” agenda “doesn’t have a clear enemy,” Burns said. “It’s like we are the enemy ourselves.”
“Whether or not this is the kind of thing that will actually resonate with voters and address the scary things happening out of the Trump White House — I just don’t know,” added Mike Konczal, a policy director at the Economic Security Project, who praised the book’s policy ideas. “I think this is something for people other than opinion writers to figure out.”
Others have written dozens of reviews critiquing the book for everything from ignoring corporate power to creating spurious historical narratives to rebranding neoliberalism.
Still, Klein and Thompson appear convinced their ideas will translate into Democratic wins.
Near the end of the 90-minute conversation, a woman asked the pair who they thought the most dangerous person in the world is, and how they would stop them.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk, said Thompson, after mulling it over. He spoke for a few minutes about the “fucking tragedy” that was Musk devolving from a “walking advertisement” of public-private partnership into a “dark wrecking ball for the future.”
“And the how-to-stop-him part of the question?” Pollan asked.
“You win,” Thompson responded.
“And what’s a good platform to win on?” Klein prodded his co-author.
“And a good platform to win on is abundance.”
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[1] Url:
https://missionlocal.org/2025/03/sf-abundance-agenda-ezra-klein-derek-thompson-michael-pollan/
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