They want abundance. But they ignore who profits most from scarcity.
This book review was published in The American Prospect. Read the full piece on the original site.
In the months before the re-election of Donald Trump precipitated our rapid descent into authoritarianism, two books were being written about the idea that progressivism went astray in the 1960s and 1970s. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a drift into a “politics of scarcity,” and in Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power.” Both books ask a pertinent question: Why doesn’t the government do big, bold things, quickly, to address the pressing issues of our time? We have an abundance of viewpoints and veto points, they argue, but a shortage of affordable housing and transmission lines. Something’s got to give.
The unstated question, of course, is who must give. The problems the authors identify are real, but they largely ignore who benefits from prolonging them. Their vision is of a government that’s more responsive to the public’s needs, but their proposal is to remove already inadequate levers for accountability in political decision-making. We should be able to agree that the tools we have to ensure progress and affluence are insufficient, without concluding that the answer is to throw them away. Improving those tools—making them actually fit for purpose—will require keeping them out of the hands of those who would wield them to exploit us. But that discussion is missing from these books.
The authors are haunted by the expediency of unchecked leadership; how rapidly a place can be remade in the hands of a figure like Robert Moses, or governments like China and Texas. The “unresolved question” for Dunkelman is how to speed things up without “licensing a new generation of imperious, unaccountable power brokers.” Klein and Thompson seem less troubled by this possibility. Dunkelman’s optimism is tempered by lessons of history, while Klein and Thompson’s is unrestrained, but both books come to the same conclusion: There are too many people at the table, too many empowered to say “no.” They want to see regulatory requirements loosened, authority centralized, legal recourse limited. They want someone to just choose.
Yet the political landscape has shifted rapidly under the feet of these authors over the first several weeks of the second Trump term. Arguing for fewer checks on government action hits very different amid mass firings, unilateral cancellations of appropriated spending, and dissolutions of entire federal agencies. The diagnosis of what constrains the state acting authoritatively to meet public needs—more or less the messy multivocality of democracy—is an ill match for an era of accelerating authoritarianism.
The books argue that the key to restoring trust in government is empowering the government to act decisively. Progressivism’s preoccupation with “the injustices of the present” (Klein and Thompson), or “speaking truth to power” (Dunkelman), has precluded building a state strong enough to meet people’s needs. Yet it is difficult to imagine coming out on the other side of the Trump-Musk madness without a progressivism built around precisely those preoccupations.
Continue reading the full book review on the site of The American Prospect.
Image: Smog in Los Angeles, California in 1973, three years after the passage of the Clean Air Act and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Photo by the EPA.