Abundance

by Ezra Klein

Elon Musk has led some of the most innovative companies of the modern era, but according to the earliest reports of his role in Trump’s government, he is focused on slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.

Environmentalists realized that sacrifice and scarcity was a losing politics.

The breakneck deployment of wind and solar infrastructure and battery manufacturing has been slowed by outdated permitting and procurement rules that split the Democratic coalition.

Liberals spent decades working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to crafting coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or slow to construct, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all.

Stopping individuals or developers from building places for people to live on land they own should require unusual cause.

But what is ultimately at stake here are our values.

Much that was designed to foster grassroots participation has been captured by incumbents and special interests. It can be difficult, in a raucous town meeting, to look around and remember who is not there: the mother working two jobs, the young family who couldn’t afford the apartment they so badly wanted to move into. “This is what democracy looks like” is a common chant at protests, but what democracy should look like is a devilishly hard question to answer.

More than a law, it was a lens.

A lens is what we have sought to offer here.

There are rhymes that we have found across these challenges, echoes across these problems, but they are not unified enough to yield a single set of answers.

In 1964, at the turning point between two orders, New York City hosted a World’s Fair to show off the stuff of our national genius. The scene was Flushing, a three-mile stretch of natural marshlands in Queens. In the 1920s, the area had been so full of trash and vermin that F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in The Great Gatsby as “the valley of ashes.”25 But for the World’s Fair, this grim meadow was transformed into a glistening global sensation, with 140 pavilions across almost 700 acres, celebrating US history and accomplishment.

At the fair’s most popular event, the General Motors “Futurama II” exhibition, tens of millions of people glided through elaborate dioramas that imagined life at the end of the twentieth century.

These were bold prophecies back there in 1939. But, again, the reality has far outstripped the vision.

But just as Johnson saw his own age darkened by the possibility of catastrophic politics, so too do we face an existential binary for our own time: abundance or scarcity. Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply?

If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?

One of the most dangerous political pathologies is the tendency to defend whatever your enemies attack.

The purpose of a system is what it does. If an outcome recurs again and again, across time and place, it is the result of choices that became rules. Which means it is the result of ideas and movements.

“Establishing a political order demands far more than winning an election or two,” Gerstle writes. It requires deep-pocketed donors (and political action committees) to invest in promising candidates over the long term; the establishment of think tanks and policy networks to turn political ideas into actionable programs; a rising political party able to consistently win over multiple electoral constituencies; a capacity to shape political opinion both at the highest levels (the Supreme Court) and across popular print and broadcast media; and a moral perspective able to inspire voters with visions of the good life.

In the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched his expansive view of government as a sentinel for American freedoms—of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Five decades later, Reagan hailed the same virtues, this time by casting government as freedom’s nemesis rather than its protector.

That is a measure of our success, but it is also a reminder that both abundance and scarcity are stories we tell ourselves.

We seek a politics of abundance that delivers real marvels in the real world.

It is a recognition that technology is at the heart of progress, and always has been.