Abundance

by Ezra Klein

“For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life,” Gerstle says. Today’s politics are suffused with cynicism and pessimism about government because “a way of living sold to us as good and achievable is no longer good, or no longer achievable.”7 In 2016, the rise of Bernie Sanders on the left and the rise of Donald Trump on the right revealed how many Americans had stopped believing that the life they had been promised was achievable. What both the socialist left and the populist-authoritarian right understood was that the story that had been told by the establishments of both parties, the story that had kept their movements consigned to the margins, had come to its end.