Abundance or Abundunces?

Democrats have caught the “A” bug.

No, I’m not making some cheap, chiv-sharp joke about the uranist virus. Hmmm. Maybe I should start over before a woke mob angrily pickets my house.

Take two: Democrats have come across a fascinating economic concept that turns their heretofore understanding of markets on its head. This theorem is so groundbreaking, so earth shattering, so cosmos shifting, that it’s taken two established journalists at the highest echelon of the fourth estate to proselytize its material benefits. Such major media backing is prefatorily requisite: Without The New York Times heralding an idea, it will remain camouflaged, veiled in an inscrutable wrapper, to progressive minds. Respected mediators must stamp “Approved” first!

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have mixed multiple elements of coastal meritocracy to bolster their policy prescription: Klein, bookish Times columnist; Thompson, The Atlantic scribe; both, a Simon & Schuster imprinted volume; also both, frail physiques and boyish bearings.

From their respective studious perches, Klein and Thompson are issuing a straight course to the drifting Democratic Party, to which they candidly claim membership to. (No faux neutrality to see here!) So what’s their grand theory of everything? Is it, perhaps, mildly suggesting that Democrats drop the identity-grievance caterwauling that defines so much of the public’s impression? Maybe it’s prodding the party to back sheepishly away from the open borders free-for-all its dozen presidential candidates embraced in 2020? Or is the brainy journo duo advocating a mass memory wipe to induce the country to forget the year Covid and woke tag-teamed our collective psyche?

Their proposal is neither techno-fantastical nor does it require abandoning the party’s sex&skin fetishism. What Klein and Thompson are peddling is stuff. Lots of stuff. More stuff. Cheaper stuff. More and cheaper and boatfuls and wagonloads and car trunks and pallet packs and swelled garages of stuff.

What kind of stuff? Well, everything that gets a red-blooded Yankee jigging like an inebriated dolt. Cars, houses, food, drink, electronics, appliances, furniture, lawn tools, exercise equipment, toys, games, clothes, shoes, batteries, gasoline, apps, streaming shows, Funko Pops, and every fruity and colorful flavor of breakfast cereal imaginable.

Klein and Thompson have issued the grande idée of “abundance,” which is also the name of their new book, that’s already tearing up the topseller chart at Ink by Hudson at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. In an interview with Bari Weiss, the authors abridge their tract into digestible bites for harried blue pols. Klein boils the idea down to this kernel: “So the abundance agenda, just very simply put, is that to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need… Let’s refocus liberalism on problems of supply. Where do we not have enough of what we need, and what has stood in the way of us creating abundance there?”

If you hear the echo of that old Scottish economist in Klein’s reduction, you may have taken microecon 101 as an undergrad. As the kids might say, Adam Smith is having a “moment.” What these intrepid wonks are proposing isn’t novel so much as a rehash of the most basic economic principle since the first early Denisovan bonked his fellow hominin on the head with a rock over a flame-grilled wildebeest.

The left, in Klein and Thompson’s estimation, is too doomerist to focus on the supply side of the universal x-y economic axis. Since upping production of any good necessarily crowds out space for the endangered Giant Palouse earthworm or gnarled whitebark pine, the progressive prerogative is to reflexively bark out: “Sorry, no more room for nice things.”

Klein and Thompson want to flip that big, sad “NO” into a big, happy “Yes!”, turn the familiar leftist scowl into a happy grin. Hence their appeal to the velleity in the heart of every American: build to consume.

There’s just one nubble in their exhortative crawl, and it’s not the fact that Klein and Thompson are merely rewrapping Sam’s Club Republicanism in burrow-print paper. Right now, leftist voters aren’t crying out for cutting housing red-tape, marching down crowded urban avenues chanting, “Don’t cancel our student loans, legalize mixed-use zones!” They’re flocking to Bernie Sanders’ rallies and flaming Teslas. The abundancy agenda is a technocratic fix that does little to soothe the reactive anger the left is simmering with after coming up empty in November. It’s managerial dissection—not a liberalism of the heart.

Redefining a political party that’s cultivated an identity of dervish Puritanism is going to take more than a polemic that stretches the Ollie’s Bargain Outlet slogan into 300 pages of M.A. prose. Too many voters hold not-so-fond memories of Democrats screeching the earth will fry into a ball of emberred sludge thanks to unchecked Walmart receipts.

Negotiating a detente between the left and hothouse capitalism isn’t on the immediate horizon. But parties, sides, and allegiances change. The young Democrat used to stale into a crotchety Republican. Now the milk-lipped MAGA trolls are aging into loyal blue balloters.

The time when Democrats are the default party of capitalism’s concopia could be in the offing, somewhere beyond our short sights. Klein and Thompson might just be ahead of the supply curve.