The Hanania Show Boomer Liberalism Must Be Overcome
Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic (profile, X account), and the host of the Plain English podcast. He joins me to discuss his new book Abundance, co-authored with Ezra Klein.
Derek was actually responsible for the first article I ever published in a mainstream media outlet, which was a response to him in The Atlantic in 2012 on the question of whether clutch matters in basketball. He had encouraged me to submit it after I emailed him. I was really proud of the accomplishment at the time, and it got me thinking that I could publish in mainstream outlets, though it would be years until I would do so again. Derek had understandably forgotten about our initial connection, and it was fun to remind him of it here.
After a bit of sports talk, we get to the substance of his book. I was already well versed in some of the intellectual currents that flowed into it, including progress studies, state capacity liberalism, and basic free market economics, yet I still learned quite a bit. Thompson and Klein do an excellent job of putting together the data, anecdotes, and anecdata necessary to make a compelling case of where liberalism has gone off the rails.
We spend a good bit of time talking about how the authors decide to frame the issues involved. In particular, I wonder why they do not make a full-throated defense of markets, since so much of the abundance agenda involves getting government out of the way. This leads to a discussion of why conservative states do so much better on the housing issue, and whether a pro-abundance agenda can actually make for a popular political program. See Klein’s recent article, “There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball.” See also my article “Forty Years of Economic Freedom Winning.”
I go on to ask Derek something that I’ve always been curious about, which relates to the sociological and demographic characteristics of the people on the left with views contrary to his own. I read outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic, and I see pro-abundance views, and very little in terms of NIMBYism and favorable coverage of NEPA review. Since elite liberalism, as represented by Klein and Thompson themselves, seems to be oriented in the right direction, why has policy not changed all that much?
Near the end, I ask about how much of the abundance/anti-abundance split on the left is reflecting an underlying difference in neuroticism.
I’ve written a lot about how pessimistic I am about the trajectory of the right, but the rise of ideas represented by Klein, Thompson, and other thinkers who are pro-progress in the best sense makes me much more optimistic about where the left is going. As we discuss here, I worry about whether there may be difficulty in overcoming vested interest groups, even if Klein and Thompson win in the marketplace of ideas.
If liberals are all abundance agenda types in a decade and not much has changed in blue state governance, it seems to me that there perhaps needs to be consideration of whether the left as currently constituted can provide answers in areas like housing and energy. In other words, perhaps those in favor of abundance cannot hope to achieve their goals as long as they find themselves in the same coalition as degrowthers, the highly neurotic, and bureaucratic elites who benefit from complex and open-ended regulations.