Liberals’ ‘Abundance’ Discourse Is Good for Trump and Musk — and Bad For Dems

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

EXCERPT

.....that’s the trouble with the Abundance Discourse: It writes America’s central scarcity problem — corporate power — out of the economic story, encourages Democrats to focus on the wrong solutions, and elevates deregulatory narratives already being weaponized by the right. 

Consider the first few months of   Donald Trump ’s second presidency. His administration has both claimed an unprecedented amount of executive authority to ignore laws and independent agencies, while launching a far-reaching   deregulatory   campaign to fully   dismantle NEPA , eviscerate   pollution rules , and kill off financial regulations. The Trump White House says it is aiming to “unleash prosperity.” This is MAGA’s own version of Abundance storytelling, and it’s now being fortified by liberal pundits similarly pretending we must choose between building and prosperity on one hand, and responsible environmental and health decisions on the other.  

“Does it make sense to be asking for special air filtration systems for developments near freeways when the alternative, for many of the would-be residents, is a tent beneath the freeway?” ask Klein and Thompson — implying that in the world’s richest country, it is unreasonably anti-development to require real estate developers (like Trump) to make accommodations for breathable air. 

It’s a reminder that when airport-book narratives are devoted to avoiding any confrontation with corporate power, they help create false oligarch-appeasing choices. In this case, readers are asked to believe that the only possible choice is between forcing working-class citydwellers to inhale   toxic tailpipe exhaust , or relegating them to permanent homelessness. 

There’s a similar dynamic unfolding with Trump’s financier,   Elon Musk , who’s heading the president’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. After a prominent right-wing commentator   described   Klein’s Jon Stewart interview about broadband as “the greatest DOGE ad you’ll ever see,” Musk   posted : “This shows why regulatory overhaul is necessary.” (The world’s richest man did not mention he   wants   his own company’s slower, more expensive satellite Internet service included in the broadband program.) 

Musk went on to claim, “The burden of mountains of regulations is why the high speed rail can’t get down [sic] in California.”

Again, this is a perfect distillation of how Klein and Thompson’s framing provides ammunition to the actual villains blocking abundance. Musk himself played a role in disrupting high-speed rail in California — he   admitted   to   his   biographer   that he came up with his Hyperloop proposal, which he had no intention of actually pursuing, specifically to undermine support for the rail project. 

Like cable monopolies, Big Oil cartels, and consolidated home construction companies, Musk had a direct interest in blocking competition — in this case, selling cars to Californians who might otherwise prefer a bullet train. 

But Klein’s   Abundance   narrative lets the Musks of the world cover up their destructive role in government failures while strengthening their claims that government is loaded with waste, fraud, and abuse.

This is not to argue that Klein and Thompson explicitly support Trump and Musk’s unconstitutional slash-and-burn assault on the federal government. On their book tour, they have repeatedly criticized DOGE’s actions, correctly   pointing out   that Musk is seeking to destroy the government rather than reform it. But they have decidedly not criticized DOGE’s stated premise,   arguing   instead that we need a more effective DOGE that will pursue government efficiency for positive, rather than destructive, ends. 

Though they make this substantive distinction, ultimately, the rhetoric put forward by DOGE and   Abundance   feature some of the same main villains: red tape, bureaucracy, overregulation, and lefty do-gooderism-gone-wrong. 

You don’t have to look at   The Lorax’s   denuded truffula groves   to know what this kind of storytelling creates when it eschews a focus on regulating and reducing corporate power. You can look at the real world. 

It looks like Pittsburgh and Los Angeles choked with   smoke   and   smog   in the 1940s. 

It looks like the Cuyahoga River   catching on fire   in 1969.

It looks like an abundance of subprime loans, Wall Street speculation, and slapdash construction in absence of financial regulations and building codes – all of which   combined   to create the 2008 financial crisis, mass foreclosures, the Great Recession, a   cratering   of new home construction, and the rise of   corporate   landlords   trapping residents in high-rent   dilapidated housing .

It is no accident that the Abundance Discourse effectively absolves oligarchs and corporations from blame for scarcity. We live in a political and media ecosystem that is owned by oligarchs, and that rewards their mouthpieces with media amplification and book sales. So when it comes to   Abundance ’s authors, Upton Sinclair’s aphorism seems relevant: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

What everyone else needs to understand is that misidentifying the villains is one of the primary political objectives of the Abundance project. After all, if there’s one thing Trump has proven, it’s that villain stories matter in electoral politics. Oligarchs do not want to be the villains in any kind of story told by Democrats heading into the next set of elections, and they’re concerned about a growing Democratic consensus that the party needs an economic populist rebrand — one that opposes the billionaires and rapacious corporations making the lives of working people harder.

This sentiment stretches across the party’s ideological spectrum. It is embodied by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) wildly successful   Fighting Oligarchy Tour , but also by more traditional Democrats, from   Sen. Chris Murphy   (D-Conn.) to many of the party’s highest-performing (and often moderate-identifying)   front-line members , like Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.). 

This growing populist coalition understands that in a world where   $79 trillion   was taken from the bottom 90 percent of households over the last few decades, the central problem isn’t a lack of “abundance.” The problem is that abundance is being hoarded by the rich.