Transcript
A (0:05)
Hello. So we're trying something new on frankly, Fukuyama. My name's Leo Barclay. I'm head of podcasts at Persuasion, which includes American Purpose. I'm here to interview Frank about your recent series on abundance. So what made you start writing this new series?
B (0:18)
Well, I am, I would say, a big fan of the abundance movement. This is based on the book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson called Abundance. And it suggests a new agenda that really has both a political and a kind of underlying policy purpose. The policy purpose is really to take away the obstacles that have prevented not just the United States, but I think, other liberal democracies from actually building things, particularly housing and infrastructure. There's not a single modern democracy that doesn't face a crisis of affordability in terms of housing. Where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's a particularly acute one. We've got a huge homeless population that nobody seems to know how to. And I think the ultimate issue is that there's just not enough housing in the area for everyone. So that's the policy reason. I think the political reason is that we're living under the burden of Trumpism, which is basically feeding an authoritarian turn in American politics. Donald Trump does not want to be constrained by law, by rules, by norms, by any of the conventional restrictions on executive power that we've come to understand is critical to the. To American democracy. And I don't think that we can simply defeat this kind of authoritarian mentality by just criticizing it. You know, in a way, the 2024 presidential campaign was based on criticisms of Donald Trump, but the Democrats were not trusted because they didn't offer any kind of a positive vision of what would happen if they were. If they were allowed to come back into power. And so I think that for both these policy and political reason, important to clear the way towards a new vision. It doesn't have to be the Democrats. It could be a bipartisan coalition of people that want America and other democracies to be able to accomplish things that are tangible, that serve public interest and the like. Now, that argument has been laid out, and I think it's actually dividing the left because there's still a lot of people in the progressive side of the ledger that are very distrustful of things like permitting reform and deregulation and so forth. Forth. And I think one of the problems is that the argument was laid out by Klein and Thompson in a very abstract form, but there's not a lot of detail as to exactly what needs to be done in order to facilitate a Country that can actually do things like build Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, things that it did in the 1930s, but seems to be unable to accomplish now. And so what I'm hoping to do in this series is that I and other people will begin writing about the concrete changes in the way we do business that would facilitate, you know, the actual implementation of an abundance agenda at some point in the future when we are back past the current, you know, quasi authoritarian administration that we have.
