Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power

Summary

Pod Save America - Detailed Summary

Episode: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on How Democrats Can Build Their Way Back to Power
Release Date: March 30, 2025

Pod Save America, hosted by Jon Favreau alongside Tommy Vietor, Dan Pfeiffer, and Jon Lovett, features a special bonus episode where Jon sits down with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson from Crooked Media to discuss their new book, Abundance: The Future of America. This in-depth conversation explores the central thesis of the book, delving into why the Democratic Party has struggled and how adopting an abundance-focused governance philosophy can pave the way for political resurgence.

---

Introduction to Abundance

Jon Favreau [01:42]:
Jon introduces the episode by highlighting the significance of Abundance, a book that has sparked considerable online debate. He expresses excitement about discussing the book with its authors, emphasizing its role in reframing Democratic strategies amidst current political challenges.

Jon Favreau [01:42]:
"If you're someone who spent any time wading into the debates within the Democratic Party about why we're doing so badly... Abundance is a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson."

---

Core Thesis of Abundance

Ezra Klein [03:49]:
Ezra articulates the book’s fundamental question: “What don’t we have enough of and how do we get it?” He asserts that this simple query can revolutionize political discourse by focusing on delivering essential governance without getting bogged down by partisan conflicts.

Ezra Klein [05:24]:
"Liberals should care that the government delivers the things it promises to you. It should be about making a future better than the past."

---

Why Liberals Have Struggled

Derek Thompson [05:32]:
Derek outlines the historical shift in liberalism from a focus on building infrastructure during the New Deal era to a politics centered on blocking and regulation since the 1960s. He explains how environmental laws and local zoning regulations, while well-intentioned, have inadvertently stifled necessary development like housing and clean energy.

Derek Thompson [08:17]:
"The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all governed by Democrats... as an area becomes more liberal, it permits fewer homes."

---

Abundance as a Governing Philosophy and Campaign Platform

Ezra Klein [08:30]:
Discussing the practical application of Abundance, Ezra emphasizes the importance of having a forward-looking and optimistic vision. He contrasts this with the current Democratic strategy, which he feels has become more about moral sacrifice than inspiring progressive change.

Ezra Klein [11:22]:
"The clean energy future should be fucking awesome... We are doing miraculous things with this technology."

---

Criticism from the Left and Addressing It

Jon Favreau [26:20]:
Jon brings up critiques from within the Democratic left, particularly the Zephyr Teachout review, which questions whether Abundance sufficiently addresses issues like antitrust and economic egalitarianism.

Derek Thompson [27:36]:
"We are asking for a set of reforms that live alongside the existing welfare state and strong antitrust enforcement in a beautiful way."

Ezra Klein [33:26]:
Ezra responds by emphasizing that Abundance is not opposed to welfare or antitrust measures but advocates for making government more efficient to achieve its progressive goals effectively.

Ezra Klein [36:05]:
"We are trying to create a framework capacious enough for different kinds of people to think in and generate insights out of. It's not supposed to be one narrow politics."

---

Connecting Abundance to the Affordability Crisis

Jon Favreau [19:38]:
Jon discusses the prevalent issue of the affordability crisis, particularly in housing, and its centrality to voters’ concerns. He questions how the abundance framework directly addresses these cost-of-living challenges.

Ezra Klein [21:03]:
Ezra links affordability to Abundance by explaining that increasing the supply of essential goods and services—like housing and healthcare—can naturally reduce costs and alleviate budgetary pressures on families.

Derek Thompson [26:20]:
"Abundance is the exact opposite message of scarcity policies. Yes, we don't have enough houses, let's build more."

---

Politics of Reform vs. Politics of Defense

Ezra Klein [44:58]:
Ezra critiques the Democratic strategy post-Obama, highlighting a shift from proactive reform to merely defending against Republican attacks. He argues that an effective abundance-focused approach requires Democrats to own and rectify their failures rather than solely criticizing opponents.

Derek Thompson [50:53]:
"The Biden-Harris model fell into a trap of finding itself in defense of a status quo that they knew to be unpopular."

Ezra Klein [56:41]:
Ezra further emphasizes the need for Democrats to distance themselves from party corruption and special interests by demonstrating genuine commitment to making government work more efficiently and effectively.

---

Examples of Abundance in Action

Derek Thompson [56:55]:
Derek cites politicians like Jared Polis in Colorado and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania as exemplars of the abundance philosophy. He highlights initiatives such as rapid infrastructure rebuilding and streamlining government processes to better serve public needs.

Derek Thompson [59:40]:
He mentions Representative Richie Torres from New York and Jake Ockanall Lopez as emerging figures who embody the principles of Abundance by tailoring policies to their specific constituencies’ needs.

---

Conclusion and Future Outlook

Jon Favreau [60:03] & Derek Thompson [62:32]:
The conversation wraps up with reflections on the potential of Abundance to reshape Democratic strategies. Jon and Derek express optimism that the abundance framework can provide a viable alternative to the current political stagnation, fostering a more dynamic and effective Democratic movement.

Ezra Klein [60:28]:
Ezra humorously acknowledges the book’s impact by referencing AI-generated presidential candidates, underscoring the growing influence of the abundance ideology.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Ezra Klein [03:49]:
  “What don’t we have enough of and how do we get it?”

• Derek Thompson [05:32]:
  “The five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all governed by Democrats.”

• Ezra Klein [11:22]:
  “The clean energy future should be fucking awesome.”

• Derek Thompson [27:36]:
  “We are asking for a set of reforms that live alongside the existing welfare state and strong antitrust enforcement in a beautiful way.”

• Ezra Klein [33:26]:
  “We are trying to create a framework capacious enough for different kinds of people to think in and generate insights out of.”

• Derek Thompson [26:20]:
  “Abundance is the exact opposite message of scarcity policies. Yes, we don't have enough houses, let's build more.”

• Ezra Klein [44:58]:
  “An effective abundance-focused approach requires Democrats to own and rectify their failures rather than solely criticizing opponents.”

• Derek Thompson [56:55]:
  “Politicians like Jared Polis and Josh Shapiro exemplify the abundance philosophy through their initiatives.”

---

Key Takeaways

1. Shift from Scarcity to Abundance: The Democratic Party needs to transition from focusing on scarcity and regulation to embracing abundance by increasing the supply of essential goods and services.

2. Government Efficiency: A central theme is making government more efficient and capable of delivering on its promises, thereby rebuilding trust and effectiveness.

3. Addressing Internal Criticism: Abundance acknowledges and addresses criticisms from within the left, advocating for reforms that complement existing welfare and antitrust measures.

4. Political Strategy: Embracing an abundance mindset can help Democrats present a hopeful and actionable vision, distinguishing them from the scarcity-driven rhetoric of opponents.

5. Real-World Examples: Politicians who adopt abundance-focused policies are seen as leading the way in implementing the book’s principles, showing practical applications of the theory.

6. Future-Oriented Vision: The abundance framework emphasizes creating a better future through proactive policies rather than merely reacting to opposition, aligning with voters' desire for tangible improvements in cost-of-living issues.

---

This summary captures the essence of the conversation between Jon Favreau, Ezra Klein, and Derek Thompson, highlighting the pivotal arguments and insights presented in Abundance: The Future of America. For those interested in the intersection of governance, political strategy, and progressive reform, this episode offers a comprehensive exploration of how the Democratic Party can reinvent itself to address contemporary challenges effectively.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

Pod Save America is brought to you by Quints. Vacation season is nearly upon us this year I'm treating myself to the luxe upgrades I deserve with Quince's high quality travel essentials at fair prices like lightweight shirts and shorts from $30 pants for any occasion and comfortable lounge sets with premium luggage options and durable duffel bags to carry it all. The best part? All Quint Items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. By partnering directly with top factories, Quince Quince cuts out the cost of the middleman and passes the savings on to us. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices in premium fabrics and finishes. Gotta love that. I love Quints and just got some T shirts for the spring. I didn't even know they also have luggage and duffel bags. I could use a new duffel bag.

[Tommy Vietor]

You could use a new duffel bag.

[Jon Favreau]

But their shirts are great. Their pants are great. I have some of those as well. For your next trip, treat yourself to the luxe upgrades you deserve from quints. Go to quints.comcricut for 365 day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com crooked to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com crooked the last thing you want.

[Derek Thompson]

To hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA auto insurance you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. USAA.

[Jon Favreau]

Welcome to POD Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. We have a special bonus episode for you today. If you're someone who spent any time wading into the debates within the Democratic Party about why we're doing so badly, why we have done so badly, which I'm sure you are. If you listen to the show, you have probably heard about the Abundance discourse. Abundance is a new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. It is a book about governance and in large part how blue states and cities need to govern better and deliver more. It is about envisioning a liberalism that builds, that actually delivers on the promises Democrats make, particularly in places that Democrats control fully. The book is fascinating. It's very thought provoking, so obviously it's become the subject of a lot of online controversy and debate. Ezra and Derek were in LA this past week to talk about the book, so sat down with them here in the studio. It was supposed to be a Quick interview, but it was such a fascinating, fun conversation that it went long and we decided we're just going to make this its own bonus episode for all of you guys. So we, without further ado, I hope you'll enjoy and as always, if you're a member of the Discord community, I hope you'll let us know what you think. Would love to talk about it more there. Here's my conversation with Ezra and Derek, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Good to see you guys in person.

[Ezra Klein]

Thanks for having us.

[Derek Thompson]

Great to be here.

[Jon Favreau]

So your new book Abundance has been out about a week now and the sure sign of its importance is that there is a full blown abundance discourse that's going on in an online debate where people are tearing each other to shreds. It's great. So I am excited to come in a week later to talk about the debate about abundance.

[Ezra Klein]

It's time to work on the discourse. It's a discourse generating machine, as one person called it.

[Jon Favreau]

It's perfect. Before we get into it though, I should say I am full fledged abundance pilled. I'm in. I would love for you to though, sell me on abundance Like I am not a partisan political junkie, but a skeptical casual news consumer, which is most Americans.

[Ezra Klein]

All right, I'll give this a shot and then Derek can jump in where I failed. We're trying to get Democrats in this case, but it could be both parties to ask a pretty simple question, which is what don't we have enough of and how do we get it? And that seems like too simple of a question on which to base much of a politics. And then you look around and like, if you're in California, as we're in California right now, we don't have enough houses and there are reasons for that. We don't have enough clean energy to meet our clean energy goals. And there are reasons for that. We don't have high speed rail and there are reasons for that. And you know, if you go to the national level, we didn't get that rural broadband we were promised. And there are reasons for that, even though $42 billion was passed in favor of it, or that nationwide network of electric vehicle chargers. And so at a point, pretty basic level, liberals should care that the government delivers the things it promises to you. Like that should be baseline. And if it doesn't, nobody should be more pissed than we are. And if we're not, then over time the government is going to get a reputation for not delivering and people are going to turn to political movements that promise to make it deliver in another much darker fashion. So, like, that's the sell here. Government should be about giving us more of the things we need to build our life on. It should be about making a future better than the past. Some of that better future is material abundance in different ways, energetic abundance. Houses for 25 year olds to live in that they can afford. And we've been failing at doing this. And so we've got to be able to work backwards from the failures and fix them.

[Jon Favreau]

So I'll ask you, in the same character as someone who doesn't really know all this, why have liberals failed to do this?

[Derek Thompson]

It's a complicated question. You know, something has happened in the last 50 years of liberalism that has marked a really clear shift in its character. If you go back 100 years to the beginning of the New Deal era, America was building like crazy. We were building roads, we were building bridges, we were building energy. We built and built and built. And Sometime around the 1960s, 1970s, the character of liberalism changed and the politics of building gave way to a different kind of politics that we think of as the politics of blocking. Essentially, you had the rise of environmental laws, which were very important in their age. The 1940s and 1950s were absolutely heinously disgusting. We needed a Clean Air and Water Act. We needed NEAT before its time. We needed ways to protect endangered species. But the rules that we wrote in the 1960s to protect the environment have created strictures and rules that keep us from building the things we need in the 2020s, like houses and energy. There was also a legal change that we get into in detail in the book, where we made it easier for neighbors to control what could and couldn't be built around them. And when neighbors have the ability to say no to any new development that might have a chance of creating new construction headaches or adding new parking headaches, or maybe even reducing the value of their homes. When you give that power at the local level, it has the ability to, to stop development entirely. And that's really what we've seen in so many areas that are governed by liberals. I mean, the five states with the highest rates of homelessness are all governed by Democrats. There was a study that we, that my colleague Yoni Appelbaum talked about in a recent cover story in the Atlantic that found that in the state of California, every single time a city adds 10% vote share of progressives, the number of housing permits declines by 30%. So as an area becomes more liberal, it permits fewer homes. So I think as Ezra Said, it's so important, I think, to look very clearly in the mirror and say we're at this moment right now where the opposition to Donald Trump needs to be popular and effective. And right now we have a Democratic Party that is incredibly, historically unpopular and also incredibly ineffective in the places that it holds the most power, like New York in and California and Oregon. And so it's really important, I think, not just to have a movement that can criticize Donald Trump effectively, but also have a movement that can say, give us power because we've earned it. Give us power because we deserve it. Give us power because when we have it, we can build the things that are most important. Houses, energy, even science and technology.

[Jon Favreau]

Abundance is clearly a governing philosophy. To what extent is it also meant to be a campaign platform or the basis for a grassroots political movement?

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, do you think it would work? You're the political professional.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, honestly, this is what most of my questions are like this, because as I read the book, I got excited about it, but I started thinking, like, the wheels started turning, and I'm like, all right, how do you sell this? How does this look like in a campaign? Is this going to appeal to regular Normie Dems?

[Ezra Klein]

I'll say a couple things on this because I think about it on a couple levels, because there's one level on which there's a part of me wants to say not my job, and lie that I wasn't thinking about this while writing the book.

[Jon Favreau]

But it's funny, you clearly did, because the book is like, I was saying this. I was talking to Ben Rhodes, my former speechwriting colleague in the Obama White House, and I was like, they wrote the book like it was a speech that a politician could give. A lot of it. Like, it's not like, too in the weeds.

[Ezra Klein]

It's a call to arms. So I think a couple things. One, I would just say, as a matter of experience, you sort of don't know how things will play, how the material works, until you try it out on the crowd. And so we've been sort of working on this in a back room for a long time. Then it comes out and people actually, it is mimetic. People do want to argue about it. And nothing I have ever done in all of my years of politics has been picked up as quickly by actual politicians. So clearly they see something in it. Both, I think, something substantive. Right. Which is a framework for confronting some mistakes liberals have made, and also a framework for thinking in a different way about the future, but also something political, I think the other thing that I would say, though, in terms of what I think works in it politically is first, I think liberals have found themselves in a dysfunctional relationship with the future. I think we have lost most of the people who are the big futuristic influencers, your Elon Musk's, your Marc Andreessens. And it's not exactly that I want them back at the moment. I have some disagreements, it turns out, with them. But that question of what is your relationship to technology, what is your relationship to what is coming? Is it fundamentally optimistic? Are you telling people a story where they can imagine a life that is better for them in the future rather than a life that is built around different kinds of sacrifices? And I actually think this is a pretty profound. I don't think I've said this anywhere. I think it's a pretty profound difference that American liberalism. It is a transformation of American liberalism from say, Obama to more or less the present. The critique of Obamaism, as you know, better than most, was it was teleological, right? The arc of history bends towards justice. It was relentlessly optimistic. So you know, the audacity of hope, right? All of it is about looking to a future that you on a very fundamental level believe is going to be profoundly better, morally better economically better than the past.

[Jon Favreau]

And a lot of the rhetoric is very abundance esque.

[Ezra Klein]

And I think that liberalism in the years since got into a rhetoric of sacrifice, moral sacrifice, because we are a nation built on sin and on stainless, but also environmental and material sacrifice because climate change is a disaster, deforestation is a disaster, biodiversity is a disaster. So it wasn't always said explicitly, but I think liberalism had stopped having a theory of technology because it didn't like the technologists anymore. It was quite consumed with arguments, understandably so, about the deep injustices of the past. And I'm not saying they were not true or there, but it was a tough politics and its environmental side, as things got worse, got it had a lot of trouble arguing what I think we should be able to argue, which is that the clean energy future should be fucking awesome. Not like our present, but a little bit worse and more solar, but amazing. We are doing miraculous things with this technology. Electric vehicles made by whomever now are better than what came before them in a million different respects. That is how Tesla became a player in the market. There's a lot to be excited about, but you have to orient the resources of government around making that true. I say all that because one of the things we're trying to do with the budget and it's why we started with this little sci fi vignette for a couple pages is try to say that you win in politics when your vision of the future is both more exciting and more credible than the other people's vision of the future. And I think it's been a while since Democrats have offered that kind of future forwardness. I think if you look at Bill Clinton, he represented the future very much against H.W. bush and Bob Dole, certainly. I think if you look at Obama, he represented the future against John McCain and then Mitt Romney, who sort of stepped out of the 1950s. And since that, it's been a little harder. I think you got to win the future back.

[Tommy Vietor]

Pod Save America is brought to you by Bilt. Attention renters. If you haven't heard of bilt, you're about to thank us. Earn your favorite airline miles and hotel points through bilt just by paying your rent on time. Let us explain. There's no cost to join, and just by paying rent, you unlock flexible points that can be transferred to your favorite hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. When you pay rent through Built, you unlock two powerful benefits. First, you earn one of the industry's most valuable points on rent every month. No matter where you live or who your landlord is, your rent now works for you. Second, you gain access to exclusive neighborhood benefits in your city. Built Neighborhood benefits are things like extra points on dining out, complimentary post workout shakes, free mats or towels at your favorite fitness studios, and unique experiences that only Built members can access. And when you're ready to travel, Built points can be converted it to your favorite miles at hotel points around the world, meaning your rent can literally take you places. So if you're not earning points on rent, my question is, what are you waiting for? Start paying rent through Build and take advantage of your neighborhood benefits by going to join built.com crooked. That's J O I N B I l t.com crooked make sure you use our URL so they know we sent you. Join built.com crooked to sign up for Built Today.

[Derek Thompson]

The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA auto insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply.

[Jon Favreau]

I also had this experience reading the book where I would, you know, get excited about the possibility for this to be a Democratic platform. And then I would go back to my job of mainlining the news, which is mostly about how, you know, a bunch of corrupt oligarchs are, you know, turning America into Hungary and shipping off people into foreign gulags. And it makes me wonder, like, how do you think the politics of abundance meets the gravity of the political crisis we're in right now?

[Derek Thompson]

I think the politics of abundance meets this moment somewhat perfectly. I think when you look at the economic agenda of Donald Trump, or maybe let's be more accurately said, the personality of Donald Trump, which is manifesting itself in what appears to be some kind of economic policy, it is just one example of scarcity after another. I mean, this man does not believe in the concept of a positive sum interaction at all. He doesn't believe in the concept of cooperation. And so I don't think it's any surprise that when you look at his economic agenda, you see him constantly identifying elements of scarcity and then trying to take something else away. Right? So he says, we don't have enough manufacturing, so what we need to do is have less trade. We don't have enough housing, so what we need are fewer immigrants. We don't have enough money. There's really high debts. What we need is less health care for poor people by cutting Medicaid. There's a lot of, let's solve this scarcity here by taking away something that America needs. And I think that by juxtaposition, abundance is the exact opposite message. Yes, we don't have enough houses, let's fucking build more like, yes, we don't have enough manufacturing of some critical goods that are essential to national security. Let's have an explicit policy to encourage their construction in America not by cutting off trade, but rather by working with our allies, our trading partners, to build an industrial base that can take on the future. So I see that being a very, very close fit. I also, frankly, see the way this book sits alongside Doge as being very apt. Right. You have right now in government, nominally a department of government efficiency, but it's basically a department of just slamming government to the ground and then grabbing whatever can be discovered in the ruins for Elon Musk. Right. So I think, by contrast, we're talking about a vision of government efficiency that is very explicit, going into specific programs, whether it's the Chips and Science act, high speed rail in California, and saying this is how government isn't achieving its ends right now. And if we are going to be the party that believes in government, we have to be the party that makes government work. That's a true Department of Government efficiency. And then the last thing I guess I would say is, you know, the book is very detailed about how government fails, how and how to make government better. But to your point, about speechwriting and meeting people in the moment at the level of meme and vibes and emotions, I also think that toward the end, in our conclusion, we have this history that we tell about political orders, about how America's changed in the last 100 years, with a New Deal order that rose between the 1930s and the 1960s, and a neoliberal order that was overseen by Ronald Reagan. And one thought that I had, as I was sort of thinking about these two big political orders that have defined American history in the last century is that each one defined freedom for its own time. You know, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, you know, he talked about the four freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of belief from want, from fear. And then Ronald Reagan redefined freedom in the 1980s. Freedom didn't mean a kind of positive freedom. It was about freedom from the government. I do think that it's not. It's not too cheap to say that successful political movements often succeed by defining freedom in the terms that the age demands. And right now, I think that one of the main issues that Americans have, the main internal crisis of America, which in many ways define the 2024 election, is unaffordability. And at the core of unaffordability is housing. It's the biggest part of a typical family's budget, of almost any family's budget, is rent or mortgage. Donald Trump won the unaffordability election, and he's immediately driving up prices with his trade policy. I think that housing policy is about freedom. The freedom to live where you want to live, the freedom to stay where you want to stay, the freedom to not feel burdened by costs, especially the cost. That's the most important and emotionally intimate part of your life. The walls around your body and the ceiling and the roof. Redefining freedom, I think, for our own age, through abundance is a message that I think politicians can click into, because it does show that we're not just talking about fixing government here and there with this sort of pointillist agenda. We are after something bigger and more capacious, and I think politicians are seeing it right now.

[Jon Favreau]

It's interesting you brought up cost of living and the affordability crisis, because clearly when you talk to voters, not just in. Especially in the last election, but in every election I can remember, cost of living issues are top of mind. And when I think about, there's like an extra step with abundance on some of this where it's like when you, when you start testing a bunch of policies the Democrats have proposed for the last, I don't know, however many years, you know, the stuff that does well is, you know, in the aca, it's the insurance protections, you know, protection for preexisting condition or the, the protection or expansion of retirement and healthcare benefits or a middle class tax cut or a child tax cut or something that people are just going to get. And with housing, you still have to make this up. Okay, we're going to build more housing and then that's going to make housing cheaper. We. I remember when we were doing the Affordable Care Act.

[Ezra Klein]

Me too. I also remember that, remember that? And a simpler time.

[Jon Favreau]

And what Obama was always very excited about were the cost cutting measures in the Affordable Care act and bending the cost curve in the out years, which is a line that I would try to get out of every. And that is clearly very important. But that's not what people cared about, you know. And I'm wondering how you think about like connecting abundance to the affordability crisis, like directly.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, let me say something on healthcare because as you know, it's like that's my thing, man. That was, that's where I come from, man. You were talking about the discourse generation on abundance. And one of the things I did not totally expect was for at least some faction of the Bernie left to see it as this big threat to them, which I don't think it is. But I want to sort of make this connection a little bit more explicit. Go back to healthcare. I used to cover the various single payer bills that would arise in different state legislatures and nationally. Right. And all these different ideas for how to do universal healthcare. And there were ideas that were much more expansive, much more generous than what we ended up doing in the Affordable Care Act. One of the truly lethal weak points of all of these that would not come in when you would pull it the first time. Like, does it sound good to you if Medicare gives everybody health insurance but would come in immediately? When people began to debate it was the fear of rationing, the fear of wait times, the fear of not being able to get what you wanted or what you needed, which happens in other countries. Right. It is not a fake thing. And frankly, it happens in our country. I would always say that the way we ration care is by price. If you can't afford it, you don't get it. In other countries they do waiting lines and different things. But imagine you did do Medicare for All imagine some future Democrat gets elected and wants to do something more like Medicare for all. If you gave the kind of highly expansive health insurance that, you know, Bernie Sanders version of this envisions to every American, what you would have immediately is a supply crisis in medical care. We don't have enough doctors for that, not enough nurses. There are key areas where we don't have enough hospitals. You could very much have shortages of certain kinds of drugs. We just solve this with Ozempic in a certain way. You would need in order to do the kinds of things we want to create the kind of equity and possibility and social insurance we want. You actually need the supply of the thing you're trying to give people. And so this connects, I think in some ways to like the left wing agenda, but it also then connects, I think, to what you're talking about, the affordability crisis, a coined term by my lovely wife. One of my potted models of politics right now is we had a long period in American politics where what defined economic politics were problems of demand, wages, how many jobs we had, I mean, jobs day, right? Jobs down to day was a big deal for a long time and still is. But the fundamental issue we had was an economy that for a very long time had been run running at low demand. So in early 2020, my wife, Annie Lowry at the Atlantic, a colleague with Derek, writes this big piece about the affordability crisis and her sort of point there. This is early in 2020, a month before COVID hits at least our shores in a big way. She says, look like behind this economy people think is good. If you look at the core things people need to build their life on, housing, childcare, elder care, healthcare and education, it's all getting really expensive and has been for a very, very long time. And it's eating up more and more and more of people's budgets even as they're getting these wage increases. And you could sort of see this unusual divergence in the data between like an economy that looks good and people feel pretty good about as consumers. But they're really getting upset about this and you can really see it beginning to stress their budgets. Then we go through the pandemic and then comes inflation. And when inflation is, is like a saliency portal for prices, we go from all of the attention in the economy being the demand side wages and jobs to all of it being on prices. And even as the price increases in consumer goods begin to slow down, what is then left is like everybody's been staring at prices for a long time. It's like, oh shit. Housing, health care, elder care, childcare. This has all gone completely unaffordable. And energy has become a really big question in this too with Russia and decarbonization. And so I just think we're now in a period that the future is going to be defined on affordability. We are in a period where the big economic problem for a long time is going to be things people need the most of. We just don't have enough of them. And I think it is actually pretty intuitive to people that you make something cheaper by making more of it. And I think one reason it is good for Democrats to admit this is that there is a political power in admitting your own mistakes, like there is something that is unlocked controversy, controversy, interest and to some degree credibility. Democratic states are losing people. Not for no reason. The reason hundreds of thousands of people are leaving California and Illinois and New York every single year for Texas and Florida and Arizona. We survey them. It's cost of living. We've made the places we govern too expensive. And that's because we have not created enough of the things that we need. And I think that requires like a, like, not just like a self examination but a message that says we actually fucked up, right? This didn't happen completely by accident, but we understand the way in which we fucked up and we have a plan to not do it again. And I don't think that what is energetic in that is like every individual housing idea. I think it is the generalized notion that the people came before me, whoever this imaginary politician is, they made some mistakes. Like we're in a different era now. And what I have is a. Not the continuation of the last 30 years of Liberal policies that you're already not happy about. What I have is something new that takes the best of that and then is alert to, to the things that you're upset about because in this last 30 years things got worse for you in a bunch of real ways.

[Jon Favreau]

So you mentioned some of the critique from the left. I'm sure you've read all of it or read most of it. I'm sure you've talked about the Zephyr teachout review of Abundance. I wanted to get your reaction to one part of that because I think it summarizes a lot of the criticism on the left. I mean, you mentioned the Bernie side. There's also sort of like a Warren esque critique as well. And she writes, I still can't tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small bore, incorrect. We need zoning reform or non trivial and deeply regressive. We need deregulation. Or whether there is room within abundance for anti monopoly politics and a more full throated unleashing of American potential. Matt Brunig has a similar critique. He says it would be a huge mistake to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction. Obviously now in the book, right? Like it's. It's not a book about like monopolistic power practices and corporate concentration. So I get that, I guess to the question that Teach out asks, is there room in abundance for a critique of concentrated economic power and anti monopoly politics and all that?

[Derek Thompson]

Of course there is. It's been really interesting reading some of these reviews and discovering within the critical reviews a kind of memoir of the author's ideology.

[Ezra Klein]

We read books not as they are, but as we are.

[Derek Thompson]

That is precisely what I meant to say, but with shorter words. And so of course someone interested in antitrust is going to read our book about abundance, the Future of America, and say, why isn't there a chapter or seven on antitrust? And someone who's coming from a place of I'm a democratic socialist, why isn't there a chapter or seven about how democratic socialism is the best way to run a country? I understand that. I think the fair thing to say is that we are in many ways asking for a set of reforms that live alongside the existing welfare state and a strong antitrust enforcement in a beautiful way.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Derek Thompson]

I mean, chocolate, peanut butter and whatever raspberry jam that seems like, maybe would be like a good trio. These are tastes that absolutely go well together. And just because there's an issue that people care about that isn't a full chapter of the book doesn't mean it's not important to me and Ezra. I mean, we talk about in the book about wanting these policies to fundamentally help people's lives. We are not interested in an abundance of things that fill a house. We're interested in an abundance of homes. There's no chapter about making it easier to build as many flat screen televisions as possible. We're interested in the most important material conditions of people's lives. To that end, of course, we support the Earned Income Tax Credit and universal health care and Social Security and we want to protect Medicare and Medicaid and even expand the child Tax credit, which would be absolutely fantastic not only for reducing poverty in this country, but also helping working class families afford to live in the cities that they live all these Policies are worthy. But at the same time, one frustration that I've had with the reviews is that they don't see clearly that what we're trying to do at the end of the day is to help liberal government achieve liberal ends more efficiently. Right. Just quick example. 2021, Joe Biden signs a bipartisan infrastructure bill. He and Pete Buttigieg call it, rightly, the most important infrastructure bill passed in the last several generations. There's $42 billion that are earmarked for rural broadband construction to help the most poor and outside of mainstream metropolitan America, people hook up to the Internet so that they can lead richer lives, get in touch with doctors when they need to. This is a classic progressive agenda. What happens is that four calendar years later, now practically nobody's been hooked up to rural broadband. And it's because the way the program worked out through the Commerce Department is that There was a 14 step process that began with the FCC drawing a map and ended with the states essentially begging the Commerce Department for money and being told, nope, you didn't file that paperwork correctly. Nope, there's a bureaucratic issue there. Nope, you have to refile it. Yada yada yada. Nothing is built. Donald Trump is trying to take over the program, shut it down, and hand the whole thing to Elon Musk. We want government to work. If government has progressive aims and it can't accomplish them, you can't blame the oligarchy for that. You can't blame monopolies for that.

[Jon Favreau]

You can't blame, especially if you control the government.

[Derek Thompson]

If you control the government, you certainly can't say, the reason we didn't accomplish this is that we don't have a welfare state akin to Denmark. We failed to accomplish this program because government got in its way and was subsumed with the kind of everything bagel liberalism that Ezra's written about so eloquently. So this is where I think the emphasis on, well, you should talk more about antitrust and welfare states misses the core a core function of this book, which is to say, if you're trying to build a progressive political movement, you should be obsessed with making political power work for liberals. Because when it doesn't, the public will notice. And when they notice, they either won't vote for you or they will literally vote in the most expensive way with their feet and spend thousands of dollars leaving the states and cities that you govern.

[Ezra Klein]

I want to be a bit more of a bad cop on this, which is to say that everything Derek says is right, but also there are A lot of ways antitrust harmonizes here and that if I were to trying to think about the nicest way to say this, my friends in the. The whole problem is oligarchy, part of the party. And I believe a good part of our problems are oligarchy. But there are certain kinds of problems they're then willing to see and certain kinds they're not as willing to see. So in housing, I find a lot of them get obsessed with this idea that private investors are buying up a bunch of rental housing. And this is an extremely small part of the market right now. And it's just not the main problem in housing. But because it is the villain they are comfortable having, it is where they want to put their focus. Kamala Harris had. I was very excited when she brought out her big plan for 3 million to build 3 million units of housing. But her plan never would have achieved anything like it. It did have a big thing about trying to do something about this private investor buying up housing issue, though. So you can really get, I think, taken off the track when you're very concerned with how policy codes. A thing I found, like, really interesting in Zephyr's review was that is it something good and small like zoning reform? And, like, try doing zoning reform if you think it's small. Right. But. Or something bad like deregulation. Okay, interesting. Right?

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Deregulation is a word that I think shuts liberals down a bit, and it shouldn't. A lot of what we're pointing out in the book is that the player that is often most regulated is not the market, it's the government itself. If you want to understand why the government can't build public housing effectively. I mean, in many ways, the federal government building public housing is now functionally illegal. It's been regulated out of possibility. If you want to know why we didn't build California High Speed Rail, if you want to know why it's so expensive to build affordable housing in a lot of liberal jurisdictions, when you trigger public money, it is because of the regulations we put on government. In the same way that deregulating the market can often allow corporations to do things they couldn't do before and move faster, you can decide in any given instance if that's good or bad. Deregulating the government can do the same thing. We're inspired here not by some conservative legal theorist, but by Nick Bagley, who was Gretchen Whitmer's former lead counsel and has this great point about the procedural fetish among liberal lawyers where he kind of makes this Whole argument that for some reason liberals are always on the one hand defending against the Republicans effort to wrap the government in paperwork and administrative procedure as we're slowing it down. But they never realize that if they could unwrap it themselves, it could actually speed government up. So in general, I don't like I am quite left and what I'm trying to build here is a much more capable government. So I consider myself on the left edge of this, of this American debate. But we are trying to be much more agnostic. The problems are different in different places and in different domains. But if you had done Bernie Sanders Green New Deal with the old environmental laws, you simply couldn't have built it. You just cannot build fast enough for what he wanted to do unless you really restructure that. And so again, going back to the core question that we're trying to get people to focus on in the book, what do we not have enough of and how do we get more of it? To me, what separates the left and the right are goals. It's not just, it's not means. But I find that a lot of people in this debate, they seem to think what separates the left and the right is means. Right. The right wants to deregulate, the left wants to regulate. But what I care about in regulation is whether or not it's achieving my goals or not. If I'm regulating the market in a way that harms my goals, like making it too hard for developers to build market rate or affordable housing, then that's bad. Even though my answer there would be deregulation. And if I've regulated government in a way that doesn't make sense for the government to achieve my goals. But what matters is the goals. Too often liberals are, I think, very symbolic in this and not outcomes oriented.

[Tommy Vietor]

Pod America is brought to you by zebiotics pre alcohol. Let me tell you, if there's a surefire way to wake up feeling fresh after drinks with friends, it's with pre alcohol zebiotics. Pre alcohol drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. We love Zbiotics.

[Jon Favreau]

I love zbiotics. I actually we had a work dinner on Tuesday night.

[Tommy Vietor]

We did. We had a work dinner.

[Jon Favreau]

We.

[Tommy Vietor]

I had a drink or two.

[Ezra Klein]

I forgot to take a Zbiotics and.

[Jon Favreau]

I regretted it the next day.

[Tommy Vietor]

Whenever we have a work dinner, I always try out this bit of material and it's we sit down at the table and I turn to Tommy or John and I say, what's new? Because we just saw each other. Never works.

[Jon Favreau]

I laugh. I thought it was funny.

[Tommy Vietor]

I remember the joke, what's new? Because I see these fucking guys all the time. That's why we have to drink a dinner and that's why we have Zbiotics. Spring is here, which means more opportunity to celebrate warmer weather before drinks on the patio, that tropical vacation or your best friend's wedding. Don't forget your Zbiotics. Pre alcohol. Drink one before drinking and wake up feeling great the next day. Go to zbiotics.com/crooked to learn more and get 15% off your first order. When you use cricket at checkout, Zebiotics is backed by a 100% money back guarantee. So if you're not satisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zebiotics.com crooked and use the code CROOKED at checkout for 15% off.

[Unknown]

Cats have always acted like their don't stink. Now with Fresh Step Heavy Duty's new 30 day odor control, it actually doesn't Fresh Steps new Heavy Duty litter fights odor three times longer than the leading brand. This is Fresh Step's strongest litter ever. Giving your litter box 30 days of odor control. Step it up to Fresh Step with the new Heavy Duty litter three times claim based on fecal mallarder versus the leading regular clumping litter. Strongest litter ever is based on odor control. Febreze is used under license from the Procter & Gamble Company or its affiliates.

[Jon Favreau]

What I saw in some of the reviews is some of it's a policy disagreement or you know, sin of omission, whatever it may be. But some of it's a political concern in that the best political stories and the most appealing political movements have villains and you know, abundance doesn't have enough of villain. Or to the extent there is a villain, it's liberals or you know, maybe they're well meaning, right? But like people who screwed up. I kind of think that you could square the circle by just, you know, fusing like an anti monopoly politics and economic populism or you know, big enough welfare State with the politics of abundance by making the whole thing a fight against entrenched special interests, whoever they may be. Sometimes they might be like a big corporation or monopolist. Sometimes it might be NIMBYs or politicians who are just caught up in their own, you know, years of old regulations that they can't get out of the way. Like, I kind of feel like both of those can coexist.

[Ezra Klein]

I would like to see a lot of different political flavors of this. Like Derek was saying earlier that there's like, you know, it's raspberry jam and peanut butter and chocolate and they go. But I would like to see a lot of different combos. There is a very left wing, even democratic socialist version of abundance, right. If you're AOC and you have a big public housing bill, which she has, and you want to do a big green new Deal, which she does, there's a bunch of questions about how you unlock supply and how you deepen state capacity and how you bring back in the expertise you needed to build these things when you've outsourced it for decades now in order to achieve that agenda. And there's like the Josh Shapiro version, right? His get shit done agenda where he's bringing down procurement reform and he's bringing down the times it takes to get a business license and he's making the government work a lot faster. And there's a Jared Polis version in Colorado and there's a lot of versions. Because the question of how do you make the state capable of doing what you want done, actually can work with a lot of different goals. And I sort of want to see different people, you know, come up with their versions of the villains and their versions of the allies and so on. Like, I have my own version of this. Cause I have my own politics. But we are trying to create in the book a framework capacious enough for different kinds of people to think in and generate insights out of. It's not supposed to be one narrow politics, right? The different flavors of the politics of redistribution are vast.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Bernie Sanders version is different than Jared Golden's version, which is different than Barack Obama's version, which is different than where Kamala Harris's version was, right? You can do a lot when you ask this question of how do we move money from richer people to working class people and make their lives better through doing it, that's like a very simple thought. Like the marginal dollar is worthless to a rich person. Let's move it to a poor person. And you can do a lot with that. Thought with a lot of different forms of politics and a lot of different both enemies and visions. By the way, I think the obvious enemy Democrats are really going to have in 2028 is the Trump administration. And one of our views is that Trump administration, as Derek was saying earlier, is an administration of scarcity. And this is a way to actually put them not on the wrong side of institutions, but on the wrong side of any kind of vision of the future you might actually want to live in. Like, I truly never tire of trying to, like, convince people that it's not just that their means are bad, but that their vision of the future, if, like, they achieved everything they want to achieve, completely sucks.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, it's scarcity and it's scarcity that they want to take it all for themselves.

[Derek Thompson]

Right, Right. They don't want to destroy the government. They want to destroy the government for the purpose of turning it into a kleptocracy, to turn a bunch of wealth over to Elon Musk, give it to his companies, and then also turn the money over to the Trumps. Right?

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Derek Thompson]

Oh, hey, maybe we'll forgive the head of Binance if we can invest in his company. Maybe if someone gives us $75 million, we'll release them from the civil fraud charge that they were on because they gave us $75 million. Like, this is classic Gilded Age 1885 shit that I thought we lost the 20th century and we're just bringing it back with abandon, that is easy to run against. It's a terrible state for the country, but it's easy to run against. So just quickly to your question, like, who's the enemy here? At the highest possible level, the enemy is very clear. It's Donald Trump. It's Elon Musk. If JD Vance runs, and he's running on the legacy of Trump and Musk, that sort of combination of cachistocracy and kleptocracy, that's a clear high villain at the local level. I do think that this book offers, as you said, a nice lens on the idea that sometimes we think of special interests or we think of power as residing exclusively at the level of big companies. Right. But sometimes when the problem is housing and the problem is nimbyism, the power that you're fighting, the special interest that you're fighting, doesn't exist at that high level of company. It exists at the level of the homeowners that show up at city council meetings and say, I don't want to add housing here because it's going to reduce my home value. Creating a memetic charge against that nimbyous world, I think is very, very important and relatively not easily done, but it's a clear story to tell. But the last piece of this that I think is really important is that we live in an anti institutional and anti establishment age. If you look at trust institutions, it's plummeting for practically every single one and among practically every demographic, especially for young people. One danger that I see Democrats falling into is, is that as conspiracy theorists and cranks and anti institutional crazies migrate toward the right, they leave the Democratic Party as the party of institutionalists and establishmentarians and folks who are just like, well, if you attack the nih, all I will do is defend the nih, which now actually is a fairly reasonable thing to do. If you criticize the government, I'm just going to defend it. If you say we don't trust the public health system, I'm just going to defend it. And if we argue ourselves into a position, if Democrats argue their way into a position where all they can do is defend the status quo against the assaults of the Trump administration, we have put ourselves in a situation where we are fundamentally out of step with the sentiment of the age, which is anti institutional and anti establishment. And one thing the book, I think does at a level of vibes, not at the level of any particular sentence, but the level of vibes is offer people a vocabulary for a lens, for being the party of institutions that seeks to understand how those institutions fail for the purpose of reforming them. Not the party that says the status quo is fine, do not attack it, but rather the party that's completely obsessed with understanding how government works, where it fails, where the levers are that we can work so that we can actually get shit done. I do think that it offers parts of the left this new language for taking institutions seriously and critically at a time when voters are honestly going to be, for the foreseeable future, angry at the status quo.

[Ezra Klein]

I'm curious for your thought on this. One of my glosses on the 2024 and even a little bit the 2020 election, but that was such a weird election with COVID and everything else. But is that the core thing the Obama coalition lost was the politics of reform? Like, it kept most of its other pieces, but Obama was a reformer. I think now people forget how much, but you don't how much of that early. It's like the political consultants and cable news and red and blue America right and money and politics and the special interests and it was this whole thing, it wasn't totally true, but everybody was deceiving you. And they're like, there's this good politics right behind it. But Bill Clinton was also a reformer. Donald Trump is a reformer. The reformist impulse in American politics has always been one of its most important streams. Like the people who grab it have grabbed a lot of high ground. And one of the most dangerous things to me about both how Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris ran was they ran fully in defense of, not in reform of. It would be great if they had done doge for real. Not like the department of destroying the government, but the department of actually making the government work better. You know, Bill Clinton did with reinventing government. Barack Obama often make a big point of how he didn't like this. Whatever it was. The thing about the salmon.

[Jon Favreau]

Salmon, yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Who regulates the salmon?

[Jon Favreau]

Interior Department regulates salmon when they're in freshwater, but Commerce regulates them when they're in seawater.

[Ezra Klein]

And he wanted.

[Jon Favreau]

And then I couldn't even almost. I got a call from Gary Locke, the Commerce Secretary, the Knight of the State of the Union, yelling at me that this was wrong. And we even that example.

[Ezra Klein]

And he wanted to remake the Commerce Department. He was never able to do it.

[Jon Favreau]

He wanted to combine it with sba, with a small business.

[Ezra Klein]

So there was a lot like there was a big reform that he wanted to do a lot on money in politics. Democrats have lost reform. And this is a place where I really do think the streams go together for us and people to our left, like on this Bernie Sanders. And they were totally right. The power of money in politics is grotesque. And it should be central to Democrats, like in an age of both actual oligarchy and attentional oligarchy, to try to do something about it. But also, like, there are other forms of power and institutions. And I think this is something people get at them often become captured, like from within, or they become captured by local stakeholders and incumbents. Things that were very well intentioned, like notice and comment periods on regulations, are now captured by lobbyists. It's not like your mom who goes to a notice and comment period for like the Affordable Care act regulations. It's the entire health insurance industry. We've created a lot of things that were meant to create small de. Democratic participation, and they've been captured by big interests. And one of the things that we're trying to say is in addition to money politics, which I think of as a real problem, you also need to be very skeptical that government and institutions are working and you should be most skeptical if you are somebody who believes in them. It's actually not a problem for Republicans when the government fails. It's great. They love it. It's why they try to make it happen. It should be a big problem for liberals when government fails. Like, it should be a big problem that every really large infrastructure project, California high speed rail, the Big Dig, the second Avenue subway that a blue state tries becomes like a byword for government failure. And one of them, in the aftermath of it should have changed their procedure so fundamentally that they believe it wouldn't happen again if they tried it again. Zero of them have. It is the tolerance of government failure on the left that I actually can't abide. Like, if you are the people who believe government should do things, then make it fucking do things. And when it doesn't, get mad and change it. But just moving on and making excuses and then saying like, well, what about them? It's not good enough. And the way you know it's not good enough is you are losing and you're losing people. So like, yeah, like big government, but government that actually works. Being trapped between like one party that wants to make government fail and another that doesn't really care if it works, like, that's intolerable to me.

[Unknown]

Cats have always acted like their don't stink. Now with Freshstep heavy duty's new 30 day odor control, it actually doesn't. Fresh Step's new heavy Duty litter fights odor three times longer than the leading brand. This is Fresh Step's strongest litter ever. Giving your litter box 30 days of odor control. Step it up to Fresh Step with the new Heavy Duty litter three times claim based on fecal mallarder versus the leading regular clumping litter. Strongest litter ever is based on odor control. Febreze is used under license from the Procter & Gamble Company or its affiliates.

[Derek Thompson]

Auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it. So don't get stuck paying more for less coverage. Switch to USA Auto insurance and you could start saving money in no time. Get a quote today, restrictions apply.

[Jon Favreau]

Pre Trump. I think the challenge was a lot of this when you're actually talking about reforming government, making government more efficient, making it work better, it wasn't as sexy as some of the other stuff, right? So every time we would and Obama was very focused on this and we'd always be like, well, it's too much of that in the speech and their efficiency and people don't care as much about that. And then there's the inertia of governing in the bureaucracy. Right. Like we, there was always a proposal to combine Education and Labor departments, but then it was like, well, which secretary do you keep? And then is Congress going to let us do this? And all the things where, you know, like you said now that we have a doge, that's awful. But like you could imagine one where you know, they're just shaking some things up within the law and actually making some change. I think post Trump and as the country got more polarized, I think among Democratic strategists and politicians, there is this feeling that because we are in such an existential crisis for democracy, if we admit failure or focus on our own failures, then we are just wasting time and energy and attention that could be going towards the big fight. I don't agree with that.

[Derek Thompson]

I absolutely disagree with it.

[Jon Favreau]

No, yeah, like I don't think it's right. I think that is what's, I think that is at the core of some of this is that, and you can see that with some of the criticism of the book too. It's like, well, you know, Donald Trump's destroying democracy and doge, blah, blah. And they're, and they're giving like they're offering doge lite. Like what is that? You know, it's like, well, no, but actual voters, they don't like the Democratic Party right now and they don't like the Republican Party much either. But in order to like the Democratic Party again, they want to hear an alternative and they want to hear that you made some mistakes, that you actually believe that you made those mistakes.

[Derek Thompson]

Bernie Sanders. I mean tell me if you, if you disagree with this interpretation. Bernie Sanders seems to be objectively the most popular figure in the Democratic Party right now. He runs against the Democratic Party every day. So this idea that Democrats should be afraid of self criticism makes absolutely no sense to me in the context of the most famous self critic of the Democratic Party being objectively the most popular.

[Ezra Klein]

Donald Trump who ran against the Republican.

[Derek Thompson]

Party, ran against the Republican Party.

[Jon Favreau]

But they also, they, you know, Bernie's criticism is coded as from the left, which then people on the left like that. Any other criticism is coded as from the right or centrist which run the experts out all that.

[Derek Thompson]

Let's run the experiment of criticizing the Democratic Party from the center. Yeah, let's have someone give it a shot. I don't know that it's going to work. I don't consider myself like some part time political consultant. But like I said before, I do think that the biden Harris model fell into a trap of finding itself in defense of a status quo that they knew to be unpopular.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Derek Thompson]

And that's a terrible position to be in. You've wiggled your way into the one corner that you know won't be majoritarian, popular, because people are upset at the system.

[Jon Favreau]

I mean, it's coalition politics in the most, like, in the messiest way. Right. Which is like, we need every single person we can get in this fight against Donald Trump. So I'm going to say this is your, you know, everything bagel. I'm gonna say yes to everyone and make everyone happy and keep the coalition together, which is a very sort of Biden thing to do, just personally. And then we ended up with nothing.

[Ezra Klein]

But that was weakness. I mean, I think we all see that now. Yeah. That was. Barack Obama had the direct connection to his own coalition that allowed him to pretty easily say no to its internal members.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

And Biden, and he believed on domestic policy, didn't, or at least felt he didn't. I would say in a different way, Hillary Clinton in 2016 didn't. They were both trying to do what Obama was able to do directly mediate. They were trying to do it in a mediated fashion.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

Do it through the groups, through the institutions, through the sort of coalitional work of party building. And both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are party builders. They're both creatures of the party. They work coalitionally. That's fine. But not at a time when people fundamentally don't like your coalition. And it doesn't work if you then don't govern in a way that makes you popular. Look, I've been trying to say this to people recently because I think it helps get at something why the Liz Cheney effort failed. But other things might succeed, which is that the salient fact about independence is not that they don't really like the other party, though. That's true. It's that they don't really like your party.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And the way Democrats tried to appeal to independence in 2024 was to try to bring in other people who didn't like the other party. Right. We. But also Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney don't like Donald Trump. But actually, the problem was these people didn't like you, and you needed to communicate to them on some level that you understood why they didn't like you, and you were going to make an effort to address it. When people have doubts about you, you have to, like, not just deepen their doubts about the other people. You have to actually allay, allay their fears about you. And I think that's a place where we've had some failures here. And look, my view is this book, this argument, it critiques the Democratic Party from the left, from the right, it critiques just failure. And I think that's not actually that ideologically coded or different ones are maybe coded ideologically differently. But to what was said a minute ago, we actually do have a ton of examples of politicians who run with a somewhat arm's length relationship to the Democratic Party. And Bernie Sanders is unusual in that he's been doing it sort of from the left for a long time. But if you look at who overperformed in the house in 2024, they're the house Democrats trying to reformat the Blue Dogs, right? They're sort of centristy. You know, it's your Jared Goldins, it's your mgps, it's a bunch of them, right. And so we actually know this politics works pretty well. We have a lot of evidence of what works. And the politicians who are somewhat independent and criticizing the Democratic Party. Look, I don't like where John Fetterman has gone for a million different reasons, but he has become more popular, not less in Pennsylvania. And like people don't like the parties and they have a sense like the fund the most powerful special interest in this country. I think to a lot of Americans are not just like the rich people, but the parties themselves. Like the parties themselves are just collections of special interests. And if you can't show in some way like send a costly signal that makes some people mad, that shows you are willing to say no to people on your side, then what they believe is you are completely corrupted by whatever that thing is that corrupts everybody else too. Yeah, like the, like I do think we have to be honest about this. Like, you know, I'm like much more Democrat. But people think the parties themselves are zones of corruption. And the reason the politicians who run to their left and to their right often succeed better is that it is a way of showing independence from a kind of special interest that most Americans don't like, which is like the miasma of political deal making that are the two main political parties, which is what.

[Jon Favreau]

Trump ran against, Obama ran against, Bernie Sanders ran against three of the more successful liked politicians of the last couple decades. Which Democratic politicians seem abundance pilled or at least abundance curious to you guys?

[Derek Thompson]

Jared Polis in Colorado, Josh Shapiro certainly in Pennsylvania. Shapiro in particular not only features in a chapter for his work on i95 repairing the i95 bridge that fell down. Project should have taken 12 to 24 months under normal conditions because of the emergency declaration that he announced. It was Instead rebuilt in 12 days. Great example of the kind of abundance liberalism that we're pointing to, the kind of get shit done liberalism that we're advancing. And then I've seen in the last few weeks he's sent a bunch of tweets that are all about essentially making government work faster, reducing permitting times. I mean, I think in many ways the policies that he's announced just in the last week since the book came out are policies that you could absolutely tie in a bow and label abundance build. Not to suggest that he's only doing them because the book came out, of course. So I think there are great examples there. Wes Moore, Richie Torres, the representative from New York, Jake Gauchencloss, Jake Ockan Kloss, who we've both spoken to. He's been on Ezra's show. Richie Torres, in response to Ezra's colleague asking, where's the Project 2029 of the Democratic Party, just tweeted the COVID of this book, which is A, I guess, you know, wonderful advertising that we certainly did not ask him to do. But B, a great example of someone representing that the ideas of this book are central to his idea of the future of the Democratic Party. So I think that the early nominees abound, and right now they're mostly at the governor and representative level. But I think it's growing. I think people are picking up in an interesting way. There are some politicians who have read this book in a clearer way than some of the critics, which is to say that we ask people very explicitly in the conclusion to see this book not as a list of the perfect policies to work everywhere, but rather as a lens that someone in San Francisco can look through that lens and see the right policies to increase housing production in San Francisco. And then someone in Georgia can look through that lens and see the right policies to increase clean battery manufacturing in Georgia. And someone can look through that lens in the Commerce Department and say, next time we want to spend $40 billion in rural broadband, let's get that money out in nine months rather than not get the money out at all in four years. I see a lot of people reading the project as it was intended, as a kind of mimetic inspiration for them to apply their own ideas about how is this going to work in Maryland, how is this going to work for upstate New York, how is this going to work for Pennsylvania? And I think that's cool, and it makes me optimistic that there's a lot of people that are reading the book in the way that we intend it to be read.

[Jon Favreau]

On our favorite platform formerly known as Twitter. There's been quite a bit of chatter, even some AI generated images that suggest the presidential candidate most suited to run on the Abundance agenda is you, Ezra. Care to comment or announce anything?

[Ezra Klein]

God help this country if it turns to me.

[Jon Favreau]

Some good, some good AI Grok is.

[Ezra Klein]

Making my life worse on the daily in so many different ways.

[Jon Favreau]

Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson the book is Abundance. It is fantastic. Like I said, I'm abundance build. You don't have to convince me. I think I probably because I read it from a politician, I read it through the political lens, you know. And I do think it, it offers a very useful frame. I've heard you Derek say that it gives us another access to think about that it's left, right and scarcity abundance. And I think that's, that's, that's well said. So everyone go get the book. Thanks for coming by. Appreciate you guys.

[Ezra Klein]

Thank you so much, man.

[Derek Thompson]

Thanks man.

[Jon Favreau]

That's our show for today. Thanks to Derek and Ezra for coming on. Tommy Lovett and I will be back with a new show on Tuesday. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free or get access to our subscript discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our Friends of the pod [e-mail] friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed. Also, be sure to follow Pod Save America on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for full episodes, bonus content and more. And before you hit that next button, you can help boost this episode by leaving us a review and by sharing it with friends and family. Pod Save America is a crooked media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Saul Rubin and Emma Ilik Frank. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Reid Churlin is our executive editor and Adrienne Hill is our executive producer. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanter is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Madelyn Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt de Groat is our head of production. Naomi Sengal is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Hayley Jones, Ben Hethcote, Molly Lobel, Kiril Palaviv, Kenny Moffatt and David Toles. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

[Unknown]

Cats have always acted like their don't stink. Now with FreshStep Heavy Duty's new 30 day odor control. It actually doesn't Fresh Step's new Heavy Duty litter fights odor three times longer than the leading brand. This is Fresh Step's strongest litter ever, giving your litter box 30 days of odor control. Step it up to Fresh Step with the new Heavy Duty litter three times claim based on fecal mallarder versus the leading regular clumping litter. Strongest litter ever is based on odor control. Febreze is used under license from the Procter & Gamble Company or its affiliates.

[Derek Thompson]

Hi, I'm Cyndi Lauper.

[Jon Favreau]

My scalp was covered with psoriasis, which.

[Derek Thompson]

Could lead to psoriatic arthritis, but Cosentyx treats both.

[Ezra Klein]

Cosentyx Secukinumab is prescribed for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, 300mg dose in adults with active psoriatic arthritis, 150mg dose. Don't use if you're allergic to Cosentyx. Before starting, get checked for tuberculosis. An increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur like tuberculosis or other serious bacterial, fungal or viral infections. Some were fatal. Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches or cough had a vaccine or plan to or if inflammatory bowel disease symptoms develop or worsen serious allergic reactions and severe eczema like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at cosentix.com or 1844-COSENTIX Cosentix works for me. Ask your doctor about Cosentyx.