Abundance: A New Blueprint for Liberal Politics, With Derek Thompson
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Cirenti. What if the biggest threat to liberal democracy isn't authoritarianism?

but our failure to build. On today's episode, we're joined by journalist Derek Thompson to unpack Abundance, a new vision of progressive politics co-authored by Thompson and Ezra Klein. In it, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path towards a politics of abundance.

Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, host of the Plain English podcast, and the author of the international bestseller Hitmakers. Carl Miller, writer and fellow at Demos, joins Thompson to discuss the book and everything from housing policy to the failures of degrowth. Let's join Carl now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Derek. Thank you very much. It's good to be here.

So I think it's safe to say, Derek, that the book has hit a nerve in the aftermath of obviously the election of Donald Trump. When did you start writing it? I mean, they've obviously been gestating these ideas with you and Ezra for a while. But was it in the kind of white heat aftermath of the election that you wanted to put a skill into a book?

Oh, it was definitely not in the white heat aftermath of the election. You know, book publishing schedules, for those who don't know, operate on a rather eternal timeline. So we started writing this book in 2022, really in earnest, took book leave in 2023, worked through the first half of 2024 to wrap it up, did edits in the fall of 2020.

2024, and then you had that November election, which gave us a chance to rewrite a few sentences, add a few paragraphs here and there to acknowledge that Trump had won. But this was a book that was largely pre-baked before the election. And it's interesting because on the one hand, I think some people could say without reading the book,

that, oh, well, it's a shame for this book to say nothing of the United States that Donald Trump won because this book sought to influence a democratic administration.

But one thing that's been really interesting is that, you know, writers cannot choose the world into which their books are born. We didn't choose the world in which this book was born. But the world in which this book was born has, I think, allowed the message to detonate in a very specific and peculiar way. Right now, you have an administration with the Trump White House that is trying very, very hard to pursue what I would describe as a scarcity mindset.

This is an administration that acknowledges that America doesn't have enough housing, and its solution is to have significantly less immigration. Or they acknowledge that America doesn't have enough manufacturing. And so what they try to do instead is to reduce global trade, kill the stock market, drive bond yields up, and essentially squeeze the US economy to punish Americans broadly in order to help one sector narrowly.

I would say that is a message or represents a philosophy that is so strikingly different from the politics of abundance that in a strange way, while Ezra and I could not have possibly imagined the political economy of the first weeks of April 2025, the book that we wrote, I think, holds up as a very clear antagonist to the Trump economic strategy in the first weeks of April 2025.

Well, I mean, there is perhaps nothing more literal of the politics of scarcity than having trillions wiped off a stock market in the matter of a few days. And saying that's a good thing. And saying that's a good thing. Well, we've already then, I think, arrived at half of the kind of fundamental dualism which the book creates. So you say that there is this kind of politics of scarcity and abundance, don't you? And that is something which can kind of be present in both liberal and conservative politics. Yeah.

I think it's a very fair summary. I think you could say that there's almost like a Z axis of modern politics that cuts through both parties such that there are scarcity Democrats and abundance Democrats, just as there are, let's say, scarcity Republicans and maybe abundance Republicans.

On the left, I would say, scarcity Democrats represents, among other people, NIMBYs, folks who say they don't want new housing to be added around them because they tend to be richer, they tend to own a home, and they don't want more traffic. They don't want more construction.

They don't want anything that could possibly threaten their home values. I mean, this is a population that I know exists in the UK just as prominently as it exists in the US. And I think it's important to say that the reason I identify this symptom is not just being a homeowner symptom, but specifically being a progressive homeowner symptom, is that there's some studies, for example, of California cities where every single time the progressive vote share increases by 10%, the number of new houses

permitted declines by 30%, which raises, I think, to me, the rather striking and depressing suggestion that as an area becomes more progressive, it in many cases becomes less amenable to adding new housing. Just as ironically, I think you see many blue states, many democratically-led states that have made it very difficult to build clean energy despite the fact that they believe or claim to believe that climate change is one of the most important existential problems of our age.

So that's sort of the scarcity mindset on the Democratic side. You clearly have a scarcity mindset, I think, on the Republican side, right? I just described the way that MAGA and Donald Trump seem to discover some new way to take something away from America every single time they identify something's wrong with America.

If you wanted to, let's say, add manufacturing jobs to the US, I think you should probably pursue something that's a little bit more like the Chips and Science Act strategy of the Biden administration, which says, let's identify places we really want to add manufacturing, let's subsidize that manufacturing, let's create a set of very clear rules to pull financing into the US, and then let's build those factories.

The Trump administration is doing the exact opposite. It's trying to destroy the Chips and Science Act. It's tearing away the subsidies. It's creating a ton of financing uncertainty and confusion, which is hurting U.S. manufacturers. It's creating the circumstances for a trade war, which further hurts exporters. So I think it would be fair to say that while I don't necessarily hold them—

equally blameworthy for what's going on in the US right now, there's very clearly a scarcity faction of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. And then there's also an abundance faction. There's many people who are reading this book, I think, and really finding something

valuable in it, mostly on the Democratic side. But I think there's also some, you know, disaffected Republicans who want a message of economic growth and economic sanity. And, you know, maybe they'll be willing to follow a non-Republican leader in the next few years who's willing to offer that message. Would it be also fair to say, Derek, that the kind of tone of the book is a one of

kind of disgruntlement, maybe even extreme disgruntlement with the scarcity tradition within liberal politics. Because I think one of the things so interesting to me was in the aftermath of the election of Trump, and I betray perhaps my own kind of like liberal kind of like wash here, as I'm sure like lots of Europeans are like, one of the things we just couldn't understand was what does so many Americans find so objectionable with the Democrat message?

What is wrong with the things that Kamala Harris is saying to mean that so many people just don't buy into that vision? And as your book lays out, we'll get into this in a second, in housing and in science policy and in so many areas as well, but actually how it's been liberal politics, it's been Democrat politics that have made it so much harder for people to imagine a better future in the United States.

To be fair to Kamala Harris, it's not just a Kamala Harris problem. It's a Democratic Party problem. It's a brand problem. If you ask Americans for their approval rate of the Democratic Party today, it is at an all-time low of 27%, according to CNN. 27%. Democrats are a third less popular in America as a brand

than the tariffs, which are crashing the stock market and sending bond rates to the moon. That is how poisoned the Democratic Party brand is right now. So why is it poisoned? Well, there's a ton of reasons, and I'm not gonna be able to click through all of them. Some of them might involve cultural positions, which I really don't report on that often. But when I look at why

Americans moved their votes from the Biden column to the Trump column. And I look at the pollsters who have asked Americans who switched from Democratic to Republican between 2020 and 2024. Overwhelmingly, it seems to me like they shifted their vote because of unaffordability in the U.S.,

And what's more, if you ask young people who have historically been the most progressive cohort in America why so many of them, a historic share of them, especially young men, voted for Trump, overwhelmingly you will find that the number one explanation is unaffordability.

So, all right, that makes unaffordability this really bright burning spot that you'd want to focus on. And it might lead you to the next question of how are Democrats doing with unaffordability in the places where they hold the most power? And the answer is they're doing quite terribly. The most unaffordable places to live in the country often tend to be governed by Democrats. I mean, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco.

Seattle, Boston, Washington, DC, parts of New York, these are not places where Donald Trump holds a terrific amount of local power. In fact, in many cases, he holds no kind of local power. And so if unaffordability and homelessness and housing scarcity and an inability to build affordable transit and infrastructure are problems in those areas, these aren't problems that we can lay at the feet of Donald Trump. And if residents of those places

think that these places aren't looking out for their interests and they leave, which they are doing at the rate of hundreds of thousands of people a year, leaving democratically run states throughout the country. If Americans are leaving, we cannot blame that on something like Republican-led misinformation. In fact, it's quite the opposite. People are leaving because of accurate information. They're on the ground marinating in the reality of these places, seeing that they're too expensive to live in.

And then that leads to another question. Why are they so expensive to live in? And as you know, and most listeners know, the biggest part of a typical family's budget is rent or mortgage. And in these places, you have enormous housing scarcity. We have created a set of rules that makes it very difficult for markets to work so that supply rises alongside demand.

made it very, very hard to build the housing that we need in these most productive cities. So I don't want to suggest some kind of like monocausal theory of Democrats lost in 2024 or some monocausal theory of why the Democratic brand seems so tarnished. But I do think that if you refuse to take seriously the affordability crisis,

and the Democrats' complicity in that affordability crisis, you are not seeing the whole picture and you're not seeing the opportunity that Democrats have to turn the places where they have the most power into advertisements for their cause

rather than advertisements for the opposition. I mean, you're very damning, aren't you? But the way you describe the kind of changing nature of cities in the story of American social mobility, I mean, you say they've kind of changed from being escalators into the middle class to becoming kind of penthouses to the upper class when we're talking about LA and SF and New York and the other kind of coastal kind of, you know, hyper wealth kind of generators. So if we could just focus in on that for a moment.

The simple problem is there's not enough houses. Is that right? And a liberal politics of scarcity has been about making it harder and harder for municipal government and private developers to get those houses built.

I think it's a very fair summary. You know, I absolutely subscribe to the housing theory of everything. I think housing is like the quantum field of urban policy. It touches everything. It touches the price of living. It touches the price of childcare. It touches productivity and innovation rates. It's dense cities where you tend to have the most patents. I think housing policy touches just about everything you should care about. And so when housing policy sucks, that matters. And the truth is that housing policy in America's most productive cities over the last 50 years has really sucked.

You know, the American dream is the idea that you can afford to live in a place where you can enjoy upward mobility. You can make more than the previous generation. And right now what we've seen in America is that the American dream has splintered. The most productive cities have extremely, extremely expensive housing, but they also have high upward mobility.

The cheaper places in America tend to have low upper mobility. It's harder to work your way up. It's harder to see income growth. But they also have, like I said, cheap housing. It wasn't always this way. You know, sometimes people will say, and I think this really pisses me off, and I think it pisses Ezra off too, they'll say, oh, you know, these rich cities, they are luxury products. It's BS.

Cities aren't luxury products. Cities are family products. Cities should be machines for urban mobility, escalators for the lower and middle class. And for much of American history, they were. In between the late 19th century and the middle of the 20th century, American cities tended to see housing growth commensurate to demand to live in those cities. And as a result, the cost of housing in these places wasn't skyrocketing the way it has in the last few decades.

But in the 1950s through 1970s, we really changed the way that we thought about land use policy here in the U.S. and honestly around the same time in Britain too. We created a set of exclusionary zoning principles in many of America's most productive places. We made it much easier for neighbors to sue developers to stop them from building land.

We saw the proliferation of single-family zoning and historical preservation areas. We simply sort of crisscrossed the American city with red tape, or maybe since they were often liberal places, you could call it blue tape. We crisscrossed the American city with this blue tape, made it very, very difficult for

to add new housing. And as a result, you can just see in the data that permits in California, New York City, and a bunch of other cities just declined over time at the same time that there was enormous demand to live in these places. And it's just econ 101 that if you have supply flat or declining while demand is rising, what you're going to find is that prices go to the moon. That's what happened.

And as a result, as prices went to the moon, it made it harder for the working class to thrive and live in these places. And they started to leave them. And I think that's a really, really big problem, right? The Democrats cannot possibly claim to be the party of the working class while presiding over cities that the working class is leaving in droves. It doesn't make any sense. It smacks of hypocrisy. And it creates a situation, I think, where Democrats become seen as the brand of democracy.

Hypocrites, right? The brand of politicians who use strong, moralizing language to tell people how to live, but can't actually govern the places that they govern in a way that reduces prices and makes people's lives better, right? One project of this book is trying to get Democrats to align their processes and their outcomes. If what we want is to be the party of the working class and to allow working and middle-class people to live affordable lives, we have to be absolutely obsessed with housing.

as a priority, not as a seventh most important thing that comes after all of these environmental review processes and permitting processes and zoning. No, that's not an actual priority. To make housing a priority means dramatically reforming this set of laws that has accumulated over the last 60 years and made it

so difficult to add housing to our most productive places. I mean, we're really, I'm really getting a sense also of the kind of urgency and kind of fire, Derek, that you feel about that kind of argument. And it's not just social mobility, is it? It's also homelessness itself. I mean, you dismiss a lot of the arguments that are often put up for why San Francisco and Los Angeles are the most, and you know, for those that haven't visited recently, the homelessness problem there is totally astonishing. It's like nothing you've really seen probably anywhere else in the world. It's

thousands and thousands and thousands of people in parts of these cities that have nowhere to live. And you dismiss the idea that these are just being bussed in from red states or the fact these are just sanctuary cities means that they are places that people tend to coalesce. You say, no, the most direct correlation, the strongest, is between housing deprivation and homelessness.

Yeah, this is a punchy issue. And there's a bit of debate here, but I am persuaded that homelessness is a housing problem, which sounds sort of basic on its face. But the argument that I would make here is that some people say that homelessness is more about mental illness, right? It's about schizophrenia. Or homelessness is about drug addiction. Or homelessness is about poverty. Well, schizophrenia exists in every state. And drug addiction exists in every state. And poverty exists in every state.

So why do the top five states for homelessness all have governors that are Democrats? What's that about? Why, if some of the causes of homelessness or some of the contributors to homelessness are relatively evenly spread across the U.S., is homelessness not evenly spread across the U.S., but rather extraordinarily concentrated, as you said, in a handful of cities? Well, maybe it's because those cities don't have enough housing.

And so what happens is you'll have a situation where maybe many people across the country are housing insecure or at risk of losing the place that they happen to be living in. But in many cities, there's a higher vacancy rate, right? The game of musical chairs for housing is such that if you lose a place to live in, let's say, a Houston or a Dallas, it's relatively easy to find the next place to live. But in a place like San Francisco or Los Angeles, where the vacancy rate is incredibly low and there's not a lot of open houses, you lose your house and you're homeless for a while.

And so this is why I think it makes sense to see homelessness as a housing crisis. It is housing scarcity that is as spiky

as homelessness. If you have another explanation for the homelessness crisis, that is some variable that's more evenly spread than the US, I don't think you can explain the spikiness of homelessness. And you've alluded to it, but could you just kind of dive a little bit deeper for a moment into what is in fact getting in the way of new houses, you know, and why? Because it feels like the kind of story you tell is one where

They may have all been standalone, like fairly rational, reasonable decisions, like who doesn't want local people to have more say in their environment around them? Who doesn't want there to be more environmentalism? Who doesn't want there to be more material checks on the buildings that are being done? And who doesn't want there to be more impact assessments of the rare mutes that might be removed? But

But kind of wedged together, it seems that what you're pointing to, this wall of blue tape, so to speak, is collectively speaking now creating outcomes which are actively immoral. Well, let me first connect it to the UK. I was talking to Sam Bauman, who's a wonderful thinker, who's sort of a real inspiration for the Abundance Project, about...

the British experience of housing. And he told me that in 1947, the UK passed the Town and Country Planning Act, which has sort of formed the basis of modern housing policy in the UK. And the TCPA essentially banned or prohibited new development without special permission from the state. And you had green belts that were established to restrict sprawl in the countryside. And what you saw is that rates of private home building never returned to their pre-war level.

right, since 1947, right? There were some spikes, but generally speaking, over the last 60 years, the share of new homes as a share of the housing stock has declined for the last six decades. Well, that happened in the 1940s, coming out of World War II. And what happened in the U.S., I would say, is that a little bit later, in the 1960s, 1970s, you saw a handful of laws that effectively did to America what the TCPA did to the U.K., okay? You

You had the spread of exclusionary zoning laws. You had new legal norms that made it easier for neighbors to sue to stop the construction of new housing from the state or from developers. You had a proliferation in the late 1960s, early 1970s

of environmental rules, like the National Environmental Policy Act, which made it much easier for individuals, again, to sue to block new development under the auspices of environmental review. You have to conduct some study in order to prove that this new development won't hurt the environment in several ways. As you added more and more procedure, you developed what the University of Michigan lawyer Nicholas Bagley has called a procedural fetish.

This idea that the law began to privilege the most litigious neighbors and groups, allowing them to sue to block almost any policy change that affected the physical environment. Now I will say that different laws affect different areas, right? We're not talking about one national law that was passed and is applied evenly, like evenly spread peanut butter. Different cities have different bottlenecks to housing. So for example, if you're in a place like Portland,

Oregon, which is beautiful in many ways, but also has a terrible homelessness crisis. There are certain rules that block apartment developments that get in the way of vistas of nearby mountains. So you can't add an apartment that keeps someone from being able to see a mountain. There's also a land use law that sort of draws a sharp border around the downtown area that you can't build out of as the city is grown.

So there's different land use laws and different, you know, Vista style laws in different places. But altogether, it accumulates the same thing, which is that we have, through a variety of ways, made it easier for individuals and groups to stop developers from adding housing stock in places that have the highest demand. And again, Econ 101 just dictates that if that's going to be your policy, the inevitable result is that housing costs are going to go through the roof.

Well, let's move from one kind of building to another. So from housing to energy. You spend a lot of time in the book talking about just how vast the building project must be in order to actually make an energy transition that's going to work, a kind of a Green New Deal. But there too, you encounter all these barriers. So talk to us about those, Derek, and how they've also kind of been produced from a kind of politics of scarcity approach.

Sure. I mean, I think it's best to set it up this way. You know, environmentalism as I see it has had three stages in American history. The first stage was the era of conservation in the early 1900s. This was an era where President Teddy Roosevelt essentially decided that we should have national parks that wall off the most beautiful parts of America from the spread of industry. And so we create Yosemite and we create Yellowstone National Park. And for decades, this is considered the vanguard of environmentalism.

But then over the preceding decades, between the 1910s, let's say, and the 1950s, the spread of industry and the development of industry makes America quite ugly and even disgusting. The water's disgusting. The air is disgusting. There's rampant pollution in downtown areas. And as a result, environmentalism can no longer be about just conservation, right? You can't solve the problem of smog in New York by creating another national park in Utah. And so the next era

This era of environmentalism is an era not of conservation, but regulation. And you pass a series of laws, the 1960s, 1970s, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, a bunch of other laws to protect certain species, and you make it harder for industry to advance, for industry to build and change the physical environment. And in some ways, this is a thrillingly successful revolution. It cleans the air, it cleans the water, it makes America a sweeter place to live.

But the problems of the 2020s are not the problems of the 1960s. The modern challenge of environmentalism as I see it is not that the rivers of New Hampshire are too dirty, even if some of them are. The problem of the 2020s is the problem of climate change, which is a global problem. And if you're going to think about solving climate change as I see it, you really only have two options.

One option is that you can ask people to make do with less. You can say, hey, we have no idea how to build clean energy. Every single time we turn on the gas stove, every single time we turn on our lights, every single time we want to heat our homes, we necessarily put carbon in the atmosphere. We don't know how to fix it, so therefore we're just going to have to ask everybody to make do with less, right? Sort of de-growther strategy. And I think you only need to see the results of the recent UK and German elections to see what happens when energy prices skyrocket.

voters tend to really, really hate that. Our policy is to say that you have to take people where they are. People want to live modern lives. And in fact, if you look at the billions of people who don't have anything like British or American access to energy, they, I think, have a moral right to develop their economies and to demand a Western style of living. So what do you do?

What do you do in a world where climate change is an existential problem, but you know that people are going to use more and more energy? You have to solve the problem with technology. There's just no other way around it. And fortunately, we've already developed solar technology and wind technology, and we're developing enhanced geothermal. And we also kind of know how to build nuclear power plants, but also if you're the UK and the US, you kind of don't know how to build nuclear power plants. It takes you like 30 years and $15 billion to do. But we do have the technology.

Ezra and I think we need to make it easier to build this stuff.

We need to make it much easier to build clean energy technology, build renewables, build zero emissions technology, because if we're going to have a modern world and we're going to power it in a way that doesn't destroy the planet, we need to build more clean tech. And I will also say, it's not just that we need to build what we know. We probably also need to invent things that we don't yet know how to build, right? Cement, for example. If cement were its own country, which is a little bit of a weird thing to think about, but if cement were its own country, it would be the seventh biggest energy

emitter in the world. We don't know how to make cement without essentially coughing up a ton of carbon dioxide into the air, partly because when you make the basic ingredients of cement, it naturally releases carbon dioxide in the process. So I think we should have poll funding technologies or poll funding policies to invent clean

clean cement, to invent green cement, new ways of making cement that doesn't automatically smoke out the biosphere. I think we should be much more aggressive about building carbon removal technology at scale, because eventually I think we are going to have to vacuum the skies for carbon dioxide, considering that the energy that you and I burned turning on our electricity five years ago created carbon dioxide, the atmosphere that's going to remain for several years or even decades. So we need a way to correct this

for past, I don't want to call it errors, but past negative externalities. I see the solution, the path forward on climate to be

highly involved with building and inventing. And right now, I think we're stuck between a Republican Party, a right that does not want to build renewable technology, and in many cases, a left that either doesn't believe in modernity like I do, or makes it deliberately difficult to change the physical environment in a way that, you know, the same way that the laws of

that we have make it hard to build housing in the downtown areas, we also have environments where view processes that make it difficult to add solar and wind and to change the physical environment, even when we're building technologies that produce clean energy. So I think we need both the political change and frankly, a mindset change as well.

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You mentioned degrowth. And I wanted to dwell on that for a moment, Derek, if we may, because we had Tim Jackson on this podcast not long ago, who's a professor of sustainable development here in the UK and the author of Prosperity Without Growth, if I remember correctly. And his argument, which I thought was very eloquent, was essentially that the kind of

that relentless amassing of wealth in itself kind of is the problem, that it kind of throws us out of balance kind of with the environment, with our own bodies, with ourselves. And that in one way or another, that is what has to be tackled in order for us to kind of navigate our way through everything from society and equality through to mental health challenges, through to the environment. And

Of course, your thesis is a direct collision with that. And I just wanted to kind of unpick why it is you don't want to let go of the idea that we need to keep growing. Is it because you think it's simply politically implausible as a offering to publics around the world? Or is it something else? I think it's largely a political difference.

You just don't think that polities will ever buy this? They're never going to de-grow. That's not what people want to do. I violently disagree with the de-growther philosophy, but let me be polite and deliberate about this. You can be as impolite as you want. I prefer to be polite. Let me put it this way. De-growtherism, prosperity without wealth, is a theory. It's a theory that deserves to be tested. Let's test it and see where it wins and see how long it wins for.

Because to argue that the modern world needs to permanently, permanently make peace with stasis and degrowth and declining incomes or declining prosperity, that is a political theory that needs to win not every two years or every four years, but for the next 40 years, for the next 400 years. Show me it can win once.

Truly, show me it can win. By win you mean electorally win, politically win, just win at the ballot box. What did we just see several months ago in the UK and Germany? You had recessionary dynamics in both countries. You had an escalation of electricity prices in both countries. The elements of de-growtherism were present in both the UK and Germany. What happened to those incumbent parties? What happened to the ruling parties?

The Conservative Coalition in Great Britain suffered its largest electoral defeat ever. Ever. The leading party in Germany suffered its largest electoral defeat in 200 years. If you're representing a political philosophy whose incumbents are guaranteed to lose by the largest margins in centuries,

how are you going to implement a 40-year plan? You can't. The evidence that I see suggests that people who argue for, what is it, prosperity without growth, or what is the line that you used? They call it post-growth, I think. People who are arguing for post-growth, they are making a case for a political revolution that cannot survive contact with democracy.

So I don't even understand the plan here. You have to prove to me that you can win elections and then maybe I can believe that you have the ability to retain power for the decades necessary in order to implement this plan. I don't believe it's feasible at all. I think in a way these folks act as if the planet has a vote. It doesn't. People have a vote.

People don't want this. People don't want post-growth, they want growth. People don't want degrowth, they want growth. People don't want to accept the fact that they happen to have been born into the only world where political leaders are telling them you don't deserve to ask for more. They want to believe that they belong to a century-long project, centuries-long project, of living a better life than their parents. So I acknowledge that a lot of the degrowthers, the post-growthers,

They want what I want in a way. They want an earth that isn't burning. They want seawater levels that aren't rising. They want fires and droughts that aren't escalating. I want all of that too. But I also recognize that there are a lot of competing political ideologies out there.

And if liberals only put forth a plan of degrowth and post-growth and asking voters to accept less, I'm worried that we are essentially resigning ourselves to permanent minority status.

And I think that in order to win, we need to actually have political power, not just console ourselves outside of power, that we're right while the people in power continue to burn the world down. So in many ways, the project you're putting together in the book is one where you're reconciling

what you think is electorally feasible with a project which will solve these massive problems of homelessness and building and the climate crisis and so on. What's interesting though, Derek, is that whilst post-growth perhaps might be electorally impossible, the politics of scarcity isn't, is it? Because we've also seen a whole bunch of elections around the world, not least the one in America itself, where a very explicit agenda of scarcity politics has just been

astonishingly successful. Well, why don't you give me a specific example of where scarcity politics has been successful and then I can talk about it. Well, Donald Trump's tariffs. Right. So Donald Trump's a really interesting example because you can look at his administration and say that the policies are a scarcity philosophy. But then, like I said, you look at the people who actually switched their vote from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and why did they switch their vote?

Was it for the politics of scarcity or was it a vote against unaffordability? I would prefer to frame it as you had lots of people voting against unaffordability. They were frustrated with Democrats because the price of everything was too high. The price of housing was too high and the price of groceries was too high. Abundance in many ways is a supply side progressivism. It's about bringing down the cost of the most important material goods.

We're trying to solve an affordability crisis such that people don't abandon progressives for the illiberal right, which promises them that all of the solutions to their problems happen to involve punishing people who don't deserve to be punished, right? I acknowledge that the solution on offer from the right involves scarcity politics, but I think that's very different from saying, it's subtly different, but very different from saying that the motivation of people to switch their vote for the Democratic to the Republican Party was motivated by a scarcity mindset.

No, it was motivated by unaffordability. And what our politics is trying to say is there is a solution to affordability that doesn't require us to give up on growth. We can build the things that we need to build, but we need a plan to build them. And right now, what you have in too many places is a plan to block their construction. And-

What do you think is the kind of greatest danger for liberal politics right now? Because, I mean, a lot of what you're saying reminds me a lot of what Reid Hoffman is saying now at the same time. And we have him on Intelligence Squared recently talking about super agency and event in London. And, you know, and I think very similar to you, his position is, look, progressive politics can't just be about constricting and limiting. He's obviously talking about technology, especially AI.

But he says progressives have to imagine a better future. We have to be pointing towards a better future. We can't just be trying to worry and mitigate the dangers. Is the danger for liberal politics now that it doesn't do that? That we're unable to put together, globally I suppose, visions for how we get through these crises and instead we're just going to be focusing on the transgressions and issues

outrageous that we see coming from the other side of the aisle. It's hard to talk about liberalism writ large around the world, right? Because the problems of Germany and France and Spain, Italy, these are different than the problems of the US in some ways. And so I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, even though I know I've been making some cross-country comparisons in this interview. Let me just say this about the Democratic Party in the US. What does it stand for?

That's my big rhetorical question for the Democratic Party in America. What does it stand for? What is the positive vision of the world we want to bring into the future? We hate Donald Trump. That's clear. We really don't like Donald Trump. We haven't liked him for 10 years. That's not enough, clearly.

Because Donald Trump won the 2016 election, and then he won more votes in the 2020 election, and then he won almost a majority of votes in the 2024 election. So hating Donald Trump clearly is not sufficient for the Democratic Party. And by the way, at the same time that we made incredibly clear our distaste for Donald Trump, the popularity of the Democratic Party declined to its lowest point in record.

So, you know, I think there's lots of contributors to that. I think inflation was a contributor to that. I think a lot of people saw the Democratic Party being fixated on language games at the same time that they saw the price of groceries rising and the juxtaposition of Democrats,

sort of moving culturally to the left at the same time that people felt material deprivation during the inflation crisis after the pandemic. I think it pissed a lot of people off. I myself am not really a cultural analyst. I don't really look at those issues that closely. I prefer to talk and write and think about the economy. But what I see on the economy is that Democrats kind of

They've been exposed a little bit for hypocrisy, right? This is a movement that I think has gained the reputation of using big, moralizing language to talk about the world. But meanwhile, the places that they govern

they are not paragons of high quality governance. San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, these are not places that are easy to brag about. Ezra has introduced a great line of the book that I've been quoting left and right because I think it's so wonderful. He said, "Democrats should be able to gesture to California and say, 'Vote for us and we'll make America like California.'" And instead, it's Republicans who very clearly see the advantage in saying, "Vote for Democrats, they'll make America like California."

Right. In many cases, I think the declining brand value of the Democratic Party has to do with the fact that we have not made the places where we hold power advertisements for our cause. And we should change that. That's not going to fix everything. It's not going to make the Democratic Party's brand 100 percent, but it might make the Democratic Party's brand like

45%, 55%, right? Almost twice as high as it currently is today. So that's the hope. It's the belief that there's enough people out there who really do believe in prosperity, who really do want growth, who really also do care about the poor and equality and egalitarianism. And

And one thing this book is trying to say is that you don't have to choose, right? I reject this false choice. You can either be for technology and growth or you can be for inequality. Excuse me, you can be against inequality. I really do think that you can be a pro-growth party, a pro-technology party, and also hang very strongly on the values of egalitarianism.

Fight for Medicare and Medicaid and the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit and even seek to broaden coverage of the latter few policies. You can do all of that. And I think that is a brand of the Democratic Party that can succeed against the liberal right rather than get its butt kicked every few years.

Towards the end of the book, Derek, you kind of introduce this idea of political orders, of these kind of often submerged areas of bipartisan consensus that kind of sustain important areas of policy from one administration to the next, even if that might flip between Republican and Democrat.

What moment are we in now? And is it the fear that Trump is establishing a kind of a new political order, so to speak, that a kind of incoming Democrat regime at some point won't be able to dislodge? And that will be a political order of scarcity. You know, we're in purgatory, man. We're in the bardo. We're in the molten moment. There's no political order in America.

Right? You have a Republican Party that's historically been for free trade, now trying to chaotically tariff every country in the world based on their bilateral trade deficits. Just utter madness. You have a Democratic Party that I think is very much looking for an identity, for a ringleader.

You know, one way to tell the story is that in 2015, before the Trump Clinton showdown, there were four parties in America. There was the Bernie left. There was the Obama, Clinton, Biden center left. There was the Romney center right. And there was MAGA, the Trump far right. And

for the Republican Party, that civil war was resolved quite easily because Donald Trump ate the Mitt Romney right. He ate it, he skinned it, he's wearing it as a hat. It doesn't exist.

On the left, you still have two, several competing coalitions that are asking different questions about the world. Some people on the left are asking the question, how do we mitigate corporate power? How do we bolster antitrust? And some people who are democratic socialists are asking the question, how do we focus redistribution? We believe in redistribution. The abundance left, we believe in redistribution. We believe that antitrust is a tool, but not the tool.

But fundamentally, we are interested in making it easier to build the things that are the basis of material well-being. Housing, energy, science, technology, all wrapped up by high-quality governance, which is today still lacking, I think, in the Democratic Party. So that's the offer that we have on our side. And, you know, are we right? That's for elections to decide, right? And ultimately, that's for people to represent. You know, no one votes for a book, right?

And very few people even vote for ideas. People vote for people. And so ultimately the success of this movement is going to be exquisitely dependent on the

the political leaders that take up this cause, that represent that you actually can build things in this country. You can represent yourself to be a housing progressive, a pro-housing abundance figure, and then you can deliver. You can build houses and people can live in them and they can reward you for building them by reelecting you again and again. And then you run at a higher level of government and a higher level of government. Maybe even you establish yourself as a leader of a party that's focused on building things for people and not trying to put up walls around America.

That's the hope. But I acknowledge that just like your previous guest on the degrowth side, what I'm offering is a hypothesis, not an answer. I'm saying this is a theory about how the world can work, about how politics can work. And it's a falsifiable one. People are going to run on this and they're going to win and some of them are going to lose and we're going to learn what works.

Well, on that theory, that very compelling hypothesis, Derek, we'll bring it to a close. So thank you very much. That was Derek Thompson, everyone. He's the co-author with Ezra Klein of Abundance, How We Build a Better Future, which is available online now or a bookstore near you. I've been Carmilla. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thank you, as ever, so much for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts.