Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on Why the Left is Bad at Governing
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, The New York Times' Ezra Klein and The Atlantic's Derek Thompson want Democrats to adopt a politics of abundance. A politics that, quote, asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there's enough of it, like housing.

Too often, they say, blue state governance makes it too hard to build homes or mass transit or clean energy because of too many rules, laws and entrenched political cultures. Listeners, do you agree? Is this the time for the left to face up to its failures of governance? Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson join us to make their case right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

California in 2023 saw a net loss of nearly 270,000 residents. The main reason given by those surveyed? The state's cost of living is too high for working families.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson say much of the blame for this lies with Democrats, pushing policies that make it too hard to build homes, mass transit or clean energy infrastructure, among other things. Klein and Thompson think the left can govern better and smarter with a politics of abundance.

which is also the title of their new book. They join us now to explain. Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist and host of the Ezra Klein Show podcast. Ezra, welcome to Forum. Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here. Glad to have you. Derek Thompson is also with us, staff writer and author of the Work in Progress newsletter at The Atlantic and host of the Plain English podcast. Derek, so glad to have you with us, too. So great to be here. Thank you.

So the focus for both of you in your book is on the pathologies of the broad left. So lay it out for us, Ezra. What are the problems with the way the left governs? In places where Democrats govern, it is too hard to build the things that families need and the things that liberalism needs to achieve its goals.

So I'm Californian. I grew up in Orange County, California, in Irvine. I went to college in the University of California system. Then I moved to D.C. for 13 years and moved back to California, the Bay Area, in 2018 and was there until just about two years ago. And one thing that I really saw when I came back to California in 2018 was that the state was gripped by an affordability crisis.

It had astonishing levels of homelessness, as everybody there knows. I mean, I do find this stat every time I say it, even as many times I've said it, amazing. In 2022, with 12% of the nation's population in California to 30% of its homeless and 50% of its unsheltered homeless population.

But it was not building enough clean energy to meet its very ambitious clean energy goals. California high-speed rail is obviously a fiasco, but so have a lot of public projects in California been very difficult.

When I dug in on why it is so hard not just to build housing but specifically in LA and San Francisco to build affordable housing using public money, the kind of housing liberals favor, I began to see that the rules and regulations and standards and goals that we layered onto public projects made them fundamentally impossible to complete. And at some point you have to look across these different domains, housing and energy and public infrastructure and there are more nationally we can talk about and say,

If liberals, the people who believe in government, the people who believe in government's ability to do big things, if in the places where they run the government – you can't blame things in California on Republicans. They have no power. If in the places where they run the government, you can't build those things and you can't build them because of the rules and regulations and laws we liberals have put into place and we're losing the very people we claim to govern on behalf of working families in part because of it.

Well, then at some point a reckoning is necessary. If you believe in government, and we do, you have to make it work. So Derek, Ezra laid out some really clear points there, but what would you add to the set of pathologies or policy failures that haunt the left, do you think? I think there's a very interesting historical story to tell. If you go back to New Deal liberalism, the left in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s, the left...

Built like crazy. The left built dams, the left built highways, the left built the Tennessee Valley Authority, utterly changed the infrastructure of this country, built transit and energy and housing. Everything that we don't have enough of today that we believe is absolutely essential for working class families was being built like mad in the 1930s to 1950s.

something happened to the identity and to the character of liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s. And there were a lot of factors here. I think one was that the collectivism that had built up over the previous decades had its objectors on the left and the right. You had the rise of the new left and the beatniks who said that they wanted to rebel against the man. You had the rise on the right of economists like Milton Friedman who were more libertarian and wanted to push back against the state.

And you also had this emergence of a new kind of environmentalism that was identifying very real disasters in the world.

I mean, the world that was unfortunately left us by all of this building in the New Deal era was a world where the air and the water was absolutely disgusting. And we needed new laws, clean air and clean water acts, laws to protect endangered species, laws to protect birds. We had a revolution of environmental legislation. We also had a legal revolution. Ezra and I in this book trace the history of Ralph Nader and the revolution within legalism,

where there was a generation of progressives who came, went into and out of law school in the 1960s and 1970s, who saw it as their mission to sue the government and sue companies to stop, stop building in the world, stop despoiling the environment, slow down and conserve the planet that we have. And many of these changes were absolutely due. They were the right medicine for the right disease at the right time.

But what sometimes happens in history is that the medicine of one generation leads to the disease of the next generation. And to solve many of the problems that even environmentalists care about today, like climate change, we need to build like crazy. We need to add solar and wind and enhance geothermal and yes, maybe even nuclear.

We need to build affordable housing units in downtown areas to allow people to live densely, which is one of the best things you can do for overall carbon emissions. But we need, in order to build, to have exactly what Ezra talked about: a reckoning, a recognition that there was a paradigm shift in liberalism between the 1960s and 1970s that served its time.

Politics of blocking. And what we need today in the 2020s is a politics of building. So then, I mean, when I think about what Doge says it's doing, which is to slash regulations and to dismantle regulatory agencies that are slowing down progress in their view, are they on the right track? Or is your view really distinct, Ezra, from what you and Derek are describing here? Imagine you lay down good track.

But the track leads to the edge of a cliff, and you run your train down it, and it goes off the cliff. You might have laid your track down fine, but where you're going was terrible.

That's a big part of the problem with Doge. And maybe I'm actually even being too friendly to them because the way they're doing things is lawless. It's thoughtless. They are gutting parts of the government that are incredibly efficient. I mean, the Social Security Administration, there is nothing more efficient in government than Social Security Administration. It is a bunch of people who move checks around the country with extraordinary alacrity.

Doge does not have as its goal a government that works. Doge has as its goal the destruction of the government, whether or not it works, so it can be burnt down and placed into the control so it can become a limb of Donald Trump, of Elon Musk, of J.D. Vance, of Russell Vaughn. Now, I don't want to say that the thing that Doge presents itself as is useless, right? I would love a real Department of Government Efficiency.

I think it is a shame that the Biden administration didn't build one themselves and use it for actual good purposes. Under Bill Clinton, they did. Al Gore had reinvented government, and it was a big deal in its time, and it actually did real things. There are things the Democrats can learn from the interest that there originally was in Doge. But what Doge is, is a slash-and-grab operation. And what we are trying to do is chart a path forward,

And provide a vision for making government efficient and efficient towards a set of outcomes that we think are just and worth fighting for. You need your means and your ends to work. A slash and grab operation for what end, Ezra? Elon Musk, I think the simplest. There are two tributaries going into Doge.

One is Elon Musk, and he has a habit at companies he's taken over, and you really saw this at Twitter, where he comes in and he just begins to break them in order to be able to control them more later. Any large bureaucracy, any large institution, any large corporation,

develops internal views, right? The employees have some power. They have views about how the company should be run. There are systems that are the way things have worked. Sometimes you do want to change those, but also they have wisdom in them. And just destroying them is not always great. So what he wanted to do at Twitter, though, was he had an ideological purpose at Twitter. He came in, he drove lots of the employees out because what he wanted was not to make Twitter work better,

What he wanted was to make sure something could control. Then there's Russell Vought, right? And he gets less press than Elon Musk, but he's the head of the Office of Management and Budget. He was there in Donald Trump's first administration. He is very much the architect of the Trump administration's war on the administrative state. And what he believes is something called unitary executive theory.

which is that the administrative agencies should be fully responsive to the president. And the original Office of Management and Budget Memo sent out freezing all of the grants and funding that was going out. This got overturned by a judge and then rescinded, but nevertheless, it said that the administrative state needs to represent the will of the people and the will of the people is expressed through their choice of the president.

So what they are doing together, if you put all this together, they're not trying to make the government more efficient. They're trying to make it something Donald Trump can fully control, something fully responsive to them and purge it of all ideological or, frankly, expertise-driven resistance to them or their agenda, whatever it is. Which is so egregious. So why not in this book, Derek, include the problems of the broad right? Why not make that your focus? Right.

Well, the right has problems, and we talk about those problems in several of the chapters. So, for example, if what you care about is climate change, and I think climate change is very much something to care about, you should be absolutely obsessed with the progress made by solar power. The price of solar energy has declined by 90% in the last decade. There's been tremendous accomplishments on the technology side, but the U.S. still lags many other countries in terms of our level of solar deployment. There's a parallel universe in which we could have a

that is essentially powered by the sun that would release far less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Why don't we have that world? Well, you go back to the 1970s and Jimmy Carter was actually leading one of the world's most advanced solar energy development projects. The U.S. in many ways was the world leader in solar energy in the late 1970s.

What happened, however, is that in 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president and he completely dismantled America's progress on solar. He didn't just dismantle it at the federal or legislative level, he dismantled it at the very literal level. He took solar panels off of the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed, put a dentist into the role of Department of Energy secretary, and gutted American R&D and energy for the next decade.

That is absolutely a shonda and it's something that he is responsible for, that Republicans are responsible for. But as Ezra said, in many of these places that don't have enough housing and energy today, it is Democrats who hold the power. So if we have critiques, we have to look in the mirror.

We're talking with Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, co-authors of the new book, Abundance. Listeners, do you agree with the arguments that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making? Why or why not? Tell us by emailing forum at kqed.org. Find us on our social channels, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads. Call us at 866-733-6786. 866-733-6786. More after the break. I'm Mina Kim.

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You're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about the shortcomings in the ways Democrats govern, failures that my guests say have serious political and human consequences. My guests are Ezra Klein, columnist for The New York Times and co-author with Derek Thompson of Abundance. Derek Thompson is staff writer and author of the Work in Progress newsletter at The Atlantic. And you, our listeners, are weighing in. What do you think about the arguments that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making about the failures of Democratic governance? And is this framing of

thinking about things in terms of the ways Democrats can improve and adopt potentially a politics of abundance resonating with you? What do you think the left needs to change about the way it governs? So I want to actually also put that question to you, Ezra, just in terms of why you didn't focus on the right so much, because you did say something interesting about how you don't see yourselves as effective messengers to the right. Say more about that.

You can write a lot of different kinds of political books. And one of the most common kinds of political books is The People I Disagree With Are Wrong. And I have been a liberal political journalist for more than 20 years now. And I've written a lot of The People I Disagree With Are Wrong. If you go to my first book, Why We're Polarized, you will find a fair amount of The People I Disagree With Are Wrong.

I don't know that it is such a remarkable contribution at this point that I can make to the conversation to say that I think it is bad that the right does not believe often in the reality and danger of climate change. I think it is more interesting often.

offering I can have in the conversation to say, given that that is true, then how come Texas is building more solar and wind power than California? How come Georgia is getting so much more of the Inflation Reduction Act's manufacturing money than many of the blue states that are more ideologically aligned?

And when I came back to California, it did force me to think about something that I had not thought about that much when I lived in D.C. When I lived in D.C., where Republicans held a lot of power, I thought a lot about all the bad things Republicans were doing. When I came back to California, it forced me to reckon with a question that was a lot more uncomfortable. If my ideas are so great, if the people I tend to align with in politics are so great, then why in the places they govern are things not going better?

Why can Democrats not run for president saying, elect us and we're going to make the country like California? Why is it Republicans run for president saying, elect them and they're going to govern the country the way they govern California? So there's a lot to say about the right. I say a lot about it on my podcast and my column week after week after week. But it is not a small question whether or not Democrats can govern in a way that actually achieves their goals.

And what, in your view, is the political cost of not addressing those issues? I mean, I guess that's for other people to decide. It doesn't feel. Oh, I'm sorry. I think I misunderstood you. Not addressing not addressing the governance in blue states. Democrats failures. Yes. I think that cost is tremendous. And I don't want to say anything in politics is monocausal because it isn't.

But I think it is part of why Democrats who understand themselves as a party of the working class are losing the working class now in election after election. It is the main reason why so many people are leaving New York and California and Illinois. I do find this statistic remarkable. If we keep seeing the migration we're seeing now from blue to red states, then after the 2030 census, when we reapportion political power based on population, it would not be enough to

for a Democratic presidential candidate to win all of Kamala Harris' states, plus the so-called blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Because after that reapportionment, you would have moved so many electoral votes to red states that you would need another state on top of that. So Democrats are losing political power because of this. And even beyond the question of political cost, even beyond the ability to run on your governance as a compelling model for the nation,

It is bad to not be able to achieve your goals. It is bad that we cannot ride high-speed rail in California the way they can in Europe or Japan or China. It is bad we don't have enough homes, and so we've allowed the nation's worst housing and homelessness crisis to metastasize. It is bad we are not on track

to meet our clean energy goals. Before I am a political journalist, I'm a policy journalist. I care about politics because I care about what we can get done in this country. Politics is about moving power to make policy. If having won the politics in California, which Democrats have, and having gotten the power, which they have, they cannot make policy which achieves their goals, then what is this all for? And the only thing that I would add to that, because Ezra touched on so much, is that

It is precisely so important that we conduct this self-examination of liberalism today because of how dangerous Donald Trump and his administration can be. You look at what they're doing not only on the constitutional side with their wrecking ball to order.

You look at the fact that they seem to have this approach to economics where every time they identify something America doesn't have enough of, they take away something that we need. They say America doesn't have enough housing and so we need fewer immigrants or America doesn't have enough manufacturing so we need less trade. This less is.

is less style of governance is going to be a catastrophe for America, not only at the legal level, but I think also at the level of economic well-being. America needs an opposition movement that is popular and effective.

And right now, I think you can relatively objectively say that Democrats are unpopular and ineffective in many of the places they hold the most power. Democrats just in a poll this week, according to CNN, are now polling at 29% approval rate. That is the lowest rate in the history of the time series of the poll. Democrats...

have never been less popular at a national level. And in fact, I think these two things are intertwined, popularity and effectiveness. I think Democrats are unpopular precisely because they are seen as being ineffective at solving material problems for people. And I think over this last half...

century that I've been talking about, there's been this idea within the left where they've associated success with how much money they can spend or authorize to spend rather than associate success with how much they can actually build in the physical world. That's a world where you have California authorizing $35 billion for a high-speed rail system that doesn't exist yet.

It's a world where Joe Biden authorizes $42 billion for BEAD, the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment, part of the infrastructure bill, which is going to build out rural broadband. It turns out now four calendar years after that bill was passed, practically none of that has been actually built.

Democrats need to confront that the divided soul within this party between process and outcome has to be resolved. We have to become the movement, the party that is obsessed with outcomes, obsessed with making government work precisely because we're the only party out there that actually wants to make government work.

Well, Don writes, the problem I have with the current progressive consensus that the solution to the quality of life and affordability problem in California is just a supply-side deregulatory one. It entirely ignores and fails to address the great increase in inequality. The Gini Index, which measures income inequality in Silicon Valley, is now 0.8%.

the highest in the world. And in some ways, Derek, your argument is to focus on supply and less on demand. First, can you explain that how Democrats have been, in your view, too focused on demand? Sure. So there's two sides to the economy, you can say. There's the spending side, and then there's the building side, right? And the spending side, the tax and spending side is what is sometimes called demand. And then actually building something in the economy, adding a new housing unit, that is what we're calling supply.

The first way to answer this question, which is, I want to commend the asker, a really, really important question: I'm a tax and spend liberal. Ezra and I believe in a strongly progressive tax system to pay for Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and public infrastructure and education and welfare to the poor. We want to eliminate poverty. We are in many ways classic tax and spend liberals in the American tradition.

At the same time, I think it's important to realize that income inequality, yes, is growing. It's growing for many, many reasons. But one reason that it's growing, I think, is actually that we've made it harder for low and middle income people to move into America's most productive cities. There's some wonderful work by the economist, Ross Chetty, that shows

that when you look at the American dream and draw a map of the American dream and really highlight those places where someone born into the lower middle class is likely to move up in the world, it happens to be places like New York and San Francisco. The only problem is no one can afford or many people can't afford to actually stay there. They can't afford to stay in these cities where they'll experience this rising income that we associate with what America is all about.

So in fact, I think we have empirical information that suggests that if we made it easier for lower and middle class people, for working class families to live in these high productivity cities by expanding their housing supply, it might actually have a positive effect on overall income inequality.

I think it's so important to see that housing is not just about housing. It's not just the four walls and the ceiling and the floor. Housing connects to everything. It connects to economic opportunity, which is why Raj Chetty finds it so important for absolute mobility.

It connects to innovation. As Ezra points out many times in these interviews, and it's such a wonderful point, it's not a mistake. It's something like 95% of the frontier AI companies are within like a 20-square-mile part of the country in the Bay Area. There is something very, very special about cities and the agglomeration effects that allow them to share ideas.

So I think that yes, income inequality is important and we should have a progressive system of taxation that accounts for it. But we should also have a housing policy in our most productive cities that is responsive to demand.

And right now, the reason that housing is so expensive in some of these places is that we have a housing policy that is not sensitive to demand, that is absolutely entangled in red tape. And so this is a place where, yes, I think allowing market forces to work a little bit better would help progressive outcomes. Well, let me go to caller Russ in Berkeley. Hi, Russ. You're on.

Hi, good morning. I'd like to get a little California specific here and bring up what seems esoteric but is actually very important, the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, which was passed to make sure that we don't build major projects that are environmentally bad. But what's happened is it's become...

over the years such a legal rat's nest that it takes years and years and years to get important projects done. And most disturbing, I think, recently, Governor Newsom and the Democratic Party in California has begun to protest

makes selective exemptions to this, sometimes for real good reasons, like after a fire to rebuild, but also to grant political favors to electric charging stations, et cetera, et cetera. So I think what's happened is that the public starts regarding

as a political currency, something that the governor can use to hand out political favors. Why can't the Democrats recalibrate

reform this if it's such a problem in providing things like housing and other basics. Russ, thanks. You know, and Ezra, California figures heavily in your book, and so does CEQA. And as one of the sort of the bad rules that are getting in the way of constructing new homes and generally the common good, I think Russ has laid out

quite well some of the issues that you've also raised in the book, but in terms of reforming CEQA, like why was that something that you also called out that maybe Russ didn't address yet? We tell the story of CEQA at some length in the book. And the way CEQA, when it was passed, was not seen as a big deal. It was passed by Ronald Reagan. It didn't merit even a full article in the LA Times and was later interpreted by judges.

to apply not just to what we would think of as public projects, but any projects that require a public permit in California, which is functionally everything. And I think Russ points out something incredibly, not just important, but telling. You look at California and you look nationally too at the National Environmental Policy Act.

And you see both parties creating carve-out after carve-out after carve-out after carve-out, right? The Chips and Science Act, which is building semiconductor facilities in America, two years after it passed, Joe Biden signed a bill co-sponsored by Ted Cruz and Mark Kelly giving those semiconductor facilities a carve-out from NEPA. They didn't have to go through the NEPA process, which is very similar to the CEQA process. Why did they do that? Because otherwise it would delay them by years. Right.

Well, if it's bad to delay your semiconductor facilities by years for these environmental reviews, and is that not true in a wider way? And then similarly true, as Russ says, we're doing a lot of car routes. We need to reform these bills. These bills were built to make it hard to build. We didn't know how hard they would ultimately make it to build because they've been strengthened dramatically by different court interpretations. Yeah.

Speaking here about the National Environmental Policy Act, initially, most of these environmental reviews were seven pages long. They took a couple months, a couple weeks. Now, they're often thousands of pages long, and they take, on average, three and a half to four and a half years. We built the empire state building in this country faster than your median environmental review gets done. So, our view in the book is,

is that the equilibrium of environmental policy in which what we said and then what we strengthened was the need for the government to conduct higher and higher levels of analysis on any change made to the status quo, whether good for the environment or bad for the environment, is the wrong answer.

Because so much of what we need to do is build and build fast and build particularly green energy infrastructure. And so we should have fast track processes for things that we know are good for the environment. It doesn't mean we'll never make a mistake in what we build, but it would be better to speed run how much solar we can lay down, how many energy transmission lines we can site, right?

rather than slow them down in the hopes that we're also slowing down fossil fuel energy. We can make distinctions between what we want to have a higher level of scrutiny for and what we want to have a lower level of scrutiny for, because we already know that it's good for the environment or good for other goals we have. And the fact that California politicians haven't done this speaks to their own interest group politics, the environmental groups who have both used CEQA to block things that are bad, but

It is a source of their power and leverage. Unions at USEQA to get negotiations and to get concessions in different negotiations. There's a lot of interest group politics here, and it is the kind of thing that is holding California back. Yeah. Well, Noelle on Discord writes, I can agree to some extent with what the guests are pointing out, but I don't think what

Thank you.

And this listener, Neil, writes, California is the first state that I've lived in with ballot initiatives. How much do you think this stymies the development process? It seems that leaving complicated policy decisions to voters who don't have a whole lot of time and certainly don't have the background to be able to fully understand the immediate and downstream implications of these initiatives is insane. I think these three comments just taken as a whole, maybe just trying to get to the question of

Are we maybe overstating the responsibility of Democrats for the kinds of issues that we've seen with regard to a lack of housing and so on? Well, it's certainly not an accident. Yeah, it's it's it's clear to me that when you look at the states that have the largest homelessness crisis, the top five do happen to all be governed by Democrats right now. And there was a study that was reported on by my colleague Yoni Applebaum at The Atlantic.

that just look at California city specifically which found that when the progressive vote share of the city went up by 10 percent the number of housing units in that city mechanically declined by 30 percent so I say that only to point out that I do think a certain amount of self-blame is appropriate

here. No one is forcing California cities to zone and permit and use environmental review the way they are. No one, no Republican in Texas, no Republican in Washington. This is a matter of self-government and we need to be critical of the way that liberals are governing themselves.

But the two things I wanted to pick up on from the questions that you reviewed, one was whether or not liberals are doing this on purpose. I think that's a very interesting and rich question. And another, which we've gotten before and I think is a really important thing to say, is are Ezra and I just saying that we're just Sarah Palinites, drill, baby, drill?

Let's take on purpose first, some of these housing laws, if you go back and look at the 100-year history of the evolution of zoning in America, some of these laws absolutely were designed to limit housing affordability and housing access for people who weren't white, rich Americans. That's just a fact.

The first zoning law in American history in the late 19th century in California was designed to essentially ghettoize the Chinese population because that was a legal way to keep Chinese people from coming into the richer areas rather than the other illegal ways that they had tried before which often involved violence.

Part of this history is absolutely on purpose finding ways to keep housing from people. But also some of it is by mistake, as we said. Some of it is efforts to fix environmentalism in the world of the 1960s now coming to bite us in the 2020s. Derek Thompson at Ezra Kleiner with us. We'll have more after the break. This is Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

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Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking with Ezra Klein, columnist for The New York Times and a host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, co-author of Abundance with Derek Thompson, which looks at the shortcomings and the ways that Democrats have governed, failures that they have committed.

made maybe going too far with regard to trying to protect things like the environment, public safety and public input to the point where they are not building things that people need and creating abundance in areas where people need it to be. You, our listeners, are joining the conversation at 866-733-6786 on our social channels at KQED Forum and at our email address at

forum at kqed.org matthew writes i'm a fourth generation californian and lifelong democrat i approved of newsom's moves to override local nimbyism to get more housing built but the housing crisis continues unabated especially here in sonoma county can the authors point to democrats here in the state or elsewhere who are pointing in the right direction how does this become the consensus of the party leaders uh can you point to anyone ezra

What's interesting is it is the consensus of the party's leaders, and they're just having a lot of trouble getting it done. So London Breed talked about the housing crisis very straightforwardly and just was not able to do all that much to solve it.

Down in Los Angeles, Karen Bass actually did pass something pretty effective. And then as it became too effective and you saw a real push towards building housing, she backed down and she gutted her own policy. It was wild to watch. Gavin Newsom has said a lot of the right things. He signed into law dozens and dozens of housing bills, but most of them are frankly too compromised to really work.

One of the things that I've been interested in is for all the victories you may have had, yes, in my backyard figures in California, if you look at California, it's not building more housing in January of 2025 than it was in January of 2015. You look at San Francisco, kind of the same issue. So I began to look into why, right? Because there are figures in California like Scott Weiner, like Buffy Wicks, who have done a lot to pass these bills into law.

And I began calling developers of housing and saying, what's going on here? Why, given everything that has passed into law, don't I see more housing in San Francisco? And what they said to me is, look,

In order to take advantage of these fast-track laws, I have to say yes to so many new regulations and higher wage standards and this and that and the other thing that it just doesn't budget out for me. So I don't do it, and nor do any of my developer friends. Like, I would love a fast-track, but not if it makes a housing I'm building more expensive. And, you know, developers aren't the most popular people, and I get all the reasons why.

But one thing this guy was getting at was if it's more expensive, he's going to charge you more too, right? This is going to be more and more and more luxury housing. So I do think there are figures in California who want to change this, and I really would shout out Wiener and Wix. But I think that the coalitional politics of the California legislature, also something Gavin Newsom deals with, just do not support or have not yet supported doing enough.

Now, you can see that it's possible. And the way you know it's possible is that though it took a bunch of time and it took a number of cycles of legislating and passing bills, we figured it out for ADUs. We eventually made ADUs by right development. You can basically do it if you conform to certain basic standards. And now people just do it. There's been a huge ADU boom in California because ultimately we did take it.

out of these veto-rich environments and just make it something that if you own the land, you could build the ADU. Ultimately, that's something that is what we're going to have to do on housing. But the governor and the legislature have not yet done it. They say the words, but they have not passed the bills.

Well, this listener writes, Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley from the Lake Tahoe region has put a proposal before Congress to put the California Coastal Commission and to gut the California Coastal Commission and have the federal government hold decision making power over decisions. Please consider this in light of your argument of the need to reduce red tape to get things moving to build more.

Robert writes, in addition to being motivated, as Ezra said, by shaping the government to their wishes and promoting the unitary executive, I believe that Trump and Musk are aiming to privatize government functions for their profit. Look at what Musk is doing with substituting Starlink for existing data systems. So let me ask you this. These recommendations that you're making, you know, these ways that the Democratic Party and the left has to face up to,

their failures, right? They're happening against a backdrop where the Trump administration, for example, wants to repeal dozens of the nation's most significant environmental regulations. Derek had a section on science and the NIH. The NIH is being targeted for major defunding. Basically, what I'm saying is that you're recommending these things in an environment where it really feels like

You know, their ability to put this forward isn't directly responding to the kind of clear and present issues that the Trump administration is are creating, essentially. And I'm wondering, I'm sure you've heard this, right? Because I think even in a piece, Ezra, you mentioned that this is an awkward time. I think that's the word you use to be making this kind of argument. So tell me how you sort of reconcile those things. Well, we worked on this book for years and we worked on it without knowing who had win the 2024 election.

And on the one hand, we both worried after we saw what happened and then we saw how the Trump administration was beginning. Oh, no, this is a terrible time for this book to come out. And then it turned out, no, it was the exact time this book needed to come out. Yes, it is bad what Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Doge are doing. And it points to the need to build an effective counterforce. There are two components to an opposition party.

There is resistance, the saying no, and there is the alternative, the ability to persuade people that there is a reason they should say yes to you. One thing Donald Trump did that allowed him to remake the Republican Party and ultimately shape the agenda of American politics for now quite a long time was

is he ran against the failures of the Republicans in the Bush era. He ran against them on the Iraq War. He ran against what they had done in the Afghanistan War. He ran against the consensus Republicans had on free trade and on immigration. And you can agree and disagree with these dimensions of him. He ran against what they said about cutting Social Security and Medicare.

You can agree or disagree on where he falls, and I have a lot of disagreements with Donald Trump. But he understood that people were disappointed in the Republican Party, and if it was going to become a dominant force again, that that disappointment would need to be channeled and answered. And we think that's true for the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party just clocked in polls its lowest approval ratings in the modern era. People do not like the Democratic Party. And while we are not saying that our agenda or even our critique is—

is the whole of why or the whole of what to do with it. We do think it is one of the most constructive parts of the critique of the Democratic Party, one of the most correct critiques of the Democratic Party. I don't want to see Democrats turn over on trans kits. I don't want to see Democrats move all the way back on taking racism and immigration seriously as issues and treating them with compassion and a willingness to pursue a more just future. I don't think those were all mistakes.

I think some of the repositioning I see is a mistake. I think it is overly responsive to Donald Trump and the last election. I think Democrats need to atone for the actual things they did wrong.

that made it harder to live in the places they governed and made them less and less appealing on what was by every poll and every measure the central issue in the 2024 election and I think will be going forward, which is cost of living and the affordability crisis. So it turns out that this ended up being not that awkward of a time to bring it out because there is a Democratic Party that is, it's soft clay at the moment. It is trying to figure out what it should become next because what it has been, it isn't winning elections.

And just one final point on this, and you're not worried about doing this sort of mea culpa or sort of examination and dissection and facing up to your failures in this particular media environment when any kind of nuanced sort of admission of mistakes ends up being warped or weaponized against you.

No, I don't. I mean, I think this has been a great conversation. We've done a lot of these. Look, I run a, I have a column at the Times. I have a podcast, which is long and nuanced. Derek has, you know, the same at the Atlantic and with the Ringer. Yeah.

I don't think that we are in a time that does not have nuance. And I don't think that we are in a time that is so averse to self-criticism or to the ability to use that self-criticism to make an argument against the Trump administration as a bringer of scarcity itself, not abundance. One of the things that we've been finding is this argument travels very well to audiences that have otherwise given up on Democrats.

And finding arguments that travel well to audiences that have given up on Democrats is actually a really good thing. The tendency, the instinct to hunker down, to get more defensive, to get more careful and cautious, it's not a good idea. When people don't trust you, you need to show that you've heard them.

And yeah, we're also journalists. I'm not a political consultant. Other people are gonna have to figure out how to run on these or other ideas. But part of my commitment to my audience is I'm gonna take the problems that I see in the country seriously. I'm gonna do my best to report out and research out the answers to them. And I'm gonna be honest about what I've found. I've said a million things about what is wrong on the right and what is wrong with the Trump administration. But the idea that I would spare the Democratic Party its failures

particularly when I share many of its goals, that would not be consistent with my work either. Well, this is Snow Rites. This discussion captured a lot of observations my friends and I have made over the past decade. We are essentially liberals, but we want to see value for our high taxes. I worked in the California EDD for a year, and after my professional experience in the private sector, I was appalled by the waste, even if it is in service of a goal I agree with. How do your guests recommend we reshape the parties in this country to enact more sensible policies and

And politics. So Derek, how can Democrats make this shift to a politics of abundance? So a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it to move away from the politics of scarcity that you've described the Trump administration as promulgating, essentially, like, what are the initial steps?

Yeah, I've been listening to your conversation with Ezra and listening to some of these questions and I feel like we're circling a really, really interesting topic here, which is not just the awkward timing of this book, which frankly I don't consider too awkward. I think it's incredibly apropos. But also this question that some people have of whether or not our proposal to deregulate some aspects of the government are just ultimately going to deregulate our way toward just becoming Republicans, right? An earlier caller asked whether we're essentially just drill, baby drill liberals.

I think there's a very, very clear distinction to draw between our environmental policy plan and Drill Baby Drill that goes directly to your question. Drill Baby Drill is a plan to burn as much fossil fuel as possible to choke the biosphere. I mean, the goal isn't to choke the biosphere, it's just to burn the fossil fuels, but without care for anything that happens to the planet. Our plan begins in the opposite direction, not with the process of creating energy, but with a goal.

We want a world without catastrophic climate change where there is enough energy that is cheap and abundant for people to enjoy their lives and for us to build new technologies that require more energy. In order to do that, in order to dramatically increase the amount of solar and wind, geothermal and nuclear in America, we have to make it easier to build these things.

And in some cases, if you study closely what it will take in order to build more solar and wind, especially, unfortunately, in blue cities and blue states, you have to deregulate. You have to remove or at least replace some of the layers and layers of environmental review that can get a project that is just trying to soak up energy from the sun and turn it into affordable energy, delay that project for four years.

In four years, the amount of fossil fuels that are going to be burned instead of using that solar farm is absolutely immense. So we see that the processes of liberalism have gotten in the way of the outcomes that liberalism asked for, especially when it comes to affordable life, which begins with affordable housing, and an energy economy that doesn't choke the planet. So what we're calling for here, in a really clear way, is a refocus on outcomes.

At the beginning of our book, Ezra and I have like a sci-fi vignette of the world that we want to exist in 2050. And to Ezra's point that he made earlier, I think it's so important that in today's politics, we aren't just motivated by a negative vision of what the other side gets wrong. It's obvious what the other side, to us, gets wrong. They get so much wrong in politics.

whether it's in the way that they treat the Constitution, the way they treat the government, the way they treat government employees, their lack of care for the climate, their lack of care for the poor, that list can go on forever. But you also need, I think, in the process of remaking a party that has now bottomed out in terms of its popularity,

You need a positive vision. You need to say this is what we're for. We're for a world of clean energy and housing, government that actually works, government that says we're going to spend 30 billion dollars in a high speed rail system, we're actually going to build it. That's what we're trying to build here and that's a message that I think can maybe even get us a little bit beyond

the 48% versus 48% world that we've been stuck in for the last 20 years. It's been really wonderful and lovely to have conversations on podcasts or on the radio or live with people who self-identify as center-right.

These are folks who say, I kind of feel lost and without a party. I want government to work. I don't share all of your priorities. But I love this vision that you have, that there's a possibility of more, not a vision of scarcity that let's just cling to the past and recreate the gender economics or the gender norms of 1950s or the environment of the 1960s.

We want to build more. We're excited by the prospect of growth and therefore excited about your vision of a liberalism that believes in growth. I think that's fantastic. We don't agree about everything, Ezra and I, I should say, and the center-right.

But the fact that these ideas are beginning to peel off a demographic or a coalition that feels lost in this political moment gives me a lot of hope that we're building something that can actually succeed in a world beyond just two and four year election cycles. A movement that's a little bit just bigger than this to and fro of thermostatic reaction that we've experienced for the last 20 years.

Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, let me remind listeners you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Let me ask you a real practical first step question then, Ezra, for example, with regard to high speed rail, which you brought up, which is, you know,

I can't even, we do whole shows on it. But is that one of the places that Dems should start in terms of cutting their losses? Should we abandon high-speed rail? I'm so curious what you think. I spent a lot of time reporting on the high-speed rail system. And I went out there and I toured the miles of track they have built. And what I would say about it is this.

They have no plan to get the money to finish it and no way to finish it. The people there told me on the record, look, this doesn't make sense if we don't do it L.A. to SF. A Merced to Bakersfield line is not what anybody was trying to build here.

Right now, even to build that line, they would need, they estimate, $36-ish billion. I think they have line of sight on something around $11 billion. So they don't even know how they're going to get the money to build the part of the line that not that many people really want that maybe would be done sometime in the 2030s.

And then to finish the whole line, they estimate it would be $110 billion. Again, they have line of sight on like $11 billion in total. They do not have line of sight on $110 billion. They have no way to get there. You know, when I asked them, like, how do you imagine this happening? Like, well, you know, maybe one day America will really wake up to the importance of having high-speed rail and it'll create a national fund for, I mean, it was wish-casting.

So, like everybody else, I don't want to say give up on high-speed rail, but either California has to pass a series of laws that completely remake how it builds something like high-speed rail and finds the money to actually do it so it can do it fast and all at once. Dribbling out money this way is part of the reason the costs keep exploding.

Or it needs to cut its losses. But what they're doing now, which is just building in the hopes that somehow forever people are just going to want to never quite cut what they've begun, that doesn't make sense. That's what economists call sunk cost fallacy. And the sunk cost is taxpayer money. So then do you agree with Derek that a key first step is a values shift, sort of like a vision shift? I think you say you're advocating for a lens, not a list. Yeah.

Yes, and it's a culture shift. I mean, if we're talking about high-speed rail specifically, though this is true for many things, it is asking what is the outcome you're trying to achieve and working backwards to a plan to get there. And if the plan to get there is politically impossible, if it's technologically impossible, if it is culturally unfeasible, then it's time to say, well, we can't get there. And either you need a new goal or you need to give up on the one you have.

But high-speed rail is a good example of just a failure of that. And housing in California is an example of actually not working backwards in a real way from the goal. At some point, these politicians, you come out and say, look, we have set this goal. We are not achieving it. And here's my plan to actually achieve it. Otherwise, I have to admit that there is – they either don't truly care about getting there or they're not the people for the job.

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on their vision for a politics of abundance during the Democratic Party. Ezra, thanks so much for talking with us. Thank you. Derek, so glad to have you as well. Thank you. And my thanks to Susie Britton for producing today's segment. And my thanks, as always, to listeners for sharing their questions and their examples and insights. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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