Ezra Klein
Dear Commons Community,
Ezra Klein had a column yesterday in The New York Times entitled, “There is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk” that provides advice on how Democrats can reclaim the political narrative. Here is the gist of his message.
“Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer [to it] is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed.
I keep seeing Democrats say the resistance failed. On these pages, James Carville counseled Democrats to “roll over and play dead” until the Trump administration collapses beneath its own weight. Assuming corpse pose, Carville said, would be “a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics.”
But Democrats succeeded at the art of resistance politics. They won the 2018 midterms, flipping 40 House seats, seven governorships and six state legislatures. Democrats won the 2020 presidential election, driving Donald Trump into exile in Mar-a-Lago. The resistance succeeded. The problem was what came next — and, in some ways, what had come before: Democrats failed at the work of governing.
Trump won in 2024 because Americans were furious about the cost of living and they trusted Republicans, not Democrats, to lower it. Part of that was the burst of post-pandemic inflation that deranged the economy from 2021 to 2023. But in 2020, before that burst, exit polls showed voters evenly split on whether they trusted Trump or Joe Biden to manage the economy. In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton on that question.
I know many Democrats believe this is a byproduct of Trump’s years of playing a businessman on TV. That may be part of it. But Democrats allowed an affordability crisis to metastasize on their watch in ways they cannot blame perception or messaging for. If they are going to marginalize MAGA, they need more than a resistance; they need new answers that admit past failures.”
I agree!
Klein’s entire piece is below.
Tony
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The New York Times
By Ezra Klein
Opinion Columnist
There is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk
Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed.
I keep seeing Democrats say the resistance failed. On these pages, James Carville counseled Democrats to “roll over and play dead” until the Trump administration collapses beneath its own weight. Assuming corpse pose, Carville said, would be “a wiser approach than we pursued in the first Trump administration, when Democrats tried and failed at the art of resistance politics.”
But Democrats succeeded at the art of resistance politics. They won the 2018 midterms, flipping 40 House seats, seven governorships and six state legislatures. Democrats won the 2020 presidential election, driving Donald Trump into exile in Mar-a-Lago. The resistance succeeded. The problem was what came next — and, in some ways, what had come before: Democrats failed at the work of governing.
Trump won in 2024 because Americans were furious about the cost of living and they trusted Republicans, not Democrats, to lower it. Part of that was the burst of post-pandemic inflation that deranged the economy from 2021 to 2023. But in 2020, before that burst, exit polls showed voters evenly split on whether they trusted Trump or Joe Biden to manage the economy. In 2016, Trump led Hillary Clinton on that question.
I know many Democrats believe this is a byproduct of Trump’s years of playing a businessman on TV. That may be part of it. But Democrats allowed an affordability crisis to metastasize on their watch in ways they cannot blame perception or messaging for. If they are going to marginalize MAGA, they need more than a resistance; they need new answers that admit past failures.
Look at the places Democrats govern — liberal strongholds like New York, Illinois and California. In 2023, California saw a net loss of 268,000 residents; in Illinois, the net loss was 93,000; in New York, 179,000. Why are they leaving? In surveys, the dominant reason is simply this: The cost of living is too high. It’s too expensive to buy a house. It’s too expensive to get child care. You have to live too far from where you work. And so they’re going to places where all of that is cheaper: Texas, Florida, Arizona.
For Democrats, this is a political crisis. In the American system, to lose people is to lose power. If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024 will lose perhaps as many as a dozen House seats and Electoral College votes. The states that Trump won would gain them. In that Electoral College, a Democrat could win every state Harris won in 2024; add in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin; and still lose.
But it is also a spiritual crisis: You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live. You are not the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families can no longer afford to live.
This is the policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build, and too expensive to live, in the places where Democrats govern. It is too hard to build homes. It is too hard to build clean energy. It is too hard to build mass transit. The problem isn’t technical: We know how to build apartment complexes and solar panel arrays and train lines. The problem is the rules and the laws and political cultures that govern construction in many blue states.
The Second Avenue Subway project in New York City was the most expensive subway project, by kilometer, that the world has ever seen. Has New York reformed its policies to make the next expansion easier and cheaper? No, it hasn’t. Did the decades of delay and the billions of cost overruns on Boston’s Big Dig change how Massachusetts builds? Not really. California has the worst housing problem in the country. The state has 12 percent of the country’s population, 30 percent of its homeless population, and 50 percent of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this undeniable failure led to California building more homes today than it was building a decade ago? No.
I could tell you a dozen stories — and in my new book, I do — but let me tell you just one.
In 1982 — more than 40 years ago — Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill to study what it would take to build a high-speed rail system across California. He liked what he saw, and so did California’s voters. In 1996, California formed a high-speed rail authority to plan for its construction.
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High-speed rail is not some futuristic technology like nuclear fusion or flying cars. Japan broke ground on high-speed rail back in 1959. You can ride these trains today across Japan and Europe and China.
In 2008, California’s voters approved Prop 1A, which set aside $10 billion to begin construction on a high-speed rail line that would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, running through the Central Valley, in 2 hours and 40 minutes. It would cost, they thought, $33.6 billion, and Californians would be able to ride by the year 2020.
Prop 1A passed. And the news kept getting better for high speed rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. It had hundreds of billions to build the infrastructure of the future. And high-speed rail had captured Obama’s imagination.
“Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city,” Obama said in April 2009. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America. Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.”
Obama wanted it to happen here. And California, where the voters had already begun planning and funding it, was the obvious place. And politically, the stars kept aligning. In 2011, high-speed rail’s foremost champion returned when Jerry Brown won back the governorship, almost 30 years after leaving it. In his 2012 State of the State address, he marked high-speed rail as his signature project.
“If you believe that California will continue to grow, as I do, and that millions more people will be living in our state, this is a wise investment,” he said, adding, “We are within weeks of a revised business plan that will enable us to begin initial construction before the year is out.”
It didn’t happen. By 2018, it was brutally clear that nothing was going to be ridable by 2020. And the cost estimate wasn’t $33 billion anymore; it was $77 billion.
In 2019, Gavin Newsom, who had served as Brown’s lieutenant governor, succeeded Brown as governor. And in his first State of the State address, Newsom admitted what everyone already knew.
“Let’s be real,” Newsom said. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”
In October 2023, I went to Fresno, Calif., and toured the miles of rail infrastructure that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has built.
The project is caught in a strange limbo between political fantasy and physical fact. The agency doesn’t have anywhere near the money or political capital it would need to complete the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line Californians actually want, a system that is now estimated to cost $110 billion. It doesn’t even have the money to complete the Bakersfield-to-Merced segment that Newsom proposed. It has no line of sight on how it will get that money or that political capital. But since it has some money and some political capital, it is building anyway, in the hopes that Californians will want to finish what they started.
How did this happen? What I heard as I walked that track with the engineers who built it was less about engineering problems than political problems. I stood on a patch of the 99 freeway that had been moved in order to clear the hoped-for train’s path. Not far away there had been a self-storage facility. In folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land and then gives you some money and takes it from you. In reality, it took the High-Speed Rail Authority four separate requests for possession, and two and a half years of legal wrangling, to get that little spit of land.
That story repeated itself again and again. There are parts of the high-speed line that intersect with freight rail lines. But the freight rail lines are so busy in the holiday season that some impose a construction moratorium from October to December. So in those areas work has to stop.
Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner. The environmental review process began in 2012, and by 2024, it still wasn’t done. “I’m always amazed the staff has been working on these segments for a decade or longer to get through the environmental process,” Brian Kelly, the chief executive of the High-Speed Rail Authority from 2018 to 2024, told me.
Many Californians were confused that construction had begun in the Central Valley, which was far less populated than the corridors near Los Angeles or San Francisco. Why did the Authority begin construction there?
One reason was that when California applied for federal money, the Obama administration wanted bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered was not really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific communities.
The Central Valley is poorer and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding went there, and so did the initial construction. But that made it less likely high-speed rail would generate the ridership, political support and financial backing to ever finish.
What has taken so long on high-speed rail is not hammering nails or pouring concrete. It’s negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners. Those negotiations cost time, which costs money.
Those negotiations lead to changes in the route or the design or the construction, which costs money and time. Those negotiations are the product of decades of liberal policies meant to protect against government abuses. They may do that. But they also prevent government from building quickly or affordably.
“Time is a killer on the estimate of a project’s cost,” Kelly said. “When you don’t have funding and can’t make decisions and can’t drive to get operational and you can’t move the ball — the cost is huge: 2 to 3 percent a year, and in higher inflation periods, like we just had, 5 percent.” As delays mount, costs keep rising. The project becomes more expensive to finish. The public loses faith. The politicians begin second-guessing.
“I watched as a mayor and then a lieutenant governor and now governor as years became decades on high-speed rail,” Newsom told me. “People are losing trust and confidence in our ability to build big things. People look at me all the time and ask, ‘What the hell happened to the California of the ’50s and ’60s?’”
In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. China does not spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. That power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains.
I do not want America to become China. But I do want it to be able to build trains.
This is an awkward time to make this argument. Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are trying to raze the federal government under the moniker of “efficiency.” But driving out talented employees and slashing capacity indiscriminately will not make government more efficient. Neither Musk nor Trump seek a more capable state; they seek a broken state that they can control and corrupt.
Donald Trump could have run on bringing Texas housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there’s no zoning code, so building is easy, and the median home price is over $300,000. Compare that with Los Angeles, where the median price is around a million dollars. Or look at Austin, which has been a popular destination for many fleeing San Francisco’s housing costs. In November 2024, San Francisco’s metro area authorized the building of 292 housing structures; Austin authorized 3,059.
In the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance ran on none of that. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel against immigrants. “Illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country,” JD Vance said in the vice-presidential debate. Trump sounded the same theme. Voters “cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs,” he warned.
Trump could have run on the success Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the Covid vaccines. Instead, he’s slashing government funding for science and medical research. He could have run on making it easier to build energy generation of all kinds in America. Instead he is trying to destroy the solar and wind industries. He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and trade them with the world. Instead, he’s trying to cut international trade by imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla — companies that are built on federal subsidies — but he is slashing what government does rather than reimagining what it can do.
There is a reason Trump has chosen this path. The populist right is powered by scarcity. When there is not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take what we have. That suspicion is the fuel of Trump’s politics. Scarcity — or at least the perception of it — is the precondition to his success.
The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance; a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government to make sure there is enough of it. That doesn’t lend itself to the childishly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, as in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, creating markets or organizing resources for risky technologies that do not yet exist.
Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply? Valuable questions bloom from this deceptively simple prompt. If there are not enough homes, can we make more? If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy, can we make more? If not, why not? If the government is repeatedly failing to complete major projects on time and on budget, then what is going wrong and how do we fix it? If we need new technologies to solve our important problems, how do we pull these inventions from the future and distribute them in the present?
But if Democrats are to become the part of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity. In the last few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that makes government work.
Liberals spent a generation working, at every level of government and society, to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to putting together coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted, even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive, or decades late, or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. They explained away government’s failures rather than fixing them. They excused their own selfishness, putting yard signs out saying no human being is illegal, kindness is everything, even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of their cities.
To unmake this machine will be painful. It’s also necessary. In the long run, the way to marginalize the most dangerous political movements is to prove the superiority of your own. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promise of strongmen, they need to offer the fruits of effective government. They need to offer Americans a liberalism that builds.
This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Mark Carney
