Dear readers,

It’s been fun watching Ezra Klein patiently ask leftists how, if they hate his ideas so much, they would instead propose to make housing production cheaper. This exchange with Sam Seder is instructive — Seder is all argle-bargle about housing being expensive because it is excessively “commodified,” and yet he has no answer for why Texas builds homes more cheaply than California. Is it because Texas has smashed capitalism and turned housing into a non-market good?

The leftists keep saying that Klein and Derek Thompson, authors of Abundance, have no “theory of power.”1 But the real issue is that leftists have an excessively narrow theory of power, and they get really pissy whenever anyone tries to operate outside of it. Their whole argument is conclusory: they begin their analyses with the conclusion that any problem must be the fault of big corporations, monopoly or “oligarchs,” and their brains glitch whenever they’re asked to address a problem that’s caused by something else — like individual homeowners trying to protect their asset values, or unions prioritizing the interests of their members over the broader public, or even simple error not borne out of any party’s selfishness.

In addition to being bad public policy analysis, the left’s fixation on “power” makes for terrible politics. Street crime, for example, has approximately nothing to do with billionaires, and if you tell voters you’ll stop car break-ins by raising taxes on the rich to invest in social services — or if you deflect those voters’ concerns by asking why people don’t focus on crimes committed by the rich, like wage theft — they’ll just laugh at you and vote for someone else, even in places like San Francisco. For a movement of people who would like to position themselves as “populist,” this blame-the-billionaires vision is incredibly impoverished as a way to address a huge fraction of the issues ordinary people care about.

But there’s something ironic about the sniping from the left at the authors of Abundance: both sides are wrong, in approximately the same way, about the politics of climate.

US government policies to reduce carbon emissions produce costs and benefits. But the costs are concentrated in the here-and-now — American consumers pay more for energy, or they get to use less of it — while the benefits accrue globally, disproportionately in poorer countries that are most exposed to the costs of a changing climate, and often very far in the future. While there is a cosmopolitan case for the morality of prioritizing the livelihood of Bangladeshis in the year 2070, this is an area where it would behoove both the abundance liberals and the anti-capitalist leftists to more keenly develop their theory of power — why would the American voters who have the power to elect our government choose to live a less abundant life now in order to improve the conditions of people who are not stakeholders in our politics?

Both of these groups tell themselves lies to square this circle. In the leftist version, the lie is the “Green New Deal” — the idea that the costs of the green transition are actually benefits because they create jobs in green industries. This branding didn’t work when interest rates were at zero and it’s even less compelling now that deficit-financed spending imposes major costs on the rest of the economy. And in the Abundance version, as I wrote, the lie comes from combining a techno-optimist vision of limitless cheap energy combined with a coalitional approach reflecting an acknowledgment that the proposed agenda can only be marketed to people who are willing to prioritize carbon reduction over cheap energy.

In their own ways, both the leftists and the ‘Abundance’ liberals purport to want to get Democratic politicians more in touch with the material concerns of ordinary voters. The former group explicitly wants to lay claim to the mantle of populism. But there is no more elitist project in Democratic politics than the prioritization of carbon reduction. This is a policy agenda advanced by well-funded philanthropic foundations and aimed at a concern that is mostly prioritized by the least materially-deprived voters in the Democratic Party coalition. Meanwhile, polling shows that voters as a whole express generic concern about climate change but have an extremely low willingness to pay to address it. The climate-prioritizers could be right on the merits — the masses have been wrong before and will be wrong again — but whatever they’re up to, it’s definitely not populism.

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Because neither side of these fights wants to admit political reality on climate, discussions of how the Democratic Party needs to change to win are often unproductive. Centrists say the party needs to move rightward to win. Leftists argue that, actually, leftist economic policies are broadly popular. In some policy areas, the leftists are right — higher minimum wages and higher taxes on billionaires are both winning messages for a general election. But these discussions sometimes leave out energy and climate due to the inconvenient-for-both-sides fact that climate policies become unpopular the moment they make voters’ everyday lives more expensive.

A truly populist Democratic Party — in the sense of standing for the desires of ordinary members of the public — would advocate a higher minimum wage and cheaper gasoline produced by a robust American oil and gas industry, because these would make lives more abundant in practice for regular Americans.

Not very long ago, this was what the party argued for. I moderated a panel on the future of the Democratic Party earlier this month, and the economist Jason Furman, who was a senior aide in the Obama White House, shared that President Obama initially touted the expansion of oil and gas production due to the fracking boom that happened on his watch, but as the years passed, Furman was eventually told to leave the talking points about the oil boom out of White House documents. The reason: climate interests in the party didn’t like that it was happening. There was wisdom in the early-Obama-era messaging, and the party should return to it.

Very seriously,

Josh