Fully Automated Luxury Liberalism

Some thoughts on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “abundance agenda”

Much of the talk online this week has been about Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance. As others have pointed out, the book is neither particularly novel nor all that radical in its assessments or recommendations, bringing together various strains of pro-growth liberalism, notably YIMBYism and eco-modernism. Hence, its significance is partly an indication of how little in the way of a positive agenda the center left has been able to offer over the past decade, consumed as it has been with the struggle to “save democracy.” The result of this has been to imply the system as it existed before Donald Trump assumed power in 2017 was fine and dandy, and merely needed to be restored. This was the implication a popular majority of voters rejected in 2024.

There are two points to add to this. First, it’s entirely possible to argue the Biden administration did have a positive agenda, as exemplified all by its investments in infrastructure and industrial reshoring. Indeed, as Klein and Thompson note, Biden took up quite a bit of Trump’s economic nationalism, including tariffs, and arguably made good on it legislatively in a way Trump still has yet to do. However, what Biden didn’t have was a compelling narrative about these projects that he was able to sell to the country; hence, Kamala Harris’s comically tepid rhetoric during last year’s campaign about an “opportunity economy” and bland platform of small-business loans.

Second, whatever positive achievements we might attribute to the Biden administration, it has become impossible to deny that blue states have been horrifically misgoverned in recent years. Even if Democrats wanted to keep telling themselves otherwise, the steady exodus of middle-class residents from California, New York, Illinois, and so on will soon mean they simply can’t if they want to survive as a nationally competitive party. As The Liberal Patriot’s Nate Moore documented a few days ago, if present trends continue, the next reapportionment of congressional seats and electoral college votes will come heavily at Democrats’ expense, making it harder for them to win elections.

The problem with blue states for most residents is that they’re expensive to live in and also poorly run; the problem with the Biden-era federal government, likewise, was that it spent a lot of money while not delivering tangible improvements to the lives of voters. Add these two things up, and it isn’t surprising that you have a party in retreat. Combine that with the fact that the opposing party’s figurehead, whatever his shortcomings in fulfilling his promises, is unabashedly promising a new “golden age” and—more so now than in his first term—showing himself capable of bold action in pursuit of his agenda.

Add to all that the realignment of Silicon Valley—the industry that comes closest (whatever its actual shortcomings) to representing the future, promise, and possibility—toward the Republican Party after years in which it seemed like a lock to the Democrats, and you have a party that has not only lost some big donors but is unable to project a future better than the past. To a large extent, it has brought this on itself. The two major reactions to MAGA within the progressive coalition were “America is already great” and “America was never great.” The latter was the ostensibly progressive view, yet it was rarely if ever tied to any vision of progress. First of all, “America” was to be abolished via open borders; second of all, we were all going to drown along with the polar bears in a few years anyway, so survival, perhaps with a side of reparations for those whose ancestry demanded it, was the best we could hope for. (This austere vision is worth contrasting with Langston Hughes’s call to “make America America again.”)

Abundance harks back to a somewhat forgotten dimension of 2010s left-of-center discourse, remembered in somewhat meme-ified form as “fully automated luxury communism,” the title of Aaron Bastani’s 2018 Verso book. (“Gay” and “space” have often been added by those mockingly referencing the phrase.) Bastani’s book, released amid the “techlash” provoked by the left’s Brexit/Trump misinformation panic, was the bookend of this discourse, which encompassed things like David Graeber’s 2012 essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s 2013 “manifesto for an accelerationist politics,” Mark Fisher’s late work on “acid communism.” All of these writers sensed something that has become more evident in the meantime: that left politics, from at least Marx onward, had been deeply tied to the promise of technologically enabled abundance, and that linkage had somehow come undone.

Near the end of their book, Klein and Thompson cite Marx in invoking the need to “unburden the forces of production and make possible that which it had been impossible to imagine.” “There is much he got wrong,” they then clarify, presumably meaning the part about transcending the capitalist mode of production. Where Marx attributed the “fettering of production” to the capitalist system’s inextricable drive for profit, the authors of Abundance instead see “[a]n economy run amok with useless fettering”—zoning laws, well-meaning but cumbersome permitting requirements, frivolous lawsuits. To their credit, they acknowledge the role of their own class of affluent, educated professionals in bringing about this situation. The solution, embodied in the book, is not revolution, but persuading their fellow PMCs to embrace the “abundance agenda.”

The problem with fully automated luxury liberalism is that it isn’t a utopia, but something that already exists, at least in some form, for those who can afford it, who as it happens will make up the vast majority of Klein’s and Thompson’s readers. Even those living in the most enshittified blue cities and states may kvetch about rising costs and public transit not working, but the reason they didn’t see MAGA coming and still struggle to make sense of it is the same reason they were baffled by outrage over inflation. The best hope for the “abundance agenda” is that the MAGA golden age fails to materialize, and that their party finds a salesman with anything close to Trump’s mythmaking gifts.

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This week in Compact

• Editor-at-large Greg Conti on why Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest is, in fact, a free-speech issue

• Lori Wallach on Big Tech’s attempt to get Trump to use trade agreements to protect industry interests

• Hollis Robbins on how the seemingly politically neutral restructuring of the university lead to the politicization of campuses in the 2010s

• Bruna Frascolla on a deal to cede control over the Brazilian Amazon to a shady “green capital” company

• Jenin Younes on how the Biden administration’s censorship apparatus set precedents that are coming back to bite the left

• Columnist Christopher Caldwell on Trump’s weaponization of the civil rights apparatus

• John Judis on the dimming prospects of the Democrats

• Jacob Savage on the dimming prospects facing young white male writers

Thanks for reading, as always.