Lawn-Sign Liberalism vs. Supply-Side Progressivism
Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Avid Reader Press, 297 pages, $30
At the turn of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of “what labor wants” added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. “We want more,” Gompers said in an 1890 speech. “We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more.”
More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more.
In the early 1970s, however, progressives started abandoning the quest for plenty. They sought instead to regulate away injustice, pollution, and risk. The expansiveness of President Lyndon Johnson and California Gov. Pat Brown became the austerity of President Jimmy Carter and California Gov. Jerry Brown. Activists unleashed lawsuits to block public and private construction. Government spending began to skew away from public goods like parks and roads and toward income transfers and public employee compensation. Outside the digital world of bits, regulation made achieving more increasingly difficult if not downright impossible—in the public sphere as well as the private.
With the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the politics of more came to mean giving people money or loan guarantees to buy things: houses, college degrees, child care, health insurance. But regulation grew along with the subsidies, and the supply of these goods didn’t expand to meet demand. The subsidies just pushed up prices. Instead of delivering bounty, government programs fed shortages, and shortages fed anger and resentment. “Giving people a subsidy for a good whose supply is choked is like building a ladder to try to reach an elevator that is racing ever upward,” write Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in Abundance.
Klein and Thompson believe in supply-side progressivism, a term Klein coined in a 2021 New York Times column. Abundance is their manifesto on behalf of “a liberalism that builds.” The authors want an activist government to emphasize creation rather than restriction, generating abundance rather than stoking resentment. Although concerned about climate change, they have no sympathy with the degrowthers who invoke it to argue for shutting down industry and imposing stasis. Making people worse off, they believe, is not a progressive cause.
“We imagine a future not of less but of more,” they write. “We do not subscribe to the seductive ideologies of scarcity. We will not get more or better jobs by closing our gates to immigrants. We will not turn back climate change by persuading the world to starve itself of growth. It is not merely that these visions are unrealistic. It is that they are counterproductive. They will not achieve the futures they seek. They will do more harm than good.”
Klein and Thompson take on the “lawn-sign liberalism,” endemic in California, where signs declaring that “Black Lives Matter, Kindness Is Everything, and No Human Being Is Illegal…sit in yards zoned for single families, in communities that organize
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