Wonks against democracy

The anti-populist theory of power recently proffered by Ezra Klein betrays the elitist ethos at the core of the centrist vision

I had not been planning to write about Abundance — by which I mean both the book and the astroturfed movement that’s adopted it as branding — again. I’ve expended plenty of words on the subject already and, as I wrote a few weeks back, I find the much of the pro-Abundance discourse frustratingly (and perhaps deliberately) vague and evasive.

In this respect, a recent NYT piece by Abundance coauthor Ezra Klein has only contributed further to that feeling. Klein opens by expressing his surprise that the book has elicited such voluminous discussion, saying he was initially “worried that its argument would be too agreeable to generate much debate.” Abundance, he adds, was intended as a critique of local Democratic governance in particular states, making it somewhat bemusing that blue state figures like Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul have received it quite warmly.

I don’t even know where to begin here. With the exception of Klein, others in the constellation of wonks, think tanks, and centrist Democrats that comprise the Abundance project — including Klein’s own coauthor Derek Thompson — have been quite explicit about its factional purpose and anti-left orientation. It’s also misleading for Klein to frame his book as one whose arguments are just uncontroversial common sense, and as something mainly oriented towards local and state politics. Abundance quite explicitly positions itself as a sweeping agenda for a new liberalism, and it’s just silly to pretend that it doesn’t.

So, once again, much of what’s going on here feels very slippery and dishonest.

There is, however, something more tangible in the main argument of Klein’s piece that I think is worth engaging with. Putting aside his repeated suggestion that the Abundance project is not actually incompatible with left wing priorities like anti-monopolism and economic redistribution, we do eventually come to this more clarifying portion (which I’ll quote at some length for the sake of convenience):

Many of my more leftist friends and antagonists have asked me if “Abundance” has a theory of power. I often say it does — but they’re not going to like it. And that’s in part because its theory of power is liberal rather than populist.

Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist, defines populism as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups: ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite.’” Different forms of populism populate these groups differently. Right-wing populism defines the people in geographic and nationalistic and racialist terms; the corrupt elite tend to be educated, foreign and cosmopolitan. Left-wing populism tends to sever society economically: the 99 percent against the 1 percent or the corporations against everyone else.

What both forms of populism share is a tendency to treat virtue as a fixed property of groups and policy as a way of redistributing power from the disfavored to the favored. When I said we needed “a liberalism that builds,” David Dayen, the editor of The American Prospect, responded that “we need a liberalism that builds power” and that the way to get it is for the government to start “actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”

Every policy, in this telling, has two goals. One is the goal of the policy or the project; perhaps you’re trying to decarbonize the economy or build affordable housing or increase competition in the market for hearing aids. But the other is the redistribution of power among groups: Does this policy leave unions stronger or weaker? Environmental justice groups? Corporations?

…My view of power is more classically liberal. In his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.”

To take this view means power will be ill used by your friends as well as by your enemies, by your political opponents as well as by your neighbors. From this perspective, there are no safe reservoirs of power. Corporations sometimes serve the national interest and sometimes betray it. The same is true for governments, for unions, for churches, for nonprofits.

A lot is lost when you collapse the complex interests of politics into a simple morality play. There are often different corporations on different sides of the same issue. There are often different unions on different sides of the same issue.

Klein is right about one thing here, because I definitely don’t like his stated theory of power or find it convincing. I expect the pluralist narrative he offers us in this piece will scan for some readers as nuanced. The world, after all, is a very complex place, and the same can be said for most political issues of real significance. Moral rectitude isn’t always cleanly distributed and actors of every kind — individual, collective, and institutional — are perfectly capable of engaging in bad and destructive behaviour.

The thing is, no one really disputes this fact, and asserting it as part of a generalized theory of power has the effect of flattening the actually existing dynamics of power in a hideously unequal country like the United States. The left doesn’t centre the question of corporate power because it maintains some naive belief in the inherent virtue of non-corporate actors, but because corporate interests objectively possess a much greater degree of political and economic influence than others. They also, importantly, possess different motivations. A corporation’s behaviour is primarily driven by a visceral drive for profit, which is the major reason corporate priorities so frequently conflict with social and public interests. And, while there are indeed plenty of competing interests in a complex society, not all interests are created equal.

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is how Klein wants to interpret the alternative theory of power he’s criticizing.