“Abundance” is a recently published book by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that, ironically, you might not be able to find at a bookstore.

When I went looking and couldn’t find it, I approached a bookseller and asked if they had any copies. Luckily, they had just received a shipment that day and got it for me from the backroom. Supply seems unable to keep up with the demand for this new vision of the future.

Something is going wrong on the American left and in our politics in general. In the post-2024 election gloom, there are many theories about why. Klein and Thompson land on a worthy one: “To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.”

Seems simple, right? However, governments haven’t been able to follow through as of late. In fact, Democratic states like Illinois seem to have a harder time building things than Republican states.

One example Klein and Thompson discuss is California’s high-speed rail project. In 2008, voters were in favor of a high-speed rail line connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. By 2025, the state still hasn’t built the project but has spent billions of dollars on environmental reviews, lawsuits, consultants and the like. It’s backing down from connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles for now, for a smaller, far less practical line between Merced and Bakersfield.

If liberals want high-speed rail lines as one solution to the climate crisis, why not fast-track these projects through environmental reviews? Surely, a high-speed rail line would be more environmentally friendly than a cacophony of cars chugging along Interstate 5 in California. But government red tape cannot get it done.

Take housing as another example. People are migrating from blue states like New York, where housing is scarce, to red states like Texas.

Houston has a quirky feature that has enabled the city to avoid the housing crisis: It’s never had a zoning code. People can build whatever buildings they want, including affordable housing, on any piece of land in Houston. While this isn’t true for all cities in red states, the inverse — that is, the enactment of policies perpetuating the housing crisis — is more true for blue states.

Thompson has been beating the drum on a research paper that argues “cities with more liberal residents tend to enact more restrictive zoning policies and permit fewer new housing units each year than similar conservative cities.”

We have this type of thing in Champaign-Urbana. There are liberal residents with “science is real” and “love is love” signs in their front yards who oppose affordable housing and upzoning. The same people who fight for justice and equality in most other circumstances show up to community meetings wanting to close up their single-family neighborhoods to any affordable multi-family development.

The “Abundance” solution is this: supply-side economics initiated by an empowered government. The focus is not on deregulating the market, but on deregulating the government itself. This distinguishes their cause from free market libertarianism because Klein and Thompson advocate for a stronger state — a state that acts instead of regulating itself from action.

They mean actually acting in the real world. The government already fights internally to allocate funds, but implementing effective projects with that money is crucial. One federal example the authors provide is former President Joe Biden’s rural broadband initiative.

States began applying for the program in 2021. Due to delays in processing applications, the first batch of money was projected to launch in 2025. Now, the Trump administration threatens to overhaul the program and hand some of the funds to Elon Musk’s Starlink company.

Trying to do everything often results in doing nothing. That’s the problem with liberalism in the 21st century. This “everything-bagel liberalism” — the authors’ term — has good intentions but is ineffective. Yes, in an ideal world, all of our semiconductor plants would have on-site daycares and be LEED-certified. However, in the real world, we need to have sensible priorities and break down unnecessary barriers.

As an urban planning student, Klein and Thompson’s hair-pulling anecdotes of housing and transportation projects gone wrong were all too familiar and a major reason I wanted to study planning. I could see how urban planning policy was at the forefront of many of our political battles today. Their book provides a framework for a way out.

My only concern with the “Abundance” agenda is the mistakes that can happen in hastened government processes. There are well-intentioned reasons for environmental reviews and community engagement, procedures popularized in the late ’60s and early ’70s, exactly the period in history when Thompson asserts the government became less effective at building.

One curious absence in Klein and Thompson’s housing conversation is gentrification — another reason why new housing projects are opposed by long-time residents. It’s not just single-family homeowners who oppose new housing; there are also lower-income minority populations who are concerned about displacement in their neighborhoods.

Despite this, it’s a minor quibble in a sea of good ideas and needed approaches. The Trump administration is thrusting us into a period of scarcity, and abundance is the counter-narrative that liberals must push to combat President Donald Trump’s attacks on our government.

“Our politics is split right now between a left that defends government even when it doesn’t work and a right that wants to destroy government even when it is working,” Klein said in an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” “What we need is a political party that actually makes government work. Democrats can be that party — they should be that party. But it requires them to confront what they have done to make government fail.”

I have lamented the lack of utopias in today’s public imagination. Dystopia and doubt are everywhere, and I sometimes think our constant doomerism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“Abundance” made me feel, for the first time in a long time, that a hopeful future will return and there are brighter futures to imagine. It made me feel naive — sort of giddy, a seemingly impossible feat in these early days of the Trump administration.

If you’ve read my column on the slow death of neoliberalism and are curious about a new political order you might support, I recommend an abundant serving of Klein and Thompson’s new release.

Grace is a graduate student studying urban planning.

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