By installing woefully under-qualified loyalists across hollowed-out federal agencies and canceling needed research, Donald Trump’s administration has undercut the government’s ability to tackle big challenges. This could not have come at a worse time, as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their influential new book, Abundance (now in its 21st week on the NYT Best Sellers List.) They argue that America desperately needs a capable government—or strong “state capacity”—to efficiently produce more things people need to improve their lives, including abundant and affordable housing, clean energy, and lifesaving medicines.
Slowing the administration’s destruction of state capacity and ultimately strengthening it enough to manifest Klein and Thompson’s vision, is a tall task that will require another kind of abundance entirely, civic abundance. By this, I mean a robust civil society and engaged citizens who are willing to vote, deliberate, organize, and advocate. This is critical not only to generating tangible benefits like ample, affordable clean energy, but to democracy itself, which cannot prevail in today’s backsliding world without citizens willing to defend and renew it.
This argument, however, runs headlong into a core concern among some abundance advocates, who view civic engagement as a hindrance to the strong state capacity they seek. As Klein puts it, “There’s a tension that I find difficult to resolve, between wanting things to be very small-d democratic and also recognizing that small-d democratic can get very captured [by special interests].”
In one sense, he’s right. As Klein and others have documented, democratic participation can slow or stop big projects—NIMBY-ish groups blocking needed housing, endless litigation, and environmental reviews grinding high-speed rail to a halt. But all policymaking can be captured by special interests, whether it happens in quiet elite conversations where big campaign contributions are a big factor, or in raucous public forums where community groups pack the hall. In either case, the solution isn’t less democracy, it’s better democracy.
Some abundance advocates recognize this. Saikat Chakrabarti is the co-founder of New Consensus, an organization dedicated to creating government capacity “to achieve economic renewal and transformation.” He argues that post-World War II Europe did a better job than America producing big public goods like high-speed rail by “bringing society in” to the process. By contrast, America took a top-down Robert Moses approach that included bulldozing communities, producing backlash that has stymied building for decades. And Zachary Liscow, former Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget, proposes ample “front-end civic participation” in exchange for reduced back-end litigation. That is, do the democratic work upfront then get on a fast track, rather than use the fast-track to avoid the democratic work and then suffer the blowback.
Consider the results this can bring. The Grand Paris Express, among Europe’s largest urban projects with 68 new stations and 200 kilometers of track, developed with communities having a strong voice in the design phase, creating buy-in along the way. California’s Transformative Climate Communities are resident-led, state-funded projects in low-income neighborhoods that create environmental, health and economic benefits. Fresno’s TCC initiative, for instance, has planted over a thousand trees, installed scores of new electric vehicle chargers, and provided solar power for a growing number of low-income households. Medellin’s cable cars, built to connect impoverished neighborhoods to the city’s main transit system, involved extensive community engagement, creating resident ownership in the project’s success. Residents, community groups, and businesses shaped New York City’s beloved High Line through public meetings and design sessions.
Such productive public participation is more possible than ever because democracies around the world, including the U.S., have innovated on the poorly designed, check-the-box public hearings that emerged from the “maximum feasible participation” ethos of the ‘60s, or the litigation strategy that may have once served Ralph Nader’s consumer activism well but is now contributing to endless gridlock. These democratic innovations include citizens assemblies (random samples of residents learning about and deliberating on solutions to public problems); participatory budgeting (communities working together to decide how to invest a portion of public spending); and next-generation online platforms (that support public dialogue and decision-making). They can lead to historic accomplishments, as when Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies helped catalyze a constitutional amendment and subsequent legislation that legalized abortion, aligning public policy with how public opinion has evolved in that traditionally Catholic nation.
Civic abundance can strengthen and complement the “material” abundance of efficient homebuilding, electric grid upgrades, and medical breakthroughs, beginning with how well-designed public participation helps communities figure out what they actually want and need from a project and enables them to help shape it. As the journalist Timothy Noah argues, “People should have some power to make their communities livable, because if your community doesn’t do that, it’s doubtful outside forces will.” This is not, to be clear, a call for the absolute veto power that abundance advocates decry exists in too many places to make ambitious public goods possible, but rather for a fair share of democratic voice and influence so that people and their communities can help shape, and thereby develop a felt stake, in their shared future.
Indeed, “people power” and political movements are often needed to overcome major obstacles to shared, rather than hoarded, abundance: the obstructing and corrupting influence of wealthy corporations. Some abundance advocates downplay this factor, focusing instead on (very real) problems of overregulation, bureaucratic sclerosis and (poorly done) public participation. But clean and affordable energy is thwarted more by fossil fuel lobbying than community groups protesting windmills; big pharma is a bigger driver of unaffordable drug prices than overly demanding federal research grants or medical manufacturers facing too much red tape. As Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg have pointed out in this publication, “the overwhelming cause of high drug prices is not insufficient numbers of pill factories, but monopolies up and down the supply chain charging monopoly prices.” Waleed Shahid of Georgetown’s Institute of Politics and Public Service adds that abundance politics and economic-populist movements need each other to accomplish their common goal of a fairer society that gives regular working people e security and ample opportunity we all deserve.
Klein and Thompson’s book begins by painting a picture of a future suffused with near-effortless plenty. For example:
Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.
But such a vision cannot be realized through top-down technocratic policy making alone; it will require a flourishing democracy in which citizenship itself is abundant, and in which people power can help stem the distorting influence of corporate power over government policy.
In the end, there’s a deeper issue: material abundance needs a civic soul. Ours is a hyper-consumer society that fails to balm today’s epidemic of isolation and loneliness. This is a malady that aspiring tech oligarchs seek to profit from rather than solve, through AI therapists, pets, DIY pals, and “lovers” that simulate intimacy without requiring anything in return—beyond, that is, endless digital “engagement” and ever more personal data. The reality is people hunger not just for affordable housing and medicine, as crucial as they are, but also for meaning, belonging, connection, and purpose. Technological wonders won’t satisfy these spiritual needs. If abundance is to fulfill its promise, we need a strong civil society, meaningful citizenship, and inclusive communities with real human relationships to go along with it.
