When a Democrat contemplates their nation’s biggest problems today, minimum lot sizes in suburban housing codes probably don’t rank very high on the list.

After all, the US president is a reality star turned insurrectionist, who’s ordering investigations of his political enemies, subverting court orders, gutting entire federal agencies, and fomenting a global trade war. To many liberals, this may not feel like a moment for turning inward and sweating the details of blue America’s permitting regulations.

But a new book asks Democrats to do precisely that. In Abundance, journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson catalog American liberalism’s failures to deliver material plenty — the housing shortages that plague blue cities, the green infrastructure that Congressional Democrats funded but then failed to actually build, the high-speed rail system that California promised but never delivered. Klein and Thompson argue that these disappointments have a common source: Since the 1970s, American liberals have been more concerned with obstructing harmful economic development than promoting the beneficial kind. Democrats have prioritized process over outcomes and favored stasis over growth, most notably through their support for zoning restrictions, stringent environmental laws, and attaching costly conditions to public infrastructure spending.

To revitalize American progressivism, they sketch an “abundance agenda”: a series of regulatory reforms and public investment programs aimed at facilitating higher rates of housing development, infrastructure construction, and technological progress.

Klein and Thompson speak for a broader faction of “abundance liberals,” which encompasses the Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, various pro-innovation think tanks, and scores of commentators. In addition to Abundance, the faction has recently produced two other books outlining its critique of American liberalism’s evolution since the 1970s, Why Nothing Works by Marc Dunkelman and Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum.

It is surely true that blue states’ governance failures are not this moment’s most pressing crisis. But Democratic areas’ inability to avert cost-of-living crises — or to build infrastructure on time and budget — is a political liability for the party. Such mismanagement has not only called liberals’ competence into question, but also chased millions of people out of large blue states and into red ones over the past 10 years.

California and New York have been shrinking while Florida and Texas have been growing — trends that will make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College or Congress after the 2030 census. Disempowering an increasingly authoritarian GOP should be Democrats’ top priority in 2025. But bringing abundant housing, energy, and infrastructure to blue states is conducive to that task. This makes Klein and Thompson’s analysis politically relevant.

Nevertheless, not everyone on the left buys what they’re selling. And Abundance has some real flaws.

In their concern with winning over progressive skeptics, Klein and Thompson sometimes elide the genuine tradeoffs between their vision and progressive ideology. For example, while they lament the stifling impact of various environmental regulations on housing and clean energy construction, they’re cagey about precisely how, and how much, they want to change such laws. Rather than stating plainly that they’re willing to reduce regulatory obstacles to fossil fuel infrastructure for the sake of abetting the build-out of renewables — a position Klein has endorsed in his New York Times column — they argue that going into details about how environmental laws should be amended would be beside the point, since “no individual law” would solve all the problems they identify and “What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just legislation.” Such slipperiness may make Abundance more palatable to progressives, but also invites distrust.

This said, much of the left’s criticism of abundance liberalism is off-base and unfair. One especially prominent charge is that the abundance agenda entails a retreat from the progressive movement’s commitments to economic justice and equality. In this account, Klein and Thompson want Democrats to stop catering to the particular needs of poor and working-class Americans — through expansions of social welfare programs or labor regulations — and start concentrating on maximizing economic growth.

The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes that the abundance movement views stagnation as a “national emergency” that requires “liberals to sideline their quest for a Scandinavian-style social democracy.” And he fears that the pursuit of Klein and Thompson’s vision could yield a less equitable society.

Wallace-Wells nevertheless endorses some aspects of the abundance agenda. Other critics are less measured. Dylan Gyauch-Lewis argues in the American Prospect that abundance liberals prize “growth above all,” and that their ideology is merely a repackaging of “free-market dogma.”

Likewise, the Baffler’s Alex Bronzini-Vender derides the abundance agenda as a “Koch-funded initiative” aimed at “reversing the Democratic Party’s skepticism of neoliberal orthodoxy.”

These criticisms are off-base in more ways than one.

First, it’s simply not true that Klein and Thompson call on liberals to abandon welfare state expansion or to pursue growth at all costs. They explicitly state that “redistribution is important” — their argument isn’t that........

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