Gavin Newsom hasn’t exactly hidden his presidential ambitions over the past half decade, but only now has the California governor finally conceded that his state has become a political punchline rather than a model, demonstrating the consequences of progressive governance. In a de facto admission of policy failure, Newsom signed two rare bipartisan bills dramatically rolling back much of the state’s 50-year-old California Environmental Quality Act, allowing new housing and property developments to move forward without facing the full force of the environmental leviathan’s regulatory rage.

“To the [‘Not In My Backyard’] movement that’s now being replaced by the [‘Yes In My Backyard’] movement, go YIMBYs,” Newsom said when announcing the CEQA rollback. “Thank you for your abundant mindset — that’s a plug for Ezra Klein.”

Newsom was referencing the 4-month-old policy book Abundance, by Klein and Derek Thompson. Both are vociferous and lifelong liberals, and, theoretically, the book’s thesis is squarely left of center. The core assumption at the heart of it is that climate change is an existential threat to humanity that requires a whole-of-government approach to transition away from fossil fuels.

In practice, the book has been interpreted by much of the Left as an indictment of Democratic governance. And that’s because, despite the Democratic optimists who view Abundance as a deus ex machina and policy pathway out of the party’s current despair, Abundance is absolutely antithetical to the core beliefs and practices of the most indigo cities and states.

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California lost a net 588,000 residents from 2020 to 2023, with more than a 1% population decline since before the pandemic. A third of Californians polled by the Public Policy Institute of California in 2023 said they were considering leaving due to housing costs, and for more than a decade, the state has seen annual losses of tens of thousands of low-income residents, who have consistently left at higher numbers than the middle class.

Abundance posits the correct reason........

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