"Abundance" Is How Dems Lose To Trump

Ezra Klein’s new book is supercharging elites’ campaign to deter Democrats from challenging billionaires and corporate power.

April 4, 2025

Last week, Abundance co-author Ezra Klein went viral on social media. In a widely shared video clip from Jon Stewart’s podcast, Klein described the maddeningly bureaucratic process for deploying rural broadband funding under the Biden administration’s bipartisan infrastructure bill — a procedure so cumbersome that barely any of the entities seeking these grants have even finished the application process, years after the bill’s passage.

The anecdote hit hard — Stewart groaned and cursed as Klein elegantly demonstrated the central thesis of his book, Abundance: Red tape and overregulation, allegedly the outgrowth of progressives’ obsession with process over outcomes, have become primary drivers of scarcity in America. Boosted by Fox News, Elon Musk, and thousands of retweets, the soundbite was the kind of fable of inefficient liberal government that Ronald Reagan told throughout the 1980s.

There was just one problem with the story’s premise: It is demonstrably false.

SNIP Rather, this burdensome procedure was created at the insistence of vote-withholding Republican senators and their cable industry donors — companies seeking to block funding to upstarts that might challenge their regional telecom monopolies or force them to provide affordable prices for broadband. After they loaded up the funding legislation with a Byzantine process, telecom giants and GOP-led states — not protocol-obsessed lefties or overly rigid bureaucrats — then manufactured a monthslong fight over what constitutes “affordable” rates, delaying quick funding for the build-out.

https://www.levernews.com/abundance-is-how-dems-lose-to-trump/

And I will add, lose big. Tomorrow is a massive protest day across the country. Let's keep that momentum alive without shooting ourselves in the foot again.