Has Trump’s return defanged Ezra Klein?

Wonks are a useful sort to have around; no governing class should be without them. A wonk is someone who makes technical improvements to the existing order of things while remaining obedient to its premises. No social order can run entirely on its own propaganda. There does, somewhere, need to be some group of sober and dutiful people applying themselves to secular problems.

For 21st-century America, this has been the “juicebox mafia,” a group of liberal bloggers who came of age in the early 2000s. Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas and Noah Smith were self-conscious wonks – the first, indeed, to treat wonkery as a personal credo.

They called their articles “explainers” rather than op-eds. They declared against both the horse-trading of the Beltway and the baleful influence of dogma. As Klein put it, “the emphasis is on empiricism, not ideology.” They were the first digital natives in DC, and their project was – more than anything else – an attempt to bring the spirit of early Reddit to the halls of government. If the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once represented a certain view of the world, then these wonks were surely its primary spokesmen.

Their moral and political ideas proceeded from the same impulse. For some it is all about the teachings of John Rawls, who held that humans placed behind a “veil of ignorance” without knowledge of their personal circumstances would always opt for a social democracy with market elements; for others it’s “effective altruism”; for the remainder it’s a cruder sort of utilitarianism.

Doctrines like these make up the indispensable high church wing of the state cult of human rights. These people pride themselves on a certain tough-mindedness and honesty about trade-offs but – being true wonks – this has never carried them so far as to question any of the system’s underlying moral premises. Klein gave a succinct summary of the wonk’s dilemma in a 2014 article on “affirmative consent”: “‘Yes Means Yes’ is a terrible law, and I completely support it.”

There is of course a shadow that looms over Abundance, and it’s the man from Mar-a-Lago

Abundance, co-authored by Klein and Derek Thompson, is the old juicebox mafia’s definitive statement to the world in the second Trump era. It is part manifesto, part jeremiad, part postmortem of the failed restoration of 2021-24. Stylistically, it is much chastened: gone is the vaguely Joss Whedon-esque tone that characterized much of the group’s earlier writings. Its thesis is a simple one: that only a huge increase in the quantity of housing, energy and technology can produce the rise in living standards that might hold back the populist tide. What the American left must now commit itself to, then, is the hard technical task of how this increase might be brought about. Social order is everywhere attacked, and only a great heave-ho of wonkery can now save it.

But how? Klein and Thompson have arrived at the same conclusions that Dominic Cummings (an advisor to former prime minister Boris Johnson) has in the UK: that what holds back growth in Anglophone countries is the system of judicial review, local permissions, procurement rules and climate audits that make building anything next to impossible. This “procedure fetish” has massively run up the cost of everything from housing to data centers and railways. According to Klein and Thompson, it was such procedures that doomed the economic program of the Biden administration. Although hundreds of billions were spent on infrastructure and industrial subsidies, these regulations meant that the money was eaten up by lawyers’ fees – and almost nothing was built.

Doing something to fix this system – some bonfire of regulations and a great reining in of judicial review – is the hidden key to growth. Whichever faction unlocks it first will generate a huge amount of material prosperity and probably win politics for the next 50 years. Klein and Thompson recognize this – and so much of Abundance is a slightly frantic attempt to show why this agenda can only be carried out under the left’s leadership.

They should be careful what they wish for, because it is the left that would have the most to lose from such a course. It is impossible to separate the modern American left from the country’s sprawling praetorian class of public servants: the very same people who staff the bureaucracies, NGOs and law firms that block development. As traditional forms of union organization continue to decline, it is these people who increasingly make up the social base of the Democratic party. Its different factions may quarrel, but what unites them is a completely to-the-wall defense of this section of society; all valorize these people in some way. For those who follow Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s the teachers’ unions, the DMV and the shady “community organizer”; for others, such as Eric Swalwell or Amy Klobuchar, it’s spy-bureaucrats like Peter Strzok.

It’s very telling that, amid all the apocalyptic frenzy of Trump 47, the only time the left has so far really bestirred itself was over plans to fire government employees. In making the case for limiting the power of the courts, petty officialdom and the NGOs, Klein and Thompson are asking the left to liquidate itself. Any serious rollback of the kinds of regulations that made California’s high-speed railway run $95 billion over budget would, in practice, mean a massive reduction in public and third-sector headcount – ending it as a social force. They are inviting America’s bureaucratic class – the country’s rulers since 1945 – to revenge itself against MAGA by committing suicide. Klein and Thompson are caught in a bind: maintaining the rule of the bureaucracy requires economic growth, but economic growth can only be achieved by destroying the bureaucracy.

Our authors spend the rest of Abundance trying to escape this dire conclusion. They hark back to FDR and the New Deal to show that growth can be achieved through big government as well. That’s certainly true, but not big government as we’d recognize it, and not the kind you’ll see at the DMV. The Roosevelt administration ignored the courts and gave 25-year-olds plenary authority over massive projects – such as the electrification of the Tennessee Valley. What does this remind you more of: the Biden administration, or DoGE? Whether you want small government or a return to mid-century “state capacity,” you will need much simpler processes, much greater levels of executive responsibility and far fewer lawyers. Either way, millions of people are going to have to lose their jobs.

Elsewhere, Klein and Thompson argue that only the mainstream left can carry out this program, because everyone else is too mired in “zero-sum” thinking to embrace the politics of abundance. Curiously enough, this is something from which their own moral ideas always seem exempt. There is a pious note early on in Abundance about “stolen land,” along with some noise about inequality – this, of course, being the classic example of “zero-sum” thinking: that someone else’s gain is your loss. Abundance rightly makes much of the AI race, but it is precisely the effective altruist ideas people like Klein subscribe to that have done so much to slow down America’s progress on this front.

There’s a fairly lame attempt to dismiss concerns about illegal or legal immigration as a species of zero-sum, because with enough abundance citizens and foreigners would not be competing for the same resources. One should note that this is certainly not the way that Singapore or the Gulf monarchies – the most YIMBY (“Yes in my backyard”) of states – run their affairs; these places have high levels of immigration, but maintain a strict separation between residency and citizenship. If Klein and Thompson really are just interested in cheaper labor, then surely they’d be willing to countenance such a system? Please.

Abundance sets itself against “democracy by lawsuit” and calls for a greater focus on outcomes over procedures. This is all well and good, but, again, these are the last sorts of forces that Klein and Thompson should want to unleash. What is the mainstream left in 2025, apart from a narrow defense of procedure? It has essentially given up on defending anything about the current society – the only argument now is that any alternative to it would be morally unconscionable.

They are inviting America’s bureaucratic class to revenge itself against MAGA by committing suicide

The current line is that the American people must simply accept problems like illegal immigration and street crime because of human rights – and that any attempt to solve these problems is a prelude to tyranny. In this sense, the Abundance agenda – if implemented – would quickly escape its authors’ intentions. If the courts lose the power to decide whether data center construction happens, the public will naturally start to wonder whether they should also lose this power over deportations, and then it’ll be curtains. Once again, Abundance calls for economic reform to forestall social revolution – but you cannot have the former without the latter. There is, of course, a shadow that looms over Abundance, and it’s the man from Mar-a-Lago. Like Klein and Thompson, Donald Trump is someone who’s neither conventionally statist nor conventionally laissez-faire. Like Klein and Thompson, he favors an active state with the power to route around outdated procedures. He also possesses a certain pharaonic sense that recalls the “state capacity” of the Roosevelt and Eisenhower eras: building Space Forces and Big Beautiful Walls.

In the White House, Trump is currently running the closest thing to the Abundance agenda seen yet: he is carrying out a program of deregulation to make construction easier; corralling $500 billion in AI investment; and is, of course, doing more than anyone else to deconstruct the system of “democracy by lawsuit.”

Faced with the most YIMBYish administration in living memory, we find these wonks holding themselves aloof only out of various Joe Scarborough-eqsue moralisms. You start to get the sense that these were the things they really cared about all along.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.