Abundance is a casualty of the Realignment

The problem is the professional class

In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe a defining failure of modern liberalism: its inability to build. High-speed rail lines stall for decades. Housing permits are bogged down in lawsuits. Infrastructure projects balloon in cost. The energy transition is championed in theory but obstructed in practice. Why did a political tradition once associated with grand public works devolve into a morass of bureaucratic procedure?

The book traces this paralysis to the rise of the public interest liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, one defined by Ralph Nader’s consumer protection movement. This was a liberalism more interested in suing the government and limiting building projects in the name of environmental protection than it was in creating jobs for the working class through large-scale public works projects.

But what Klein and Thompson describe here is no accident of history. It is the inevitable consequence of the political realignment that made liberalism the tribune of a highly…