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-educated legal and managerial class. That realignment can be directly traced to the political upheaval of the 1960s, when Democrats started losing the votes of blue-collar working class whites and replaced them with the votes of highly educated professionals.

In short, liberalism stopped building because it lost the people who formed the core political constituency for abundance.

From Labor to Lawyers

During the New Deal and postwar era, liberalism was inseparable from labor. Its core base was made up of industrial unions—steelworkers, autoworkers, and construction workers whose livelihoods depended on national investment, infrastructure, and physical growth. These voters didn’t just support big projects. Their families lived off them.

But beginning in the 1960s, that base began to erode. As the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, environmentalism, and antiwar activism, it alienated large segments of its white working-class coalition. At the same time, it gained new constituencies: college-educated professionals, especially in law, academia, and the nonprofit sector. The balance shifted—from labor to lawyers.

Everett Carll Ladd captured this class inversion in a prescient 1976 journal article titled Liberalism Upside Down. Ladd noted an emerging class role reversal among whites, with an increasingly Republican white working class and the newly college-educated elite a bulwark of the Democratic Party. He wrote:

Over the last decade, a decisive inversion has taken place in the relationship established during the New Deal of class to sociopolitical commitments. The high social strata now consistently provide a greater measure of support for liberal programs and candidacies than do the lower strata. This is no temporary phenomenon. No return to the New Deal pattern should be expected.

This new coalition brought with it a different vision of what politics was for. Material abundance was no longer the north star. This gave way to a range of interests, from climate activists more interested in controlling growth to policy experts more interested in optimizing and tweaking incentives rather than flooding the zone with projects that supported the livelihood of American workers.

By the early 2000s, this shift had fully worked its way through our politics. David Brooks wrote about the “Bobos” — the bourgeois bohemians redefining the ethos of America’s elite from the big-building corporate raiders of the 1980s (epitomized by Donald Trump) to a “crunchy” version of conscious consumption. Back in 2004, Tom Edsall wrote about the rising professional class in the Democratic Party, and how it was intrinsically hostile to a material, New Deal style of politics:

Knowledge workers with postsecondary degrees are not voting Democratic to advance their economic interests, as did trade unionists, European immigrants, urban Catholics, rural whites, and newly enfranchised blacks during the heyday of the twentieth-century Democratic Party. Indeed, the knowledge-worker class often espouses values and beliefs adversarial to America’s business enterprises, mounting critiques of corporate greed and profiteering. Instead, the central political motivation of the new Democratic professional class has been to support a politics that reflects its beliefs in a range of recently democratized rights centered on autonomy, self-development, and individualism. Although such voters do not seek pork-barrel benefits from the government, they do seek government funding of programs consistent with their ideological commitments—for example, government affirmation and enforcement of such key rights as women’s rights, the right to sexual privacy, the right to self-expression, the right to agreed upon race and gender preferences, and the right to claim once-stigmatized identities like homosexuality. In addition, upscale Democratic activists focus on environmental issues, antiglobalization, freedom of artistic expression (films, lyrics, television or radio programming, Internet content, etc.), and ideological support for tolerance of difference and for a broadly conceived multiculturalism.

When the Builders Leave

This transformation didn’t just reflect changing liberal beliefs. It marked a sea change in who liberals were. Industrial union membership is now at record lows. And while organized labor remains a formal partner of the Democratic Party, its political clout is at a low ebb.

Many rank-and-file union members have drifted toward the GOP, especially in energy and construction. The Teamsters’ refusal to endorse Kamala Harris in 2024—after decades of reliably backing Democratic nominees—is just the latest sign of that split. It traces back to Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, when he actively courted labor and the AFL-CIO failed to endorse George McGovern.

The Vietnam War marked a critical turning point. For liberal Democrats, the failure of the war marked a repudiation of organization men like Robert McNamara who thought he could micromanage Southeast Asia from Washington as he had the Ford Motor Company. And as Klein and Thompson write, the environmental movement took off right around this time, with the first Earth Day in 1970. This marked the beginning of a liberal revolt against the size and scale of postwar America—from the scale of America’s foreign policy ambitions to unchecked suburbanization.

But this change first required the Democrats to become an egghead party—one willing to sacrifice the material comforts of booming postwar America for postmaterialist aims like human rights and a clean environment. And that meant a wealthier, college-educated base, not a working class base that depended on growth in the tangible economy to get ahead.

So, while liberal activists protested the war, the hard hat became a symbol of Nixon’s campaign.

The unions leave the Democratic Party

That fracture never fully healed. Unions are largely allied with real estate developers and energy companies in supporting the construction of large-scale projects, but they are no longer central to Democratic policymaking. Their priorities often clash with the prevailing concerns of the party’s professional-class base. So they are consulted, but sidelined.

Abundance frequently cites the work of Paul Sabin’s Public Citizens. Sabin, who has written extensively of the sclerosis instigated by the public interest left, himself acknowledged the sociological dimension of this conflict, writing that the New Left was frequently “attacking economic development projects, such as the Alaskan pipeline, that generated jobs for the white, male, working-class voters who traditionally supported the Democratic Party.”

The politics of abundance requires builders. But those builders—both literal and political—are no longer the center of the Democratic coalition. And the kinds of people who would have fought for ambitious infrastructure and energy projects have either exited the party or been quietly pushed to its margins.

A return to New Deal liberalism would require more than policy tweaks. It would require a different coalition—one where the interests of hardhat union workers trump those of environmental NGOs. Until then, abundance will remain a distant dream on the horizon.