Last year, in the wake of the Trumpian seizure of power and Elon Musk’s vandalizing government agencies, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson sparked a brief tizzy among the chattering classes with their book “Abundance Liberalism.” The Democratic establishment was in a funk over losing the 2024 election, and the book seemed to offer a panacea for winning over the fickle American voter.
The idea was that Democrats should drop their phobias about environmental degradation, urban sprawl, interstate highway construction and other quality-of-life considerations, and instead engineer the economy to crank out more stuff for the masses — housing, green energy jobs, infrastructure. All they have to do is defang regulations contained in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, zoning restrictions and other examples of Luddite do-gooderism. Grateful voters would flock to the Democratic Party, and right-wing extremism would lose its steam.
There are a few problems with this thesis. A New York Times reviewer noted that the authors seemed to be channeling “a few elite finance and tech bros in two or three coastal cities.” Another reviewer pointed out the incongruity of proposing to gut regulations precisely when Trump and Musk were taking a chainsaw to the federal government.
We can be even more pointed. Ever Since Ronald Reagan appointed James Watt to head the Interior Department and Anne Gorsuch Burford to helm the Environmental Protection Agency, Republicans have relentlessly sought to eliminate regulations. Their success was mixed, but once Trump added his three — and counting — appointees to the Supreme Court, safety, environmental and other policies have fallen by the score. On a political level, Klein and Thompson’s proposals are nonsensical: getting into a bidding war with Republicans over cutting regulations is like being suckered into a hot dog-eating contest with Joey Chestnut.
Besides, Democratic administrations have tried to enact policies that improve the safety and prosperity of Americans. Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act wasn’t nothing, whatever progressives think: At its height, 21 million people were insured who otherwise would have been out of luck. Joe Biden pushed through the largest infrastructure program in decades, and the Chips and Science Act was a welcome start in reshoring high-tech manufacturing.
The result? Since 2010, Republicans and GOP front groups have filed over 2000 lawsuits against ACA, and the second Trump regime has succeeded in gutting it. Trump has used executive orders to halt tens of billions of dollars of Biden’s infrastructure funding, and Trump 2.0’s equity stakes in tech companies are mainly a lever to financially benefit the president and his cronies personally by manipulating the companies’ share prices through executive edicts and social media postings.
To gloss over the rabidly partisan aspect of why government can’t do things to improve Americans’ lives in the breezy manner the authors have done — something that is obvious to any sentient observer — is either implausibly naïve or disingenuous.
There is another, more important reason why “Abundance Liberalism,” at least as the authors conceive it, is unlikely to work: The groups it hopes to convert don’t want it.
There is another, more important reason why “Abundance Liberalism,” at least as the authors conceive it, is unlikely to work: The groups it hopes to convert don’t want it.
The evidence for this startling conclusion comes from the most significant opinion study you’ve never read or read about. Published in May, the Johns Hopkins Agora Institute and ReD Associates conducted an in-depth research of conservatives in three red counties in Michigan, South Carolina and Wyoming. The authors describe the content of “Faith, Freedom, Family, Place: An Ethnographic Study of Conservative Americans’ Relationships to Democracy” as follows:
This study relies on ethnographic research: sustained immersion in people’s homes, lives, and communities through extensive interviews, observations, participation, and relationship-building. Where much democracy research documents what people say they believe, ethnography examines how and why political worldviews take shape within the full context of daily experiences, relationships, and social environments.
The most fundamental issue the researchers attempted to resolve is the relationship their subjects had with what is commonly thought of as the American secular faith in democracy. What the study found is that the respondents either had a notion of what constituted democracy that greatly differed from what is taught in Civics 101 — when such a course is even offered — or rejected outright the very concept of democracy. In fact, the latter view was the majority opinion:
14 out of 21 participants in this study had an immediate negative reaction when asked about democracy . . . Sarah (mid 30s, WY), a homeschooling mother, put it plainly: “I don’t like the word democracy.”
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Let that sink in. It’s what many of us expected, but it’s still surprising to see it in print, given the almost phobic avoidance by major media, academia and think tanks of any discussion of whether Americans actually believe in the nation’s unofficial civic religion of democracy. It may also explain why ordinary, non-elite conservatives are untroubled by Donald Trump’s assertions that he would be “dictator on day one” or that he intended to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. On the contrary, that’s what they want.
Throughout our history, major domestic quarrels have erupted over economics: the prairie rebellion of the 1890s, the Progressive era, the New Deal. Political scientists commonly believe economics is the predominant political issue for most people, and they view it from the perspective of their own self-interest. From Gore Vidal’s notion that “The only subject that a mature people in a so-called republic should be interested in is who collects what money, to spend on what, for whom” to the Clinton campaign’s “It’s the economy, stupid!”, the primacy of economics is the conventional wisdom. And it’s the leitmotif of Klein and Thompson’s book.
But for all the major media’s hand-wringing about “economic anxiety” being a driving force behind Trump’s election victory in 2016, there is little discussion of that sort among the study’s respondents. There is one reference by Maria from Michigan to losing her job as a result of “the economic collapse under Obama,” which actually occurred under George W. Bush. (Economic growth was positive in seven of the eight years of Obama’s presidency, with a rate of -0.2% only in 2009 as the effects of the financial collapse of 2008 were ongoing — nothing remotely as poor as the -3.4% gross domestic product decline in the last year of Trump’s first term.)
The study describes Maria from Michigan this way: “Her verdict on the Democratic Party as having dedicated its playbook to Satan and chosen the ‘platform of death’ does not leave room for normal civic constraints to apply.”
What do the study’s participants talk about? Their central concern is their own so-called “moral foundations.” For them, any democracy is valid only insofar as it vigorously upholds “faith, family, freedom and place,” as indicated in the study’s title. Since they believe their values are under relentless attack by the institutions of democracy, then democracy must be sacrificed. In this mindset, political opponents are not acting in good faith but are outright demonic. The study describes Maria from Michigan this way: “Her verdict on the Democratic Party as having dedicated its playbook to Satan and chosen the ‘platform of death’ does not leave room for normal civic constraints to apply.”
It should be emphasized that these values mean their faith, not a non-Christian religion or no religion; their family (forcible family separation of immigrants or gay marriage don’t count); their freedom (getting vaccinated as a civic responsibility to protect the frail and immune-deficient is incomprehensible to them) and their place (typically small-town and rural, cities being dens of iniquity).
Ever since Richard Nixon, Republican politicians have expressed the conceit that traditional, religious, conservative Americans constituted the “silent majority.” Televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr., expressed it as the “moral majority.” But the subjects of the study did not believe they were the majority. Rather, they perceived themselves as a minority under pressure from a godless and wicked majority. The authors describe it:
Most participants believe that the cultural conditions necessary for a viable democracy no longer exist. A ‘true’ democracy of untrammeled majority rule would require a population with shared values, shared realities, and the capacity for self-governance conditions they feel America has lost.
Part of their rejection of democracy is the fact that they know they would be outvoted in a straight-up, ungerrymandered system: “Kyle (mid 20s, WY), a delivery driver, extends the logic: ‘Every single small town would be outvoted by every single city. We wouldn’t be able to feed people cows. We’d all be eating seaweed.’”
The participants are similar to the authoritarian personalities that Canadian psychologist Robert Altemeyer studied for his 2008 book “The Authoritarians”: “They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times and are often hypocrites.”
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Compartmentalization and hypocrisy are evident in the participants’ attitudes toward Trump. One might think a twice-divorced serial adulterer and rapist (as stipulated by the presiding judge in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit), compulsive liar and multiple indictee might be rejected by those for whom moral values are paramount. But as the study describes, they see him as a “protector” of both their values and themselves. That people who claim to place such worth in untrammeled freedom and independence have a patriarchal loyalty to a dictatorial figure is further confirmation of Altemeyer’s hypothesis about thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds.
That is the state of at least part of America anno 2026. The subjects of the Johns Hopkins study may not be representative of America, or even all people who call themselves conservative, but their large presence in thinly populated states or heavily gerrymandered states makes them an outsized electoral force for the foreseeable future. They are no more likely to be bribed by “Abundance Liberalism” than Afghan tribesmen were going to lay down their weapons because of international development aid.
That is a significant finding. It’s a pity the big media won’t report it.
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Hello, my name is Asma E Nur. I am a tech blogger.
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