How parties of the left can win next time

A new book offers new ideas

There’s a new book out this week which I think is going to be BIG. Big in the way it will dominate the political conversation over the next few weeks, but also big in that it represents a significant breakthrough for left wing thinking. The book is designed in part to explain why the Democrats did so badly in 2024 and while much of the internal commentary around this so far seems to have missed the point (“we did everything right, but maybe we should have done more of it”), Abundance, by Democrat-aligned journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, begins from an important and obvious starting point: something needs to change.

The premise, beautifully expounded over 300 pages and now to be clunkily summarised by me, is that parties of the left have turned into Blockers, when they need to be Builders - that people (voters) want and need healthy homes, great public transport and safe community spaces, but so much regulation and other costs/delays have been added by well-meaning politicians, that it’s impossible to get anything built.

They offer plenty of examples from their own country - urban development and Californian high speed rail feature prominently - but it’s not hard to think of examples from New Zealand and wonder if the same problems apply here. Transport blog Greater Auckland reports that the three kilometre Avondale to New Lynn cycleway cost $44m. Hayden Donnell in The Spinoff this week reports on the creative thinking Auckland Council uses to turn down modern, infrastructure-friendly housing. A project called Get Wellington Moving sputtered along for almost ten years before eventually being extinguished due to cost and bureaucratic meltdown.

People (not just conservative-voting people) have had enough, and anti-establishment Trump offered something appealing (the authors note that he campaigned on bringing down house prices but, in all the frenzied activity of the past eight weeks, has done nothing on this front except for increasing tariffs on the major suppliers of residential building products).

In order to win votes, goes the premise of the book, left leaning parties should offer a new vision of abundance through the promise of getting things done. The right has a political advantage in that they get to appeal to baser human instincts when making their case; what I think Abundance is suggesting is that the left have an opportunity now to make a similar appeal: vote for us and we’ll blow up this bloated bureaucracy and start building rail lines and houses.

You can read a longer, localised precis of the book in the Listener this week written by superbrain Danyl McLauchlan (not paywalled the last time I looked).

The authors of Abundance appeared on the Bari Weis podcast Honestly this week, and several moments stuck out. If you don’t have time in your life to read the book I can recommend that conversation, or this one which Danyl described to me as “my favourite instance of two very smart people disagreeing with each other”.

Here are some memorable insights from the interview on Honestly:

Turning NIMBYs into YIMBYs

I have a close friend whose parents I know very well, all of whom live in Los Angeles. And I was talking to the parents who live in a very well to do neighborhood in LA, and I was talking to them about their neighborhood and they said, “It's so annoying, this construction project they started down the street. They're trying to approve this large development, this housing apartment complex, 200 units. It's gonna be awful. The traffic will be bad. I don't know where the parking's going to be. I don't want them to do it. I'm doing everything that I possibly can to round up all my friends in the block and get them to stop adding units to the street.”

“Okay,” I say, “hey, by the way, how's your kids’ housing search going?”

“It's terrible,” he said, “There's nowhere for them to live in the city of Los Angeles. It's impossible for them to find a place. It's too expensive.”

The authors argue that by giving people a voice in decisions over development, we are stacking the deck. Because while we inevitably hear from the (usually well-resourced) people who oppose a new five-storey apartment building, we don’t ever hear from the dozens of families who might move into the housing it would create. They are silent in the process.

While there are lots of modern problems to worry about (and vote on), the authors say housing is at the root of many of them: “housing is not just about the walls and the ceiling and the floor. Housing is everything. Housing is the quantum field of urban life. It touches everything.”

The fall of the neoliberal order

While it seems that left and right have different ideas about the world, it’s helpful to think of periods of history as being defined by their political order - the stuff both left and right agree on. Here in New Zealand, though National and Labour seem very opposed on the best way to do things, there has been a tacit agreement since the 1980s that the free market should be deregulated, that the private sector should provide things of public interest (housing, electricity, phone lines) when it can do so more efficiently, and that the state should be as lean as possible.

That consensus led to some important and necessary structural changes, but it also failed the people in many ways. It caused the housing crisis, sacrificed the environment to profit and increased societal inequality. These and other problems have got to such a desperate state that people on both sides of the political spectrum now are wanting something different - we all agree, for once, that the old system isn’t working.

It was the perfect moment for Trump to arrive, promising to blow it all up. For a decent chunk of voters the alternative - a Democratic party promising more of the same - was too hard to bear.

But Trump and his team are fighting scarcity with scarcity - cutting everything as a blunt strategy to make things better (“Every scarcity that the White House identifies in America, they think of another scarcity to be its remedy”).

For all his problems, Trump is, the authors say, an awesome power of negative polarisation - he has the ability to galvanise the opposition party around everything that he isn’t.

Their suggestion is that the Democrats (and other left leaning parties around the world) can and should come together around the opposite of scarcity: abundance. That they can be the movement that builds the utopian future that our technology and wealth should be able to offer us.

After all, we are richer and more technologically advanced than ever before, but we are getting worse and worse at creating the things we need. Billions of dollars in research and development to work out how to hook teenagers for a few extra seconds on Snapchat, but none of this energy and urgency spent on figuring out how to build a cycle lane for less than $15,000 per metre.

Make America Pregnant Again

I honestly don’t know how the conversation ended up here but there is a long and interesting chat about fertility towards the end of the podcast.

The birth rate is falling in almost every country. Things are getting bad. In South Korea last year they sold more strollers for dogs than for babies.

And the fewer kids there are, the less people want kids around. There are cafes with signs saying that kids are not welcome inside.

Some people don’t want children, but others want them and don’t feel they can have them, because they can’t afford them

How do we change that? There are no obvious policy solutions. Klein estimates that you’d need to pay people $300,000 per child in order to meaningfully shift the birth rate. Utopian social democracies like Sweden have fertility problems, despite offering the works in terms of maternity leave, childcare, social safety net.

One of the interesting changes they note - not directly related to the abundance argument - is the rise of individualism means people now think about having children in terms of “how will it benefit me?”:

I think people talk about families, talk about having kid … as if you are trying to weigh a vacation. Like, what will my weekends be like? Like, will it be more or less fun? … But one of the things that really bothers me about it is that I think what is important is not just my weekend. Like, my children's experience of the world is itself the gift …

“Doesn't mean I'm not happy about [having kids]. I have a delightful time with them. And sometimes I do wish I could just sit around and read on the weekend. But I don't think we value the experience of the children. I think it has been absorbed into this question of the experience of the adult. And so it's like ‘Will you be happier? Will you have more fun?”

Is the latest season of White Lotus any good?

They discuss. I can’t decide. I thought I was enjoying it until I read a piece on the internet this week suggesting that maybe I wasn’t. Thompson says the cinematography is good but the storytelling sucks. that’s hard to disagree with. Maybe we won’t know for sure until we’ve watched through until the end.

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I had ten other things I wanted to bring up but this piece is already too long. Thank you for reading through.

Ultimately, the authors of Abundance offers a cause upon which left and right leaning moderates might agree - and there are signs in New Zealand they might be right. There were hints in the Labour-National urban housing accord a few years ago that there is consensus around the need for more housing, and the need to remove things that get in the way. The participation and cautious approval of Labour finance spokesperson Barbara Edmonds at the recent investment summit is another promising example.

Then there is Chris Bishop’s Fast Track Legislation which I think aligns with a lot of the Abundance agenda, but which has been one of the most polarising parts of the coalition government’s agenda. I wonder what that legislation would have looked like if the centre left parties were involved in the drafting. We have widespread agreement that something needs to change - will we ever be able to agree on exactly what?