Last Wednesday I mentioned an interview with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson in which they made the case for a new approach to progressive politics. They are calling it “abundance” which is the title of their forthcoming book, but it could be called other things including basic competence. Here’s a bit of what Thompson had to say:
The problem we have, and especially a problem that we have in Democratic-run places, is not just that we can’t invent things we don’t have yet, we also can’t build what we understand. The apartment building is a very ancient technology. Elisha Otis came up with the elevator about 170 years ago. But somehow we can’t build apartment buildings in San Francisco and Los Angeles and many Democratic-run cities.
I think we went from a world where liberalism was a liberalism of building, between the 1930s and 1960s, and then there was…
