The Free Press interviewed the authors last week, calling them "the two most important liberal journalists working in the legacy press today." Bari Weiss framed their argument thusly:

To have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.

While conservatives and libertarians might say, Yes, exactly, let the free market do its thing, Ezra and Derek insist that the government can play a crucial role—if liberals will let it. They want to rein in the laws, regulations, and bureaucratic thinking that have made it nearly impossible to do anything in this country.

How do we build a government that’s less like the DMV and more like the Apple Store? How can it actually deliver for Americans and solve our most pressing problems—in housing, energy, transportation, and healthcare? And, how do we reverse government’s long march into total incompetence?

The entire interview is worth either reading or listening, but Klein and Thompson make a curious argument about Donald Trump. They are claiming that Trump's policies are "very clearly a vision of deprivation":

America doesn’t have a healthy economy, therefore we need a recession. America doesn’t have enough houses, therefore we need fewer immigrants. America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, therefore we need less trade. America doesn’t have the right kind of science being done, and therefore we need less scientific funding.

This is a series of strawman arguments, or at the very least, claims that lack a significant amount of intellectual honesty. Trump's team isn't advocating for a recession; they are admitting that a short recession might occur while they correct for trade imbalances, but recession isn't the point. Similarly, Trump isn't saying we need fewer immigrants, but far fewer illegal immigrants, and that's a point that has nothing at all to do with housing policies. Similarly, Trump efforts to cut off funding to NGOs and schools has nothing to do with science funding per se and everything to do with the corruption and political manipulation that occurs through unchecked transfers to unaccountable NGOs and schools. 

If anything, Trump's economic policies are designed to be supply-side, not demand-regulating. That doesn't mean they will succeed, but Trump's policies are very clearly intended to return manufacturing to the US and create more jobs and investment here rather than overseas. Especially in his energy policies, Trump is siding with abundance rather than using government power to assume scarcity and ration accordingly. Progressives have strangled the middle class in jurisdictions they have traditionally controlled over the last several decades by doing the latter, especially in California.

If this is how Klein and Thompson see Trump, then perhaps it explains Klein's assertion on the divide in American politics at the moment. In an appearance on Bill Maher's HBO show over the weekend, Klein laid out the stakes for Democrats who refuse to retool before the Great Realignment makes it too late to correct. Voters are already voting with their feet by relocating to red states because progressive cities and states are far too bureaucratic to succeed any longer (via Twitcher):

“This looks like game over. The reason why people are voting with their feet is a lot of what your book is about. Taxes and regulation”

“People are leaving these kind of states for places where they're not feeling the heavy breath of government on them. It's not that hard for Democrats to understand this, but they seem to be incapable of doing anything about it.”

Klein then makes a curious comment toward the end about what he sees as the essential difference between Democrat and Republican governments, at roughly 3:30 in the clip:

KLEIN: The problem is that the Right -- the personality type of the Right -- is autocratic now. And the personality type of the Left is bureaucratic. And you can't govern if you're this obsessed with process, and you can see it in the outcomes. If you want to sideline dangerous, populist Right autocratic movements, you gotta offer people the fruits of effective government. If the places you govern are not advertisements for your governance, you are going to lose.  

The latter part is certainly true -- but it also cuts against Klein's argument that the "personality type" on the Right is autocratic. Where, precisely, is that manifested? Not in Florida, where Ron DeSantis has made Florida into a solidly red state through reductions in bureaucracies and ending top-down government interventions in the lives of citizens and their businesses. Nor in Texas, either. It's not even true with Trump except perhaps in tone, but that's a far cry from the autocracy Klein suggests here that progressives need to counter. 

Even the example that Klein uses -- Texas and solar power -- cuts against his argument. Texas Republicans have grown hostile to solar power because of the large amount of land it requires at scale, and also because of its lack of scalability in energy production. The GOP here clearly wants more capacity from traditional sources such as coal and natural gas, as well as an expansion of nuclear power, which will require extensive federal cooperation. However, as Klein himself notes, solar power keeps expanding in Texas because of the free-market approach taken here, which cuts entirely against Klein's "autocracy" narrative, not to mention Thompson's "deprivation" claim about Trump.

Klein also overlooks the fact that the Bureaustate already exists. The efforts to dismantle it can take two tracks in our form of government: either the legislature dismantles it through statute or the executive branch dismantles it through executive authority. At the federal level, Congress not only hasn't been inclined to even trim bureaucracies, they have happily handed over its authority to the Bureaustate to avoid taking responsibility for regulatory choices. California did the same thing decades ago; check out bureaucracies such as the Coastal Commission and the Air Quality Management District, just to name a couple, which exercise massive authority over California's economic life.

In order to end that reach, in the lack of legislative enthusiasm, executives will have to act to dismantle the Bureaustates through their inherent authority. That may look like authoritarianism, and it may be autocratic in the specific exercise, but only because executive power is based on executive authority. Only one executive exists in states and in the federal government, which means only one person will make these decisions. 

However, that confuses mechanism with both intent and outcome. Of course an executive action is autocratic -- EOs by their nature are entirely autocratic. However, the outcome from dismantling bureaucracies is the antithesis of autocracy. It is the Bureaustate that engages in autocracy; dismantling it will at least offer the promise of ending autocracy and returning to a responsible model of self-governance. Would it be better if legislatures took those actions? Yes, but that doesn't make us hostages to Congress or state legislators who prefer to avoid responsibility for regulation. We also elect executives and invest them with carefully bounded power, authority, and jurisdiction, and exercises of those powers are not inherently autocratic. 

In short, Klein and Thompson should stick to their main thesis in Abundance. They had better recognize, too, that it will take significant executive action in blue states to dismantle the Bureaustates that are strangling their economies, which will also look a lot like "autocracy" in the short run. If that makes them squeamish, then perhaps they are not quite as ready to end autocracy via bureaucracy as they sound.