Abundance in the Wrong Decade: a letter to the media about fighting the last war

I want to begin with respect. Ezra Klein has helped keep serious conversation alive at a time when spectacle eats the world. I admire the discipline he brings to hard problems and the clarity he brings to messy debates. His book, Abundance, is thoughtful, courageous, and the product of a good-faith effort to help a failing system deliver again. It pains me to write a critique of a work by someone I respect, and the sadness is not performative. It comes from watching the media industry and the political class lift the book Abundance up as if it were the compass for our times, when in truth, it is a brilliant map to a country that no longer exists.

My covenant with readers has always been simple. I will tell the truth as I see it, anchored in facts, without embroidery, and I will favour clarity over comfort. On those terms, the honest thing to say about Abundance is not that it is wrong. It is that it is right in the wrong decade. It speaks in the grammar of policy primacy to an era that is ruled by the economy of attention. It offers a precise diagnosis of sclerosis inside liberal governance while missing the deeper disease that hollowed out the authority of governance itself. It is a fine blueprint for rebuilding institutions that have already lost the narrative oxygen they need to function.

This is the source of my sorrow, because the media has seized on Abundance as the next big corrective, the civil way to say to Democrats that they have drifted into process worship and abandoned the work of building. That critique contains truth. But truth can be misplaced in time, and misplacing it can harm. We have to be honest about the era we are in, not the one that trained us. We live after the rupture, not before it.

For three generations after the Second World War, the West stabilised its institutions around a handful of durable narratives. They became habitual and then invisible. America as guarantor of freedom and growth. Russia as the adversarial bear. China, as the Communist giant whose participation was tolerated so long as it manufactured cheaply and stayed predictable. Europe as the liberal technocratic project. Japan as the power that vowed to build rather than to conquer. These frames were the furniture of our broadcast age. Political parties, schools, foreign policy shops, and the press all moved inside them. Once they were installed, they ossified. The words did not change even as the world did. This is the furniture the media is still trying to dust while the house has been knocked off its foundations.

Some time ago I published HOW: Elections Are Won in the Digital Age. The thesis was stark. Attention precedes governance. Whoever captures attention acquires the leverage to define reality for a time. Whoever cedes attention loses the ability to govern, even with perfect policies on paper. This is not a slogan about social media. It is a structural observation about where legitimacy is now manufactured. The broadcast pipeline that once delivered authority from institutions to citizens has been replaced by a contested network in which authority is borrowed moment by moment from emotions that travel fastest.

Policy used to be the centre of gravity. In that world, Abundance would be the book of the year and the blueprint for renewal. But we do not live there. We live where thirty seconds of outrage can erase three years of legislative work. We live where the spectacle of action outweighs the action itself, where delivery is discounted because the story that lands first has already judged it. The media, pollsters, tacticians, and even conscientious commentators keep writing as if the last fifteen years did not happen. They are in analysis paralysis over platforms and programs, while the actual fight is over narrative oxygen. Every editorial that denounces Democrats for the wrong policies performs the wrong autopsy. The cause of death is not policy. The cause of death is loss of attention.

Look at the clearest test cases, not as slogans but as living case studies. Trumpism is the most extreme example of politics without a program. The great promises became punchlines. Repeal and replace never materialised. Infrastructure Week floated in limbo as a running joke. Education, climate, institutional reform, none of it cohered into a plan. Yet Trump dominates the political theatre because he never ceded the stage. He is a continuous producer of emotional moments that colonise the feed and define the day. He governs nothing with policy and everything with attention.

Cross the Channel and the pattern repeats. Nigel Farage did not present a governing architecture for a post-Brexit Britain. He did not need one. Brexit condensed into three words that became an incantation. Take Back Control. That phrase did all the work that a thousand pages of white papers could not do. It created meaning. Meaning brought momentum. Momentum outran detail. The rest was logistics and fallout.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally changes its economic posture as needed. There are days of protectionist bravado and days of fiscal moderation. The constant is not a platform but an emotional current that fuses national pride with grievance and fear of cultural erosion. Policy shifts because policy is a prop in a story whose engine is identity. The prop can be replaced; the engine keeps running.

Germany’s AfD writes almost nothing that could organise a governing agenda. Its strength is negation. Anti-immigrant, anti-Brussels, anti-establishment. It is an anti-program with real results because negation travels faster through the network than construction, especially when the media insists on treating construction as the only serious thing. Attention rewards what cuts and what shocks. The AfD understands this. So do smaller movements across Europe that rise not on the back of proposals but on the back of memes.

If you judge these movements by Abundance’s metric, they should be weak because they refuse the hard work of building. In practice, they are strong because they aim at the oxygen that Abundance treats as background. They dominate attention. They decide the emotional weather. Policy becomes collateral damage. The media, still marking policy as the main act, keeps reviewing the wrong performance.

This is where the critique deepens into the media’s suicide pact. By lifting Abundance up as the definitive corrective, the industry signals that it has not metabolised what the attention economy has done to political gravity. Editors and producers feel responsible when they analyse a proposal and measure costs and benefits. That instinct is good. But when analysis becomes the only way to tell the story of politics, and when all the old Cold War furniture remains in place, the industry becomes a curator of a museum rather than a guide through a living city. The audiences notice. They peel off to feeds that give them intensity. Opportunists notice too. They learn to deliver intensity on command.

This is why I warned after the Democratic loss to stay away from suicide. The reflex to tear the party apart on policy grounds is understandable to people trained in the broadcast age. It is disastrous in the network age. Every op-ed that scolds Democrats for the wrong policy mix tells the public that the winning side must be winning because it has a better plan. That is untrue. The winning side is winning because it monopolises attention, often with nothing behind it.

You do not have to like this to admit it. You only have to decide whether you want to keep losing because you refuse to speak the language that now sets the agenda. The right lesson to take from Abundance is not that Democrats must deregulate faster or build bigger, true though parts of that may be. The lesson is that none of it will land until the story that carries it lands first. Delivery follows meaning, not the other way round.

Let me set a clear boundary. This is not an argument for propaganda. It is not an invitation to lie more effectively. It is not a conspiracy theory about elites or a charge that Ezra Klein is secretly trying to hobble democracy. It is a claim about sequence and about literacy. The sequence is attention, then governance. The literacy we lack is narrative literacy that is compatible with truth. We need editors, journalists, campaigners, and policymakers who can build stories that are accurate and alive at the same time, stories that move as fast as the outrage factory but are grounded in facts that survive a second look.

There is another boundary to draw. We cannot keep importing the post-war frames to explain this century. When the media speaks about China in tones borrowed from 1962, about Russia as if nothing changed after the fall of the Soviet Union and then after Crimea and then after Ukraine, about the United States as guarantor of a liberal order that it no longer consistently inhabits, audiences hear habit, not insight. They hear the voices of institutions that have chosen to defend their furniture rather than to remap the house. That is not objectivity. That is a refusal to update the model that guides your work.

If you want a concrete demonstration of how attention outruns process, look at the political theatre of tariffs. They are announced like reality-show reveals, wrapped in the language of strength, timed for maximum impact on the daily cycle. The economic details are secondary. What matters is the jolt, the sense of action, the posture of protection. The policy consequences are messy, contested, and often counterproductive. The narrative consequences are immediate. Cameras roll. Algorithms light up. The story becomes that someone is finally doing something. This spectacle is not an accident. It is the operating model.

The answer cannot be to refuse spectacle entirely. The answer is to stage reality itself, to let delivery become the spectacle, to make competence cinematic without falsifying it. That is narrative stewardship. That is the literacy gap our institutions have not filled because they keep imagining that the public will return to the old channels if only the policies are sound. They will not. They cannot. The channels are gone.

I will not disrespect Abundance. It deserves to be read carefully, argued with in good faith, and mined for the reforms that will matter once the oxygen of attention is restored. But it cannot be the compass for a decade in which legitimacy is minted in feeds before it is written into law. A politics that wins on paper and loses on screens does not govern. A media that speaks perfect policy and broken narrative does not inform. It scolds. It watches. It wonders why it is ignored.

The choice I am leaving on the table is unforgiving, because the world that trained the commentariat will not come back. Either we accept that attention now precedes governance and build a practice that treats narrative as the main act, married to truth and delivery, or we keep writing elegant suicide notes about process and platforms while movements with no policies take the levers that used to belong to programs. Either journalists and editors update their mental models and their storytelling craft, or they keep serving Cold War furniture to an audience that lives in a different house. Either Democrats learn to make meaning first and policy legible through meaning, or they keep arriving with excellent plans to an empty auditorium.

Ezra Klein did the work his training asked of him. He wrote a serious book about how to make government build again. I respect that work. I also believe he aimed it at a stage that has already been dismantled. That is why this article saddens me. It is a letter to an industry I grew up respecting, telling it that rigor without narrative is not rigor in this era, that policy without attention is not policy in practice, and that the fight has moved while the cameras stayed pointed at yesterday.

Engage seriously with this reality, or do not. Remain guardians of a museum, or become stewards of a living city again. The decision is yours. The consequences are everyone’s.