Midcult Redux
The "Abundance" of Klein and Thompson refuses to admit that rich people want a government that works only for them
Dwight Macdonald’s essays on culture (“Against the American Grain”, 1952-62) described three forms. Elite culture (“Highcult”) wrote (painted, composed, designed, played) for elites who respected standards, but did not fetishize them, and who were eager to accept novel (Stravinsky, Joyce, Eliot, even Hemingway before he became a parody of himself, Faulkner, Monk) art. Taste mattered and while sales were necessary they were not the main idea. culture’s (“Masscult”) standard was popularity (Life Magazine, professional sports, the novels of Earl Stanley Gardner, and, recently, talk radio, the Huffington Post, hip-hop, podcasts, Facebook); Masscult will accept new work if it sells. Mass culture fetishized the common man whose modest folk (universal, eternal) wisdom[1] was asserted as a standard of judgment superior to that of “pointy-headed professors who can’t park a bicycle straight” (to cite the late George Corley Wallace). Attaching Macdonald's labels to contemporary political intellectuals, Masscult today might include George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Rogan, and Jeff Sachs; Highcult might be Brad De Long, Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman, Mariana Mazzucato, Branko Milanovic, Rick Perlstein, Yanis Varoufakis, and Elizabeth Warren.
What vexed Macdonald was not the charge of elitism brought against Highcult—he embraced it. Nor did the generic and pervasive vulgarity in Masscult bother him—he ignored it.[2] What troubled MacDonald was the third culture: “Midcult”. MacDonald wrote Midcult was: “an intermediate form having the essential qualities of Masscult—the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity. In Masscult the trick is plain : to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while it in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them”.
"Abundance" (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson; KT) begins with the unmistakable Midcult[3] style: the velvet painting cover, the “I have a dream” sequence in the introduction (which reads like an outtake from the collected works of Joel Osteen), and the inimitable tone coupling disdain for the audience with a saintly appeal to Higher Purpose.
The first Midcult aspect of “Abundance” is the failure “to respect standards”. KT interviewed sources, spoke with the appropriate Davosawi, read some technical papers, and even ventured west of upper Connecticut Avenue (one of the many tiresome aspects of “Abundance” is that it takes Steinberg’s New Yorker cover depicting the US beyond the Hudson as a map drawn to scale).
Despite this formulaic respect of Authority, KT drown in Midcult because they exclude evidence that would weaken their arguments while misinterpreting other information. KT ignore: the long-run gap between productivity and wages in the US, health care costs, financialization, elite manipulation of print and social media, the destructive effects of Proposition 13 in California, fiscal transfers from blue states (“union” at times here) to the red states (“confederacy”), the costs of seismic regulations in California and of disasters in Texas, and political corruption in general. Abundance aims at the political impact of Highcult by making good use of its analytic bases while putting its arguments in a more readable, if rather tendentious, form; it fails, first, because Klein and Thompson did not invest enough time (or enough time of their fact-checkers) in supporting their arguments, an investment which would have sacrificed mass appeal (and sales) on the blade of sharper analysis.
It is not an accident that “Abundance” gives no data--on wealth, the gap between productivity and wages (Appendix: “Grow wealth and productivity”), air and water pollution, welfare indicators other than house prices, poverty, education, and medical and dental care. Presenting a quantitative annex would have demanded engagement with the raw information beyond interjecting passing references to various authorities without understanding the comparisons (red and blue, rural and urban, small cities and large, Europe and the US, Asia and the China) on which stouter arguments could have been built.
The second thing making Abundance a work of Midcult is trying to “please the crowd by any means”. KT take a Rodney King view of politics : “Why can’t we just get along ?” The book’s bland style is imposed by a compulsion to offend no one, by an insistent voice ordering the writers to say nothing of controversy, especially about the plutocracy that has bought naming rights to much of the country, and apparently, by the perverse view, in a volume of politics, that little can be done about the (important) problems that the writers have identified because to do so might, again, annoy some generous member of the plutocracy or some proud-independent-tiller-of-the-soil-recipient-of-farm-subsidies in Nebraska.
What really tightens the belt of Midcult around the belly of Abundance is its obsessive both-siderism. We learn (p. 203) that:
“The Democratic and Republican parties do not merely disagree over the details of tax policy. They disagree over the legitimacy of elections, of institutions, of the structure of American government. They are split in their views of speech and history and decency and truth. Distinguished scholars write books considering the nearness of another civil war and wondering whether fascism is resurgent on American soil.”
The disagreement over taxes is not a detail. The Republicans want low income and property taxes, with no wealth, or inheritance taxes at all; they prefer regressive tariffs and sales taxes for the rest of us. Republicans steal elections and, when they cannot steal them, they lie about them; Democrats accept the results (even when they should not as in 2000, 2004, and 2024). The Republicans want a king in Washington, theocracies in the suburbs, and libertarian homesteads in land grabbed from bankrupt farmers. No honest person, scholar or not, is writing seriously about the danger of the Stalinist left.[4] The Republican image of decency is a pack of cretinous teenagers firing thousands of dedicated scientists because they think it’s funny.
KT reassure us that the “big government-small government divide [between D and R] is often more a matter of style than substance” immediately after describing Republican governance as having led to a “surveillance state of terrifying scope and power.” They are simply incapable of understanding that the Republicans want power for its own sake and to get richer; most of the Democrats want power to do good.
The narrative
Klein and Thompson chain hortatory verbs—Grow, Build, Govern, Invent, Deploy—into a somewhat irrational sequence (would not Govern, Invent, Deploy, Build, and Grow be the straighter path ?),[5] a format having Orwell’s virtue of brevity without always respecting his insistence on actually saying something. I extract a narrative here from KT’s main themes though, as we shall see, the narrative rests on some heavy mistakes of interpretation and the writers ultimately present no ideas about what to do with the pathologies that they diagnose.
• Cities grow faster than towns and villages;
• Cities have faster growth because of lower production costs (access to markets for goods, money, labor, knowledge) and faster logistics (ports, railways, large airports); those lower costs are owing to economies of scale created by population size and to area-volume relations in building infrastructure projects;
• Cities accumulate wealth more rapidly;
• Cities attract more migrants, internally and from abroad, because they offer better jobs at lower search costs through affiliate networks (Italian, Irish, Black neighborhoods, Klan membership in Southern California[6]) and higher job density;
• The wealth advantage created long-term advantages in education and cultural influence, with weaker differences in political power as the Constitutional legacy of slaveholding;
• A closing of the US frontier and an attendant loss of physical mobility within the country occurred between 1970 and 1990;
• As population growth has fallen—a measure of frontier closure—at local (neighborhood, unincorporated area, small town, large city, county) there has tended to develop an exclusionary mentality in urban areas (the economic and political threat of invasion) and a victim mentality in rural areas (the cultural trauma of being left behind);
• Inflation in US house prices, beginning in the late 1970s, shifted part of the purpose of owning a house from consumption to investment; since then, as ET note, a substantial minority has wealth only in its home equity; the majority of the country is deprived of home equity wealth by rising prices on the urban coasts and lack of good jobs in the rural center (Appendix — “Govern to do things”);
• The inflation in home prices and the concentration of personal wealth in home equity have reinforced the exclusion mentality;
• Homelessness, resulting in part from exclusionist values, has become an economic and a moral failure;
• The failure to solve homelessness is related to the boom in federal, state, and local laws, regulations and procedures governing air, water, labor, public health, the rights of minorities, and other externalities;
• Unsolved problems of home and infrastructure development have generated a vicious cycle; rising home values create an incentive to defend the owner’s one asset by tightening local regulations against new supply; supply restrictions further stimulate house prices thereby promote more regulations against housing density and multipurpose buildings because they are associated with demographic diversity; environmental and social regulations push housing costs even higher, creating more homelessness and less faith in the capacity of government to solve problems;
• New environmental laws and regulations have created a form of democracy by lawsuit; KT recount the histories of green investments (wind, solar, the California train) delayed for decades by court proceedings; and
• The boom in health research and technologies, precisely because it has been so costly to generate, has created a barricade of bureaucratic interests around health work, stifling innovation, and preventing further growth in welfare and longevity.
Klein and Thompson misinterpret a great deal
Agency is not one-sided. KT open with the admission that: “[our] focus [is on] the pathologies of the broad left” (p. 16). This focus[7] is blind about US politics--the Republicans have fought relentlessly against even modest remedies for the country’s problems. In contending that “the mistakes of liberals contributed to the rise of illiberalism” (p. 208), KT do not mention George W. Bush, Viguerie, McConnell, Cheney, Scalia, Rehnquist, Alito, Comey, or Starr. They ignore the partisan decisions in Bush v Gore, Citizens United, McDonnell, Dobbs, and Heller. We read nothing of the costs of Junior’s glorious wars[8] which have blocked public investment in infrastructure, housing, and health in the 21st century. There is nothing on irresponsible Republican tax cuts, passed under cover of the lie that they would be self-financing, and designed to restrict the fiscal space of the blue states because of the danger that their governments might do popular things with their own money. They omit Project 2025, the authoritarian platform raised to impose a religious petro-state, about which Trump lied in the 2024 campaign and about which he lies today.
One does learn from KT that blue states and cities have long-term advantages in education, wealth, and population. One does not learn that the Senate and the Electoral College block earned blue state advantages (population, wealth, educated people) in favor of red state entitlements (the Senate, tenure in the federal courts, and the Electoral College) and use those Confederate anachronisms to impose a modern form of “taxation without representation”.
The job of the state. KT describe one job of the state as investing in technologies that produce widely-distributed private benefits, citing the work of Mariana Mazzucato on the components of mobile phones. Yet they refuse to understand that another job of the state is to resolve conflicts over natural resources. One example is California water. If we want abundant fruits, vegetables, and nuts California already has them but at the costs of groundwater depletion, desiccated wetlands, and foregone urban use. KT claim to see that there is no simple technical solution for more efficient California water allocations (they are right) but imply strongly (pp. 52-53) that a political solution would be to abandon legal and regulatory measures that block development.[9]
The reactionaries do not act in good faith. The prize example is health care.[10] KT refuse to accept that there has been organized partisan resistance to wider access to health care, from soap-peddler Reagan’s lies about Medicare in the 1960s, to construing health care as “the Democrats’ Afghanistan” in the 1990s, to the struggle of MAGA against the ACA, to the corrupt anti-vaccination campaign led by former junkie Bobby Kennedy Jr and to the obscene spectacle of Jay Bhattacharya as the head of NIH.[11] One would expect KT, who tell with admiration the story of Dr Katalin Karikó (Appendix: “Barriers to invention”), to note that Bhattacharya is now threatening to stop mRNA vaccines on the grounds that scientists do not know how they work. KT say nothing of Junior Bush’s noble (admittedly bipartisan) campaign to raise Medicare drug prices, again because it is inconvenient to their argument that “well-meaning” liberal pathologies are why we cannot have nice things.
KT nowhere mention the gaps in longevity among races, income and education levels, regions, or sexes in the US because to do so would require some analysis of the cause—high costs imposed by the medical-industrial complex and its paid servants in government and in law. Nor do they mention the gap in longevity between most of Europe and the US because that would force them, again, to consider the disgraceful resistance of the Republican party to decent health care for all.
Political power is not so easily abandoned. KT do not understand that housing and the environment, birth and death, marriage and divorce, investing in war or in peace, are not friendly dialogs among citizens interested in the general welfare. They are fights over who gets what, including the best places to live. What follows from KT’s myopia on the tenacity of power is the delusion that the wealthy will volunteer for their own extinction[12].
Life is better in the union states than in the confederate. Quality of life indicators—none of which KT ever discuss—include longevity, rates of murder and suicide, health, education, family life (divorces, domestic violence), and drug addiction and alcoholism; they are all better in blue states than in red. KT somehow miss the facts that death and disability from diseases and toxins are higher in red states than in blue. They ignore Case and Keaton, who found that “Deaths of Despair” were more common among white men (the base of MAGA) in red states. It is notorious that gun deaths, from homicide, suicides, and accidents are more common in the Confederacy and among the Confederate diaspora.
KT present a Fox News mock-up of homelessness. Darrell Owens’ does[13] not mention “Abundance” but does damage its arguments. Owens notes that homelessness is indeed worse in blue cities but makes the obvious point, which escaped KT’s fact-checkers, that most cities are blue. Owens shows that homelessness is a coastal issue not a partisan one; that serious homelessness exists in red cities; that most growth comes from blue cities and states,[14] so of course house prices are higher there; the coastal states have better human development indicators and attract more residents; home ownership is not the only form of shelter and that rental costs per square foot are much closer between red and blue states than are ownership costs.
The distribution of income and wealth is not an accident. A defining feature of the US economy since the Carter administration has been the rising concentration of income and wealth, one which has been stimulated as a matter of policy with tax cuts for the rich. The concentration of wealth (Appendix: “Grow wealth and productivity”) in the US is the main reason that popular measures—build more housing, provide more health care, build more schools, invest more urgently in renewables and in public transport, in sum, have a more productive government at all levels—do not advance. One brick in the wall against good ideas is bribery of politicians with campaign donations; campaign finance reform is another omission of KT whose wish for a better culture of politics cannot be realized where a chief motivation of seeking political office is wealth.
Project 2025. One might in theory forgive KT, writing for liberals[15] and publishing in March 2025, for saying nothing about Project 2025 which was, during the campaign, no more than a lunatic diatribe. It seems to have escaped the notice of our bold authors that the administration launched Project 2025 as soon as the election was called. KT could, at least, have added an annex (“What now ?”) when it had become evident that the political culture had moved in the opposite direction from the one they had charted. That they did not do so is not an accident. It derives from their view of US politics as an enlightened journey toward a mythical center in which the travelers have the same destination and the same ideals differing only on “details”. KT are so entranced with their own self-regard that they consider the force of their arguments to be greater than that of Trump’s victory and hence apparently saw no need to benchmark their enduring wisdom against reality.
What is to be done ?
Klein and Thompson conclude nothing. Their economic and fiscal model is can-opener economics as sung by John Lennon: “imagine all the people”. They give no support to platforms, make no recommendations, estimate neither costs nor benefits, and draft no schemes for the (unnamed) winners to compensate the (unnamed) losers.
Their boldest findings amount to the Post-It stickers that one sees at “listening events”, with which no one can disagree, a neutrality of expression inherent to Midcult.
• "What is needed here is a change in political culture, not just a change in legislation" (p. 98) if the country is to activate the mechanisms of grow, build, govern, invent, deploy;
• “Politics is a way of organizing conflict” (p. 203); this is stuck on near the end so that no one accuses the writers of not having a theory of change; and,
• Urge progressives to accept some (unspecified) environmental and social costs as necessary stops on the highway to abundance; and
• The chapter “Invent” is strong in identifying obstacles to scientific discovery suggest nothing to accelerate discovery beyond the lamentation that “We need a better science of science”.
Klein and Thompson miss[16] a generic four-part reform that can be applied across projects at all levels, is simple to explain, and allows the public to be well-informed about progress. The first step, in California anyway, is to raise property taxes. Low property taxes have meant low government revenue for 47 years. They have imposed a constant foraging for new money from fees, sales taxes, special levies, hotel turnover taxes, private donations, and many other annoyances. (Higher property taxes are not as distortionary as sales taxes and are cheaper to administer). A second step is to use new money from higher property taxes to exclude private money from politically sensitive transactions (such as building public housing) and to channel foregone philanthropy into replenishing public pension funds or into more traditional areas such as funding a decent living for artists. The third step is to have fewer evaluations (with fewer partners, there are automatically fewer evaluations to begin) and to do more evaluations ex-post with stiffer penalties for non-delivery. The fourth is to publish scorecards (I despise that term, but it will have to do for now) on progress and update them regularly in townhalls.
Klein and Thompson call for “a liberalism that builds” based on the bromides of Gary Gerstle who called for “deep-pocketed donors”, “promising long-term candidates”, “think tanks”, “policy networks”, all of which we have and all of which have been to some extent wasted. If KT had advised on where to invest in organization, housing, infrastructure, renewable energy generation, transmission, and storage, environmental cleanup, if they had advised on how to deliver projects on time and on budget, this book would be less of a missed opportunity in telling progressives how to regain power and to hold it.
[1]. The staged outrage over Justice Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” was not over the notion of common-sense wisdom, but because she had committed the error of allowing people other than older white men to claim that wisdom.
[2]. Which was a pity, because had MacDonald heard any rock-n-roll other than the generational no-talent Elvis, he might have enjoyed the Kinks.
[3]. Klein and Thompson recall a college prof who wrote "a layman's guide to Joyce"; a classmate asked: "Did he say that before he wrote it or after he wrote it ?"
[4]. A forgotten Midculter, David Horowitz, recently summoned to join Ayn Rand, another Midculter, was perhaps the last American Stalinist before he converted to a more remunerative form of agitprop—reactionary fanaticism--in the 1970s.
[5]. Appendix — “Are there Chinese lessons for Abundance ?”
[6]. https://harris.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/fiszbein_ppe_seminar_paper_11-28-23.pdf?utm_source=perplexity; also Kerr and Kerr, 2021
[7]. The reasoning of KT is summarized in “Murc’s Law” — the theorem that only Democrats have agency, because Republicans are what they are, can never be otherwise, and therefore can cannot be held responsible for anything. If something goes wrong, it is because the Democrats didn’t stop it from going wrong.
[8]. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. "The True Cost of the Iraq War: $3 Trillion and Beyond." Washington Post, September 5, 2010.
[9]. A feature of discovery in California is a productive agriculture research system, public and private.
[10]. Another is the SALT deduction cap which results in more taxation without representation in California and New York and forces citizens in those states to pay for Confederate welfare.
[11]. While I do praise Harvard President Alain Garber for defending his school’s interests against the wicked regime, it buggers belief that Garber’s public defiance of the regime was his immediate response. His first action was surely to call his collaborator Bhattacharya to discuss a deal. Of course, I have no evidence for this admittedly Midcult contention but … what would you have done in Garber’s place ?
[12]. Anand Giridharadas, “Winners Take All”.
[13]. Darrell Owens, “Homelessness is not a blue city problem”.
[14]. California has just become the world’s fourth largest economy, which must be a great disappointment to Klein and Thompson, who have put so much of their team’s effort into the idea of California as a kind of Somalia with fewer camels.
[15]. Klein and Thompson remind me of a college prof who wrote what he called "a layman's guide to Joyce"; a classmate asked: "Did he say that before he wrote it or after he wrote it ?"
[16]. Klein and Thompson deserve credit for noting Jennifer Pahlka’s work on government efficiency.
