ROSS DOUTHAT: It is impossible for me—as a religious person, I’m sorry—not to look at progressivism right now and say, “You need something else on the horizon besides saying we’re all going to be inclusive, and we’re going to get rich together with flying cars.” You need to say, “So that we can live in some specific way that we are supposed to live.” What is that way, Ezra Klein? How then shall we live?
EZRA KLEIN: My friend, I am a liberal. I actually believe in creating a space for liberal individual flourishing of different kinds. … I don’t really want to tell you where you have to drive your flying car.
— “Interesting Times,” September 2025
The first three pages of Abundance, the bestselling political blueprint by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, are written in the second person. “You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets,” they begin (they are also written in italics). “A few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blinks in the morning sun.” The year is 2050, we are told, and the interlocking crises that define social and political life today—the climate crisis, the housing crisis, the crisis of democracy—are a blip in the rearview mirror. Technological advancement, combined with a new birth of supply-side economics, has created the conditions for clean air, electric vehicles and nutritious food that is produced, without any need for animals, in low-cost labs. Completing the vision, the 2050 version of “you” is invited to step outside just as “another last-mile delivery drone descends from canopy level, pauses over a neighbor’s yard like a hummingbird, and drops off a package.”
What follows this “utopian” tableau is a book full of mostly unobjectionable policy suggestions for making government more efficient and responsive, which have nevertheless been met with many strenuous objections. To their detractors on the left, Klein and Thompson are technocratic elitists who refuse to admit the necessity of class struggle or mass politics, while paying too little attention to the influence of corporations and the superrich. Yet beneath the mockery and invective, the debate is shallower than it looks. As some progressive commentators have pointed out, the goals of abundance liberalism are broadly compatible with those of millennial socialism: indeed, Zohran Mamdani’s DSA-backed campaign for New York mayor smoothly incorporated aspects of each. (Klein has said that he voted for Mamdani.) Likewise, the two factions seem to share a common limitation when it comes to articulating the horizon of their political projects. This is why, for all the criticisms of Klein and Thompson’s supposed blindness to the way politics work in the present, it is only conservatives like Douthat who have pointed out the dismal character of the “abundant” society they imagine in the future.
Due to the successes of consumer capitalism, Americans today “have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house,” Klein and Thompson write at the end of their introduction, “and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.” But what is needed, besides material sufficiency, to build a good life? Neither Klein and Thompson nor their leftist detractors seem to have an answer, and it is not always clear that they are aware of the full significance of the question. Perhaps the vision offered up in the opening of Abundance—a temperature-controlled apartment, well-stocked fridge and drone technology for package delivery (something already current in select American cities)—is utopian enough for Klein and Thompson’s most likely readership: well-educated progressives who already inhabit some version of this life but would like to be liberated from the guilt they feel at the injustice and scarcity on which they know it is built. Surely, though, there must be something more to the “good life” than this.
●
There are understandable reasons why liberal and leftist intellectuals are cautious about discussing the good life. A core tenet of modern liberal theory holds that the job of a just political system is not to tell anyone how to live but rather to give them the freedom and, in its more left-leaning versions, the economic wherewithal, to live as they please. Although there are “perfectionist” strands in the liberal tradition, the most prominent Anglo-American political philosophers over the past half century, from John Rawls and Richard Rorty to Judith Shklar and Martha Nussbaum, have argued for a liberalism that remains rigorously agnostic about ultimate questions, leaving the great spiritual, philosophical and aesthetic projects for the private or semi-private sphere. “Apart from prohibiting interference with the freedom of others,” writes Shklar in her classic 1989 essay “The Liberalism of Fear,” “liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make.”
The logic of this formulation is both hard to dispute and famously unsatisfying. Rawls, Shklar, Rorty and Nussbaum reached the height of their influence in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, when liberal ideals benefited from their contrast with Soviet totalitarianism as well as an unprecedented middle-class prosperity. Writing just before the end of the Cold War, Shklar warned those who wanted the modern liberal order to provide a more robust vision of the good against forgetting the conditions of its historical emergence, in the aftermath of those famously robust political movements, Nazism and Stalinism. But if Shklar’s original readership might have needed occasionally to be reminded of such things, we who confront her essay 36 years later, in a country with no Soviet-style adversary and a disappearing middle class, have not only forgotten such historical lessons, but probably never learned them in the first place. Consequently we have often wished for “more” from our political life and—not always fortunately—have often found it.
On the right, this wish has taken its most cogent intellectual form in post-liberalism, which has endeavored to reopen fundamental political questions that many liberal intellectuals had gotten in the habit of treating as settled, including about whether our politics should revolve around a “common good.” The reopening of these questions has been appealing to religious and traditionalist thinkers long at odds with progressivism as well as to many thoughtful young people who have come of age in a highly secularized society suffused by mindless consumerism and addictive technology, even as the post-liberals have largely failed to account for how their preferred society would guarantee the most basic religious or civil freedoms. But it is not only the right that has fashioned alternatives to liberalism in recent years. Although it was deeply invested in liberal principles like diversity and egalitarianism, wokeness was insensible to the firewall that the theorists of liberalism had erected between public policy and personal life. The ambition of wokeness, which arose from within liberalism itself, was to inculcate the values that Rawls had relegated to the “basic framework” of society into every aspect of its civic and social life; and with the help of social media, as well as groups of impassioned millennials who had come of age under the aegis of Obama’s campaign to bend the arc of history toward justice, the movement achieved a short-lived cultural hegemony. But the totalizing reign of wokeness over the nonprofit world, the mainstream media and academia, not to mention large parts of the Democratic Party, led inexorably—as its most perceptive liberal critics long predicted—to a backlash in a pluralistic democracy where its leading ideas never gained anything approaching majority assent.
Still, at its high point wokeness achieved a popularity and depth of influence that the post-liberals can only dream of, and as it receded from public life it left something hollow in its wake. Klein himself has speculated that Abundance became such a flash point in part because it was published into an intellectual vacuum. Whatever one thinks of the policy frameworks the book recommends, however, it is clear that Klein and Thompson are uninterested in offering the kind of instructions for living that came so naturally to the evangelists of 2010s progressivism. They have no duty to do so, and the topics that they do focus on are hardly unimportant. Yet there remains something discomfiting about the degree to which today’s most prominent liberal intellectuals seem to have habituated themselves to eschewing fundamental moral, philosophical and aesthetic questions altogether.
It is symptomatic that the newest liberal intellectual magazine to arrive on the scene, appropriately titled the Argument, lacks a culture section or any demonstrated interest in art or ideas that do not bear directly on policy disputes, just as many of the liberal commentators in Thompson and Klein’s orbit seem to see their role as being indistinguishable from that of campaign strategists. If it makes some rough sense for elected officials in a liberal society to refrain from making prejudicial statements of judgment and value, this is no argument against intellectuals or artists advancing their own “positive doctrines”; in fact, it makes it all the more necessary that they do so. There is all the difference in the world, moreover, between abstaining from public pronouncements about the good life out of political principle, historical memory or a sense for the tragic irresolvability of conflicting ethical commitments, and doing so because one has never felt the pull of such commitments to begin with. In the latter case, what may look to some like sophistication or maturity is in fact an abdication of responsibility—and, perhaps, the harbinger of cultural exhaustion.
●
“Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” wrote the liberal critic Lionel Trilling, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like.” The line comes from his 1946 essay “The Function of the Little Magazine,” written in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Partisan Review and later included in his landmark collection, The Liberal Imagination (1950). At the time modern liberalism was emerging as the dominant political philosophy in postwar America, but its very dominance, in Trilling’s view, posed a threat to the vitality of its values. When liberal culture was unopposed, Trilling noted, the ideas that rose to its surface inclined toward “a certain simplicity,” while its most successful spokespeople tended to shrink from the “unmistakable note of seriousness” that could be found, reliably, only in the art and argument of the small-circulation magazines like the one he was celebrating. That so many of his fellow intellectuals and critics preferred a “literature of piety” to the “best of the literary mind of our time”—which then included the great works of European and American literary modernism—was for him but one sign of a deepening corruption. The result was not only a culture that Trilling found “stale” and “inert” but one he worried would inspire many to turn away from liberalism altogether.
Today, the places that disaffected liberals can turn are perhaps less world-historically destructive than they were in the age of The Liberal Imagination, but they are certainly not, as might have seemed the case even a decade ago, merely hypothetical. The forum in this issue, on “the left and the good life,” was inspired in part by Mana Afsari’s essay from issue 34, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History.” Afsari’s discussions with Gen Z Trump voters suggested, among other things, the extent to which the most recent manifestations of liberalism and leftism were failing to appeal to ambitious young people not only as a matter of policy or messaging but also at the level of “imagination and mind.” This represented, for us, both a challenge and an opportunity. In line with one of the long-standing functions of this little magazine, which is to envision and advance those models of philosophical, aesthetic and political contestation that have always accompanied any “serious” search for the good life, we asked leftist and liberal thinkers to step back from the drumbeat of debates about electoral strategy and the proper way to resist Trumpism and to articulate, instead, positive and persuasive ideals in the spheres of art, philosophy, work, education, technology and much else—ideals that were consistent with left-liberal values like egalitarianism and social justice but that also extended beyond them.
The resulting essays question some of the baseline assumptions of contemporary leftism and liberalism, as Trilling implored the true friends of left-liberalism to do in his own time, while at the same time attempting to excavate their intellectual traditions for more promising—and, not unimportantly, more inspiring—paths forward. Our contention being that even if one agrees with Klein that it is not the job of the liberal intellectual to tell the citizens of 2050 (or 2026) where they should drive their electric cars, there remain few tasks more urgent today—for the friends and the foes of liberalism alike—than to demonstrate that there remain places worth going.
The first three pages of Abundance, the bestselling political blueprint by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, are written in the second person. “You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets,” they begin (they are also written in italics). “A few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blinks in the morning sun.” The year is 2050, we are told, and the interlocking crises that define social and political life today—the climate crisis, the housing crisis, the crisis of democracy—are a blip in the rearview mirror. Technological advancement, combined with a new birth of supply-side economics, has created the conditions for clean air, electric vehicles and nutritious food that is produced, without any need for animals, in low-cost labs. Completing the vision, the 2050 version of “you” is invited to step outside just as “another last-mile delivery drone descends from canopy level, pauses over a neighbor’s yard like a hummingbird, and drops off a package.”
What follows this “utopian” tableau is a book full of mostly unobjectionable policy suggestions for making government more efficient and responsive, which have nevertheless been met with many strenuous objections. To their detractors on the left, Klein and Thompson are technocratic elitists who refuse to admit the necessity of class struggle or mass politics, while paying too little attention to the influence of corporations and the superrich. Yet beneath the mockery and invective, the debate is shallower than it looks. As some progressive commentators have pointed out, the goals of abundance liberalism are broadly compatible with those of millennial socialism: indeed, Zohran Mamdani’s DSA-backed campaign for New York mayor smoothly incorporated aspects of each. (Klein has said that he voted for Mamdani.) Likewise, the two factions seem to share a common limitation when it comes to articulating the horizon of their political projects. This is why, for all the criticisms of Klein and Thompson’s supposed blindness to the way politics work in the present, it is only conservatives like Douthat who have pointed out the dismal character of the “abundant” society they imagine in the future.
Due to the successes of consumer capitalism, Americans today “have a startling abundance of the goods that fill a house,” Klein and Thompson write at the end of their introduction, “and a shortage of what’s needed to build a good life.” But what is needed, besides material sufficiency, to build a good life? Neither Klein and Thompson nor their leftist detractors seem to have an answer, and it is not always clear that they are aware of the full significance of the question. Perhaps the vision offered up in the opening of Abundance—a temperature-controlled apartment, well-stocked fridge and drone technology for package delivery (something already current in select American cities)—is utopian enough for Klein and Thompson’s most likely readership: well-educated progressives who already inhabit some version of this life but would like to be liberated from the guilt they feel at the injustice and scarcity on which they know it is built. Surely, though, there must be something more to the “good life” than this.
●
There are understandable reasons why liberal and leftist intellectuals are cautious about discussing the good life. A core tenet of modern liberal theory holds that the job of a just political system is not to tell anyone how to live but rather to give them the freedom and, in its more left-leaning versions, the economic wherewithal, to live as they please. Although there are “perfectionist” strands in the liberal tradition, the most prominent Anglo-American political philosophers over the past half century, from John Rawls and Richard Rorty to Judith Shklar and Martha Nussbaum, have argued for a liberalism that remains rigorously agnostic about ultimate questions, leaving the great spiritual, philosophical and aesthetic projects for the private or semi-private sphere. “Apart from prohibiting interference with the freedom of others,” writes Shklar in her classic 1989 essay “The Liberalism of Fear,” “liberalism does not have any particular positive doctrines about how people are to conduct their lives or what personal choices they are to make.”
The logic of this formulation is both hard to dispute and famously unsatisfying. Rawls, Shklar, Rorty and Nussbaum reached the height of their influence in the last thirty years of the twentieth century, when liberal ideals benefited from their contrast with Soviet totalitarianism as well as an unprecedented middle-class prosperity. Writing just before the end of the Cold War, Shklar warned those who wanted the modern liberal order to provide a more robust vision of the good against forgetting the conditions of its historical emergence, in the aftermath of those famously robust political movements, Nazism and Stalinism. But if Shklar’s original readership might have needed occasionally to be reminded of such things, we who confront her essay 36 years later, in a country with no Soviet-style adversary and a disappearing middle class, have not only forgotten such historical lessons, but probably never learned them in the first place. Consequently we have often wished for “more” from our political life and—not always fortunately—have often found it.
On the right, this wish has taken its most cogent intellectual form in post-liberalism, which has endeavored to reopen fundamental political questions that many liberal intellectuals had gotten in the habit of treating as settled, including about whether our politics should revolve around a “common good.” The reopening of these questions has been appealing to religious and traditionalist thinkers long at odds with progressivism as well as to many thoughtful young people who have come of age in a highly secularized society suffused by mindless consumerism and addictive technology, even as the post-liberals have largely failed to account for how their preferred society would guarantee the most basic religious or civil freedoms. But it is not only the right that has fashioned alternatives to liberalism in recent years. Although it was deeply invested in liberal principles like diversity and egalitarianism, wokeness was insensible to the firewall that the theorists of liberalism had erected between public policy and personal life. The ambition of wokeness, which arose from within liberalism itself, was to inculcate the values that Rawls had relegated to the “basic framework” of society into every aspect of its civic and social life; and with the help of social media, as well as groups of impassioned millennials who had come of age under the aegis of Obama’s campaign to bend the arc of history toward justice, the movement achieved a short-lived cultural hegemony. But the totalizing reign of wokeness over the nonprofit world, the mainstream media and academia, not to mention large parts of the Democratic Party, led inexorably—as its most perceptive liberal critics long predicted—to a backlash in a pluralistic democracy where its leading ideas never gained anything approaching majority assent.
Still, at its high point wokeness achieved a popularity and depth of influence that the post-liberals can only dream of, and as it receded from public life it left something hollow in its wake. Klein himself has speculated that Abundance became such a flash point in part because it was published into an intellectual vacuum. Whatever one thinks of the policy frameworks the book recommends, however, it is clear that Klein and Thompson are uninterested in offering the kind of instructions for living that came so naturally to the evangelists of 2010s progressivism. They have no duty to do so, and the topics that they do focus on are hardly unimportant. Yet there remains something discomfiting about the degree to which today’s most prominent liberal intellectuals seem to have habituated themselves to eschewing fundamental moral, philosophical and aesthetic questions altogether.
It is symptomatic that the newest liberal intellectual magazine to arrive on the scene, appropriately titled the Argument, lacks a culture section or any demonstrated interest in art or ideas that do not bear directly on policy disputes, just as many of the liberal commentators in Thompson and Klein’s orbit seem to see their role as being indistinguishable from that of campaign strategists. If it makes some rough sense for elected officials in a liberal society to refrain from making prejudicial statements of judgment and value, this is no argument against intellectuals or artists advancing their own “positive doctrines”; in fact, it makes it all the more necessary that they do so. There is all the difference in the world, moreover, between abstaining from public pronouncements about the good life out of political principle, historical memory or a sense for the tragic irresolvability of conflicting ethical commitments, and doing so because one has never felt the pull of such commitments to begin with. In the latter case, what may look to some like sophistication or maturity is in fact an abdication of responsibility—and, perhaps, the harbinger of cultural exhaustion.
●
“Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” wrote the liberal critic Lionel Trilling, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like.” The line comes from his 1946 essay “The Function of the Little Magazine,” written in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Partisan Review and later included in his landmark collection, The Liberal Imagination (1950). At the time modern liberalism was emerging as the dominant political philosophy in postwar America, but its very dominance, in Trilling’s view, posed a threat to the vitality of its values. When liberal culture was unopposed, Trilling noted, the ideas that rose to its surface inclined toward “a certain simplicity,” while its most successful spokespeople tended to shrink from the “unmistakable note of seriousness” that could be found, reliably, only in the art and argument of the small-circulation magazines like the one he was celebrating. That so many of his fellow intellectuals and critics preferred a “literature of piety” to the “best of the literary mind of our time”—which then included the great works of European and American literary modernism—was for him but one sign of a deepening corruption. The result was not only a culture that Trilling found “stale” and “inert” but one he worried would inspire many to turn away from liberalism altogether.
Today, the places that disaffected liberals can turn are perhaps less world-historically destructive than they were in the age of The Liberal Imagination, but they are certainly not, as might have seemed the case even a decade ago, merely hypothetical. The forum in this issue, on “the left and the good life,” was inspired in part by Mana Afsari’s essay from issue 34, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History.” Afsari’s discussions with Gen Z Trump voters suggested, among other things, the extent to which the most recent manifestations of liberalism and leftism were failing to appeal to ambitious young people not only as a matter of policy or messaging but also at the level of “imagination and mind.” This represented, for us, both a challenge and an opportunity. In line with one of the long-standing functions of this little magazine, which is to envision and advance those models of philosophical, aesthetic and political contestation that have always accompanied any “serious” search for the good life, we asked leftist and liberal thinkers to step back from the drumbeat of debates about electoral strategy and the proper way to resist Trumpism and to articulate, instead, positive and persuasive ideals in the spheres of art, philosophy, work, education, technology and much else—ideals that were consistent with left-liberal values like egalitarianism and social justice but that also extended beyond them.
The resulting essays question some of the baseline assumptions of contemporary leftism and liberalism, as Trilling implored the true friends of left-liberalism to do in his own time, while at the same time attempting to excavate their intellectual traditions for more promising—and, not unimportantly, more inspiring—paths forward. Our contention being that even if one agrees with Klein that it is not the job of the liberal intellectual to tell the citizens of 2050 (or 2026) where they should drive their electric cars, there remain few tasks more urgent today—for the friends and the foes of liberalism alike—than to demonstrate that there remain places worth going.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.