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“How,” asks Trevor Jackson in our September 25 issue, “in conditions of runaway climatic disaster, can the future be recovered? What visions of a shared transformative future are possible, and what happens to emancipatory politics, and to democracy itself, without them?” Two new books—Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and Overshoot, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton—offer wildly different answers:

The mood of Abundance is that of a chirpy regional sales manager giving a PowerPoint; Overshoot’s is a wild-eyed buccaneer swinging onto a burning frigate with a cutlass in his teeth. Klein and Thompson blame liberals and liberalism for the decline of an abundant future; Malm and Carton blame fossil capital for planetary destruction, and they do not hesitate to analogize oil executives to Nazis, slave owners, serial murderers, and arsonists. Klein and Thompson believe that we live in a post-material political world, one constituted by ideas, narratives, and verbal persuasion, where “policy is downstream of values” and “political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past.” Malm and Carton believe we live in a world ruled by the profit imperatives of capital.

Below, alongside Jackson’s essay, are five articles from our archive about the last few decades of liberalism.

Trevor Jackson
How to Blow Up a Planet

For liberal supporters of the “abundance” movement, deregulation is crucial to solving climate and economic crises. Their critics argue something more confrontational is needed.

Jonathan Lethem
The Forty-Fourth Year of the Reagan Administration

“We find ourselves in a world where Kamala Harris is endorsed by none other than Dick Cheney, the personal conveyor of Nixon’s global dream into the twenty-first century (or, as my Instagram feed grimly joked, ‘the ghost of Henry Kissinger endorses Kamala Harris’). When asked to explain the title of Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs said, ‘A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.’”

—November 7, 2024

Robert Kuttner
Free Markets, Besieged Citizens

Why did Democratic presidents embrace an economic credo that annihilated their own public philosophy and its appeal to the electorate?

—July 21, 2022

Thomas Frank
What’s the Matter with Liberals?

For the 2004 campaign, John Kerry moved to the center, following the well-worn path of the corporate Democrats before him, downplaying any “liberal” economic positions that might cost him among the funders and affirming his support for the Iraq invasion even after the official justifications for that exercise had been utterly discredited. Kerry’s pallid strategy offered little to motivate the party’s traditional liberal and working-class base, but revulsion against Bush was assumed to be reason enough to get out and vote.

—May 12, 2005

Lars-Erik Nelson
Watch Out, Democrats!

Instead of personal prosperity, traditional working-class voters get condescending lectures about the virtues of free trade, often couched in language suggesting that anyone who doubts the benefits of globalization is a knuckle-dragging mouth-breather too dim to understand the works of David Ricardo. In postindustrial Washington, Clinton and his favorites (wearing blue jeans to seem folksy) dine not on nightingales but on barbecue at a Democratic National Committee dinner that raises $25.5 million, much of it in $500,000 contributions, for the party that supposedly represents the common man.

—July 20, 2000

Richard Sennett
An Urban Anarchist

Many people, especially during the last few years, have challenged these assumptions of liberal planning. Dissenters on both the left and right have called into question the fitness of planning by an elite which is often out of touch with its constituents. They point to injustices in urban renewal, labor negotiations, and schools as examples of how centralized elitism has failed. They have insisted that cities be “decentralized,” and that there must be more “community control.” But why is the local community more appropriate than the city for dealing with urban problems?

—January 1, 1970

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