On "Abundance," free speech, Charlie Kirk, and the future of the Democratic Party.

A review of a review of a book everyone claims to be reading, plus thoughts about free speech and why so many Christians flocked to follow Charlie Kirk.

A vigil for Charlie Kirk by the river in Croton-on-Hudson

Time for another mea culpa for the loyal readers of “Words for the Wise,” some of whom are actually paying for their subscriptions, that it has been so long since the last post (about 11 days.) I realize that many editors of Substack newsletters post pretty much every day, although as a subscriber to a number of them I often wish they would not. Like many of us, I am so deluged with reading matter that I cannot keep up with it all.

I’ve tried to keep to a roughly once weekly publishing schedule here, but I hope readers will be forgiving if sometimes it is less and sometimes more. No one is required to pay, and so that makes me feel less guilty if sometimes I stray from a rigorous schedule.

As regular readers know, one reason for the less frequent posting is that as editor of an online newspaper serving my Hudson Valley village, The Croton Chronicle, I have had my hands full with a free speech controversy involving a Trump banner flown high and proudly in the center of town. This has become a national story, and has attracted the attention of Trump’s Department of Justice and President Trump himself.

The latest development in this drama, in which Trump supporters have posed as champions of free speech and village officials have become anti-free speech villains in the minds of some here, is a whistleblower letter the Chronicle obtained that had been written by the very Code Enforcement Officer whom officials claimed was acting in a neutral and non-political way. It turns out that this village employee did not see it that way at all, and provided details of how he was allegedly pressured by our Village Manager into going after Lenny Amicola, the owner of the property and the Trump banner.

Shortly after the Chronicle broke this story, it went national all over again, with Newsmax leading the way as it did earlier. Newsmax was kind enough to cite the Chronicle’s reporting—something the New York Times rarely does when another publication breaks a story—and so our little hometown paper has once again come to national attention, although I have few illusions that this will last more than the proverbial 15 minutes.

So, with the above paragraphs I have managed to provide some excuses for why the posting of a new edition of “Words for the Wise” has been delayed, and at the same time I have told readers some things they might find interesting—because our local situation in Croton-on-Hudson is in many ways a microcosm of what is going on nationally. Think globally, report locally, someone once said (actually that was me, although it’s obviously only a slightly modified version of an old activist adage.)

But I have also provided a segue into what I really want to talk about in this post. I want to make some remarks about the book “Abundance,” the Democratic Party, and the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk. Nothing I say will be stunningly original, since I see myself as a journalist and synthesizer and not a deep thinker on my own. Like Blanche DuBois, I really heavily on the kindness of strangers—although I try to pick smart and insightful ones.

There has already been a lot of discussion of “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—a lot of it critical—online and in various commentaries. I have not read the book, and I doubt that I will, because I have no reason to disbelieve the critics who contend that it is a blueprint for moving the Democratic Party even further to the right than it already is, and of course I am not going to support that.

But I did want to flag what I think is an excellent review of the book in the New York Review of Books by Trevor Jackson, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley. Jackson also reviews a second book, by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, entitled “Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown,” whose analysis he seems to prefer. But I will focus here on what he says about “Abundance.” The online version of the piece is behind a paywall, but it, and the NYRB, are well worth your time and money.

(By the way, if you think I am the slightest bit embarrassed at writing about a review of a book I do not intend to read, you could be wrong.)

After a somewhat lengthy introduction to the intellectual and political history that provides the context for these two books, Jackson got my attention with this thumbnail sketch of Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein was one of the leading intellectual lights of Obama-era liberalism. Throughout his trajectory from early Internet blogs to The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” to founding Vox to The New York Times and his own podcast, Klein has been the exemplar of a certain style of politics that has dominated the Democratic Party and its ancillary media for fifteen years. It is an urban, affluent, and educated political outlook, one that is conflict averse, self-consciously “smart,” and enthused about “complexity,” but with specific meanings for both of those words—where smart conveys a certainty of opinion and the speed of its expression, and complexity means a grasp of the arcane self-referential rules and vocabulary of policy and economics. It’s a style that can be glib and smug but also earnest and excited. Klein might be the most influential figure in liberal media at the moment, and he played a powerful part in advocating for the end of Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign. His coauthor, Derek Thompson, is a journalist at The Atlantic with a podcast, a Substack, and two previous books.

In other words, Ezra Klein is a shining example of everything that is wrong with the mainstream of the Democratic Party today. The publication of “Abundance” is a warning sign that the party’s establishment is determined to defeat its left wing and sign even more peace treaties with the oligarchs who are not only responsible for most of our ills, but also responsible for giving us Donald Trump.

That’s me talking right now, but later in the review Jackson gets down to it in what I think is a very quotable statement of basically the same analysis:

The political function of the abundance agenda is straightforward: with its preference for friendliness to corporations, market solutions, and technologically driven growth over redistribution, it is the only coherent alternative to the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left. By losing to Donald Trump a second time—after the felony convictions, after the January 6 insurrection, after everything—and losing so comprehensively, the Democratic Party stands revealed as one of the most incompetent, rudderless, and barren political forces in modern history. For decades Democrats have had no vision to offer beyond gentler versions of Republican policies: the same commitment to market-based social policy at home and militarism abroad. From higher education to health care to retirement policy, they have had no ideas to match the relentless Republican drive to privatization, and nothing to rival the terrifyingly comprehensive creativity of the Project 2025 agenda.

Well, there you have it. Jackson takes some time to get to this paragraph, but when he gets there, he is devastating. I cannot resist quoting what Jackson says in the following paragraph:

If you promise hope and change and fail to deliver, there is no way to recover from the consequent sense of popular betrayal, and no way to credibly promise change again. Since 2016 the Democratic Party has consisted of two things: the Sanders left and efforts to defeat it. Abundance is the latest effort, a closed parenthesis in the halfhearted sentence of contemporary liberalism.

So this is the battle that those of us who really want to defeat Donald Trump and his fascist MAGA movement are up against: The enemies within, who have betrayed us time and again because in reality they are not on our side.

So now I want to say something about Charlie Kirk. The photograph of the vigil that opens this post was taken on September 21 during a candlelight vigil by the Hudson River in our village of Croton-on-Hudson, and accompanied the short story I did about that event. The 75 or so participants included a handful of well known Croton conservatives (all of whom I know personally through my coverage of village affairs) plus a significant number of parishioners from the two main Catholic churches that serve our local community.

As I described the event, the speakers emphasized the religious aspects of Kirk’s life and death but downplayed his controversial political views and strong support for President Trump. There was little mention of the many controversial positions and statements by Charlie Kirk over the years on issues such as race, feminism, LGBTQ rights, immigration, the death penalty, and other matters.

That’s not entirely surprising, because Kirk’s views, as so many others have pointed out, were bigoted and odious, which is exactly why Trump and his henchmen and women have made such a big deal out of his death. Oh, and of course to suppress freedom of speech about all of these subjects, which makes it all the more ironic that conservatives in our village have been the champions of our local “free speech” movement in support of Lenny Amicola and his Trump banner.

But while I despise Charlie Kirk and all he stood for, Trump opponents really have to think long and hard about why he and his varying messages have proved so powerful for so many in our country. Engaging in self-righteous condemnation of Kirk and his followers might be emotionally satisfying and even necessary in some situations, but it doesn’t really do the job.

Thus some wonder how people who claim to be Christians can overlook Charlie Kirk’s bigotry and flock to follow him. But others wonder how people who claim to believe in justice and the sanctity of life can vote for Democratic Party leaders who bankrolled genocide in Gaza.

That’s a contradiction that needs to be resolved before anti-fascists and progressives can hope to make any headway against what is now clearly a fascist agenda, unfolding before our very eyes. Moving the Democratic Party further to the right, giving capitalists everything they have dreamed of and then claiming it will benefit everyone, is clearly going to be self-defeating in the long run. (They used to call it the “trickle down theory,” which makes it all the more depressing that some liberal intellectuals are flocking to embrace it.)

Thanks God we have Zohran Mamdani doing so well in New York City as the champion of an entirely different agenda. Will Mamdani survive to carry out some of his very sensible plans, or will he fall victim to an assassin’s bullet just as Charlie Kirk did? Sorry to have to voice the question that is on many nervous minds.

That’s really all I have to say for now. Look for another post in a week’s time, or maybe sooner if all goes well.

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