In progressive and centrist circles, the publication of Abundance by Ezra Klein and David Thompson has been an event. According to the authors, the key problem with progressive economic policy is that it has been too concerned with redistributing purchasing power and has neglected the economic system’s ability to make and build things in the first place.

Critics on the Left have viewed Klein and Thompson’s “supply-side progressivism” as little more than repackaged neoliberalism. However, the core idea predates Reaganism by several decades. Each postwar Democratic administration vowed to solve distributional problems by generating growth. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson used supply-side policy instruments like tax incentives, subsidized credit, and regulation-lite zones to shape business investment.

Credit growth was always the most effective policy instrument to spur growth, and deregulating the banking sector became a key strategy for Keynesians. But the reliance on credit was always a double-edged sword. The more the financial sector grew, the greater its power to discipline how democratically elected governments could use the public purse. By the late ‘70s that contradiction came to a head, and Jimmy Carter’s decision to put his faith in inflation hawk Paul Volcker empowered finance in a way that would shape the American and global economies for decades to come.

Bill Clinton defined his supply-side program in opposition to Ronald Reagan’s cynical trickle-down philosophy. Soon after taking office, however, his own economic policy team vetoed the idea of using public investment to rekindle economic growth. But help came from an unexpected corner: when Volcker’s successor Alan Greenspan found that credit growth no longer fueled inflation, he saw no reason to stop lowering interest rates. The effect on industrial activity was limited, but economic growth was fueled by a wave of asset inflation and capital gains.

During the Obama administration, the magic of financial growth no longer worked. Although the asset economy went from strength to strength, it was no longer able to sustain the dream of universal prosperity. The extremely uneven recovery from the global financial crisis of 2008 sparked a wave of populism on both the Right and the Left, but economic stagnation also led many mainstream voices — the Federal Reserve, most notably — to question the fiscal austerity formula.

In combination with the unique circumstances and supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic, this questioning of fiscal austerity created an environment where the Biden administration could try new combinations of demand stimulus, supply-side incentives, and public investment. The policy shift provided the stage on which the revival of supply-side thinking took place.

To be sure, Klein and Thompson were by no means unconditional supporters of Biden’s policies. They voiced particular concern about his spending habits, which they viewed as inflationary in a context where a supply-side agenda had not yet resulted in a sufficient expansion of the nation’s productive capacity. Of course, supply-side conditions are malleable, as abundance theory teaches. Klein and Thompson might therefore just as well have argued that Biden should have significantly stepped up the pace and size of his supply-side policies (e.g., freely funding public projects to alleviate supply-chain disruptions). But they shy away from such proposals.

In the end, what they find more inspiring than Biden’s willingness to ruffle the feathers of the business establishment by supporting unions is the Clinton era’s appearance of effortless prosperity. That dream was embodied in Kamala Harris’s short-lived elevation — but although she enjoyed tremendous support from Wall Street, it did not change the fact that, for the time being, there simply does not exist an untapped asset class that can generate a new tide of widely distributed capital gains.

There is, however, more to the abundance agenda than nostalgia for the ‘90s and affinity with the style of technocratic managerialism. To reduce it to a neoliberal fantasy would be to miss how suitable its producerist ethos is to the construction of a post-neoliberal consensus.

Reflecting on the reception of Abundance, Thompson notes that the book’s agenda has been embraced not just by centrists but equally by some of the Democratic party’s most prominent left-wing populists, like Representative Ro Khanna of California, who was the national cochair of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. Khanna is a member of the New Economic Patriots, a group of House Democrats who want to return the party’s focus to the core economic problems faced by the American working class.

Khanna views the Clinton and Obama administrations’ commitment to economic and financial globalization as a mistake, is an ardent advocate of reindustrialization, and sees enough common ground with the MAGA program that he has referred to his own politics as “Blue MAGA”. A similar ethos shapes the Congressional “Build America” Caucus, in which populist Democrats and Republicans work together to achieve a supply-side environment that will revive growth and ensure generalized prosperity.

These curious ideological alliances may be easier to comprehend if we recall the reactionary dimension of Bidenomics — its aggressive nationalism. The military has been a cornerstone of the American economy since World War II, driving technological innovation and providing stability during a period of fiscal austerity. But the Biden administration went further, channeling huge amounts of energy and public expenditure into reviving great-power rivalry and shaping domestic conditions in order to wage it.

In the coming years, the Trump administration will build a more fully militarized Keynesianism upon an ethnonationalism that operates both geopolitically and domestically. When deportation spectacles lose their capacity to distract and MAGA generals like Steve Bannon demand more attention for the material welfare of the (electoral) troops, Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, stands ready to design a stimulus program organized around “defense-driven procurement.”

The economic policy platform of any new Democratic leaders emerging through the party ranks will be animated by the ethos of the Biden-Trump decade. Project 2029, the Democrats’ attempt — modeled after Project 2025 — to formulate a new program to maximize electability, prominently features input from both supply-side progressives and Jake Sullivan, the architect of Biden’s reassertion of American nationalism.

The abundance agenda will provide a comfortable umbrella for the construction of new alliances. It will serve as a bridge between Blue MAGA concerns with the renewal of heartland prosperity and the commitments of business-friendly Democrats, while also facilitating the kind of bipartisan collaboration with MAGA loyalists proudly advertised by the Build America Caucus. Those dynamics will serve to normalize — rather than counter — the new style of authoritarian populism.