The Ezra Klein Show - There Is a Liberal Answer to Elon Musk

Episode Date: March 9, 2025

Right-wing populism thrives on scarcity. The answer is abundance. But a politics of abundance will work only if Democrats confront where their approach has failed. This audio essay is adapted from my forthcoming book, “Abundance,” which I wrote with Derek Thompson. You can preorder it here. And learn more about our book tour here. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein show. Democrats have a problem that runs deeper than the 2024 election. They have a problem that runs deeper than Elon Musk's assault on the government. Look at the places they govern. Strongholds like New York and Illinois and where I'm from, California. They're losing people. In 2023, California saw a net loss of 268,000 residents. In New York, 179,000. Why are all these people leaving? In surveys, the dominant reason is simply this. The cost of living is too high. It's too expensive to buy a house.

It's too expensive to get childcare. You have to live too far from your work. And so they're going to places where all of that is cheaper. Texas, Florida, Arizona. I know these families. These families are my friends. I've lived with them in these places, and I've watched many of them move away from the place they love, the city they wanted to raise their children, because they could

not afford to live there. You cannot be the party of working families when the places you govern or places working families cannot afford to live. You are not the party of working families when the places you govern or places working families cannot afford to live. You are not the party of working families when the places you govern are places working families cannot afford to live. In the American political system, to lose people is to lose power.

If these trends hold, the 2030 census will shift the Electoral College sharply to the right. The states that Kamala Harris won in 2024, they'll lose about 11 house seats and Electoral College votes. The states that Trump won would gain them. So in that Electoral College, a Democrat could win every single state Harris won in 2024 and also win Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and still lose the presidency.

There is a policy failure haunting blue states. It has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. It's too hard to build homes. It's too hard to build clean energy. It's too hard to build mass transit. The problem isn't technical. We know how to build apartment complexes. We know how to lay down solar panels and transmission lines.

We know how to build trains. The problem is the rules and the laws and the political cultures that govern construction in many blue states. The second Avenue subway project in New York City, it was the most expensive subway project by kilometer the world has ever seen. Has New York dramatically reformed its policies to make the next one easier and cheaper? No, of course it hasn't.

Did the decades of delay and the billions of cost overruns on Boston's Big Dig change on Massachusetts' builds? Not really. California. California is the worst housing problem in the country. In 2022, the state had 12% of the country's population. It had 30% of the country's homeless population, and it had 50 percent, five zero, of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this unfathomable failure led to California

building more homes than it was building a decade ago? No, it hasn't. Our politics is split right now between a left that defends government even when it doesn't work, and a right that wants to destroy government even when it does work. What we need is a left that defends government even when it doesn't work, and a right that wants to destroy government even when it does work. What we need is a political party that makes government work. Democrats could be that party. They should be that party. But it requires them to first confront what they have done to make government fail. I could tell you a dozen stories.

In the book I've just written, I do. Let me here tell you just one. In 1982, so more than 40 years ago, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill to study what it would take to build a high-speed rail system across the state. He liked what he saw, and so did California's voters. In 1996, California formed a high-speed rail authority to plan for construction. High-speed rail is not some futuristic technology like nuclear fusion or flying cars. Japan broke ground on high-speed rail back in 1959. You can ride on these trains elsewhere.

I have ridden on these trains. In 2008, California's voters approved Prop 1A, which set aside $10 billion to begin construction on a high-speed rail line that would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. It would run through the Central Valley. It would get there in under two hours and 40 minutes. And it would cost, they thought, $33.6 billion. California's high-speed rail authority estimated we'd be able to ride that train by the year 2020.

And the news kept getting better for high-speed rail. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. That had hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure of the future. And high-speed rail in particular had captured Obama's imagination. Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal. No delays.

No sitting on the tarmac. No lost luggage. No taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America. Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful pie

in the sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It's been happening for decades. The problem is it's been happening elsewhere. Not here. Obama wanted it to happen here. In California, where the voters had already begun planning

and funding high-speed rail was the obvious place. And the political stars had just kept aligning. In 2008, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a high-speed rail critic, was governor. But in 2011, high-speed rail's foremost champion returned when Jerry Brown won back the governor's mansion almost 30 years after he first left it. In his 2012 state of the State address, Brown marked High Speed Rail as his signature infrastructure project. If you believe that California will continue to grow as I do, and that millions more people will be living in our state, this is a wise investment.

As governor the last time, I signed legislation to study the concept. Now 30 years later, within weeks of a revised business plan that will enable us to begin initial construction before the year is out. But it didn't happen. By 2018, it was brutally clear that nothing was going to be rideable by 2020. And the cost estimate, it wasn't $33 billion anymore.

It had risen and risen and risen. By 2018, it was $76 billion. The next year, 2019, Gavin Newsom, who had served as Brown's lieutenant governor, succeeded him as governor. Next level, let's level about the high-speed rail. And in his first state of the state address, he said what everybody already knew, which was that high-speed rail in California was failing. Let's be real. The current project as planned would cost too much

and respectfully take too long. There's been too little oversight and not enough transparency. Right now there simply isn't a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to LA. I wish there were. Today, California is trying to salvage something, anything,

from what has become a fiasco. It's now trying to build a line between the agricultural centers of Merced and Bakersfield. It's a line no one would have authorized if it had been the plan presented in the first place. The latest estimate is that line alone will cost $35 billion to complete, as much as the entire LA to SF line was estimated to cost in 2008.

And this Merced to Bakersfield line, it won't begin carrying passengers until sometime between 2030 and 2033. I'm told now that finishing the LA to San Francisco line will cost $110 billion at least. California doesn't have anywhere near that kind of funding for high-speed rail. So they're building this line with no idea how they will ever finish it. What went so wrong here? In October of 2023, I went to Fresno, California, and I toured the miles of rail infrastructure that the California High-Speed Rail Authority has already built. What I heard as I walked that track with the engineers who have built it and the people overseeing it,

it wasn't engineering problems, it was political problems. I stood on a patch of the 99 freeway that had been moved in order to clear the Hope 4 trains path. Not far from there, there had been a mini storage facility. In folk imagination, eminent domain is a simple process by which the state simply tells you it wants your land, and it gives you some money, and it takes it from you. In reality, it took the high-speed rail authority four separate requests for possession

and two and a half years of legal wrangling to get that little, tiny spit of land. In this story, it repeated itself again and again and again everywhere we went. There are parts of the high-speed rail line that intersect with freight rail lines. But the freight rail lines, they're so busy in the holiday season that some impose a construction moratorium from October to December. So in those areas, construction just stops

for months every year. Trains are cleaner than cars, but high-speed rail has had to clear every inch of its route through environmental reviews, with lawsuits lurking around every corner. The environmental review process began in 2012, and by 2024, 12 years later, it still wasn't done. Many Californians were confused. The construction begun in the Central Valley, which was far less populated than the corridors near Los Angeles or San Francisco. Why did the authority begin

construction there rather than near the megacities? One reason was that when California applied for federal money, the Obama administration wanted bids that would improve air quality in poor communities. And so the $3 billion the federal government offered, it wasn't really to build high-speed rail. It was to begin building high-speed rail in ways that addressed air pollution in specific communities. The Central Valley is poor and more polluted than coastal California, so federal funding

went there and so did the initial construction. But that made it less likely high-speed rail would generate the ridership, the political support or the financial backing to ever actually finish. And that, of course, is bad for air pollution in Fresno and across the state. What has taken so long on high-speed rails, not hammering nails or pouring concrete, it's process, it's negotiating. Negotiating with courts, with funders, with business owners, with homeowners, with farm owners,

with other parts of the government. Those negotiations cost time, which cost money. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route, or the design, or the construction, and that costs money, and that costs time. Those negotiations lead to changes in the route, or the design, or the construction, and that costs money, and that costs time. Those negotiations are the product of decades of liberal policies meant to protect against government abuses.

And they may do that, but they also prevent government from building quickly or affordably. In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system, China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail. The Chinese government doesn't spend years debating with judges over whether it needs to move a storage facility. Its power leads to abuse and imperiousness. It also leads to trains. And look, I don't want America to become China.

But I do want it to be able to build trains as China can, as Europe can, as Japan can. This is an awkward time to make this argument. Elon Musk and Doge are trying to raise the federal government to the ground. Musk has been a loud critic of California's high-speed rail project, calling it a fraud, saying we should just let him build his imaginary hyperloop instead. But in reality, he's never offered a plan that would work to build anything better or cheaper than high-speed rail. His alternative, in truth, is nothing.

And I refuse to accept that this is our choice. A Democratic party that will not make government work, and a Republican party that wants to make government fail. What those two parties have created over decades is scarcity. Scarcity of homes, of good infrastructure, of clean energy, of public goods. But the difference between them is that the populist right loves scarcity. It is powered by scarcity. When there's not enough to go around, we look with suspicion on anyone who might take

what we have. Look, Donald Trump could have run on more. He could have run on bringing Texas's housing policies to the nation. In Houston, there's no zoning code, so building is easy, and the average home sells for a bit over $300,000. Compare that to Los Angeles, where the average home now sells for over a million dollars.

Or look at Austin, which has been a popular destination for many fleeing San Francisco's high housing costs. In November of 2024, San Francisco's metro area, and remember, it has a housing shortage, it authorized the building of 292 new housing structures. In Austin, they authorized 3,059. In the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance ran on none of that. Instead, the housing crisis became a cudgel they used against immigrants. 25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant

drivers of home prices in the country. As just one example, a vivid one, look at the explosion in rent in Springfield, Ohio, where Kamala has resettled the 20,000 Haitians. Trump could have run on the success Operation Warp Speed had in speeding up the COVID vaccines. Instead, he's slashing government funding for science and medical research and firing scientists. He could have run on making it easier to build energy of all kinds in America. Instead, he's trying to destroy the solar and wind industries. He could have run on making it easier for Americans to make things and to trade them

with the world. Instead, he's trying to cut international trade, imposing tariffs and alienating partners. Elon Musk is rich because of SpaceX and Tesla, companies that are built on federal subsidies. But he's slashing what government can do rather than reimagining what it can do. The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it.

That doesn't give you the childlessly simple divides that have so deformed our politics. Government is not simply good at all times. Government is not simply good at all times. It is not simply bad at all times. Sometimes government has to get out of the way, like in housing. Sometimes it has to take a central role, like in creating markets or organizing resources for technologies that do not yet exist and that we need and that are too risky for markets to fund. There is going to be pressure over these next few years as Elon Musk and Donald Trump dismantle

the federal government to see only the sins of the mago right. And don't get me wrong, the mago right is dangerous. A resistance is needed. But so too is an alternative. If liberals do not want Americans to turn to the false promises of strongmen, they need to offer them the fruits of effective government. In the long run, the way to sideline, to marginalize dangerous political movements like MAGA is to make liberalism actually deliver.

But if Democrats are to become the party of abundance, they have to confront their own role in creating scarcity. In the last few decades, Democrats took a wrong turn. They became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that forces government to work. Liberals spent a generation working at every level of government and society to make it harder to build recklessly. They got used to crafting coalitions and legislation that gave everyone a bit of what they wanted,

even if it meant the final product was astonishingly expensive or decades late or perhaps never found its way to completion at all. Then they explained away government's failures. They excused their own selfishness, putting out yard signs saying, no human being is illegal. Kindness is everything, even as they fought affordable housing nearby and pushed the working class out of the cities they ran. To unmake this machine will be painful. But it's necessary. If liberals don't make government work, zealots like Elon Musk are going to come in and burn it down. Thanks for watching!