Progressivism is back. As with its original formation, its reemergence comes with pitfalls for the US Left.

By referencing the word “progressivism” here, it is important to note what it is not. Surprising to some, it does not mean policies that advance a modern social democratic state. That understanding of “progressivism” is a relatively recent and somewhat obscurant meaning that developed in the context of the Cold War. During that time, socialists, and especially Marxists, were aggressively ostracized from US political life. To ensure that the US Left did not die from interdiction, various social democratic and communist organizations rebranded themselves as “progressives,” a seemingly unproblematic euphemism. Progressive Citizens of America, the Progressive Party, and the Progressive Labor Party were all noteworthy examples of this mutation and ranged in ideology from New Deal social democrats to Marxist-Leninists. What is meant by “progressivism” here, however, is a general belief in human progress and the responsibility of government to promote that progress. Fundamentally, it is a belief that futures are only secure when governments are empowered to create them.

This is the idea that has returned.

The clearest evidence of progressivism’s comeback is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance, which—at near breakneck speed—has gone from a podcast topic for liberal intellectuals to a full-fledged social movement. Few of the ideas expressed in Abundance are new. Much of the book is a rearticulation of ecomodernist arguments, including a celebration of urbanity, technology, and innovation, not to mention a scathing critique of the degrowth movement. What is new, however, is the coalescing of these ideas into a specific ideology. Whereas ecomodernism has attempted to remain painfully apolitical, Klein and Thompson have repackaged their ideas into a form of US liberalism.

The book is not a promotion of abundance as such, but of the idea of “abundance liberalism,” which claims to be capable of shocking the Democratic Party out of its sclerotic state through a mixture of technocratic solutions and utopian ambitions. Undergirding this is a renewed faith in progress. For the authors, “government should have a vision of the future.”^[1]

True to the original meaning of progressivism, the book begins by asking readers to envision a future that is overflowing with convenience. The air is clean, the food is fresh, the workload is casual, and—by implication—the politics are mild. The authors argue that this future is within reach, if only US liberals can get out of their own way. Government cannot focus merely on what it should provide, but also on how efficiently it can provide it. As the authors proclaim, “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.”^[2]

On its face, there is nothing inherently troubling with this optimism. If anything, it comes across as refreshing considering the bleak survivalism that has engulfed so much of US politics. Indeed, the book’s blockbuster success can be partially attributed to its earnest faith in the future.

Nonetheless, the story the authors tell is a story of ideas, not people, one of technical fixes, not political struggles. For Klein and Thompson, US liberalism has failed not because it was devoured by neoliberalism, which itself became predominant because of underlying structural changes in the global economy, but because US liberals lost their way ideologically. For reasons unexplained by the authors, US liberals became disenchanted with their own success. The triumph of the New Deal produced a series of political and material superfluities, which then provoked a backlash. In response, liberals adopted a similar pessimism toward collective action as conservatives, but instead of idolizing the market, liberals insisted that government adopt ever increasing layers of bureaucracy to enhance accountability. In the end, our scarcities, they argue, are “chosen”^[3] by a series of unwarranted trade-offs, as if the policies that created shortages in housing, healthcare, and transportation were a collective effort by a fully informed public.

The solution to this overcorrection is to return the government to its proper role; that is, making it responsible for progressing society by freeing the government from itself. Government should be empowered to build, to fund, and to innovate the future. However, nowhere in their analysis of government do traditional political concepts such as rights, justice, or sovereignty—and, of course, no mention of class struggle—appear. Progress exists for its own sake.

An exaltation of progress, detached from social and economic conditions, is nothing new in the United States. As evidenced by the mixed and often peculiar politics of the original Progressive Era, embracing progress for its own sake has a long tradition and does not necessarily lead to any specific policy outcomes. Rather, it is more of a means of justifying policy outcomes through the language of efficiency, scientific rationality, and human flourishing.

During the Progressive Era, many prohibitionists were considered progressives in that they promoted the outlawing of alcohol not on its religious immorality but on the wastefulness of the drunkard. Eugenics was considered a progressive cause because it managed to repackage the chauvinisms of racial prejudices in the language of genetic efficiency. Progressives within the business community supported the overthrowing of local democracies and reconfiguring municipalities in the image of for-profit corporations, because it was assumed that private corporations represented the most advanced form of social organization. Essentially, during the Progressive Era, people identified as “progressives” not to indicate what they stood for, but to indicate how they justified what they stood for.

By arguing that politics is fundamentally a struggle over ideas rather than power, “abundance liberalism” suffers from the same problem. “Abundance liberalism” becomes the means for justifying policies, not forming them. Nowhere in the book do Klein and Thompson distinguish how different classes have different conceptions of “abundance,” and nowhere do they directly tie the idea of “abundance” to an understanding of justice. At no point is it clearly articulated how or why the reader should favor abundance of homes, medical technologies, and clean energy, as opposed to an abundance of private wealth accumulation, even though the desire for the latter clearly led to a paucity of the former.

To be clear, none of this means that Klein and Thompson are—as some critics have argued—covert neoliberals,^[4] secretly in bed with the fascist adjacent tech bros. They are sincere US liberals, and throughout their book their arguments are both framed and qualified in liberal terms, including skepticism of using markets alone to solve social problems. They have no qualms throwing bones to the Left if it supports their arguments, including approvingly referencing the optimism of The Communist Manifesto and Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Instead, it is to point out that by ignoring the underlying framework of power on their policy objectives, they fail at their own mission. Societal scarcities are not a matter of “choice,” but of coercion. If you want to create political support for a so-called abundance agenda, you need to demonstrate that certain people have been forced to accept scarcities while others have lived a life of plenty, and that these injustices are not an unintended consequence of a policy overcorrection but illustrative of real struggles—class struggles—in society.

Local Regulations and Middle Class Embourgeoisement

As an example of their lack of understanding of power politics, take Klein and Thompson’s analysis of the housing crisis in California. They rightfully acknowledge that after the Second World War, like the rest of the country, California went gangbusters on housing, building more than 200,000 new homes a year. Nonetheless, by the 1970s, housing construction dramatically slowed, to the point where the state has not built more than 150,000 homes since 2007. Klein and Thompson accurately recognize that this dramatic downturn in production was a consequence of the zealous downzoning agenda that rapidly spread throughout the state. However, they never explain why downzoning became so popular in California when it did.

An analysis of the racial and class politics in California makes the reasons obvious. The initial wave of downzoning policies occurred in Los Angeles after the 1965 Watts Riot.^[5] Prior to the riots, Los Angeles' affluent residents were content with the city's emphasis on building more housing to keep up with population growth. However, after the riot, this deferential attitude toward planning evaporated. Instead, there was an active effort to downzone the city, especially in wealthy neighborhoods. Between 1968 and 1972, approval for downzoning policies jumped by over 40% in the city. Unsurprisingly, enthusiasm for the downzoning was not evenly distributed. Only a minority of inner-city dwellers favored restrictions on new construction in housing, but residents who lived in the elite western Santa Monica Mountains, mid-Valley, and Sherman Oaks favored it by overwhelming majorities.

In City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis proposes that throughout the 1980s, Los Angeles' affluent homeowners had become the city's most powerful social movement. This form of "sunbelt bolshevism"^[6]—a phrase Davis ironically stole from conservative pundit George Will—developed its own form of “homestead exclusivism”^[7] that successfully mobilized a network of anti-development homeowner associations. Motivated by the principle that they "love their children, but they love their property values more,"^[8] these suburban parochialists realized quickly that municipal governments were vulnerable to their insurrectionary style of land-use politics. In the 1980s, the Los Angeles Times reported that "a revolution, of sorts, is brewing in Orange County,"^[9] and by the early 1990s, it had become a permanent "revolution of sorts" that had spread throughout the entire state.

Thus, restrictive zoning laws were not a “reaction to the excesses and consequences of New Deal liberalism”^[10] as Klein and Thompson claim. Instead, it was a reaction against the momentum of New Dealism to include other marginalized groups, particularly those of racial minorities, into the promise of US prosperity. Downzoning began with wealthy homeowners in California, but eventually trickled down to middle class communities as well, until it was accepted as a default political norm.

Middle class adoption of upper-class anxieties has been a frequent phenomenon throughout US history. As Lily Geismer argues in her excellent book Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, the process of mass suburbanization in the United States had an ironic and contradictory outcome.^[11] It could not have happened without New Deal policies, but once one generation was firmly locked into a lifestyle of homeownership, they found their class affiliations drift from a lower to a higher stratum, thus leading to the breakup of the New Deal coalition.

Essentially, as part of becoming middle class, the United States’ working class went through a process of embourgeoisement, which was facilitated by Cold War liberalism. In doing so, their politics changed from securing themselves economically by uplifting the poor, to protecting their assets, the most significant one being their homes, by aligning with the rich. In this process, Mike Davis, in another one of his blistering insights, observed that homeowner associations had become the "trade unions of an important section of the middle class,"^[12] but instead of fighting to increase the value of their labor, they fought to protect the value of their assets.

Middle class embourgeoisement also explains the tendency of environmentalists to lean into an exclusionary form of green politics that is heavily reliant on legalistic strategies, embodied by the US’ cumbersome process of environmental review, which Klein and Thompson criticize. As Matthew Huber describes in Climate Change as Class War, the professional middle class that has dominated environmental organizations has created a form of green politics that reflects their class interest. Huber explains that:

…for this form of politics, the materiality of production is not something you experience but something more abstract, an object of knowledge or study. The result of such study is usually to show the hidden costs embedded in distant production systems. Once the study was complete, environmental activism often meant organizing to oppose specific forms of industrial development… The socialist and working-class project of transforming industrial production toward human liberation slowly faded away…^[13]

Klein and Thompson are correct in pointing out that environmentalism has essentially accepted an operational paradigm of scarcity. In the words of Huber, environmentalists have sought to oppose development rather than transform it under the assumption that we have achieved a consumption limit. Where they go wrong is in believing that this scarcity mindset is merely an overcorrection to supposed New Deal excesses. Instead, early environmental bestsellers, like Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome's The Limits of Growth, were celebrated because they provided justifications for the racial and class anxieties of the United States’ post-war professional middle class.

For decades, the Sierra Club was an openly bigoted organization.^[14] In the 1950s, its Los Angeles chapter had an explicit policy against African Americans joining and anti-immigrant sentiment was a major force within the organization until the Obama presidency. Early in the environmental movement, homeowner associations applied prognostications of planetary destruction to their own backyards, justifying their NIMBYism as a green crusade rather than an attempt to protect private property. It was not until the existential threat of global warming, when it was clear that society had to transform development and not simply oppose it, that this green canard created real rifts within the environmental movement.

In the early 2000s, before he became United States’ best-known health crank, Robert Kennedy Jr. was a senior attorney with the Natural Resource Defense Council. As an early indication of his utterly opportunistic personality, Kennedy would warn of the dangers of global warming, only to fully dedicate himself to stopping an offshore windfarm from being built off the coast of the Nantucket Sound once nearby wealthy homeowners opposed the project.^[15] Many environmental groups derided Kennedy, but in the end, the homeowners got their way and the project was abandoned. In this situation it is not that abundance lost the policy debate. It is that the abundance of scenic views triumphed over the abundance of clean energy, because the wealthy homeowners had more power to press their will.

The Corporate Regulatory State

Nowhere is Klein and Thompson’s obliviousness to the realities of power in US politics more evident than in their excoriation of social movements. For the authors, one of the primary reasons large development projects have become nearly impossible to accomplish is because of the phenomenon of “everything bagel liberalism,”^[16] the belief that once the government has committed itself to undertaking a project, liberal interest groups pressure policymakers to remake the project to advance their specific agenda. The overwhelming and often competing goals lead to projects failing. As they warn, “a government that tries to accomplish too much all at once often ends up accomplishing nothing at all.”^[17]

In Abundance, Klein and Thompson singled out Biden’s CHIPS Act, and specifically the provisions that sought to bring back semiconductor manufacturing to the United States, as an example of “everything bagel liberalism.” Klein and Thompson criticize the law for its additional measures to promote workforce development, environmental review, and minority participation in the industry. However, as Joel Dodge, director of Industrial Policy & Economic Security at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, pointed out in his analysis of the CHIPS Act, those provisions had strong justifications, and none of them seem to have dramatically slowed down the process.^[18]

Furthermore, conveniently left out of the book, and which Dodge demonstrates Klein was aware of, was any mention that the Biden administration favored applicants from firms where states had agreed to an expedited permitting process. Meaning, while the law did attach additional social goals to the project, it was also designed to cut through the red-tape and bureaucracy that Klein and Thompson opposed.

The reality is that the problem with many government projects is not “everything bagel liberalism.” While grassroots activists have some influence over major government decisions, rarely are they in a position to dictate the terms, and scenarios where they can overwhelm the terms are far fewer. Rather, it is “everything bagel managerialism,” where projects are sliced and diced between so many private consultants and competing firms that it inevitably creates mismanagement.

In a certain sense, Klein and Thompson are aware of this phenomenon. They acknowledge that California’s inability to create a high-speed rail system can be partly attributed to the decades-long ideological aversion within the state to doing tasks in-house. They quote Brian Kelly, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority from 2018 to 2024, in observing that when he was hired 70% of the work was outsourced to consultants.^[19] However, nowhere in the book do they seriously elaborate on the possibility that this private managerial class is its own interest group—one that is far more powerful than the grassroots NGOs they finger wave at—and that this consultant class lobbies governments to redesign projects to support their agendas, namely more lucrative contracts paid for by taxpayers. Indeed, seeing how the private managerial class picks apart government projects it is important to remember the observations by political scientist Raymond Wolfinger on the persistence of the US’ political machines: “it is all very well to talk about ‘middle-class values of efficiency and honesty,’ but the thousands of lawyers whose political connections enable them to benefit from the billion-dollar-a-year case load of the Manhattan Surrogates’ Court are surely not members of the working class.”^[20]

It is this inability to seriously wrestle with concentrated private power where Klein and Thompson really fall short. Amazingly, US corporations play nearly no role in their narrative and in many ways their argument for greater government efficiency is oriented around better positioning the government to serve the private sector. They write “government should have a vision of the future,” but immediately follow it up with the qualifier “and within that vision it can create space for companies to do what they otherwise cannot, to make possible what is otherwise impossible.” The problem is that it is the undue influence of the private sector, especially at the federal level, that is responsible for so much of the inefficiency that the authors rail against.

Ezra Klein’s interview with comedian John Stewart went viral when Stewart, flabbergasted by Klein’s description of the multiple-step application process for Biden’s rural broadband expansion, exclaimed “it’s far worse than I could have imagined.”^[21] However, Klein’s framing during the interview was extremely disingenuous. The incommodious application process was adopted not because well-intentioned though misguided activist groups and public bureaucrats wanted it. Instead, it was pushed by Republicans and the telecommunications industry to purposefully derail the project.^[22] So far, it appears that the industry has succeeded and even years from when the law was passed, not a single person has been connected to rural broadband through the program.

Naively, Klein and Thompson seem to believe that government regulation is nearly always pushed by liberals to reign in US corporations. However, as Micheal Parenti has noted, much of the regulations at the federal level are “monopolistic regulations,” favored by corporations to “limit entry into a market, subsidize select industries, set production standards that only big companies can meet, weaken smaller competitors, and encourage monopoly pricing.”^[23]

Social Efficiency for the Twenty-First Century

All this raises an important question: is it possible to have “abundance,” to adopt Klein and Thompson’s policy proposals—less restrictive zoning, more sensible regulations, and robust funding for basic scientific research—but frame them as part of a broader struggle to benefit the poor and marginalized? The answer is not only is it possible, but that it has been done before.

During the Progressive Era, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) was at its peak. Part of its success can be attributed to its development of a uniquely US version of social democracy known as “constructive socialism.”^[24] Constructive socialism combined a Marxist analysis of political economy with the US progressive desire for effective government. For the constructive socialists, the political machines that dominated governments during the Gilded Age had created a distinct class of unscrupulous politicians and bureaucrats. Capitalism's unrelenting pursuit for profit encouraged politicians to remake government bureaucracies in a manner that purposefully led to waste, fraud, and abuse in order to more easily extract surpluses from working-class taxpayers. Dislodging this class was only possible through the election of an honest socialist government, which would address the issue at its roots by not only eliminating corrupt political machines but the capitalist system that made them possible.

With the landslide victory of the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party in 1910—when the party won Milwaukee's mayoral position, the city controller, the city treasurer, the city attorney, all the city council's available at-large seats, council seats in fifteen wards, a majority of the seats on the county board, and two judges—the constructive socialists had an opportunity to put their ideas into practice.

The Milwaukee socialist inherited a chaotic and thoroughly mismanaged city bureaucracy. In response, the socialists created the Bureau of Municipal Economy and Efficiency (BMEE) and appointed labor economist John R. Commons to head it. The guiding philosophy of the BMEE was known as social efficiency and contrasted with the business-oriented progressives who promoted governmental efficiency as a propaganda tool to lower taxes. The purpose of social efficiency was to promote good-government practices, but rather than claiming these were neutral values, the socialists were open about the need to structure these reforms in a way that benefited the working class. For the socialists, municipal governments should be well managed not only for the sake of efficiency but also because such efficiencies would generate surpluses that could then be used to benefit the working class. According to Mordecai Lee in his Bureaus of Efficiency: Reforming Local Government in the Progressive Era:

Milwaukee’s Socialists explicitly called for promoting social efficiency, a term that in the twenty-first century would likely be called social justice. For the Socialists in Milwaukee, efficient government did not automatically mean cheaper government. Rather, it meant a government that properly allocated and used its capabilities to maximize the achievement of public purposes.^[25]

The socialist government in Milwaukee used the BMEE to eliminate the city’s obstinate political machine and institute a modest, though nonetheless meaningful, program of redistributing wealth from corrupt officials to working-class taxpayers. The socialists consolidated Milwaukee’s fire and police alarm telegraph systems, and modernized its plumbing, house-drain inspection, garbage, ash, and rubbish collection. Both of which saved taxpayers considerable funds. However, rather than simply lowering taxes, the government redirected this money to streets, sidewalks, and parks, and created a world-class public health system.^[26]

An aspect of social efficiency that Klein and Thompson would approve of is its suspicion of an unwieldy regulatory state. Despite aligning several policy points related to improving working conditions, Milwaukee’s socialists were critical of the regulatory state promoted by the progressive Wisconsin governor and later senator Robert La Follette. La Follette, recognizing the abusive practices of private monopolies, advocated for their regulation through various government boards. For the constructive socialists, such regulations were misguided, because they failed to make the economy fully efficient by forcing customers to pay twice for corporate accountability: once, in the costs of the product, as companies would have their own systems to adhere to the regulations, and again in the form of taxes, as the state would have to create various agencies to enforce the regulations.^[27] True social efficiency, the constructive socialist argued, entailed public ownership of businesses, especially utilities and other natural monopolies, because public ownership was the only way to ensure that businesses were accountable to the public interest without burdening working class taxpayers with a costly bureaucracy.

Today, the phrase “social efficiency” is considered old fashioned, but the idea remains relevant. Zohran Mamdani’s recent victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary demonstrates that a platform of governmental efficiency can go hand-in-hand with a commitment to working-class power. Mamdani plans to reform the city’s small business permitting process, in addition to cutting the fees and fines for mom and pop stores.^[28] He also is an advocate for zoning reform and supports a fast-tracked approval process for affordable housing projects.^[29] These proposals are coupled with calls for free childcare,^[30] municipal owned grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.^[31]

One of Mamdani’s flagship campaign promises, fare-free public transit, thoroughly embodies the concept of social efficiency. While the project requires a significant initial investment, it saves the city in long term expenses by eliminating the bureaucratic and regulatory infrastructure of a fare system. Indeed, in 2020, Olympia, Washington became the largest city in the Pacific Northwest to eliminate all fares in its Intercity Transit system after it realized it would cost more money to modernize fare collection than it would to just make all buses fare-free.^[32]

The Need for Class Struggle Abundance

Klein and Thompson end Abundance with a political truism: “political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past.”^[33] The fundamental problem with their approach is that they assume that “abundance” is a self-evident virtue. It is the same mistake that progressives a century ago made with the concept of “progress.” In this way “abundance” does imbue the future with a virtue from the past, but rather than offer a fundamentally new approach, it rehashes a classic idea. In both cases, whether “abundance” or “progress,” the virtue’s value only becomes evident when it is explained what you are using it for. For Klein and Thompson, they never elaborate on their criteria for making something abundant and who is supposed to benefit from that abundance; they only emphasize on the potential to solve social problems by focusing on supply.

The inability for Klein and Thompson to clearly articulate what should be made abundant, and why it should be made abundant even at the expense of other things, including private profits, is where their message seriously falters. Klein and Thompson are technocratic policy wonks, not only in their policy prescriptions, but in ideology. Klein has acknowledged that he believes that the purpose of politics is policy.^[34] According to him, no one enters the rough-and-tumble arena of collective decision making unless there are specific policies they want to see from government. However, such a conception of politics confuses cause and effect. The true purpose of politics is not policy, but power. Policy is merely the outcome of power struggles within the political arena, not its cause.

It is this inability to seriously wrestle with power, and specifically class struggle, that ultimately makes their message so directionless, despite its accuracy on specific policy points. Efficiency, scientific rationality, human flourishing, and abundance are causes worth pursuing, but they are only worth pursuing within a broader struggle of social and economic justice. For that to occur it is not enough to proclaim that we need a future that is abundant; instead, we must declare that we need a future that is abundant in the things that would make society more just.

1. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance (Simon and Schuster, 2025), 183.

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2. Ibid, 4.

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3. Ibid.

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4. Besty Reed, “What is ‘Abundance Liberalism, and Why are People Arguing About It?,” The Guardian, March 28, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/28/what-is-abundance-liberalism.

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5. Gregory Morrow, “The Homeowner Revolution: Democracy, Land Use and the Los Angeles Slow-Growth Movement, 1965-1992,” PhD diss., (University of California, Los Angeles, 2013).

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6. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Vintage Books, 1992), 156.

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7. Ibid, 159.

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8. Ibid, 153.

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9. Heidi Evans, “’Slow Growth’ Emerges as Key Issue in Local Politics,” The Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1986, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-11-02-me-15499-story.html.

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10. Abundance, 149.

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11. Lily Geismer, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton University Press, 2015).

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12. Davis, City of Quartz, 160.

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13. Matthew T. Huber, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet (Verso, 2022), 116-117.

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14. Hop Hopkins, “How the Sierra Club’s History With Immigrant Rights Is Shaping Our Future,” Sierra Club, November 2, 2018, https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2018/11/how-sierra-club-s-history-immigrant-rights-shaping-our-future.

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15. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007).

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16. Ezra Klein, “The Problem With Everything Bagel Liberalism,” The New York Times, April 2, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism.html.

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17. Abundance, 113.

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18. Joel Dodge, “In Defense of Everything-Bagel Liberalism,” Washington Monthly, April 25, 2025, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/04/24/in-defense-of-everything-bagel-liberalism/.

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19. Abundance, 118.

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20. Raymond E. Wolfinger, “Why Political Machines Have Not Withered Away and Other Revisionist Thoughts,” The Journal of Politics 34, no. 2 (May, 1972), 365-398, 389.

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21. Jon Stewart, “Why Can't We Have Nice Things with Ezra Klein,” The Weekly Show, March 27, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZxaFfxloo.

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22. Bharat Ramamurti, “Ezra Klein Ripped for Viral Jon Stewart Show,” Breaking Points, April 2, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi8IBAEpAd4.

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23. Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few (For Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002), 279.

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24. Sally Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism (Praeger, 1973).

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25. Mordecai Lee, Bureaus of Efficiency: Reforming Local Government in the Progressive Era (Marquette University Press, 2008), 199.

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26. Judith W. Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

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27. Daniel W. Hoan, The Failure of Regulation (Socialist Party of the United States Press, 1914).

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28. Josephine Stratman, “Zohran Mamdani Pledges to Slash Small Fees and Fines in Half for Small Businesses,” New York Daily News, May 16, 2025, https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/05/16/zohran-mamdani-pledges-slash-small-fees-fines-small-businesses/.

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29. Laura Foot, “Is Zohran Mamdani a YIMBY Socialist?” In Practice, July 11, 2025, https://inpractice.yimbyaction.org/p/is-zohran-mamdani-a-yimby-socialist.

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30. Betsy Reed, “Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign Proposes Free Childcare. Is it Finally a Winning Policy?,” The Guardian, July 14, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/14/zohran-mamdani-campaign-free-childcare-win.

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31. Abdallah Fayyad, “Zohran Mamdani’s Not-So-Radical Agenda,” Vox, July 3, 2025, https://www.vox.com/politics/418626/zohran-mamdani-new-york-city-mayor-socialist-agenda.

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32. Zack Budryk, “Olympia Becomes Largest City in Pacific Northwest to Offer Free Public Transit,” The Hill, January 6, 2020, https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/476901-olympia-now-largest-city-in-pacific-northwest-offering-free/.

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33. Abundance, 221.

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34. Ezra Klein, “Why Ezra Klein is so F***ing Angry (with Democrats),” Hasan Minhaj, May 21, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUNSNXcfAgg.

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