I’ve been reading Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance. This book has sparked a lot of conversation and debate, and, I think, at least with me, a lot of much-needed hope.

For me, the book and its ideology, called the Abundance Agenda, has more methodological and rhetorical significance than any or all of the specific policies it advances. Don’t get me wrong, I do like what they propose, but much more than that, I love how they do their proposing.

This movement does a lot of the best things designers do. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. Abundance Agenda is designerly politics.

First and maybe best, they demonstrate a commitment to positive persuasion. This has been missing in leftist politics for a long time. When I say “positive persuasion” I am not talking about appealing to “emotional positivity” (though they do lead with optimism). I mean that they offer possibilities we can want, instead of possibilities we want to avoid or defeat.

The book starts by telling what we designers call “Stories From the Future”, meant to appeal to the maximum number of people. The goal is to get a critical mass of citizens to align behind their vision of life, and all the policies and initiatives that will bring that vision to life and support its establishment and growth.

In design, we work backwards from these desirable stories. We ask ourselves “can we do this today?” Wherever the answer is “no” we ask “What is required to do it?” The answer to that question is a capability or set of capabilities. A capability might be a new policy, or a new process, or a new technology of some kind, or an organizational change or even a new organization. Once we develop these capabilities, and turn our answer from “no” to “yes, we can do this today” we can start actualizing the story.

In other words, in design we operationalize backwards from a story.

This is what the Abundance Agenda is doing — starting with clean energy and housing.

Part of what is exciting about it is that many of the technological capabilities required for the stories it proposes are in place. Can we do this today? Yes, we can.

The missing capabilities are social ones — alignment problems. And — glory hallelujah! — they embrace these alignment problems as the very substance of politics.

I read a piece criticizing Abundance Agenda as a sort of technocratic revival. I found that angle of attack interesting, because it is right, but not nearly right enough. Technocracy is not bad because it puts experts in positions of power. It is bad because the experts become so enamored with their expertise that they stop responding to non-experts. They feel qualified to engineer society instead of codesigning it with those who will live with the consequences of their actions.

I see Abundance Agenda as rejecting technocratic social engineering and instead embracing technocratic social design. That makes all the difference.

One other thing good designers know very well is that all design involves trade-offs. Designers who work for clients who refuse to make trade-offs in a misguided drive for perfection end up with much worse solutions than clients who seek the wisest trade-offs. Much of what Abundance Agenda criticizes about contemporary leftism is along these lines. In general, the left refuses to make intentional trade-offs aimed at optimal outcomes. It avoids even acknowledging the need for them. Its “idealism” seems to hope for a world without trade-offs — which is unrealistic — and condemns all trade-offs, or at least ones that affect the groups they care about, as unacceptable flaws, which makes them uncompromising, in a bad way.

What the Abundance Agenda needs now is a center-left Ronald Reagan to announce that it is, once again Morning in America. Because the cement gray malaise of now is reminiscent of the drab brown late-70s. It is high time for a sunburst. Sometimes optimism, not anger, is the most powerful force.

(This post needs serious editing. I’m posting it, anyway.)