In the New York Times, Ezra Klein responded to critics who accuse him of not having a theory of power:

My view of power is more classically liberal. In his book “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” Edmund Fawcett describes it neatly: “Human power was implacable. It could never be relied on to behave well. Whether political, economic or social, superior power of some people over others tended inevitably to arbitrariness and domination unless resisted and checked.”

To take this view means power will be ill used by your friends as well as by your enemies, by your political opponents as well as by your neighbors. From this perspective, there are no safe reservoirs of power. Corporations sometimes serve the national interest and sometimes betray it. The same is true for governments, for unions, for churches, for nonprofits.

A lot is lost when you collapse the complex interests of politics into a simple morality play. There are often different corporations on different sides of the same issue. There are often different unions on different sides of the same issue. To know where you stand — and who stands with you — you need to know what you are trying to achieve. This is not, I should say, some untested approach to politics: It’s how Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the two most successful national Democrats of the past 50 years, approached both their campaigns and their presidencies.

I found Klein’s article strange because he recently published a book with Derek Thompson called Abundance that spends most of the concluding chapter on this question. But what he wrote in his opinion piece does not seem to relay much at all what he wrote in the book.

At the crux of this chapter, the book approvingly quotes Gary Gerstle’s explanation of how to establish a new political order:

It requires deep-pocketed donors (and political action committees) to invest in promising candidates over the long term; the establishment of think tanks and policy networks to turn political ideas into actionable programs; a rising political party able to consistently win over multiple electoral constituencies; a capacity to shape political opinion both at the highest levels (the Supreme Court) and across popular print and broadcast media; and a moral perspective able to inspire voters with visions of the good life. Political orders, in other words, are complex projects that require advances across a broad front.

In my years of being around politics, I’ve heard this variously called a “grasstops” strategy, a “top-down” strategy, and an “influence-the-influencers” strategy. I’ve remembered this part of the book because it corresponds so well with what is actually happening.

The Abundists have secured hundreds of millions of dollars for think tanks and policy networks and have managed to recruit a significant number of personalities in popular media outlets. With the amount of money flooding into it, I would not be surprised if we see a whole Abundance-themed digital publication launched soon.

The Abundists have recruited a number of elected representatives to their cause, including 30 members of Congress who started the Abundance-themed Build America Caucus. They had a political conference called WelcomeFest, which combined the Abundance money with the Abundance electeds and the Abundance pundits.

Even the Supreme Court part of the quote has played out, with the Supreme Court recently curtailing the scope of National Environmental Policy Act reviews.

I think some people find this sort of approach distasteful and elitist, as it looks a lot like combining a few dozen rich people with a few dozen media and political personalities in order to force-meme a moderating politics that otherwise does not have very much purchase in American society. But saying you are disgusted with it does not mean it is not a theory of power, nor does it mean that it cannot work.

At the very least, the general orientation of Abundance — which is to de-emphasize redistributionism and anti-corporatism in favor of innovation and growth (“Abundance reorients politics around a fresh provocation: Can we solve our problems with supply?“) — has explosive growth potential in the precise channels it is targeting. A significant number of rich people, especially in the tech world, really do love to hear this and want to give money to it. A lot of moderate politicians really are looking for things that aren’t just about the welfare state or bashing business as they believe both things turn off key voters and also make it harder for them to raise campaign funds. And a lot of the popular media people they want to recruit live in high-cost cities where some of the Abundist themes around housing in particular are personally resonant.

In this sense, the near-term political case for this is not at all hard to see. It has a lot of the same qualities as education reform: donors loved education reform, it gave moderate politicians something to do that wasn’t redistribution or railing against corporations, and a lot of influential media and policy people lived in cities where the notion of failing inner-city schools loomed large. Education reform was also pretty successful in the sense of getting implemented. Obviously, every movement wishes it could have done more, but moving 8 percent of public school students into charters is no small feat.

I had a thought many years ago that the best way to think about the Democratic Party and how to win influence in it is to imagine that you are in a contest to come up with the most progressive-sounding agenda that does not involve significant welfare expansions, tax increases, unionization, or public ownership. With this rough framework, it was easy to see fairly early why, for example, antitrust advocacy was going to be very potent. But this crude theory suggests Abundance has a lot of potential as well.