What is the Progressive Vision of the Good Life?

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An interesting discussion today between a center-right Catholic and a progressive atheist on a topic which should interest a lot of our readers: What is wrong with the left?

Ross Douthat interviewed Ezra Klein on this topic today. Right out of the gate, Douthat asked Klein if he felt it was fair to say that there was a lot of despair on the left these days.

Klein: I think there has been an evaporation of a bright horizon in liberal thought, in a lot of left thinking. It has become about averting different kinds of calamities: the calamity of fascism, the calamity of a return to white supremacy or a re-strengthening of it, the calamity of climate change, the calamity of oligarchy.
Instead it’s been about how much of how bad it will be we can avert. I don’t think that’s the right way to look at the future, but I think there is something to that.
But because I get to be on the podcast with you, don’t you think this is a bit of a both-sides thing? I have been really struck by how much the right also turned backward in this time. I mean, all the way back to antiquity with Bronze Age Pervert and a rediscovery of Sparta ——
Douthat: We have to return to the steppe warriors. Yes, absolutely.
Klein: There’s been something where it feels like our politics has cast its view backward. I think the right has a version of this, which is that we lost touch with who we really are. Then the left has a version of this, which is that we’ve never fully accepted, repented, transcended who we really were.

One of the topics that comes up is the lack of new and compelling leaders on the left. Klein suggests that, after Obama, most liberals seemed out of ideas for where to go next. And then came Trump.

Klein: I think there’s that. I think the loss of 2024 shattered the Democratic Party’s confidence in its own politics. I just don’t think that the new leadership, the new ideas, have yet emerged. One reason I think “Abundance” did as well as it did as a book and created so much energy — which was more than I thought it was going to create — is because it dropped into a void.

Douthat points to some evidence of that void in terms of broader behavior.

Douthat:...progressives are having fewer kids. Thirty years ago, progressives and conservatives in the Western world had the same birthrates, and today they don’t.
Klein: It’s all about the birthrates with you, Ross ——
Douthat: No, I’m going to add some other data points besides my perpetual hobby horses. But 30 or 40 years ago, if you looked at statistics on depression and anxiety, maybe progressives looked a little more neurotic than conservatives. But today — maybe it’s the smartphones, maybe it’s something else — progressives look a lot more anxious and depressed and neurotic.

Depression, anxiety and a seeming lack of faith in the future for themselves and their children. And Klein doesn't really disagree with that assessment. It's part of what made him write the book Abundance. The idea behind Abundance is a kind of techno-optimism about the future. It's, frankly, the kind of thing Elon Musk does all day long, but clearly he's not associated with the left at this point.

Klein: I believe technology can dramatically transform human life for the better. Dramatically. I think it can make possible ways of living. I think it can solve problems that we take as completely inevitable and totally for granted. I think that we should be able to deliver dramatic changes to public infrastructure quickly. I think we should be able to build things.
And I think when the government promises you something from high-speed rail to a subway extension to a national electric vehicle charger network, that thing should emerge. It should be gleaming. It should happen quickly. It should be like, “Oh my [expletive] God, the government did that.”

To be fair here, Klein isn't saying that's where the government is. He knows it's nowhere close to that. Instead of creating new things, the government seems to fail to deliver on every promise. And that, again, is why he wrote the book. He believes progressives need to show some optimism and basic competence or the argument for government intervention really falls apart.

That sets up the most interesting part of the discussion (at least for me) where Douthat pushes Klein to define something bigger than government success as a message or a vision that the left has to offer. And Klein really can only offer a sort of vision of an America welcoming to immigrants.

Douthat: ...doesn’t a utopia need that kind of story as well? Part of what Obama offered was the language of the arc of history. Is there an arc-of-history vision available to the left that can restore optimism? Like cosmic hope, not just hope in technology alone, but hope in the ultimate horizons of the human species.
Klein: I don’t think where the mainstream of the Democratic Party is going to get its teleological structure of politics is going to be from the hippies, Age of Aquarius, consciousness raising. I don’t think it’s going to be at this point from Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism. I do think that there are remarkable stories contained inside the American story...
So if you want my version of your cosmic hope, I do think that there’s a story in which America doesn’t just bend toward justice, but it does bend toward a kind of greatness that comes from diversity and inclusion, one might call it, that has fallen out of favor a bit.

That's really not what Douthat was looking for so he tries again. Is there more to life than abundance?

Douthat: This is the last demand I’ll make of you — inclusion into what, exactly? What view, what vision of the good life? This is where I still feel like the utopianism of your book, while really good as a corrective to despair, lacks something that even the right in its various dark and black-pilled forms still gets to offer. The right can say, you see Charlie Kirk say this over and over again — one of the personas that he had was Christian evangelist and Christian dad where he would go around and say to young men, “Look, politics is important, but you have to get married and you have to go to church and you have to start a family.” That is a concrete vision of the good life, that politics exists to support and technology exists to enrich...
And it is impossible for me — as a religious person, I’m sorry — not to look at progressivism right now and say, “You need something else in the horizon besides saying we’re all going to be inclusive, and we’re going to get rich together with flying cars.”
You need to say, “So that we can live in some specific way that we are supposed to live.” What is that way, Ezra Klein? How then shall we live?

And Klein sort of says it's not his problem, while also saying that, for him personally, he agrees.

Klein: My friend, I am a liberal. I actually believe in creating a space for liberal individual flourishing of different kinds. I don’t find it to be some great countercultural thing to say you should have a family. I have two children. I talk about it on my show all the time. I am a left pronatalist. I don’t believe it has been a great advantage of the right’s in politics that some of their people say, “It’s good to be a dad,” and nor do I believe it’s a great advantage of mine...
I don’t really want to tell you where you have to drive your flying car. That’s not, in this particular spot, my role.

I get what he's saying to some degree. Not everyone involved in politics is also going to want to share their personal life past a certain point. Still, I think Douthat has a point that if you already believe there's a problem with progressivism (it's dour and judgmental and depressive) there has to be something offered to people to balance that out. Of course Ezra Klein doesn't have to be that person doing that, but someone on his side does. Who is dong that?

I actually think there is a pretty clear answer to this question which Klein sidesteps: Wokeism has long been seen by many of us on the right as a substitute religion. It has many elements of a religion, including pretty clear aspects of community organization and lots and lots of rules and moral certitude. That is, I think, the big selling point for a lot of young people on college campuses for those who have abandoned traditional faiths. Join us and you'll always be on the right side of history and you'll feel good about yourself. That's the woke gospel in a few words.

The problem of course is that wokeness makes you intolerant and insular and not willing to do the politics of addition and persuasion in the way that Charlie Kirk did them. The woke don't want to debate with you, they want you to confess your sins and submit. That may appeal to certain college aged leftists but it's more of a hurdle for a lot of people who have jobs and dependents.

But the mainstream left really doesn't have anything else to offer except slightly watered down versions of these same ideas. So I think Douthat is sort of suggesting that Klein's politics wind up looking like a donut. It's well fleshed out around the outside but at the center is just his relatively normie personal life that he doesn't want to talk about.

And I think Douthat is right that a big part of Charlie Kirk's appeal (and Jordan Peterson's appeal) is that he was willing to speak directly to those things not exactly as part of his politics but as something over and above politics.

In short, many people want more than good policy ideas. They want a clear answer to "How then should we live?" The right is offering that in the form of traditional faith and a focus on family. The woke left is offering a very twisted version of that as well. But progressive just seem sort of lost in the shuffle. Their politics are focused on alarmism and they don't offer a vision of the good life that goes beyond that.

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