The market for “big ideas” depends far more on demand than supply, and the craving in the Democratic Party for the next new and popular thing is intense. Amid all of the chaos created by President Donald Trump’s antidemocratic power grab, one idea has broken through.

Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter

“Abundance” is, depending on your point of view, a bold and confident answer to the problems plaguing progressives; a fiendishly clever plot by corporate interests to blunt the power of the populist left; an intellectual craze that will pass; or a sensible but rather modest set of ideas to make building housing, clean energy projects, and mass transit easier and scientific breakthroughs more likely.

Advertisement

There are certainly reasons to doubt that a “New Abundance” will ever take its place in history alongside the New Deal or the New Frontier. But the passionate response the idea has provoked and its resolute hopefulness about how well-designed government action could make life better and richer for the vast majority of Americans marks it out as the kind of idea Democrats need. It has the potential of dividing the party. In some ways, it already has. But there are also signs that Abundance may answer political needs of the party’s center and left alike.

The foundational text of the movement is “Abundance” by Ezra Klein, the New York Times writer and podcaster, and Derek Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Published in March, the book has spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and hit No. 1 in April.

Do your own Google search to discover how a relatively slim volume — 226 pages plus footnotes — has so roiled and inspired the Democratic world. Like all successful manifestos, “Abundance” is briskly written and straightforward. “This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need,” Klein and Thompson write. “That’s it. That’s the thesis.” The book’s very last words describe their ideological aspiration: “a liberalism that builds.”

The core argument is that well-intentioned progressives have created too many choke points that stall or block building things — including public and not just private projects. There are good reasons for environmental reviews, community-participation requirements and other permitting rules. But the authors insist that they shouldn’t be allowed to delay projects for years — or forever. The travails of high-speed rail in California are Exhibit A in “Abundance” catalogue of horrors but they offer many others.

The cause won a major victory on Monday when Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed two bills amending the half-century-old California Environmental Quality Act. The changes, which divided Democrats, will allow many development projects — particularly for housing — to avoid the rigorous reviews that often delayed construction and inflated costs. The measures drew opposition from leaders of environmental and community groups who fear the loosening of the rules went too far.