The theme of “abundance” is being adopted by leading Democrats across the nation as a counter to Trump and MAGA.
The theme comes from a best-selling book by the same name: “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
The authors contend that government is broken. But instead of wanting to drastically shrink it, as they claim that Trump wants, they want government to be a catalyst for abundance by shedding the red tape and inefficiencies propagated by Democrat policies.
It is not my purpose here to review the book, but I can’t let the claim pass that Trump wants to drastically shrink government. Despite his rhetoric and DOGE initiative, Trump is actually a statist. He wants the federal government to have centralized control over social and economic affairs, but for different ends than Democrats want. Moreover, his “big and beautiful” spending bill will continue to grow the big and ugly federal deficit to an unsustainable level.
Anyway, when my wife and I moved to Tucson seven years ago for family reasons, I tried to start an organization with a similar theme as abundance, but I called it “prosperity” instead of “abundance.” The idea was to establish a nonpartisan, apolitical think tank to detail why Tucson was operating way below its potential and to recommend what could be done about it.
What drove me to that point were the socioeconomic conditions in the city: the poverty, low wages, crime, homelessness, low K-12 test scores, widespread seediness and shabbiness, and lack of economic dynamism compared to other Sunbelt cities.
The Arizona Daily Star published an op-ed of mine on a couple of these points. It struck a nerve and led to me being on local radio, making contact with likeminded citizens, and getting to know some local leaders and influencers.
Having lived in Southern Arizona for 25 years, I understood that Democrats had held a political monopoly in the City of Tucson and surrounding county for decades, that the city had an election system that made political diversity almost impossible, and that local Republicans felt disenfranchised and frustrated as a result. Accordingly, a theme was needed that both Democrats and Republicans could get behind.
Who could be against prosperity?
Perhaps egotistically, I thought that I was qualified to take this on, considering my political and media experience as an activist leader in the political minefield of metro
New York, my experience in healthcare reform, my corporate experience, and my authorship of a book on how to eliminate bureaucracy and subsequent consulting on the subject.
Was I ever mistaken.
The blame is mine. I underestimated the extent of the local partisan divide; the extent of the Tucson culture of apathy, provincialism and acceptance of substandard government services; the extent of the influence on local political thinking of the left-leaning University of Arizona; and the extent of the resistance from the entrenched political establishment to the idea of prosperity, which they saw as a threat to their monopoly by making residents less dependent on them.
For sure, it was naivety on my part.
Will the new theme of abundance succeed in getting Tucson to achieve its full potential? It would be naïve to think so.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].