Opinion | Building a World ‘Quite Unlike Our Own’

So I think this ideology- common-sense distinction Sanders is making is a rich text. If the argument is that we have a horrendous bureaucracy, absolutely correct. It is terrible. I’ve worked for years to bring two health clinics into the state of Vermont that we needed. I wanted two more, to renovate one and build another one. And you cannot believe — you cannot believe the level of bureaucracy to build a bloody health center. It’s still not built. All right. So I don’t need to be lectured on the nature of bureaucracy. It is horrendous. And that is real. But that is not an ideology. I covered Sanders getting that money for community health clinics. That was in the Affordable Care Act, which passed in 2010. It is 2026. He is saying one of the two is still not built. And I think one of the things that I am saying around all this is that nobody should be angrier than the left if we have what Sanders calls a horrendous bureaucracy, that kind of saying, we all know bureaucracy sucks, we all know the government can’t do anything. We all know the meeting structure is crazy. And saying, but that’s not the point of politics. But I think it is the point of politics. And I think that, particularly if you are the political party that in your ideology believes very fundamentally that government can do big, good things, that actually confronting the ways in which bureaucracy is horrendous just needs to be a very, very high-order issue. And I actually understand that distinction he’s making. I think that there is a version of abundance which is just good government. And I think there’s a version of abundance which is a vision of a world that is quite unlike our own, a world where you could be a firefighter in San Francisco or a firefighter in Brooklyn, and be able to afford a home in the city you’re keeping from burning down. A world in which your health care — you don’t have to be afraid of your health care. You don’t have to be — and how much it will cost. You don’t have to be afraid of how much your rent is going to go up. You don’t have to be afraid of this economic insecurity and precarity so many people live under. What we’re talking about with clean energy abundance, a vision of a radically increased energetic standard of living is actually a quite different world than we live in. If we can actually figure out a way to make A.I. serve the public’s ends and not just be a way to replace white-collar workers, I think that could create a radically different world. So yeah, I think there is a real distinction between abundance as efficiency and abundance as vision. If all abundance does is push forward zoning reforms for housing, like, that would be good. But it’s not — I agree, it’s not a vision. It’s supposed to be creating some different world than the one we live in.