Is Brett Kavanaugh the new Ezra Klein?

Also: moral outrage in the streets, and moral emptiness among the elites

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Jun 11, 2025

After live-tweeting his fallout with the world’s richest man, the president has been soothing himself with the pageantry of control. Miles of tanks have rolled into D.C. in preparation for Trump’s military parade. ICE agents have raided workplaces and seized thousands of people across the country. Police have targeted journalists, medics, and protestors in Los Angeles with rubber bullets, tear gas, and smoke grenades. Now the latest escalation: the president has deployed Marines to Los Angeles, threatening martial law.

At the same time, an organic moral outrage is rising up from people on the ground. On Monday, The American Prospect’s David Dayen wrote a moving dispatch from the LA protests demanding the release of labor leader David Huerta, president of SEIU California, who was detained for days after being arrested as a community observer of an ICE raid. Dayen described the arrival of a Tejano band sparking up singing and dancing in the crowd, transforming the protest into a “celebration of the culture of Los Angeles and the roots from which it came”:

“‘Los Angeles is amazing,’ one spectator said to me. I have lived here for over 20 years, and I never felt that sentiment as strongly as in that moment. These protests, which have been abbreviated in the media as ‘unrest,’ were actually a cry of hope, and a reminder of the human need for community, the need to turn to each other to find something to believe in.”

This is one of the more hopeful dissonances of the moment: small-d democratic expressions of defiance and community blooming amidst the ongoing destruction of our democracy. The Democratic party, meanwhile, has not found its place as a coherent opposition party amplifying the moral outrage of its base. If the party’s moderate flank has their way, it never will.

The Moral Emptiness of the Moderates

Last week, my colleagues Henry and Vishal wrote about the donors and organizers behind WelcomeFest, the gathering of moderate pro-corporate Democrats in DC that they nicknamed “Abundance Coachella.”

WelcomePAC (the organization for which the event was named) is backed by billionaires and nepo babies including Reid Hoffman (who you might remember wanted Kamala Harris to fire Lina Khan if elected), relatives and heirs of Walmart founder Sam Walton, Rupert Murdoch’s estranged son, Joe Manchin’s Big Pharma CEO daughter, and Michael Bloomberg. Two of the main spokespeople of the “abundance agenda,” Derek Thompson and Matt Yglesias, were speakers at the event. (See the piece for the full list of WelcomeFest’s speakers and donors.)

The centrist confab was a case study in how to miss the moment. Josh Barro, ex-Republican turned libertarian never-Trump Democrat, preached his anti-union gospel to Ritchie Torres (D-NY): “When I look at policies in New York that stand in the way of abundance, very often if you look under the hood, you eventually find a labor union at the end that's the driver.” Barro doubled down on his Substack, criticizing teachers' unions and construction unions for having the temerity to advocate for the physical safety and job security of their members, and criticizing fellow abundance advocates Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson for downplaying the “conflict between abundance and the labor movement.” (After a weak sidestep of Barro’s question at the event, Torres released a short video yesterday clarifying that he felt abundance does not need to be in conflict with labor.)

Less than 48 hours after Barro took to the stage to criticize the power of organized labor within the Democratic party, labor leader David Huerta was arrested by ICE. All seven Representatives who spoke at WelcomeFest last week—Torres, Tom Suozzi (D-NY), Blue Dogs Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Jared Golden (D-ME), and abundance caucus members Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Adam Gray (D-CA), and Kristen McDonald Rivet (D-MI)—signed on to a resolution this week expressing gratitude to ICE for “protecting the homeland.”

As our executive director Jeff Hauser wrote in the Prospect, what WelcomeFest offers is “a mass politics that screams ‘nothing is wrong, everything is fine, and you’re the real problem for talking about it!’” Jeff’s piece hones in on pollster and vocal popularist David Shor’s prominent role at WelcomeFest, whose firm vetted ads for the Harris campaign and—well, we know how that turned out. As Jeff wryly observes, the popularist position “is only angry because it has analyzed public sentiment to find that the public is angry, so performative anger is currently optimal.” These are people who act like they have no skin in the game.

As our neighbors were being abducted from their lives, the moderates at WelcomeFest were seeking sympathy for the supposed difficulties of posting on Bluesky as a moderate. Their politics is an amoral politics that takes its direction from whatever focus groups identify as optimal in the polls, regardless of whether it is right or good. This recipe for politics overlooks a gobsmackingly obvious point: “Politicians are supposed to believe in things.”

The WelcomeFest crew is also vocally opposed to the idea that political preferences are shaped by messaging—by storytelling. At WelcomeFest, Thompson said this loud and clear: “The far right has a story. The far left has a story. The center doesn't have story. That's a problem. What I would say in response to that is, yeah, stories are for children.”

Time and time again people have organized to turn the tide of public opinion towards more moral positions through concerted effort. (The opposite is also true, of course—that misinformation campaigns have stoked fear of everything from vaccines and wind turbines to “critical race theory” and “DEI.”) If we defeat American fascism, it will be because people have come together to reject and resist it. As of now, the protestors in the streets don’t have an opposition party who has their backs. The billionaire donors steering the party apparatus are platforming pundits who like to dunk on unions and environmentalists, and politicians who don’t think we should use the word “oligarchy.”

The Abundance Agenda’s Newest Spokesperson: Brett Kavanaugh

We’ve written at length about why environmentalists should be skeptical of the abundance agenda. One reason is that abundance advocates have joined the political right in targeting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), viewing it as an unacceptable source of delay for infrastructure projects of all types seeking federal permits. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity frequently bring cases under NEPA against fossil fuel projects, and pro-abundance groups like the Breakthrough Institute and the Foundation for American Innovation have explicitly pitted themselves against those legal efforts.

Last week, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh penned the opinion in a consequential decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, limiting the courts’ discretion in evaluating federal agencies’ actions under the NEPA. As pro-abundance law professor Nicholas Bagley gleefully (and accurately) put it on the Shift Key podcast, Kavanaugh’s opinion sounded like an Ezra Klein column.

Kavanaugh called NEPA a “1970 legislative acorn” that “has grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development ‘under the guise’ of just a little more process.” He griped about “fewer and more expensive railroads, airports, wind turbines, transmission lines, dams, housing developments, highways, bridges, subways, stadiums, arenas, data centers, and the like.” Bagley called it a “coming out party for the law of abundance,” and a “walloping loss” for environmental groups. The specific project in question is an 88-mile railroad line that would transport crude oil from Utah alongside the Colorado River—the water source for 40 million people—to refineries on the Gulf Coast, causing an increase in emissions roughly equivalent to the emissions of Sweden or Ireland. Yet the podcast hosts seemed sanguine about the decision’s consequences.

For the abundance proponents who do acknowledge that climate change is real—their right-wing flank is still in denial—a fascinating mental slippage seems to be happening. They view decisions like this from SCOTUS as beneficial to the clean energy industry, and conflate the success of clean energy with the success of fighting climate change, without recognizing that decarbonization expressly requires the elimination of carbon-emitting activities as well. They act as though clean energy cancels out dirty energy, when it doesn’t. In their minds, it’s like zero plus one equals zero. But as long as there are sources of pollution, carbon in the atmosphere will increase, and climate change will worsen.

Right now we’re living through the deliberate destruction of our democracy, the eradication of environmental, labor, health, and consumer protection standards, the acceleration of climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Amidst all that, there is a faction within the Democratic party whose central pitch is that environmentalists and unions have too much power, and that we actually need to spend less time and effort evaluating the environmental harms of infrastructure development. This is cowardly nonsense.

The planet has already crossed dangerous thresholds of warming, breaching the 1.5°C warming limit for the first time last year. Scientists expect that we may reach 2°C of warming by 2029. Ezra Klein’s home publication has an excellent, terrifying feature about the planet’s nearing tipping points, including the die-off of coral reefs, the abrupt thawing of permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the shutdown of currents in the Atlantic ocean, and other massive transformations of our planet’s habitability.

The problem of our broken relationship with the natural world goes far beyond atmospheric pollution. In the last 150 years, we’ve lost nearly half of the earth’s topsoil—in which we grow 95 percent of our food—to industrial agriculture’s environmentally reckless practices. At this rate, we could run out of topsoil worldwide within the next sixty years. Insects, the bedrock of the global food chain, are disappearing in what scientists call an “insect apocalypse.” Since the 1970s—an era of environmental law-making that abundance advocates bemoan as an “overcorrection”—our planet has lost two-thirds of its wildlife.

When it comes to protecting the most vulnerable among us, the politics of abundance has little to offer, least of all courage.