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Good morning again, everyone.

You might call what we're about to hear tough love for liberalism from two people who care about it.

Journalists Ezra Klein from the New York Times and Derek Thompson from the Atlantic have co-authored a new book called Abundance.

Derek and Ezra suggests that Donald Trump won the election last year, not because of his vision

for America, but because of the failures of present-day liberalism.

They say those failures have produced some political ironies.

Red states are actually producing more clean energy than blue states. Big blue cities

have the worst housing shortages. They call some of this the problem with everything bagel

liberalism. Not that they're fans of Republicans. They say both parties have embraced a wrong-headed

politics based on the idea of scarcity. Hence the title of the book,

Abundance. Let's hear more. Asra Klein is a columnist and podcast host for the New York Times,

his latest book was the bestseller Why We're Polarized from 2022. Derek Thompson is a

staff writer at the Atlantic and host of their podcast Plain

English. He's also an NPR news analyst and a CBS News contributor, and he wrote a national

bestseller too called Hit Makers, the Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction.

Ezra and Derek, thanks for making us think with your original framing here, and welcome

back both of you to WNYC. Thank you for having us. Let's start with your idea. Scarcity. Derek,

I see in the Atlantic in an article based on the book, you wrote, Trump offers fear, retribution,

and scarcity. But then you wrote, in many places run by Democrats, the solution on offer

is another variety of scarcity. So maybe start by describing the Democratic and Republican

...