Last year, in the wake of the Trumpian seizure of power and Elon Musk’s vandalizing government agencies, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson sparked a brief tizzy among the chattering classes with their book “Abundance Liberalism.” The Democratic establishment was in a funk over losing the 2024 election, and the book seemed to offer a panacea for winning over the fickle American voter.

The idea was that Democrats should drop their phobias about environmental degradation, urban sprawl, interstate highway construction and other quality-of-life considerations, and instead engineer the economy to crank out more stuff for the masses — housing, green energy jobs, infrastructure. All they have to do is defang regulations contained in the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, zoning restrictions and other examples of Luddite do-gooderism. Grateful voters would flock to the Democratic Party, and right-wing extremism would lose its steam. . . .

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What do the study’s participants talk about? Their central concern is their own so-called “moral foundations.” For them, any democracy is valid only insofar as it vigorously upholds “faith, family, freedom and place,” as indicated in the study’s title. Since they believe their values are under relentless attack by the institutions of democracy, then democracy must be sacrificed. In this mindset, political opponents are not acting in good faith but are outright demonic. The study describes Maria from Michigan this way: “Her verdict on the Democratic Party as having dedicated its playbook to Satan and chosen the ‘platform of death’ does not leave room for normal civic constraints to apply.”

It should be emphasized that these values mean their faith, not a non-Christian religion or no religion; their family (forcible family separation of immigrants or gay marriage don’t count); their freedom (getting vaccinated as a civic responsibility to protect the frail and immune-deficient is incomprehensible to them) and their place (typically small-town and rural, cities being dens of iniquity).