The conclusion frames today’s extreme polarization as occurring alongside the potential emergence of a new “political order,” drawing on historian Gary Gerstle’s idea that durable eras are built on cross-party consensus. It recounts how the New Deal order (active government managing the economy) survived into the Eisenhower years under Cold War pressure, then collapsed in the 1970s as crises and a new individualism reshaped values and policy, culminating in the neoliberal order’s smaller-government assumptions.

Ezra Klein argues that this neoliberal order has been breaking for years: the Great Recession weakened faith in deregulated markets; climate change exposed market blind spots; trade with China undercut promises about shared prosperity and democratization; slow recovery, inequality, the pandemic, and inflation spotlighted scarcity and affordability. With the old story of the “good life” no longer believable, the country enters an unstable interregnum where new narratives compete to define what politics is for.

The chapter then presents a fork: scarcity politics or abundance politics. Scarcity politics channels shortages into suspicion and exclusion, illustrated by JD Vance and Donald Trump blaming immigrants for housing costs, and by right-wing populism’s preference for closing doors and elevating strongmen. Klein also argues liberal governance has fueled scarcity through restrictive zoning and process-heavy rules that raise costs and slow building, helping create the affordability pressures the right exploits; he adds that China’s visible capacity to build has further destabilized confidence in American institutions.

Against that backdrop, Klein describes how Trump’s “builder” rhetoric offered grievance without follow-through, while Joe Biden adopted parts of the critique and passed major build-oriented laws (infrastructure, CHIPS and Science, and the Inflation Reduction Act). Yet implementation failures—such as the slow rollout of EV charging—show how weak state capacity and layered requirements can prevent promised benefits from reaching communities, potentially letting successors claim credit for delayed results.

Klein argues abundance is not a single policy checklist but a governing lens that asks what should be abundant and why building and invention are hard. He warns that pursuing abundance requires accepting trade-offs, unmaking process accretions, revisiting participation systems captured by incumbents, and resisting left-wing scarcity impulses like “degrowth.” He closes by invoking LBJ’s World’s Fair warning—abundance or annihilation—and calls for institutional renewal that makes government work, aligning technology and production with widely shared ends: more homes, clean energy, cures, and competent construction.