Episode 239: The Vague, Capital-Serving Co-Optation of "Affordability" Politics

**Nima Shirazi** (0:03)
This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson. Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (0:15)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:17)
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**Adam Johnson** (0:45)
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**Nima Shirazi** (0:54)
The Congressional Progressive Caucus has a plan for high prices, insists Politico. Democrats ride the affordability wave, announces The Hill.
Democrats pitch new affordability, looking to widen midterm appeal, proclaims the New York Times.

**Adam Johnson** (1:13)
In recent months, we've heard a lot about the Democrats' latest attempt to attract voters, so-called affordability, an age of rapid inflation, tariffs, war and so-called artificial intelligence has exacerbated the extraordinary rise of prices on essentials like housing, groceries, gasoline and utilities, resulting in a cost of living that for so many in the United States is untenable. And as the recent mayoral victory of Zoran Mamdani has shown, a policy platform focused on lowering the cost of living has widespread appeal.

**Nima Shirazi** (1:41)
All this sounds like a necessary and promising intervention. Who wouldn't want to be able to afford more and thus have some of the greatest stressors of daily life alleviated? But all too often, what's presented as Democrats' vision of affordability smacks more of corporate PR and free market boosterism than of a genuine desire to ensure dignified lives for their constituency.
Instead of promises to make essentials free, publicly subsidized or universal, we see instead slippery ill-defined terms like fair pricing, the always elusive access, and even worse, red flags like reducing regulatory barriers.

**Adam Johnson** (2:19)
On today's show, we'll examine media and policy makers' intentionally fuzzy framing around affordability. How, in an era of skyrocketing costs in housing, gas, utilities, and food, billionaire-funded efforts, namely that of so-called the abundance movement, seek to channel populist anger over high prices into capital-friendly deregulatory regimes, and the broader consultant and think tank PR world designed to take good ideas and strip them of anything that makes them subversive, just, or narratively interesting.

**Nima Shirazi** (2:46)
Later on the show, we'll be joined by politics and culture writer Luke Savage. Luke is the co-host of the political cinema podcast Michael and Us, and author of the book The Dead Center, Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History, which was published in 2022 by Or Books. He also co-authored with late former leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, Ed Broadbent, Broadbent's own memoir, Seeking Social Democracy, Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality, which was published in 2023 by ECW Press.

**Luke Savage** (3:19)
Talking about affordability and access is a way of sounding like you are gesturing at a bread and butter issue, a core issue that people are concerned about, price of food, the price of health care. But what's implicit if you're talking about accessibility or affordability is that this thing is still a commodity, right? We're still keeping this within the confines of the market. This is still something that you can buy or sell, which I live in Canada, so health insurance here, you just have it if you're a citizen. And that's what's missed. And that possibility is what's being elided when people talk about affordability and access.

**Adam Johnson** (3:57)
This is a spiritual successor to probably a few shows, but specifically episode 188, how capital repackages substandard products for the poor as increasing access. So we've talked about this access language a lot. And that'll be part of what we talk about today, because much of the affordability rhetoric is very much, as we'll discuss, not a rights-based language, or even a universalist language. It is fundamentally language about reducing costs in some unspecified way. So it could be as little as 1% or 100%.
And somewhere within that range, that very wide range, things become quote unquote more affordable. Also, you can repackage a decline in increases or a reduction in the rate of increase as something becoming more affordable. So it has a very broad definition in terms of how you measure its success or how you pitch it. And like a lot of these very vague terms or these kind of liberal banalities is therefore easily exploitable. Because again, if something is reduced by 1%, you technically made it more affordable. But is that really a bold rights-based reorientation of the relationship between labor and capital? Of course not. It's about amelioration.