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The Affordability Crisis Can’t Be Advised Away
Politics
The Affordability Crisis Can’t Be Advised Away
Conservatives risk turning off voters if they meet political problems with nonpolitical solutions.
It was the dominant intraconservative debate of the week. No, not that one. The spirited exchange about whether young people who are discouraged by the high cost of living in their hometown, or at least the city where they currently reside, should move.
As the great political philosopher William Joel once asked, “Who needs a house out in Hackensack? Is that all you get for your money?” This was in response to wise old Mama Leone’s sage counsel: “Sonny, move out to the country.” After all, working too hard can give you a heart attack (ack-ack-ack-ack-ack).
The name of the song? Aptly enough, “Movin’ Out.”
Modern American conservatism is about hearth, home, and rootedness while at the same time representing dynamism, growth, and opportunity. “Go West, young man” and “I’ll be home for Christmas.” Mayberry and Wall Street, even if in the current moment we are seeking to emulate Russell Kirk more than Gordon Gekko.
As a political movement, we on the right contain multitudes. Not even so fusiony a fusionist as myself would dare attempt to reconcile all these contradictions. Life isn’t math, even if the cost of living and your household budget are important parts of it.
What I would, however, like to remind my fellow conservatives is that we are in large part a political movement. That doesn’t mean conservatism is only political. It is proper for even non-libertarian-tinged forms of conservative thought to remind people that there is a limit to what can be accomplished through politics. Don’t immanentize the eschaton. Or as Samuel Johnson put it, “How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”
Nevertheless, some things are a matter of public policy. Political questions are resolved by political means. The government, when not shut down capriciously, governs.
If the point is to give sound, Dave Ramsey–style personal financial advice to cash-strapped youngsters who find a degree in puppetry no longer goes as far as it once did in SoHo, it may well be the case that telling people to move is the correct answer. You could do much worse than heeding our modern-day Mama Leone, Ben Shapiro.
But if the point is to defeat political figures like socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the ballot box, this is probably not going to cut it. This is especially true now that the working class is the last line of defense against socialism in New York, of which the degreed-but-downwardly-mobile (even at the low six figures) are the vanguard.
While New York City is an exaggerated version of the problem, this is to some extent true nationally as well. The Republican Party and the center-right more broadly are increasingly working-class. Many affluent suburbanites remain comfortably at home within an increasingly socialist Democratic Party, even after stretches of inflation, rising crime, and Mamdani types winning the odd urban elected office challenged that realignment.
There is certainly a place for telling people that their expectations are unrealistic or their problems have no viable political solutions. I am less sure that place is politics itself.
Nowhere has this been more readily apparent than in healthcare over the past 50 years. There is a lot that can be said for the virtues of the American healthcare system in comparison to those of Canada, Great Britain, and the various Scandinavian welfare states. But it also has problems and trying to tell people otherwise, or that the proposed solutions are uniformly worse than the problems, can begin to sound like pretending 41-year record inflation is merely transitory.
At least it works, until it doesn’t. But eventually, the problem will be addressed on the terms of the side that says it has solutions, even if those solutions are bad. The horrendously misnamed Affordable Care Act has not worked especially well, and it ought to give us pause as to how well the Democrats’ new affordability agenda will fare, but it is not nothing. (In fact, parts of it were loosely based on halfhearted Republican attempts to make the problem go away.)
Personal advice has to be given within the constraints of the system as it is. Public policy is a chance to tweak and reform that system, adjusting incentives.
Conservatives have allowed libertarian rhetoric to talk themselves out of attempting to solve problems while not actually doing anything substantively libertarian. So we say “Don’t ask for free stuff, move instead” while jacking up federal spending, running record deficits even during relative peace and prosperity, eroding civil liberties, waging all kinds of wars, and watching the national debt careen past $38 trillion.
It is the kind of thing that makes a person think that they are taking crazy pills, as many conservatives now apparently are. Taking a different approach doesn’t require rejecting the American founding, scrapping capitalism, believing in bizarre and hateful racial theories, or liking Hitler and Stalin better than Reagan and Churchill.
But you should never argue with a crazy mind. I ought to know by now.
The post The Affordability Crisis Can’t Be Advised Away appeared first on The American Conservative.
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