The Progressive’s “Affordability Agenda” is a Fraud
In the wake of devastating setbacks in the 2024 elections, Progressives are deemphasizing identity politics and instead are prioritizing economic issues. Progressives are now embracing an “abundance movement” and claiming they are the party to deliver abundance to working families. The latest iteration of this new strategy was expressed by progressive activist and pundit Donna Brazile in her recent commentary published by The Hill, where in her attempt to project an even more explicit show of solidarity with working families, she augments the concept of “abundance” with its fraternal twin, “affordability.” As Brazile recounts, in two races for governor that will be decided this November, the progressive candidates “seek to lower the costs of health care, housing, energy and groceries.” Brazile writes:
“Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, is campaigning on her Affordable Virginia Plan. Similarly, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, candidate for governor in New Jersey, is campaigning on her Affordability Agenda.”
This is a rational pivot for progressives, and it could work. Leftist progressives have a natural rhetorical advantage. Leftist messaging relies on nurturing resentment and exploiting envy, while consistently promising to redistribute wealth from rich individuals and corporations to the less fortunate. That’s an easier message to sell to the average voter trying to afford rent than the right-wing answer, which is to create equal opportunity through meritocracy, private property incentives, and deregulated competition. Now that pragmatic forces on the left is moving away from nurturing resentment between identity groups, and instead trying to restore a pure economic basis for resentment, they can promise abundance and affordability to everyone. It’s a smart move.
What may be smart politically, however, in practice can never work. Progressives can promise affordability, throwing open the tent to welcome back all the white working class voters they’ve turned their backs on ever since 2008, but they can never deliver on their promise. Affordability in the United States has been steadily eroding since the 1970s thanks to policies almost exclusively promoted by progressives. Across the decades in their pursuit of power, leftists wielded rhetorical arguments that voters often were deceived into viewing as morally superior. And in every case where their arguments won, their policies lost.
Evidence of this failure is easily seen in the demographic shift from states controlled by liberals to states controlled by conservatives. A 2030 apportionment forecast shows, without exception, the dramatic shift in population out of blue states and into red states. In the wake of the 2030 census, California is projected to lose one seat in the U.S. Congress, New York will lose two seats, and Oregon, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Pennsylvania will lose one seat each. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida are projected to both gain four seats, with Arizona, Utah, and Idaho gaining one each.
With only four years left in this decade, and migration trends firmly established and unlikely to change, the conclusion one may draw from these projections is unequivocal. People increasingly prefer to live in states ran by conservatives. We may even acknowledge that Pennsylvania and some of the other midwestern states are no longer reliably liberal, but their new status as battlegrounds only reinforces our case. The politicians who once claimed to fight for all working families, and are trying to restore that brand after a nearly two decade excursion into identity politics, have utterly failed their constituents in every state where they have been dominant.
It’s not complicated. Progressive ran governments in blue states have over-regulated and over-taxed all forms of business including housing construction and small family enterprises. Governments in these states have also over-regulated energy markets in favor of renewables, which can still only compete with conventional energy when renewables are subsidized and conventional energy is crushed by regulations. These states have also under-invested in maintaining their roads, water systems, and all critical infrastructure in order to instead overpay their unionized public workforces and allocate government aid to citizens that can no longer afford the cost-of-living that these government policies created.
That’s why blue states are losing population. But they keep on electing the politicians who do this to them. And they do that because these progressive politicians have not only a rhetorical advantage, they have an overwhelming advantage in donations that come from crony corporations and public sector unions that benefit from these policies. What great irony. Progressive policies empower large corporations because they can easily comply with regulatory obstacles that small businesses can’t possibly afford to navigate. Blue state policies, in direct conflict with their leftist rhetoric, enable giant corporations to consolidate market power and charge higher prices.
It isn’t the rhetoric that attracts families to red states and induces them to vote for conservatives. Telling people they have to succeed on hard work and competence isn’t easy, nor is it easy to tell people that the right to private property also comes with some people owning much more property than others. It’s also not easy to explain that fewer regulations may result in less official protection for organized labor or endangered species, but only with deregulation can many companies survive and compete in a free market, lowering prices for everything. These are higher level arguments. They require an intellectual leap. They rely on reason instead of emotion. Rhetoric favors the left.
But results matter more than rhetoric. People can afford to live and raise families in Texas and Florida. In California and New York, not so much. There’s a reason the median price for a home is $866,000 in California and only $339,000 in Texas, and it isn’t based on what parties promise. If it was, those ratios would flip, and California would be the destination state it once was.
Affordability, as implemented by progressives, equates to rent control and other incentive-destroying regulations, paired with high taxes and redistribution of wealth, sold on the rhetoric of resentment. Their so-called abundance agenda equates to a selective and futile version of deregulation, one that is limited to streamlining approvals of high density infill housing and renewable energy, while leaving in place restrictions on open land development and conventional energy investment. All of these policies lead to a higher cost of living.
Even if progressives shed their obsession with identity politics and successfully rebrand themselves as once again committed to the economic interests of all Americans, they are inherently incapable of delivering abundance or affordability. Their policies, and the special interests that support them, are inherently oriented towards the opposite result.
Scarcity, high prices, and hyper regulation is all we can expect from progressives, no matter what Donna Brazile may hope. The question for voters in every state is simple: will they choose rhetoric, or will they choose results.
A version of this article originally appeared in American Greatness.
Edward Ring is the Director of Water and Energy Policy at the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).