The ‘affordability’ crisis is also a crisis of broken trust in the American Dream

Guest Commentary written by

Jennifer Mercieca

Jennifer Mercieca is a historian of American political rhetoric, professor of communication and journalism at Texas A&M University, and a contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square. She is the author, most recently, of “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump“.

Affordability is the top issue in this year’s U.S. midterm election. But it’s more than that. Frustration over affordability is so severe that it threatens the viability of the American Dream — and potentially America itself.

If the American Dream was a promise made by the nation to its workers — if you work hard, you can achieve economic security — then that promise is broken. America is much less affordable than it was a few generations ago. This is true for everything from dinner at McDonald’s for a family of five — which cost the equivalent of three hours of minimum wage work in 1955, and today costs nearly an entire eight-hour work day — to buying a home — which is less than half as affordable for the average family today compared to 1960.

“Affordability” is the gap between what things cost and what you can afford to spend, yes, but it’s more than that. Affordability is a capacious political term that describes a series of shortfalls: the gap between the ultrarich and everyone else, the gap between how economists talk about the economy and people’s everyday experiences, the gap between a “poverty wage” and a “livable wage,” the gap between what politicians promise on the campaign trail and what they deliver in office, and the gap between the promise and the reality of achieving the American Dream in the 21st century.

Affordability is the political issue of our time, a crisis that isn’t going to end unless we understand and address all of those gaps. In today’s political discourse “affordability” is another (perhaps less obviously strident) way to say that for a lot of people (maybe most), capitalism feels broken. 

How did we get here? The language we use to talk about the economy offers some clues.

National economic conditions are difficult to generalize because the economy is complex, and personal economic conditions are also difficult to generalize because people do not have the exact same economic circumstances. 

That double complexity means that it’s easy to mislead with economic statistics, like the performance of stock markets, the cost of gas, or inflation or unemployment metrics. But focusing on any one of those factors — or even all of them — doesn’t tell a complete story. No one of those parts can ever stand for the whole.

Typically, that’s the kind of situation that calls for a metaphor. A metaphor is what 18th-century rhetorical scholar George Campbell called “an allegory in miniature.” Metaphors are compact little nuggets of narrative that work by comparison (comparing a known and easily recognizable thing to an unknown or difficult to describe thing). The “metaphors we live by,” explain George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, shape our very thought.

Economists represent their thinking in equations, charts and graphs that are difficult to translate into paragraphs. Translating those graphs into paragraphs is an act of metaphorical representation — in this case, using words to describe data trends. The most common metaphor used to describe today’s economy is the letter “K,” where “K” stands for the shape of a graph showing how “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” 

The K-shaped metaphor tells a story that resonates with a lot of Americans’ experience. “Affordability” is the word that captures that K-shaped metaphorical narrative in political discourse.  

Affordability is an interesting word because it describes a literal gap (between what things cost and what you can afford) but it also describes a rhetorical gap between the bureaucratic language of professional economists (those who speak about “national economic indicators” or “stock market gains”) and the vernacular language of people who worry about “bills” and “rent” and “interest rates” — people who know the ins and outs of “side hustles,” “GoFundMe” and “payday loans.”

There are terms that attempt to bridge the rhetorical gap: “cost of living” or “making ends meet,” perhaps, but those phrases don’t get at the real thing, which is that K-shaped gap. Affordability in America is a K-shaped story.

Affordability as a political project is about giving all Americans the power to choose how (and whether) they spend their money. The rent is too damn high, but so is everything else — and Americans have no choice but to pay now or use credit — which is to say, Americans have no choice at all.

As a political project affordability asks: “Why don’t we have better choices in the land of the free?”

America’s affordability crisis is a violation of the bargain of the American Dream. Political leaders have promised repeatedly to make that dream possible again, but things have steadily gotten worse. America’s affordability problem has fueled outrage, instability and extremism.

In the nation’s 250th year, the affordability crisis is existential. It isn’t just about Americans’ personal finances. It’s a national crisis of broken trust.

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.