Conservatives Should Care About Affordability
The skyrocketing cost of living isn’t something to be ignored.
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Ronald Reagan famously warned that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
For decades, conservatives rightly embraced that line as a defense against bureaucratic excess and centralized power. Americans had seen too many programs that promised relief but delivered dependency, inefficiency and frustration instead.
But New York City Zohran Mamdani has offered a competing nine words, captured in the message animating his mayoralty: “I worked all day and can’t feed my family.”
Conservatives shouldn’t dismiss that line. They should understand why it resonates.
Too often Republicans answer economic anxiety with statistics and abstractions. They point to GDP growth, low unemployment or rising markets. Those things matter. Markets and free enterprise remain the greatest engines of prosperity in human history. But millions of Americans increasingly feel disconnected from that prosperity and from many opportunities.
A worker whose rent has doubled doesn’t experience the economy through stock indexes. A parent watching grocery bills climb faster than wages isn’t reassured by aggregate growth numbers. A young couple delaying marriage, children or homeownership because costs seem permanently out of reach won’t be persuaded by another lecture about market efficiency.
I see this with my students and graduates almost daily. I teach at a school where tuition runs close to $70,000, and the affordability crisis is no longer somewhere else—it sits in my classroom. Parents stretch to make tuition work. Students stare down loan balances that will shape decades of their lives. Graduates with prestigious degrees are discovering that the middle-class stability their parents took for granted is no longer guaranteed by credentials alone.
None of this means Mr. Mamdani’s politics are correct. They aren’t.
His agenda reflects a familiar faith that government can centrally manage costs and engineer fairness from above. Conservatives are right to warn that price controls distort markets, subsidies expand dependency and bureaucracies tend to grow long after the crises that created them have passed. Many of his proposals would raise costs and taxes while weakening the dynamism that made New York great.
But conservatives should be careful not to mistake voters’ frustrations for a rejection of economic fundamentals. Most Americans drawn to populist economic messages aren’t demanding socialism because they reject work or ambition. They’re reacting to a broader sense that the social contract no longer functions for ordinary people and they’re struggling. Housing costs have soared. Attachment to faith and family formation have declined. Local civic life has eroded and the institutions of our grandparents are long gone. Economic insecurity has merged with loneliness and cultural fragmentation, leaving many feeling abandoned by the very institutions that once shaped middle-class life.
Into that vacuum step politicians like Mr. Mamdani, who offer not merely policies but recognition. The message tells struggling voters: I see your exhaustion. I understand your fear.
If conservatives answer only with “government is the problem,” they risk sounding detached from the realities families experience every day. The better conservative response is not bigger government, but stronger foundations for middle-class life.
That means making it easier to build housing. It means reducing energy costs. It means restoring respect for vocational paths and skilled trades alongside elite professional careers. It means rebuilding civic institutions, local associations, and the dense web of family and neighborhood ties that once meant no one faced economic precarity alone. It means recovering a politics of dignity rather than merely a politics of efficiency.
Reagan’s optimism succeeded and captured so many hearts and minds precisely because it paired skepticism of government with confidence in ordinary Americans. He believed people could thrive when institutions stopped suffocating them. But his confidence rested on a foundation that has since weakened: a vibrant civil society, attainable family life and a sense that hard work translated into stability. Repeating his line without rebuilding that foundation reduces a once-powerful argument to a slogan.
That is the conservative challenge today. Restating Reagan isn’t enough. The task is to make the conditions Reagan trusted real again, so that government skepticism isn’t a posture but a description of a country where families and communities actually have room to flourish.
Because if Republicans have no answer to the sentence, “I worked all day and can’t feed my family,” voters will keep turning toward politicians who promise expansive intervention and moral validation. Conservatives must offer not merely a warning about government, but a vision of a country where ordinary work once again sustains an ordinary life.
Until they do, many anxious and exhausted Americans will decide that Mayor Mamdani’s nine words matter more than Reagan’s ever did.
Mr. Abrams is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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It's sad that such a piece even has to be written, but it does, and this one nailed it.
Beltway Republicans are completely divorced from the reality of their constituents, and it's a dangerous situation.
Part of it is simply environmental. The Beltway is recession-proof. Since government spending will only ever rise, the area's economic prospects are permanently bright. Housing prices only rise. Even those federal worker head count cuts, so beloved by conservatives on X, are good news for the Beltway, since those workers are simply replaced with "contractors" - sometimes literally the same people, but now checking a private sector box. Lotta lotta Beltway mansions with government contractors living inside.
Even Trump, perhaps because he's (understandably) no longer doing large public rallies, seems to have lost touch with his MAGA base on economic issues.
There's too much kowtowing to billionaires, and too much indifference to the economic realty facing regular Americans.
The biggest disconnect comes from the Uniparty's obsession with the stock market. While the 1/3 of us deeply invested in the market rely on the implicit promise by the Uniparty never to let stocks decline (and I thank them for that!), roughly 2/3 of Americans have either zero or negligible exposure to the market. When they hear market indexes and corporate profits are at record highs, what that means for them is their wages have been successfully suppressed. In fact, the latest data shows that despite a GOP Trifecta, inflation is now rising faster than wages.
P.S. Early voting in the earliest states begins in about 120 days.
Excellent article, but I have a question: how do we reestablish confidence in civic associations? The pride I feel in being an American, a member of my family and involved in my church have been supported by each of those groups, with education reinforcing each of them. Unfortunately, there has been an intentional debasement of each by the educational system. Criticizing everything American is the sport of much education and the media. It is much easier to tear down than buildup.