Affordability, affordability and affordability

And so begins another week closer to the midterms. A further week of intellectual arguments represented by a no-vision, no-agenda approach from Democrats in a country in which 21% of the population is illiterate, and 54% manage a 6th-grade literacy score. I have long been an advocate for not dumbing down the sociopolitical argument, but there is a fine line to tread when the party in government is convincing the public that dumb is the new smart.

It’s very unfortunate that the ‘Democratic Socialist’ argument debate has taken so long to come to the fore, and it’s even more unfortunate that democratic socialists chose the ‘socialist’ tag to hang their hat on. A far better strap line is ‘people first Democrats’; it’s simple, descriptive, and carries no baggage that opens the door to being labelled communism, Marxism, or socialism. As soon as the 2024 election was over, there should have been a full-throated apology to the American people for failing them in 2024 and a commitment to do better. Instead, we’ve seen an epidemic of self-preservation and a silence that was deafening for the best part of a year.

I was struck by a comment left after unsubscribing to one of last week’s posts:

As much as I may agree with Martin, the constant ranting about the stupid American electorate begins to wear thin, from someone across the pond who doesn't have the same skin in the game.

I have no problem with folks unsubscribing; it comes with the job, but to this statement I simply would say, I have tried everything to highlight the at times seeming indifference to the urgency of the problem when it comes to sacrifice and inconvenience. As an outside observer, it’s unfortunately difficult to come to any other conclusion as to why the American people would vote for a pathological liar who stole from his own charity and perpetually evaded paying his taxes while employing hundreds of the very immigrants on low wages he now wants to mass deport. All while stiffing contractors and students at his fake university, yet the American people voted for him TWICE.

On the point of me being “someone across the pond who doesn’t have the same skin in the game”. Rest assured, it not only affects me, but it also affects millions of people across the world, because it’s the same stupidity that has now put the whole world economy and security at risk. All from some sort of inexplicable electoral brain fart. The whole reason we have Nigel Farage in the UK, Germany has the AfD, and France has Marine Le Pen is because of Trump, not in spite of him, so I absolutely have skin in the game and what better place to fight tyranny than at its source?

Returning for a moment to the Democratic Socialist argument, it does represent the type of revolution that is required within the Democratic Party, and to be clear, I absolutely welcome it. This should have happened a long time ago, and it’s certainly regrettable that it has taken until this primary season to see it elevated into a war that sees progressives not only attacked by Republicans, but also by their own party establishment.

Since the era of Clinton, we have slowly seen the lines blurred between what were traditional Republicans and Democrats, as each attempted to park their tanks on the centre ground of US politics. It’s become the very source of the same old, same old politics that led 90 million voters to sit on their hands in 2024. Trust in politicians in the US is now in the basement at 17%, compared t over 50% in many Nordic capitalist countries with far more ‘people first’ political policy agendas and higher tax societies. That’s until you add up the cost for what’s not included in US social costs; then the costs look more on par.

The argument is that you don’t get growth and prosperity in ‘socialist societies’, to which I would agree, and the Nordic nations, despite the propaganda narrative, are NOT socialist societies; they are free market capitalist countries. As a comparison, and remembering that these countries are allegedly NOT on the front edge of the AI revolution the US claims to lead. The Nordic countries averaged between 1.5% and 2% growth in 2025. By comparison, the US grew around 2.1% WITH the AI frontier technologies in their camp.

Let’s drill down a little more, though. If you strip out AI and short-term investment in AI infrastructure from the US economy, it grew by just 0.1% in 2025. Now, before you jump in and say that’s a nonsense comparison, I would ask you one simple question: how much of the growth generated by AI in the US is real and how much is based on the hope of jam tomorrow? The magnificent 7 companies that are driving Trump’s wet dreams are passing trillions of dollars around to each other and passing it off as revenue and growth. It’s NOT; it’s a bubble. So the next obvious question is what happens when the bubble bursts, which I assure you it will, as has every major revolutionary advance in history, from the railways to the Internet.

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I suppose the reason I get confused is that I assume that common sense and critical thinking are part of the natural makeup in a democratic society. BIG MISTAKE: common sense and critical thinking have become an optional luxury in a world where greed is king. All you need to make the greed work is someone below each demographic to blame when their lives seem to be going nowhere. It’s for good reason that the decline of unions and collective social movements has eradicated all but the upper middle class, while at the same time decimating the working class. This has now just left the have-yachts and the have-nots. Corporate America knows organised labour is a threat to profits, and they want none of that. US trade union membership currently stands at 10.0%, representing 14.7 million members; there are almost as many top 10% households as there are union members. In Norway, for example, union membership sits at around 50-55% in the private sector and 80% in the public sector.

There is a sweet spot for a progressive agenda, and there’s no better example of understanding that than AOC. Since her early years as part of the Squad, she has evolved so much, and the reason she has done that is that she understands the evolution of politics and the need to pick your battles carefully. She knows that transformative change can’t be delivered overnight and that the first step is to gain power. Only then can you transform society.

If you watch what Zohran Mamdani is doing in New York, this is a great example of how you can marry really resonant messaging with a very visible policy agenda. It’s all about an emotional connection with voters and breaking the political mould by doing what you said you would do on the campaign trail. It’s the same reason AOC resonates and is able to raise the kind of money required to run a presidential campaign.

You can see the difference between Abdul El-Sayed and AOC, and the reason AOC has backed him is that she can see herself in him back in 2018. If you look at his campaign, he clearly got hooked up with a similar messaging team that propelled Mamdani and AOC to power. If you understand emotionally connective messaging, half the battle is won. Despite what he might say publicly, the close result in Michigan shook him, despite the massive spend against him. He expected a bigger win, and I think that’s a good thing, because now he knows the fight he has on his hands, and I’m confident he will rise to that challenge.

The messaging line for November has to be affordability, affordability and affordability with a healthy dose of affordability. Everything else stems from that central premise. Ideology has to take a back seat to pragmatism, because I've seen up close and personal the consequences of misreading the room. In 2018, when Jeremy Corbyn in the UK was backed by a movement called ‘Momentum ’, it had a phenomenal young messaging team that delivered a similar progressive agenda. They believed wrongly that they were riding a wave of confidence that they assumed would wipe out a very unpopular conservative government. Corbyn went down to a historic defeat that saw Boris Johnson win the election with the largest conservative majority in 30 years.

Corbyn’s experience is a cautionary tale: the Democratic Socialism label is probably not the answer, and I believe he lost that election because the Conservatives weaponised ‘socialism’ so effectively, and they had nowhere near the kind of capture of media messaging that Trump has right now. We have seen already that Republicans are running the ‘red-scare’ playbook, and candidates ignore this at their peril. This is why, for a long time, I have advocated for using the term ‘people first’ Democrats. Yes, Republicans will attempt to tie it to socialism, but it’s never easy to demonise the term ‘people first’. Why provide them with a loaded gun to shoot you with is my position.

In this midterm cycle, there is now no time for a revolution within the Democratic Party; that boat has sailed for now. This has to be about regaining the power of the subpoena to facilitate the forensic examination of the corruption that has been the hallmark of this regime. This is where attention has to be split: one part of the majority focuses on accountability, while remaining Democrats develop a compelling proposition to the American people for 2028. It’s important to use the investigations to force Republicans to incriminate themselves. Yes, they will claim lawfare and victimhood, but that is the last thing Democrats need to worry about.

If Democrats are to succeed in November, it MUST be laser-focused on the affordability agenda. Remember, you can roll so much into affordability, like healthcare, the minimum wage, affordable child care and paid parental leave, which can be used to raise awareness of the key issues without making them central. It’s about careful framing of the agenda until after the election. After November, we move to phase two, when there will be an imperative to present a coherent policy agenda to serve the many, not the few. It’s about knowing which battles to fight and when.

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