Abundance, bagels, food metaphors, and walking while chewing gum.

A Members-Only column by Josh Ishimatsu

I like eating. Food is one of my top sources of joy in these bleak times. I like high-brow food. I like low-brow food. I like middle-brow food.

I like reading. I like writing. I like to think about reading and writing – about language and communication (this column series is ostensibly about communication).

I like housing. I’ve worked in the affordable housing/community development space for almost all of my adult professional life.  I think about housing and community development almost all of the time.

Put these all together and you get a column critiquing a food metaphor about housing – Ezra Klein’s invocation of liberalism as an everything bagel in his 2023 (a precursor to Abundance), opinion piece, “The Problem with Everything Bagel Liberalism.”  This column was inspired by my friend Thomas Silverstein’s recent article in the Poverty & Race Journal, on this same topic.

On one level, Klein’s everything bagel is a pretty successful metaphor.  Evocative and memorable, tied to a food trend and an unexpected Oscar-winning movie, the metaphor was designed to grab attention and it’s been successful in that we’re still talking about it, 2+ years later.  BUT, for me, the metaphor sucks (despite its success) because it’s poorly applied and in service of a crappy premise.  That is, instead of talking about the problem of everything bagel liberalism, we should be talking about the promise of everything bagel liberalism.

Affordable Housing as an Everything Bagel

Klein’s first level argument is about affordable housing. Affordable housing, Klein contends, costs too much because it is trying to be too much to too many people.  Environmentalists, labor, disability activists, etc. all want to sprinkle their topping on the bagel.  Klein says, referencing the Everything, Everywhere, All At Once bagel, “Add too much… and it becomes a black hole from which nothing, least of all the government’s ability to solve hard problems, can escape.” But Klein’s use of the metaphor belies the realities of affordable housing, of progressive movement building, of culinary creativity, and of the charm and deeper meanings of the movie in question.

First off (as Klein notes), everything bagels are delicious (and they don’t cost any more than a plain bagel at most bagel shops).  So, if you’re trying to argue that the problem with liberalism/affordable housing policy is that it has too many add-ons (not necessarily the argument I’d make), your illustrative metaphor should be, I don’t know, a pizza that’s topped with bacon cheeseburger sliders and mini-cali burritos. Or if you’re fixated on bagels, your metaphor should be an everything bagel whose toppings include caviar, shaved truffles, and gold flakes.  

But Klein’s misuse of the metaphor aside, given the deliciousness and balance of everything bagels, I actually think an everything bagel is an appropriate metaphor for affordable housing.  But in a positive way, not a negative way.

We can have honest disagreements about the mix and quantity of toppings but let’s be clear – it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time (to mix my metaphors). It is okay – desirable even – that we ask affordable housing to serve more than a single purpose. And a ruthless, singular, bureaucratic focus on cost efficiency (proposed metaphor: government cheese on stale white bread) or a completely de-regulated private market (proposed metaphor: toxic sawdust McNuggets), might get us units of affordable housing at cheaper costs of production. But a high quality everything bagel still looks pretty good to my eyes.

The Promise of Everything Bagel Liberalism

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once is an everything bagel of a movie. It’s a messy, absurd mix of genres and moods and tones that somehow fit together into a surprising, creative, moving, cohesive whole. Like an everything bagel, it works because it is a single thing made up of a diversity of things.  The diversity, the multiplicity, the combination are part of what makes it so good.

The problem with our coalitional politics is not that we try to solve too many problems or address the interests of too many different groups. We should be solving all of the problems. We should be looking out for everybody. Our problems, I believe, happen when we lose sight of the fact that, when we do this right, the whole is better than the sum of the parts. Our problems come when we retreat too far into our own corners and when we treat our messy, shared space as purely transactional.  When we forget that we all benefit from good jobs, from high quality housing, from education, from healthcare, from accessibility, from a sustainable environment, etc. Our problems are those of lack of shared culture and shared language, of communication, of how we treat each other, of lack of patience and empathy, and our inability to keep our bigger picture values at the forefront. It is not a problem of trying to do too much.

The promise of diverse movements where we are truly mutually invested is the promise of justice and abundance for everybody, everywhere, all at once. This is the promise of everything bagel politics – new and creative things, new wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts.  And yes, sometimes (often?) we don’t get it right.  And so we keep trying. We keep experimenting. We keep creating. But we don’t throw the everything bagel out with the bathwater. And we give everything bagels their due. They are delicious.