“LIVING CLOSE TO work shouldn’t be a luxury for the rich,” Democratic presidential candidate and former congressman Beto O’Rourke tweeted in September. “It’s a right for everyone.”
In a video of a campaign stop embedded in the tweet, the perpetually earnest Texan elaborated on this new right.
“Here’s a tough thing to talk about, though we must,” O’Rourke said. “Rich people are going to have to allow, or be forced to allow, lower-income people to live near them.…We force lower-income, working Americans to drive one, two, three hours in either direction to get to their jobs, very often minimum wage jobs.”
There are a half-dozen fuzzy-to-erroneous ideas baked into that language—“we” don’t “force” just about anyone to drive two-plus hours a day to and from work, for starters. But the…
