When You Hear “One Size Fits All,” Think “Universal”

The origins and expansion of a right-wing shibboleth

Once, the phrase “one size fits all” was a futuristic boast offered by manufacturers availing themselves of new, high-tech materials that stretched and flexed without tearing or deforming. Today, it’s a curse-word used to damn universal programs. What happened?

As is so often the case with big linguistic shifts, the culprit is capitalist realism, the ideology that there is no alternative to unfettered profit-seeking, which relies heavily on linguistic games. Much of our vocabulary is infected with these ideological shibboleths. For example, “free markets” — a term that once referred to markets free from “rent” (passive income collection by asset-owners that productive firms had to deal with) has now come to mean the opposite: markets today are only “free” if you can extract rent from assets, rather than production:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Scientific terms are heavily represented in capitalist realism’s lexicon — and why not? If you want to convince people that your ideology is inevitable, cloaking it in science can make your preferences seem like immutable laws of nature, as inescapable as gravity. For example, “learned helplessness,” the evidence-free…