This item, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, and originally published here on December 10, 2009, is cross-posted from Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, where it first appeared. It is a response to E.J. Dionne’s review of Alan Wolfe’s The Future of Liberalism.
These are perplexing times for American liberals. Last November’s euphoria has given way to frustration and even doubt. This was inevitable, to an extent, because governing is always harder than campaigning. Mario Cuomo’s dictum that we campaign in poetry but govern in prose applies with special force to a president whose eloquence on the campaign trail so effectively aroused enthusiasm and raised expectations.
But some critics have gone farther, charging that liberalism is undermining itself because, as Alan Wolfe puts it, “all too often, liberal politicians lack the courage of liberalism.” This diagnosis leads to a prescription: We must “get liberals to once again believe in liberalism.” This is a version of the 12 Angry Men/Mr. Smith Goes to Washington theory, prominent to this day in Hollywood–a leader willing to confidently deliver an unvarnished liberal message will sweep away all before him. (The remake would star Warren Beatty.)
Reviewing Wolfe’s new book The Future of Liberalism in these pages, E.J. Dionne rejects the author’s shortage-of-courage thesis but focuses on a related phenomenon–namely, liberal ambivalence–about radicalism, populism, social democracy, globalization, individualism, and much else [See “Liberalism Lost and Found,” Issue #14]. While it’s hard to object in principle to Dionne’s suggestion that liberals should “face their own contradictions squarely,” it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi as a bumper-sticker (except perhaps among former Marxists). More to the point, it’s inadequate analytically. Today’s liberals face political difficulties not because they’re gutless or conflicted but because many of the things they believe (rightly, in my view) go against the grain of beliefs that are deeply entrenched in our political culture.
That is not a reason to abandon liberalism. As Wolfe, Dionne, and Paul Starr have shown, the liberal tradition is responsible for much of what is best in modern America, and it charts the most promising path to future reforms. It is, however, a reason to proceed in full awareness of the obstacles in its path and to acknowledge that along the way we will often have to accept much less than we want. This means that liberals in high places may have to be less full-throated than either Wolfe or Dionne might prefer. But as the late Ted Kennedy so shrewdly recognized, a series of modest victories can add up to major changes.
Last year’s electoral sweep, to begin, was a victory for the Democratic Party, but not necessarily for liberalism. Self-described conservatives outnumber liberals by nearly two to one, and the liberal share of the population has risen only marginally, from 19 to 21 percent, during the past decade. And while 72 percent of Republicans consider themselves conservative, only 37 percent of Democrats consider themselves liberal, versus 39 percent moderate and 22 percent conservative. Republicans are ideologically homogeneous; Democrats represent a diverse coalition. If liberals hope to pass major legislation, they must negotiate and compromise with members of their own party whose outlooks differ from their own.
This is a current reality, unlikely to change anytime soon. Other challenges to liberalism have roots deeper in our history. One centers on the role of government. The early American liberalism of the founding era embodied a handful of basic ideas: among them, fear of tyranny and of concentrated power; mistrust of human nature, which needed to be checked and channeled through institutions and rules; and a preference for government that was limited in scope, though not purely laissez-faire by any means.
From this parsimonious beginning, the federal government grew by fits and starts. The Whigs successfully advocated investment in the public goods needed for economic growth, a strategy that arch-Whig Abraham Lincoln continued as president through measures like the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act. The post Civil War expansion of industrial corporations created a thrust toward government as a countervailing power that could limit monopolies and impose regulations in the public interest. Three generations after Andrew Jackson strangled the Bank of the United States, repeated financial crises led to the creation of a much more powerful central bank, empowered to curb dangerous market-based instability. A generation after that, an economic crisis that overwhelmed the capacities of individuals, civil society, and state governments led to new national institutions and policies to provide some measure of security against disaster. In the wake of World War II, the overlapping demands of national defense and global leadership produced a large standing army and a new array of security-oriented institutions. The war also sparked demands to move the historic commitment to equal rights from an abstract norm to concrete practice, which involved the national government in a new system of enforcement. And rising public concern over the externalities of economic growth–especially its impact on the economy–led to new national institutions, laws, and regulations.
Each of these expansions of national power seemed justified, and often compelled, by changing circumstances. In the aggregate, though, the federal government became more expensive and intrusive; it assumed more responsibility that it could easily discharge; and it presumed a level of competence that it often lacked. After the mid-1960s, trust in government declined steadily, reaching an historic low in the month before Barack Obama’s election. It has not improved appreciably since.
This is the central conundrum of modern liberal governance: While state power has grown, America’s anti-statist public culture has persisted. Our national default setting, from which we deviate only under extreme pressure, is suspicion of state power. Half a century ago, this took the benign form so pithily characterized by political scientists Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril, that Americans were “ideologically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Today, after policy failures at home and abroad, many American object to larger government, not (only) on ideological grounds, but also because they doubt its competence and integrity. While the American people accept many liberal aims (including fundamental health reform), they mistrust the means by which liberals typically pursue them. As Obama is discovering, change we can believe in requires a government we can trust, which most Americans don’t think we now have.
Ed Kilgore
This item by James Vega was originally published on December 9, 2009.
The plan President Obama laid out last week for Afghanistan has confronted anti-war Democrats with a profoundly difficult strategic choice – one that will have far-reaching implications not only for Afghanistan but for America as well.
The first option is to conclude that Obama is either a helpless or a willing captive of the pentagon and to dismiss his entire administration as hopelessly and irrevocably committed to militarism. The second is to view the Obama administration as instead the arena where a strategic debate between the advocates of a political solution and a purely military one is now going on and to attempt to influence that key strategic decision.
For many anti-war Democrats there is a powerful temptation to embrace the first alternative. After all, on the surface there seems little difference between the views of Obama and his generals. Compared with the clear and disciplined agreement among Obama’s cabinet members in favor of sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, any slight disagreements over the details seems trivial.
Disappointed Democrats can point to evidence to support this view. A Dec 7th Washington Post analysis entitled “McChrystal’s Afghanistan plan stays mainly intact” begins by saying that McChrystal “will return to Kabul to implement a war strategy that is largely unchanged after a three month-long white house review of the conflict… the new approach does not order McChrystal to wage the war in a fundamentally different way from what he outlined in an assessment he sent the White House in late August.”
This would seem quite conclusive, but, it is, in fact, not the complete picture. Obama actually did modify McChrystal’s original plan in four significant ways. To see this, it is necessary to clearly describe several key elements of a standard counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.
1. The enemy – called the “insurgents” in COIN – are broadly defined as any people or groups actively opposed to a “host government” that is supported by the U.S. In the case of Afghanistan, the leading COIN strategists define the enemy as any and all of the seven quite distinct groups that comprise the Taliban as well as a variety of other forces influenced by jihadist Islam or who oppose U.S. troops on nationalistic grounds.
2. The mission is defined in purely military terms. The enemy must be defeated and his will to resist broken. The goal is victory, not a political compromise.
3. A counterinsurgency campaign’s basic strategy is not simply to defend static positions or train soldiers but to create stable governments, deliver services, build new institutions and promote pro-western development. A COIN campaign is said to be a failure if it does not win the support and loyalty of the population for the U.S. supported “host government”.
4. The timetable is long-term and open-ended. Historically a few counterinsurgency campaigns have been successfully concluded in 8-14 years while a larger number dragged on for decades. COIN advocates realize that long, indecisive wars are deeply unpopular so they usually define the timetable as simply “as long as it takes” or “until victory” rather than defining any specific number of years or decades.
General McChrystal’s August memo actually incorporated all four of these elements, but none remained in the final plan. With the help of Joe Biden, Obama was able to modify these basic principles in four key ways:
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
In case you missed it, once-and-maybe-future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee traveled to Calgary, Alberta, Canada the other day and delivered himself of an address (according to his own pre-speech account, reported in the local press) focused on the terrible temptation of conservatives in the United States to tolerate diverse points of view, under the shorthand of a “Big Tent.”
That would be bad, said Huck, struggling from afar against the vast forces calling for ideological heterodoxy within the Republican Party.
As someone who adores our Neighbors to the North, and has made speeches there on occasion, I was struck by how odd it was for Huckabee to be sending this particular message in this particular place. It is customary for Americans speaking in Canada to express a great deal of interest in, you know, Canada. Maybe Huck did that in his actual speech, but he sure did seem to make it clear to the S.E. Calgary News that he wanted to inform Canadian conservatives of the threat of creeping liberalism among their counterparts down south.
To be sure, Huck’s on a long-term mission to make his image among conservatives match his actually extremist views. He outraged most of the Right’s chattering classes in 2008 by suggesting there were grounds for resentment of economic inequality in George W. Bush’s America. And his many detractors on the talk radio circuit have just been handed a big hammer, via the Maurice Clemmons story, to crush his presidential ambitions.
So maybe Huck’s just exhibiting message discipline. But you have to wonder if in Calgary he went over the brink into an assault on those godless socialists in the U.S. who contemplate a pale imitation of the notoriously totalitarian Canadian system of publicly provided health insurance (which most Tories in Canada would not even think to repeal). And you also have to wonder if U.S. conservatives generally will ever stop beating the dead horse of Republican “moderation.”
Whatever else happened politically in 2009–and a lot obviously happened–one development that couldn’t quite have been anticipated was the erosion of public confidence in the case for doing something about global climate change.
Yes, recessions always diminish interest in environmental action, on the theory that it’s something we can only “afford” in prosperous times. But that’s not the half of it, as Chris Mooney explains at Science Progress:
Back in 2006, the year of the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it felt as though serious and irreversible progress had finally been made on the climate issue. The feeling continued in 2007, when Al Gore won the Nobel and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that global warming was “unequivocal” and “very likely” human caused. Mega-companies like General Electric were burnishing new green identities, and the Prius was an icon. The Bush administration was widely suspected of having deceived the public about the urgency of the climate issue, and journalists were backing away from their previous penchant for writing “on the one hand, on the other hand” stories about the increasingly indisputable science.
Then came the election of Barack Obama, boasting a forward-looking policy agenda to address global warming and a stellar team of scientists and environmentalists in his cabinet and circle of advisers, including climate and energy expert John Holdren and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu. The United States, it seemed, would finally deal with global warming—and just in the nick of time.
Who could have known, at the time, that the climate deniers and contrarians had not yet launched their greatest and most devastating attack?
The “story” on this subject changed, says Mooney, thanks to two separate lines of argument from conservatives that exploited public doubts on climate science. The first was the hammer-headed approach of pointing to cold temperatures here or there as “proof” there was no global warming:
The new skeptic strategy began with a ploy that initially seemed so foolish, so petty, that it was unworthy of dignifying with a response. The contrarians seized upon the hottest year in some temperature records, 1998—which happens to have been an El Nino year, hence its striking warmth—and began to hammer the message that there had been “no warming in a decade” since then.
It was, in truth, little more than a damn lie with statistics. Those in the science community eventually pointed out that global warming doesn’t mean every successive year will be hotter than the last one—global temperatures be on the rise without a new record being set every year. All climate theory predicts is that we will see a warming trend, and we certainly have. Or as the U.S. EPA recently put it, “Eight of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001.” But none of them beat 1998; and so the statistical liars, like George Will of the Washington Post, continued their charade.
The second prong of the backlash against a climate change consensus among Americans was all about the incident that delighted conservatives call “ClimateGate.” If you’ve somehow missed it, emails hacked and linked from the bowels of a British climate change institute allegedly show coverups of inconvenient data and other unkosher practices. It’s not clear why this is supposed to make us all assume that climate science is a vast cesspool of conspiracy, but that’s how it has been used by climate change deniers, notes Mooney:
“ClimateGate” generated a massive wave of media attention, blending together the skeptics’ longstanding focus on undercutting climate science with a new overwhelming message of scandal and wrongdoing on the part of the climate research establishment. This story was not going to go away, and even as scientists put out statements (most of them several days late) explaining that the science of climate remains unchanged and unaffected by whatever went on at East Anglia, the case for human-caused global warming was dealt a blow the likes of which we have perhaps never before seen.
The timing of the ClimateGate furor, on the eve of international discussions on global climate change, isn’t coincidental, and has obviously been as destructive as it was intended to be.
It may well be that increasing public doubts about climate change in this country are just rationalizations for the normal fear that saving the planet is in conflict with saving jobs, and is thus a challenge best consigned to manana.
But the aggressive campaign of denialists and skeptics, skillfully exploiting every bit of evidence and pseudo-evidence that the consensus on climate change is unravelling, is a factor too large to ignore.
This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
At fivethirtyeight.com, Professor Tom Schaller offers an interesting explanation of the recent obsession of Republicans with resisting any second look at health care costs for seniors. It’s just a matter of identity politics, he says:
Republicans point at Democrats in Congress and the White House and charge that they and they health care reform plans must be stopped because (a) they are going to cut seniors’ Medicare; and (b) they are going to institute “death panels” to pull the plug on seniors.
In other words, although the end-of-life use of Medicare is a government problem that violates almost every philosophy they espouse about the proper role of government—public sector over private; easily exploited by, rather than protected from, trial lawyers; a moral hazard, consequence-free billing system as opposed to rational, need-based spending; a program with rising outlays as opposed to slow or zero growth outlays—Medicare is instead the very program they are rallying behind.
And why? For votes—specifically the votes of those angry, mostly-white seniors upon whom they are betting their electoral fortunes in 2010 and beyond. In short, the GOP has now become so wedded to its dying, white majority that it is willing to sacrifice not only good public policy and smart long-term budgeting, but its very own core principles.
That may be largely true. But there’s another reason for the conservative focus on end-of-life care: the threat of euthanasia has long been a major talking point for the Right to Life movement, which in today’s shrunken GOP continues to play an outsized role. The argument, such as it is, suggests that the contempt for human life reflected in legalized abortion will eventually lead liberals to begin croaking the elderly on grounds that they are as inconvenient as fetuses. That’s why the late Terri Schiavo became such a cause celebre for anti-abortionists. And that’s why it was no accident that the whole “death panel” smear of health care reform was first given wings by the queen of the RTL movement these days, Sarah Palin.
This observation reinforces Schaller’s broader point that the GOP’s message is being dictated by its constituencies. Anything that simultaneously thrills the Culture War Right while frightening white seniors looks like electoral gold to today’s Republicans.
Word is the so-called “Team of Ten”–a group of Democratic senators that includes five perpetually shaky “centrist” votes on health care reform–has come up with a compromise that could hold the 60 Democrats more or less together going into the next savage phase of floor debate.
Details on the deal are skimpy; its authors want the Congressional Budget Office to “score” the proposal’s budget impact before releasing a plan description. But here’s what Ezra Klein is reporting:
The deal looks pretty much like it’s looked for the past few days: The Office of Personnel Management will shepherd national, non-profit plans into existence. Medicare will open to folks between 55 and 64 who are eligible for the exchange. If the national non-profit plans don’t materialize, then there appears to be a trigger that will call a public plan into the market, but that seems pretty unlikely. All of this, of course, is contingent on CBO giving it a good score.
The details will be important here. What are the conditions for the non-profit plans? How many plans do there need to be? What does the regulation look like? When does the Medicare buy-in start? But assuming those pieces don’t come in much worse than expected, the combination of national non-profits and a Medicare buy-in seems like a pretty good deal. Better by far than what Democrats looked likely to get a week ago. And more likely, by far, to seed health-care reform with scalable experiments.
Two particular notes here: if the deal is as reported, it represents a break with past Senate reliance on a state-by-state method for adjudicating differences of opinion on the public option. National non-profit plans could achieve economies of scale that could make them as effective as a negotiated-rate publicly run plan. The approach also coopts the conservative hobby-horse of insurance sales across state lines, with the crucial difference that these national non-profit plans would be federallly regulated.
The inclusion of a Medicare buy-in was a crucial concession to Senate (and indirectly, House) progressives who have for ages longed for an expansion of Medicare beyond the population eligible for Social Security. Letting near-seniors “buy in” has been discussed off and on for at least a decade, and has been a particular focus for Sen. Jay Rockefeller (a member of the Team of Ten), who had been threatening to blow up any deal that deep-sixed the public option.
It’s worth noting that the Democratic senator considered most likely to join a Republican filibuster of health care reform, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, is a member of the Team of Ten. He will certainly need to make up his mind soon, since the Senate voted down his amendment yesterday seeking to impose the same sorts of restrictions on abortion funding that the House adopted in the Stupak Amendment. Nelson had been threatening to join a filibuster if his amendment failed; now we’ll see where he really is.
We’ll also see how the public and key stakeholders–and House members–react to the Team of Ten’s work. Will public option advocates react as sunnily as Jay Rockefeller seems to have done? Is Olympia Snowe interested in any “trigger” approach other than her own? Will Joe Lieberman–who was initially appointed to the Team of Ten by Harry Reid, and failed to show up–try to blow up the deal? Or will CBO blow it up with “bad” numbers? All these things are currently up in the air.
Republicans’ favorite polling outfit, Rasmussen, sure gave the GOP a toxic little gift this week, in the form of a “generic ballot” for Congress listing the Tea Party Movement (hypothetically organized as a political party) as an option. The Tea Party brand outperformed the GOP 23% to 18% (Democrats lead the pack with 36%).
The Tea Party movement has been around for roughly ten months, compared to 156 years for the Republican Party.
Unsurprisingly, another political parvenu is being closely linked to this third-party talk. On Friday, Sarah Palin was pressed by a conservative talk radio host to rule a third-party presidential run in 2012 out or in. She responded: “If the Republican party gets back to that [conservative] base, I think our party is going to be stronger and there’s not going to be a need for a third party, but I’ll play that by ear in these coming months, coming years.”
Palin nicely sums up the real meaning of the Tea Party threat. It is exceptionally unusual, not to mention counter-intuitive, for a major party to move away from what is general perceived to be the political “center” and become self-obsessed with ideological purity immediately after two crushing general election defeats. But the Republican Party has been doing just that; it is a far more conservative party, in terms of its overall message, than it was going into the 2008 election cycle. But it’s not conservative enough just yet for a lot of activists, and for those Tea Party participants who really do think “looters” and “loafers” elected Barack Obama and are busily constructing a totalitarian society. Palin’s telling the world the rightward trend needs to continue, or she’ll be pleased to act out the GOP’s worst nightmare in 2012.
Nate Silver has a post up at 538.com that is sure to get a lot of attention. Looking closely at an IPSOS/McClatchey poll that asks supporters and opponents of health care reform their underlying concerns, Nate notices that about one-fourth of those opposing current proposals think they “don’t go far enough to reform health care,” and suggests there’s a little-discussed segment of the electorate that might either grow if reform is further compromised, and/or might eventually come around if and when legislation is on the president’s desk.
This is an argument that Jonathan Chait made a couple of weeks ago at TNR, based on earlier polling.
Both articles are important refutations of the common assumption of conservatives that there is monolithic majority opposition to health care reform, and also a monolithic majority of Americans happy with the status quo in health care.
Beyond that, of course, this argument will be catnip to those progressives who are searching for ways to convince the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership to abandon or greatly toughen its endless negotiations with Senate “centrists” and the odd Republican, particularly over the public option. A majority of Americans, they will argue, either likes the current bill or wants something with more and more generous coverage, and a stronger public option. This is, of course, a subset of the ancient debate among Democrats between the strategy of seeking a majority coalition by peeling off “centrist” independents, or by solidifying and energizing the presumably liberal party “base” (along with “populist” independents).
There are, however, two problems with excessive reliance on the “progressive majority” analysis on health care reform. The first is that the polling numbers are based on some pretty vague ideas about what would constitute “doing more” on the health care front; it’s not entirely clear “more” means “more” of what progressive opinion-leaders want. And the second problem, more to the immediate point, is that in a Senate with a sixty-vote threshold for enactment of major legislation, a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, who represent not the nation as a whole but their own states, have the whip hand on the details of health care reform. I don’t think many progressives would want to abandon health care reform if a durable majority did, in fact, favor the status quo; this is a complex issue that’s not exactly good material for a plebiscite.
The more useful observation about the existence of a “dissent from the left” on health reform involves the wrath that Republicans (and obstructionist Democrats) may well inherit if nothing happens this year, and health care premiums, along with insurance industry abuses, continue to get steadily worse. We will then be talking not about a constantly shifting and poorly understood thing called “Obamacare,” but about one party that sees a major national challenge and wants to do something about it, and another that’s fine with an increasingly untenable status quo.
The diversity of opinion among those unhappy with the present legislation is, to be clear, an excellent argument for increasing the frequency and volume of claims that said legislation reallly will accomplish a great deal, if not everything it should or could achieve. All the news that’s been made about compromises on health reform over the last few months, along with reform advocates’ efforts to reassure seniors and others that they won’t lose anything worth caring about, have undoubtedly “undersold” the extent of change that even a “weakened” bill would make happen. A reform effort that’s marketed as a tepid bowl of porridge won’t satisfy much of anybody.
This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
An explosive political scandal in my home state of Georgia serves as a reminder that in state elections in 2010, there are many Republicans who are currently in control of statehouses, and could suffer the vicissitudes associated with malfeasance in office and a surly, wrong-track-dominated electorate.
Georgia’s Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson resigned yesterday, a few days after his ex-wife in a television interview said she knew for a fact that the conservative solon had conducted an extramarital affair with a utilities lobbyist even as he championed legislation highly beneficial to the lobbyist’s employer. What made this charge political dynamite is that House Democrats had filed an ethics complaint against Richardson in 2007 making that exact charge, which was briskly dismissed by Republicans.
The story was made more lurid by the fact that Richardson had obtained considerable public sympathy last month by disclosing he had attempted suicide out of depression over the dissolution of his marriage. His ex-wife took to the airwaves in part to charge that the “suicide attempt” was in fact no more than an act of manipulation aimed at controlling her–and presumably, her mouth.
Georgia Republicans, of course, quickly handed Richardson an anvil, but it may not be so easy for them to avoid collateral damage; the scandal is already bleeding over into the borderline-vicious GOP gubernatorial primary for 2010. One candidate, Secretary of State Karen Handel, has already reminded Georgians that one of her rivals, former state senator Eric Johnson, chaired the ethics panel that peremptorily dismissed the Democratic complaint against Richardson, which now appears to have been entirely legitimate. Another of her rivals, state Rep. Austin Scott, was one of Richardson’s strongest allies in the legislature. Moreover, the blame-game over Richardson’s sex-and-corruption scandal can’t help but remind voters of the cozy relationship between the GOP and corporate influence-peddlers.
With two Democratic candidates for governor, former Gov. Roy Barnes and Attorney General Thurbert Baker, both looking reasonably competitive against the fractious GOP field, Republicans may not have much of a margin for error, even in this conservative state. Power has its privileges, but in this particular day and age, being the incumbent party comes with handicaps as well.
As the White House and the Democratic Senate leadership continues health care negotiations with Democratic “centrists” and a Republican or two, with a nervous eye cast towards what House Democrats can tolerate, the intra-progressive dispute over the indispensibility of the public option has erupted once again.
The ever-estimable Paul Starr, who’s been beating this drum virtually all year, fired the first shot in the latest debate on Monday in the New York Times, arguing explicitly that the public option as it has evolved in Congress is not worth fighting for:
An earlier version of the public option, available to the entire public, might have realized progressive hopes and conservative fears. By paying doctors and hospitals at Medicare rates (which are 20 percent to 30 percent below those paid by private insurers), the public option would have had a distinct price advantage. But by severely cutting revenue to health-care providers, it would also have set off such a political crisis that Congress would never have passed it.
Instead, the bills in Congress now call for the government plan to negotiate rates with providers, as private insurers do. That limitation exposes a defect in the idea. The government plan may well have to charge higher premiums because it is likely to attract more than its share of the chronically ill and other high-cost subscribers. It could go into a death spiral of mounting costs.
But giving the exchanges the necessary authority to regulate private insurers could solve many of the problems that motivated the public option in the first place. Strengthening that authority and accelerating the timetable for reform are what liberals in Congress should be looking for in a deal.
Two days later, the influential Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein echoed Starr’s argument, suggesting that larger subsidies for insurance purchases and tighter regulation of private insurers would accomplish more than a largely symbolic rearguard fight to preserve an already-watered-down public option.
Another influential online voice, Hullabaloo’s Digby, took up the challenge with an eye-catching post:
Ezra believes that if the votes aren’t there for a decent public option then the horse trading should be around getting something good in return for giving up the public option rather than negotiating the terms of the public option. That would make sense if the public option were just another feature of the health care bill. But it is not. It is the central demand of the liberal base of the Democratic Party in this rube goldberg health care plan and has long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.
Perhaps that is wrong on policy grounds. People will argue about that forever. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is no longer a matter of policy but rather a matter of political power. And to that extent it cannot be “bargained away” for something like better subsidies, even if it made sense. “Bargaining away” the Public Option is also the bargaining away of liberal influence and strength.
And that led my Progressive Policy Institute colleague Elbert Ventura at ProgressiveFix to charge that Digby had “given the game away” by admitting the public option was about symbolism, not substance:
Digby argues that the implications of the public option extend far beyond health care, that “powerful people” are “desperate that the liberals are not seen to win this battle.” Funny, because I thought the way that progressives win this battle is by making health care accessible and affordable to millions of Americans who currently don’t have it. According to some very smart people, the public option is playing a steadily diminishing role in achieving that goal. But don’t tell that to Digby, whose position now boils down to: Why bother with policy advances when we can have symbolic victories (or, heck, defeats)?
While personally, I ultimately come down on the side of Starr, Klein and Ventura in this debate, and have felt the public option has been overemphasized by both sides of the health care battle for a good while, I think Digby’s critics are missing something important that has implications for the endgame of health care reform and other issues as well. She speaks for a considerable number of progressives who basically despaired of a good health reform bill the moment the House eliminated the linkage of the public option from Medicare payment rates–the “robust” public option that so many Progressive Caucus members had pledged to demand at the risk of their votes on final passage. Unlike the public option as it exists in the Senate debate, that “robust” PO wasn’t a matter of symbolism; it reflected the views of millions of single-payer advocates on whose behalf the PO was devised in the first place. These are folks who believe the existence of a for-profit health insurance industry in this country is a moral calamity, and supported a “robust” public option in order to demonstrate that private insurers could not compete with a properly constituted public system. Moreover, they believed, and still believe, that a “reformed” system that includes an individual mandate and public subsidies for private insurance purchases, without a “robust” public option, represents a massive taxpayer subvention of for-profit companies that is arguably worse than the status quo.
From this perspective, what’s strange is that defenders of private health insurance–or what Digby calls “Republicans and corporate centrists”–are still fighting the largely symbolic public option as it exists in the Senate today. She interprets that as a matter of pure power politics, and as an effort to crush progressive liberalism. Naturally, she thinks the Left should respond in kind–not out of indifference to “substance,” but as a recognition that the real substantive fight has largely been lost, and as a demonstration of the Left’s own power, backed up in this case, she argues, by public opinion.
If my interpretation of the dynamics here are right, then ironically, there may be less intra-progressive fighting over the endgame of health care reform that one would initially expect. The underlying contempt of capital-P Progressives for the weak public option at stake in the Senate may mean that if and when it’s sacrificed, it will be a matter of relative indifference to some of the “robust” PO’s strongest supporters. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, not only a “robust” PO champion, but someone extremely interested in the ability of the Left to flex its muscles on this and every other issue, created another stir this week by concluding that he supported final passage of a health reform bill on the limited grounds that even access to bad, immoral health insurance policies would save lives. Others will probably reach the same conclusion, though not happily.
But what this debate illustrates is a broad and pre-existing gulf between Democrats on a pretty fundamental issue. Those of the Clintonian, “New Democrat” tendency have long argued for the use of “market means” to implement progressive “public goals.” In the context of health care, that’s always meant support for what used to be called “managed competition,” and more recently, “premium support”: a private health insurance system regulated and subsidized by government to provide universal coverage. On much of the Left, as noted earlier, “market means” are considered inherently illegitimate when it comes to health care. In the end, the “public option” didn’t serve to bridge that gap. But we all need to be honest about the gap itself, and aware of its possible existence in other areas of public policy.
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