In the last days before the HCR bill passed the house last Sunday several influential progressive bloggers put forth a rather startling thesis — that although the health care bill was still worth passing, the compromises that were required to enact it actually made the bill a setback or defeat for progressives rather than a victory. For example:
• Jeff Greenwald in Salon – “…this process highlighted – and worsened – the virtually complete powerlessness of the left and progressives generally in Washington.…no one will ever take progressive threats seriously again in the future”
• Jane Hamsher in Firedoglake- “nobody will take progressives in Congress seriously, nor should they…Whatever Barack Obama wants to do will be the farthest left any piece of legislation gets.”
• McJoan in DailyKos – “Trying to argue that the provisions in this bill signify a progressive victory is from my perspective a negotiating mistake…I’d argue that it’s bad politically and for future policy for progressives to lose sight of the fact that we had some pretty big losses in this one. Who lost? Labor…Women…Latinos.”
To be very clear, unlike some other, more extreme critics, all three of these commentators did indeed agree that the bill needed to be passed and none advocated its rejection. But, as the quotes show, they were also united in the view that the compromises embodied in the final bill made it represent a major defeat for progressives.
A progressive Rip Van Winkle from the social movements of the 60’s, suddenly waking up today, would be profoundly bewildered by this perspective. He or she would not be at all surprised to hear that a progressive reform had been “diluted”, “sold-out” “watered down” or “compromised” in the process of passing a bill in Congress. But what he or she would find utterly baffling were the implicit assumptions that underlay the argument.
1. That it was possible to directly identify the broad progressive campaign for universal and affordable health care with the quality of any one specific piece of legislation.
2. That the major measure of progressive “influence” on the struggle for a social reform like universal and affordable health care could properly be defined as how far an initial bill proposed in Congress could be pushed in a progressive direction, a view that essentially identifies all progressive “influence” with bargaining power inside the halls of Congress.
3. That progressives could reasonably expect to achieve a genuinely significant social reform without having first built a vibrant and genuine grass-roots social movement deeply committed to that reform.
In fact, it would actually take the newly awakened 60’s progressive several re-readings of the various commentaries to fully convince himself that these actually were the implicit assumptions underlying the debate. On all three topics, the 60’s movement progressive would start off with almost directly opposite assumptions.