Progs, paradox, class and health care

We now come to the moment of progressive self-examination. As health care reform loses support, as the progressives turn against Obama, all those on the left side of the political dividing line must ask the big questions: "What do we stand for?" "Who are we?" "What the hell went so wrong in one short year?"

Here are some answers.

Many thanks go to reader G for drawing my attention to this piece by Sam Smith of the Progressive review, which highlights the major reason why the Obama movement was doomed to fail:

My sense is that the infatuation over Obama was based on much larger problems including the iconization of politics, an excessive infatuation with words over deeds, as well as naive assumptions of what having the first black president would be like. Few recognized that true equality among ethnicities includes a balanced dispersal of sins and weakness as well as virtues.

That's the lesson I started to draw while mulling over the cartoon republished in the post below. (Sometimes you don't understand your own work until months or years later.) Everyone looked at Obama and saw two-and-only-two things: Skin color and the (D) next to his name. From those two factors, most of the country wrote a narrative that had nothing to do with reality. Everyone drew conclusions at odds with the man's history, to the extent that he had a history.

The right saw those two factors and concluded that Barack Obama must be a bolshie. Of course, they say that about all Democrats. It is a measure of this country's collective insanity that the Marxist bogeyman has become a political issue in 2009.

The left saw the same two factors -- the skin color and the (D) -- and concluded that Barack Obama must be the Progressive Messiah, the Lightbringer, the Kwisatz Haderach.

Neither side allowed itself to contemplate the possibility that Obama might be just another compromised politician with conservative instincts.

Those of us who didn't judge Obama by his skin color were -- paradoxically -- called racists. Yes, I had a bias, but not that bias. My prejudice was founded on geography, not parentage. Chicago. Fucking Chicago. Chicago Democrats were the most corrupt kind, as virtually everyone in the party admitted in the days before the ascent of Obama.

Let's get back to Sam Smith's piece. All liberals and progressives should study this next passage the way clerics study scripture:

Most of all, however, Obama represented a triumph of a generation of liberals dramatically different from their predecessors, most markedly in their general indifference to issues of economic as well as ethnic equality.

This heavily professional liberal class never once - in the manner of their predecessors of the New Deal and Great Society - took the lead in pressing for economic reforms. It wasn't that they opposed them; they just never seemed to occur to them.

They, after all, had risen in status even as much of the rest of the country was slipping. Over a quarter of a century passed and the best the liberal Democrats could come up with was to slash welfare and raise the age for Social Security.

Remember how the Kos Krowd radiated utter contempt for the working class voters who favored Hillary? The sheer spectacle of this historic turnaround still astounds me: Democrats disparaging workers.

And now, as a direct result, we have a Democratic congress tossing money at Wall Street and allowing the escalation of an unpopular war in Afghanistan. How could it have come to this?

The first thing that needs to happen is for there to be a clear distinction between smug, self-serving liberalism contemptuous of so many Americans and a populist progressive movement that seeks unity with those [whom] many liberals prefer simply to condemn.

The magnets for this unity are such obvious yet ignored issues as the creation of jobs, the preservation of pensions, decent treatment of endangered homeowners, an end to credit card usury, respect for local decision-making, and, yes, a healthcare plan based on providing financial assistance, not bureaucratic nightmares.

The healthcare reform bill is the turning point. The sleeper must awake. Yeah, a lot of the people who voted for Obama were idiots -- but none of those idiots voted for this.

Right now, the progs have Lieberman as their "shield of dreams": The Thing From Connecticut functions well as blame-catcher. But no less an authority than Russ Feingold tells us that Lieberman has acted as Obama's avatar:

On Tuesday, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) pointed the finger at President Barack Obama, rather than Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), for the disappearance of the Medicare buy-in and public option from the Senate health reform bill.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” Feingold said...

(So vote against the bill, Senator. Why should the Thing From Connecticut make all the grand gestures?)

Anthony Weiner is one of the best on Capitol Hill, but he still misses the essential point that Feingold has grasped:

“Snowe? Stupak? Lieberman? Who left these people in charge?" Weiner asked. "It’s time for the President to get his hands dirty. Some of us have compromised our compromised compromise. We need the President to stand up for the values our party shares. We must stop letting the tail wag the dog of this debate.”

The president is the one who left those people in charge. He's not the tail. He's the wagger.

Obama's health care bill is now decidedly unpopular -- polls indicate that more people would now rather keep the horrid status quo than go for mandated health insurance. Meanwhile, the reimportation of Canadian drugs is very popular. So is single-payer. Yet single-payer and Canadian drugs are unthinkable in DC, while health insurance mandates may well carry the day. This, at a time when Democrats control both Congress and the presidency.

Why is this?

Why do popular ideas flounder while unpopular ones move forward? Who are the eldritch eminences defining the politically permissible?

And what can those on the left do to change this situation?

Much of the problem, I think, goes back to the aforementioned schism between the snooty, college-educated progs who idolized Obama -- the "Whole Foods nation," as some have called them -- and the working class. As Sam Smith notes (in sections of his essay not quoted above), workers sense the antipathy of the progs, and disingenuous reactionaries have stepped in to fill that void. By now, it's a familiar trick: We've all chuckled at the sight of opera-loving Ann Coulter pretending to be spiritually aligned with the NASCAR crowd. It's an old trick, yes, but it works. In fact, the strategy is more effective now than ever before.

Even after eight years of George W. Bush, the working class accepts right-wing framing of the issues, no matter how deceptive and ludicrous that frame might be.

For example, here's how the Republicans in Feingold's state see the problems with Obama's health care reform bill:

Government-Run Health Care Will:

-Take health care decisions away from patients and doctors.
-Undercut private insurance rates.
-Empower government bureaucrats to set prices and determine what treatments to cover.
-Force private insurers out of business.
-Raise taxes and reduce the quality of care

Bullshit.

Yes, it's a bad bill -- but it's not bad for those reasons.

Granted, there is some truth in the assertion that a robust public option might undercut private rates. That would be a good thing -- if there were still a public option in this bill. But there isn't. Most of the public option was taken out ages ago, and now even the wispy remains have been swept away. All we have left is a compromise of a compromise of a compromise, just as Weiner said.

Nothing in this bill has anything to do with "Government-Run Health Care." The Republicans are lambasting a plan which simply does not exist.

Nevertheless, this hallucination is very real in the minds of millions of working class Americans.

Now here is Deborah White, a liberal, describing the problems with the very same bill:

The Obama-Lieberman health care plan eliminates all proposed competition for private insurance corporations in what Dean calls "a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG."

An Obama-Lieberman plan mandate that all Americans purchase health care coverage will translate into tens of billions more annually for private insurers, but with absolutely no measure to control costs charged to consumers.

Thus, the same private insurers who caused our current unaffordable mess can (and will, according to history!) charge sky-high prices, and we have no choice but to pay.

That's a lot closer to reality, innit? And here's Jane Hamsher:

And what are senators planning to call a “win”?

• A removal of the ban on annual limits that Reid slipped in at the last minute, in violation of the president’s promise in his September address to Congress;

• an exemption from antitrust law for insurance companies, which will reduce competition;

• taxes that start up in January but benefits that don’t start until 2014; and

• a tax on middle-class insurance plans that is designed to cut back insurance benefits, reduce coverage and increase co-pays and deductibles.

Again, one has to sit back and bask at the spectacle of the thing. Both Republicans and an increasing number of progressives now condemn the same piece of legislation. Yet they do so for very different reasons. Republican propagandists attack a "socialized medicine" bill which does not exist. White and Hamsher are attacking a bill that does exist.

Here's the problem: More blue collars have heard the Republican argument than will ever read what Hamsher, White or even Howard Dean have to say.

Why? Because working people have stopped listening to them.

Yes, it is true that working people favor single payer; polls have demonstrated this. And yet -- paradox! -- they have also internalized the Republican framing of the health care issue, of every issue. Workers want socialized health insurance run by private industry. They want Medicare without gummint. They want welfare without the State. They want a cubical sphere and a dog that meows.

Clean, but obscene -- know what I mean?

Workers want contradictory things because the Republicans, who don't have their interests at heart, have learned to talk their language.

Until "progressives" find a way to rebuild a base among those who toil -- until they stop attending the Cabernet Sauvignon soirees and sit down with the guys swigging Miller -- the Democratic party will fail. So will the country.