The ghost of Reagan

In the NYT, Nicholas Kristof offers a good piece on the reaction to Medicare legislation back in the 1960s. Medicare was called "the beginning of socialized medicine."

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”

All of these prophecies, like so many other conservative predictions, were proven wrong. Republicans had earlier peddled similar nonsense about Social Security.

(Speaking of hyperbolic predictions, am I the only one who recalls the NRA poster that popped up all over California in the 1980s, when a gun registration proposition appeared on the ballot? The poster conflated Holocaust imagery with the words: "First register the guns -- then register the Jews.")

The Daily Howler points out an important omission in Kristof's column: Ronald Reagan receives no mention. Reagan, now the subject of so many Republican hagiographies, made anti-Medicare pronouncements that one can only describe as totally bugfuck insane.

First you [the governement] decide that the doctor can have so many patients. ... So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town, and the government has to say to him, "You can't live in that town, they already have enough doctors, you have to go live somewhere else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. Pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school where he will go or what he will do for a livin, but will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do. ...

And if you don't [stop Medicare] and I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free.

Yet Ronald Reagan is now revered by many older Americans who depend on Medicare. They also depend on Social Security, brought to this nation by Franklin Roosevelt, whom the Republicans, the Freidmanites and the fundamentalists continually demonize. On the right, it is an article of faith that FDR caused the Depression -- as though Herbert Hoover had not been president for four miserable years. I wish Americans who believed this nonsensical revisionism would have the decency to refrain from cashing their Social Security checks.

Incidentally, the above clip from Michael Moore's Sicko does not specify (as it ought) that Reagan's recorded diatribe against socialized medicine was prompted, in large part, by the Medicare debate.

At the Howler, Bob Somerby writes:

We’re always struck by how long disinformation campaigns can persist without any real attempt at rebuttal by the liberal world. Why are these types of complaints still effective today? Because the liberal world has been so inept at fashioning counter-messaging. Example: Very few voters have ever heard the ludicrous predictions Reagan made. That’s because the liberal world has never had the first idea how to fashion political movements: How to spread information, potent messaging, frameworks for understanding.

Somerby is being a tad unfair. People on the left can create a political movement: The Obama hysteria of 2008 proves the point. I didn't like that movement, but it was a movement. (At issue is the question of whether it was truly a left-wing movement, since so many "former" libertarians were in charge of catapulting the propaganda.)

Beyond that, it seems unfair for Somerby to carp about an inability to fashion killer counter-arguments to popular right-wing fantasies. Instead of dissing others, why doesn't he school them on how to do the job right? He's been in business for the better part of a decade, and he hasn't figured out a strategy. All he can do is tell the truth as best he sees. That's all I can do. That's all most of us know how to do.

Obviously, that tactic is not good enough.

Earlier this year, those who argued in favor of nationalizing the too-big-to-fail banks could not reach the ears of those who made the decision. We told the truth as we saw it, but we could not create a movement.

Those who created the "Obama as socialist" propaganda meme do not care about mere truth-telling. They are in the advertising business. They have a product to sell -- an image, an idea. A movement.

We now face two big battles, and we have precious few resources with which to fight the ghost of Ronald Reagan:

1. Medicare for all. If the current health "reform" bill in congress fails, we must renew the fight for single-payer. Even if the current reform bill succeeds, we must still fight for single payer, because the American people will soon express their outrage at mandates and fines. We cannot let this bad bill define the left.

But with what weaponry shall we do battle? The Democrats depleted their stores of ammunition fighting for Pelosi's stupid legislation. The logical first step would be to concentrate on the state-by-state approach -- California and Vermont are ready to lead the way.

Alas, the ghost of Ronald Reagan remains a formidable opponent.

1. A real stimulus. Obama's stim package failed for one simple reason: Too much of it did not go toward the creation of jobs. It went to tax cuts, grants, unemployment benefits, and so forth. Can you think of a modern-day equivalent of the TVA or the WPA that was created by the stimulus bill? Mr. Obama, you ain't no FDR.

Yet now the conservatives can claim that what they are pleased to call "socialism" has been tried and has failed. Obama has clearly signaled that there will be no jobs-creating "Stim II" package, because the we've already gone too deeply into debt. The Republicans have made further stimulus politically impossible. They have convinced the nation, and perhaps the administration, that now is the time to pay back the unpayable deficit.

As Ed Harrison of Naked Capitalism notes:

The President just doesn’t seem to understand how the economy works frankly. Reducing deficits by cutting spending or raising taxes decreases aggregate demand. And it is a decrease in aggregate demand which would induce a double-dip recession.

Once again, we confront the ghost of Reagan. In this instance, however, the host is Janus-faced.

Face 1 depicts Reagan as the apostle of small government and balanced budgets. This was the face he presented to the world when running for office.

Face 2 is the real Reagan legacy, as summarized by the immortal words of Dick Cheney: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

Except when a Democrat is in office, facing crushing unemployment. Then deficits matter.