In comments, I wrote:
Barring some truly enormous increase in the amount of taxes Americans are willing to pay — the costs of medicare et al are going to increasingly crowd out other things that I think we should also be spending money on, like infrastructure investment and schools.
Ballgame responded:
I don’t think we should accept Republican framing in discussing this issue (i.e. ‘you have to choose between health care and schools!’). We could afford a great deal of the anticipated additional health care needs of our aging population by switching to single payer. A clear majority of Americans also favors increasing taxes on the rich, so the ultimate additional cost burden on everyone else may be fairly modest. (They’ll be paying more in taxes but would no longer have to pay for private health care insurance.)
But I think we’re basically in agreement about what should be done, Amp.
Yes, switching to single payer could, if done correctly, save a lot of money, although it’s not a cure-all.
But I don’t understand how we’re going to switch to single-payer care within the US’s political system. In the US, there is now effectively a super-majority requirement in the Senate; nothing passes the Senate without 60 votes. But even when we had — for a few brief months — 60 Democrats in the Senate, we didn’t have nearly 60 votes for single payer or anything like single payer. We don’t need just 60 Democrats, in other words — we need 60 progressives elected to the Senate. Is there a plausible, politically viable plan for doing that?
(Never mind that we have to retake the House, too.)
Oh, one more thing — the numbers in the upcoming Senate races strongly favor Republicans in 2012 and 2014. So we should anticipate the legislative climate to become more and more right-wing until at least 2016. And even at the best the legislative climate has been in my adult lifetime — which was last year — we were nowhere close to getting single-payer through Congress. So how is this going to happen?
I do think that individual states might be able to do single-payer health care, with the help of the Affordable Care Act, if the ACA isn’t revoked or (more likely) sabotaged by the coming right-wing majority in Congress. Which will be wonderful for people living in Vermont and perhaps a few other states. But I don’t see any other politically viable plan for getting single-payer care in the US.
(Okay, I can imagine it coming about. For instance, the filibuster may well be repealed once Republicans have a majority in the Senate, and then we’d only need 50 progressive votes in the Senate. But that’s really more of a vague hope than a plan, isn’t it?)
I don’t think we should accept Republican framing in discussing this issue (i.e. ‘you have to choose between health care and schools!’).
If we want the federal government to have enough money to fund multiple progressive priorities, over the long term, then we should take the problem of rising health care costs seriously. That’s not a Republican framing; it’s a realistic framing by someone who is fully dedicated to progressive priorities, but who also wants to take facts seriously.
Saying “let’s not frame this like a Republican” isn’t an answer. It’s burying your head in the ground and refusing to acknowledge that there’s a real problem here. (Pretty much what Republicans do if you talk to them about global climate change, come to think of it.)
A clear majority of Americans also favors increasing taxes on the rich, so the ultimate additional cost burden on everyone else may be fairly modest.
Yes, but: Who cares what a clear majority of Americans think? Certainly not the US political system. Quoting a paper by Martin Gilens (pdf link):
Using an original data set of almost 2,000 survey questions on proposed policy changes between 1981 and 2002, I find a moderately strong relationship between what the public wants and what the government does, albeit with a strong bias toward the status quo. But I also find that when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans.
In the table above, the dark line represents the opinions of the highest-earning 10% of Americans. The further to the right the dark line goes, the more that top 10% wants a policy change to happen. And the further towards the top the dark line goes, the more likely it is that politicians will make the desired policy change happen. As you can see, the more the top 10% want a change, the more likely it is to happen.
The gray line represents the opinions of the lowest-earning 10% of Americans. As you can see, it’s completely irrelevant what they (er, we?) think. Politicians couldn’t care less. Gilens also has a similar graph showing that politicians barely listen any more to middle-class Americans than they do to poor Americans.
I’d happily agree to vast increases in taxes for the wealthiest Americans. But getting me to agree isn’t the problem. Getting a strong majority of Congress to agree is the problem. But you can’t get a strong majority of Congress agreeing on a big tax hike for the rich unless you first break the overwhelming influence rich people have on policy.
So what’s the plan for that?
And if we don’t have a plan for that, except maybe “organize and educate and hope that in 10 or 20 or 30 years things will be different” — which is a reasonable plan — then what’s the best we can do in the meantime, while we wait for things to be different?
I’m not against progressive solutions. But I want to be convinced that they’re possible. And if they’re not possible, then I don’t see what’s wrong with supporting the inferior policies that are possible.
Please, someone: Convince me I’m wrong about this.
(There’s a little more discussion of the Gilens paper in this exchange between Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias. See also this article by Larry Bartels, another political scientist who has researched the relationship between income and who politicians listen to.)
You are right that the political class does not and has not every given a fuck about us. But that doesn’t mean that representative government cannot be better, and in fact it has been better — i.e., more responsive to social needs — in the past when there was a greater sense of social responsibility in the ruling class ideology. Not surprisingly, this occurred when the main ideological competition was coming from some sort of socialism, whether real or in name only (set aside an argument over terms in a separate thread.) Take a look at footage from the Great Depression, where you find thousands of people marching down the street, carrying signs for the CP-USA.
Don’t like the commies? Fine, then look at the mainstream of the labor movement, which was robust and motivated. Politicians responded to movements of people. Not just folks who showed up to vote every now and then, but actual party organizations that mounted serious competition, and maintained a steady thrum demanding change.
The problem is leftist passivity. We make “what’s possible” arguments like this one even as the range of what is possible becomes narrower and narrower. Well, if that’s what you want to accept, if that’s all you feel capable of doing, that’s okay. But don’t be surprised if you get argued with by people who are supremely frustrated with the half-measures and 2-steps-back created by accommodationist Democratic centrists, their Obama apologists, and the irresponsible GOPers who rile up Tea Party thugs.
Moreover, “what’s possible” is myopic and ahistoric. Yes, the Senate should change its rules to prevent easy filibustering. But that shit wouldn’t matter if people were more organized, more united and more persistent. This past decade we have seen too often all the eggs thrown in weak baskets, from Nader to Obama. Well, at least speaking for myself. But one thing that Nader said long ago that stuck with me, that he was right about (and only increases my frustration with him, given his organizing experience and talents): government only responds to the public pressure created by mass movements of people. Civil Rights wasn’t LBJ’s doing; it was the doing of millions of people — who were, I should note, constantly counseled to accept baby steps about what was “possible.” I can guarantee you that the people in Bahrain, where the government is far more oppressive and violent, are not limiting their concepts of possibility to the operations of parliamentary procedure.
Step out of the electoral box! Great progressive or radical changes in the U.S. have almost always come from sustained grassroots pressure by millions of people who grew tired of waiting for the powers that be to hand them out. Too many of us are still too comfortable, or too willing to let our own agency to create change be taken from us by opportunistic Democrats and Republicans. Furthermore, we “leftys” have gotten totally uncreative with our efforts, assuming that we can just protest a little bit, write some letters to Congress, Tweet and Facebook our complaints, and suddenly things will change. Or that we can abandon our social movements every two years for the current “Election of the Century” to elect Democrats who rarely, if ever even try to stick behind anything bold in their campaign promises.
Single payer died at the Congressional level before it even made it to the floor of the House or Senate. Most Democrats didn’t want the ideas given breath to because they didn’t want to tick off the health care industrial complex that helped fund their campaigns.
You wanna see something like single payer. Get active at a local level. Start creating mechanisms with local and state officials. Start putting energy into educating your friends and family. Start engaging doctors and nurses and others who might give a shit, and stop buying into the “viability crap” being peddled by the mainstream media, Fortune 500, and national elected officials.
Too many American “leftys” are so desperate for a few table scraps that they are willing to murder their dreams, and toss their visions under the bus. Why? In my opinion, it comes back to being too comfortable with how things are. When enough of us are truly fed up with how things are, and probably have lost nearly everything, then maybe something major will shift. I really want to be wrong, but all the evidence supports that view.
Obviously I agree with both Kevin and Nathan.
But the other thing is – why are you only interested in things that are possible in the short term? You are not someone who has to vote for them
Often Democrats are not getting for, or trying for, the most left-wing thing that is possible now. By talking only about the things that are possible now, then you limit the acceptable discourse. By talking about out there things like single payer you drag the discourse to the left, and make it more likely that the most left-wing of hte things that are possible in the short term actually happen.
Or to look at it from the other side – would you have said that unfunding planned Parenthood was politically possible under Regan, Bush 1 or ever Bush 2? OK so it’s not going to get through now. But it’s now on the agenda of things that are politically possible.
Kevin, I like commies just fine! Well, some commies, anyway. But footage from the Great Depression isn’t completely comparable, because the Great Depression was much, much worse than what we’re facing now, and the situation was much more desperate and oppressive, which can sometimes result in more motivated and active resistance. (Look at what’s going on in Wisconsin this week.)
I think leftist passivity is a result, not a root cause. I think passivity is caused by a lack of plausible-seeming direction for hope. When leftists have a direction to go in that they believe is plausible, there’s a lot of energy. For example, there’s a lot of lefty energy in the same-sex marriage fight, despite loss after loss, because there’s a plausible path to victory that people can envision. There was a ton of activism in the Green Party in 2000, because we (mistakenly) thought that was a viable path forward.
I’m very frustrated — or furious — with all those groups, as you know, Kevin. But I am also frustrated with leftists who oppose the Affordable Care Act, because merely covering 26 million currently uninsured Americans isn’t worth supporting if it’s not their fantasy of a perfect single-payer system.
I don’t agree that it wouldn’t matter. But yes, I’d have a lot more hope of overcoming that shit if people were more organized, united and persistent.
But that avoids what I think is the key question — WHY aren’t people more organized, more united, and more persistent?
Nathan says “Too many of us are still too comfortable,” and that’s one possible answer. But isn’t it a good thing if ordinary people have comfortable lives?
Maia wrote:
I’m not only interested in the short term. As I wrote (emphasis added):
But I want to know what the plan is. And although I’m interested in the long term, I’m also interested in the short term; both terms matter.
Well, the Democrats aren’t the left. At best, they’re a coalition between left-progressives and the center-left. So of course whatever they come up with is going to be compromised.
I’m not convinced that just talking about things makes them more politically possible. The US may be more of a plutocracy than that logic allows for.
Be that as it may, I don’t object to people talking about single payer care (which I’ve talked about a lot over the years, by the way). But I’d be more interested if people talked about how they think that can happen. And I do object to progressives using the idea of single payer as a reason to oppose measures like the affordable care act — and I heard a lot of that over the last couple of years. I do object to being told that if I’m concerned about the fairly obvious fact that there actually are legitimate progressive reasons to not want extremely high health care costs to shoot up forever, that’s a “republican framing.”
Here’s how I think health care in the US can get much better: We pass the ACA, fight against attempts to defund or sabotage it, and gradually expand it over the next couple of decades until it becomes much closer to the health care system we want. Meanwhile, a couple of states like Vermont use the ACA’s state waiver and funding to set up local single-payer care systems. Because those systems are much cheaper than other systems, while delivering better results, they gradually spread to many of the blue states, but many of the most ideologically conservative states refuse to believe that single-payer health care works, regardless of evidence.
So that’s one plausible route to better health care. In some ways, it’s similar to how Social Security and Medicare both because decent programs.
I don’t understand how opposing the ACA and saying that single payer health care is better will get us to single payer health care, though.
I’d say in general people tend to be O.K. with increasing taxes on anyone who makes more money than they do – or, perhaps better said, makes more money than they hope to some day. If you want to support the above statement more specifically, please define “rich”. Which is important, as that’s how you get people to focus.
It would be interesting to run the numbers and see if what people want to spend money on is fundable by the amount of money you can expect to raise by increasing taxes on a certain percentage of top income generators.
Thugs? Tea Party movement adherents are running around beating up people and trashing/damaging property? A little hyperbole here, eh? It was interesting that during the coverage of what’s going on up north of here in Madison, Wisconsin (“50 square miles surrounded by reality”) the MSM only started worrying about the possibility of violence when the Tea Party folks announced that they were going to schedule a set of rallies themselves. I wonder if they thought that the Tea Party was inherently violent, or if they just figured that the two groups together was the problem?
You might want to think about what the Tea Party movement is doing. How they originated, how they operate and what the people they supported are doing now.
The late Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA) once famously said “All politics are local.” He was right. And so are the comments above that are related to people talking to people and mass movements. That’s what happened in this most recent election. Sure, the party in power always loses seats in an off-Presidential term election. But this one was the biggest loss in both number of seats and percentage of seats ever. This one was different. And it was because of people talking to their neighbors, getting local groups together, turning out to rallies, and then voting.
Substitute “principles” for “social movements” and “politicians” for “Democrats” and I believe that you could get a lot of people who have voted for Republican candidates in the past to sign off on this statement as readily as people who voted for Democrats. The left has no unique claim here.
Something different. What’s going on is that a group of people – the Tea Party movement adherents – voted for a group of politicians who made bold campaign promises. But then, after they got elected, those politicians are actually trying to keep those promises. That’s different. They openly ran on that concept in the GOP primaries, that they were not just another set of RINOs. And there’s been a lot of emphasis in the right-oriented blogosphere getting people to follow up with their newly elected reps to ensure that they stay focused.
In the Federal House you’ll note that the freshman class isn’t keeping it’s head down and deferring to the more experienced members. Rep. Allen West (R-FL) and others are leading, not following, which is why you’re seeing things like the move to remove Federal funding from things like Planned Parenthood.
By that measure the Republicans aren’t the right. They’re a coalition between right-conservatives and the center-right. But what you’re seeing now is that the distribution of the two in the GOP has shifted markedly towards the conservatives. They were elected to make changes, they weren’t elected to compromise, and they’re trying to do what they were elected for. And the center-right and RINOs are hearing from their constituents that they stand a very good chance of primary challenges from actual conservatives if they don’t get in line. In previous years the line was “Well, they’re not really electable”. This last election put the lie to that. So they’re starting to shift as well.
You are all giving good advice above. Your problem is that from your viewpoint the wrong people are following it.
Ron —
* We’re wandering a bit from the subject, maybe? I’ll allow it for now, but I’m reserving the right to pull things back on track later if things wander too far.
* Actually, it’s not true that “all politics are local.” Virtually all our congressional elections are nationalized nowadays. More on this here (scroll down), here and here.
* This poll asked about letting tax cuts expire for households with incomes of over $250,000 (or $200,000 for an unmarried individual). So defined that way, most Americans favor raising taxes on the wealthy.
* Can you link to where the folks in Wisconsin (particularly the governor), when they were running for office, publicly declared that they were going to ban the rights of public unions to negotiate, except for the Republican-leaning public unions? I hadn’t heard they made that promise while running for office (although I could be wrong, of course, I’m no expert on Wisconsin politics).
* It’s hard to say how much taxes on the rich would have to be raised to bring the budget into balance, without looking at specific proposals. For instance, virtually all progressives also want to save money by making major cuts in our military budget; does that count towards the total or not? And are we assuming that loopholes are closed or left open? Etc, etc. So it’s complex. But one estimate I’ve seen is that the topmost bracket would have to be raised about ten percentage points higher than the current top level.
The Tea Party isn’t the best example of focused, grassroots action since it’s really not terribly unified in message, and has – at least in part – been seeded by uber wealthy corporate and political interests who wanted to get more public pressure placed on moderate Republicans. However, I agree with Ron that the Tea Party is still a decent example of what can happen when people get energized and organized around certain issues – as opposed to specific candidates. In fact, if the Tea Party gets too attached to specific candidates – it will die. Period. And while I don’t agree with much of what the Tea Party stands for, to the extent that they have remained focused on specific issues, sustaining pressure on any public official concerning those issues, and also seeing other avenues for change (beyond legislation) – they’ve actually had a tangible impact.
It’s not just about electing people and legislation – it’s about having enough public energy to get your ideas spread across the country over and over again. Even if the Tea Party had never gotten one of “their” candidates elected, they have succeeded in getting millions of people to think about the views – and that has already probably led to the development of projects outside of the legislative process that will change local communities. It’s foolish to just stay within the legislative process, trying to fight for table scraps. That’s necessary at times, but not sufficient by a long shot. You have to help shift the consciousness of people – that’s what great mass movements do. The Tea Party isn’t a “great” mass movement yet in my view. But you know, it’s possible that they could become one. And those of us on the left could learn from them – perhaps even find common ground on a few issues – if we stopped being so limited in our approaches.
The biggest thing I have learned as a historian of political movements, is that no-one knows what is possible. There’s an idea that when things get bad that’s when people revolt – but it doesn’t really work historically. There have been horrific times with very little protest, and comparatively good times with lots. Organised political movements have historically been what has created meaningful political change to the left, even under conservative administrations. And it’s true that no individual can make that happen. But that’s kind of what’s so exciting about political activism, we just don’t know what the effect of our actions will be.
In 1965, Mary King and Casey Hayden wrote ‘Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo’ – there is a direct line from this memo and the beginning of the women’s liberation movement. And it contains the phrase: “Objectively, the chances seem nil that we could start a movement based on anything as distant to general American thought as a sex-caste system.” They were part of creating what they thought was impossible.
Or as this post reiterates over and over again, no-one thought what is happening in Wisconsin was possible.
Or to go back to the 1960s in America in 1962 Casey Hayden was also involved in writing the Port Huron statement. It included a plan for taking America to the left . Some bits of it became true beyond it’s authors wildest dreams, and changed America in ways that they hadn’t imagined possible. Others (mostly the bits about the Democratic party) were not possible then and didn’t come true.
Plans can be useful, even if they don’t achieve what they set out they can be a catalyst for something else (see Port Huron). But I don’t think ‘I can’t see how it would be possible’ is a paritcularly meaningful statement, because more often than not when meaningful change has happened it hasn’t seemed possible beforehand.
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“I don’t understand how opposing the ACA and saying that single payer health care is better will get us to single payer health care, though.”
But what do you mean by oppose? Unless we have a secret readership of lawmakers that I didn’t know about, no-one here gets to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on the ACA Act. I don’t understand the desire to act like lawmakers if we’re not lawmakers.
I think there is political value in both criticising the ACA Act and organising about healthcare from the left. And because we don’t get a vote on the law we don’t have to choose whether to vote yes or not.
Lawmakers pay attention to what the chattering class is saying; if a thousand lefty bloggers are talking about how ACA is crap and not good enough, then Democratic legislators are a lot less likely to go to the mattresses passing/defending it. Whereas if everyone is talking like Amp, then their spines are stiffened.
Robert – But Amp’s whole assumption is that lawmakers don’t listen to people.
If the argument is law makers listen to blogs, therefore how should leftists use that. Then that’s a completely different discussion, with a different set of assumptions to what Barry said in this post.
That isn’t Amp’s assumption. In fact, he makes it very clear that lawmakers do listen to people – SOME people.
While the original post talked about income (because that’s where the statistics are to be found), it seems fairly obvious to me that high-influence, as well as high-income, people are listened to quite regularly. And of course those two subsets of the population often intersect considerably and also are additive, rather than exclusive, in terms of influence.
Influence of (Amp the penniless cartoonist) < I (Amp the penniless blogger) < I (Amp the penniless blogger with a big following) < I (Amp the millionaire cartoonist smoking Cubans and doodling his latest masterwork on palimpsest copies of the original Constitution)
Now it's true that Amp's approach to the problem of influence is to say "hey, how can we get Congress to stop listening to the rich and powerful?" We will pause for a long gale of bitter laughter and encourage Amp to take up some hobby with a higher chance of success, like building a soap ladder to the moon.
Instead he should bow to human nature and say "hey, how can we convince the rich and powerful to be progressives, so that the government will slavishly obey them?" It's demonstrably possible to convince a wealthy person to be a bleeding-heart liberal, and a lot easier than building soap ladders to the moon or attempting to change the fundamental nature of power.
Andrew Sullivan (who has been on Walker’s side until today) looks into it, and can’t find any evidence that Walker said he was going to end collective bargaining rights during the election.
I looked myself, and couldn’t find anything that specifically said that. On the other hand, I did find that he was pretty out-front that unions were the problem, or part of the problem, and he was going to go after them with a big ole’ hammer. So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone.
The one thing I want to see, but cannot find, is an anti-Walker flyer that was sent around by ACT-Wisconsin during the campaign, purportedly saying that Walker was the antichrist who would destroy the world etc. (Not literally, Mythago.) That would provide an insight into what his political opponents THOUGHT he was running on.
I think it would have been quite unfair if, during the campaign, liberals had been going around saying “he’s going to effectively eliminate the right of public unions to negotiate altogether!” Most people thought he’d be working to cut pay and pensions. but assuming that a politician’s intent is to wipe out the unions entirely, without any evidence, would have struck me as an unfair accusation without some actual evidence.
ETA: OTOH, maybe from now on, whenever a Republican talks tough about unions, the fair thing to do would be to assume his or her unstated intent is to wipe the public unions out entirely, except for those unions that vote Republican.