2016 Postmortem
Showing Original Post only (View all)With his fantasy health-care proposal, the Bernie movement becomes closer to a left-wing tea party. [View all]
The angry white people have been there from the start, and now he's added magic unicorn policies to the mix. And when I say magic unicorn, I mean exactly that: everyone knowledgeable who's looked at Bernie's plan in any detail (Krugman, Ezra Klein, etc.) has come to the same conclusion: it's a joke.
It's obvious why he did it. First of all, this moment has been coming for a while. He's avoided policy details for as long as possible, because he's well aware that his proposals cost a lot. And being honest -- admitting that Single Payer would mean a significant number of people would either pay more, have worse coverage than they do now, or both -- isn't very appealing politically. So instead, he proposes something that resembles more than anything the GOP's budget proposals with their wildly unrealistic assumptions.
It might hurt him a bit with people who care about policy, but I'm sure he's calculated that there aren't too many of those people, and he's probably right. But it does mean that the whole "Hillary more electable, Bernie better on policy" thing that was going on for a while is no longer valid. Now she is better not just on guns, but also on healthcare, and a few other issues including financial reform. But Bernie consolidates his advantage with the passionate left-wing base.
In some ways, the growth of a left-wing tea party is a good thing. For a while now, the Democrats have been the only party with serious policy proposals, whereas the GOP has been proposing fantasy supply-side tax cuts, banning Sharia law, defaulting on the debt, etc. The political advantage to that is that the Dems become seen as the sane party, and the GOP as the crazies. But the downside is, too often, in the media, too often it just gets reported as two competing visions, as opposed to one sane vision and one fantasy vision.
Well, now there are two fantasy visions. And if the movement he started lasts past this election, that means that there are going to be more fantasy proposals from the left going forward. And it will be tough for the media to label the left-wing fantasies as fantasies after a decade of taking right-wing fantasies seriously. If getting rid of the IRS, flat taxes, and all that are part of the media discussion, we might as well in add free healthcare and college all paid for by billionaires. It restores the balance.