http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/just-noiseAnd the Rest Is Just Noise
Why the health care bill is the greatest social achievement of our time.
Jonathan Chait
American liberals have a habit of withdrawing into cynicism and ennui at the most inopportune moments. The 2000 presidential election, and subsequent recount, was one such moment. The most die-hard reaches of the left, deeming the Democratic Party hopelessly corrupt, rallied to Ralph Nader’s fulsome populist denunciation of Al Gore’s subservience to the corporate agenda. Among more moderate quarters, an attitude of wry detachment prevailed. (“G.O.P.-lite, Democrat-lite,” sighed Frank Rich, “For the 95 percent of the country unwilling to go for Ralph Nader or Pat Buchanan, that is the choice, it always has been the choice, and it will still be the choice on Nov. 7.”) Those liberals who did see something large at stake took on an almost apologetic tone, conceding the lack of any inspired positive choice and focusing instead on the dangers of Bush.
The right, meanwhile, was engulfed in passion that occasionally flared into rage. Mobs of chanting conservatives harassed Gore at his residence day after day. Another such mob intimidated Miami canvassers into abandoning a recount then seen as potentially decisive. The left met all this with a shrug.
The denouement of the health care debate has brought about a similar moment in the political culture. The opponents of the bill are full of passionate intensity. The right, of course, is subsumed in rage and paranoia. Conservatives have been joined by fiery liberals like Howard Dean and a slew of left-wing blogs, denouncing the bill as a corporate giveaway and urging its defeat. The attitude closer to the center is more resignation and disappointment. (Frank Rich again: “Though the American left and right don’t agree on much, they are both now coalescing around the suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger
’s public image.”) The endorsements invariably have a defensive tone—the bill “has some imperfections but is worthy of support,” concludes a New York Times editorial.
At some level, it is possible to understand the roots of liberal frustration. The machinery of Congress has ground away at the health care bill, as it does to almost any bill. But at a broader level, the liberal mood is insane. What has emerged from that machinery is not merely “better than nothing” or “a good start.” It is the most significant American legislative triumph in at least four decades. Why can so few people see that?
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But what about the left? Why has the rhetoric from progressives increasingly come to mirror the uninformed ranting of the right?
One reason, obviously, lies in the slow, painful political death of the public option. The public plan did play an important role in the design of Obama’s health care plan. The plan relies upon regulated competition between private health insurance, but it’s not clear how effectively government can regulate insurers. The establishment of a public plan, which would not be tempted to mistreat customers in the pursuit of profit, would help provide a backstop in case regulation failed.
The defeat of the public plan, largely at the behest of insurance companies that don’t want competition, does weaken the reform plan. Yet liberals have responded out of all proportion to the scale of the setback. Left-of-center economists and policy wonks—including Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, who created the public option—have endorsed the Senate bill. Liberal activists, bloggers, talk show hosts, and a few members of Congress, by contrast, have attacked it as, in Howard Dean’s words, a “bailout for the insurance industry.”
Right-wingers, oddly enough, have joined this critique. (Joe Scarborough: “And as Howard Dean said, and this is a devastating fact, insurance companies' stocks reached a 52-year high on Friday after this so-called reform bill got its 60th vote.”) Until not very long ago, the conservative line was that the health care industry was a bunch of dupes, collaborating with a reform that would crush them beneath the foot of big government. “They’re just negotiating with the cannibals over who gets eaten last,” complained one Republican in August. The Wall Street Journal editorial page ran a series of columns pleading with the industry to turn against reform for the sake of its own survival. The new right-wing line casts the industry as co-conspirators in Obama’s corporatist scheme to engorge their profits at the expense of the public’s freedom.
Reality lies in between the two mutually exclusive caricatures. First of all, the insurance industry has taken a decidedly mixed stance on health care reform. (Here’s a recent news story detailing industry complaints.) Second of all, most of us normally accept private profit accompanying public services. Liberals don’t call programs to reduce class size a “teacher’s union bailout.” (Nor do conservatives call Pentagon increases a “defense contractor’s bailout.” If you support the the policy being provided, nobody objects to somebody making a buck providing it.) Insurers may be getting a lot of new customers, but that comes with the trade-off of a lot of unwanted regulation. There is more at work in the progressive revolt than an irrational attachment to the public plan or an executive distrust of private industry. The bizarre convergence of left-wing and right-wing paranoia echoes the forces that brought down the moderate consensus of the postwar era. The GOP retreat into Palinism represents one half of this collapse. The left’s revolt against health care reform represents the other. What has re-emerged in recent weeks is the spirit of the New Left--distrustful of evolutionary change, compromise between business and labor, and the practical tools of progressive reform. It is the spirit that rejected Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Al Gore in 2000.
The New Left rejection of “corporate liberalism” came at what we now regard as the historical apex of American liberalism. At the moment of another historical triumph, liberals are retreating from politics into languor, rage, and other incarnations of anti-politics. One day they may look back upon this time with longing.
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