Everything Is On The Table?

What the Democrats need to scream now is: “The Republicans are trying to shutdown the government to force the elimination of Medicare!!” McConnell has made it explicit that he won’t extend the debt ceiling without Medicare cuts (and Republicans in Congress have made explicit that they want Medicare gone) and that this is a strategy to force Democratic buyin on Medicare cuts to neutralize it as an issue. Even if they are ultimately going to cave, Democrats need to yell very loudly that the Republicans are blackmailing the country into gutting Medicare. Since it has been pretty well established that the Republicans are attacking Medicare, and since almost all the Senate Republicans have officially signed on to that, the framework for this is already in place. If the Democrats yell loud enough, the Repubs will rightly take the blame, even if the Dems do eventually cave. But it will take yelling, not nuanced wonkery.

As for the topic of this post, I think you’re right, but would put it more succinctly: “I everything in on the table, tax increases for the rich are on the table”

For high-school economics: from Money to Supply & Demand, 5 shorties that play automatically:

Your last slipped in. I look at those when I can.

But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as cuts.

I’m probably wrong, but it sounds like they’re signaling their willingness to cut military spending. I’d take it. You can certainly achieve some serious deficit reduction by cutting 3-400 billion/year from the Pentagon budget.

I’m with Jim Nichols and Martin Bento – framing is about simplicity in defining the issue. Trying to get fancy by “you did it, not us” just won’t work – “Republicans are trying to shut down the government to kill Medicare” will, especially because the two themes reinforce each other. Republicans are anti-government extremists, thus they want to kill Medicare.

In order to properly flip the situation around, of course, you’d require the surrounding circumstances to be inverted, such as having spending levels far below, not above, historical norms. Oh, wait, then we wouldn’t have the huge deficit…. Well, maybe balancing the budget with taxes instead would just return tax rates to historical norms.. Oh, wait, nope, it would require tax rates higher than the public has ever had to face…

Indeed, I’d try taking them seriously, and demand that cuts in military spending be a part of the mix. But, really, we’re running a huge deficit right now because of ‘stimulus’ spending. You know, spending which, theoretically speaking, wasn’t supposed to be anything but temporary? Why the heck wouldn’t spending cuts to pre-stimulus levels be the default position?

Colin: I’d note that, in that vein, it’s the Democrats in the US who are constantly proposing political censorship, (Calling it ‘campaign reform’, but who’s fooled?) and who insist on having state run media. (NPR…) And who’s proposing an “Internet kill switch”, the first resort of despots everywhere who are being twittered out of power?

Neither party is very good from this perspective. I mean, listen to the outrage from Democrats about the militarization of police… A decent like this country is taking pretty much DOES have to be bipartisan, you know, unless you’re a one party state.

MPAVictoria- and these are the same people who get their “information” from Fox News, which really does bear a close resemblance to Pravda. Conservative projection never ceases to fascinate me.

Lee @3 and Martin @5: I don’t think you can count on the public becoming more educated about economics. I agree that it’s a worthwhile endeavor; however to win elections and the right policies, I we need a sound plan that takes the public as they are.

John Holbo, agreed in every respect but this: the Democrats should not frame their attack as a conditional. It must not be if Republicans think otherwise, or if a problem is so urgent. To succeed, imho, a positive political narrative must be constructed primarily of declarative sentences.

The weakness of the Republican approach is that it is unrealistic, and fundamentally clashes with the desires and values of Americans. Americans do not want drastic cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Americans want to protect these programs more than they want to protect the highest tax brackets from a tax increase.

The Republicans have already tipped their hand with the Ryan plan. They would use the desire of Americans for fiscal sustainability to scare Americans into cutting programs for the elderly and the poor, for the sick and the disabled, for the unemployed and the vulnerable, when Americans would far prefer to make small changes to these programs while raising taxes on those most able to bear the burden.

That is why the GOP must have tax increases off the table. If it is on the table, if budget cuts and tax increases are linked issues, the GOP loses the debate. They know it.

The line of attack for Democrats should be simple, and focused. It should be premised on the two fixed beliefs of Americans: America is a great nation of immense capability and promise; and America is in trouble and must be fixed.

That is, the attacking narrative must be one of responsibility and progress. If we are responsible, then, with all our power and resources, we will succeed. Responsibility means that those who have benefited the most, who are most secure and most able to help, should do so. Responsibility means not giving the weakest members of the family a heavier pack to carry. Responsibility means that we consider all options. Responsibility means that everything is on the table.

I also think it would be a mistake to cut defense spending. The Democrats have an opportunity to wrest competence on national security matters from the Republicans. Rather than urging defense cuts, the Democrats should argue the need to continue to invest in our military. To do this, of course, we must keep responsible tax options on the table. This is not only the smart political move; it is also the correct move for the country. History has not stopped, and we have not seen the last conventional war between great powers. Investment in our military is as important to preserving lives as is investment in Medicare and Social Security. Today, in the U.S., we honor those who fell in the service of their country. If we invest less now, we will have the misfortune to honor more in the decades to come.

Of course, Holbo’s rhetorical trick is a neat one and might be effective. But that assumes that the Democrats actaully want to win this argument, rather than simply persuade their base that they’ve tried hard enough to do so without actually winning (cf the Republicans treatment of the religious right over the years). If that’s what you want, then bold reframings of the issue are the last thing you should try.

This is a quote from a commenter at RedState:

“Democrats only come into power when they are successful at persuading people through tools of anger, envy, jealousy, bitterness, and the GOP doesn’t fight back because they are afraid to and won’t stand and fight for what they believe in. These tactics are exploitative of course but only serve to keep them in power and in the ultimate end, make our country something it was never intended to be: A Marxist state.” (Source Alicublog)

This is the kind of thinking we have to deal with. I am not sure that this person and I inhabit the same reality. The trick is how do we get the average voter to see this kind of thinking for the insanity it is?

““It’s all on the table” is bullshit. You think a Republican will allow cuts to Defense”

Yes they will. These links came from two seconds of googling on the subject:

http://militarytimes.com/blogs/outside-the-wire/2011/04/06/2113/

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/?nid=150&sid=2267085

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/143957-gates-criticizes-gop-for-proposed-cuts-to-defense-spending

Gates has proposed his own cuts. The quote from Cantor in fact is most likely Washington-speak for “the defense budget will be cut”, with other DC Republicans as the intended audience.

The situation, as it stands, is historically high spending and historically low taxation.

This is not true and very misleading. Discretionary spending is not high, but the stabilizers like unemployment insurance are eating much of the budget. It is the economy.

I am blocked by the NYT paywall, but Paul Krugman has been discussing this for months and a good post is on May 1st, 2011 “Origins of the Deficit” There are others.

This post, Holbo, seems, in some way too subtle for me, to want to put Medicare “on the table.” This is not necessary or wise, and “we will twick them with our rhetoric” will fail. The deal was hinted at in the “Catfood Commission”, drastic social safety net cuts in exchange for a reduction in “tax expenditures” and probably a VAT. We should simply not take a chance on Republicans agreeing to this, because they are patient and will get their chance again, and at this time will accept a minimum of shifting the rhetoric.

Only tax increases should be on the table for Democrats. Otherwise, walk away and let Wall Street discipline their lackeys.

@27 –

You may want to have a military so large that other can “deter any other nation from attempting to build a force that could attempt such a war,” but I’m pretty sure most Americans wouldn’t consider that an important goal, and more to the point, aren’t willing to accept the continuation of the Great Recession and more austerity in order to protect that goal.

It might also be a good idea if there was more attention nationally on how budget balancer and possible Presidential candidate Rick Perry’s latest round of cuts are going to work out for Texas. It seems to be drop any pretense in terms of aiming to destroy public education and healthcare provision.

Is this opposite day? Even if the US had no army, no other nation on earth would have the capability to attack it. It’s that simple. Our neighbours are too small, and any potential attacker of any size is too far away. And this assumes that a nation like China is even interested in invading anyone, in itself an absurd proposition that has no basis in fact. The claim that we need anything approaching even 10% of our current level of military spending for self-defence is pure paranoia.

As for the subject of the original post, I agree with Martin Bento. From now until 11/2012, the democrats should do nothing but say every day “the Republicans want to take your medicare away”. And as far as the debt ceiling is concerned, call their bluff. Do nothing, and they will vote for raising it anyway.

“This is the kind of thinking we have to deal with.”

I don’t think so. RedStaters are not people one “deals” with. They are, by definition, uncooperative. We on the internet are probably too aware of those types, because they are noisy and because we are much more informed than the average voter.

But most independents, and even a fair number of registered Republicans, are not really that ideological. They’re prejudiced against the Democrats, but they like their Medicare, their Social Security, etc., and they’re making well under $250K/year.

THOSE people are the ones Obama and the Dems should be explaining things to. A commercial pointing out that Reagan and Dubya both raised the debt ceiling would say something genuinely surprising to most of those voters. A speech explaining how Ryancare screws upcoming seniors could do a lot of good.

Most of US defense spending isn’t investment in future capabilities. The US military is stationed throughout the world, and that costs vast sums of money. But those sums do not all translate into greater military capability in any given conflict. The American technological edge is a product of the very large sums invested over the last several decades the relative size and strength of our domestic economy. That edge is not a static advantage. It can be lost quickly. And once lost, given the economic growth of China, it will not likely be regained.

Now that I’ve fixed this paragraph, it’s actually rather insightful. Most military spending goes to projecting power today. It’s not an investment in future capabilities–if you want to invest in future capabilities, invest in the domestic economy. The actual technology of the weapons we put in the field is not a static advantage–it is lost quickly as both sides field the newer generations of weapons. Thus, there is a tradeoff: we can spend more on current conflicts and deployments, or we can build our economy so we have a fighting chance against China and other powers in the coming century.

It’s simply not possible to deter a rival with comparable GDP to our own from attempting to build a force that could match our own, if it is determined to do so.

I think maybe it would be a good idea for the President, and Democrats in Congress, to say something like this: we think now is not the time…

Of course, it would help if the President and Democrats in Congress in fact thought that now was not the time for radical measures designed to balance the budget. Fortunately or unfortunately, the Democrats are much more serious fiscal conservatives than the Republicans are.

As for the GOP’s putting defense cuts–even serious ones–on the table, so long as neither major party is at all interested in making such cuts, this is a pretty empty gesture.

Playing by the deficit-is-our-priority rules won’t win the political game.

Too bad that’s been the Obama Administration’s main message for like 18 months now.
Made even more toxic by caving on extension of the Bush tax cuts.

But really “Save Medicare. Vote For the Democrats” is the winning bumpersticker.

Which is why the Republicans are desperate to rope the Democrats into agreeing to something, anything, that can be described as a Medicare cut so they can muddy the waters. I don’t know what your level of confidence is that they won’t fall right into the trap, but mine is pretty much zero.

39: I think that’s a massively overcomplicated frame. No successful frame has a subordinate clause

The premise of virtually all comments on this thread so far is that the level of public information and understanding in the contemporary United States is sickeningly, lethally low. Unfortunately, that premise is largely true, and so all the above arguments about “framing” are depressingly necessary. But shouldn’t we also be discussing, however wistfully, how to raise the reasoning capacity of the public and the intellectual level of public discussion, even if only in the long run?

No, I don’t have any ideas. But somebody here must.

For once, I agree with Sebastian. (Though if there really is an offer, I rather doubt it’s sincere.)

I agree with DivGuy. Eventually we will have a Democratic Congress and President again and we can introduce additional cost control measures to Medicare. Eventually we need to limit medicare coverage to actually useful for the dollar procedures. This probably needs to happen by 2020 or so. Until then rising costs should be manageable through deficit spending. It will cost Democrats the next election for sure because Republicans will cynically complain about it, but I doubt the consequences will be any worse than the 2010 cycle. Ideally you do this during the next economic downturn which will get the ruling party kicked out of Congress regardless. The Republicans will not overturn the changes as long as it really is excessive deficit spending that is forcing the Dem’s hand on the issue. They like to give money to their industry pals, but actual doctors are not high enough on the list to really matter.

The real coup will be when we extend medicare to the entire US population, but that will be very difficult to do because all of the blue dogs will want to protect the incomes of health insurance company CEO’s.

I don’t agree with geo – simple framing and deliberative democracy can and do co-exist; indeed, they always have. “I pledge a New Deal for the Forgotten Man” is a simplistic frame; so is “New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises. It is a set of challenges.” But they stood for and embodied a much larger and more complex argument, allowing people to synthesize and structure a national debate.

I tend to follow Geertz’s argument about ideology here; the reason for political frames is that people, no matter how sophisticated they believe themselves to be, need a mental blueprint for understanding the universe to deal with political questions.

So while the argument “Republicans are trying to kill Medicare to give tax cuts to the rich” is simple, it also reflects the essential truth of the debate.

mpowell – not sure what you mean by “limit medicare coverage to actually useful for the dollar procedures”.

Regarding the future of health care reform, my read of where we’re going to end up going is that we’re going to see Medicaid merged into Medicare, state-level single payer programs expanding and merging, and the Federal exchanges/Medicare being gradually shaped into something that can do a national-level single payer system with a strong outcomes focus.

This kind of argument could be used to justify ANY amount of military spending. Should we all be wearing rags and living in boxes so that the pentagon can have one more high tech wonder weapon?

I agree with your general criticism. My point was directed at those who believe that the US military should be calibrated at the minimum strength necessary to win a war. As to the point at which the opportunity-cost of an additional dollar spent on defense becomes too great, I don’t want to derail the thread with a lengthy discussion about the specifics of the defense budget. I’ll simply say that, imho, the US should not be cutting advanced weapons systems like the F-22, F-35, and other programs. No one is asking that we live in boxes.

Consum @36: I disagree. Advances in technology build on previous advances. If a nation’s state of knowledge is far behind, it cannot quickly catch up unless the newer technology can be acquired by purchase or theft. So the US advantage is not merely a function of greater GDP. It is a function of years and years of investment, of patiently developing knowledge and experience. High GDP doesn’t automatically bring with it the knowledge required to produce the most advanced weaponry.

Jorgenson @37: It’d be nice if all security didn’t depend on an act almost certain to result in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, no? The US wants to defend things that aren’t worth a nuclear war.

I fully agree with Anderson’s comment at 34.

matthias –

Given that modern public opinion polling didn’t exist in 1932, there’s no statistical evidence either way. However, there’s an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence, especially in the form of letters written to the newly-elected President which picked up on the New Deal’s connection to them as individuals.

In terms of Roosevelt’s policy vision, I really do have to argue against that canard that “Roosevelt had no platform in 1932.” Roosevelt ran on three main things that distinguished himself from Hoover – Federal direct relief, Federal public works, and economic planning. People really over-emphasize the Philadelphia speech, especially when you realize that Ickes, Perkins, and Hopkins had basically locked down the New Deal’s agenda in 1933.

Advances in technology build on previous advances. If a nation’s state of knowledge is far behind, it cannot quickly catch up unless the newer technology can be acquired by purchase or theft. So the US advantage is not merely a function of greater GDP. It is a function of years and years of investment, of patiently developing knowledge and experience. High GDP doesn’t automatically bring with it the knowledge required to produce the most advanced weaponry.

I find this puzzling. The United States is not going have high GDP without also having advanced technology.

I guess when you say technology, you mean military-specific technology. Where I would invest in better robots generally, you would invest in better drone aircraft narrowly. That is the tradeoff–general purpose civilian tech or special purpose military tech.

But if I’m wrong about that, then that’s even less reason to worry about China–because they’re the ones who have to do the catching up today.

MPAVictoria is right that for many of us here analyzing political questions is either a profession or a hobby. That’s exactly right – a hobby. It’s a hobby because what we believe, or what the vast majority of the population thinks, makes very little difference in outcomes. In a situation when people feel that they actually impact political decisions – as for example a revolutionary situation – many very quickly become politicized and try to make informed decisions. But in our current polity where the choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee every 2 years, why spend valuable time on knowing more than the one or two issues necessary to make that choice (eg, positions of abortion, gun control, or indeed the continuation of medicare as we know it) – unless it’s your hobby?

But in our current polity where the choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee every 2 years, why spend valuable time on knowing more than the one or two issues necessary to make that choice (eg, positions of abortion, gun control, or indeed the continuation of medicare as we know it) – unless it’s your hobby?

To reach the level of level of knowledge required to make this judgment (which issues matter to you, what your opinion on those issues is, and how much of a difference can you make on them) itself requires a significant amount of study. Especially if it turns out that you care most about something non-simple like the general well-being of your country or your world.

Posting blog comments on other people’s blogs is, for the vast majority of us, a hobby, of course. But I’m not sure the level of engagement required to make an educated guess about how engaged you should be is much lower than the level required to engage in political discussion as a hobby.

“To reach the level of level of knowledge required to make this judgment (which issues matter to you, what your opinion on those issues is, and how much of a difference can you make on them) itself requires a significant amount of study. Especially if it turns out that you care most about something non-simple like the general well-being of your country or your world.”

Exactly. Which is why people tend to vote based on slogans and bumper stickers. The democrats need to get much better at framing issues in short easily understood sound-bites. In fact I would argue they should be shorter than the ones proposed by Dr. Holbo. Someone up-thread proposed something like “Republicans want to destroy medicare.”
That is perfect.

Deficit my arse. yanks arew nutters. even th esupposed leties (HV, about 3 others exluided) fuck these idiot s – sorry I’m pissed iout of my tinyn mind buit ‘kinell, waht is fgoing on? Taht ‘market therad was bad and that wab;t even Shermans,. Bollocks t he lot iof youse. soiufefwsdfhgl;fyhALFGlf;eay]f NO HOPE

You see? It’s not just a hobby it’s a passion.

The dude’s name is cantor, there’s got to be a joke in here somewhere about infinity or hotels, but I can’t see it for the life of me.

The point is that the relative sizes of the conventional arsenals of the great powers is completely *irrelevant* It does not matter whether China, India, the US, Russia or the French have the scariest expeditionary forces, because they cannot, ever, be used against other members of the nuclear club. Because the territorial integrity of all of them is, in the final calculus backed up by the fire of the stars themselves. So when people worry that “China will overtake US in military might” they are making a fundamental error. China is already immune to the military might of the US, and the US to any possible future version of the PLA. So how much money the chinese are going to spend on toys for their generals is of zero importance to the spending priorities of the US military, because countering China, or any other great power is not what conventional weapons are for the only actual use for conventional weaponry is not security. It is the enforcement of the will of the great powers on particularily annoying third world hellholes. In some cases this is just, moral and nessesary. Others it is anything but. It is never. Ever. A question of security. Particularily for the US, which has oceans seperating it from any refugee streams. Which means the right and proper debate to have is not “how much should we spend on security” but “how much money are we willing to spend on what is effectively extraterritorial lawenforcement”?

Having a bigger conventional army doesnt get you more votes in the UN security council, so it still doesnt matter for budgetary purposes. – Note that the security council is mostly a formalization of an underlying reality – Conflicting opinions on in the area of “which obnoxtious regime are we going to bomb today” either go the way of the power that cares the most (usually because it is closest. Geography still matters) or more usually everyone stays the heck out and the local tinpot dictator gets to keep on tinpotting.

StevenAttewel @ 52: I’m not being too specific here. It just appears to me that medical costs are going to continue to grow even if we cut insurance companies out of the loop because the available treatments will simply grow more exotic and expensive. But that doesn’t mean they are offering significant increases in quality life years. At some point single-payer care will have to attack this problem by picking and choosing which procedures are actually reasonably effective for their cost.

That’s Moe Lane, who takes up the nastiness slack now that Erick has a good job to lose.

76: That is another very common argument that makes no sense whatsoever when you stop and think about it. The march of technological progress in every single other field of human endeavor has had the inevitable consequence of making things cheaper. Yet somehow, everyone seems to expect medicine to the be magically diffrent, and that ever better understanding of the mechanics of the human body and the advance of biological and dataprocessing science will somehow continue to produce ever more expensive treatments in defiance of logic, economics and all human experience. Which is not going to happen- medicine is going to get automated and commodified just like every other service and product we provide on a massive scale has, and suddenly that medicare post on the budget is going to look a lot smaller.
The only way the projections for medical costs everyone uses could possibly have any relation to reality at all is if the vast bulk of those projections of “20-30% of gdp goes to medicine” ends up being elective interventions as we rush down a transhumanist path of doing things like curing old age and blatantly upgrading our bodies and minds, in which case, the knockon effects of that on the rest of the economy are going to make all our estimates of what the budget looks like a joke.

Thomas: The reason healthcare is different is that we will always want more of it – for completely understandable reasons. If you’re dying of cancer, and there’s a new cure that can save you for $100000, that’s a potential expense of $100000 that your healthcare provider (whether private or public) has to consider.

We tolerate inequalities in access to most commodities, but we (reasonably) don’t tolerate much inequality when it comes to being allowed to go on living.

We also have limited desire for most commodities. Once you’ve got a lot of something, you tend to be less obsessed about getting more. Not so with life itself: Most of us want to live as long as possible, cost what it may, and the older we get, the more work it is to keep us alive.

Consum @58:

So it’s a strange situation—one in which it’s very easy for a China that is currently far behind us to catch up without us noticing, but very difficult for us to catch back up to them afterwards. I happen to think that military catch up would be relatively easy if you have high GDP and advanced (civilian) technology.

I think you may be conflating two separate issues. First is the technological edge of the US military. For that to be lost, another nation simply must develop sufficient countermeasures to render that edge useless. For the US to lose the edge provided by stealth technology, for example, another nation need not develop better stealth technology; it simply must develop sensory equipment able to detect it. Second is our disagreement as to whether high relative GDP is enough to provide a technological edge, or whether it requires years of cumulative investment and development. This could turn into a long and interesting discussion, but I don’t want to derail.

Jorgensen @72:

Because the territorial integrity of all of them is, in the final calculus backed up by the fire of the stars themselves.

A lot can happen in East Asia that doesn’t involve the territorial integrity of the US, but that would involve war.

MPAVictoria @62:

Exactly. Which is why people tend to vote based on slogans and bumper stickers. The democrats need to get much better at framing issues in short easily understood sound-bites. In fact I would argue they should be shorter than the ones proposed by Dr. Holbo. Someone up-thread proposed something like “Republicans want to destroy medicare.”
That is perfect.

I may be in the minority, but I think the Democrats are doing just fine. Interest group politics will always make certain policies harder to pass or preserve than they should be. That won’t be altered by better soundbites.

ps – I should have said, this is how the Dems should frame the issue of the deficit and taxes, re John Holbo’s suggestion.

Republicans are good at harnessing fear/tribalism and Democrats are bad at remembering a political slogan is not the place to hold a nuanced policy discussion.

ISTM that you might as well just replace “a political slogan” with “a representative democracy” and start looking for philosopher-kings, if you’re going to be that fatalistic about it. If you give up on nuanced policy discussions you will end up with un-nuanced policy, which is not an effective way to deal with a complex universe.

On the other hand, if you can get the public to realize that fear and tribalism are a dumb way to run a country, then the Republicans will have to find another trick by which to defend the interests of a rich minority. *That’s* the ball game. Don’t concede it before you start and aspire to become a more effective huckster in a white hat.

Steve @56

Given that modern public opinion polling didn’t exist in 1932, there’s no statistical evidence either way. However, there’s an enormous amount of circumstantial evidence, especially in the form of letters written to the newly-elected President which picked up on the New Deal’s connection to them as individuals.

In terms of Roosevelt’s policy vision, I really do have to argue against that canard that “Roosevelt had no platform in 1932.” Roosevelt ran on three main things that distinguished himself from Hoover – Federal direct relief, Federal public works, and economic planning. People really over-emphasize the Philadelphia speech, especially when you realize that Ickes, Perkins, and Hopkins had basically locked down the New Deal’s agenda in 1933.

Those are fair points. But I still find it very hard to believe that 1) public opinion polls, if available, would have revealed mass policy preferences that were greatly more coherent than those which exist after the dawn of public opinion polling, or that 2) a hypothetical Roosevelt with very different (or: as different as possible while remaining inside the acceptable range of elite opinion) policy preferences could have lost an election against an incumbent with the employment rate being what it was.

I’m aware, of course, that I’m only offering an argument from incredulity – if there’s any reading that you think would be good for demonstrating that the above is actually much more plausible than I feel it is, feel free to suggest it.

Gene @71

Can I just say that I find the whole “on the table” metaphor repugnant? It makes out as if our lives were a game of cards, or a stunt for some hot shot negotiator to be a bully.

It’s okay to find it repugnant, if you like, but it’s accurate, and I can’t conceive any alternative to some form or another of what it’s a metaphor of. When and where politics transcends soap opera, it just is a negotiation over who lives and who dies, who has a right to or from what, &c. Sometimes politics is a pareto-efficient agreement among those with the capability to enforce it and sometimes it is pursued through other means.

Or as some washed-up unappealing authoritarian or another said: who? whom?

Salient @89: Establishing, enforcing, and defending a national curriculum that is sympathetic to democratic socialism. That’s the ball game. The rest is skirmish details and defense.

This, you say, is “not even hard”? You’ve proposed some excellent slogans. But don’t forget: slogans have to be publicized if they’re to have any effect. And publicity requires colossal amounts of money (or volunteer energy). That’s why the Right has won power over the last several decades. It’s not that conservatives have had “good new ideas,” or any ideas at all. They’ve simply bought up the media and a large share of academia, and also increased their public-relations budgets exponentially. And the evangelicals have supplied the foot soldiers, getting out the conservative vote, intimidating local school boards, newspapers, and radio/TV stations, etc.

And on top of that, the entertainment industry has made us stupid. No subordinate clauses (as DivGuy pointed out), no complex ideas or emotions, allowed. Advertisers/financial backers mistrust complexity, and eventually viewers/listeners/readers just lose the hang of it.

And then there’s the built environment, and the American diet, and … Well, what isn’t coarsening and dumbing down contemporary American culture and society? If you (and the estimable John Q, who professed “optimism” on a recent thread) want a sense of just how hard it’s going to be to win this “ball game,” look at a couple of brilliant, profoundly depressing books by Morris Berman: The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Age America.

I don’t think it’s achieved by vanguardism. It just happens.

Wasn’t thinking of a vanguard, Henri. Why can’t we the people bestir ourselves and make it happen?

Why can’t we the people bestir ourselves and make it happen?

Yes, in a small way, by influencing our children, for example. But on a massive scale, it’s a different sort of phenomena, imo.

I assume you don’t just expect each citizen to bestir herself.

Yes, I confess I did have something like that in mind. Isn’t that the definition of a healthy democracy?

Parties are where politics goes to die. The Japanese in the 1st half of the 20th, with the benefit of European experience, especially German, made an extra-special effort to get their citizenry involved in several grass-roots organizations at every political level, environmental, feminist, neighborhood etc with the specific goal of diffusing and disarming dissent and unrest. People have an angry meeting, sign a petition handed to a middling bureaucrat, they can be satisfied and stalled for years. Watch Wisconsin.

Totalitarianism has become much more scientific than back in the old days. It can even be made to look like freedom.

We don’t need no stinking organization.

What we need is riots.

Attewell, what, you gonna have memberships, agendas, elections of officers, takin the minutes, Robert’s Rules…and use that to get your revolution? What you will get is a deeply instilled deference to structures and processes that will be the mirror of what appears one step above you. And then Obama some politician above you will say they feel you pain, are worried too about unemployment and global warming, these things take time, we have obstacles and enemies, have patience and some sympathy. And then the people behind you will tar and feather the guy? No, they will say she really really cares and go home.

Burn it down and take their stuff. There’s a slogan.

PS:Thanks for mentioning Berman, geo, I went immediately and read his blog. I needed someone now that IOZ has retired.

To Bob, #26: someone told me that if you turn off “accept cookies” in your browser, it defeats the NYT paywall. If that were true, it would imply that the formerly greatest media institution on earth had become effete and impotent as the Democratic party it is accused with representing. So it can’t be true.

Steven @ 107:
Right, I think you’re setting up a false dichotomy between Romantic/spontaneous/no-thought and organization/rational-behavior, but okay, you’re kind of admitting that there are organizations that don’t work the way the ones you prefer do. For one, those Maoists and Trotskyists who you say were distorting the way the New Left meetings worked. For another, the unthoughtful relapse into prerevolutionary sex roles and whatever social dynamic let (if true) Hoffman metaphorically get away with murder. I’d add things like crowdsourcing, the anti-WTO protests, Anonymous, and so forth. It isn’t obvious why the last two couldn’t be easily leveraged in combination.

Also, aren’t you casting out anybody who doesn’t fall well on the “reason” side of your dichotomy? I think one might be forgiven jumping to the conclusion that the “organization” you say you need has to do more with ensuring people fall on the right side of the dichotomy, in the first place, than with micromanaging what they do afterwards.

I’m not sure I understand, anyway, what your political organizations do. Do they deliberate, or what?

bob mcmanus, I really think that everything I’ve ever read by you about Japan is just flat out, completely wrong.

Thank you, Salient, it’s quite intoxicating to have my prose quoted back to me. And I’ve never received a more deftly turned compliment than you’re … not some random trollish schmuck, at least on the Internet.

If I were an intelligent liberal (or one or both), would I be so rah-rah for higher rates? Why would I be committed to 25% of GDP or 40% or 50%? Is it really the case that the last dollar of federal spending is so critically important that it can never, ever be cut on fear of introducing Donner party consequences? Is the last press attache in the commerce department really so critical? These are the questions that get me to sleep at night.

“well then Bob, how’s this… are you seriously arguing that Japan in the first half of the 20th century had a democracy that was participative at the grassroots level?”

Cambridge History v 6 pg 589 and that section on the development of the nohonshugi movements after WWI. (Hey, grass roots don’t have to be liberal) The oligarchs also used land policies at the start of Meiji, and agricultural aid, well, back in the 18th but especially in the 20s and 30s. The oligarchs always understood that it was better to co-opt local and rural and dissenting movements than to violently repress them, altho they did their share of that too.

They didn’t shut down their parliaments or parties even during the war:they absorbed them and the War gov’t remained a mass of conflicting interests. Yet it still managed an Empire.

Now I don’t think the consensus-building is that cultural, or god forbid racial. I think the Japanese developed a science of soft totalitarianism during the shogunate. And since I think this the way the West is going, I study Meiji and Taisho Japan.

the lesson seems to be more that quiet civic engagement in apolitical local groups will build a socialist and cooperative society, and that the government will then be largely irrelevant to the ordinary goings-on of everyday life.

You have to be kidding. Tell that to the people of Miyagi.

bianca –

The “organizations that don’t work the way the ones you prefer do” are still organizations, which kind of answers your question about “couldn’t people do all those things without an organization.” Even in the least organized groups, organization was created, but a kind of organization that was unaccountable, not transparent, and totally vulnerable to infiltration/disruption from Maoists, Trotskyists, Yippies, Black Panthers, the FBI, etc. and ultimately collapsed.

I don’t get what you mean by “reason” side of your dichotomy. I didn’t really mention anything about that.

My political organizations both deliberate and act in ways that are transparent and accountable. We see the deliberation in debates over platforms, manifestos, campaigns, legislation, messaging, etc. – good examples of this would be the long discursive project, from the People’s Party through to the New Deal on how to reconcile Jeffersonian ideology with the need for the state to intervene against corporations, taking place in conventions, party newspapers, primary campaigns, etc. The action part is the process that begins at the level of ward and precinct captains turning out the vote to party whips ensuring that elected delegates vote the way the platform pledged to vote – by which process the results of discourse are realized in state action.

How is there “far less distance between Steven Attewell and bob mcmanus than bob (and maybe Steven) would ever care to admit” that doesn’t include you as well?

…shucks I’d be very happy to include myself in there, I think? The grammar of your question might be confusing me more than it should. I hope I didn’t come off as dismissive as that would be the exact opposite of what I intended (pretty much everything you’ve ever said about social insurance makes perfect sense to me, for example, and your comments on the need for constructing emotionally appealing cognitive shortcuts to build policy around, e.g. “we all tend towards certain shortcuts in thinking about the government and politics in general, and that it would be a good thing if we compensated for that in our politics,” are about as sharp as offhanded blog comments can be).

One thing the Democrats had right was pushing for a “clean” raising of the debt ceiling, which is exactly right. So thye House Republicans held a votte, similar to the symbolic doomed vote the Senate had for the Ryan plan. Almost half the House Democrats voted against sanity and their own talking point. Steney Hoyer welcomed this. Why? Explicitly because they were afraid the Republicans would use it against them. There is no hope for these people.

1) “The Democrats voted to raise the debt ceiling without cutting spending” is a lousy frame because it needs to he explained. Especially swing voters, the most superficial, will not swing on that. So the Dems were afraid of a bogeyman.

2) Now the Democrats have to switch from “We should just raise the debt ceiling and negotiate over spending without holding the nation’s economy hostage”, a really sensible and understandable position that (correctly) makes the Republicans look fanatical and irresponsible, to “our stupid cuts are better than their stupid cuts”. Fail.

They have just told the public that they are profoundly unserious and complete cowards.

1) “The Democrats voted to raise the debt ceiling without cutting spending” is a lousy frame because it needs to he explained. Especially swing voters, the most superficial, will not swing on that. So the Dems were afraid of a bogeyman.

“Debt” and “spending” are effective fear-inducing buzzwords without any explanation whatsoever. In fact, it works better if the targets don’t understand (because if they really understood the issue they’d realize that Democrats had the more reasonable position).

our stupid cuts are better than their stupid cuts

With the way political sentiment is going right now, you can either be on the stupid cuts bus or under it. As the old saying goes, it’s not enough for the Democrats to have the vote of every thinking person, they need a majority. (Or they need to get more people to think, but AFAIK no democracy has ever successfully solved that problem.)

As long as that’s true, the least harmful plate of stupid cuts is the best achievable outcome and therefore should be supported by people who understand that. In theory there are better options, but in practice you can only choose from options that can actually be put into practice.

With the way political sentiment is going right now, you can either be on the stupid cuts bus or under it.

Nonsense. You don’t need to capitulate to every talking point if you have large and useful clubs like Medicare and Social Security.

You don’t have to cut Medicare and Social Security, maybe, but you still have to cut something because people are scared of deficits and debts and big numbers.

No they’re not.

#88 “On the other hand, if you can get the public to realize that fear and tribalism are a dumb way to run a country, then the Republicans will have to find another trick by which to defend the interests of a rich minority. That’s the ball game. Don’t concede it before you start and aspire to become a more effective huckster in a white hat.”

I think this is far from the mark. You cannot get started on a more nuanced discussion until you counterpunch. Pithy slogans are important for getting people’s attention and making your argument in a nutshell. For example, how about “Jobs now, deficits later!” as a rallying cry? After that, you can go on to explain the rationales.

a plan to get more of our fellow citizens to think

Via LG&M this is interesting.

129:Should we be doing this here? Moderator can step in.

You had a specific argument that grass-roots organizations kill dissent.

I said “disarm and diffuse.” Or channel. I also think it is a mistake to see grassroots and ruling elites as always in opposition, dichotomous, and contradicting. This is kinda my point, that smart elites manage to channel popular discontent into activities that weaken or distract unrest and are useful to the elites.

The agricultural coops are an example. What Japan did was to send, or find locally, people with expertise in infrastructure, agronomics, agriculture to villages to help design irrigation, dams, etc. Projects and coop equipment would be funded with local taxes, some loans, tax breaks. The point was to have rurals create a small org with the appearance of autonomy but “infiltrated” (not spies, just respected voices) near the top ideologically. I actually think this was more important in the teens thru thirties when competing agencies, liberal and nationalistic, each tried to wrest ideological control of influence over the farmers. They smartly focused on second sons for these purposes. There are many other examples, youth organizations.

the nihonshugi (日本主義), a Meiji Era movement in opposition to westernization

nohonshugi not nihonshugi, although they interacted. Agrarianism, not quite nationalism, the idealization of the yeoman peasant-soldier and farming as the soul of Japan, solidarity of the village against the “state”, which blamed capitalistic, commercial-industrial interests for poverty. Etc. “State” in quotes because Japan never became monolithic, and there were always competing groups of oligarchs trying to find forces to direct toward their ideological or personal goals.

Speaking of feminism, you could look at the rise of conservative women’s organizations and policies in Japan in Late Meiji (also Britain and Germany in the 20s).

And how the fuck do get away with claiming that Japan is a “pit of inequality”?

Political power on a national level?

Japan has been moving since the 80s, slowly but steadily toward this distribution: 1-5% with vast wealth; 15-20% aspirational well-educated UMC; 60% struggling and stressed middle class; 15% hopeless in poverty. The second and bottom classes very slowly increasing. Does this look familiar? It makes a vanguard very difficult, as we can see.

Does membership of political parties funnel dissent away from its object, or is it membership of local grassroots organizations?

The goal of elites would be to eliminate the difference. “Top-down” vs “bottom-up” only exists when leadership isn’t paying attention (watch Egypt) I can use America here, the grassroots orgs Obama used for the caucuses and then moved beyond after the convention getting corporate money and then shut down after election day. The issue-advocacy groups Obama moved into the “veal pen.” Another example is the Tea Party, which is a lot more complicated than merely a Koch-controlled tool.

Politics, as we have mostly known it, only really works when elites can channel popular sentiment toward self-serving purposes. Pure democracy is barely politics at all.

Why “Burn it down and take their stuff?” I want something elites can’t control, that Wilder can’t direct toward his enemy neighborhoods. Because I think they have achieved a technology, a sociology, that can control everything that isn’t a riot.
They got NARAL to sign onto Stupak.

This is enough. I have reading to do.

Yes, Henri, Berman makes a very strong case. I just thought maybe someone reading this thread could prove him wrong.

StevenAttewell, reading the interwebs, I’m getting the impression that a lot of people now don’t believe that the US political system is capable of delivering anything useful anymore. Apparently, this has something to do with the performance of the Obama administration and heavily Democratic legislature in 2009/10.

I don’t see how this hypothesis can be characterized as ‘ivory-tower-defeatism’; after all, it can be observed or refuted empirically. If your car doesn’t start, that’s a fact, not someone’s annoying tendency.

139: Why isn’t what you want already happening, or why hasn’t it already happened? Are you and I the only ones around that can do it? Does no one else understand political history and the theory of movements? You can’t convince me to use 1900-style methods when I believe that the assholes learned from the last century and you haven’t.

Berman does have an answer, a structural analysis:”the people suck.”
Hedges is trying your methods, with added radicalism, with little success.
I have another:”the technology of socio-political control has advanced since 1900″
Hedges is trying your methods, with added radicalism, with little success.
The Arab Spring and Gene Sharp have something newish to say, and I am watching them closely. Why are we different? Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Spain.
Germany is killing their nuclear program, which is apparently not even a possibility for us.

Attewell, if you or I are the ones needed to start the movement, we are in big fucking trouble. Why isn’t there someone charismatic for me to follow?

Look, Global carbon emissions hit an alltime high last year. Declining real-estate prices and a double-dip could bring down the big banks before the end of year. Democrats are negotiating budget cuts in a recession.

Good will toward your patient incrementalism, but I’m in a hurry. This isn’t defeatism, it is close to fucking panic.

Yes, the premise is exactly that there is no way, in the current, actually existing environment, to built up political power that could actually hold politicians accountable. Without riots, anyway. ‘Politician’ is just an apprentice lobbyist. And since it’s difficult to prove a negative, you’re welcome to provide a counterexample.

Steven:
Part of the issue between us might be that I’m unsure how seriously to take your talk about framing and so on, things that seem to involve a realm of politics other than voting in elections and developing party platforms. On the one hand, those ideas strike a lot of people as non-obvious, and furthermore, though maybe inaccurately, as the special property of liberals and the left [1]. On the other hand, someone (not me[2]) who took those ideas seriously might conclude that framing is more important than the details of organization and managing (or, which to me is about the same thing, that managing can be done just by doing framing activities). Not that this is the only or the most important thing that needs to be done; for one thing, it doesn’t seem to have even a tenuous connection to things like organizing electoral politics on basic economic-justice issues, which I agree is probably best done using the methods you’re describing.

I’m absolutely not convinced that the concerns of people like Berman are of any importance except to themselves and the people who end up arguing with them.

[1] Though I wouldn’t agree either with someone who insisted that organization and managing were all that mattered.

[2] Okay, people who either’d never heard of large swathes of philosophy or assumed all philosophers, like all other college professors were “lefties” or “liberals” (or have some idiosyncratic definition of “left”), but still.

StevenAttewell, reading the interwebs, I’m getting the impression that a lot of people now don’t believe that the US political system is capable of delivering anything useful anymore. Apparently, this has something to do with the performance of the Obama administration and heavily Democratic legislature in 2009/10.

Not really. The 2009-10 Congress actually passed quite a lot of progressive legislation. It wasn’t everything a leftist could wish for, nor was all of it as purely leftist as a leftist could wish for. But relative to historical standards, it was quite active, and almost everything was more liberal than the status quo ante (not that that’s hard, coming off the Reagan-Bush with occasional Clinton decades).

And the House passed even more legislation, and what it passed was more liberal; none of which was vetoed by the White House, AFAIK. Anyone seriously looking for the reason why “not enough” got done in the last two years would have to arrive at the conclusion that it was the Senate. Systematically unrepresentative, with rules that favor obstructionism, where some of even the nominal Democrats are a long way from liberal — it really puzzles me why people look for reasons to blame the President for doing too little when the Senate’s fingerprints are all over a dozen progressive bills that never reached the President’s desk.

People who are eager to declare defeatism based on a track record that can objectively only be classified as a historic success are either viewing everything through a lens of extremely unrealistic expectations (such as refusing to acknowledge the existence of the Senate or believing that liberals controlled it), or they have some ulterior motive for promoting defeatism specifically in left-of-center circles.

…So what if your car *does* start, runs fine, maybe making a funny noise or two but getting you where you want to go, but your friend complains how horribly broken and useless it is because it doesn’t fly? It’s a fact that it doesn’t fly, certainly, but isn’t it at all relevant that only a fool would expect flight from a car?

Or, dropping the car analogy, if your standard of “anything useful” is set so high that the intersection of “possible” and “useful-according-to-you” is empty, then of course the intersection of “achieved” and “useful-according-to-you” will also be empty, but whose fault is that really?

There has to be a middle ground between lowering your standards until they’re already met and raising them until they’re unmeetable and you foreordain your own disappointment; for example, choosing between actually possible outcomes.

Anyway, issue polls are of very limited relevance to election outcomes.

Um, okay then, enough with the deficit nonsense. It’s an ongoing theme.

Ther4e are two possible outcomes to the debt ceiling fight:

1) The Republicans get spending cuts and vote to raise the ceilin g. McConnell has already signaled that this must include Medicare. At this point, both sides agreed to raise the debt deling. The difference is between those who wanted to do just that, and those who wanted the budget cuts too. All will have agreed to raising the debt limit, so that cannot be used to distinguish them. Only the budget cuts cans, and, once we are talking actual b cuts, rather4 than “budget cuts” in the abstract, that favors the dems, at least those who can say, “Hey, I wanted to just raise the thing without all these cuts”. In this scenario, the Repubs have to run on the cuts, not the debt ceiling itself, and the cuts they want are extremely unpopular.

2) The US defaults. In this case, we are talking a severe blow to the economy. Whatever everyone thought before, they will instantly become bitter enemies of default now, and pretend it was always so. At that point, you definitely want to be the guy who voted against default, no ifs, ands or buts, which is what this vote amounted to.

151.2: The Republicans have already taken their position on this, and there is legislation pending. The US gov’t gets enough revenue from taxes to pay all bondholders, especially overseas bondholders, not including SS and the other trust funds. Even without raising the debt ceiling, there is, according to them, no reason that credit markets should suffer any losses. Makes sense.

And knowing Obama and Geithner, I think they will continue to do their best to protect finance. Geithner is already raiding pension funds.

IOW, they are already developing the narrative in which any problems from the debt ceiling not being raised are the responsibility of Obama and the Democrats and their refusal to cut spending. I think this will work much better, much longer than you do.

And of course, I have my own ideas about what is going on here, and “Republicans are totally crazy and will destroy the global economy” will be most effective if they actually get to cause some noticeable damage. “Ha ha ha Republicans have totally destroyed their political prospects for generations” keeps another part of the electorate satisfied and quiescent, and is what I was hearing around the time Clinton signed welfare reform, just before the Repubs took all branches of government.

The Democrats came to power in 2008 supposedly committed—with the public’s backing—to reversing de-unionization, protecting the environment, rolling back encroachments on civil liberties, re-regulating the financial industry, fighting for serious health-care reform, helping the un- and underemployed, providing relief to stressed homeowners, and generally championing Main Street against Wall Street.

Er, no. A few of them were committed to that. Most were not committed to even half that stuff. Some ran against substantial parts of it in order to prove that they weren’t too liberal for places like Nebraska. “Democrats” are a large and heterogeneous group.

As for what the public supported, they’re an even more heterogeneous group than the Democrats. Mostly they were pissed off about Bush’s mismanagement of the country, the economy, several wars… you name it, Bush mismanaged it. Which is a fine thing to be pissed off about, but not much of a coherent agenda, let alone a commitment to issues that weren’t even on the radar.

They’ve done none of these things.

False. The financial industry has been re-regulated; the un- and underemployed and stressed homeowners have been helped. You may think that not *enough* was done on those fronts, and I may even agree that I would like to have seen more done (and that doing more would have been better for the economy); but to say that nothing was done is just plain false.

Cleverly, on the health care point you included a weasel word that allows you to semi-legitimately dismiss and deny the existence of one of the biggest liberal policy achievements in decades (yes, I know it was centrist in parts, but the subsidies to the poor alone would qualify it for that description, let alone guaranteed issue and the elimination of pre-existing condition exclusions). Describing health care reform as “nothing” or “not serious” is very strong evidence that you’re unwilling to settle for non-ideal outcomes.

“Championing Main Street against Wall Street” is a particularly misleading point, given that the administration’s (rather unpopular) actions were aimed specifically at putting out the fire on Wall Street before it could burn down any more of Main Street. To the extent that those terms mean anything at all, their interests weren’t even opposed; they were all in the same boat.

They haven’t even tried hard.

I’d like to know exactly what you would accept as evidence of “trying hard” short of the bills actually passing. Since, for example, seeing liberal bills pass the House only to be strangled in the Senate isn’t enough to convince you. “Trying hard” is generally a poor metaphor for any task more complex than lifting a heavy object, but for politics it’s particularly misleading. You can lead a Senator to legislation, but you can’t make him vote for it.

We’re not left-wing purists, deluded by “unrealistic expectations” and “eager to declare defeat.”

No, of course not! You’re just dissatisfied with every outcome that actually happens in reality. There’s nothing purist about that. Declaring defeat 100% of the time isn’t eager at all.

If you compare political outcomes *to other political outcomes that actually happen* the last Congress was the most liberal in decades, with the active assistance of the President, who would have liked it to be even more liberal than it was. The fact that you then say “eh, but it wasn’t as liberal as I wanted it to be so it doesn’t count”… well, that may sound convincing to someone somewhere, but that someone is not me.

I hope that the high water mark of American liberalism a few generations ago will not hold the record forever. But if you won’t accept any progress that doesn’t zoom immediately to the previous record and shatter it instantly (let alone if you denounce anything not-record-breaking as “nothing”, “not trying hard”, and betrayal of the cause), it’s going to be hard to continue the struggle to move politics toward a more liberal area of the political spectrum. At least, you’re not helping the cause, although you claim to sympathize with it.

Bob at 140 –

“Why isn’t what you want already happening, or why hasn’t it already happened? Are you and I the only ones around that can do it? Does no one else understand political history and the theory of movements? You can’t convince me to use 1900-style methods when I believe that the assholes learned from the last century and you haven’t.”

Why what I want hasn’t happened is primarily due to disengagement with party politics, especially among left-leaning activists, which means that people like me don’t have the troops to prevail in a sustained national fight over the party. Not totally, which is why we saw things like the Dean campaign’s transition into the DNC, or the way superdelegates got rolled in 2008, but enough so that our influence doesn’t extend to 218 House Seats and 51 Senators.

Obviously, you and I aren’t the only ones who can do it – we’re standing in for approaches and archetypes. And what I’m saying is the folks like me need more numbers, and it’s hard to get them when the folks like you check out of the process entirely. It’s not about charismatic leaders, it’s about organization and mobilization.

And as I’ve said before, you and I draw fundamentally different lessons about the 20th century – I see a fifty year period where the social democratic strategy worked, and another fifty year period where the right gained power using the methods I talk about; you see no change at all.

Henri – my argument about that stance is that it’s a cop-out that allows people who want to think of themselves as leftists for romantic reasons rationalize why they don’t actually do any real work to make left policies happen.

Bianca – I see the two levels (framing and party politics) as inherently linked. Without a frame, you have no “elevator pitch” to get people into the party; without the party, you have no way to transmit the pressure you get from mobilizing people into action. Framing is absolutely necessary for social justice, because most people don’t start out with a full-fledged analysis and awareness ready to go – so you need some initial hook. Whether that hook is “don’t shop where you can’t work” or “Republicans are trying to kill Medicare,” the intended outcome should be the same – mobilizing the unmobilized into the movement as step one in a larger process.

geo – but isn’t the debate here about how we process disgust – do we check out or do we replace those who disgust us? Because it seems to me that your way means we leave bad actors in a position of power.

Martin Bento – rule didn’t allow for amendments.

Bob, Steven Attewell’s response to you is why we’re doing this here even though it looks a little OT. He has summarized your problem in one paragraph very nicely: it’s NoTrueScotsman elitism. The government organizes grassroots organizations to facilitate basic development and it’s co-opting a movement for change (Japan in the 20s); the government does nothing or refuses to support any form development (US under Bush) and it’s elitist and destructive; the government uses a grassroots movement to get into power and try and enact some significant change (US now) and it has funneled dissent.

All your roads lead to the same conclusion, which means that your analytical framework is empty, and/or you’ve constructed it to get to the same ends: riots.

Your framing of the Japanese experience is clearly, on the face of it, biased and ahistorical, though you claim to be familiar with the history. You have confused funneling, killing, harnessing and riding dissent [as is evident from your mention of conservative women’s groups], and your alternative explanation of events in the Meiji era is clearly a very specific way of looking at them – it’s neither the only nor the most plausible explanation. Your depiction of Japan today is also skewed. Yes, the least unequal of countries in the OECD has become slightly more unequal after 20 years of very low to zero economic growth. But there’s no project of neo-liberal dismantlement here, and no strong impetus towards this. There are still jobs for life and the corporate cradle-to-grave structure is still generally acceptable. There has been no 15 year wreckers project like in the US.

I think in short most American leftists would consider you very weird if you had a chance to move their social welfare system to the Japanese model, and said no. It would be another example of the weird purism you’re showing here.

Chris, I think we’re kind of talking past each other. Every one of the things I listed is mentioned in the 2008 Democratic Party Platform and in Obama’s Audacity of Hope. If you want to argue that not all Democrats campaigned explicitly on those issues, well, OK. Every poll I saw in the NY Times indicated majority public support for a position to the left of the Democratic Party on most economic/national security/civil liberties issues. But if you want to claim that there were other polls, or that polls don’t tell us much, then once again, OK. The Democrats literally did nothing, or worse than nothing, on unionization, civil liberties, and restraining the executive branch. They’ve done next to nothing about mortgage relief. The financial re-regulation legislation is feeble. The health care bill is better than nothing, but only a little better. The troops came back from Iraq and many of them were then shipped back to Afghanistan.

I agreed with you, remember, that this shabby record was nonetheless a tiny improvement over the preceding three decades, though scarcely a baby step back toward the relatively robust liberalism of the three decades before that. But I think the glass is three-quarters empty. If you think it’s three-quarters full, well, OK. No point I can see in arguing about it.

I’d like to know exactly what you would accept as evidence of “trying hard” short of the bills actually passing

Fair question. But easy to answer. Obama’s appointments are the most obvious answer. His appointments immediately sent exactly the wrong signals on the economy, defense, and the environment. His chief of staff was an unprincipled hack (as is the hack’s successor). His approach to the stimulus/bailout was a preemptive capitulation, as was his negotiating strategy for the health care bill. His capitulation on the Bush tax cuts was shameful. His treatment of Elizabeth Warren likewise. His positions on Israel, arms control, executive secrecy, civil liberties, amnesty for torturers, offshore drilling — all these were unforced defeats. Of course he occasionally sounded marginally more enlightened than George Bush on most of these issues, but he committed no political capital — ie, gave few or no forceful, widely heralded speeches and twisted no arms on Capitol Hill. And there has been no pressure from the left wing of the Democratic Party, at least partly because there is no left wing of the Democratic Party.

I’m not quite sure what we’re arguing about. If you’re not as depressed as I am by the last two and a half years, I’m glad for you. Please send me medication recommendations off-thread.

He has summarized your problem in one paragraph very nicely: it’s NoTrueScotsman elitism. You have confused funneling, killing, harnessing and riding dissent

NoTrueScotsman populism?

I’m not confused, although I have merged most grassroots organizations. Capitalism absorbs and corrupt everything. So I have two kinds of grassroots orgs: a) corrupt tools of the power structure, and b) the ones the gov’t uses the full force of the state to completely destroy. I think many on the left would recognize this position. I could list illustrative examples, they are legion, but think about the IWW.

It was easy to recognize a True Scotsman by the death sentence England put on his head.

We Are on the Verge of a Great Great Depression …Naked Capitalism

We are going down, and this time the right will be in charge. The one thing I know for sure (although I can guess that liberals will work with the fascists, they always do) is that liberals will never regret not acting forcefully enough, early enough. They are always morally right. .

I’d like to know exactly what you would accept as evidence of “trying hard” short of the bills actually passing

I’ve given up on caring about whether so and so “tried hard” or “did the best they could” or whatnot. Obama doesn’t need my sympathy.

geo’s basically got this, but I’ll chime in as backup. I don’t feel like my willingness to exploit the Democratic party when opportunities to collaborate arise in any way compromises my commitment to politics which are to the left of their leftmost candidate for office. But celebrating the party, or speaking well of their accomplishments, is increasingly alien to me. I gave it an honest try, for a while, to the point of trying to see and speak of the good in vulnerable Senate incumbents who are frankly rather mediocre. (I’d promised to give it a try.) It left a metallic taste in my mouth, the kind you get from drone attack reports on NPR that nonchalantly celebrate routine extrajudicial mass killing because something-something-militants-something. Obama-ordered, Democrat-approved. You know what? Fuck those people, and fuck their party.

It’s not even that blah blah affordable health care act blah blah isn’t good enough for me (though it isn’t). It’s not even that I expected or demanded more progressive legislation (though I did). Those things are orders of magnitude less important than the fact that every goddamn thing I was in the streets screaming about, when Bush did things worth screaming about, were continued and enshrined by the guy who — I thought — promised us all an end to that insanity. The promise was actually kind of plausible. Two dozen executive orders on Day 1 and it’s done, let the bastards on cable news sort it out. Why not? Instead Obama expands every illegal unconstitutional immoral unacceptable policy of his predecessor. Unacceptable.

So hey, when you speak about how to appropriate the local party structure and organizational force of the Democratic party, I’m receptive and I’ve got your back (semi-literally, as you’re operating on one front while I’m largely operating on another). And for whatever infinitesimal it’s worth, Obama’s got my vote in 2012 (for reasons I’ve gone on about here before). However, you’ll find me — and quite a lot of people in my region of leftwingostan — completely unreceptive to arguments that the national Democratic party deserves more from me than spit. The national Democratic party is an institution which can potentially be appropriated for progressive ends. My head is open to that. But my heart is utterly and permanently cold to those people. And — literally no matter what you offer in their defense — that’s just how it’s going to be.

Steve: geo – “there is no left wing of the Democratic Party” – doesn’t this suggest its own alternative?

Believe me, I greatly admire anyone who goes out and tries to create a left wing of the Democratic Party — or, for that matter, anyone who (unlike me) goes out and tries to do anything. If it doesn’t work out, I promise never to say “I told you so.” But do yourself a favor and first read Ralph Nader’s Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender (2002) and his campaign manager Theresa Amato’s Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny (2009), so you’ll know what you’re up against.

I’d like to know exactly what you would accept as evidence of “trying hard” short of the bills actually passing

We’ve done this one before, right? And it does seem to be the consensus opinion that Chris isn’t offering an analysis, he’s trying to impose a narrative. What else could he be doing, given that he’s advancing a series of essentially untestable propositions.

But just to show everyone what’s what, turnabout’s fair play: I’d like to know exactly what Chris and others like him would accept as evidence that this gang is not trying hard. Since Geo has given a nice summary of what appears to me to be some very convincing evidence[1], I’d expect the same from Chris – and not “evidence” where we have to look at their secret diaries and assume everything they write there is to be taken at face value.

Something a little more realistic please.

[1]There’s also the fact that Blanche Lincoln was not punished in her primary by the national party, but actively supported, despite her many betrayals, despite the fact that she stood less chance of winning the general election than did her opponent, and despite the fact that DNC types had already declared a “hands-off” policy with regard to local primaries.

Martin, it seems that currently there is one national party with a coherent platform – the Republicans, and the assorted group of opportunistic individual politicians identified as Democrats. Republicans vote the party line; for the Democrats it’s on the case by case basis: each one of them has professional consultants who analyze his individual district and tell him what to say and how to vote.

So, IOW, when you say “it puts them in a much better position“, perhaps there is no them there.

Martin Bento: http://politicalcorrection.org/mobile/blog/201105310013

I don’t know why they haven’t messaged on this – I’m not in contact with the House Democratic Leadership. But this did happen.

People are dying right now from lack of health care. In a few years, fewer of them will die.

Bet five dollars? Life expectancy in America is declining, which is the number I would prefer to use.

Although it may be that a previously protected part of the population is sacrificed to make the numbers look good.

Life expectancy in America is declining, which is the number I would prefer to use.

Is this actually true? Not according to the World Bank.

Bloomberg

Raw Story citing journal Health Affairs

or just google “life expectancy decline 2010 USA”

Liberals live in a dream bubble impermeable to facts

People are dying right now from lack of health care.

Including me.

In a few years, fewer of them will die.

Let’s hope so. My fingers are crossed. I suspect that the negative effects of persistent high unemployment is currently overwhelming the positive effects of ACA (note that saying this does not fail to acknowledge the benefits of ACA nor does it suggest ACA should’ve been abandoned, quite the opposite).

So I really don’t give a damn what kind of taste is in your mouth.

It’s supremely ironic that you say so, because when I literally have a metallic taste in my mouth it’s because of life-and-functionality-preserving medications I have to take that would be flatly unaffordable without student loans for graduate school, even with the university-provided health insurance. I take out loans to pay for my health. So actually you care quite a bit about the taste in my mouth, and you celebrate and support legislation that will make it easier for me to get the health care corresponding to that taste. Thank you for that. The compassion in your statement is not unwelcome and does not go unnoticed, even if it was expressed in an adversarial way.

Okay, let’s go back to the topic. I’m happy that the affordable health care act passed, and I would’ve mourned its demise. But seriously, are you trying to say I’m shouldn’t be mournfully preoccupied with the people this country killed and continues to kill, because this country is now doing a moderately better job of taking care of its own? I’m not allowed to assert that giving more of one’s own citizens health care access does not, cannot, make up for that country’s military aggression and systematic murder of foreign persons? Really?

You frankly don’t sound all that celebratory either, so I feel like you’re accidentally damning yourself here. Rhetorical flourishes aside, I see rather little distance between our perspectives.

I want what I want, and I call moral judgments like I see ’em. Especially on a blog where there’s no consequence in terms of party-building or party-destroying. And given that I support and even admire folks like Steven Attewell and Lemuel Pitkin who are investing their time and energy into contemplating and building viable party politics, and given that I’m a reliable party-line vote for the lesser evil when voting day rolls around, I think I can hardly be accused of clapping insufficiently loudly.

This talk of “expectations” as predictions is silly. To say “I felt disappointed by what happened, I expected better” is to express my emotional state and then my moral judgment of the parties involved. To respond with “you should feel satisfied, it was unreasonable to expect more” is to demand that I align my emotions and moral judgments to what would be convenient for the national Democratic party. No thanks. If the discussion is about how we feel then there’s room for us to each feel differently. But discussion of how we should feel is patently offensive.

The folks who contributed to the enshrinement of illegally aggressive foreign policy can all go fuck themselves far as I’m concerned, ACA or no. They’ve permanently lost my respect, and only a drastic 180^o^ turn could hope to change that. And I won’t acknowledge any right of other people to dictate to me that I should feel otherwise, just as I try to avoid dictating to them how upset they should feel.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that we don’t see any evidence for Chris’ multiple claims. And twice as shocked that he refuses to even tell us what sort of evidence would disprove them ;-)

bob mcmanus: vWe are going down, and this time the right will be in charge.

I remember hearing a well educated progressive (I can’t remember who) imply that only the right can propose and implement substantive change because the right always represents the interests of the dominant class of society [1]. The farther-left parties can only agitate. This maps poorly onto most real societies. I suppose there may be some subcultures it describes well. But it would of course be an error to mistake a single subculture’s social structure for a structure applicable to the broader society.

So anyway people who believe that (if there are any, the person I heard it from might have been mistaken) would have little problem with the right getting into power once they’d ostensibly absorbed formerly left-wing views. Leninists wouldn’t of course right?

[1] not sure how they account for the possibility of the masses being the dominant class, whether this is discounted as Marxist nonsense or whether it’s accepted that this applies only to our own conservative society. I suppose there is also a way of seeing the Democrats as the party of the dominant bourgeois class and maybe even a consistent one. In that case, of course, the Democrats would be the party to propose and implement change, though not clear pushed by whom, whether the far left, maybe libertarians, or the right on a pendulum-swing kind of theory.

…this isn’t a circular firing squad, fellow leftists, it’s an Archimedean spiral, sideways-facing and extending outward, dominoes with shotguns to their backs ever onward, handles that pass for names, triggers that pass for pronouncements, one to the next to the next, toward some apex limit past all horizons, some escalation toward the infinite, distance from its origin increasing, growing never quite back in on itself, perhaps it’s done already, somewhere, perhaps they have crossed their words already, and have converged, perhaps they have carried one another to the threshold of their tolerance, before the door that opens on the sublime, convergent, that would surprise them, who would be allies, corkscrew-twisted, if it opens to blank hostility, will it be us who cross the threshold, suddenly parallel? Will it be the silence, where I am, and is the silence to be found there one of universal accord, or of void? I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the squabbles you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on

Henri –
See, I don’t think it is “without a doubt” that Obamacare is nonsensical.
The mandate/premium subsidy is basically the Swiss model.
The exchanges aren’t that odd an idea.
And, what most people haven’t glommed onto yet, half the expansion of coverage comes through the partial Federalization of Medicaid and the creation of Medicaid as a right to anyone within 133% of poverty. That’s basically a gradual model of single-payer on the lines of the British 1911 act.

Henri – See, I don’t think it is “without a doubt” that Obamacare is nonsensical.

The mandate/premium subsidy is basically the Swiss model.

The exchanges aren’t that odd an idea.

If by “basically” you mean that marriage between man and jellyfish should be legalized because they are basically the same, you might have a point.

Iow, don’t be lazy. It’s been pointed out, for example, that the “mandate/premium” is not basically the Swiss model because this presumes that insurance companies are as tightly regulated and constrained here in the U.S. as they are in Switzerland. When that’s simply not the case; in fact, insurance companies aren’t allowed to make a profit on basic coverage in the Swiss model. Surely you were aware of these “basic” differences that renders your use of that word nonsensical? You were paying attention way back when when all this was being bandied about, yes?

…I guess the alternative to participating in the spiral firing squad is just watching it spiral away, so…

Ian Welsh and others, including myself, believe that it is imperative that Obama loses in 2012

It’s ‘imperative’ that we save the Democratic party from a branding problem by disempowering them?

Then we’re screwed, because nothing on God’s green Earth will save the Democratic party from a branding problem (sadly, for pretty much the opposite reasons that nothing on God’s green Earth should be able to save the Democratic party from a branding problem).

But bob, you’re letting me down. Since when did you give a carp about Democratic party image? I thought we were going to be rioting-in-the-streets buddies, you know, when gas hits $6 a gallon and the revolution finally comes.

OTOH, if a Republican is elected in 2004, she will under current conditions be a failure, and as outsiders Democrats can safely rebuild the party and its reputation without as much damage to themselves, and then win in 2008 with a decent agenda.

…I have nothing to add to that.

I’m sorry Steven, but how is what I wrote condescending? In fact, you’re doing exactly the same thing here – again- that I warned you about the first time: Show, don’t Tell.

Telling me the two types of coverage are “basically the same” doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to show me. Similarly, telling me I’m being “condescending” doesn’t cut it. Show me.

Iow, don’t try to get other people to accept your conclusions as simply given premises or observations. As I said, that’s – at best – lazy.

Oh, and for the record? For the specific reasons I gave and backed up with a cite, I disagree that mandates for private insurance here in the U.S. is “basically the same” as the Swiss model.

Salient, do you have anything specific to say about specific arguments I’ve made or specific opinions I’ve advanced or specific assertions of fact?

If not, then why post what you just did?

“Obamacare is, without a doubt, the most ridiculous, nonsensical healthcare arrangement of all those in the developed countries and a good chunk of the non-developed ones. How can it be cited as evidence of this political system not being completely perverted?”

To be fair, Obamacare is without a doubt, the most ridiculous healthcare arrangement *other than what we had in the US preceeding it*. Between Medicare and Medicaid, the US government already spends enough money that in any other country all citizens would be covered. And it isn’t just the stupid government, between the private plans we *ALSO* spend enough money that in any other country all citizens would be covered. So we have two sets of systems, both of which spend enough money to cover all other citizens, and even combined we don’t have everyone covered.

Something is clearly very wrong in the way the US does healthcare. And it isn’t a government/private question.

Bob gets his facts wrong again … life expectancy in America is declining (or expected to decline) due to obesity.

This isn’t screenplay writing, SoV.

No, it’s presenting a clear and coherent argument supported by facts and cites. You didn’t do this, in fact, think that my asking you to do so is “condescension”.

I think that an individual mandate to buy private insurance, government premium assistance, and regulations on insurers makes the two similar, you think the fact that Switzerland bans profits invalidates the other points – but you haven’t shown me why that should be the case.

Er, no. You were the one who said they were “basically the same”. It’s up to you to defend this claim by showing that the differences, such as they are, are of little to no consequence. You aren’t doing this, preferring instead the usual “make me say I’m wrong” lobotomy shuffle.

There’s also the fact that – from various little tells – you actually didn’t know about this difference between the two systems until I pointed it out. So you’re not really being serious; you just want people to think that you are while in fact are doing nothing more than parroting a party line. Please, stop wasting everyone’s time with this sort of nonsense.

Also, please do your research before making claims like this in the future. Then at least you won’t flounder about so much and spout absurdities about “this isn’t screenplay writing”. As it is, you look every bit the partisan tool that Chris is taken to be.

jesus christ on a bike, bob. How did you get from my statement to your conclusion?

Declining life expectancy is not caused by your broken healthcare system, it’s caused by obesity, which has zero percent of fuck all to do with personal trainers. How your health system is going to handle this fatness is important, but it’s not the cause and it’s unlikely that a decent universal health system (such as the rest of the civilized world enjoys) will fix that. Especially since obesity is driven by inequality and structural factors well upstream of the health system.

But there’s no point in pretending that your current dog’s breakfast of a health system is the cause of this decline. It’s not. And saying so is not equal to saying “people without personal trainers deserve to die.”

Take a chill pill man.

bianca: Bill Clinton was no better. Hillary Clinton would have been no better. John Edwards would have been no better.

Would someone remind me why it was irresponsible of me to vote for Nader?

Seriously, if you’d just said something like “I don’t think the ACA sets up a system that’s anywhere close to the quality of Sweden’s, because it fails to meet these criteria that the Swedish system meets: [1] … [2] … [3] …” then you’d have gotten your point across just fine and there wouldn’t have been this whole pointless pissing match and who knows, maybe Steven would chime in to agree with you or acknowledge the validity of your perspective or whatever. Demanding that Steven ‘show’ you that the systems are similar according to your definition of sufficiently similar is just weird posturing, hostility for its own sake, ill-directed, machine-gunned. Regarding events of years past, granted, I’ve been spotted moonlighting as Crooked Timber’s own theater of memory from time to time — and generally speaking, being the target of someone’s aggression flags them in your mind — but I’m hardly the only one to make note of your aggression here & elsewhere.

But now I’ve flagged your weirdness and backed it up with a cite. Similarly, telling me I’m being “condescending” doesn’t cut it. Show me. Even in the midst of a migraine-induced hallucinatory fever I don’t think I could come up with something that weird in my head, but to put the finish on it, you accused me of hallucinating the thing because I was slack enough to say ‘prove’ instead of ‘show’ even though you prettttttty clearly meant for ‘show’ to be synonymous with ‘prove’ at least in the everyday sense of the world ‘prove.’

believe me, you don’t paint a pretty picture of yourself

You’re tellin’ me. This blasted chalk gets e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. And the chalk in colors smears when it erases, so I work and work and I’m left with some impressionistic blur of lines and curves.

As for the rest. Oh my god. You said, to Steven,

telling me I’m being “condescending” doesn’t cut it. Show me.”

I summarized:

whatever it was you said along the lines of “you need to prove to me that I’m being condescending,”

Any rational human being on the face of this earth, if asked “is that a fair and reasonable summary of the original statement,” would say something like, “sure, why are you even asking?” And if asked “does the original statement back up the latter claim,” they’d say something like “what claim? I guess they implicitly claimed that the person said something that falls under the category of ‘whatever they said that can be loosely but not unfairly summarized as this’? well that much is true.”

Salient, please stop stalking me, and stop with unearned hostility. Oh, and that thing where you said that since I was a woman I would never be a top mathematician? That was just mean, and I don’t appreciate it.

Cute, but you could’ve done better, don’t you think? I started out pretty jokingly. You coulda smiled. And the image of a machine-gunner in a circular firing squad is interestingly evocative enough, in a New Yorker cartoon sketch sort of way. I didn’t intend it to be insulting or derogatory, just facetiously playful and maybe (if I’m brutally honest with myself) a little condescending. “well you know how that SoV is, gunning for people all the time.” I guess I’m glad you decided to break off from badgering Steven to badger me but didn’t consider me worth the effort of trolling better, because … who on earth needs more blog fights? This one’s been bad enough.

Still, from now on I’ll remember these quips of yours whenever you’re jackhammering on about the need for citations backing up every last damn assertion or conjecture (or even joke!) that a person dares to make in your presence, and I’ll smile a little. The trouble with deciding to out-and-out troll somebody, even when it’s in obvious pokety-poke jest, is that you forfeit credibility when trying to assert yourself as a paragon of incisive and well-sourced assertions of fact and argumentation. You’ve given that status up by implicitly acknowledging the legitimacy of alternative modes of communication, unless you think your own statement’s unfair, which would be silly. (And hey, it’s cool. Most of the rest of us never bother to even attempt that paragon-type assertion about ourselves; it’s probably a good thing to give up.)

I don’t know what I’ve done out of the ordinary to earn your spite

See, that bit was nice, clever, because you’re aware you didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and that part of the point of my original joke was that you’re ordinarily this obtuse and inexplicably demanding. So, in the most literal sense, you’ve done nothing out of the ordinary to earn my spite or spittle! All good troll quips contort themselves around a small kernel of truth like this. So if I even attempted to respond to this, I’d be left sputtering at the incoherence of it, its utter detachment from any description of events I could comprehend, its nonetheless-plausible-soundingness, and probably its character as a “mirroring of the Right” or whatever strange thing it was you accused me of earlier (I have no idea what that meant, and don’t mind heading to the grave not knowing). This bit was good, though. That’s the quality trolling I figured you’d be able to deliver.

It’s a bit strange reading the last portion of comments in this thread. Obama has done quite well on health care, financial regulation, and foreign policy.

On health-care: the fact is that after months of negotiations, a bill with a public option barely passed the House in late 2010, and in late December 2010 a bill without a public option squeaked by in the Senate. In January the Democrats lost their 60th vote in the Senate. Two months later, Obama signed a compromise bill that, while it did not contain a public option, still constituted the most massive reform of the health-care system in decades.

On financial reform: the bill addressed the major problems that led to the financial crisis: lack of transparency and oversight of credit default swaps, regulatory inability to seize and wind down systemically important companies in an orderly fashion, and proprietary trading.

On foreign policy: Obama has wound down the conflict in Iraq, while focusing efforts to bring matters to a conclusion in Afghanistan. He has strengthened US relationships across the globe, and has acted very prudently with respect to Iran.

I regard all of these things as excellent outcomes, and as important stepping stones to future policy achievements. Obama is pragmatic, and, though left-leaning, a moderate. That is why I voted for him. It is why he will win in 2012. It is why he can plausibly run as the candidate grounded in reality, with a focus on pragmatism and progress, while painting the Republicans as a group of carnival performers divorced from reality, hawking ideological snake-oil when what we all want is real medicine.

I understand why those further to the left disagree with his policies, but surely we can all agree that they’re better than what the Republicans offer, and surely we can all agree that they’re a big step in the right direction.

The Swiss model is bad, it’s unable to contain costs, and yet it’s sill much more logical than the new US system. Others noted the non-profit nature of it, and the fact that it’s the same for everybody; no Medicaid, Medicare, VA, etc. – what a mess.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I was a Hillary supporter, and it is precisely because of health care issues that this is so. Yes, she would have been in all probability another embedded third-wayer. But on her signature issue – health care reform – I believed (actually, believed what Krugman wrote at the time) that she would have done a far better job of it than Obama did. Who in any event has turned out to be – surprise! – the most committed third-wayer of them all.

In fact, here’s my conspiracy theory: The shenanigans around the primary process which resulted in Hillary losing to Obama were engineered precisely because she couldn’t have been fobbed off on health care reform the way Obama was.

So what exactly would have been different?

… See, the problem is summed up by your use of the word “exactly.” The devil is in the details for more than one of those steps. If you prefer something other than the Hacker blueprint, than it doesn’t matter how it’s tweaked, and “exactly” isn’t relevant. On the other hand, if you think the Hacker blueprint was implemented poorly by the Affordable Care Act, then deviations from “exactly” become important. As we also saw with Dodd-Frank, for instance, “regulated” has a lot of wiggle room.

(FWIW, which approaches zero as a limit, I’m much more inclined towards single-payer, or indeed pretty much any European system other than the Swiss one. Yet the Swiss model as implemented in Switzerland would still be an improvement, especially since we weren’t getting the NHS or Canadian Medicare out of the US Congress this time around. Perhaps someday, assuming those systems weather the electoral empowerment of those pledged to destroy them.)

Steven, this really does not become you. If you want to claim that these are “exactly” the same, it behooves you to show why, in particular, why the differences don’t matter. You know, the whole burden-of-proof thing? As to the differences, let’s let Krugman have his say:

Both plans require that private insurers offer policies to everyone, regardless of medical history. Both also allow people to buy into government-offered insurance instead.

And both plans seek to make insurance affordable to lower-income Americans. The Clinton plan is, however, more explicit about affordability, promising to limit insurance costs as a percentage of family income. And it also seems to include more funds for subsidies.

See that bit about “government-offered health insurance”? Also, ironically enough:

But the big difference is mandates: the Clinton plan requires that everyone have insurance; the Obama plan doesn’t.

And:

But while it’s easy to see how the Clinton plan could end up being eviscerated, it’s hard to see how the hole in the Obama plan can be repaired. Why? Because Mr. Obama’s campaigning on the health care issue has sabotaged his own prospects.

You see, the Obama campaign has demonized the idea of mandates — most recently in a scare-tactics mailer sent to voters that bears a striking resemblance to the “Harry and Louise” ads run by the insurance lobby in 1993, ads that helped undermine our last chance at getting universal health care.

If Mr. Obama gets to the White House and tries to achieve universal coverage, he’ll find that it can’t be done without mandates — but if he tries to institute mandates, the enemies of reform will use his own words against him.

If you combine the economic analysis with these political realities, here’s what I think it says: If Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, there is some chance — nobody knows how big — that we’ll get universal health care in the next administration. If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, it just won’t happen.

The Krug-man calls it again :-) The takeaway here is that Hillary seemed more up-front about the realities, and I tended to trust what she had to say about her signature issue. Obama? Not so much. He was promising a pony he couldn’t deliver and this was obvious to everyone who was paying any sort of attention at all.

More thoughts from Krugman in another column on health care, Obama, and his apologists:

Now, if I had my way I’d just go to single-payer, Medicare for All. But that’s politically impossible, at least for now. What had me hopeful was that the Democratic candidates seemed to be offering a more feasible path that could work politically: regulation, subsidies, mandates, plus public-private competition that could eventually lead to single-payer.

Obama’s plan fell short — but I was initially willing to cut him slack, figuring that it could be improved. But then he began making the weakness of his plan a selling point, and attacking his rivals for getting it right. And in the process he has systematically trashed the prospects for actually achieving universal coverage.

The Obama plan is still vastly preferable to plans that rely on tax credits and the magic of the marketplace. But from where I sit, a dream is dying — and progressive Obama supporters, caught up in the romance of his candidacy, don’t understand that he’s actually undermining their cause.

Well Steven? The ball’s in your court now. And this time, when you have an opinion, please take the trouble to support it with facts and cites.

No more of this nonsense where you throw out something unsubstantiated and then challenge others to prove you wrong or hope that no one catches you out on the important details which make the two plans anything but “basically the same” :-(

SoV:

You know what? I hope you don’t treat your colleagues like this in real life, because this pattern of giving no benefit of the doubt whatsoever and automatically jumping to the worst possible conclusion is really rude. How ’bout we read the Clinton plan together?

But as for specific issues you mention:

1. The mandate – guess what? Obama ended up including a mandate to have insurance!
2. Subsidies – the subsidies enacted also cap costs as a share of income!

I see an earlier comment of mine is still stuck in moderation, so let me repost:

—-begin—-

This would seem to be the nut of the needless disagreement between Mr. Attewell and Professor Violets. Mr. Attewell is correct that the mandate to buy private insurance under a government framework is similar between the two systems, and that it probably wasn’t the best European model to emulate. Professor Violets is correct that there is nevertheless a noticeable difference due to levels of regulation and the non-profit nature of Switzerland’s lowest tier of coverage.

Actually, my point was just a little different: Attewell disagreed that HCR “reform” was nonsensical. He also said the two mandates were “basically the same”.

As I pointed out, anyone halfway familiar with this assertion (shucks, I believe even McArdle did her usual dissembling generalization schtick and said the Swiss and U.S. mandates were “basically the same”) knew it for the talking point it was.

Iow, if you want to say the system of mandates were similar, fine. If you want to say they are “basically the same”, you’re kinda sorta obligated to add that crucial piece of information about the differences. Otherwise you’re just trying to force a conclusion onto other people who may not know better.

Notice btw that “basically the same” is a normative judgment call: Some people will disagree that same-sex marriages are “basically the same” as the hetero-sex ones while other people will agree that humans and jellyfish are “basically the same”. And vice versa.

The point is, if you’re going to present your (normative) opinion as if it has some sort of weight, it’s on you to make sure your audience has all the relevant facts so it can decide for itself. Or even more briefly: None of this claptrap about calling Saddam a “gathering threat” while selectively feeding and withholding information to the general populace with the intent of fostering a like opinion amongst them.

With those thoughts in mind, if you look up above, you’ll see that I first made the claim about a difference between the two systems, then I added a link, and then finally I offered my own opinion, not a considered analysis. I’ll let other people decide for themselves whether or not the two implementations of insurance mandates are “basically the same”. Does anyone really think that this extra bit of information isn’t necessary to form an opinion as to whether or not the two are “basically the same”? Does anyone think that Attewell[1] was actually just about to inform us of this difference :-(

[1]Since he’s stated before that he’s at least a mid-level party apparatchik, I’ll give him a pass on personal conduct; after all, no one expects a Seattle Mariner 3rd baseman to say anything but good about his team’s prospects whatever the current win/loss stats may indicate.

—-end—-

In the meantime, Attewell’s , shall we say, idiosyncratic ideas of what’s “rude” and what’s “proper” have been made more apparent. So, a little test: Who thinks that there is a difference worth remarking upon between these two statements:

1)The U.S. and Swiss mandates for insurance are basically the same.

2)The U.S. and Swiss mandates for insurance are basically the same, but the Swiss system also exercises much tighter regulation over the insurance industry to the point that it is not allowed to make a profit on basic coverage.

Does anyone really believe that no one who didn’t know that extra fact in 2) would change their mind? Does anyone really believe that the ones who changed their minds would change from “not basically the same” to “basically the same”?

Or do most people believe that there would be a significant number of people who would change their minds in the light of this extra fact, and that they would change their minds to say that the mandates are not basically the same?

Steven is perfectly entitled to his own opinion. He is not (imho) entitled to withhold information that has the potential to change other people’s minds on the subject in way that would conflict with his opinion.

Finally, does anyone really believe that this is a horribly contrived standard, or that I’m simply being mean or hostile in drawing attention to lapses in it’s application? Or do most people believe that this is a perfectly reasonable, perfectly acceptable standard, and that people who don’t hold to it, say the makers of Vioxx, are behaving in a less than sterling manner?