Christopher Hayes of the Nation has an article up called System Failure in which he discusses his disappointment with the administration, but concludes that we must support it.
Hayes article runs through a compassionate enunciation of causes for liberal discontent with the incumbent administration. Obama's foreign policy 'realism', which Obama himself compared to Bush 41 - healthcare inefficiency - the un and underinsured - unemployment - climate change - immigration's status quo. He finally decides that the "ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems" is oligarchy, "too much in too few hands".
The problem, as he notes, is that the structures of government are too weak to easily fix the first-order problems - the only easy way is to entrust them to the oligarchy.
By example, he uses an analogy about a hypothetical do-gooder (a community organizer, perhaps) who wants to help protect the small business owners of his poor neighborhood from the gang that is extorting protection money from them. You, as the do-gooder, have the opportunity to help pay the protection money of any of the locals who can't afford it - saving them from the terrible outcome of default; but you are in a moral quandry:
by taking this action you would also be channeling revenue into the pockets of the protection racket and, perhaps more insidious, further entrenching its power by conceding its central premise: that all local businesses must pay up in order to survive.
Hayes goes on to say that both choices are correct:
Those arguing that the bill will be a massive step forward in reducing the misery of the uninsured are for the most part right. And those arguing that the Senate version of the bill is a grotesque sellout to Big Pharma and, to a lesser extent, Big Insurance, are more or less correct as well.
Hayes describes himself as being in the "pay off the thugs" camp, because of the real benefits of the bill, and his hope that it can be fixed later.
I firmly agree with Hayes comment that both sides of this debate are in the moral right, because they are committed to the same good end. The intent to provide universal health care and control costs before they strangle the nation is shared by everyone in every post I've read.
Hayes makes his big pitch to convince those like me who are increasingly disaffected (check the poll), through a German fable:
a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. "After the old man's death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being."
This parable is especially apt if, as has been argued, the public option was never on the table, and was just floated to excite liberals into supporting the HCR bill and scare conservative Democrats into staying at the bargaining table.
No rational person disagrees with Hayes argument that democracy is a never-ending process, which will probably never reach a 'perfect' point, where it needs never to be improved. That's the problem with the argument, - does Hayes think that the anti-democratic institutions want just the 'protection money', and that is it? Or that they are waiting passively for us to till their corruption from our soil? Incremental and pragmatic change may be inadequate to the task of confronting the dynamic resources of anti-democratic institutions.
Those who, like me, wish this bill would be scuttled in its present form, are sometimes accused of hoping for a 'noble failure' instead of this weak success - but the fundamental belief that we can't employ the precedents of conduct that the Republicans set in their passage of Medicare Part D, the invasion of Iraq, and the tax cuts for the rich by reconciliation is a recipe for 'noble failure'; the legislative process was redefined, and to refuse to employ similar behavior to the Republican precedents to advance our own agenda is like fighting for your life with one hand behind your back.