A philosophical question for you: If the intelligentsia loses its intelligence does it automatically become part of the right wing?
I bring this up because Maureen Dowd, usually the driest of intellectual wit, is now comparing “progressives” (for whom she has a demeaning definition) with Republican crazies:
On the Republican side, the crazies often end up helping the Republican leadership. On the Democratic side, the radicals are constantly sniping at Obama, expressing their feelings of betrayal.
Mark Halperin tries to come to her aid on The Ed Show, but guest host Cenk Uygur takes him apart. More on him later, but first, can you believe Dowd agrees with Robert Gibbs? Can you believe anyone does?
The video clip of Mark Halperin is below, but first, let’s talk about Maureen Dowd’s love letter to Robert Gibbs. In No Love From the Lefties, she purports to think Gibbs should be fired, but not for his comments about the “professional left”, which Dowd buys hook, line and sinker.
According to her, there’s a new definition for “progressive”:
After Bush, Democrats thought the way to paper over the distinction between liberals and radical lefties was to call everyone progressives. But calling yourself a progressive is just a stupid disguise where you pretend the contradiction isn’t there.
Let’s first clear up the lazy thinking here. The primary difference between progressives and liberals is that progressivism is primarily a reaction to modern life and is specifically founded in the middle class, whereas liberalism more broadly aims at social justice. These two political philosophies overlap considerably, probably making them difficult to distinguish. Since it’s almost never necessary to do so, most people probably don’t bother.
This would be quaint, if it weren’t that Dowd uses this loose thinking to take swipes at us.
On the Republican side, the crazies often end up helping the Republican leadership. On the Democratic side, the radicals are constantly sniping at Obama, expressing their feelings of betrayal.
Let’s clear up this lazy thinking, too. The primary difference between right-wing crazies and the “radicals” “sniping” at Obama from “the left” is that we are smart enough not to fall victim to our own propaganda. On the right, a Republican “authority” can make a pronouncement and immediately many ditto heads will repeat whatever it is without giving it a moment’s thought. For example, they can tell their side that building a mosque in lower Manhattan is an affront to the nation’s pride, and immediately you will see otherwise sensible men stand up on TV and condemn those terrible Muslims for daring to build a house of worship in the U.S. (I’m not talking about Newt when I say “otherwise sensible men”, obviously.)
Progressives don’t buy such obvious tomfoolery. Truly stupid stuff gets what it deserves. This should not be misinterpreted as “expressing … feelings of betrayal”.
Dowd apparently can’t tell the difference between politics and policy.
Some liberals, like the president, felt he could live without the public option, whereas lefties thought the public option was essential. Some liberals, like the president, think you can escalate our wars to end them, whereas lefties just want the wars ended.
I’ll let the spurious comment that the President is a liberal pass, for now. Moving on…
Long sufferers of my diaries will know that (A) I’m a liberal and (B) I think the public option is essential to healthcare reform. Is that a “liberal” position? I think it is because the public option increases individual liberty. It gives you more (and better) choices. It also defends your personal interests against powerful corporations. IMO, the essence of liberalism is a strong sense of defending the personal sphere of thought and action against all intrusions: from government, from family, from traditional institutions like the church, from corporations, and from any other powerful interest (especially ones where the power is derived from wealth). Not to mention from traditions themselves, such as racial or religious prejudice.
So, by my definition, the public option is a liberal policy. And, a progressive one, too, in that many people are simply born into poverty and will never get decent healthcare unless they have access to a publicly-defined and managed option. In the modern world, you don’t have the option to go cut out your own share of the wilderness and make the most of it on your own. The society you are born into has established all the rules and circumscribed your life well before you showed up.
So, whether you think healthcare reform demands the public option or not has nothing to do with whether you are a liberal or a progressive; it is simply both.
But Dowd’s implication is more than that. She’s implying that this is just a matter of politics. In her parlance, it’s about “appeasing your ideologues”. That makes it seem like it’s optional. The public option is not “optional”. It is the minimum change necessary to move us away from for-profit healthcare insurance and toward some kind of integrated public system. This has to do with pure economics, not politics. To get an affordable healthcare system, the U.S. must cut vast sums of money from the current system. The only feasible way to do that is to end corporate waste. The public option is the minimum step necessary to move in that direction.
Put simply, we spend about $10,000 per person in this country for healthcare. For those that get it through public systems (like Medicare or the VA), most of the money goes to actual care and the cost is less than $10K. For the rest, who receive their care primarily through for-profit healthcare plans (HMOs, PPOs, etc.), the cost is greater than $10K because there is money for the actual care plus money for corporate waste: profits, excessive executive pay, marketing and other costs the for-profit system pays that public systems don’t.
We pay about $2.5 trillion a year for healthcare, about 17.6% of GDP, but we don’t cover everyone. Those additional people mostly don’t get the care they need until it becomes catastrophic. Then they get it from the emergency room (or they die). PPACA (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) pushes an estimated 30 million of those people into the for-profit health insurance system, which will charge them about $10K per person in order to be able to service them. Actually, since it’s for-profit, the amount will probably be higher because that system has to pay for services plus corporate waste. (But, some amount will be saved because they will probably get care in a non-emergency setting.) If you just multiply out the estimated $10K time 30 million people you get about $300 billion or about 2% of GDP, which will push healthcare in this country toward 20%, despite these savings.
What would the public option do and why is it essential to fixing the healthcare crisis? It would allow more people to move into the public system, where the cost structure is lower and which avoids corporate waste. If this resulted in (eventually) a single-payer system, not only would we avoid corporate waste but it would radically cut down on the number of plans in existence. This would reduce administrative costs, as well. It would save both absolutely in economic terms and it would save the federal government on its costs, as well, bringing down the budget deficit. By eliminating up to 20% corporate waste (based on an 80% medical loss ratio) and up to 12% on administrative costs (based on reducing the current estimate of 15% administrative costs to about 3-4% more typical of public systems), it would cut costs enough to get us affordable, universal coverage. No other proposal on the table comes close. Republican plans could save perhaps $60 billion or so, but we need to cut about $650 billion out of current costs to get an affordable system. A 30% reduction in costs is feasible by eliminating corporate waste and unnecessary administrative costs, enough to save hundreds of billions per year and make affordable, universal coverage feasible.
So, it isn’t a question of liberal vs. progressive. It’s a question of actually solving the problem vs. not actually solving it. It’s a policy matter, not a political one.
But maybe the real issue is White House “pragmatism” vs. progressive “idealism”. Maybe, as Dowd puts it:
President Obama is testing how elastic he can be, how much realism he can have before he betrays his idealism. For better and worse, he is an elitist and a situationist. But the professional left — like the professional right — often considers pragmatism a moral compromise.
Let me skewer this one, too. First of all, I’m not a member of the professional left. But my perception of them isn’t one of idealism. Far from it. I look at them as all too willing to sell out for their individual causes. In any case, my personal criticism of Obama is not that he’s too pragmatic; it’s that he’s pragmatically going quite often in the wrong direction. For what is wrong with PPACA is not that it’s a compromise, but that it moves the post in the wrong direction—toward for-profit healthcare and therefore away from solving the healthcare crisis. I could brook a baby step toward the goal. What I can’t countenance is moving a leap away from it. At some point you have to make progress or you can’t honestly label yourself a “progressive”. And, at some point you have to increase liberty or you can’t honestly label yourself a “liberal”. Obama has no claim to either.
Well, that’s not generous enough, really. I can imagine Robert Gibbs now screaming, “See! I told you so! Those blankety-blank progressives won’t give Obama credit no matter what he does.”
Settle down, Bob.
I think he’s made progress on a number of issues. The most salient is that he helped keep us out of a 1930s-style depression. If one can say that holding your ground when it is collapsing all around you is progress against a setback, then I would grant this as “progress”. I also think that he made progress on arms limitation (although feedback from other progressives would dispute this). I would grant him moderate progress on Wall Street reform, although my comments on holding your ground while it collapses apply here, too. (Not that I could get agreement from all progressives even on this.)
But, Dowd’s defenders (like Mark Halperin of Time Magazine on The Ed Show, interviewed by Cenk Uygur) might claim that a public option wasn’t feasible:
Halperin: I think what Maureen Dowd and Robert Gibbs were talking about was a different set of issues, on which, in the view of Robert Gibbs and, I think, some other people in the White House the left blogosphere and other voices are unrealistic in their expectations about the difference between what’s possible and what’s not possible. …
Uygur: Mark, when you go to actual examples, though, I don’t see any of their points. Because, look, what did he have to do? Robert Gibbs made up one. He said, “Oh, all these liberals that want to get rid of the Pentagon.” Really? Name one? He couldn’t name one in the country. So, where is the left being deranged? Just give me one example.
Halperin: Well, “deranged” is not a word I would use. I think what frustrates Robert Gibbs and other people in the White House is, let’s say, take for example, healthcare. There’s an issue where the President and a lot of Democrats, at great political expense which they knew going in, they knew that if they passed healthcare the way it came out … [there was] a pretty good chance they’d suffer political costs. They passed what they felt, and I think they were right, was, given the way they went with Democrat-only votes, the best bill they could. There are a lot of Democrats who complain it’s not single-payer, there’s no public option, and there’s more focus and energy on complaining about the way the bill came out, including, as you pointed out, making a deal with the pharmaceutical companies. Their legislative strategy required making that deal from their point of view. [emphasis mine] They’d like to see more appreciation and energy for the mid-terms on the overall passage of a historic act on healthcare rather than complaining that the bill’s not perfect from the point of view of some on the left.
…
Uygur: Now, let me explain it really clearly. What we had was originally President Obama saying he was for single-payer. And then, after he won the election: “Single-payer? I’ve got no interest in that!” Right? Not even close. Then all we wanted was a tiny, tiny thing. A public option, just to introduce competition in any way. Instead, what President Obama did is he left the system exactly as it is. We have to go to private insurance. We don’t have a choice. Is that clear? Why is that crazy or radical to worry about that?
Halperin: You know why he did that? He did that because they could count the votes. … They tried with all their might.... [Continuing in the same vein.]
Uygur: That’s an easy... No. Every single report coming out of the White House… No, they didn’t. That is not true. Every report out of the White House said that they did not try for the public option. They never wanted the public option. The easy answer is, “Oh, I don’t have the votes! Oh, what can I do?!” How about you try. … Did Bush or Cheney ever whine about not having the votes or did they just get whatever they wanted whether it’s the Iraq war or the largest tax cuts in history with a much narrower majority, if any majority at all in the Senate?
The idea that somehow the public option wasn’t feasible is not credible. For one thing, even in the final hour, about 45 Senators pledged to vote for it. But even if it were never feasible, that doesn’t mean that it should have been left out. Why should we go backwards on healthcare in order to “get something”? If that something isn’t moving us toward the goal, why make the sacrifice? Isn’t this putting politics before policy?
What Halperin is saying, and what is undoubtedly true, is that their legislative strategy was to sell out the public option and make deals with the pharmaceutical companies to extend the current, broken system and label that a victory. Then they want us to pretend that this is “a historic act on healthcare” and get excited for the mid-term elections. In what universe? Look, Maureen, I mean Robert, I mean Mark: Liberals are simply not stupid enough to go along with a real failure like our counterparts on the other side. We aren’t interested in historic acts. We want solutions to problems. If you can’t give us that, then don’t expect our appreciation for failing.
Which is also what is most at fault with Dowd’s column: she thinks that this is a political problem. The complaint is that the left isn’t sufficiently appreciative of what Obama had done for them. Again, I say, it isn’t about what he’s done for the left. It’s about what he’s done for the country. Does forcing poor people to pay rich people for healthcare constitute some kind of social justice? Was spending a king’s ransom to The Bandits of Wall Street to keep us from utter depravation the best they could do? Does maintaining very expensive wars contribute to our country’s security? Does entrenching Bush’s callous disregard for justice make this a stronger democracy? Are we really to believe that cuts to Social Security need to be on the table in order to balance the budget?
My answer is “no”. This isn’t good enough for the country. Never mind whether it’s liberal or progressive. The policy is wrong. Maybe it would improve if Obama were a little less pragmatic and a little more ideological.
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Find more Liberal Thinking here:
Progressive Lessons for Robert Gibbs
Obama Administration Successes and Failures
Measuring the Success of Healthcare Reform
The Still Obtuse Chris Matthews