Recently there have been some signs of resistance among the progressive caucus in the House, and among some senators, at least on accepting further compromises to the already watered down health care legislation. One would have been more enthused to see this sort of backbone evidenced when the single-payer option mysteriously disappeared from discussion before the debate even began, but, I suppose this is progress of a sort.
As progressives, we’ve come a long way since the aftermath of the 2000 election. We’ve elected some genuinely serious people to the House and the Senate. Largely through the blogosphere, we have a certain influence on the terms of debate for issues of interest. Our support, however, is largely taken for granted. This is the case, I would argue, because it is always assumed that in the end, and usually quite a long way from the end, we will jump on board with whatever compromise is concocted by those with real power.
What we lack as a movement, as much as we would like to deny it, is real conviction and maturity. We need to recognize that sometimes it is necessary to say no even if it means wrecking a compromise solution. What a lot of our adherents seem to think is that having a seat at the table and getting some media attention is equivalent to having real power. The right-wingers spent years in the political wilderness before achieving their aims. We should be prepared to do the same thing if we are serious.
There is a good article out on Salon now by Michael Lind, “Can Obama be Deprogrammed?”. Although I do not always see eye to eye with Lind on all issues, he makes a number of valid points, the principal ones being that Obama is a neoliberal, not a progressive in the sense that we understand the term, and that there is a big and principled difference between the market-driven neoliberal solutions and the kind of New Deal/Democratic Socialist programs that we advocate.
Just because we all want to feel that we haven’t wasted our time and money electing these guys because they seemed to be the best alternatives available does not mean that we have to support legislation that we know is dopey or meaningless. So, to their credit, some of these legislators are waking up. I’m certainly not proposing some kind of sectarian warfare from the left, but, at the risk of creating some controversy here, shouldn’t there be a point where we realize that sometimes having a bad solution is worse than having none at all?
The health care bill, whatever is ultimately adopted, will determine the foundation of health care in America for the next twenty years. Is this foundation to be private sector insurance and the principle that everyone should be forced to buy crappy insurance? Similarly, the climate control bill is just a bad bill that establishes the dubious principle that the best way to transition to green and renewable energy is to establish a market for pollution and then give away credits to all the polluters so that it doesn’t cost them anything anyway.
The problem with neoliberalism, the third way, and all that stuff, is that it is the lobbyist’s dream. This is because it was invented by lobbyists and oligarchs as a way to assuage their collective conscience while still allowing the country to be fleeced. All the neoliberal solutions are very complicated and subject to continuous refinement and tinkering and the insertion of all kinds of exceptions. This isn’t by accident, is it? One of Lind’s points is that at least the New Dealers proposed palliatives that everybody could understand. They established rights and entitlements, bad words nowadays.
Samuel Lubell suggested that in times of political realignment, it is within the majority party that the real issues are fought out, that what happens within the minority party is of little consequence, or merely a reflection of the majority party split. What I want to suggest is that if we are genuinely entering a period when the Democratic Party is set to become the new majority party, we as progressives ought to be aligning ourselves with a winning position that will actually allow us to set and address the real political agenda in this country, that in fact the victory of Obama was an illusory one, representing the reestablishment of the neoliberal, DLC-oriented Democratic agenda, an agenda that has no real constituency in the classic political sense. In any case, we have nothing to lose here. If we are not in a majority position, then the Republicans will return to power and we are all in deep trouble anyway.
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