ASSUMPTION - This Is the "Last Chance" to Pass Health Care for a Generation: This.... makes zero empirical sense. Last I checked, Democrats will still control Congress and the White House for all of 2010. These are the Democrats making this "last chance" argument - and they are the same Democrats who would get to decide if that's actually true.
ASSUMPTION - Dems Couldn't/Wouldn't Come Back to Health Care Again Soon If This Bill Fails: This is related to the first assumption. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't - but there's the assumption that they would be strongly inclined not to because of the politics of it. I don't get this at all. Seems to me Democrats and the White House are so completely vested in getting something - anything! - done that they'd have to come back to it, and quickly.
ASSUMPTION - We Need 60 Votes to Pass Anything: Again, just not true, even though it's been said over and over and over again. Sure, there are problems with reconciliation - but it's a fact that Democrats could at least attempt to pass a public option or Medicare buy-in via reconciliation.
You remember the Mad MagazineNatinal Lampoon cover, 'Buy this magazine, or we'll shoot this dog'? Well the above arguments basically amount to 'Buy this magazine, or I'll shoot my dog!'
David, you are brilliant and a great writer, but the health care fight isn't just a matter of a few people deciding to do it or not. It's the culmination of movement work, local/state/federal, going back decades. Of fighting and losing in 1993-4, regrouping and rebuilding. Of putting together a coalition, HCAN, that is historic and unusually unified on our side (full disclosure: I'm a founder and co-chair). Of having a President and a strong Democratic (no, not progressive, Lord knows we've learned that well enough) Congressional majority who campaigned to win health care.
We just aren't going to get this opportunity again in a long time. How long? You don't know and I don't know, but I don't want to find out. I don't want to fight this fight when health care is over 20% of the GDP, when 60 million people are uninsured, when even fewer doctors practice primary care, when private corporations have even further dismantled one of the best public goods our government offers.
What Jeff inadevertantly revealed was a fundamental orientation predestined to produce sub-par, if not totally inadequate results. I'm not blaming him personally for this--the inter-related problems here are much bigger than any one person, organization or even coalition. Let me quickly explain the three problems:
(1) In contrast to the more-than-decade-long process of "fighting and losing...regrouping and rebuilding...[and] putting together a coalition" that Jeff mentions, the right shows us to still be in the horse-and-buggy era. Unlike us, the right builds long-term institutional infrastructure. With that infrastructure in place, it's a relatively easy task to pull together a coalition to do whatever it is you want to do. You are not assured of success, of course. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you need to go into battle. And as a result you can afford to go all out, and risk losing everything, because the cost of doing it all over again is not prohibitive. In fact, if you do it right, you can actually gain more from the repeat effort than it costs you.
Compared to that, our organizing methodology is doomed to failure. The cost of trying again as Jeff describes it is prohibitively high. And since everyone knows this in advance, everyone knows that compromise is hardwired into the very heart of the effort, which in turn means that the entire fight is conducted with at least one hand tied behind our back.
(2) Jeff representatively assumes that if we don't succeed things will just continue to get much worse, but that that won't do anything to increase political pressure to help our side. This indicates an underlying disconnect, in which all the agency comes from top down, from the organizers who put the coalition together, and others like them, rather than from the people themselves. This sort of top-down elitism, and lack of faith in the people themselves is also fundamentally self-defeating. The idea that we are going to do something to save you is precisely the thing that conservative narratives are primed to attack--and for good reason. People cannot and should not reasonably trust institutional solutions that they themselves do not have a significant role in shaping.
(3) Yet, paradoxically, Jeff himself has no sense of his own agency. If we fail now, it's over. Nothing more we can do. And he is not alone in this. This is virtually universal mindset of those who have had "a seat at the table", or been closely aligned with them.
Again, this is not a criticism of Jeff personally. It's not even a criticism of like-minded health-care advocates. The same failings can be found on other issues as well. This is a failing of progressives in general, and unless it is addressed at a movement-wide level, it his highly unlikely that anything significant can be done to change things, and rid ourselves of the fundmantal big stupid that otherwise quite intelligent people continue to thoughtless embrace.
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