David Frum is right: conservatives have suffered crushing, nearly irreversible defeats

by: Chris Bowers

Fri Apr 02, 2010 at 13:52


David Frum appeared on the Colbert report last night.  His segment was impressive for its lucidity and intellectual honesty, traits that are difficult to find in conservative commentators these days.  Frum is correct on many points, but most importantly the following three:

1. The intellectual origins of the health care bill are Republican.

The DNA of this bill traces back to what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts, and it traces back before that to the Republican alternative to Clinton Care back in 1993 and 1994.

Correct.  This is not an ideal progressive achievement, even if there are some aspects of the bill, such as the student loan component, as well as large expansion of Medicaid and Community Health Centers, that are progressive victories.

2. This is the largest expansion of government since the New Deal

We are facing, as conservatives and Republicans, the largest expansion of government since the New Deal.

This is also correct.  Since fiscal year 2007, the last budgetary year of Republican trifecta governance in Washington, D.C., total public sector spending on social programs (that is, public spending that does not include defense, criminal justice, interest payments, or general government administration) has increased by 7.66% of GDP.  The only other time in American history where social program spending increased by that amount was from 1929 to 1939, when it increased by 7.86% of GDP.  Even during the Great Society expansion of 1961 to 1972, total public sector program spending only increased by 5.11% of GDP.

Click here for a chart detailing this history. The source material is taken from usgovernmentspending.com.

3.  the conservative defeat is nearly irreversible.

Conservatives and Republicans suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960's... We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

Once again, this is correct.  As point #2 details, over the past four years, conservatives have suffered significant defeats in terms of the expansion of public social program spending. But, just as importantly, they are highly unlikely to ever reverse these defeats.

Other than the decline that took place in World War Two, public expenditures on social programs have never declined by more than 2.52% of their peak (see here).  Historically, it has proven extremely difficult to cut social program spending on a broad scale.  Republicans failed to make any dents in public sector social program spending when they had the trifecta from 2003-2006, for example.

Further, even after the unemployment situation improves, even after the stimulus is over, and even after TARP is done, future projections show that any decline at all is unlikely.  Future projections for fiscal year 2014 and beyond, when the spending portions of the health care bill start to kick in, put public sector social spending at the same levels of GDP as current levels.   Republicans really are going to have to repeal, or make cuts, to things like Medicaid, SCHIP, Social Security, local education spending, and the new student loan public option in order to return public sector social program spending to pre-2009 levels.

It is very unlikely that cuts of that sort will happen.  Wagner's law seems likely to hold.

****

Progressives didn't get close to everything we wanted, and it sure as hell isn't the job of progressives to be satisfied or happy.  However, Frum is absolutely right that conservatives have still suffered a crushing defeat that is highly unlikely to ever be reversed.  Even if some of the ideas in the health reform bill came from Republicans, the idea of expanding public sector spending on social programs most definitely did not.  Over the past four years, public sector spending on social programs has increased by an amount equivalent to, or greater than, the New Deal and the Great Society.  We have a long way to go, but it is still a generational achievement to be proud of.

*****

Update: If you think the 2007-2015 expansion of public sector social investment spending by 7.63% of GDP has been mainly in the form of corporate welfare, it would behoove you to post the numbers proving this.  For example, in 2015, TARP will be entirely over (0.00% of GDP in 2015), and the subsidies in the exchange are projected to be $45 billion (or about 0.23% of GDP in 2015).  Further, the student loan bill actually cancels a corporate welfare program.

By no means do I think the job is done, and I am well aware that there is a lot more corporate welfare than there used to be.  However, declarative statements that current expansions of public sector social programs are entirely, or even mainly, corporate welfare isn't proof.

Without citing the Wall Street bailouts, and without citing more than $45 billion in exchange subsidies, please point out the massive increases in public sector expenditures that either have gone, or will have gone, go to private corporations since 2007.  I don't think they are a large percentage of the public sector social expenditures expansion, but I am open-minded to being shown otherwise.

Chris Bowers :: David Frum is right: conservatives have suffered crushing, nearly irreversible defeats

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David Frum is right: conservatives have suffered crushing, nearly irreversible defeats | 58 comments
not the teabagger numbers again... (0.00 / 0)

Out of the mouths of turncoats (4.00 / 2)
I'm no Frumfan, Chris. If it were up to me, I'd drop him naked in the middle of the Kalahari with a gourd half full of water and a pointed stick. Still, I think you're right. Glenn Beck, apoplexy and an AK-47 does not a counter-revolution make.

We have far more to fear, in the long run, from our good, gray President, who's beginning to resemble George II more with every passing day. If only he were as smart as he thinks he is.

Make that George III (N/T) (4.00 / 1)

[ Parent ]
on social security and medicare (4.00 / 2)
from the march 29 quinnipiac poll:

The relative lack of a partisan gap also is evident in limiting the growth of Social Security and Medicare. On Social Security, 73 percent of Republicans, 84 percent of Democrats and 75 percent of independent voters are opposed. On Medicare, 75 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of independents are opposed.
http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x129...
Republican Health Care Bill (4.00 / 1)
While it is absolutely true that the HCR bill's roots are largely Republican, I'd like to point out that at no time did Republicans ever try to implement this idea nationally.  (Heck, even RomneyCare is largely due to a Democratic state legislature.)

So while this form of HCR may be what conservatives would do if they actually gave a damn, well, you'll notice there is no evidence that they do give a damn.

exactly (4.00 / 9)
the new democrats and New Democrats are the real compassionate conservatives, in a literal sense.  If 'crushing defeat' means having nearly all your legislative programme enacted, including the repeal of welfare, extraordinarily high prison rates, massive tax cuts, at least two wars, a huge defence industry, enormous privatisation, infrastructure cuts and mismanagement so bad that they leveled a city, and eventually the people you despite taking on the ideas that you were never really serious about,

then yes, conservatives have met a crushing defeat.  i'm going to go talk to one of the 400,000 people that was deported this year or find out what happened to all those peopled for whom Welfare Ended As We Know It to find out what they think about the crushing defeat that conservatives have suffered.

[ Parent ]
but (0.00 / 0)
We beat them on Bork. Ha!
[ Parent ]
indeed!!! (4.00 / 2)
and with the help of spoiler Ross Perot, we ended 12 years of Republican tyranny in 1992, saving the American welfare state for two years!
[ Parent ]
Bork's replacement was Kennedy (4.00 / 1)
Kennedy voted with the majority on the 5-4 Casey v. Planned Parenthood decision.  That's no small victory to laugh at.  
[ Parent ]
Kennedy (0.00 / 0)
Has voted the right way on a few other key decisions that may be remembered in 100 years as saving the Republic.  Had Bork been in that seat, the dismantling of the New Deal by constitutional fiat would be far ahead of where it is today.

Kennedy is wrong more than he is right, but he is right sometimes.  Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas are always on the wrong side of everything.  Add a fifth vote like them and watch the magic unfold.

[ Parent ]
Right (0.00 / 0)
and barring a Souter-level mistake, its the best we could have expected out of Reagan, I would think.  
[ Parent ]
Not so (4.00 / 1)
Romneycare was iteration of the 1993 GOP plan, a fact pointed by not just by critics but by Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait.

This year's plan and the GOP's plan are compared here in this chart.

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.or...

The Dems' plan is better but the idea is largely the same.  

[ Parent ]
So (4.00 / 1)
What I said doesn't disagree with your response.  My point was the 1993 GOP plan was never introduced by Republicans at the national level; nationally, they never attempted to implement their plan, despite having 8 years in the White House, four of which with full Republican congressional control.  (I even mentioned RomneyCare as a parenthetical, so obviously I wasn't ignoring it, but that ain't national.)
[ Parent ]
Huh? (4.00 / 1)
the 1993 GOP plan was never introduced by Republicans at the national level;

Of course it was.

In November, 1993, Sen. John Chafee, R-R.I., introduced what was considered to be one of the main Republican health overhaul proposals:

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.or...

Now, if you mean, that a Republican president (GWB) never introduced a plan like this year Democratic plan, then I'd agree.

You point, I think, in any case, is that a plan this "good" would never have been support by a critical mass of the GOP. I'd agree with this too.  

[ Parent ]
Ok (0.00 / 0)
By the same token, Single Payer has been "introduced" by Democrats.  I think we all know how seriously to take that.
[ Parent ]
Brad DeLong Has Pointed This Out Several Times As Well (4.00 / 2)
Best of all was the post ending with this gem:

Over in that alternative branch of the quantum-mechanical multiverse in which Mitt Romney was elected President in November 2008, this health care bill--with much smaller subsidies and no tax increases on the rich, and with other tweaks and modifications--passed the House of Representatives 352-83 and passed the Senate 79-20, with near-solid Republican support. Left-wing Democrats whined that it was not real reform. The David Broders and David Brookses of the world trumpeted it as an extraordinary victory for American bipartisanship.

Instead, we are here -- where a nearly identical plan appears very, very different.

We truly live in a weird world.



"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Two points (4.00 / 17)
1. I wish I were as confident as you are that the GOP (with Dems) won't be able to make cuts to Social Security and other programs.

2. This is not a great way to gauge progressivism, seeing what percentage of the budget is social spending, mainly because not all social spending is created equal. The missing component here is the power of corporations or, if you prefer, the merging of private power and government. Much of the new spending, as opposed to the spending in the 30s and 60s, has increased the power of corporations, which means not only that the reforms will be less progressive but the corporations will be that much more able to block progressive reforms in the future.

The goal of progressives shouldn't be to merely increase spending--that's living down to a caricature--but to reduce the power of corporations and to make sure that government spending is spend on government programs.  

Agreed (4.00 / 5)
In fact, who's to say that Obama won't be the one to achieve the kinds of cuts Chris is talking about?  He just has to dig up another Heritage blueprint, dust it off and give it a good "progressive" gloss.
[ Parent ]
This is why the left's role is still important. (4.00 / 7)
Even if the GOP defeats are irreversible in some sense, the prevailing thought-patterns (as spread by hegemonic media) are still center-right, poll results to the contrary notwithstanding.  It is necessary to hold up the banners, even if the battles are unsuccessful.  

If Obama tries to be the one who guts Social Security, he must be opposed.  No more NAFTAs - Republican policies shoved down the throats of Democrats.  I don't necessarily put Health Insurance Reform in the same bag - it's more ambiguous given the politics of it - but I would put Social Security "Reform" there.

sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

[ Parent ]
this has been pointed out repeatedly in most of the triumphalist posts of this nature (4.00 / 6)
it has been ignored, for the most part - at least when i've raised it.  i'm not really the best messenger because i get aggravated easily, but it's truly disturbing that after 'conservative' got repackaged as reactonary and 'Democrat' as conservative and 'progressive' as corporate statist.

i don't think there's anything to be done.  other than making persuasive arguments i guess ;)

[ Parent ]
I just read a post (4.00 / 1)
by Al Giordano, who considers himself an anti-capitalist, and this part made me chuckle-cringe.

The sheer innovation, for example, of having the single-largest government-ordered redistribution of wealth in US history be administrated by private sector insurance companies (for that, kind readers, was the magic trick of the new Health Care Law), was the kind of three-point shot that characterizes the cleverness of the basketball player-in-chief.

(By the way, this post is pegged to Bowers's much-discussed post the other night.)

http://narcosphere.narconews.c...

[ Parent ]
Al has gone full-Pangloss WRT Obama, hasn't he n/t (4.00 / 2)

[ Parent ]
Full KOOL-AIDE, Don't You Mean??? (4.00 / 10)
When it comes to domestic policy, the United States simply has not had as effectively progressive a president since the 1933-1945 governance by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yeah.  Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Immigration Act of 1965... all peanuts, really.

'Cause Obama passed the Heritage Foundation's 1994/95 answer to HillaryCare!

Wooooooooow!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
how can a personal/party wing be considered community organising? (4.00 / 1)
successful parties combine social mobilisation around issues and electoral work, but to invoke community organizing as the reason this health care bill succeeded - that's downright offensive.

unless it did happen - and i'm in the dark - and americans are a lot more conservative and well informed than i thought.  otherwise there would have been articles and a groundswell for the public option, methinks.  or something like it.

i didn't see any opposition.  but giordano's point about the internet is right on - it really is on the ground where things happen - in concern with e-tools.  unfortunately, you can't just make up an imaginary place in your head and call it 'reality,' which i am guessing is what he did in his spiel about community organising.  unless i'm  totally mistaken.

[ Parent ]
I've directly asked Kossack "Femlaw" (4.00 / 9)
who is a higher-up staffer in OFA California about their system for prioritizing issues and deciding on OFA's agenda, as in her comments in response she's said, essentially, that the decisions are made in DC by OFA leadership, but they're always interested in getting input from people on the ground.

That's not community organizing, and Giordano knows it.  It's centralized political mobilization.  So when he says this:

For once those skills are learned and tested, they can be applied to redressing any of the grievances that the organizer (with his and her community, because an organizer never walks alone) chooses to redress. They are universal weapons that can be deployed wherever and whenever the organizer wishes to deploy them.

he should know that he's not talking about OFA.  I'm glad that OFA folks have learned how to give a rap, track numbers, and possibly how to target and cut turf.  I don't see any evidence that they're learning how to make democratic decisions about anything, or how to plan strategically...in short, how to build their own organization.  Because OFA doesn't belong to them -- it belongs to the DCC and the Obama Administration.

At least that's what I've been able to glean from what I've seen and read about it.  If anyone has evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to see it.

[ Parent ]
Ain't none (4.00 / 3)
Does anybody besides me remember what was once meant by company union?
[ Parent ]
They still exist. (4.00 / 1)
CWA of Qwest, I'm looking at you.

Health insurance is not health care.
If you don't fight, you can't win.
Never give up. Never Surrender.
Watch out for flying kabuki.
[ Parent ]
Well.... (4.00 / 4)
We I suppose we could ditch that obnoxious word progressive, and start calling ourselves something slightly more inflammatory, like Democratic Socialists, or Radical Leftists.

I mean, if the President, Arianna Huffington, and David Frum are progressives, then I'm Queen of the May. My new/old terminological suggestions might turn out to be shitty framing (Lakoff, Lakoff, Lakoff, Rah, Rah, Rah!), but at least I wouldn't have to take a ritual bath after every attempt to describe my political philosophy.

[ Parent ]
Bush (0.00 / 0)
I seem to remember Bush called himself "progressive" at least once.  I've never found the term to have any real meaning, thus preferring "liberal".

But it seems we've settled on "progressive" and the right is now attacking that, which apparently is required for a word to have actual meaning, so it is what it is.

[ Parent ]
progressive-populist works for me (0.00 / 0)
it gets both the connation of the left always splitting as well as the nice + democratic aspect of it all.  but social democrat is more accurate i think.
[ Parent ]
I really, really like the word "liberal" (4.00 / 2)
I also really, really like the term "social democrat". At least that's what I tell people when they ask me for a self-identifying political label. And then I point them to the Kennedy "Liberal" quote.

http://www.wisdomquotes.com/00...

[ Parent ]
I think we should try taking back our labels (4.00 / 1)
like "liberal", "progressive", "big government", "tax and spend", and even "socialist", before we start inventing new and ever-more elaborate ones that will inevitably be pilloried by the Right anyway.
[ Parent ]
Also to cut needless military spending (4.00 / 3)
More $ for life, less $ for death.
[ Parent ]
Indeed (4.00 / 4)
Good piece here laying out the mindblowing numbers:

Washington's deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, to which the U.S. already owes $1.5 trillion. Debt service will cost $250 billion.

To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today.

Obama's total military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret black programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan; 225,000 military "contractors" (mercenaries and workers); and veterans' costs. Add $75 billion (nearly four times Canada's total defence budget) for 16 intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far), will cost $200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and indirect expenses. Obama's Afghan "surge" of 30,000 new troops will cost an additional $33 billion - more than Germany's total defence budget.

http://www.torontosun.com/comm...

[ Parent ]
yes clearly the conservatives have suffered a crushing defeat (4.00 / 10)
that's why the democratic party has become their home ;)
it's mind boggling how many times we have to see this repeated over and over and over without acknowledging that what has happened is that the whole era of fights over the great society programs is finally over.  now we have new fights - between technocratic market-based conservatives and populists of rightwing and hopefully eventually leftwing stripes.

calling any of this progressive is ludicrous.  

the best that you can say is that conservative power finally peaked in the bush administration and now we are beginning to see a slow and steady reversal - the beginning of which is the entrenchment of their basic philosophies in law through the supreme court, the senate, to an extent the house, and in the presidency, for at least a while.  

unless the republican alternative to clinton care was not conservative?  back some republicans WERE conservative - in the sense of being pro market over pro people- now they're all reactionaries, and the conservatives have fled for the democratic party.  where they're fighting with us (rather than when they were in the republican party and fighting with the tea party and christian fundamentalist folk).

welcome to the future.  where Republicans are reactionaries, reactionaries are called conservatives, conservatives are called Democrats, Democrats are called progressives, and all progressives are called to mount the e-barricades in defense of who knows what.

on an aside, i'll ask you again just because i'm stubborn why you continue to use data that is unverified, is clearly from a source that has an ideological leaning and therefore deserves scrutiny (not dismissal) and conflicts vastly with other measures of how much the u.s. spends on social spending (as opposed to total measures of spending, for which this seems fine, despite that the data for recent years is 'guesstimated' - their words not mine) - without a word of commentary on why this is the best data to use rather than some other data or aggregates of data.

http://openleft.com/showCommen...

Still Not Believing Those Social Spending Numbers Are Everything They Purport To Be (4.00 / 8)
It's possible for everyone to fail.  That's what happens when societies, cultures, nations fail.  If there's one thing I think we can count on from Obama, it's a concerted effort to "reduce the deficit", and since war & Wall Street are off the table, the big cuts have just got to come from social spending.

Meanwhile, the public school system is being privatized--but the money still counts as part of the "social spending" total, and state and local governments are being cut back 20-40% over the course of this downturn.

Yes, the conservatives have failed.  But there's virtually zero coordinated effort to realize a progressive victory.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

I agree (0.00 / 0)
but at the same time, Obama's not an idiot.  He's not going to come out and say "I'm cutting Social Security and Medicare".  He's as well aware of the political consequences of that as anyone.  And that's the only sizeable social spending that's left.  

What's far more likely is a bunch of public agonizing and wailing, followed by a few symbolic cuts, and a promise to work on it more, or something like that.  Or maybe he'll try to sell the end of the stimulus as 'deficit reduction.'  

I just don't see obama aching to commit political suicide so much as he's aching to seem 'serious' on the deficit.  

[ Parent ]
I Just Don't See Obama As A Remotely Competant Politician (4.00 / 5)
So, while I agree with you re what he's probably intending to do, what he will do is an entirely different matter, and we should be preparing for the worst.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Well that's just erroneous (0.00 / 0)
A little over a year in office, and he's signed some of the most consequential legislation of a generation, drawn down hugely our presence in Iraq, negotiated a nuclear weapons treaty, and won a Nobel Prize.

He is an extremely competent politician.  He's our first black President for Christ's sake!

You might not like what he's getting done.  But holy crap is he getting it done.

[ Parent ]
Where are the violins? Shouldn't there be violins? (N/T) (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
I don't understand your comment (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
Trumpets? (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
Forgive me, it wasn't a very kind comment (4.00 / 1)
What I meant was that your assessment of the President's performance seems more sentimental than realistic. Paul's accusation of incompetence against President Obama is -- in my opinion -- based on a far more insightful set of criteria than your praise of what he's supposedly getting done. In my opinion what's getting done is us. Painfully, given who the Presdent is purported to be, but veryy thoroughly, even by GWB's standards.
[ Parent ]
I Never Said He Was An Incompetent Con Man (4.00 / 1)
It's a sign of the times that folks don't instantly recognize the difference.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
I don't see him as that level of incompetent (0.00 / 0)
maybe I'm wrong, but this isn't mucking up the health care argument a bit.  This isn't asking the Republicans for something, and then settling for half.  This is outright, nearly instantaneous, political suicide.  He was a constitutional scholar, after all.  I can't believe that he hasn't heard endless talk about the 'third rail'.  I can't believe that his pollsters haven't pointed out the importance of the elderly vote.  

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I really have trouble believing in massive SS or Medicare cuts happening.

[ Parent ]
Normally, I'd Agree (4.00 / 3)
But he seems to positively delight in flipping off his base.  It makes him feel moral somehow.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
I don't think it's a moral issue with him. (0.00 / 0)
Rather, it's how a wimp acts who wants the bullies to see him as one of them.  He thinks that by doing what the bullies tell him, beating up the other kids, they'll like him and respect him, which is what he wants.

There's gotta be a name for this kind of behavior, by I'm no psychologist.

In any event, the bullies will never like nor respect Obama, but the only way he will learn it is the same way every wimp in his situation learns it.  His conscience will eventually rebel, and he'll say no to the bullies.  And they'll beat the effing snot out of him.  His only hope is that he hasn't pissed off his potential friends (us) so much that they've abandoned him.

Health insurance is not health care.
If you don't fight, you can't win.
Never give up. Never Surrender.
Watch out for flying kabuki.

[ Parent ]
Check out "When We Were Kings" ... (0.00 / 0)
for the difference between being a wimp and being a counterpuncher.

Note especially the fight reporters who had never seen Ali look scared before a fight---which he was (to their eyes) before fighting Foreman in Congo (then Zaire).

Obama's a counterpuncher.  He's willing to take short-term pain for long-term gain.  

If he wants to verbally position himself as a moderate centrist willing to entertain good policy ideas from the left and the right, that's his decision.

If, in doing that during his first term, he's able to, say:

*end the recession;
*end the Iraq war;
*enact health care reform;
*enact a new energy/climate change policy;
*increase investment in education and clean energy;
*end DADT;
*reinvigorate the federal government's regulatory agencies, and;
*get 2-3 decent justices on the Supreme Court;

then I for one, am willing to put up with both his verbal positioning and with the compromises needed to get fundamentally progressive policies enacted.

[ Parent ]
Yes yes. (0.00 / 0)
Eleven dimensional chess.  How many more Friedman units should we wait?

Health insurance is not health care.
If you don't fight, you can't win.
Never give up. Never Surrender.
Watch out for flying kabuki.
[ Parent ]
A competent politician would have recognized (0.00 / 0)
the potential the era we live in afforded him.

He has offered excuse after excuse for NOT 'pushing the envelope' to use the vernacular.

[ Parent ]
Someone said (4.00 / 10)
was it you, in the 300+ post thread earlier this week - that Democrats since 1970 have at best succeeded in rolling back half the damage perpetrated by their Republican predecessors?  That's a useful thing to think about.

The more I think about it, the less I like this From theme.  If we're winning, it sure FEELS Pyrrhic.  Conservatives have suffered the "irreversible defeat" of seeing all their ideas appropriated by supposed liberals.  REPUBLICAN MAY (emphasize may) have suffered irreversible defeats, but CONSERVATIVES have been defeated all the way to the bank - they now have  more control over the "liberal" party than they ever did.  The best spin I can put on this is that the attempt to jam the Overton window even further to the right has been checked, and it will be much harder for them to make much progress in this project.  But that's a far cry from progressive victory.

sTiVo's rule: Just because YOU "wouldn't put it past 'em" doesn't prove that THEY did it.

[ Parent ]
It feels pyrrhic (4.00 / 7)
because the society we're in to a large extent isn't reflecting our values.  Whatever these "public sector social spending" numbers look like, wealth disparity has been getting worse; civil rights are weaker in many areas (esp. WRT law enforcement, privacy, women's right to chose); the labor movement is weaker than ever; wages have stagnated for a generation or so; health outcomes continue to suck; the education system is getting worse and more expensive for the vast majority of people; the military-industrial complex has as strong a stranglehold on our society as ever; the military budget is approaching $1 trillion, as David points out above, because we're still fighting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; the environment is in an extreme state of crisis...

So we may be spending lots of money, but it's not solving the problems we on the left want to solve.

[ Parent ]
Maybe your update was directed (4.00 / 3)
at my comment upthread?

declarative statements that current expansions of public sector social programs are entirely, or even mainly, corporate welfare isn't proof.

If so, I wasn't saying spending was "corporate welfare." I was saying that bills like the health care bill enrich and increase the power of corporation at the same time that they directed funds to social services. The government is using the private sector to provide a social service.

This is better than no social spending but it's a far inferior form of social spending and strengthens the very entities that stand in the way of progressive reform.

Chris Hayes gets at the problem here:

So what, exactly, is it that ails us?

In pondering the answer, it's useful to distinguish between two separate categories of problems we face. The first are the human, economic and ecological disasters that demand immediate action: a grossly inefficient healthcare sector, millions un- or underinsured, 10 percent unemployment, a planet that's warming, soaring personal bankruptcies, 12 million immigrants working in legal limbo, the list goes on. But the deeper problem, the ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems, is the perverse maldistribution of power in the country: too much in too few hands. It didn't happen overnight, of course, and the devolution has been analyzed and decried by a host of writers and thinkers in these very pages.

It's also not the first time. Indeed, the story of the American Republic is the never-ending task of redistributing power that always seems to collect and pool and re-form, a cycle in which we break up the power trusts, only to find them reassembling, Terminator 2-like, and requiring yet another dose of the founders' revolutionary fervor to be broken up again.

The central and unique paradox of our politics at this moment, however, is that our institutions are so broken, the government so sclerotic and dysfunctional, that in almost all cases, from financial bailouts to health insurance mandates, the easiest means of addressing the first set of problems is to take steps that exacerbate the second.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/2...


This begs the question: can Obamacare be considered corporate welfare, or is it social spending? (4.00 / 5)
Or is it both?  After all, government is paying for people's health insurance, so it's social spending.  On the other hand, that money is going towards giant for-profit corporations, making it corporate welfare.

This melding of public expenditure and corporate welfare is the hallmark of New Democrat "we should incorporate markets instead of using big government!"ism.  I know Chris excluded the health insurance subsidies from his analysis and restricted it to just 2014-2015, which I don't think is fair considering that many of us leftists who don't like Obamacare, don't like it precisely because of what its effects might be beyond 2015 into perpetuity/whenever the system crashes and burns.

If the government is in fact spending a lot more on public services than it has in the past, then I really think, without any sarcasm, that's awesome.  However, beyond dollars and cents I think we all need to wake up and realize that conservatism may have lost the surface battles, but they've almost totally won the ideological and rhetorical battles for our nation's very political landscape, to the point where the only solutions the supposedly liberal party are able to even consider are market-based, "New Democrat" ones, and the best the decried Democratic Party "socialists" can pass is a repackaged and upgraded Bob Dole/Mitt Romney/Heritage Foundation-care (and conservatives attack it anyway) and, worst of all, many of the "left of the left" bloggers here and elsewhere were cheering on passage of that legislation when I'm certain they would have decried it had it been pushed by President Romney or McCain instead of Obama.

[ Parent ]
Bank Bailout Not In Budget (0.00 / 0)
The vast majority of the Wall St bank bailout is not captured in the Federal budget process, and that part that is, TARP, is not a significant part of the bailout.

Here's the breakdown as of March 2010:

Total Bailout:

  $10.4 Trillion

Total Potential Liabilities:

  $17.2 Trillion

Here's the numbers:

http://www.sitemason.com/files...

Given that the Special Inspector General of the TARP (http://www.sigtarp.gov/index.shtml) had all potential liabilities at over $23 trillion in his initial report, I guess you could say we're making progress, but to somehow imply that the USG "expansion" with the health care insurance bill even comes close to matching what was spent bailing out Wall St is ridiculous.  The cost to fund health care reform for the next ten years is ONE TENTH of what our government spent over just the last year bailing out failed Wall St companies.
 

I really don't understand this post. (4.00 / 2)
The main driver of non-defense spending is out of control health care costs, which isn't really a progressive objective since it goes to the wealthy health care industry without translating into better health. Apart from that the U.S. spends way less on social programs than the OECD average. Nothing to be proud of.
Heartily agreed (4.00 / 3)
This time it's a lot clearer than in his much-commented earlier post that Chris really is giving a lot of credit to Obama for his supposed achievements. And this time I definitely can't defend what he's saying. We just passed a huge, regressively funded bailout for a for-profit health insurance industry that shouldn't even exist and for providers who are seriously overpaid by the standards of every other industrialized country. Chris will have to forgive me if I don't feel much like celebrating.
[ Parent ]
Dear President Obama.... (4.00 / 4)
I honestly don't see how anyone to the left of Calvin Coolidge could actally believe that going from paying people to hurt us (last week) to paying them not to hurt us (this week) can legitimately considered the greatest progressive victory in a generation.

See also Matt Taibbi's latest. As with insurance companies, so also with international financiers.

Whether you call them progressive or not, I just don't see how the country can afford any more of these Mafia-style approaches to social welfare.

David Frum is right: conservatives have suffered crushing, nearly irreversible defeats | 58 comments
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